He commits himself to no definite esthetic system, thus suggesting his affinities to the French impressionists and to that Jules Lemaître whom he so much admired. “No meio não está só a virtude, mas a verdade,” he writes; “not only virtue, but truth, lies in the middle.” This, as I have said, is not a wish for the Horatian safety of the middle course, but rather an innate mistrust of extremes. To the ancient apophthegm that there is nothing new under the sun--and it would be just as true to say that there is nothing old under it, or that all things under the sun are new--he composes a variant that might well stand as the description of the best in our newer criticism: “Nada ha de definitivo debaixo do Sol”; “there is nothing definitive under the sun.” In United States criticism there is a lapidary phrase to match it, and from a spirit who, allowing for all the modifications of time, space and temperament, is kin to Verissimo. I refer to a brief sentence that occurs in the Introduction to Ludwig Lewisohn’s _A Modern Book of Criticism_, in a paragraph devoted to demonstrating the futility of absolute standards, as represented in the important work of Paul Elmer More.… “Calmly oblivious of the crumbling of every absolute ever invented by man,” writes Mr. Lewisohn, “he (i. e., Mr. More) continues in his fierce and growing isolation to assert that he knows what human life ought to be and what kind of literature ought to be permitted to express its character. That a form of art or life exists and that it engages the whole hearts of men makes little difference to him. He knows.… And what does he know? Only, at bottom, his own temperamental tastes and impulses which he seeks to rationalize by an appeal to carefully selected and isolated tendencies in art and thought. And, having rationalized them by an artifice so fragile, he seeks to impose them upon the men and the artists of his own day in the form of laws. I know his reply so well. It is this, that if you abandon his method, you sink into universal scepticism and undiscriminate acceptance. The truth is that I believe far more than he does. For I love beauty in all its forms and find life tragic and worthy of my sympathy in every manifestation. I need no hierarchical moral world for my dwelling-place, because I desire neither to judge nor to condemn. _Fixed standards are useless to him whose central passion is to have men free._ Mr. More needs them for the same inner reason--infinitely rarified and refined, of course,--for which they are necessary to the inquisitor and the militant patriot. He wants to damn heretics.… I do not. His last refuge, like that of every absolutist at bay, would be in the corporate judgment of mankind. Yes, mankind has let the authoritarians impose upon it only too often. But their day is nearly over.…”[2]