keep our opinions, if they are reasonable; but in keeping them, we should never wound the feelings of others, or appear to be shocked at what they have said. It is dangerous to wish to be always master of the conversation, and to talk of the same thing too often; we ought to enter indifferently on all agreeable subjects which offer, and never let it be seen that we wish to draw the conversation to a subject we wish to talk of.

It is necessary to observe that every kind of conversation, however polite or however intelligent it may be, is not equally proper for all kinds of well-bred persons; we should choose what is suited to each, and choose even the time for saying it: but if there be much art in knowing how to talk to the purpose, there is not less in knowing how to be silent. There is an eloquent silence, it serves sometimes to approve or to condemn; there is a mocking silence; there is a respectful silence. There are, in short, airs, tones, and manners in conversation which often make up what is agreeable or disagreeable, delicate or shocking: the secret for making good use of them is given to few persons, those even who make rules for them mistake them sometimes; the surest, in my opinion, is to have none that we cannot change, to let our conversation be careless rather than affected, to listen, to speak seldom, and never to force ourselves to talk.

Translation of A. S. Bolton.

ÉDOUARD ROD

(1857-)

BY GRACE KING

DOUARD ROD belongs in the class of young French authors of the last quarter of the century; the last recruits in the column of which De Stendhal, in the opening quarter, was the standard-bearer. His writings belong to that phase of the literary development of the period which may be termed parenthetical, rather than transitional. They are in their nature a consequent, a production, a reflection, rather than a factor, a vital actor; and their value lies perhaps in their ethical rather than literary relation to their period, important and charming as they are from a literary point of view. They might indeed be fitly defined as intuitive, had not the author, by himself assuming the classification of "intuitivist," shorn the term of its fundamental meaning of self-unconsciousness.

Although Rod's writings belong to French literature, he himself is Swiss. He was born at Nyon in 1857, and studied at Berne and Berlin; and after a brilliant literary career, was invited to the chair of professor of foreign literature in the University of Geneva. Starting with essays upon his first ideals,-Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, he has followed in his books, as a critic has pointed out, the entire revolution of thought with which men's minds have been in travail for twenty years: first the inflexible rulings of naturalism and positivism,- of facts, externals, experiences, limited by the contracted horizon of immediate reality; then the gradual modification of the reactionary movement, when facts began to be accompanied by explanatory and supplemental ideas,- deprived of which they had been proven incomplete and sterile of conclusions. The soul was rediscovered; the phenomena of conscience began to be observed; intellectual activity was recognized to have an aim, and its development to be in conformity with certain rules and regulations of the time; the sum of whose changing, amended formulæ constitutes morality, which is of and for all time. And now it is being asked in literature if this morality, to be solid, should not rest on some supernatural foundation. In short, the human mind has turned round and retraced every step of its previous journey.

(

Rod's first novel, Palmyre Veulard,' is dedicated to the author of 'Nana. "Conscientiously brutal and studiously impure," says the

judicial critic, René Doumic, "it is worthy a disciple of Zola and the school of Medan." But-to follow the reasoning of this authority — nature protested against the developing tendencies of Naturalism; and besides, outside influences came to his assistance. He is a Swiss University man, and he is a Protestant; although he has retained but little tenderness of heart for the religion in which he has been reared, and mocks it upon all occasions. "But we remain prisoners for life in the religion that first fashioned our souls; we may lose faith, but not mental discipline." Disengaging himself from Zola, and following his intuitive predilections for Leopardi, Schopenhauer, the music of Wagner, the art of the English pre-Raphaelites and the great Russian novelists, and for the contemporary psychological analysis, as applied by Bourget,- he came to the conception of his own work, his own true originality, and his self-possession, enfranchised from all other mastership.

'La Course à la Mort' (The Way to Death), 'Le Sens de la Vie' (The Sense of Life), 'La Haut' (Up Above), 'La Vie Privée de Michel Tessier' (The Private Life of Michael Tessier), and 'La Seconde Vie de Michel Tessier' (The Second Life of Michael Tessier), are the novels which, succeeding one another in rapid succession, have carried his name and the stream of his fresh strong thought afield into literature. Their titles are a fair indication of their essential nature. 'La Course à la Mort' is the intimate journal, the pitiless self-analysis, of the typical pessimistic youth of the day; a despairing cry in the darkness; the confession of the want of the very light of which one denies the existence. It has been criticized as a catechism of pessimism drawn from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and its author is reproached with its possible contagious influence upon the young. But as he himself observes in the preface to the book, the analysis of a more or less subjective state of mind, which is itself more or less general, is not to be taken as the personal conviction of the author,- a confession of faith; still less as the propagation of a system. 'La Haut' itself is the antidote to the contagious influence, if such there be, of 'La Course à la Mort.' It is the story of the cure of a soul and its restoration to virility and hope, in the pure heights of an Alpine village. La Vie Privée de Michel Tessier,' with its sequel, is the melancholy story of a highprincipled man, overtaken in his home and in an honored and honorable career by a love which seems to him pre-eminent above all previous claims and duties; and his conscientious effort, through divorce and remarriage, to reconsecrate his life with love, and his love with life. It is a modern French tragedy of the purest writing. 'The Sense of Life,' crowned by the Academy, is however the work which displays M. Rod's originality to the best advantage, to himself

12337 and to that of the reader. There is hardly a novel in modern French literature that can be read with more profit, particularly by the foreign student of that literature and that life. And it is one of the books upon which criticism seems least profitably employed; necessarily, from its nature and from the nature of M. Rod. To quote a characteristic passage from Jules Lemaître about it:-"M. Édouard Rod puts to himself the question: What is the Sense of Life?' and if I have quite understood him, he answers himself in pretty much these words: 'If life have a meaning, it is that which honest and brave people give it, no matter what be the kind and degree of their culture.' . . Life has no meaning except for such as believe and love, that is his conclusion."

Besides these stories, M. Rod has written other works on the same lines. It would hardly be just to the author to omit the competent criticism of M. Anatole France upon one of these:-"I understand nevertheless that there is a moral in the book of M. Rod,-that to the vain all is vanity, to the lying all is lies. But even in its desolation of sadness, the book warns us to fear egoism as the worst of evils. It teaches us purity of heart and simplicity. It brings back to our memory that verse of the 'Imitation': 'For in whatever instance a person seeketh himself, there he falleth from love.»»

'Moral Ideals of the Present Time' is a volume of essays upon those masters who have appeared to M. Rod to exercise a direct moral influence upon the public. It opens with a worthy dedication to M. Paul Desjardins, and passes in review Renan, Schopenhauer, Zola, Bourget, Lemâitre, Scherer, Dumas, Brunetière, Tolstoy, and De Vogüé. The most succinct expression of the worth of the work is, that it is an invaluable and indispensable document to any literary student or demonstrator of the literary influences of the century.

Gran Ting

MARRIAGE

From The Sense of Life'

SHOULD like to find a word to express a being who is tranquil, sweet, good, confiding; one whose presence alone gives repose; a being of grace and charm, breathing peace.

While I work she is there behind me, watchful not to disturb

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me; from time to time I am conscious of the noise of the worsted she draws through the canvas, or the page she turns, or of her light breathing. Sometimes I turn and no longer see her; she has silently disappeared: after a moment she returns in the same way, without even a creak of the floor beneath her little slippers; and I feel her look resting on me as a continual caress, the look of her great, deep, clear eyes, wherein there is only goodness, tenderness, and devotion. And always also I feel her thought following mine, and traveling side by side with it across. the dreams, as across the cares of the day.

What mystery is there, then, in this sentiment of intimate union, which lessens disquietude and doubles joys? I suffered so much formerly in feeling myself alone! I passed nights wandering amid crowds to evade myself; forcing myself to the illusion that I was something to those others who were moving before my eyes. I have fled with horror from my home, so pitilessly filled with myself; where the smallest objects-the bibelots, books, paper on the wall, pictures and easy-chairs-sent back to me like multiplied mirrors my odious image. It seemed to me that I might leave it behind me as I went in the streets—this me; or forget it in a café, or deposit it in a theatre; and I haunted theatres, cafés, and streets. Often I fastened myself on to trumpery friends,-friends met by chance,- and recounted to them my affairs, sharing with them fragments of my soul, without allowing myself to be rebuffed by their indifference. How many times has not my heart beat out to strange hearts, without hearing aught but its own palpitations beating in a vacancy? How many times after having forgotten myself for an hour or a night in gay company,-in salons, casinos, or taverns; after laughing from full lips, and talking boisterously; after having diffused myself in confidences to others, and received with a friendly air theirs in return,- have I not felt with tenfold bitterness on the morrow that I was still alone, irremediably alone; that the noises had vanished, leaving naught behind; that the fumes of alcohol,- all had exhaled into sadness, like the friendship or love of the day before.

Well, it seems to me me now that my solitude is vanquished; certainly not because I see unceasingly near me the same known form, but because that form is loved. Something of her passes continually into me, like a beautiful warmth; like another, better life; and something of me passes into her. It is no longer a