as you do. But I shall go on using it, because things must have a name if the public is to believe they 're

new.

"First, I've fixed a nail, and with a blow of my hammer I've driven it into the public's skull an inch; then with a second blow I've driven it in another inch. Well, my hammer is the journalism I do for myself in connection with my own works."

Lo! our portrait of the modern author stands completed by his own hand. In addition to his other activities, he humbugs the ingenuous public with a name or some other "good hooraw"

66 thet 's wut the

people likes; Sutthin' combinin' morril truth with phrases sech ez strikes"

and with the assistance of his own disinterested criticism, anonymously published, he gradually succeeds in working himself up a very pretty notoriety.

The fact is that Zola's is a puzzling, enigmatical sort of personality, and in that respect, as in so many others, representative of his times. There was undoubtedly at the bottom of his make-up a stratum of honesty, courage, and good faith. But like other men deficient in the highest culture and discipline he must have lived in a constant hallucination. I lay no particular stress in this connection on his determination to ugliness or on his belief in an

organised conspiracy to ruin him, which are usually reckoned as symptoms of mental alienation. As a matter of fact I do not suppose that Zola was madder than are most of us. What I refer to is that form of delusion which consists in believing that things are other than they are, or that, being as they are, their results will be other than they will be, simply because it is we who have to do with them. And to this form of hallucination he was particularly susceptible. Just as he could persuade himself, for instance, that this "naturalism" of his, whose nakedness he should one day expose to his intimates, was something of the noblest after all, and could still later, when profitable, turn square about to work for the most vapid socialistic idealism that ever floated by its own levity between heaven and earth in the region of the impalpable inane; just so he had no difficulty in believing that his enormous circulation was due solely to literary merit, when all the time he must have been conscious in some way or other that it was due in reality to his flattery of the lowest and most subterraneous instincts of human nature.

In the first petition for Tartuffe Molière boasts with legitimate pride that he has left in the play nothing morally ambiguous, nothing that might tend to confuse the distinction between good and evil. The principle is as

sound to-day as it was then; and much as we may shut our eyes to the consequences, its violation is attended with inevitable harm. For whoever attempts to introduce into literature anything that is itself equivocal or that tends to confuse this distinction, does not only debase the art that he is practising, but also throws away one of the strongest and most vital motives at his command-the absorbing conflict between good and evil. He fails to present a sound conception of life; he fails to inspire us with those correct ideas whose acquirement is the end of experience; and, what is perhaps equally or even more to the point as far as he is concerned, he fails to interest us and arouse our enthusiasm as he might have done. For after all the ultimate significance of existence is interpreted by our conscience and our moral nature. To live is not only to have engaged ourselves in the struggle of right and wrong, but to have learned the difference between them. But it was one of the faults of Zola's contemporaries to make this very confusion. And in following their lead here as elsewhere, he has sacrificed to an immediate vogue the permanent position to which his powers might otherwise have entitled him-provided he had the moral sense for it, for that is the very question his novels leave unanswered.

THE

JONATHAN SWIFT

LUDIBRIUM RERUM HUMANARUM

HE virtual completion of Mr. Temple Scott's new edition of Swift's prose writings1 naturally invites to a reconsideration of the strangely perturbed and intemperate spirit of which they are at once the mask and the expression. To be sure, something like a definitive edition of his poetry and his correspondence would be desirable also. But so much of his work is contained between the covers of these volumes that it is hardly presumptuous to attempt to pronounce upon him on the strength of this freshly bolted material alone.

I

On the whole Swift belongs to that small class of authors whose character is more arresting and significant than the main bulk of their work. There is a natural temptation for a critic or editor to exalt the object of his atten

The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. Edited by Temple Scott. 12 vols. Bohn's Library. New York: The Macmillan Co.

tions; and Mr. Scott, like other exhibitors of Swift, is inclined to take rather too bright a view of the latter's authorship. In literature, as in many other respects, Swift was a man of his age, and, as will be seen, not always of the best, or at least of the prevailing, tendencies of that age. And in spite of the fact that it was the nursery of modern English, the prose ideal of that particular period was after all a very imperfect one. It was well enough in affirming the virtues of clearness, simplicity, and reason. But it erred in attempting to follow too closely the misleading example of talk, and it fell in consequence into shallowness and commonplace. It failed to go deep enough, it fetched up no profound moral ideas. And only a century later, after Johnson had succeeded in pioneering a general reaction, did English prose find itself properly headed, with many of its lost powers restored, on the road to Burke and the great modern masters of style. In its kind Swift's prose is both more and less satisfactory than Addison's. While it is much less "elegant" and academic, it is much more searching and racy. But at the same time it is Addison's finish and "correctness" which have made him classic, while Swift's poignancy and liveliness are results of his nearer approach to that "timeliness," that 'occasionalism" which has served only to