 Section 50 of the Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Michael Wolfe. Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 1. Section 50. Selections from Holland and Its People by Edmondo de Amici's. The Land of Pluck. From Holland and Its People. Whoever looks for the first time at a large map of Holland, wonders that a country so constituted can continue to exist. At the first glance it is difficult to see whether land or water predominates or whether Holland belongs most of the continent or to the sea. Those broken and compressed coasts, those deep bays, those great rivers that, losing the aspect of rivers, seem bringing new seas to the sea. That sea which changing itself into rivers penetrates the land and breaks into archipelagos. The lakes, the vast morasses, the canals crossing and recrossing each other all combined to give the idea of a country that may at any moment disintegrate and disappear. The hills and beavers would seem to be its rightful inhabitants, but since there are men bold enough to live in it, they surely cannot ever sleep in peace. What sort of a country Holland is has been told by many in few words. Napoleon said it was an alluvian of French rivers, the Rhine, the Skelt and the Muse, and with this pretext he added it to the empire. One writer has defined it as a sort of transition between land and sea. Another as an immense crust of earth floating on the water, others an annex of the old continent, the China of Europe, the end of the earth and the beginning of the ocean, a measureless raft of mud and sand, and Philip II call it the country nearest to hell. But they all agreed upon one point, and all expressed it in the same words. Holland is a conquest made by man over the sea. It is an artificial country, the Hollanders made it. It exists because the Hollanders preserve it. It will vanish whenever the Hollanders shall abandon it. To comprehend this truth we must imagine Holland as it was when first inhabited by the first German tribes had wandered away in search of a country. It was almost uninhabitable, though a vast, tempestuous lakes like seas touching one another, morass beside morass, one tracked after another covered with brushwood, immense forests of pines, oaks and alders, traversed by herds of wild horses and so thick were these forests that tradition says one could travel leagues passing from tree to tree without ever putting foot to the ground. The deep bays and gulfs carried into the heart of the country the fury of the northern tempests. Some provinces disappeared once every year under the waters of the sea and were nothing but muddy tracts, neither land nor water, where it was impossible either to walk or to sail. The large rivers, without sufficient inclination to descend to the sea, wandered here and there uncertain of their way and slept in monstrous pools and ponds among the sands of the coasts. It was a sinister place, swept by furious winds, beaten by obstinate rains, veiled in a perpetual fog where nothing was heard but the roar of the sea and the voices of wild beasts and birds of the ocean. The first people who had the courage to plant their tents there, had to raise with their own hands, dykes of earth, to keep out the rivers and the sea and lived within them like shipwrecked men upon desolate islands, venturing forth at the subsidence of the waters in quest of food in the shape of fish and game, and gathering the eggs of marine birds upon the sand. Caesar passing by was the first to name this people. The other Latin historians speak with compassion and respect of these intrepid barbarians who lived upon a floating land, exposed to the intemperance of a cruel sky and the fury of the mysterious northern sea. And the imagination pictures the Roman soldiers who, from the heights of the uttermost citadels of the empire, beaten by the waves, contemplated with wonder and pity those wandering tribes upon their desolate land like a race accursed of heaven. Now if you remember that such a region has become one of the most fertile, wealthiest and best regulated of the countries of the world, we shall understand the justice of the saying that Holland is a conquest made by man. But it must be added, the conquest goes on forever. To explain this fact, to show how the existence of Holland, in spite of the great defensive works constructed by the inhabitants, demands an incessant and most perilous struggle, it will be enough to touch here and there upon a few of the principal vicissitudes of her physical history from the time when her inhabitants had already reduced her to a habitable country. Tradition speaks of a great inundation in Friesland in the sixth century. From that time every gulf, every island, and it may be said every city in Holland, has its catastrophe to record. In thirteen centuries it is recorded that one great inundation besides smaller ones has occurred every seven years, and the country being all plain, these inundations were veritable floods. Since the end of the 13th century the sea destroyed a part of the fertile peninsula near the mouth of the Ems, and swallowed up more than thirty villages. In the course of the same century a series of inundations opened an immense chasm in northern Holland, and formed the Zidreze, causing the death of more than eighty thousand persons. In 1421 a tempest swelled the mews, so that in one night the waters overwhelmed seventy-two villages and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1532 the sea burst the dykes of Zeeland, destroying hundreds of villages and covering forever a large tract of country. In 1570 a storm caused another inundation in Zeeland, and in the province of Utrecht. Amsterdam was invaded by the waters, and in Friesland twenty thousand people were drowned. Other great inundations took place in the 17th century, two terrible ones at the beginning and the end of the 18th, one in 1825 that desolated north Holland, Friesland, Overisal and Gelder's, and another great one of the Rhine, in 1855, which invaded Gelder's and the province of Utrecht, and covered a great part of north Brabant. Beside these great catastrophes, there happened in different centuries innumerable smaller ones, which would have been famous in any other country but which in Holland are scarcely remembered, like the rising of the Lake of Haarlem, itself the result of an inundation of the sea, flourishing cities of the gulf of Zaudizé vanished under the waters, the islands of Zeeland covered again and again by the sea and again emerging, villages of the coast from Helder to the mouths of the Muse, from time to time inundated and destroyed, and in all these inundations immense loss of life of men and animals. It is plain that miracles of courage, constancy and industry must have been accomplished by the Hollanders first in creating and afterwards in preserving such a country. The enemy from which they had to rest it was triple, the sea, the lakes, the rivers. They drained the lakes, drove back the sea, and imprisoned the rivers. To drain the lakes, the Hollanders pressed the air into their service. The lakes, the marshes, were surrounded by dykes, the dykes by canals, and an army of windmills putting in motion force pumps turned the water into the canals, which carried it off to the rivers and the sea. Thus vast tracts of land buried under the water saw the sun and were transformed, as if by magic, into fertile fields covered with villages and intersected by canals and roads. In the seventeenth century, in less than forty years, twenty-six lakes were drained. At the beginning of the present century, in North Holland alone, more than six thousand hectares, or fifteen thousand acres, were thus redeemed from the waters. In South Holland, before 1844, twenty-nine thousand hectares. In the whole of Holland, from fifteen hundred to eighteen fifty-eight, three hundred and fifty-five thousand hectares. Substituting steammills for windmills, in thirty-nine months was completed the great undertaking of the draining of the Lake of Harlem, which measured forty-four kilometers in circumference, and forever threatened with its tempests the cities of Harlem, Amsterdam, and Leiden. They are now meditating the prodigious work of drying up the Zyrzei, which embraces an area of more than seven hundred square kilometers. The rivers, another eternal enemy, cost no less of labour and sacrifice. Some, like the Rhine, which lost itself in the sands before reaching the sea, had to be channelled and defended at their mouths against the tides by formidable cataracts. Others, like the Muse, bordered by dykes as powerful as those that were raised against the ocean. Rivers turned from their course. The wandering waters gathered together, the course of the affluence regulated. The waters divided with rigorous measure in order to retain that enormous mass of liquid and equilibrium, where the slightest inequality might cost to province. And in this way all the rivers that formerly spread their devastating floods about the country were disciplined into channels and constrained to do service. But the most tremendous struggle was the battle with the ocean. Holland is in great part lower than the level of the sea. Consequently, everywhere that the coast is not defended by sand banks, it has to be protected by dykes. If these interminable ball-works of earth, granite and wood were not there to attest the indomitable courage and perseverance of the Hollanders, it would not be believed that the hand of man could even in many centuries have accomplished such a work. In Zeeland alone the dykes extend to a distance of more than 400 kilometers. The western coast of the island of Valkharn is defended by a dyke, in which it is computed that the expensive construction added to that of preservation, if it were put out at interest, would amount to some equivalent value to that which the dyke itself would be worth where it made of massive copper. Around the city of Helder, at the northern extremity of North Holland, extends a dyke 10 kilometers long, constructed of masses of Norwegian granite, which descends more than 60 meters into the sea. The whole province of Freesland, for the length of 88 kilometers, is defended by three rows of piles sustained by masses of Norwegian and German granite. Amsterdam, all the cities of the Zardisay and all the islands, fragments of vanished lands, which are strung like beads between Freesland and North Holland, are protected by dykes. From the mouths of the Ems to those of the Skelte, Holland is an impenetrable fortress, of whose immense bastions the mills of the towers, the cataracts of the gates, the islands, the advanced forts, and like a true fortress it shows to its enemy, the sea, only the tops of its bell towers and the roofs of its houses, as if in defiance and derision. Holland is a fortress, and her people live as in a fortress, on a war footing with the sea. An army of engineers, directed by the minister of the interior, spread over the country and ordered like an army, continually spy the enemy, watch over the internal waters, foresee the bursting of the dykes, order and direct the defensive works. The expenses of the war are divided. One part to the state, one part to the provinces, every proprietor pays, beside the general imposts, a special impost for the dykes, in proportion to the extent of his lands and their proximity to the water. An accidental rupture, an inadvertence, may cause a flood. The peril is unceasing, the sentinels are at their posts upon the bulwarks. At the first assault of the sea, they shout the war cry, and Holland sends men, material and money. And even when there is no great battle, a quiet, silent struggle is forever going on. The innumerable mills, even in the drained districts, continue to work unresting, to absorb and turn into the canals the water that falls and rain that which filters in from the sea. Every day the cataracts of the bays and rivers close their gigantic gates against the high tide trying to rush into the heart of the land. The work of strengthening dykes, fortifying sandbanks with plantations, throwing out new dykes where the banks are low, straight as great lances, vibrating in the bosom of the sea and breaking the first impetus of the wave, is forever going on. And the sea eternally knocks at the river gates, beats upon the ramparts, growls on every side her ceaseless menace, lifting her curious waves as if to see the land she counts as hers, piling up banks of sand before the gates to kill the commerce of the cities, forever gnawing, scratching, digging at the coast, and failing to overthrow the ramparts upon which she foams and fumes in angry effort, she casts at their feet ships full of the dead that they may announce to the rebellious country her fury and her strength. In the midst of this great and terrible struggle, Holland is transformed. Holland is the land of transformations. A geographical map of that country, as it existed eight centuries ago, is not recognisable. Transforming the sea, men also are transformed. The sea at some points drives back the land. It takes portions from the continent, leaves them, and takes them again, joins islands to the mainland with ropes of sand, as in the case of Zeeland, breaks off bits in the mainland and makes new islands, as in Wiringen, retires from certain coasts and makes land cities out of what were cities of the sea, as Lewaden, converts vast tracts of plain into archipelagos of a hundred islets, as Biesbos, separates a city from the land as Dodrecht, forms new gulfs two leagues broad, like the Gulf of Dollart, divides two provinces with the new sea, like North Holland and Friesland. The effect of the inundations is to cause a level of the sea to rise in some places and to sink in others. Fertile lands are fertilised by the slime of the rivers, fertile lands are changed into deserts of sand. With the transformations of the waters, alternate the transformations of labour. Islands are united to continents, like the island of Amaland. Entire provinces are reduced to islands, as North Holland will be by the new canal of Amsterdam, which is separated from South Holland. Lakes as large as provinces disappear altogether, like the lake of Beamster. By the extraction of peat, land is converted into lakes, and these lakes are again transformed into meadows, and thus the country changes its aspect according to the violence of nature or the needs of men. And while one goes over it with the latest map in hand, one may be sure that the map will be useless in a few years, because even now there are new gulfs and process of formation, tracts of land just ready to be detached from the mainland and great canals being cut that will carry life to uninhabited districts. As Holland has done more than defend herself against the waters, she has made herself mistress of them, and has used them for her own defence. Should a foreign army invade a territory, she has but to open her dykes and unchained a sea and the rivers as she did against the Romans, against the Spaniards, against the army of Louis XIV, and defend the land-cities with her fleet. Water was the source of her poverty, she has made it the source of wealth. Over the whole country extends an immense network of canals which serves both for the irrigation of the land and as a means of communication. The cities, by means of canals, communicate with the sea. Canals run from town to town and from them to villages which are themselves bound together by these watery ways and are connected even to the houses scattered over the country. Smaller canals surround the fields and orchards, pastures, and kitchen gardens, serving at once as boundary wall, hedge, and roadway. Every house is a little port. Ships, boats, rafts move about in all directions as in other places carts and carriages. The canals are the arteries of Holland and the water her life blood, but even setting aside the canals, the draining of the lakes and the defensive works, on every side has seen the traces of marvellous undertakings. The soil, which in other countries is a gift of nature, is in Holland a work of men's hands. Holland draws the greater part of her wealth from commerce, but before commerce comes the cultivation of the soil, and the soil had to be created. There were sand-banks interspersed with layers of peat, broad downs swept by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently condemned to an eternal sterility. The first elements of manufacture, iron and coal, were wanting. There was no wood, because the forests had already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began. There was no stone, there were no metals. Nature, says a Dutch poet, had refused all her gifts to Holland. The Hollanders had to do everything in spite of nature. They began by fertilizing the sand. In some places they formed productive soil, with earth brought from a distance, as a gardener's made. They spread the salacious dust of the downs over the two watery meadows. They mixed with the sandy earth the remains of peat taken from the bottoms. They extracted clay to lend fertility to the surface of their lands. They labored to break up the downs with the plough, and thus, in a thousand ways, and continually fighting off the menacing waters, they succeeded in bringing Holland to a state of cultivation not inferior to that of more favoured regions. That Holland, that sandy marshy country which the ancients considered all but uninhabitable, now sends out yearly from our confines agricultural products to the value of 100 millions of francs, possesses about 1,300,000 head of cattle, and in proportion to the extent of a territory may be accounted one of the most populous of European states. It may be easily understood how the physical peculiarities of their country must influence the Dutch people, and their genius is in perfect harmony with the character of Holland. It is sufficient to contemplate the monuments of their great struggle with the sea in order to understand that their distinctive characteristics must be firmness and patience accompanied by a calm and constant courage. That glorious battle, and the consciousness of owing everything to their own strength, must have infused and fortified in them a high sense of dignity, an indomitable spirit of liberty and independence. The necessity of a constant struggle, of a continuous labour, and of perpetual sacrifices and defence of their existence, forever taking them back to a sense of reality, must have made them a highly practical and economical people. Good sense should be their most salient quality, economy one of their chief virtues. They must be excellent in all useful arts, sparing of diversion, simple even in their greatness. Succeeding in what they undertake by dint of tenacity and a thoughtful and orderly activity. More wise than heroic, more conservative than creative, giving no great architects to the edifice of modern thought, but the ablest of workmen, a legion of patient and laborious artisans, and by virtue of these qualities of prudence, phlegmatic activity, and the spirit of conservatism, they are ever advancing, though by slow degrees. They acquire gradually, but never lose, what they have gained. Holding stubbornly to their ancient customs, preserving almost intact, and despite the neighbourhood of three great nations, their own originality. Preserving it through every form of government, through foreign invasions, through political and religious wars, and in spite of the immense concourse of strangers from every country that are always coming among them, and remaining in short of all the northern races, that one which, though ever advancing in the path of civilisation, has kept its antique stamp most clearly. It is enough also to remember its form, in order to comprehend this country of three million and a half of inhabitants, although bound and so compact a political union, although recognisable among all the other northern peoples by a certain traits peculiar to the population of all its provinces, must present a great variety. And so it is, in fact, between Zeeland and Holland proper, between Holland and Friesland, between Friesland and Gelder's, between Croningen and Brabant, in spite of vicinity and so many common ticks, there is no less difference than between the more distant provinces of Italy and France. Difference of language, costume and character, difference of race and of religion. The communal regime has impressed an indelible mark upon this people, because a no other country does so conform to the nature of things. The country is divided into various groups of interests, organised in the same manner as the hydraulic system. Wentz, association and mutual help against the common enemy, the sea. But liberty for local institutions and forces. Monarchy has not extinguished the ancient municipal spirit, and this it is that renders impossible a complete fusion of the state, in all the great states that have made the attempt. The great rivers and gulfs are at the same time commercial roads serving as national bonds between the different provinces and barriers which defend all traditions and old customs in each. The Dutch Masters, from Holland and its people. The Dutch School of Painting has one quality which renders it particularly attractive to us Italians. It is above all others the most different from our own, the very antithesis or the opposite pole of art. The Dutch and Italian schools are the most original, or has been said, the only two to which the title rigorously belongs, the others being only daughters or younger sisters, more or less resembling them. Thus even in painting Holland offers that which is most sought after in travel and in books of travel, the new. Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of Holland. As long as the northern and southern provinces of the low countries remained under the Spanish rule and in the Catholic faith Dutch painters painted like Belgian painters. They studied in Belgium, Germany and Italy. Heimskerk imitated Michelangelo, Blumart followed Correggio and Ilmoro, Coppetician, not to indicate others. And they were one and all pedantic imitators who added to the exaggerations of the Italian style a certain German coarseness, the result of which was a bastard style of painting still inferior to the first, childish, stiffen design, crude in color, and completely wanting in Cerro Scuro, but at least not a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint prelude of the true Dutch art that was to be. With a war of independence, liberty, reform, and painting also were renewed. With religious traditions, fair artistic traditions, the nude nymphs, Madonna's, Saint's, Allegrae, mythology, the ideal, all the old edifice fell to pieces. Holland, animated by a new life, felt the need of manifesting and expanding it in a new way. The small country, become all at once glorious and formidable, felt the desire for illustration. The faculties, which had been excited and strengthened in the grand undertaking of creating a nation, now that the work was completed, overflowed and ran into new channels. The conditions of the country were favorable to the revival of art. The supreme dangers were conjured away. There was security, prosperity, a splendid future. The heroes had done their duty, and the artists were permitted to come to the front. Holland, after many sacrifices and much suffering, issued victoriously from the struggle, lifted a face among her people and smiled, and that smile is art. What that art would necessarily be might have been guessed even had no monument of it remained. A Pacific, laborious, practical people continually beaten down to quote a great German poet to prosaic realities by the occupations of a Volga-Berger life, cultivating its reason at the expense of its imagination, living consequently more in clear ideas than in beautiful images, taking refuge from abstractions, never darting its thoughts beyond that nature with which it is in perpetual battle, seeing only that which is, enjoying only that which it can possess, making its happiness consist in the tranquil ease and honest sensuality of a life without violent passions or exorbitant desires. Such a people must have tranquillity also in their art. They must love an art that pleases without startling the mind, which addresses the senses rather than the spirit, an art full of repose, precision, and delicacy, though material, like their lives. In one word, a realistic art in which they can see themselves as they are and as they are content to be. The artists began by tracing that which they saw before their eyes, the house. The long winters, the persistent rains, the dampness, the variableness of the climate, obliged the hollowness to stay within doors the greater part of the year. He loved his little house and his shell much better than we love our abodes, for the reason that he had more need of it, and stayed more within it. He provided it with all sorts of conveniences, caressed it, made much of it. He liked to look out from his well-stopped windows at the falling snow and the drenching rain, and to hug himself at the thought, rage, tempest, I'm warm and safe. Snugging his shell, his faithful housewife beside him, his children about him, he passed the long autumn and winter evenings and eating much, drinking much, smoking much, and taking his well-earned ease after the cares of the day were over. The Dutch painters represented these houses and this life in little pictures proportionate to the size of the walls in which they were to hang, the bed-chambers that make one feel a desire to sleep, the kitchens, the table set out, the fresh and smiling faces of the house-mothers, the men at their ease around the fire, and with that conscientious realism which never forsakes them, they depict the dozing cat, the yawning dog, the clucking hen, the broom, the vegetables, the scattered pots and pans, the chicken ready for the spit. Thus they represent life in all its scenes, and in every grade of the social scale, the dance, the conversazione, the orgy, the feast, the game, and thus did T'Burch, Meetsu, Necce, Dau, Myris, Steen, Brawer, and von Ostaade become famous. After depicting the house, they turned their attention to the country. The stern climate allowed but a brief time for the admiration of nature, but for this very reason Dutch artists admired all the more. They saluted the spring with a livelier joy and permitted that fugitive smile of heaven to stamp itself more deeply on their fancy. The country was not beautiful, but it was twice dear because it had been torn from the sea and from the foreign oppressor. The Dutch artist painted it lovingly. He represented it simply, ingeniously, with a sense of intimacy which at that time was not to be found in Italian or Belgian landscape. The flat, monotonous country had, to the Dutch painter's eyes, a marvellous variety. He caught all the mutations of the sky and knew the value of the water with its reflections, its grace and freshness, and its power of illuminating everything. Having no mountains, he took the dikes for background. With no forests, he imparted to a single group of trees all the mystery of a forest, and he animated the whole with beautiful animals and white sails. The subjects of their pictures are poor enough. A windmill, a canal, a grey sky, but how they make one think. A few Dutch painters not content with nature in their own country came to Italy in search of hills, luminous skies, and famous ruins, and another band of select artists is the result. Botte, Svanveld, Pijnakker, Breenberg, Van Laar, Asselijn. But the palm remains with the landscapes of Holland, with Vijnans, the painter of mourning, with Vandeneer, the painter of night, with Rostal, the painter of melancholy, with Hobema, the illustrator of windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with others, have restricted themselves to the expression of the enchantment of nature as she is in Holland. Simultaneously with landscape art has borne another kind of painting, especially peculiar to Holland. Animal painting. Animals are the riches of the country, that magnificent race of cattle, which has no rival in Europe for fecundity and beauty. The Hollanders, who owe so much to them, treat them, one may say, as part of the population. They wash them, comb them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen everywhere. They are reflected in all the canals, and dot with points of black and white the immense fields that stretch on every side, giving an air of peace and comfort to every place, an exciting in the spectator's heart a sentiment of Arcadian gentleness and patriarchal serenity. The Dutch artists study these animals and all their varieties in all their habits, and, divine, as one may say, their inner life and sentiments, animating the tranquil beauty of the landscape with their forms. Rubens, Lauders, Pol de Vos, and other Belgian painters had drawn animals with admirable mastery, but all these are surpassed by the Dutch artists van der Velde, Bergen, Cargol du Jardin, and by the prince of animal painters Paul Potter, whose famous bull in the gallery of the Hague deserves to be placed in the Vatican besides the transfiguration by Raphael. In yet another field of the Dutch painters great, the sea. The sea, their enemy, their power and their glory, forever threatening their country and entering in a hundred ways into their lives and fortunes, their turbulent North Sea, full of sinister colour, with a light of infinite melancholy upon it, beating forever upon a desolate coast, must subjugate the imagination of the artists. He passes indeed long hours on the shore, contemplating its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its waves to study the effects of tempests, buys a vessel and sails with his wife and family, observing and making notes, follows the fleet into battle and takes part in the fight, and in this way are made marine painters like William van der Velde, the elder, and William the younger, like Buckhosen, Dobbles and Stork. Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland as the expression of the character of the people and of republican manners. A people which without greatness are done so many great things as Michelette says must have its heroic painters, if we call them so, destined to illustrate men in events. But this school of painting, precisely because the people were without greatness, ought to express it better, without the form of greatness, modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country, because all had done their duty, a pouring adulation and the glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of many. This school has to illustrate not a few men who have excelled and a few extraordinary facts, but all classes of citizenship gathered among the most ordinary and pacific of Berger life. From this come the great pictures which represent five, ten, thirty persons together, aquabasias, mayors, officers, professors, magistrates, administrators, seated or standing around a table, feasting and conversing of life-sized most faithful likenesses, grave open faces expressing that secure serenity of conscience by which may be divine rather than seen, the nobleness of a life consecrated to one's country, the character of that strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent generation. All this set off by the fine costume of the time, so admirably combining grace and dignity, those gorgets, those doublets, those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons, those arms and banners, in this field stand preeminent thunder-helst, hulse, hovart, flink, and ball. Descending from the consideration of the various kinds of painting to the special manner by means of which the artist excelled in treatment, one leads all the rest as the distinctive feature of Dutch painting, the light. The light in Holland, by reason of the particular conditions of its manifestation, could not fail to give rise to a special manner of painting. A pale light, waving with marvellous mobility through an atmosphere impregnated with vapour, a nebulous veil continually and abruptly torn, a perpetual struggle between light and shadow, such was the spectacle which attracted the eye of the artist. He began to observe and to reproduce all this agitation of the heavens, the struggle which animates with varied and fantastic life, the solitude of nature in Holland, and in representing it, the struggle passed into a soul, and instead of representing, he created. Then he caused the two elements to contend under his hand. He accumulated darkness that he might split and seam it with all manner of luminous effects and sudden gleams of light. Sunbeams darted through the rifts, sunset reflections in the yellow rays of lamp-light were blended with delicate manipulation into mysterious shadows, and their dim depths were peopled with half-seen forms, and thus he created all sorts of contrast, enigmas, play in effect of strange and unexpected charoscuno. In this field, among many, stand conspicuous Gerard Dau, the author of the famous four-candle picture, and the great magician and sovereign illuminator, Rembrandt. Another marked feature of Dutch painting was to be color. Besides the generally accepted reasons, that in a country where there are no mountainous horizons, no varied prospects, no great coup d'oeil, no forms in short that lend themselves to design, the artist's eye must inevitably be attracted by color, and that this might be peculiarly the case in Holland, where the uncertain light, the fog-velled atmosphere, confuse and blend the outlines of all objects, so the eye, unable to fix itself upon the form, flies to color as the principle attribute that nature presents to it. Besides these reasons, there is the fact that in a country so flat, so uniform, and so gray as Holland, there is the same need of color, as in southern lands there is need of shade. The Dutch artists did but follow the imperious taste of their countrymen, who painted their houses in vivid colors, as well as their ships, and in some places the trunks of their trees, and the palings and fences of their fields and gardens, whose dress was of the gayest, richest hues, who loved tulips and hyacinths even to madness, and thus the Dutch painters were potent colorists, and Rembrandt was their chief. Realism, natural to the calmness and slowness of the Dutch character, was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature, finish, which was carried to the very extreme of possibility. It is truly said that the leading quality of the people may be found in their pictures, vis patience. Everything is represented with the minuteness of a dagger-o type. Every vein in the wood of a piece of furniture. Every fiber and a leaf, the threads of cloth, the stitches in a patch, every hair upon an animal's coat, every wrinkle in a man's face. Everything finished with microscopic precision, as have done with a fairy pencil, or at the expense of the painter's eyes and reason. In reality, a defect rather than excellence, since the office of painting is to represent not what is, but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see everything. But a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one admires and does not find fault. In this respect, the most famous prodigies of patients were Dao, Mirus, Potter, and van der Heist, but more or less all the Dutch painters. But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp and such admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects. The artists' desirous only of representing material truths gave to their figures no expression saved out of their physical sentiments. Grief, love, enthusiasm, and the thousand delicate shades of feeling that have no name, or take a different one with the different causes that give rise to them, they express rarely or not at all. For them the heart does not beat, the eyes do not weep, the lips do not quiver. One whole side of the human soul, the noblest and highest, is wanting in their pictures. More in their faithful reproduction of everything, even the ugly, and especially the ugly, they end by exaggerating even that, making defects into deformities and portraits into caricatures. They culminate the national type, they give a burlesque and gracedous aspect to the human countenance. In order to have the proper background for such figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects, hence the great number of pictures representing beer shops and drinkers with grotesque, stupid faces in absurd attitudes. Ugly women and ridiculous old men, scenes in which one can almost hear the brutal laughter and the obscene words. Looking at these pictures, one would naturally conclude that Holland was inhabited by the ugliest and most ill-mannered people on the earth. We will not speak of greater and worse license. Stain, Potter and Brower, the great Rembrandt himself, have all painted incidents that are scarcely to be mentioned to civilized ears, and certainly should not be looked at. But even setting aside these excesses, in the picture galleries of Holland there is to be found nothing that elevates the mind or moves it to high in gentle thoughts. You admire, you enjoy, you laugh, you stand pensive for a moment before some canvas. But coming out you feel that something is lacking to your pleasure. You experience a desire to look upon a handsome countenance to read inspired verses, and sometimes you catch yourself murmuring half unconsciously, oh Raphael! Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded at this school of painting—its variety and its importance as the expression, the mirror, so to speak, of the country. If we accept Rembrandt, with his group of followers and imitators, almost all the other artists differ very much from one another, no other school presents so great a number of original masters. The realism of the Dutch painters is born of their common love of nature, but each one has shown in his work a kind of love peculiarly his own. Each one has rendered a different impression which he has received from nature, and all, starting from the same point, which was the worship of material truth, have arrived at separate and distinct goals. Their realism, then, inciting them to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted that Dutch art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country. It has been truly said that should every other visible witness of the existence of Holland in the 17th century, her period of greatness, vanish from the earth, and the pictures remain in them would be found preserved and tire, the city, the country, the ports, the ships, the markets, the shops, the costumes, the arms, the linen, the stuffs, the merchandise, the kitchen utensils, the food, the pleasures, the habits, the religious beliefs and superstitions, the qualities and effects of the people, and all this, which is great praise for literature, is no less praise for her sister art. The French have long been writers of what they call pensée. Those detached thoughts or meditations, which for depth, illumination, and beauty, have a power of life and come under the term literature. Their language lends itself to the expression of subjective ideas with lucidity, brilliance, charm. The French quality of mind allows that expression to be at once dignified and happily urbain. Sometimes these sayings take the form of the cynical epigrams of a La Rochefoucault, or expand it into sententious aphorisms by a Labrier, or reveal more earnest and athletic souls, who pierce below the social surface froth to do battle with the demons of the intellect. To this class belong men like the seventeenth-century Pascal and the nineteenth-century Amiel. The career of Henri Frédéric Amiel illustrates the dubiety of too hasty judgment of a man's place or power in the world. A Genovese by birth of good parentage, early orphaned, well educated, much traveled, he was deemed on his return in the springtime of his bandhood to his native town as professor in the Academy of Geneva, to be a youth of great promise destined to become distinguished. But the years slipped by and his literary performance, consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse, was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he died in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering heroically born, as pathetic entries and the last leaves of his diary remain to show, there was a feeling that here was one more faithful failure. But the quiet brooding teacher in the Swiss city, which has, at one time or another, emured so many rare minds, had for years been jotting down his reflections in a private journal. It constitutes the story of his inner life, never told in his published writings. When a volume of the journal and team appeared the year after his taking off, the world recognized in it not only an intellect of clarity and keenness, and a heart sensitive to the widest spiritual problems, but the revelation of a typical modern mood. The result was that Amiel, being dead, yet spoke to his generation and his fame was quick and genuine. The apparent disadvantage point of Geneva proved, after all, the fittest abiding place for the poet-philosopher. A second volume of extracts two years later found him in an assured place as a writer of pensée. The journal of Amiel is symptomatic of his time, perhaps one reason why it met with so sympathetic a response. It mirrors the intellectual doubtings, the spiritual yearnings, and despairs of a strenuous and pure soul in a rationalistic atmosphere. In the day of scientific test and of skepticism, of the readjustment of conventions, and the overthrow of sacrosanct traditions, one whose life is that of thought rather than of action, finds much to perplex, to weary, and to sadden. So it was with the Swiss professor. He was always in the sanctum sanctorum of his spirit, striving to attain the truth. With Hamlet-like a resolution he poised in mind before the antenamies of this universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern thinker's inability to be partisan. This way of thought is obviously unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid. It implies the undue introspection which is well nigh the disease of this century. There is in it the failure to lose one's life in objective incident and action, that one may find it again in regained balance of mind and bodily health. Amiel had the defect of his quality, but he is clearly to be separated from these shallow or exaggerated specimens of subjectivity, illustrated by present-day women diarists like Bashkirchev and Kovalevsky. The Swiss poet thinker had a vigor of thought and a broad culture. His aim was high, his desire pure, and his meditations were often touched with imaginative beauty. Again and again he flashes light into the darkest penetralia of the human soul. At times, too, there is in him a mystic fervor worthy of St. Augustine. If his dominant tone is melancholy, he is not to be called a pessimist. He believed in the good at the central core of things. Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative force, and these outpourings of an acute intellect and a nature sensitive to the ideal are conveyed in addiction full of literary feeling and flavor. Subtlety, depth, tenderness, poetry succeed each other. Nor are the crisp, compressed sayings the happy modes of the epigramist entirely lacking. And pervading all is an impression of character. Like Pascal, Amiel was a thinker interested above all in the soul of man. He was a psychologist seeking to know the secret of the wents, the why, and the wither. Like Joubert, whose journal resembled his own in its posthumous publication, his reflections will live by their weight, their quality, their beauty of form. Nor are these earlier writers of Ponce likely to have a more permanent place among the seed-sowers of thought. Amiel himself declared that the Ponce writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist. He plays with thought and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things of detail. But he is more anxious about truths than truth. And what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity escapes him. In a word, the Ponce writer deals with what is superficial and fragmentary. While these words show the fine critical sense of the man, they do an injustice to his own work. Fragmentary it is, but neither superficial nor petty. One recognizes in reading his wonderfully suggestive pages that here is a rare personality indeed, albeit sickly or with the pale cast of thought. In 1889, an admirable English translation of Amiel by Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist, appeared in London. The introductory essay by Mrs. Ward is the best study of him in our language. The appended selections are taken from the word translation. Richard Burton extracts from Amiel's journal. October 1st, 1849. Yesterday, Sunday, I read through what made extracts from the Gospel of St. John. It confirmed to me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one but himself. And that what we have to do is to discover the true image of the founder behind all the prismatic refractions through which it comes to us and which alter it more or less. An array of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has been broken into a thousand rainbow colors and carried in a thousand directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to assume with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis and to be forever spiritualizing more and more her understanding of the Christ and of salvation. I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which still exists 19 centuries after the Redeemer's proclamation. It is the letter which killeth after his protest against a dead symbolism. The new religion is so profound that it is not understood even now and would seem a blasphemy to the greater number of Christians. The person of Christ is the center of it. Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell, all these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened that with a strange irony, they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered. It is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine. There is a relative revelation. Each man enters into God so much as God enters into him. Or as Angelus I think said, the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which he sees me. Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world while at the same time detaching us from it. February 20th, 1851. I have almost finished these two volumes of Joubert's pensée and the greater part of the correspondence. This last has especially charmed me. It is remarkable for grace, delicacy, atticism and precision. The chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are the most insignificant. All that has to do with large views with the whole of things is very little as Joubert's command. He has no philosophy of history, no speculative intuition. He is the thinker of detail and his proper field is psychology and matters of taste. In this sphere of the subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling within the circle of personal affections and preoccupations of social and educational interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr and aeolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body, timid, dreamy and clairvoyant. He hovers far above reality. He is rather a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the character of a child so that we feel for him less admiration than tenderness and gratitude. November 10th, 1852. How much have we not to learn from the Greeks, those immortal ancestors of ours? And how much better they solved their problem than we solved ours? Their ideal man is not ours, but they understood infinitely better than we, how to reverence, cultivate, and ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand respects we are still barbarians beside them as Beranget said to me with a sigh in 1843. Barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in matters of art, and so forth. We must have millions of men in order to produce a few elect spirits. A thousand was enough in Greece. If the measure of a civilization is to be the number of perfected men that it produces, we are still far from this model people. The slaves are no longer below us, but they are among us. Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers, yet lives side by side with us. We carry within us much greater things than they, but we ourselves are smaller. It is a strange result. Objective civilization produced great men while making no conscious effort toward such a result. Subjective civilization produces a miserable and imperfect race contrary to its mission and its earnest desire. The world grows more majestic, but man diminishes. Why is this? We have too much barbarian blood in our veins and we lack measure, harmony, and grace. Christianity and breaking man up into outer and inner, the world into earth and heaven, hell and paradise, has decomposed the human unity in order it is true to reconstruct it more profoundly and more truly. But Christianity has not yet digested this powerful leaven. She has not yet conquered the true humanity. She is still living under the antinomy of sin and grace of here below and there above. She has not penetrated into the whole heart of Jesus. She is still in the narthex of penitence. She is not reconciled. And even the churches still wear the livery of service and have none of the joy of the daughters of God baptized of the Holy Spirit. Then again there is our excessive division of labor, our bad and foolish education which does not develop the whole man and the problem of poverty. We have abolished slavery but without having solved the question of labor. In law there are no more slaves. In fact, there are many. And while the majority of men are not free, the free man in the true sense of the term can neither be conceived nor realized. Here are enough causes for our inferiority. November 12, 1852. St. Martin's summer is still lingering and the days all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of an hour around the garden to get some warmth and suppleness. Nothing could be lovelier than the last rose buds or the delicate coffered edges of the strawberry leaves embroidered with horsfrost. While above them a Rakhne's delicate webs hung swaying in the green branches of the pines, little ballrooms for the fairies carpeted with powdered pearls and kept in place by a thousand dewy strands hanging from above like the chains of a lamp and supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf world and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the poetry of the North, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden, Frithjof and the Eda, Asean and the Hebrides, all that world of cold and mist, of genius and of reverie, where warmth comes not from the sun, but from the heart, where man is more noticeable than nature, that chest and vigorous world in which will place a greater part than sensation and thought has more power than instinct. In short, the whole romantic cycle of German and Northern poetry awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality and acts upon one like a moral tonic, strange charm of a vaccination. A twig of pine wood and a few spider webs are enough to make countries, epochs and nations live again before her, January 6th, 1853. Self-government with tenderness. Here you have the condition of all authority over children. The child must discover in us no passion, no weakness of which he can make use. He must feel himself powerless to deceive or to trouble us. Then he will recognize in us his natural superiors and he will attach a special value to our kindness because he will respect it. The child who can rouse in us anger or impatience or excitement feels himself stronger than we and a child respects strength only. The mother should consider herself as her child's son, a changeless and ever-radiant world wither the small restless creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, passionate, full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth and electricity of calm and of courage. The mother represents goodness, providence, law, that is to say, the divinity under that form of it which is accessible to childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will inculcate in her child a capricious and despotic God or even several discordant gods. The religion of a child depends on what its mother and its father are and not on what they say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides their life is precisely what touches the child. Their words, their remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of feeling even are for him merely thunder and comedy. What they worship, this it is, which his instinct divines and reflects. The child sees what we are behind what we wish to be. Hence his reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power as far as he can with each of us. He is the most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes under the influence of each person about him and reflects it while transforming it after his own nature. He is a magnifying mirror. This is why the first principle of education is, train yourself and the first rule to follow if you wish to possess yourself of a child's will is master your own. December 17th, 1856. This evening was the second quartet concert. It stirred me much more than the first. The music chosen was loftier and stronger. It was the quartet in D minor of Mozart and the quartet in C major of Beethoven separated by a spore concerto. The work of Mozart penetrated as it is with mind and thought represents a solved problem, a balance struck between aspiration and executive capacity. The sovereignty of a grace which is always a mistress of itself, marvelous harmony and perfect unity. His quartet describes a day in one of those addict souls who prefigure on earth the serenity of Elysium. In Beethoven's on the other hand, a spirit of tragic irony paints for you the mad tumult of existence as it dances forever above the threatening abyss of the infinite. No more unity, no more satisfaction, no more serenity. We are spectators of the eternal duel between the two great forces, that of the abyss which absorbs all finite things and that of life which defends and asserts itself expands and enjoys. The soul of Beethoven was a tormented soul. The passion and the awe of the infinite seemed to toss it to and fro from heaven to hell, hence its vastness. Which is the greater Mozart or Beethoven? Idle question. The one is more perfect, the other more colossal. The first gives you the piece of perfect art, beauty at first sight. The second gives you sublimity, terror, pity, a beauty of second impression. The one gives that for which the other rouses a desire. Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean. Beethoven, the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea. And while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuttering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both. Each represents a moment of the ideal life. Each does us good. Our love is due to both. Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender. May 27th, 1857. Wagner's is a powerful mind endowed with strong poetical sensitiveness. His work is even more poetical than musical. The suppression of the lyrical element and therefore a melody is with him a systematic party pre. No more duos or trios, monologue and the aria are alike done away with. There remains only declamation, the recitative and the choruses. In order to avoid the conventional in singing, Wagner falls into another convention, that of not singing at all. He subordinates the voice to articulate speech and for fear less the muse should take flight, he clips her wings so that his works are rather symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is brought down to the rank of an instrument, put on a level with the violins, the old boys and the drums, and treated instrumentally. Man is deposed from his superior position and the center of gravity of the work passes into the baton of the conductor. It is musically personalized neo-hegelian music, music multiple instead of individual. If this is so, it is indeed the music of the future, the music of the socialist democracy replacing the art which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective. December 4th, 1863, the whole secret of remaining young in spite of years and even of gray hairs is to cherish enthusiasm in oneself by poetry, by contemplation, by charity. That is, in fewer words, by the maintenance of harmony and the soul. April 12th, 1858. The era of equality means the triumph of mediocrity. It is disappointing but inevitable for it is one of time's revenges. Art no doubt will lose, but justice will gain. It's not universal leveling down the law of nature. The world is striving with all its force for the destruction of what it has itself brought forth. March 1st, 1869. From the point of view of the ideal, humanity is trist and ugly. But if we compare it with its probable origins, we see that the human race has not altogether wasted its time. Hence there are three possible views of history. The view of the pessimist who starts from the ideal, the view of the optimist who compares the past with the present, and the view of the hero worshiper who sees that all progress whatever has cost oceans of blood and tears. August 31st, 1869. I have finished Schopenhauer. My mind has been a tumult of opposing systems, stoicism, quietism, Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be at peace with myself? If impersonality is a good, why am I not consistent in the pursuit of it? And if it is a temptation, why return to it after having judged and conquered it? Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? The deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and aim of life seems to me a mere lure and deception. The individual is an eternal dupe who never obtains what he seeks and who is forever deceived by hope. My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism of Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt which never leaves me even in my moments of religious fervor. Nature is indeed for me a maya. And I look at her as it were with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skeptical. What then do I believe in? I do not know. And what is it I hope for? It would be difficult to say. Folly. I believe in goodness and I hope that good will prevail. Deep within this ironical and disappointed being of mine, there is a child hidden, a frank, sad, simple creature who believes in the ideal in love and holiness and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millennium of idols sleeps in my heart. I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer. Born in his nature, I am finie dans ses voeux. L'homme est un dieu tombé qui se suivit des cieux. March 17th, 1870. This morning the music of a brass band which had stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over me. It set me dreaming of another world of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of paradise in the soul. Memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. Oh Plato, oh Pythagoras, ages ago you heard these harmonies surprise these moments of inward ecstasy. Knew these divine transports. If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony. Harmony is perfection. Perfection is our dream. And our dream is heaven. April 1st, 1870. I am inclined to believe that for a woman, love is the supreme authority, that which judges the rest and decides what is good or evil. For a man, love is subordinate to right. It is a great passion, but it is not the source of order, the synonym of reason, the criterion of excellence. It would seem, then, that a woman places her ideal in the perfection of love and a man in the perfection of justice. June 5th, 1870. The efficacy of religion lies precisely in that which is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal. Its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion and proportion as it demands more faith. That is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind. The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries to dissolve them into light. It is mystery, on the other hand, which the religious instinct demands and pursues. It is mystery which constitutes the essence of worship, the power of proselytism. When the cross became the foolishness of the cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own day, those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to enlighten religion, to economize faith, find themselves deserted, like poets who should declaim against poetry, or women who should decry love. Faith consists in the acceptance of the incomprehensible, and even in the pursuit of the impossible, and is self-intoxicated with its own sacrifices. Its own repeated extravagances. It is the forgetfulness of this psychological law which stultifies the so-called liberal Christianity. It is the realization of it which constitutes the strength of Catholicism. Apparently no positive religion can survive the supernatural element which is the reason for its existence. Natural religion seems to be the tomb of all historic cults. All concrete religions die eventually in the pure air of philosophy. So long then as the life of nations is in need of religion, as a motive and sanction of morality, as food for faith, hope and charity. So long will the masses turn away from pure reason and naked truth. So long will they adore mystery. So long and rightly so will they rest in faith. The only region where the ideal presents itself to them in an attractive form. October 26th, 1870. If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue of thought and conscience of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and vulgar crowd is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty. When any society produces an increasing number of literary exquisite of satirists, skeptics and Moses Pree, some chemical disorganization of fabric may be inferred. Take, for example, the century of Augustus and that of Louis XV. Our cynics and railers are mirror egotists who stand aloof from the common duty and in their indolent remoteness are of no service to society against any ill which may attack it. Their cultivation consists in having got rid of feeling and thus they fall farther and farther away from true humanity and approach nearer to the demoniacal nature. What was it that Epistopheles lacked? Not intelligence, certainly, but goodness. December 11th, 1875. The ideal which the wife and mother makes for herself, the manner in which she understands duty and life, contain the fate of the community. Her faith becomes the star of this conjugal ship and her love, the animating principle that fascists the future of all belonging to her. Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle. January 22nd, 1875. The thirst for truth is not a French passion. In everything appearance is preferred to reality. The outside to the inside. The fashion to the material. That which shines to that which profits. Opinion to conscience. That is to say the Frenchman's center of gravity is always outside him. He is always thinking of others playing to the gallery. To him individuals are so many zeros. The unit which turns them into a number must be added from outside. It may be royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite newspaper, or any other temporary master of fashion. All this is probably the result of an exaggerated sociability which weakens the soul's forces of resistance, destroys its capacity for investigation and personal conviction, and kills in it the worship of the ideal. December 9th, 1877. The modern haunters of Parnassus carve urns of agate and avonics. But inside the urns what is there? Ashes. Their work lacks feeling, seriousness, sincerity, and pathos. In a word, soul and moral life. I cannot bring myself to sympathize with such a way of understanding poetry. The talent shown is astonishing, but stuff and matter are wanting. It is an effort of the imagination to stand alone, substitute for everything else. We find metaphors, rhymes, music, color, but not man, not humanity. Poetry of this factitious kind may be guile one at twenty, but what can one make of it at fifty? It reminds me of Pergamus, of Alexandria, of all the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty of thought and exhaustion of feeling. I strongly share the repugnance which this poetical school arouses in simple people. It is as though it only cared to please the world-worn, the over-subtle, the corrupted, while it ignores all normal healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections, steady laborer honesty, and duty. It is an affectation, and because it is an affectation, the school is struck with sterility. The reader desires in the poem something better than a juggler in rhyme or a conjurer in verse. It looks to find in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a conscience, who feels passion and repentance. The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they are, for justice and fairness. His effort is to get free from himself, so that he may in no way disfigure that which he wishes to understand or reproduce. His superiority to the common herd lies in this effort, even when its success is only partial. He distrusts his own senses, he sifts his own impressions by returning upon them from different sides and at different times by comparing, moderating, shading, distinguishing, and so endeavoring to approach more and more nearly to the formula which represents the maximum of truth. The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public. May 19, 1878. Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair. It cannot be taught or demonstrated. It is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises which conceal it, for discovering it in spite of the errors of testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter who nothing deceives for long and whom no roosts can throw off the trail. It is the talent of the juge d'instruction, who knows how to interrogate circumstances and to extract an unknown secret from a thousand falsehoods. The true critic can understand everything, but he will be the dupe of nothing, and to no convention will he sacrifice his duty, which is to find out and proclaim truth. Competent learning, general cultivation, absolute property, accuracy of general view, human sympathy, and technical capacity. How many things are necessary to the critic, without reckoning grace, delicacy, savoir vive, and the gift of happy phrase-making. May 22nd, 1879. Ascension Day. Wonderful and delicious weather, soft caressing sunlight, the air a lipid blue, twittering sub-birds, even the sound of the birds, even the distant voices of the city have something young and spring-like in them. It is indeed a new birth. The ascension of the Savior of men is symbolized by the expansion, this heavenward yearning of nature. I feel myself born again. All the windows of the soul are clear. Forms, lines, tense reflections, sounds, contrasts, and harmonies, the general play and interchange of things. It is all enchanting. In my courtyard, the ivy is green again, the chestnut tree is full of leaf, the Persian lanak beside the little fountain is flushed with red and just about to flower. Through the wide openings to the right and left of the old College of Calvin, I see the saliv above the trees of Sanatuan. The guaron above the hills, in the middle of Colomille, while the three lights of steps, which from landing to landing lead between two high walls from the rue Verdun to the terrace of the tranchet, recall to one's imagination some old city of the south, a glimpse of Perugia or of Malacca. All the bells are ringing. It is the hour of worship. The historical and religious impression with the picturesque, the musical, the poetical impressions of the scene. All the peoples of Christendom, all the churches scattered over the globe are celebrating at this moment the glory of the crucified. And what are those many nations doing who have other prophets and honor the divinity in other ways, the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Goebers, they have other sacred days, other rites, other solemnities, other beliefs. But all have some religion, some ideal end for life. All aim at raising man above the sorrows and smallnesses of the present and of the individual existence. All have faith in something greater than themselves. All pray, all bow, all adore. All see beyond nature, spirit, and beyond evil, good. All bear witness to the invisible. Here we have the link which binds all peoples together. All men are equally creatures of sorrow and desire, of hope and fear. All long to recover some lost harmony with the great order of things and to feel themselves approved and blessed by the author of the universe. All know what suffering is and yearn for happiness. All know what sin is and feel the need of pardon. Christianity reduced to its original simplicity is the reconciliation of the sinner with God by means of the certainty that God loves in spite of everything. And that he chastises because he loves. Christianity furnished a new motive and a new strength for the achievement of moral perfection. It made holiness attractive by giving to it the air of filial gratitude. July 28th, 1880. This afternoon I have had a walk in the sunshine and have just come back rejoicing in a renewed communion with nature. The waters of the Rhone and the Arve, the murmur of the river, the austerity of its banks, the brilliancy of the foliage, the play of the leaves, the splendor of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the fields, the lucidity of the distant mountains, the whiteness of the glaciers under the azure serenity of the sky, the sparkle and foam of the mingling rivers, the leafy masses of the Labati woods. All and everything delighted me. It seemed to me as though the years of strength had come back to me. I was overwhelmed with sensations. I was surprised and grateful. The universal life carried me on its breast. The summer's caress went to my heart. Once more my eyes beheld the vast horizons, the soaring peaks, the blue lakes, the winding valleys, and all the free outlets of old days. And yet there was no painful sense of longing. The scene left upon me an indefinable impression, which was neither hope nor desire nor regret, but rather a sense of emotion, a passionate impulse mingled with admiration and anxiety. I am conscious at once of joy and of want. Beyond what I possess I see the impossible and the unattainable. I gauge my own wealth and poverty. In a word, I am, and I am not. My inner state is one of contradiction because it is one of transition. April 10th, 1881, he died May 11th. What dupes we are of our own desires. Destiny has two ways of crushing us by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them. But he who only wills what God wills escapes both catastrophes. All things work together for his good. And of section 51. And of the library of the world's best literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 1. Recording by Leonard Wilson of Springfield, Ohio.