dramatised Sapho, and the play was acted with considerable success at the Gymnase, Jane Hading being in the title-rôle. Last year the play was again acted in Paris, with Madame Rejane as the heroine.

daudet’s younger son.

M. Daudet, like most novelists, takes a special interest in all that concerns dramatic art and the theatre. When his health permits it he is a persistent first-nighter, and most of his novels lend themselves in a rare degree to stage adaptation.

I once asked him what he thought of the attempts now so frequently made to introduce unconventionality and naked realism on the stage.

“I have every sympathy,” he replied, “with the attempts made by Antoine and his Thêatre Libre to discover strong and unconventional work. But I do not believe in the new terms which a certain school have invented for everything; after all, the play’s the thing, whether it is produced by a group who dub themselves romantics, realists, old or new style. Realism is not necessarily real life; a photograph only gives a rigid, neutral side of the object placed in front of the camera. A dissection of what we call affection does not give so vivid an impression of the master-passion as a true love-sonnet written by a poet. Life is a thing of infinite gradations; a dramatist wishes to show existence as it really is, not as it may be under exceptionally revolting circumstances.”

His own favourite dramatist and writer is Shakespeare, whom, however, he only knows by translation, and Hamlet and Desdemona are his favourite hero and heroine in the fiction of the world, although he considered Balzac his literary master.

M. Daudet will seldom be beguiled into talking on politics. Like all Frenchmen, the late Panama scandals have profoundly shocked and disgusted him, as revealing a state of things discreditable to the Government of his country. But the creator of Désirée Dolobelle has a profound belief in human nature, and believes that, come what may, the novelist will never lack beautiful and touching models in the world round and about him.

The Dismal Throng.

By Robert Buchanan.

Illustrations by Geo. Hutchinson.

(Written after reading the last Study in Literary Distemper.)

thomas hardy.

The Fairy Tale of Life is done,
The horns of Fairyland cease blowing,
The Gods have left us one by one,
And the last Poets, too, are going!
Ended is all the mirth and song,
Fled are the merry Music-makers;
And what remains? The Dismal Throng
Of literary Undertakers!

Clad in deep black of funeral cut,
With faces of forlorn expression,
Their eyes half open, souls close shut,
They stalk along in pale procession;
The latest seed of Schopenhauer,
Born of a Trull of Flaubert’s choosing,
They cry, while on the ground they glower,
“There’s nothing in the world amusing!”

zola.

There’s Zola, grimy as his theme,
Nosing the sewers with cynic pleasure,
Sceptic of all that poets dream,
All hopes that simple mortals treasure;
With sense most keen for odours strong,
He stirs the Drains and scents disaster,
Grim monarch of the Dismal Throng
Who bow their heads before “the Master.”

There’s Miss Matilda[1] in the south,
There’s Valdes[2] in Madrid and Seville,
There’s mad Verlaine[3] with gangrened mouth.
Grinning at Rimbaud and the Devil.
From every nation of the earth,
Instead of smiling merry-makers,
They come, the foes of Love and Mirth,
The Dismal Throng of Undertakers.

tolstoi.

There’s Tolstoi, towering in his place
O’er all the rest by head and shoulders;
No sunshine on that noble face
Which Nature meant to charm beholders!
Mad with his self-made martyr’s shirt,
Obscene, through hatred of obsceneness,
He from a pulpit built of Dirt
Shrieks his Apocalypse of Cleanness!

ibsen.

There’s Ibsen,[4] puckering up his lips,
Squirming at Nature and Society,
Drawing with tingling finger-tips
The clothes off naked Impropriety!
So nice, so nasty, and so grim,
He hugs his gloomy bottled thunder;
To summon up one smile from him
Would be a miracle of wonder!

pierre loti.

There’s Maupassant,[5] who takes his cue
From Dame Bovary’s bourgeois troubles;