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The great loss which accompanies age is, of course, the loss of energy. Many wheels have run down by the time a man or a woman may rightly be called old. The power to follow new paths of argument up to new conclusions commonly, though not always, abates with the natural force; but there are compensations, especially among women. The mind of a woman is not quite the same as that of a man. Loss of mental force is to her a less loss, and with age a woman nearly always becomes wider-minded. Her strong point mentally is her power to comprehend character. This gift is perfected by experience, and has very little to do with either theories or systems. Breadth of view is as dependent upon sympathy as upon abstract thought. Not that women as they grow old lose their prejudices. They keep them as treasured dogmas in the memory, but they very often cease altogether to apply them. Age, and age alone, teaches what Coleridge defined as the difference between persons and "isms," and to know this is to know how to break down all barriers, social. political, and religious. Of course the secret is discovered at the cost of a certain amount of logic. To be old is to be inconsistent, because it is to realize that there is more of truth than can be seen from any given standpoint.

the play is nowise dependent upon taking part. But that liberty which is the gift of years brings a grace greater than the grace of humor. It gives to the good when they get old power to put themselves completely in another person's place. Shakespeare in Richard II. draws a wonderful picture of this late development of love. Gaunt is heart-broken at the thought of his son's exile:

Ere the six years that he hath to spend

Can change their moons and bring their times about,

My oil-dried lamp and time-wasted light

Shall be extinct with age and endless night;

My inch of taper will be burnt and done,

And blindfold death not let me see my son.

But no sooner does he realize Bolingbroke's despair than he sets himself to relieve it. Love revives his memory. He gives his experience to console his son. He recalls the spirits of Youth, Romance, Adventure, Folly, the spirits of the long-dead past, that they may enable him to inspire hope. "Had I thy youth and cause, I would not stay," he tells him:

All places that the eye of heaven visits
Are to a wise man ports and happy
havens.

Teach thy necessity to reason thus:
There is no virtue like necessity.
Think not the king did banish thee,
But thou the king. Woe doth the
heavier sit,

Age, if it saps the energies and weakens the motive force, has its own beneficence. It sets the old free. At last they can, if they will accept its franchise, get outside the vicious circle of self-absorption. The bonds of self-interest are struck off. The goad of ambition is blunted for good. moi dies long before the moi spectateur. Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase

The

One of the first delights of liberty is leisure to be amused. "How I should like to be present at such-and-such a scene, if only I could be invisible," we hear young people say. Age will grant them such wishes. Capacity to enjoy

Where it perceives it is but faintly borne.

honor

And not the king exiled thee; or
suppose

Devouring pestilence hangs in our air
And thou art flying to a fresher clime:
Look, what thy soul holds dear, im-

agine it

To lie that way thou go'st, not whence thou com'st;

Suppose the singing birds musicians, The grass whereon thou tread'st the presence strew'd,

The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps

no more

Than a delightful measure or a dance.

One other lesser gift comes in the hand of age, the gift of humility. We speak sometimes of an old man's vanity. It is a vanity of the past, a vain recollection of the workman who was. By humility the usefulness of Nature's leisured class is often impaired. They fear sometimes that they may be unwelcome within the hurrying circles of the younger world. There is a peculThe Spectator.

iar shyness which belongs to age. Many young people buy very dear the experience which an old friend could have given them for nothing-but dared not offer, because they did not know how thankfully it would have been accepted. The good opinion of the old is very greatly desired, because men know it to be a detached opinion. It is strange how little the old seem to realize this fact, withholding the meed of praise which would have refreshed a thirsty man because they imagine he does not want it. But this humility is a blessing we may not grudge. How could they bear to go could they realize the blank that is left at their departure.

SOME TYPES OF MODERN FRANCE.

M. Rod is nothing if not critical. He began his career as an independent thinker by criticizing the naturalistic formula, then in full career of triumph, and he has gone on criticizing ever since. The work which first made him known to English readers, La Vie Privee de Michel Teissier gained its vogue with us from a superficial resemblance to the Parnell episode. Michel Teissier is a trusted party chief who ruins his career and breaks up his home for the sake of a girl half his age, a friend of his wife's. Some people at the time complained of M. Rod's handling of his subject as inconclusive. His story could only be taken as a criticism of ordinary domestic ideals. Yet it was none the less a criticism of the theories of those who would break them up, and the partisans of L'Union Libre gain no more from him than the advocates of the indissolubility of marriage. . In fact his dissolvent criticism gives him a false air of conservatism. He spares nothing, not even the newest theories. Like Clough, whom in some points he

resembles, one seems to hear him murmur, "Ah yet, consider it again," in view of our old beliefs and institutions, not because they are not faulty, but be cause the offered substitutes are SO poor.

His two new novels, Un Vainqueur and L'Indocile are particularly interesting, as presenting with the sensitive. ness and the lucidity which are M. Rod's special endowments, three distinct types of modern French life. The Conqueror, Alcide Délémont, a successful manufacturer, represents the oldfashioned individualism whose watchword was Laissez-faire. Opposed to him is the figure of Romanèche, the influential editor and leader of Socialism, who hopes everything from the action of an omnipotent State working in the interest of the proletariat. Then there is the boy whom Délémont adopts, the nameless child of his sister, Valentin, the anarchist.

Délémont does not appear in the second book, except by a casual reference. The two figures Romanèche and Valen

tin remain in opposition. The development of Romanèche is indicated with considerable skill. In the first part of the book he seems little better than a solemn poseur, "impregnated with certainties, stuffed with ready-made conclusions." He urges his brother-in-law Délémont to adopt their orphan nephew, while himself carefully abstaining from giving him anything but good advice. He enjoys the advantages that accrue from association with the rich manufacturer, and dares not express too freely his disapproval of the social conditions which have produced that wealth. In reality he is a man who has not yet found his way. Later on, when he becomes a regular contributor to L'Egalite and a recognized chief of his party, with a platform and a backing, he can afford to speak out what is in him, and prepares to impose what his master Robespierre called "despotism of liberty."

He

Délémont, the manufacturer of glass bottles, engages our sympathies. is a narrow unimaginative man, whose very narrowness has helped him to concentrate his mind on the struggle for fortune, and now prevents him from adapting himself to the changed conditions of modern industry. The Government inspector insists on his observance of regulations that cut into his profits. Special difficulties arise in connection with the Italian boys supplied to him by an agent, who is a mere slave-trader. The inspector does his best to secure humane treatment for these wretched little exiles, and he has the sympathy of Délémont's daughter Alice, a charming creation. Other troubles accumulate upon him, the crazy suspicions of his wife, the selfish lightmindedness of his second daughter, the terrible death of Alice, murdered on her sister's wedding-day by a workgirl whom the bridegroom had betrayed and deserted. But the final impression that the story leaves is that of a

man whose triumphs belong to the industrial system of the past, beaten and broken by the impact of new and uncomprehended forces.

We have his point of view in his complaint to the Government functionary against the Inspectur de Travail.

...

I have no complaint to make against him personally, but I complain of . . . the authority which your law gives him, the duties which it imposes on him, if you will . . . I complain because he comes when he pleases to my factory, enters it as if it belonged to him and walks about as if he were in a garden . . . I complain because this surveillance weighs on me like my oppression, because it annuls my authority over my staff, paralyzes my means of action, puts fresh difficulties in the way of an industry which has so many already, and hinders my lawful possession of what belongs to me, because it humiliates me in short. Let your Government frankly turn us out, let it drive us from the factories which we have founded, let it take them, confiscate them, socialize them as you say. One would know at least where one was and where one was going. Better that, than to hinder our work and give us up, bound hand and foot, to our own workpeople.

And when the functionary has explained to him that "the State has at last understood that it has a mission to protect the weak and those under age, that it is their natural guardian," Délémont begins to perceive that while he has been absorbed in making money, a change has really taken place in the equilibrium of society,-a change which threatens to be fatal to the interests of his class.

Yet the man, as he appears in the last pages of his history, disappointed, bereaved, and half ruined, is more human and attractive than in his conquering stage. That germ of pity and sympathy which had begun to develop in him as he followed his sister's miserable funeral with the hand of her

orphan child in his, and the memories of his distant childhood returned to him, begins to assert itself against the fierce egotism which has marked his conquering period. The last glimpse we have of him is touching. Burier, the young inspector, who had loved Alice with a timid and hopeless love, comes back to the factory after her death.

Délémont advanced without seeing him, his hands behind his back, his head bowed. . . . He replied to the salute of the young man-"Ah, Monsieur l'Inspecteur."

...

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He

The glass manufacturer sighed. "Like all who have known her," he said. After a short silence he went on: "I shall alter a good many things here, as she wished. In memory of her. And for other reasons which I did not understand once but which are now clear to me-clear as crystal." looked at the inspector, who seemed to be waiting for the explanation of this remark, cut the air with his old despotic gesture and said, "After such a misfortune, sir,—after such a misfortune. . . ." And without saying more, he moved away.

Meanwhile, the boy Valentin is serving his first painful apprenticeship to life. He begins as a déclassé in the house of his rich uncle. Alice only, with her delicate charm and tenderness, gives him the illusion of maternity. She induces her father to take him from the coarse drudgery of the factory and give him the education for which he longs. When she dies, an innocent victim, receiving the revolver-shot that

was meant for another, all kind and genial influences disappear with her from the path of the lonely boy.

In the opening chapters of L'Indocile Valentin has become a young man. He has left the Lycée and is looking for some occupation by which he can maintain himself while preparing for his degree. He has two friends, Urbain Lourtier, an ardent Republican and a Free-Thinker, and Claude Frémont, an equally ardent Liberal Catholic. Each of them would gladly welcome him as an adherent. He has also a sweetheart, the daughter of relatives of Lourtier's, and the young people come to a sort of tacit understanding before Valentin goes to take up the position of tutor, which Romanèche has found for him with one of his friends.

M. Frümsel, Valentin's employer, is an ardent anti-clerical. He finds, like so many others, a point of contact in his hatred of Christianity with those whose socialistic aims he only half appreciates. Men of his type are perfectly ready to help Romanéche and his party to put down the priests; they do not ask to see what lies beyond that. Romanèche, on the other hand, looks to the destruction of religion as only a preliminary, though a very necessary one, to the destruction of private property and the establishment of the collectivist millennium. The irony of the situation is well brought out in the description of the visit of the Republican leader to Rheims, at the invitation of Frümsel and some other chiefs of the party, to speak at the fête of the Libre Pensée. With ostentatious contempt of wealth he declines the offer of Frümsel's automobile and prefers to walk to the place of meeting.

He is taken on a tour of inspection through the cellars of the great winemerchants.

At a sign from Frümsel the workpeople approached, expecting the usual questions on their wages, their habits,

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"You must think, always and before all, of the radical transformation of the capitalist system which we have in view. Tell yourself that nothing has been done so long as the proletariat has not realized its integral programme, of which the main point, as you know, is the socialization of the soil and of the

...

means of production. The struggle is engaged... between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It cannot be terminated by a compromise."

The workmen of the cellars, good people whose life is easy, listened with surprise, more alarmed than attracted by the prospects of a world turned upside down, from which the pleasure of saving would vanish with the disappearance of capital, and where the key of equality would close for ever the door, which now stood open, of the bourgeois paradise. As to the masters, they grew more downcast as Romanèche went on giving the details of their coming dispossession. . . . Frümsel gnawed his moustache furiously; his foreman, in consternation, whispered to him, "He will spoil them for us."

...

But at the time of Valentin's arrival M. Frümsel has not yet reached this point of semi-disillusion. He receives with satisfaction the relative of the great leader and at once explains to him what is expected of him. The son of the house, under the influence of a tutor with Catholic sympathies, who was promptly kicked out so soon as his tendencies were discovered, has become tainted with superstitious ideas. The real business of the new tutor is to act as surveillant, and to do his best to eradicate any traces of bigotry on the part of his pupil.

The note of Valentin's character is an exaggerated hatred of restraint. One feels that only a moral miracle would make him a submissive child of the

Church; at the same time he revolts from the domestic tyranny to which he is introduced and the spy's part which he is expected to play. He feels strongly drawn to his timid, silent pupil, who on his part, while perfectly docile, shuts up in himself a world of ideas which he guards jealously from the observations of his uncongenial

environment.

Valentin has to confess to Frümsel that he is making no way with his The

pupil in the direction desired. surroundings of the old cathedral city, the recollections of feudal France and Joan of Arc, are not favorable to the growth of the free-thinking spirit. His friend, Urban Lourtier, writes to him from Rome enlarging on the spectacle of superstition and corruption daily offered to his notice. Valentin suggests in perfect good faith that the best way of disgusting Désiré Frümsel with his pietistic ideas would be to take him to Rome for the winter. Frümsel agrees to this naïve suggestion, and the two youths start.

There is this note of universality about Rome that every one finds there what he wishes, just as in Shakespeare or the Bible. Lourtier found new texts for his anti-clerical diatribes; Désiré, on the other hand, intensifies and deepens his Catholic sympathies by contact with the centre of Latin Christianity, and he comes back from the Eternal City more of a Catholic than

ever.

He refuses to be present at the fête of the Libre Pensée where Romanèche is announced to speak, and Frümsel in a fury of disappointment turns on the tutor.

You have the word of liberty always in your mouth. . . . But liberty for a son is to obey his father. ... Liberty is to walk upright, to think justly. . . . No one is free to fall into error and superstition. I warn you that if this child whom I confided to you persists in his

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