read in the dialogue. Greek life was not so simple as Pierre Louys would have you believe. It was not alone love, nor was love only the peopling of the world.

In his "Lectures Antiques" he has preserved more of the Greek spirit—in these little "Songs of Bilitis" that tricked the heavy German professors into the belief that a lost author had been recovered from the years. Of his nine volumes of Greek paraphrases and translations, few need trouble the incurious reader. The "Aphrodite" and the "Chansons de Bilitis" will suffice even the curious student. In his last book he has tried to find in Seville la liberté morale of Athens; and so it may be after all that his neo-paganism is little more than an attempt to draw aside that veil which is not the veil of Isis.

J

Jean Richepin and the
Vagrom Man

EAN RICHEPIN was born (he says) at
Medeah, in Algeria, in 1850. His father was a

French army surgeon of good family. His early years, like those of Sterne, were passed in the barracks or in the train of the wandering army. When he was about ten years old he was placed in the École Normale, where he remained until the breaking out of the war. He joined a company of francs-tireurs and fought until there was an end of fighting. Then he drifted to Montmartre. This was the epoch of the grande Bobème. Richepin, brooding in the Cabaret des Assassins, was as poor as poet well can be. He wrote fugitively for the newspapers. Between times he elaborated his marvellous "Chanson des Gueux." In summer he lived the life he had sung- he was a sailor, a strolling player, a "strong man" at suburban fairs. At this time—I speak of the early seventies - the Parnassian spirit was beginning to be dominant in French verse. Jean Richepin did not wholly escape its influence; but he was more than a rhetor, more than a juggler of words; he was not one to sit docilely in any

school" of poetry. He went his own way, stormy, independent, audacious. He was the

strong man" of the fair.

*

The trouble with the arts to-day is that they are anæmic. They are deficient in red blood corpuscles. This is true of literature; it is true of music, painting, sculpture, the drama — all the arts. George Moore used to have a phrase for it: "Art to-day," he would say, "lacks guts." And yet the world is ready enough to welcome the "strong man"; it will welcome a tenth-rate poet of windlasses and barrack-room balladry, if he have the lusty air; it will accept the tawdriest art if it have—I repeat George Moore's gruff Saxon phrase "guts." Were I to use my own phrase I should say that what we all lack is the Rabelaisian spirit. Perhaps it is not quite easy to define this spirit in exact terms- unless one should use Luther's alliterative phrase but your idea of it is clear enough. every age when art has a strong accent, when it displays vigor, inventive force, power of hand, originality, you find something of this Rabelaisian spirit. It sparkles in Aristophanes. It flaunts itself magnificently across the Renascence. It laughs with you in the mirth of the Canterbury Pilgrims, just as it beckons you from the insolent canvas of Titian. Shakspere had it, and his roaring contemporaries.

In