twirling at the fire. Still the educated peasant spills his gaunt pot-hooks on paper and his faded daughters chronicle the faded thoughts that to them seem so formidably new. Margot still weeps in the melodrama. But all this is not literature, profitable though it may be to those who are interested in the results of the modern experiment in universal education. No

The men in mail- the splendid minority that of old played with the scarlet and beneficent energies of war- have thrown themselves into the game of letters. They are crowded by the lean fellows, who come down from the garrets, by the mouldy men who crawl up from the cellars. And they are gay and insolent as those silken gentlemen of Versailles, who attacked the mob of revolutionary helots, with ribboned jasper canes. Perhaps the mob will sweep over them and trample them in the gravel. But for the moment they make a gallant stand-brandishing their clouded canes in the face of the unleashed people.

And when I think of these gentlemen adventurers - Nietzsche, the outlawed count of Poland, should have been of them - there is none upon whose swordsmanship I count more surely than upon that of Hugues Rebell. He has a supple wrist and a quick eye ("thou knowest my old ward; here I lay and thus I bore my point"), and has carried himself swashingly against the buckram men and the misbegotten knaves in Kendal Green.

Oddly enough—at least at least I cannot quite understand it in his fiction Hugues Rebell's gay aristocratism takes on quite a lawless air. He has all Aristophanes' fondness for "garlands, singing girls and bloody noses." In "Nichina"-a Venetian tragi-comedy, which made him famous-he riots like a Gascon free-lance. A far truer measure of his talent is "La Femme qui a connu l'Empereur," a singularly fine novel, accomplished, balanced, audacious. The craftsmanship and the subtlety of characterization remind you of Thackeray. And like Thackeray, be it remembered, M. Rebell writes always "in the Gentlemanly Interest." Tante Rachel and M. le Vergier des Combes would not have been out of place in "Vanity Fair"; and, though that blunt girl Virginie is almost epic in her way of looking at love, she is not without a touch of Becky Sharp's wistful impulses toward virtue. And nowhere, by the way, will you find quite so admirable, colorful and vivacious a picture of the downfall of the second empire and the rise of the third Republic that organized disorder.

As Musset said of some one's book:

Ton livre est ferme et franc, brave homme; il fait aimer.

A few years ago I read a book of proud and fanciful little verses, which Rebell published under the title-a charming title: "Chants de la Pluie et du Soleil." In verse and rhythmic prose he sang the

joy of life — the joy of affronting destiny — the joy of the silk cloak and (it is the aristocrat's ultimate pleasure) the joy of ennui. And ever since I read these chants of the sun and rain, I have expected a great deal of Hugues Rebell. He is a young man, plein d'avenir.

Le comte Robert de Montesquiou

Fezensac

The

Always there have been two poetries — the one immediate, contemporary, in touch with the Zeitgeist, alive to the problems of the moment and prophetic in its forecasts of human destiny; and the other poetry, which begins by being literature, degenerates at last into sheer trifling, faded eroticism, word-juggling and self-sick analysis. plant that has borne the hardiest, most splendid flowers, decays soonest; the bravest literature has always the most conspicuous decadence. While Byron chanted and Shelley sang, England rang with the piping of a nestful of little, libertine poets. It is an infinite error to imagine that great artists and their parodists do not exist side by side-that the rose and the dwarf rose may not blow in the same garden that Spenser may not have his Gabriel Harvey and Vergil his Valerius Cato. Indeed the strength of a poetical movement is often most notably seen in the crowd of poetasters it drags in its

train.

France has always been exceptionally rich in boudoir art- the pretty, fluttering, fantastic, obscene art of the salon-the art of Laclos and

Boufflers, of Bernis and Chanlieu; always, too, it apes the modes of its century—is classic or romantic, precious or free, symbolic or crystalline; it is of the fashion.

M. de Montesquiou is the type of the man who writes because all write, who echoes and exaggerates -in his shrill little way the poetic modes of the hour. Personally he is a good-natured, harmless, fashionable, little soul, more like a silver penny than a genius to use Horace Walpole's effective phrase-but, as the parasite and zany of modern French poetry, he is not uninteresting to the philosophically inclined. He is a gentleman. I once

said- and M. René Doumic did me the honor of appropriating the phrase that he had raised literature to the dignity of a sport. That is quite true. He has entered literature in the Gentlemanly Interest - and is, indeed, a ghastly, little parody of what I should like to call the Aristocratic Intention in letters. Hugues Rebell is the apostle of cloak and sword and panache; M. de Montesquiou stands for butterflies and blue hortensias, for Japanese pottery and Venetian glass, for perfumed fans and Russian In dark, symbolic verse he pipes the glories of the drawing-room - the ideographic hand is that of Mallarmé, but the voice is that of Beau Tibbs.

tea.

The Latin poets of the time of the decadence diverted themselves by stringing epanaleptic verses -a game like any other. Pentadius, for instance,