is a difference. The wit of Sorel is caustic, cynical, as that of the old raconteurs had been. The humor of Urfé is always genially optimistic. Indeed, his genius is astonishingly supple and various within his chosen sphere, so that many of the episodes are almost independent studies of various phases of love, and may perhaps be read in that way with the greatest pleasure. Thus, as Montégut has said, the love of Hylas is a sportive hedonism, witty, light-hearted, and inconstant, that of Damon is violent and gusty passion, that of Chryseide is vehemently self-assertive, that of Valentinian lusty and with a satyr leer; while on the other hand Tircis is nobly Platonic, Sylvandre shows a subtlety born of experience, and all offer so many object lessons to Céladon's sentimental ideality. Thus Urfé is in a very real way and to no small degree the predecessor of Racine and Marivaux, the first who made the study of love the center of minute observation and description, though not yet of psychological analysis. In this regard Urfé is not surpassed, is not even approached, by any novelist of the century, save perhaps Madame de Lafayette, whose "Princesse de Clèves" owes perhaps its present greater popularity to its shortness.

I could wish that it were possible for me by further citations to show that Urfé, in spite of the obvious artificiality of his scheme, was in his way a sort of realist. Hylas himself is obviously intended to suggest the typical courtier of Henry IV.; and Patru, a contemporary of the author, says that Urfé told him that the foundations of all the characters were taken from Urfé's immediate circle, just as the scene of their loves, the banks of the Lignon, was chosen, as he tells us, "to make as honored and renowned as possible the scene of his own birth. In this, too, Urfé is at once first and best of the ideal novelists of the century. And this touch of realism shows itself also in his style, especially in conversations, of which he inaugurated the difficult art that has now become a tradition of French fiction..

Thus far we have taken no account of the great space accorded by Urfé, following here as in so much else the example of Montemayor, to verses which indeed form so

considerable a part of the whole that Boileau ventures the suggestion that the novel was written to furnish a fit setting for them (Dialogue des héros du roman, Préface), though they are neither original in subject nor polished in execution, so that there is little reason to dwell upon them. It is far more likely that the motive of the "Astrée was to react against the coarseness which had overtaken French manners under the vert galant reign of Henry IV. Urfé's book, taken as a whole, and with some discordant notes, is a praise of all the social virtues, which are rewarded with the same precision that deals out condemnation to vice. It is not improbable that this kindly sermonizing of the aristocratic reformer assisted the popularity of the "Astrée" as much as it was assisted by it. It is certain that it had an immense influence in this direction. The first Parisian literary salon, the Hotel Rambouillet, of such cardinal importance in the evolution of French society and literature throughout the century, both for good and for ill, and at the zenith of its influence from 1624 to 1648, seems to have had its origin in a desire to approximate, so far as might be, to the aristocratic republic of the "Astrée." It has even been said, and by Frenchmen, that bon ton in French society dates from the "Astrée." Nor can one wonder at its influence when one considers the evidences of its astounding popularity. It came at the right moment. It met a longfelt and universal want, and the salt of its humor saved it from the penalty of its sentimentality. Even Sorel, the declared enemy of the whole pastoral school, whose "Berger Extravagant" is a sort of "Joseph Andrews" to Urfé's "Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded," pronounced it "an exquisite work." Bishops and saints, Camus and Francis de Sales, echoed the sentiments of the author of "Francion." The Bishop of Avranches, the scholarly Huet, writer of a treatise on the origin of novels, says in a letter to the novelist Mademoiselle de Scudéry: "This work was received by the public with infinite applause, and especially by those who were distinguished by the polish and beauty of their minds.

. I was almost a child when I first read it, and I was so

affected by it that I used to avoid seeing or opening it, fearing that I should be forced to read it again by the pleasure that I foresaw from it, as by a sort of enchantment." Later he yielded to the sweet temptation and read the novel "repeatedly aloud to his sister." Lafontaine, who surely was a man of good and unconventional taste, says: "When I was a boy I read his novel, and I read it still as a graybeard." Strangest of all is to find the crusty old Marquis de Larochefoucauld and the sprightly Fontanelle rejoicing in the love affairs of Céladon. The book was not only the "breviary of courtiers," but, if we may credit the satirists, was read and studied by all who had social aspirations. Sorel makes the hero of his "Berger Extravagant" belong to "a company of boys and girls who took all the names from the book of 'Astrée,' so that their talk was a perpetual pastoral," and the Javotte of Furetière's "Roman Bourgeois" cannot lay it down until she reads herself almost sick over its five thousand pages. Among such people it seems for two generations to have been a sort of book of reference on questions of deportment and breeding, and it was imitated on the popular stage in pastorals as countless as they were contemptible.

There is no end to the evidences that might be gathered of the universal and continued popularity of this work whose memory is now but a legendary mockery. It may suffice to state that twenty-nine German princes and princesses, with nineteen lords and ladies of high nobility, addressed to the author of "Astrée" in 1624 a petition, reciting that they had constituted themselves an Académie des vrais amants, had taken to themselves names from his work, and begged him for its speedy completion. This surely makes all other evidence superfluous.

The "Astrée" is a novel in a sense that no work preceding it is. It showed as no preceding work of fiction had done the possibilities of a new genre, which, however, neither Urfé nor his successors clearly defined. Indeed, the whole century is taken up with an effort, or rather with manifold efforts, to find out what the novel is, what limita

tions set it off from the drama and from history, from the epic and from satire. Gradually from these efforts there emerges a clear conception of what prose fiction could be and attempt, and what it should leave to other forms of literary art. The first novel that marks this demarcation is "Gil Blas." B. W. WELLS.

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH PAINTING.1

THERE are now in Christian lands only two schools of painting, the English and the French. The former embraces the British Isles; the latter, the rest of the world.

movement.

France has been to the art of the nineteenth century what Italy was to the art of the Renaissance, the center whence almost all light has radiated and the instigator of almost every When she painted in the classic style of David, the world acknowledged David as the supreme master. When Géricault and the Romanticists established their revolt in Paris, the world became romantic. When Millet had depicted the low life of brutal peasants with a power and a poetry that rank him with the greatest masters, the world discovered that peasants were the only things worth painting. When the Impressionists arose, so anxious to paint the atmosphere that they lost sight of the opacity of solid objects, the world turned Impressionist. And her hold upon the domain of art has rather strengthened than decayed as the century has moved onward to its close. Nearly all painters go to Paris to study, learning in the Parisian ateliers the French method; and those who are not able to go there study at home under masters who have received a Parisian education. Hence the whole world paints in the French manner. Whether you go to New York or to Moscow, to Stockholm or Madrid, to Berlin or Rome, you see only French painting. Subjects and costumes may differ, but the handling and the method are the same. Every picture is such as some French artist might have produced had he taken up his abode in the foreign land whence it comes.

But when you go to the England of the last half of the nineteenth century you seem to be transported to another

"English Contemporary Art," by Robert de la Sizeranne, translated by H. M. Poynter. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. "British Contemporary Artists," by Cosmo Monkhouse. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.