throws it into the fire, she exclaims, with a ferocious laugh: "Now, I am burning your son, Thea, O thou beauty of the curling locks! the child you have had with Eybert Lowborg!". . . Irene meets the sculptor Rubek after many years. She had sat to him for her portrait, which is his masterpiece. As they talk of that time, she reproaches him sadly and gently for his manner of receiving the greatest gift of all which she had really made him: "I gave you my soul, my soul proud of life and youth; . . . and I remained with a void in my breast, without soul. After I had given you that gift, Arnold, I died.” Ella Rentheim, when she hears Borkmann, grown old and almost mad, tell how he resolved to abandon her, though he loved her, both judges and condemns him, placing herself above him and above herself, like an independent power, but she is really, on the contrary, the most passionate incarnation of femininity when she does this, of a femininity which rises to being a religion to itself: "You have put out the flame of love in me, do you understand? The Bible talks of a mysterious sin for which there is no pardon. Till to-day, those words were obscure to me. Now I understand. That capital crime, the crime without pardon, is the putting out of the flame of love in a human being.

The poet gives them faces, gestures, garments, realizing them completely, because for him they belong to reality and not to the categories of thought. Borkmann with his grave appearance and his delicate profile, his penetrating eyes, his gray beard and curling hair, dressed in a black suit out of fashion, lonely, separated from his relations, confined to the upper story of the house, walks up and down all day,

chewing the cud of the past and awaiting the future, to which he is attracted more than ever tenaciously. Hedda Gabler has "an aristocratic port and appearance, she is pale and looks calm and cold, her hair is light brown in colour." She appears to us at home "in an elegant morning dress, cut rather loosely." Beside her and contrasting with her is her husband, George Tessmann, with his "jovial aspect, slightly inclined to fatness, fair hair and beard, wearing spectacles and not too well dressed." We saw them all like this, and nevertheless Ibsen's dramas which have so plastic a poetical form, are developed with a simplicity which at times is almost simplicism. Coming from an artist of such ability, this is not an indication of poverty or of impotence, but of an intentional neglect of externals. There is no poverty or impotence in the symbols that he introduces from time to time they perform the duty of lyrical images and comparisons: the tower from which Solness falls, Alving's asylum that burns, or the wild duck that waddles about and grows fat on the floor of Ekdal's house, forgetful of sky and sea. The truth is that the style and ingenuous procedure of the primitives suit well this art of chaste and courageous confession, this art that is almost religious. Ibsen has recourse to it, sure of his own strength, and showing proof of his strength by means of this deliberate simplicity.

XXIV

MAUPASSANT

IF any one of modern poets especially deserve the title of " ingenuous " poet, that one seems to me to be the most Parisian, liberal, malicious, jesting, sarcastic story writer, Guy de Maupassant.

He is ingenuous and innocent in his own way, as one without any suspicion of what is called human spirituality or rationality, faith in the true, in purity of the will, in the austerity of duty, the religious conception of life, of the moral struggles and intellectual conflicts, by means of which those ideals develop and maintain themselves. He is all sensehe suffers and enjoys,-suffering far more than he enjoys, only as sense.

The feeling of love is tender and often refined in the author of Fort comme la mort and Notre Caur; it is also natural, that is to say, not perverted nor perverse, but tenderness and refinement and naturalness do not alter its essentially sensual character. Love is a very sweet thing, the sweetest that life yields, the flower of youth, and indeed youth itself in its illusion perpetually reborn; but which is altogether consumed in this sweetness, producing nothing and rising to no heights. He who loves, defends the centre of his own being in his love, his own reason for living, which is pleasure, that pleasure which has no equal. So overwhelming is the power of pleasure, of lovepleasure, as to impose itself upon the soul with

absolute necessity and to take the place of every ideal interest and of every other source of comfort and of joy, and to withdraw itself from the action of moral law or to pass beyond it.

A woman, a mother, who has had a lover and feels herself condemned by her legitimate son, bursts out passionately into a confession addressed to the other, the child of love: "Dis-toi bien que si j'ai été la maîtresse de ton père, j'ai été encore plus sa femme, sa vraie femme, que je n'ai pas honte au fond du cœur, que je ne regrette rien, que je l'aime encore tout mort qu'il est, que je l'aimerai toujours, que je n'ai aimé que lui, qu'il a été toute ma vie, toute ma joie, tout mon espoir, toute ma consolation, tout, tout, tout pour moi, pendant si longtemps! Écoute, mon petit devant Dieu qui m'entend, je n'aurais jamais eu de bon dans l'existence, si je ne l'avais pas rencontré, jamais rien, pas une tendresse, pas une douceur, pas une de ces heures qui nous font regretter de vieillir, rien ! Je lui dois tout!" This mode of feeling has its own inflexible logic, its pride in itself, expressed in a resolute and defiant manner, which commands, one knows not exactly what form of respect, like every undivided rectilinear force.

That this love, all sense and passion, although it fill the mind with an unspeakable and incomparable voluptuousness, is nothing but a deception of nature, a spring-time intoxication, "the exchange of two imaginations and the contact of two skins," Maupassant is well aware. Perhaps, like Baudelaire, he also has a glimpse of the taste of evil in its depths; but this does not amount to much, because the criticism of love does not take away its reality, the real existence of the illusion. He is also aware that love, as it is

faithless, so it is fragile and destroys itself, ending in abandonment, betrayal, weariness, reciprocal tedium. He does not, however, wish it to be otherwise, because, if that pleasure is a sweet fever, the fever cannot be expected to endure for ever, and if love is not moral purity, the betrayal discovered and suffered, although it torture the heart, yet does not move it to ethical indignation and does not elevate it spiritually by suffering. It is a torture similar to the separation by death of beloved beings, which Maupassant feels with the abandonment to anguish of a most sensitive temperament, tells in words of heartfelt grief and portrays in powerful images, such as that of the man who returns to his empty house and stops before the mirror which had so often reflected the dead woman's face and ought somehow to have preserved her image. He stands gazing into it, the eyes fixed upon the flat surface of the glass, empty and profound, the glass that had entirely possessed her, possessed her as he had possessed her, as his loving look had possessed her. Then, again, the portrait of the youth who cannot persuade himself that the being whom he adored, the unique being, with those bright eyes which had smiled with tenderness, is no more, " is dead," will never again exist in any place, that her voice will never sound again among other human voices, that no one will again pronounce a single word in the way that mouth pronounced it. But although weariness, betrayal, loss of the beloved one are the end of loves, they are not the end of love, which is born. perpetually anew, ever youthful, ever fascinating.

'

The true malediction lies elsewhere, in the ending for the individual of the capacity itself of loving, the end of youth, the falling into habits, the drying up,