is the desert Arab of twelve hundred years ago. What he was in those days we know from the salient portrait of him in Arab ballad poetry. We have referred already to Sir Charles Lyall's translations of these ballads. There is no mistaking for a moment the man there depicted. One after another these poems are as like as peas in a pod. They are all perfectly agreed as to the kind of man they admire and what those qualities are which form an ideal character. And the man they paint is a man strongly marked with the aggressive and virile virtues; full of pride and valour, fiercely militant, keen and wary in mind, lean, hard and tireless in body, vengeful to a high degree, yet courteous and generous; the pride of his own tribe and the terror of all others-in all respects, in short, what we might call a 'gentleman,' one who is himself his own standard and whose demand upon conduct is that it shall be worthy of himself. Such were Kaled and Omar and Okba in days of old; such was El Mokrani to-day, or El Negoumi, who vowed that he would hurl back the British advance and carry the Koran through all Europe, and whose grave is on the Nile banks near Wady Halfa; such, too, was our friend on the steamboat.

Not an ignoble ideal certainly, and yet with what terrible limitations! In describing what the Arab is, we have already described what he is not. The active and virile virtues he undoubtedly possesses and always has possessed; but the reader may search through every one of these poems, and of such qualities as humility, self-sacrifice, longsuffering, forgiveness of injuries and the like, he will find not a trace. More than this, he will find these virtues treated as despicable weaknesses. To forgive an injury, to count himself as nothing, to go down lower when he can go up higher, all this sums up for the Arab the idea of abject worthlessness. These qualities are the qualities which make society possible, failing which society would go to pieces for want of a common feeling between its members. And -alas, for the Arab's claim to a personal as apart from a collective estimate-not only are these qualities the cement of society, they are also the qualities that give richness and depth to character itself. All races have their balladpoetry stage. But with most races this passes. The poetry of thought succeeds to the poetry of action. The Shakespeares and Wordsworths come in their season. But the Arab has remained always in the stage of ballad poetry.

The ideals of that stage are the only ideals that have ever had any meaning for him.

And if we ask how it is that this limitation has clung to the Arab so tenaciously the answer is written for us across a million square miles of sterile sand and crumbling rocks. He who lives in the desert lives in an enemy's country. He makes his way here by force. He must foresee his needs, forget nothing, and press on to his destination. He must fight with Nature for every well and palmtree he possesses. His whole life is a training in wariness, vigilance, courage, endurance. Such are the qualities which are called forth by this scenery, and which are, indeed, indispensable to existence in it. But beyond this nothing. The stable conditions which develope social life are totally lacking. That life is here unknown. The influence it exerts is an unknown influence. To such surroundings the Arab has been inured for immeasurable lapses of time. What wonder that the limitation in nature, here so marked, should have become in him a fixed limitation in character? What wonder that the only virtues applicable to such an environment should have come to seem to him the only virtues worth having?

It is this temperament, combined as it is of fierceness and energy, but stopping short of all those qualities which give birth to social stability, which seems to us to explain so much of the Arab's history. It explains both his successes and failures. It explains the fury of his attack and his success in destroying and consuming all that is rotten, effete, and worn out in the world. It explains the lack of definite purpose in all his undertakings, which we began by laying stress on, and his failure to build up anything durable and solid of his own. It explains why in Europe's dark hour he was so prominent and terrible a figure, and why to-day he is back in the desert once more.

ART. VII. SAINTE-BEUVE AND THE ROMANTICS. (VICTOR HUGO, LAMENNAIS, GEORGE SAND, BALZAC.)

1827-1837.

1. Sainte-Beuve. Par LÉON SÉCHÉ. 2 vols. T. 1, Son Esprit. T. 2, Ses Mours. Paris: Mercure de France, 1904.

2. Le Livre d'Amour de Sainte-Beuve. Par G. MICHAUT. Paris Fontemoing, 1905.

3. Lettres de Sainte-Beuve à Victor Hugo et à Madame Victor Hugo. Éditées par GUSTAVE SIMON. Paris: Revue de Paris, 15 Déc. 1904; 1, 15 Jan., 15 Février, 1905.

4. Sainte-Beuve. Par ALBERT SOREL. Paris: Revue Bleue, 17 et 31 Déc. 1904; 7 et 14 Jan. 1905.

5. Les Causeries du Lundi. Par SAINTE-BEUVE. 15 vols. Paris: Garnier Frères.

6. Nouveaux Lundis. 13 vols. Portraits Contemporains. 5 vols. Poésies Complètes. 2 vols. Par SAINTE

BEUVE. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.

7. Les Cahiers de Sainte-Beuve. Paris: Lemerre.

8. Volupté. Par SAINTE-BEUVE. Paris: Fasquelle.

'Posez la main sur la terre et dites-moi pourquoi elle a tressailli. Quelque chose que nous ne savons pas se remue dans le monde: il y a là un travail de Dieu.'-LAMENNAIS: 'Paroles d'un Croyant.' 'J'ai pu m'approcher du lard, mais je ne me suis pas pris à la ratière.'-SAINte-Beuve.

THE

HE influence of Sainte-Beuve, which is mild, insidious, furtive and pervading, determined the second half of the nineteenth century in France. He was the master-or rather the tentative suggestive teacher-of Taine and of Renan. He whispered to the first that a man is the product of the race, climate, and civilisation into which he is born: that his very feelings and intelligence depend more or less on the height of the thermometer and the price of food-stuffs. He insinuated to Renan that there is nothing in the mind of Man which the mind of Man has not evoked and developed ; that a religion is a growth like a plant, a natural phenomenon like a storm or a volcanic eruption. He was the leader of positive criticism; he was the apostle of the contingent, and held that every effect has its cause within the bounds of nature. He was a man of science in his sphere, a pupil

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of Lamarck's, and as he loved to say-a 'naturaliste des esprits.' But for ten years of his youth he had wandered into Armida's garden-he had worshipped Romance, the lyric cry, passion, the sudden conversions worked by a grace divine-he had been in love, he had been religious, he had been a poet. He, too, had laid his hand on the breast of earth, and had felt her quiver; he, too, had said: There is something which we know not that stirs and travails in the world.' He had been a Romantic.

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Those were the ten most passionate years of his life, and the notes and souvenirs, of which he was so prodigal in his old age, constantly revert to them. The man and the critic in him (as he used to say) survived the poet in him, who had died young. Those among us who, like M. Troubat, can remember Sainte-Beuve on the eve of the FrancoPrussian war (which, happily, he did not live to witness) still recall his constant allusions to that far-distant past. His old age was singularly calm and prosperous; at sixtyfive his genius was still as prompt, as ironical, as delicate, as solid, as various, as in his happiest days; every Tuesday the Temps' produced one of his admirable 'Lundis.' He was a Senator, he was an Academician; as he walked from his quiet little villa in the Rue Mont-Parnasse across the Luxembourg gardens to the Senate, a murmur of sympathy would salute the neat, alert, replete little old gentleman who was the idol and the hero of the Latin Quarter. Yet there is nothing heroic about 'l'Oncle Beuve.' His domed bald head, contemplative brow, kind humorous glance, inquisitive nose, and mischievous sensual chin, belong to an amused and indulgent spectator of the world and its ways. He says his say, and it is the say of a Liberal and a Free-thinker; but he will push no extremes against the powers that be, who were his patrons yesterday and may be his stand-by again to-morrow.

He lived the life of a scholar, if not always the life of a sage, and by no means the life of a saint, in the house which his mother had built in a green little garden, just off that quiet Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs which had witnessed the best years of his youth. There, in his tranquil library, surrounded by his Greek reader, his doctor, his secretary, and the respectable lady who kept his house, he received enthusiastic deputations of students, the Princess Mathilde, fellow scholars, or little Bohemian grisettes. Nothing human was a stranger to him. But often, when he sat alone, his fancy would wander away to that wonderful

episode of long ago; to the friends he sees no more-some of them dead (like Lamennais and Lacordaire), some of them bitterly estranged (like Pierre Leroux), some of them merely absent (and he smiles as he thinks of kindly George Sand, a comfortable old country-woman in Berry); and more especially his memories cling to one of them, the dearest, who is at once absent, estranged, and dead to him, while his fancy evokes the rock mid-Channel, with the pompous exile in his frayed old cloak, mouthing immortal verse to the storms that break on a foreign strand; and his heart goes out to the man whom for more than forty years he has admired, adored, followed, forsaken, betrayed, reviled, belittled, injured, forgiven, but never forgottenVictor Hugo.

Of late, that name comes tripping to his pen. His work is full of allusions to the hero of his youth, whose full grandeur he only now begins to perceive.

He remembers a line of his favourite La Bruyère, in which that artist in human nature describes the passage of Genius in our midst-sublime, solitary, too huge to be contained in our traditional formulas, shocking those just and moderate minds who judge everything by the standard of yesterday, trampling on their rules, irritating them and arousing their resentment.

'Perhaps,' he says to himself, perhaps I never under'stood him. He was at once too immense and too small.'

...

...

'Je suis demeuré timide à son égard, et insuffisant comme critique. .. Toujours, en le louant ou le critiquant, je l'ai désiré un peu autre qu'il ne l'était . . . toujours, j'ai opposé à la réalité puissante, en face de laquelle je me trouvais, un idéal adouci ou embelli que j'en détachais à mon choix. . . Je n'ai jamais réussi ni consenti à l'accepter et à l'embrasser dans toute la vigueur et la portée de son développement.'-(Sainte-Beuve, 'Portraits Contemporains,' i. p. 463.)

And now they will never meet again. A gulf, not only of winds and waters, but of feelings, of rancour, of political passion, separates the exile in Guernsey from the prosperous little Academician in the Emperor's Senate of 1869.

I.

'In describing a great man, insist on the dominant influence of his youth that is to say, on the first group of young contemporaries and associates where his talent takes on its definite form. These young men of an age will go together down the path of life-or the greater tretch of it-companions, competitors, friends, witnesses, adversaries.