It is well to content one’s self, at all events, with affection; so stiff a job, in such a case, is understanding or, still more, explanation. There is a kind of finality in Loti’s simplicity—if it even _be_ simplicity. He performs in an air in which, on the part of the spectator, analysis withers and only submission lives. Has it anything to do with literature? Has it anything to do with nature? It must be, we should suppose, the last refinement either of one or of the other. Is it all emotion, is it all calculation, is it all truth, is it all humbug? All we can say as readers is that it is for ourselves all experience, and of the most personal intensity. The great question is whether it be emotion “neat” or emotion rendered and reduced. If it be resolved into art why hasn’t it more of the chill? If it be sensibility pure why isn’t it cruder and clumsier? What is exquisite is the contact of sensibility made somehow so convenient—with only the beauty preserved. It is not too much to say of Loti that his sensibility begins where that of most of those who _use_ the article ends. If moreover in effect he represents the triumph of instinct, when was instinct ever so sustained and so unerring? It keeps him unfailingly, in the matter of “dialogue,” out of the overflow and the waste. It is a joy to see how his looseness is pervaded after all by proportion. LONDON NOTES _August_ 1897 I shrink at this day from any air of relapsing into reference to those Victorian saturnalia of which the force may now be taken as pretty well spent; and if I remount the stream for an instant it is but with the innocent intention of plucking the one little flower of literature that, while the current roared, happened—so far at least as I could observe—to sprout by the bank. If it was sole of its kind moreover it was, I hasten to add, a mere accident of the Jubilee and as little a prominent as a preconcerted feature. What it comes to therefore is that if I gathered at the supreme moment a literary impression, the literary impression had yet nothing to do with the affair; nothing, that is, beyond the casual connection given by a somewhat acrid aftertaste, the vision of the London of the morrow as I met this experience in a woeful squeeze through town the day after the fair. It was the singular fate of M. Paul Bourget, invited to lecture at Oxford under university patronage and with Gustave Flaubert for his subject, to have found his appearance arranged for June 23. I express this untowardness but feebly, I know, for those at a distance from the edge of the whirlpool, the vast concentric eddies that sucked down all other life.