e, and beyond remains only the broad
expanse of the ocean. The poor people who dwell here are silent and
tenacious: their heart is full of tenderness and of dreams. Yann, the
Iceland fisherman, and his sweetheart, Gaud of Paimpol, can only live
here, in the small houses of Brittany, where people huddle together in
a stand against the storms which come howling from the depths of the
Atlantic.

Loti's novels are never complicated with a mass of incidents. The
characters are of humble station and their life is as simple as their
soul. _Aziyade_, _The Romance of a Spahi_, _An Iceland Fisherman_,
_Ramuntcho_, all present the story of a love and a separation. A
departure, or death itself, intervenes to put an end to the romance.
But the cause matters little; the separation is the same; the hearts are
broken; Nature survives; it covers over and absorbs the miserable ruins
which we leave behind us. No one better than Loti has ever brought out
the frailty of all things pertaining to us, for no one better than he
has made us realize the persistency of life and the indifference of
Nature.

This circumstance imparts to the reading of M. Loti's works a character
of peculiar sadness. The trend of his novels is not one that incites
curiosity; his heroes are simple, and the atmosphere in which they
live is foreign to us. What saddens us is not their history, but the
undefinable impression that our pleasures are nothing and that we are
but an accident. This is a thought common to the degree of triteness
among moralists and theologians; but as they present it, it fails to
move us. It troubles us as presented by M. Loti, because he has known
how to give it all the force of a sensation.

How has he accomplished this?

He writes with extreme simplicity, and is not averse to the use of
vague and indefinite expressions. And yet the wealth and precision of
Gautier's and Hugo's language fail to endow their landscapes with the
striking charm and intense life which are to be found in those of Loti.
I can find no other reason for this than that which I have suggested
above: the landscape, in Hugo's and in Gautier's scenes, is a background
and nothing more; while Loti makes it the predominating figure of his
drama. Our sensibilities are necessarily aroused before this apparition
of Nature, blind, inaccessible, and all-powerful as the Fates of old.

It may prove interesting to inquire how Loti contrived to sound such a
new note in art.