composition; they disposed their incidents in due order of sequence; they arranged their figures with an æsthetic sense of perspective, prepared and suspended their crises and held the balance of accent and emphasis. In the hands of their successors, of Daudet, Loti, Maupassant, the Short Story underwent fundamental modification. One and all were content, with occasional reversions to older tradition, to abandon any attempt at narrative structure. They substituted for plot of consecutive events and actions, which to a greater or less degree constituted the framework of earlier the contes, the presentment of detached episodes, single personalities, and isolated situations. The Short Story of the artist was resolving itself into the sketch of the literary journalist. The unity of effect attained in earlier days through the harmonizing dominance of a single note of passion or emotion, or by the accentuated impress of some individual trait of temperament and character, was achieved by the exclusion from the canvas of all happenings, all ideas, save one. Under stress of this exclusion the conte became not seldom a mere art of anecdote, an art of the memorandum book. Of this art, in his contes, Alphonse Daudet was master. A naturalist by intention and conscience, intention and conscience suffered daily defeat overcome by the sympathetic humanitarianism of his Provençal temperament. The spiritual leaven in his nature proved, in the judgment of the realist, an invincible weakness-"La maîtresse faculté de Daudet c'est la faculté de l'attendrissement." His sensitive, nervous perceptions caught and trapped sentiment on the wing and registered the impression of its passage across the sordid or brutal human background. His scenes are drawn from the stage of realism, the sentiments appertain to the sphere of sympathetic idealism: "J'ai toujours été très curieux de ces petites scènes silencieuses et intimes qu'on devine encore plus qu'on ne les voit . . . de ces pantomimes qui d'un geste vous révèlent toute une existence." Graceful and sympathetic, the pastel vignettes, for they are little more, added by Daudet to the list of Short Stories, fringe the profounder depths of irreparable sadness which his longer novels portray. They are concise, with the terseness of an artist who has learnt never to transgress the limits of his chosen frame; their unity of effect is that of a scene, colored and permeated by its own sentiment, reflected in the sensitive mirror the artist has prepared on which to net its fugitive image. This note of sympathetic sadness which runs through Daudet's work was deepened and expanded by Pierre Loti. The episodes Loti treats-the mournful reluctance of the seaman to whom has fallen the task of tending the ship's cattle when the last calm-eyed victim awaits its hour of slaughter, the hopeless pathos of human dying in "Tante Claire nous quitte"-are not as Daudet's vignettes, anecdotes of an observer, nor are they isolated scenes noted in a sketchbook. They are rather the memento mori of fugitive emotional impressions. Moreover, they are impressions stamped and sealed with the signature of sincerity. It is by force of emotion alone that they live in the memory, and emotion is the true medium of that "talent dévocation" by which Loti supplements his descriptive gift. "L'Etui de Nacre," published in 1892, marked a new era in the history of the Short Story. Since the days of Mérimée, objective intellectualism, so far as the conte was concerned, had passed by on the other side. The great naturalists, Flaubert (with the exception of his "Trois Contes"-"Un Cœur Simple," "La Légende de Saint to la Vierge and "la tête en bas, les pieds en l'air jonglait avec six boules de cuivre et douze couteaux," in the monastery chapel, are presented with a lucidity of outline, a felicity of touch, which, if it leaves them devoid of any illusion of reality, endows them with the vitality of art. The "Procurateur de Judée" stands foremost as an attempt, in strict accordance with the genius of the Short Story, to concentrate in one salient phrase the gist of the whole preceding narrative. It is a mode of procedure peculiarly in keeping with the aims of the conte writer. The scene of the story is the Roman watering-place where Aelius Lamia, returned in middle age to Italy after the long exile of his riotous youth, encounters his friend of past years, the ex-procurator of Judea. The invalids discourse together concerning the last period of Pilate's residence in Palestine. To Lamia's questions Pilate replies at length. Lamia too has Judean memories of exile, memories belonging to the green years of youth. One memory has outlived all others. It is of a woman of Jerusalem, before whose beauty Cleopatra's might have paled. To illfamed hovels of fisher folk, to taverns crowded with soldiers and publicans, he had followed her vagrant steps. And then she had vanished from the street-ways. Men said she had joined herself to a little band of disciples, disciples of a young thaumaturge, a Galilean wanderer. "Il se nommait Jésus, il était de Nazareth, et il fut mis en croix pour je ne sais quel crime. Pontius, te souvient-il de cet homme?' Pontius Pilatus fronça les sourcils et porta la main à son front comme quelqu'un qui cherche dans sa mémoire. Puis-Jésus?' murmurat-il: 'Jésus, de Nazareth? Je ne me rappelle pas.'' Julien l'Hospitalier," "Hérodias"), the de of The process here is obvious: the places, the names, the ideas, referred to in the dialogue are already familiar to the reader, hence all explanatory details are obviated, and the author draws into his service all the associations attached. The keen and subtle irony which threads the pages to the climax lies throughout, it may be said, in what is not written. And in the final sentence placed in Pilate's mouth-"Je ne me rappelle pas"-it is our consciousness that the name that Pilate has forgotten has focussed the remembrance of nineteen centuries, that gives its point to the story. But if amongst moderns M. France has achieved singular distinction as the intellectualist of the modern conte; if Alphonse Daudet colored his brief notes from life with the tenderness of his Provençal sympathy; if Pierre Loti has lent the accent of poignant emotional fatalism to the vraie vérité the of insignificant tragedies of lives, were holds of Guy de Maupassant rank as the supreme conteur his century in the estimation of his countrymen. "Saveur amplitude, puiswhich sance," the qualities the Flaubert's and pupil sought, fashion of his finding elicits from M. Doumic the pronouncement that commentary fails where the critic is face to face with "la perfection même.""" Some two hundred and more "nouvelles" belong to his short period of incredibly productive activity. In the telling of these stories there is no search for dramatic phrase, no suspension of the crises for dramatic effect, no resort to disused, artificial, or technical terms for direct descriptive expression. His talent for observation, his faculty for description and narrative, are unrivalled; he possessed a faultless sense of proportion in fitting his theme to the dimensions of its frame, and above all he achieved the finished art of simplicity of d'Aujourd'hui." Rene 10 "Ecrivains Doumic. thought: "J'ai pensé simplement." Absolute lucidity of statement, combined with a brevity which never suggests an abbreviation, was the result of that prominent characteristic of his literary processes. Moreover, it is noticeable that his psychology is the psychology of the immediate circumstance and sensation; his characters have neither past nor future. Within the confines enumerated by M. Lanson, confines admitting no indication -except by rare exception-of any spiritual side to life material and sensual, it would be difficult to say what aspect of mœurs contemporaines he has not treated. His pictures of peasant life-emulating the brutality of Balzac's "Paysans"-form a group unrivalled in their adaptation of intimate knowledge to its verbal expression. He has mirrored his slowwitted in villagers the egoistic animalism of their unawakened symThe provincial bourgeois, pathies. equally sordid if less frankly brutal, supplies him with another series of models. He has portrayed the libertine survival of monarchism; the Paris viveur, his emotions blunted, his sensations dulled, his passions atrophied; depraved little marquises, in exquisite toilettes, with a callous sensuality, a gross shamelessness their sisters of the street would find it hard to emulate. Episode after episode of intrigues, base, vicious and squalid, succeed one another, the last vestige of all that makes the desire of man for his mate a healthful and regenerating force in Nature's great economy eliminated. His hunting anecdotes are stories of sportsmen possessed by sanguinary manias; his contes-à-rire retain the grossness of oral folk-tales or medieval farce. In "La Peur," "Lui," "Qui sait?" notably in his masterpiece of terror "Le Horla," he has chronicled the hauntings of his own diseased brain as sanity made surrender to the as humanity of mating love, "Le Pardon," where Berthe lays the heavy bouquet of roses, white roses, on the tomb of her husband's mistress, with "une prière inconnue et suppliante"; "L'Enfant," where the younger Berthe takes in her arms the new-born child of the dead woman Jacques had loved and abandoned: "La mère est morte, dites-vous-nous l'élèverons, ce petit," are records of absolutions none the less divine because purely human. "Une Veuve," which curiously enough suggests the pen of an Emily Brontë, where "la vieille tante," wearing upon her finger the ring of blonde hair, relates the long-past story of her childcousin's precocious and fatal passion, primitive in its violence, piteous in its issue, is a story of pure sentiment. In all these, to name no more, sympathy and emotion vibrate through the assumed impassibility of the conteur. And he has told finally, in "L'Amour," of that greatest love that no man can outdo. It is the dawn scene of a hunter's chase. The first shot has broken the truce of night and darkness on the frozen marsh, the slaughter of flying fowl has begun, the dogs bring in the bleeding, stricken wild duck to the feet of the two sportsPresently in the cold, clear sun delusions of a madman's fantasy." To what extent was the torturing mental malady that shadowed all his popular triumphs responsible for the artist's conception of life and character? To what extent should the absence of certain æsthetic moral qualities and the lack of experience implied by his avowal: "Je n'ai jamais aimé. . . . Je ris souvent des idées sentimentales, très sentimentales et tendres que je trouve en cherchant bien," share the onus attaching to the extraordinarily narrow outlook from which he treats with wearying recurrence, the relationship of man and woman one of mutual degradation? It is a question for the psychologist to determine. For the critic of non-latin race, to read consecutively a prolonged series of Maupassant nouvelles is to alternate between an attitude of acute homage to his genius and one of equally acute exasperation at the continuous and monotonous ascription of a crude animalism as the source of every action and the mainspring of every character depicted. It might almost be said that the accuracy of truth to life in detail enhances the sense of the want of truth to life in its entirety, for life as a whole embraces, with a wider tolerance than his harsh pessimism dreams of, good rise light two silver-breasted teal rise with evil, compassions with cruelties, the loves of spirit with the loves of sense. What Maupassant could effect on the silver reverse of his genius has, nevertheless, been understated. Finer intuitions not seldom mitigated and enlarged his materialistic preconceptions, more especially as the childish desire Gautier initiated, to scandalize the bourgeois, gave place to other esthetic motives. "Claire de Lune," in its moonlit atmosphere, where the old priest signs an armistice with the "La Vie et l'Euvre de Guy de Maupassant." E. Maynial. Paris. men. from the rushes: "Je tirai-une d'eux tombe presque à mes pieds. Alors, dans l'espace audessus de moi une voix, une voix d'oiseau cria. Ce fut une plainte courte, répétée, déchirante, et la bête, mit à la petite bête épargnée, ce tourner dans le bleu du ciel au-dessus de nous, en regardant sa compagne morte que je tenais entre mes mains. Karl à genoux, le fusil à l'épaule, l'œil ardent, la guettait, attendant qu'elle fût assez proche "Tu a tué la femelle,' dit-il; 'le mâle ne s'en ira pas.' Certes il ne s'en allait point. Il tournoyait toujours et pleurait tutour de nous. Jamais gémissement de souffrance ne me déchira le cœur Such is Maupassant's rendering of L'Amour, nor, one may conjecture, was it wholly in irony that he atThe Edinburgh Review. tributed love's supreme sacrifice to the love of the mated bird. A complete survey of the French conte would resolve itself into a mere catalogue of authors and titles, and in a brief study of some definite types many noteworthy names must necessarily be omitted. Further, in a criticism of foreign literature it is well that the critic's endeavor should be rather to interpret qualities and methods than to class them in orders of pre-eminence: for him it is wise to lay the finger on the lips, and recall the axiom of a greater critic: "C'est le temps qui classe les hommes, et il les classe selon l'influence qu'ils ont sur l'avenir." Una A. Taylor. THE BALKAN WAR AND THE INDIAN MUSALMANS. BY "AN INdian Muslim.” The Crescent in its glory is all but set in Europe and there is wailing in the tents of Ottoman and darkness over the whole of the Mohammedan world. Probably not even in the Turkish Empire has the defeat of the Turkish forces been so keenly felt as by the Mohammedans of India. All throughout the war the Indian Musalmans identified themselves so closely with Turkey, as far as it was possible, that the war was bound to have a great effect on them for good or for evil. The war is at last over and peace has been made, but its consequences will remain long after the war itself is forgotten. How it has affected the Mohammedans of India and what result it may have on their future is what we are concerned with. more than a surprise to the Mohammedan world: it was a crushing blow, a staggering revelation. And because Turkey was regarded as the sole surviving power of Islam, its only hope of glory, this revelation of its weakness was accompanied with all the bitterness of a present disappointment and the uncertainty of a gloomy future. It was such a grievous shock that it unnerved the whole Mohammedan world. In this respect the war has been an unmixed evil to the followers of the Prophet. The defeat of Turkey in the Balkans came as a great surprise to the whole world like the defeat of Russia by Japan a few years ago. But it was In India the public causes, with which the Mohammedan community concerned itself, suffered considerably on account of the war. The war had occupied such a pre-dominant place in the mind of the Mohammedans that it hardly left room for anything else. Only one single object seemed to engross the entire attention of the community to the neglect of other public duties and temporarily all sense of |