This keen appreciation of the beauty and character of Nature, combined with a tragic sense of the aimlessness and incertitude of human destiny, are the peculiar quality, I think, of the closing Nineteenth Century: a mingling of enchantment and disenchantment. Nowhere, of course, is it so remarkable as in Pierre Loti, but he is out of our perspective--which only concerns the Twentieth Century. We have noticed it in Jules Renard, only lately dead (1864-1909). We shall find it again, with less artistry and a more poignant pity, in another writer, ten years younger, who died about the same time, Charles-Louis Philippe; as we found it in Madame Colette. Jules Renard was one of the rare French authors of our time who do not scorn to love their calling; who are men of letters from the bottom of their soul, and not principally apostles, or disciples, or reformers, or philosophers;--who are as happy as Flaubert when at last they enclose an aspect of reality, however humble, in some perfect phrase as pure as the amber which preserves a fly. Renard had ideas and passionate convictions of his own; to resume, let us say that they were the exact opposite of the ideas and passionate convictions of a Paul Claudel; but he did not usually write to express or to expound his peculiar theory of anti-clericalism or democracy. If these opinions came into the picture, he noted them with his customary poignant exactitude, no more. Only once did he think of writing a play with a purpose. His great, his scrupulous endeavour was to represent reality as he saw it, just as it struck his shrewd, short-sighted gimlet-glance, his Japanese or Alexandrian sense of detail; but an endless patience--the patience of the sportsman and the painter--enabled him to track an impression down to its most secret touch. And then he fixed it in one perfect phrase--sometimes just marred by too tense an effort to seize an evanescent reality. Jules Renard, in fine, was an artist. He looked at Nature, not as so many do, from the fourth floor of a Paris boulevard, but from the village street or from the field that slopes away beyond the orchard hedge. He was mayor of the little commune in the department of the Nièvre where he spent so much of his time--and a mayor passionately absorbed in his municipal affairs; but when he turned homewards and sat down to his writing-table, Chitry-les Mines and Chaumont lost their magic; the man, the mayor, gave place to the patient artist--surely the most scrupulous of our time--carving his cherry-stone, polishing his bead of amber, where some chance insect lives for ever in a pellucid incorruptibility.