could not remain a stranger to the general change of direction; instinctively at first, then consciously, doctrinally, she adapted her materials and her ideas to the new spirit. Her first essays at reformation were uncertain and awkward: romanticism (we must now acknowledge it) was a bastard production; it breathed revolt. In reaction from the classical hero, it sought its subjects by preference in the social depths: but, permeated still by the classical spirit, the monsters it invented were its old heroes turned wrong side out; its convicts, courtesans, beggars, were even hollower windbags than the kings and princesses of earlier times. The declamatory thesis had changed, but not the declamation. The public soon grew tired of it. Writers were asked for representations of the world more sincere, and more in conformity with the teachings of positive science, which was gaining ground day by day: readers wanted to find some sentiment of the complexity of life; beings, ideas, and the spirit of rationality which in our day has replaced the taste for the absolute. Thus realism was born. Moral inspiration alone can make us pardon realism for the hardness of its processes. When it studies life with rigorous precision, when it unravels down to the minutest rootlets of our actions in the fatalities that cause them, it responds to one of the exactions of our reason. But it deceives our surest instinct when it voluntarily ignores that mystery which subsists above and beyond rational explanation: the possible quality of the divine. I am willing that the realist should affirm nothing of the unknown, but at least he should always tremble on its threshold. Since he prides himself upon observing phenomena without suggesting arbitrary interpretations of them, he should accept this evident fact: the latent fermentation of the evangelical spirit in the modern world. More than to any other form of art the religious sentiment is indispensable to realism; the sentiment that communicates to it the charity which it needs. As realism does not recoil from the ugliness and misery of the world, it should render them endurable by a perpetual pity. Realism becomes odious the moment it ceases to be charitable.

Oh, I know that in assigning a moral end to the art of writing I shall cause a smile among the adepts of the honorable doctrine of art for art's sake; I must confess that I do not understand that doctrine.

To summarize my ideas of what realism should be: I seek some general formula to express both its method and its power

of creation.

I find only one: it is very old, but I do not know a better or a more scientific one, or one that comes closer to the secret of all creation: "God made man out of the dust of the ground." See how just the word is, how significant,- the dust! Without prejudgment or contradiction of detail, it contains all that we guess about the origin of life; it shows us those first thrills of humid matter in which was formed and perfected the slow series of organisms. Made out of the dust of the earth: that is all that experimental science can know. . . Yes, but there is something else than experimental science; the dust of the ground does not suffice to account for the mystery of life; . . the formula must be completed to account for the duality of our being: therefore the text adds, "And he breathed into him the breath of life, and man became a living being." This "breath,” drawn from the source of universal life, is the mind, spirit, the sure and impenetrable element that moves us, infolds us, frustrates all our explanations, and without which they are insufficient. The dust of the earth: that is the positive knowledge that we can obtain in a laboratory, in a clinic, about the universe, about a man; it goes very far, but so long as the breath does not intervene, a living soul cannot be created, for life begins only where we cease to comprehend.

>

Translated for A Library of the World's Best Literature by Grace King.

VOLTAIRE

(1694-1778)

BY ADOLPHE COHN

OLTAIRE, whose real name was François Marie Arouet, is certainly the most influential of the numerous writers that

have been produced by France. He was born in Paris on November 21st, 1694, and died in the same city on May 30th, 1778. At the time of his birth Louis XIV. was still the absolute ruler of France; no one dared to question his divine right to the crown, or to resist his clearly expressed will. When he died, public opinion had become so irresistible a power that King Louis XVI. had been compelled, much against his desire, to assist the revolted colonies of North America in their struggle against the English King; and that eleven. years later the French also determined to begin a revolution, the object of which was to establish free and equal government over the ruins of the old system. Of the transformation which had taken place between the dates of 1694 and 1778, Voltaire had been the chief artisan.

His family, like that of most of the great writers of France, belonged to the ranks of the middle class. His father had, as a notary and as the confidential legal adviser of numerous influential families, amassed a comfortable fortune; and occupied late in life an honorable official position, which connected him with the highest court of law in France, -the Parliament of Paris. His mother, Catherine Daumars, was connected with several families of the nobility. He received the best education which a French bourgeois could then give to his son. His chief educators were the Jesuit Fathers, -in whose best college, the College Louis-le-Grand, he received all his early schooling,-- and a certain Abbé de Châteauneuf, a worldly abbé of aristocratic birth, to whose care he had been intrusted by his mother, whom he lost when only seven years of age. The abbé made iis business to introduce his young charge into the most aristocraic and witty, but withal, dissolute circles of French society. The young man's wit and inborn charm of manners, his ease in composing pasing and light verses, his close attention whenever older people spoke of whatever important events they had acted in or witnessed, made him at once a very great favorite.