made by one of the family, to whom I had submitted the problem. Then at last I understood the association of faithless friendship which all the time had hovered about the original phrase, leaving me, nevertheless, unable to determine whether it was implied in the forgotten benefits, or had been thought worthy of separate mention in the context. I read the song through carefully, and tried to fix the whole in my mind, but possibly only succeeded in attaching to the phrase one more train of associations, which, the next time I want to find the quotation, may lead me on a wild-goose chase to the "Frog who would a-Wooing go, Heigh-ho!" or on some other equally fruitless expedition. It is not unlikely, either, that a different train still may take me another time on a hunt through Mr. Rudyard Kipling's ballads.

The same lucky young woman who found this quotation also read to me, one evening, part of a certain melancholy ode, some days after I had told her of a line running through my head about "clouds that give their motion to the stars." Led on by "waters on a starry night," I had hunted through Wordsworth, and under the influence of "stooping through a fleecy cloud" I had read a good part of Milton, but naturally without the success I desired. And I was dependent on another young woman

who, as it chanced, had but the day before read the poem-for the source of a line which spoke of well-meant groping "among the heart-strings of a friend." The line came into my mind one morning when I was thinking of the tragedy wrought in a life near me by a cruel silence, maintained from motives of pure kindness, and in the conviction of an apparently wise resolve. There was a suggestion of popularity about the line which sent me to Tennyson. I had looked through In Memoriam, because of some associations of idea or metre, and given up the search in Locksley Hall, when I came to the "chord of self."

Those readers of the Club whose memory is better than mine will recognize the quotation without any further suggestions from me; and those who get the same satisfaction out of their imperfect memory which I have undertaken to describe may be interested enough to care to follow up the quotation according to their own lights.

Critic and

-Of the four elections made Academician. in 1893 to the French Academy, the latest gave the youngest member but one to that venerable body. This is M. Ferdinand Brunetière, who began his literary career in the Revue des Deux Mondes, of which he has at last been made director in chief; who, with none but a bachelor's degree, has become a leading professor of the Ecole Normale, and conférencier in vogue at the Sorbonne; and who, with all his youth, has given to publication a score or more of serious and noteworthy volumes in what Jules Lemaître, that smiling fellow-critic, has named "a series of paradoxes on French literature." It is only twenty years ago that Brunetière and Paul Bourget were teaching together in the same private boarding-school in Paris. Both have gone a long distance in a short space of time. Perhaps the new Academician will soon be called to receive the companion of his early struggles in nostro docto corpore. Both, too, in a way, are the disciples of the late philosopher Taine: as such they are clearly marked off from other writers of their age, like Jules Lemaître and Anatole France, who glory in the inconclusive heritage of Ernest Renan.

M. Brunetière was born at Toulon in 1849. The youngest Academician of all is that romancing child of the Huguenots, Pierre Loti (naval lieutenant Julien Viaud), who was born in 1850. It was in 1891 that a stampede of the elder Immortals, led by Taine before the spectre of his unruly disciple Zola's candidature, brought Loti into the chair of Octave Feuillet and Racine. The Vicomte de Vogüé, who holds the chair of Fénelon, was elected in 1888 at the still earlier age of forty. In 1884 François Coppée succeeded to the poet's place of Laprade and Alfred de Musset, at the age of forty-two. But these elections to the Academy are as exceptional on the side of youth as was, at the other extreme, the choice in 1884 of Ferdinand de Lesseps at the age of seventy-nine, and of the historian Duruy at seventy-three. Of the other elections of 1893, M. Thureau-Dangin, the clerical historian of the Monarchy of July who takes the chair of Bossuet, was fifty-six ; the Vicomte de Bornier (scarcely immortal as the poet of Luther's Marriage and Mahomet) was sixty-eight; and M. ChallemelLacour, who was a red revolutionist and introducer of Schopenhauer's philosophy to

France before he became the present decorous president of the French Senate, and Renan's successor in the Academy, was near the average at sixty-six.

"Cani sunt sensus hominis ;" and if the sense of M. Brunetière has not yet made his locks gray, they at least eke out his significant figure as he stands on the lecturer's platform. Brown and flat-lying, with the thin fringe of beard below, they frame in irregularly a worn face of strong, restless, wellnigh morbid vitality, from which keen and defiant eyes look out through glasses. The decent black redingote of the French professor terminates in spindle shanks that stand braced sturdily as if against a storm. It is the figure of a man who has thought in solitude, and expects little but combat from the world when he brings it his message. Years ago, when this man began commanding the world's attention, Jules Lemaître, whose own philosophy is cheery and not troubled with deep things that disquiet, said of him, "It is not enough for M. Brunetière to be right; he is right with temper, and he is not sorry to be disagreeable in thinking rightly." Within the past year, M. Lemaître has been again to hear the lecturer in his crowded course at the Sorbonne, where he speaks learnedly of Bossuet and that serious, dogmatic seventeenth century, which he knows as no other, to brilliant ladies in search of new ideas, and to thoughtful men anxious for old truth. The impression of the sympathetic fellow-critic has only deepened with time: "M. Brunetière makes me think, in spite of myself, of a theologian who is damned."

The new Academician takes the place of John Lemoinne, that English Frenchman who so long led thinking Anglomania in France through his classical Journal des Débats. The chair had before been occupied by Sainte-Beuve, the father of all recent French criticism. But a greater than Sainte-Beuve is here, one whose omnivorous intellectual appetite has led him to graze in English and German pastures nearly as much as at home; one, too, who has studied all modern science for the due criticism of letters, just as Sainte-Beuve studied literature in the light of natural history. And the communicativeness of M. Brunetière is almost in a line with his receptivity. It would be difficult to sum up briefly the full amount of work which this critic, who

is at the same time philosopher, historian, moralist, and, above all, dialectician, has given to the world. It is but slowly that his books have impressed the public imagination, made up as they are of review articles and lectures, which seldom have the air of consecutive and closely bound chapters. Yet there is a triple sequence in all that he has written.

The first is historical, beginning with the seventeenth century, which Matthew Arnold would have agreed with him in ranking as the only modern age of a prose that is classic in the universal sense; that is, as the prose of the great Greeks and Latins is classic. M. Brunetière's own style has caught an archaic fragrance from the formal syntax and serious periods of the writers of Louis XIV.'s time. It was objected to his becoming director of the Revue des Deux Mondes that he would recognize no literary spirit later than that golden age of French letters. The objection did not reckon with the other and greater qualities of this philosophic intelligence.

The second sequence is tradition. SainteBeuve investigated the individual author and his surroundings, — as it were, the habitat of the particular literary animal he was studying. Taine took a wider view of environment and race. To Brunetière, literature and criticism itself are, like life, the result of tradition; and of any given author he first asks, At what historical moment does he appear? I suspect that he includes in the question some real reference to the momentum of tradition with which every writer, consciously or not, comes into his literary existence. "At each moment of its duration, humanity is made up of more dead men than living ones," said Auguste Comte; and I imagine M. Brunetière would say the literary consciousness is like humanity.

The last sequence is, naturally, that of evolution. This, by a gradual assimilation of the Darwinism in the air, has resulted in the évolution des genres. In his lectures of the last few years at the Ecole Normale, and, last of all, at the Sorbonne and at the matinées of the Odéon Theatre, M. Brunetière has explained the history of French literature by philosophizing on the development of its types,- on the evolution of criticism since the Renaissance, on the evolution of the French drama and

of lyric poetry in the nineteenth century. This smacks, perhaps, too much of the vir systematicus; but it has a well-based dogmatic seeming about it that is reassuring in these skeptical days.

François Coppée, who takes care to say that he is not often in agreement with M. Brunetière, has nothing but compliments for his study of the impersonal poetry and beauty-worship of Théophile Gautier, and this at no great time after the Baudelaire incident, which, in French fashion, had all but terminated in a duel for the terrible critic. He had lectured the young men in his usual way, as one having authority on their somewhat affected veneration for the poet of the Fleurs du Mal, a corrupter of sound speech and sane ideas and morals. Youth loves not to be lectured; hence songs and sonnets and scurrility. But M. Coppée's assurance that the philosophy of Brunetière extends happily to these latter days is not needed by those who have observed his conduct of the great literary Revue des Deux Mondes. It is he who drew from the fin-de-siècle offices of the Echo de Paris such young story-writers as Paul Margueritte and Marcel Schwob; and he opened the famous review to that latest chronicler of high life, Paul Hervieu, who has a right to entitle his book Peints par Eux-mêmes. Even la jeune critique seems willing to forgive. One of its representatives has written, "I believe that M. Brunetière is growing young daily; his last articles are more modern than his first."

An entire essay might be devoted to describing accurately the work of Ferdinand Brunetière in the field of morals. It has been written in a searching volume on the Moral Ideas of the Present Time, by one of the ablest of the younger French writers, Professor Edouard Rod, of the University of Geneva. He has given the critic his proper place in the semicircle of recent thought described by the swinging of the pendulum from the negative Renan to the positive Tolstoy. M. Brunetière is a positif, in full reaction by his constant turning back to the tradition of morals as of letters. His favorite seventeenth century, with Pascal, to whom he has given a book, was an age of earnest casuistry dividing the

soul from the spirit. It is he, also, who, with strange versatility, has shown in the pessimism of Schopenhauer a moral philosophy that ends as consistently in Christian beatitude as in Buddhist Nirvana. His hatred of the Ego and of personal literature, his rehabilitation of "objective "criticism, his impatience of the mere observer of life, the "idle dreamer of an empty day,". are as much a part of his morals as of his literature. Without belief himself, as he has just rather gratuitously taken it on himself to explain while speaking of Bossuet, he looks with frank sympathy on belief, because it is real and a fact in the evolution of man. And he holds with belief that "one single affirmation solves all pessimism, that life is not its own end and aim." "From the dialectic marvel of his pages," adds Professor Rod, " come forth with a crazy desire to throw ourselves on the Summa of St. Thomas, and to consecrate to theology the remnant of a penitent life."

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It was long ago evident that a seat was reserved for Brunetière under the great dome of the Collége Mazarin, unless the French Academy were to belie all its history and traditions. There is but one outward distinction that remains for him to win in the world of letters. So far, he has only a chaire libre at the Sorbonne, which has been the head and centre of the University of Paris and of France for six hundred years. The venerable institution of learning could not receive among its regular professors one who was not a doctor nor even an agrégé in the studies of the university. Perhaps the Academician will be able to climb over the wall of curricula and degrees. At least, he is the intellectual father of the doctors of young France. It is hard to estimate at its real value the influence he has exerted over a nation and a literature, in spite of all reluctance and the opposition of minds forced by his very insistence to heed him. In his first book he gave fair warning to the world (and his words are as true now that he is the author of many volumes) : My studies are but the expression, differing according to subjects and to men, of a few fundamental ideas that are always the same."

XI.

"I'LL go and see Utile Dulci," said Dr. Lavendar to himself, with a sigh.

It was Friday afternoon, and Joseph was to be at home the next day; but in spite of that Dr. Lavendar had received a letter from him. This in itself, apart ⚫ from the possible contents of the letter, was a startling fact; for in all these years of "being away from home" in the middle of the week Dr. Lavendar had received scarcely six letters from his younger brother, save of course the note written each Monday night to announce Mr. Joseph's safe arrival at Mercer. But here was a letter written on Thursday, though Joseph himself was to appear on Saturday.

Dr. Lavendar had been working at his lathe, for it was five o'clock, and this was his free hour. As he worked he thought very much about his book, and he perceived, suddenly, a chance for a new subdivision, The Relation of Precious Stones to the Science and Practice of Medicine. The very title was rich with suggestions! He saw at a glance the possibilities of psychical investigations; delusions and illusions, and their uses; and of course a dozen instances and minor histories. He sighed with happiness, and made a little mental calculation, as he had done many times before, as to the probable amount of money the book would earn for Joey.

The window was open beside him, for it was hot, and the hum of the bees out

side mingled with the buzz of his diamond-wheel; his thin, veined fingers were grimy with oil, and his face was full of that satisfaction in accomplishment which has no relation to the value of the thing accomplished. One sees it on the face of a child who surveys with ecstasy his mud pie, or in the eye of a woman measuring the day's toil on a piece of embroidery for which the world has no need. It must be a comfortable frame of mind, this satisfaction with achievement without relation to value; perhaps still higher beings than we, who observe the mud pies and embroidery, may envy us our anxious and happy preoccupation in our little reforms, or philanthropies, or arts, — who knows?

Dr. Lavendar, his stiff white hair standing up very straight, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, his head sunk between his shoulders, was saying to himself that he had never got so fine a polish on a carnelian. He sat on the edge of his chair, his knees together to make a lap for a dropping tool or stone, his gaitered feet wide apart to afford room for Danny to lie between them. His sermon was written; he had made three parochial calls, one of them upon Mrs. Pendleton; he had seen a little blind horse bought because it was blind and ill treated - installed in his stable; and he had put an unequaled polish upon the carnelian. No wonder his face beamed with satisfaction.

And then arrived Mr. Joseph's letter. It startled him so that he must have

stepped upon Danny, for the little grizzled dog yelped sharply, and Dr. Lavendar, frowning with anxiety lest Joey should be writing to say that he was ill and could not come home on Saturday, paused, the unopened letter in his hand, to feel the little gray legs remorsefully and pull the ragged ears as an assurance that his awkwardness was unintentional. Then he read the letter.

The experience of the human race should have decided by this time whether it is best to communicate unpleasant news by word of mouth or in writing; but Mr. Joseph Lavendar, like all the rest of us, had had twenty minds about it. He had something to say which his brother would not like to hear. Should he tell it or should he write it? One or the other must be done, for Mr. Lavendar was meditating an important step, and he was incapable of such disloyalty as acting, and then telling. The week before, he had decided to talk it out over their pipes in the arbor; but it had rained, and they had smoked indoors. Now, it is a fact that if one sets one's mind on doing a thing in one way, it is quite difficult to do it in any other way. So Mr. Lavendar, owing to the rain, had carried his secret back with him to Mercer. But the consciousness of secrecy was misery; he felt he must confess, and he dared not put confession off until his next visit, lest it might rain again. So he wrote his let ter; carried it about in his pocket for one uncertain, hesitating day; mailed it on a sudden impulse, and had regretted it ever since, because perhaps he ought to have spoken its news?

He followed the letter in his thoughts on its journey in the battered leather mail-bag down to Old Chester. He knew the moment when Nancy would bring it into the study, her friendly Welsh face keen with curiosity to know what Mr. Joseph was writing about, and "him to be home to-morrow." His heart burned and ached as he fancied his brother reading it; he knew the old clergyman's

pipe would go out, that he would turn his back upon the lathe, perhaps even upon an unfinished sermon. Oh, when we receive, as we all do now and then, a letter that strikes us to the heart, at least let us feel that the writer, too, calculating to the moment its arrival, may be turning hot and cold, as do we while we read it.

"I am sure, my dear James," Mr. Lavendar had written, "I am sure you will be glad to know that I have placed my affections upon a lady for whom I have the highest respect. Indeed, I am confident that you will feel as warmly as I do towards her when you truly know her, which, my dear brother, judging from your opinions expressed about the estimable Mrs. Pendleton, you do not at present. It is my intention to beg her to accept my hand; and my deepest desire, apart from the hope that she may accept it, is that I may have your sympathy in my suit."

It was after supper that old Dr. Lavendar, still quite shaken from this distressing letter, said to himself, "I'll go and see Utile Dulci."

He sighed deeply as he took his hat and stick, and called Danny, and went plodding up the road to Miss Carr's house. Of course he did not mean to speak to her of his dismay at Joey's plan, but he might perhaps skirt the subject, if only in his thoughts; and she, being a strong, good woman, an "intelligent person," would, quite unconsciously, give him some sort of comfort.