strong in other matters, does not control French literature. With us democracy has been more triumphant and emblazons its coronet of 500,000 copies sold (or 1,000,000, whatever it may be), on the frontispiece. We feel a comfortable security in accepting the vox populi as the chosen oracle of the Divine Taste in literature; but in France, where older ideas linger, a small company of gentlemen, the most distinguished for their excellence in various matters, principally in literature, take upon themselves the task of pronouncing that a book is good without waiting for the guidance of a plébiscite. Such an approbation is eagerly coveted, seriously sought, and exerts a widespread influence on literary standards; incidentally, it is of great comfort to readers. Not to speak irreverently, the phrase ouvrage couronné is like the double asterisk with which Baedeker marks those objects deemed most worthy of the tourist's economical attention.

Hellé expressed Mme. Tinayre's first feeling of reaction against that class of novels which we generically call French. It sounded a challenge and put forward, under the form of our own love stories, Mme. Tinayre's theory of a successful solution of the great problem that confronts us all. It displayed a boldness, a directness, a freshness of personal utterance, rare in the present homogeneous flow of French novels. The heroine, an orphan, is brought up in the country by her uncle, a Greek scholar, who teaches her his own Greek-tinged approbations and disapprobations concerning life and literature, and his aversion to the mediæval and Christian influences, which still, in his opinion, regulate too much of modern life. Hellé, bred a pagan, and free from the ignorances, reticences, insipidities, and also the infiltered sophistications of a jeune fille, grows up, as her name implies, a young Hellene. She is indeed charming, and the scenery in which her girlhood is passed the old French country-house, dignified and serious, the garden, the woods and walks

beyond, the French sky overhead, the south wind blowing - is very simply and charmingly done. The uncle himself suggests the type, now become classical, embodied in Emile Souvestre's Un philosophe sous les toits.

When Hellé is grown up, her uncle, very proud of his handsome, high-minded, intellectual young pagan, takes her to Paris to introduce her to society, or more truly, to look for a husband. He wishes for a man to whom he may, with quiet mind and happy heart, bequeath her; the girl, herself, is possessed with the idea of a Greek demi-god, whom she shall adore. Two lovers of different types present themselves, one a young poet, handsome, clever, admired of women, a frequenter of salons, a professing worshiper of Greece; the other, a social reformer, a serious, almost sombre, enthusiast, who has given away his fortune in order to devote himself to the task of diminishing the huge sum of social injustice. The latter wins the uncle's esteem, frequents the house, persuades Hellé to interest herself in the concerns of justice and charity, and declares his love for her. The poet, fresh from the Isles of Greece, reciting alcaics to a silver lyre, also admires Hellé's beauty, her divergence from the common type, and makes love to her very prettily. On the occasion of the first representation of his Greek masque, in the midst of applause and excitement, stirred by music and poetry, she imagines that he is her demi-god and the two become betrothed. The uncle is already dead, and so a cousin of the bridegroom, a lady of fashionable interests and aptitudes, undertakes to lead the bride-to-be into the green pastures of her social world. In the course of this pilgrimage a critical situation arises in which the poet reveals a mean nature. The poetic spell is broken; Hellé realizes that she has let herself be deceived by the romantic dreams of inexperience; she turns, with a hungry soul, to the rejected suitor who is wholly and truly possessed by the great enthusiasms, love, loyalty, jus

tice, truth. The two are married; and if one is tempted to add "lived together happily ever afterwards," the addition springs from a complete and childlike sympathy.

The freshness, the innocence (not of ignorance but of aspiration), the romance of the story, ring a chime like memories of youth; the simple proportions of the plot, the unaffected presentation of the characters, the light that illumines the book, like the first flush of an heroic morning, persuade the reader's judgment to confirin the decision of his sentiment. No wonder that the Academy, breathing in the fresh air of ardent hope and noble belief, was eager to bestow the well-deserved coronet.

The Storm-bird (l'Oiseau d'orage), written a year earlier than Hellé, was not published, I believe, until a year later. This is the novel M. Rod judged "most delightful," "most perfect." The plot is of the simplest and most conventional nature. There are three characters, the plain, affectionate, unsuspicious husband, the delicate, over-sensitive wife, and the jeune premier. The culmination of the plot is reached about the middle of the book; the jeune premier flits away, leaving the wife to the bitterness of disillusion. It is impossible for an ordinary American to imagine that a wife of refined mind and manners could subordinate so readily her affection for her husband to what from the first presents itself as a very bald temptation. M. Rod, however, in the freedom of his larger experience, is not troubled, and finds the story "délicieux." And for us also the narrative of the heroine's disillusion and repentance is admirable. Its truthfulness and impetuous emotion show tender sympathy, sweet womanliness, and a loving heart, and go far to support M. Rod's verdict, "most perfect."

La Rebelle, written in the years 1904-05, displays enlarged experience of life, close study of that experience, strength and ease in making use of it, and an unshaken, unshakable optimism. The heroine, the

rebel, has an odious husband; she cooks for him, tends him, physics him, endures his "Balzacian" humors, and fulfills all the obligations that she recognizes. Life with him is literally unendurable; she obtains strength to support it in the love of another. The husband dies; the lover passes on, abandoning the heroine and their little boy. It is then that the hero, Noël Delysle, comes upon the scene. He is a man of strong and deep feelings, full of high discontent with social injustice, young and sensitive; he entertains a proud disdain for the vulgarity of the ordinary ways of social life, but he sips with some frequency the fly-blown honey which that social life offers. The heroine, on her part, is refined, delicate, and womanly. The friendship between the two, which starts with strictly Platonic intentions, slowly ripens into love. But there is one obstacle to their complete intermingling of soul. The more Delysle loves her, the more jealous he becomes of her first lover. With a man's longing for complete proprietorship he insists upon knowing all her past, and she cloaks nothing. He wishes her to say that her feeling for her first lover was a caprice; but she rejects any disguise of the truth; love alone justified her conduct, and she would not do herself the wrong to deny its genuineness and intensity. Delysle professes to believe in a full charter of liberty for a woman; but this claim upon her past held by another man and embodied in their child is more than he can bear. Possessed by the instinct of personal dignity, she continues to accept and justify her past, and thinks him unreasonable. Their union trembles on the brink of disruption. But as her love grows and comes to dominate her wholly, she begins to hate that past, which is not his, and renounces it passionately. More, however, is necessary; he must be able to accept that renunciation as fully as she offers it. Her child falls ill and very nearly dies. In his sympathy for her agony, love triumphs over jealousy; he longs for the life of her child, his rival's

child, as if it were his own. The child recovers; but her past has been blotted out, his love has quenched all jealousy, and the lovers are bound each to each by a love "strong as death, deep as the grave," built upon trust, loyalty, and truth.

IV

Mme. Tinayre's novels are didactic, they express decided opinions; but her fresh, maidenly personality, unshaken, undisturbed by contact with the intellectual life of Paris, shines brilliantly in them all; and though we are reminded of the old editor of La Fronde, who has forsaken the féministe revue for the larger scope of the novel, that is merely because she is still absorbed in the enfranchisement of woman. Mme. Tinayre approaches her subject from a distinctly feminine point of view; she is wholly dominated by a poetic sense of the worth of romantic love. For her the highest attainment of man and woman is true love. All cannot attain it; for true love is the prize of the noblest capacity for love,

as the achievements of genius are the prizes of genius, and cannot be won by any who are not strong in truth, loyalty, purity of heart, and deep desire.

Dalle più alte stelle
Discende uno splendore
Che'l desir tira a quelle,

E quel si chiama amore. Nevertheless, when this splendor that mortals call love comes down from the highest stars, it reveals not merely to the lovers themselves but to all the world a perfect human ideal. It is a grace emanating from the nature of the universe that descends upon the elect, and through them blesses all men. Man and woman, by it incorporate, become one complete being; and from their union springs a nobler race. Mme. Tinayre finds the chief obstacle to the realization of this Platonic ideal in the social restraints that shut women out of the freedom accorded to men. Checked and thwarted by lack of freedom, a woman cannot forsake all

else and follow the ideal of her heart; nor will a man, for the sake of a being less free, less amply grown than himself, exert his full capacity for love. The aim of Mme. Tinayre and her fellow chartists is to secure for women the full stature of womanhood that Nature grants, by releasing them from the peculiar burdens, economic, social, ethical, that past centuries have put upon them. This is reasonable. Freedom, not Equality, is their cry. The taunt of the partisans of "masculine superiority," that Nature has established inequality between man and woman, is irrelevant and ill-bred. There is no equality in the universe except among isosceles triangles; Nature has a mad passion for differences. The féministes wish not to thwart Nature but to return to her.

Mme. Tinayre boldly confronts the most difficult and delicate part of this proposed enfranchisement of woman. She has a profound, a devout belief in the holiness of Nature; if men and women will love one another with all their power of love, the regeneration of the world will be secure. In Hellé, true love was attained in conformity with a social system such as we have here in America. In L'Oiseau d'orage illusion put on the form of reality false Duessa appeared in the guise of Una and the offense brought its own punishment. In La Rebelle the road was encompassed by false paths and the heroine went astray, but, keeping her eyes fixed on her guiding star, she found her right road and attained.

Where such poetic beliefs obtain, conformity with the conventions of social expediency is of secondary importance. Ecclesiastical rites, if they are the public proclamation of a true marriage, are touched by the nobility and by the religious character of the inward love, but depend wholly for their sacredness upon that love. A mariage de convenance, which almost inevitably bars the wife from all chance of true love, becomes not merely inexpedient but wicked; and ought not in reason to debar a woman

from her spiritual right to give and receive love, honor, and respect. Most clearly, a legal union that does not bind the husband does not bind the wife. In all her doctrines, Mme. Tinayre expresses the cause of the individual soul as against the claims of society.

Her consideration of this cornerstone of human society is the main substance of her novels; yet they are interesting in themselves merely as stories. Mme. Tinayre is a rarely gifted woman; and she has the charming art of depicting her own personality most clearly at the very time when she is most taken up with her subject. Her theme indeed possesses her, using her thought and hand to express itself. Not her least attraction for us foreigners is her marked French flavor. For though she differs from contemporary French novelists in almost every way, she is eminently French. She is wholly free from cynicism, and yet she is not blind to the things that make men cynics; she is wholly free from artificial sentimentality, and yet she has great sentiment; she is a free thinker, and yet a devout believer in the religion of the heart; she is a Parisian, and yet finds her interest, not in the shadows and sunny glimmerings of Parisian life, but in the human hunger for love.

She has not yet, indeed, acquired that delightful French accomplishment of rendering her thought buoyant by the mere grace and ease of her language, such as marks many a writer on the Figaro; nevertheless, she traces her literary descent from the great masters. Like a honeybee she has sipped honey from the flowers that please her. She has the frank self-expression, both premeditated and unconscious, the c'est moi que je peins of Montaigne; the optimistic trust in nature of Rousseau; the almost girlish romanticism of Victor Hugo; the fresh womanliness of George Sand; and far deeper and more formative than these is the old spirit of Celtic poetry that burned in the pleasant land of France before the Teuton invaders or even the Romans

came. The Celtic idea of love is embodied in Tristram and Iseult, — a legend indeed of the Celts of Cornwall, yet its inheritance fell not to England but to France. M. Gaston Paris says, "The note that dominates this Celtic poetry is that of love. Tristram, among all the great poems of humanity, is the poem of love. To the poetry of Greece love is almost unknown; in the noble Teuton poetry love is severe and pure, it knows no passion but the vague aspiration of the youth for his betrothed, or the profound, chaste faithfulness of the wife for her husband. But Celtic poetry sings of love, free from all ties, from all restraints, from all duty other than to itself, a love, born of fate, passionate, lawless, that carries all before it, difficulty, danger, death, even honor." This Celtic passion burns in Mme. Tinayre's veins, but she has also inherited, either from her remote Frankish ancestry or some nearer German strain, the pure and severe idea of love that is inseparable from faith and truth

66

Hang there, my soul, like fruit, till the tree

die."

She insists upon this spirit of love as the magic that can lift men and women above the vulgarity of life, above the grossness of their animal origin, that can open their eyes to the radiance of God, which is obscured by the curtains of existence without love. The very fierceness of passion is proof of its permanence; it is master by right because its rule is long as life. It is profoundly ethical, because it is the foundation of all aspiration. It dominates the body, because it possesses the soul, and, with the soul, possesses all that belongs to the soul. No disciple of Browning is more a believer than she in, "Nor soul helps flesh more now, than flesh helps soul."

This deep informing Celtic inheritance and the various influences of French literature do not in any way obscure Mme. Tinayre's fresh, delightful personality; they but serve to bring out its full color.

In enumerating her French traits, one must not omit a certain frankness of

thought and of speech, far more common in France than with us, which, indeed, until we learn to know her, half threatens to erect a barrier between her and our sympathies. At times the American reader feels that Mme. Tinayre's frankness is excessive, that it is not needed to make her point, that it in fact goes so far as to suggest a disregard for the safety of those dikes which civilization has set up against the spring floods of the great river of animal life; such an inference would be wholly wrong. This frankness is French; it is honest; it is serious; and, we are persuaded, it is ne

cessary.

The argument that persuades one to this surrender of American doctrine is the trait that distinguishes Mme. Tinayre

among other writers, even more than her romanticism and her advocacy of the feminine cause, which indeed are rather themes than qualities; — her maidenliness, I mean, that is innate in the conviction that love comes but once into a life, that it has a right to our absolute loyalty, and that nothing but death may gainsay it. This maidenliness, so rare in French literature,-"fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky," makes not only the secret of her charm but also the persuasiveness of her advocacy; it lights up her books with that purity of purpose, which (when, for instance, we lean over the bow of a ship and stare at the moonlight on the inscrutable darkness of the ocean) we feel to be our most profound human need.

WHAT is it in Walt Whitman, the writer and the man, which will not permit people to stop writing and publishing books about him? When his unique star first rose above the horizon of letters, more than fifty years ago, it would have taken something beyond even his own confidence in himself to foresee the present extent of "Whitman literature." Year by year its growth has continued; and now at a bound it is enlarged, in a single year, by four volumes which are far from negligible. Two of these books are formal lives; a third embodies the per

1

1 A Life of Walt Whitman. By HENRY BRYAN BINNS. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1905.

Walt Whitman: His Life and Work. By BLISS PERRY. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1906.

2 Days with Walt Whitman. With Some Notes on his Life and Work. By EDWARD CARPENTER. New York: The Macmillan Co London: George Allen. 1906. VOL. 98 - NO. 6

sonal and general observations of an ardent admirer; the fourth3—most ardent of all, because it assumes most preserves the daily words of Whitman during four months of his old age. If anywhere, then in these four volumes, one should be able to get at something of the spell which Whitman casts over those who feel his spell at all.

First of all it is to be recognized that the spell is not, and cannot be, universal. Multitudes have shown themselves, and other multitudes will remain, immune to it. Vaccine of a uniform strength and purity cannot be made to "take" in every inoculation. We know what happened, before the days of modern science, to seed that fell upon stony ground. The sower of the parable, however, might have made a shrewd guess about the 8 With Walt Whitman in Camden (March 28-July 14, 1888). By HORACE TRAubel. Boston: Small, Mayard & Co.

1906.