Again: “We regulate ourselves by France. France has no strife of schools now, neither have we; France has some extravagant youths, so have we; it shows now an even stronger tendency,--the humanitarian, and we begin to write socialistic books.” He spoke of poets as “the sonorous echo of Hugo’s verse, between heaven and earth, to transmit to the gods the plaints of mortals,” yet only in the end do any of his poems ring with such an echo, and the plaints that rise from the poems of Bilac that his countrymen most love are cries of passion. “Art,” he said, as if to bely the greater part of his own life’s work, and with something of repentance in his words, “is not, as some ingenious visionaries would have it, an assertion and a labor apart, without filiation to the other preoccupations of existence. All human concerns are interwoven and blend in an indissoluble manner. The towers of gold and ivory in which artists sequestered themselves, have toppled over. The art of today is open and subject to all the influences of the milieu and the epoch. In order to be the most beautiful representation of life, it must hear and preserve all the cries, all the complaints, all the lamentations of the human flock. Only a madman or a monstrous egoist … could live and labor by himself, locked under seven keys within his dream, indifferent to all that is happening outside in the vast field where the passions strive and die, where ambition pants and despair wails, where are being decided the destinies of peoples and races.…” This is, as we shall presently be in position to note, fairly a recantation of his early poetic profession of faith. Which is right,--the proclamative self-dedication to Form and Style that stands at the beginning of his _Poesias_, or this consecration to humanity? Both. For at each stage of his career, Bilac was sincere and filled with a vision; in art, for that matter, only insincerity and inadequacy are ever wrong. And perhaps not in art alone. M. Gsell, who lately wrote an altogether delightful book made up of notes taken at Anatole France’s retreat at Villa Saïd, quotes this little tale from the master, who was reminded of it by a portrait of Paolo Uccello in Vasari. “This is the painter,” said France, “whose wife gently reproached him with working too slowly. “‘I must have time,’ the artist said, ‘to establish the perspective of my pictures.’ “‘Yes, Paolo,’ the poor woman protested, ‘but you are drawing for us the perspective of destitution and the grave.’ “She was right,” commented France, “and he was not wrong. The eternal conflict between the scruples of the artist and harsh reality.”