His work was the construction of a paradise for himself in which other people are allowed to walk. His stories are a substitute for opium and haschisch, and take us into a world like that of old romance and myth, where we meet our own souls walking in strange clothes. 'Art,' says Santayana, 'so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to be a disappointment.' We leave a volume of Gautier as we leave the _Mabinogion_, or the _Morte Darthur_, or the _Volsunga Saga_, or a book of fairy-tales. We have to readjust ourselves before meeting the difficulties of life. But opposite Santayana's sentence we may set one from Mahomet. 'If any man have two loaves, let him sell one, and buy flowers of the white narcissus; for the one is food for the body and the other is food for the soul.' And perhaps this art, where the world is simplified into the conventions of a tapestry, by its intense appeal to primitive emotions, may help us like a touchstone to distinguish between the things to which more than lip-service is slavery, and the things to which less than life-service is death. POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE [Self-conscious method.] 'IT is the curse,' says Poe, 'of a certain order of mind that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Not even is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.' It is all very well to call it a curse; it is the curse that gave us Leonardo's notebooks, Reynolds' Discourses, and Stevenson's few essays on the art of writing; the curse that is among the reasons of Leonardo's excellence, Reynolds' excellence, Stevenson's excellence, and the excellence of Poe himself. It is the curse that is the secret of all real knowledge of technique. The man who is as interested in the way of doing a thing as in the thing when done, is the man who is likely to put a new tool in the hands of his fellow-craftsmen.