Yet the tone of his novels--though in my brief account the stories sound melancholy enough--is as far removed as possible from the _roman rosse_ of the Eighties; M. Bazin is full of faith and hope and charity; he is, in spite of human malice, so convinced of the final triumph of God that we might write on all his books the refrain of Æschylus:-- ‘Sing alas! and say alas! But the Good shall come to its own!’ Aιλινoν, Aἰλινoν, ειπε, τo δʹέυ νικατω. In those last years of the Nineteenth--in those first years of the Twentieth--Century, while René Bazin’s angelic voice was welling up in treble ecstasies, the pastoral novel in France had other notes which held, as it were, the bass--deep, strange notes--brief, complicated, syncopated phrasing. In other words, Jules Renard and Charles-Louis Philippe were giving their sense, too, of the life of woods and fields. I wrote once that Jules Renard was the Hokusaï of French literature. He just glances at an object, sees its essential character, fixes that and neglects the rest; a bird, a flower, a little boy with carroty hair and sensitive, eager eyes, a scolding housewife, best of all, perhaps, an old, old country-woman, who cannot read or write, but who is full of the knowledge of things. I would give even _Poil-de-Carotte_ for _Ragotte_! The quarrel of Ragotte and her son, ‘le Paul,’ moistens one’s eyes with the tenderest pity; and yet it is told with a dry, almost a hard precision, a concise sobriety; not a word superfluous. The thing happened so, and a pity ’tis ’twas so; there’s no more to be said. But underneath this real compassion there is a sad certitude of the end of all things, a melancholy nihilism, a hopeless irony. Few books are sadder reading than Jules Renard’s Bucolics. This harsh, terse, impassible writer breaks our heart by his choice of a subject: an ill-treated child, a helpless, infirm old woman. If we smile at anything that he evokes, it is seldom a happy thought, a hopeful suggestion, but some quaint image or touch of character, for Jules Renard enjoyed the gift of an incomparable visual imagination: he makes us see the bushy-tailed squirrel flitting through the autumn woods and lighting up all the dead leaves with his bright brush as he passes; or old Mother La Chalude, knitting as she walks, who has threaded on her apron string the pierced kernel of an apricot and placed it at her waist, a little to the left, to support the end of one of her knitting needles; or older Honorine, coming across the field-path, bent double, so that she appears a headless woman, while her stick, on which her rugged hands stand out like knots, is higher than her cap.