‘Le style de La Calprenède est maudit en mille endroits; de grandes périodes de roman, de méchants mots--je sens tout cela ... et cependant je ne laisse pas de m’y prendre comme à de la glu; la beauté des sentiments, la violence des passions, la grandeur des événements tout cela m’entraîne comme une petite fille.’ And even as Mme de Sévigné was absorbed in _Cléopatre_ we lose ourselves in _Jean-Christophe_. Romain Rolland is the great spectator of our times. Will this quality of moralising criticism, this tendency to preach as well as to paint, and to hold the mirror up to Nature in a mood of violent irony--will this gift of satire keep its savour when the generation whom M. Rolland alternately objurgates and encourages shall have passed away? It is difficult to say. He is perhaps one of a race who exist rather because of a certain flame of life, a force of personality, than because of the perfection of their work. Tolstoi, Dr Johnson, Rousseau, are the great names of this fraternity. _We_ are their characters, they mould _us_, they move _us_, no less than their puppets. And we treasure their lessons. But do we often open _The Rambler_ or _La Nouvelle Héloise_? Will our children know, as we know, all the ins and outs of _War and Peace_? And have we, finally, the right to include M. Romain Rolland in this great category of artists who were something more than artists? It is too soon to say. We are still lost in the multiplicity of detail, the immense succession of portraits (not only of persons but of generations and nations and societies) which fill the vast canvas of _Jean-Christophe_. EDMOND ROSTAND When, in 1886, at eighteen years of age, Edmond Rostand, carried off the Prize for Eloquence at the Academy of Marseilles, the bent of his genius was already plain. For in praising Honoré d’Urfé and his great romance, _Astrée_, the young poet pleaded the cause of a form of art as far removed as possible from the Naturalist formulas which were still the fashion of the hour. And his praise appeared a programme; and the young apologist of Urfé discovered himself to be the apostle of an idealist and sentimental revival. Despite his amusing originality, and notwithstanding the real nobility of his ideas, Edmond Rostand is not a poet for poets. He was too clever by half--never was a clearer case of the wisdom of the ancients whose proverb ran that ‘the half is more than the whole!’ His poems are like a brilliant display of fireworks, whose flowers and fusees, whose flashing greens, and blues, and carmines, confuse our sight and prevent our seeing the quiet radiance of the stars behind, above.