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and maintains that prior to 1789 literature had generally sided with the forces of order against anarchy. No doubt there is a germ of truth in this categorical statement. Intelligence, once firmly entrenched on the Right, is swinging more and more to the Left. In that respect France is certainly more advanced, for better or worse, than England or America, but that is because civilization in France goes down to a lower level than in other countries.

Maurras goes on to deplore that the literary men in France during the last hundred years should have consistently backed the wrong horse. Not only did they devote their energies to bringing about a state of political anarchy, but they resolutely set themselves against material progress. A gap has appeared between the spirit of culture and the commercial and scientific forces of the country, where formerly there was no gap at all. So it is that literature, because it fell into the hands of men who idealized life instead of accepting it, has become more and more estranged from the great mass of the people. Nor is there anything surprising in this estrangement. Maurras, never at a loss for a reason, finds it in the foreign extraction of the leaders of the romantic movement. Rousseau was a Swiss, so was Mme. de Stael, and though they all benefited by French culture they never accepted the national discipline. They were weak precisely where the French genius is strong. In the place of logic, accurate observation, and critical insight, they brought only a fund of barbaric vitality. Those people who pride themselves on their Nordic ancestry would do well to ponder these words of Maurras. It is a French point of view if you will, but it is also the point of view of a man who can be unsparing in criticism of his own nation. As a critic Maurras is supremely important because he realizes the intimate relationship of literature, history and sociology. It is not true to say that he hates the French Revolution and all its works because he is a crusted conservative. He hates it because his sympathies lie with Greece and Rome rather than with England and Germany, and because owing to the Revolution France, "le boulevard de classicité," has been led astray by men and ideas that are foreign to her genius.

Maurras is a man whose antipathies are easily comprehended.

No great subtlety of mind is required to grasp his contempt for democracy, or his hatred for everything in literature that is slipshod in thought or expression. His enthusiasms are more elusive; they are not merely the converse of his dislikes. Only in his last volume, La Musique Intérieure, recently published in the Cahier Vert series, does he disclose the fundamental optimism of his character. Twenty years ago he wrote an account of his impressions of Greece and Greek art which struck a note of profound pessimism. In Anthinea, as the book was called, he went to Athens as a lover going to a trysting-place, and when he left Athens it was as if the world had suddenly grown dim. Even Florence could not revive his spirits. "A gradual decadence," he says, "has invaded Florence as it has invaded Italy and the whole world, which day by day grows colder, uglier, and more barbarous." Since then his sympathies have so broadened that this narrowly classical view of the universe fills, as it were, only one compartment of his mind. One of the most effective cures for over-fastidiousness is editing a daily paper, a task to which Maurras has devoted himself for over twenty years. No one can accuse him of being a theorist living in an ivory tower. He has become the Cassandra of French journalism, and it is not inconceivable that he will be right about the monarchy as he has proved right in his other prophecies. He foretold the War, the Allied victory, and the ensuing failure of the Treaty of Versailles, on the ground that the broken machinery of international relationship could not be repaired by the clumsy hands of democracy.

La Musique Intérieure represents an important advance in the literary progress of M. Maurras. Hitherto he has been engaged almost exclusively in controversy; now for the first time he steps out of the arena and we find that this master of dialectics is a poet at heart. There was some excuse for the English reviewer who, commenting some years ago on Albert Thibaudet's excellent monograph, Les Idées de Charles Maurras, maintained that Maurras was hardly more than a first rate publicist. There could be no excuse for such a statement now. As the title suggests, La Musique Intérieure is a curiously intimate book. The author has long suffered from deafness, so that the music he hears comes through the imagination rather than through the senses. The

first half of the volume is autobiographical. Maurras tells us how he grew up with the ambition of being a poet and how he decided, with some searchings of heart, that he must devote whatever literary talents he had to his country rather than to the Muses. Stated thus baldly it may sound as if the author were inclined to pride himself on conscious rectitude, but actually his writing is entirely free from the sin of self-righteousness. There is nothing heroic in his mind about serving the State. His father held a small governmental position and he had been brought up in the tradition of service. The æsthete or the bohemian recoils from patriotism as a bourgeois virtue that is apt to interfere with the splendid code of individualism that every man must evolve for himself. The relentless intelligence of Maurras thrusts aside any such selfish, easy-going philosophy. Those few moments that he could snatch from journalism and controversy he gave to poetry, but having once dedicated his life to rescuing France from anarchy he has not often taken his hand from the plough.

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The second half of La Musique Intérieure shows us what happens on those rare occasions when M. Maurras plays truant. As a poet he presents grave difficulties to the unwary reader. Perhaps the best way to understand him is to bear in mind his comment upon his own early work. own early work. "En ce temps-là," he says, speaking of his youth, "il fut décent de faire l'idiot en vers.' To play the idiot in verse means nothing more than surrendering oneself to the cult of prettiness. For the verbal dexterity required to make a ballade or a triolet he has nothing but contempt. Maurras has enough of the Greek in him to recognize beauty under any disguise, but he insists upon a beauty of conception rather than execution. It is significant that the only modern poet whom he praises without stint is Jean Moréas, whose mother was a Greek, and that what he admired in Moréas was his capacity for seriousness. While other poets were content to embellish a trivial subject with vivid epithets, Moréas conceived of themes that were intrinsically poetical. Maurras has evidently tried to walk in the footsteps of his master. His later poems, particularly Le Mystère d'Ulysse, are crystal clear in expression; and yet though they are bathed in sunlight they are curiously difficult. Many poets have been inspired by the wanderings of Ulysses, but no

one except Maurras, so far as we know, has cared to show how the wanderings ripened the bitter kindliness of his nature.

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For many people this poetry will seem to be too philosophical, to rely too much on the reason and not enough on the imagination or the senses. Possibly this criticism is just. Maurras can be as exuberant as Francis Thompson, but he will never lose himself in the clouds. When his Pegasus comes back to earth we see that all the time there was method in his fine frenzy, that he had carefully deliberated before caracoling. In everything that he writes, prose or poetry, there is always method. A man of his crusading spirit would be incapable of playing the virtuoso. Because his poetry is charged with reflection rather than emotion the multitude will not accept him as a poet. As a vigorous independent thinker, however, he has won the enthusiastic admiration of a few and the respect of a great many. That there any demand at all for the stark severity of his teaching proves that the French people have not lost their appetite for ideas. Maurras has been compared to a doctor warning a timid patient that the only alternative to a dangerous operation is death. The operation in this case involves cutting away the malignant growth of democracy that is stifling the life of the nation. It is possible that his forebodings are not justified and that the body politic is not in the imminent state of collapse that he pictures. That is a question for Frenchmen to determine. For the foreigner the importance of Maurras lies in his reasoning more than in his conclusions. He has enlisted reason and argument in the support of an apparently lost cause, which is something that the Legitimist has never done before. He is called a reactionary because he insists that as long as she is a Republic France can never regain her old position in Europe. As well might he be called a Communist, because he believes that the welfare of the community and the family is of greater importance than the welfare of the individual. If we must define him let us call him a radical reactionary, a philosopher, a poet, and the very prince of debaters. Long may he flourish—a delight to lovers of literature the world over and in France a thorn in the flesh to all those who have made up their minds that whatever is is right. ARNOLD WHITRIDGE.

THE REAL ESTATE AGENT'S TALE

BY AMY LOWELL

THE furniture goes with the house. Oh, yes.
There ain't no silver, but silver's never let,
At least I never heard of that being done.
There's lots of dishes though, and only a few

Are cracked or chipped, the owner was very careful.
She washed her plates as though they were her babies,
And everything's spick and span, just as she left it.
Maybe you'll want a little bit more comfort

In

your chairs. But you can send up one or two
If these don't suit, and probably a spring sofa
For the sitting-room, the one there's hard as nails
And I don't fancy you'll like its horse-hair cover,
Folks don't to-day. My wife couldn't abide ours,
We broke it up for fire-wood long ago.

It's a pretty place, the more you look it over,
And the rent is very reasonable indeed.
Now just you let me make a note or two:

You'll take it as it stands without the sofa,

And you don't want the bed in the East Chamber,
Nor the kitchen things, and you do want an ice-chest.
Nothing more? Well, now, there's just one thing
Which may surprise you, but I wouldn't keep
That clock if I was you. Oh, it goes all right.
It hasn't missed its strike in fifty years.
I've come here every Sunday and wound it up,
Sam Gould, Miss Bartlett's nephew, told me to.
He's all that's left of the family, he and the clock,
But I don't notice he's sent for it to Boston.
It's a very handsome thing, the sort that dealers
Hunting old furniture can't get enough of—
We have a good few of the tribe up here,
Nosing about whenever there's an auction-
But for all that I wouldn't want it round.
I guess I'm mighty poor at real estating
To say a thing like that, but still I wouldn't,
Not if 'twas me. You needn't laugh, Mr. Brooks,

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