‘Clarté fondue à la clarté, ces travailleurs Récoltaient du froment la plus pure des fleurs. ‘Ils venaient visiter sur ce coin de la Terre La beauté que Dieu donne à la vie ordinaire.’ One of my friends, who is Professor of Rhetoric (Modern Literature) in a High School, tells me that the enthusiasm of her scholars for Francis Jammes is a thing touching to behold--for we of a bygone generation can never quite attain their diapason. Michelet and Renan leave them cold; Claudel and Francis Jammes fire their imagination. If I were a teacher, certainly I should profit by the experience; by all means let the young learn from the young! _Les Géorgiques Chrétiennes_ is full of the most delightful episodes of country life told in beautiful (if rather free-and-easy) French. There is no particular tale in it. It is rather a series of pictures; the daily life of a family of husbandmen on a farm. It is a sort of rural _Christian Year_. But what candid and happy pictures! What a sense of rustic cheer and frugal abundance! What primitive poetry in the labourer’s account of the creation of his daily bread; the chestnut, the maize, the vine! And the betrothal of the little farm servant! And the vocation of the farmer’s daughter who takes the veil. There is but one thing in the whole volume which I find displeasing. It is the short certificate of orthodoxy which the poet delivers to himself on the first page and on the last. He is at great pains to assure us that he is not a reformer, a philosopher, a modernist, or a free-thinker. We should never have suspected this gifted and ingenuous singer of being any kind of thinker! He is a poet, a most indubitable poet, and that is enough. RENÉ BOYLESVE René Boylesve reminds me of some twy-faced Roman statue, some bust of Janus, turning a different mask to opposite points of the horizon. One of these visages (but that regards the Nineteenth Century) has the libertine grace, the refined scepticism, the voluptuous detachment of an Anatole France or a Henri de Régnier, with less philosophy than the one and less poetry than the other; but these are the qualities which distinguished our Republic yesterday: _Non ragionam di lor_. The second face looks at the new Renaissance of our time, and is that of an inhabitant of the province of Touraine, poet and gentleman-farmer, a man pleasantly occupied with the affairs of his neighbourhood, in which he finds the diversity, the unexpected developments, the food for thought, which animate, in any place, if sufficiently observed, the innumerable acts of the Human Comedy.