, "is his work
which other men cannot see."[14] The humanist, at least, does not
blink the fact that we are caught in a serious and difficult world. To
rail at it, to deny it, to run hither and thither like scurrying rats
to evade it, will not alter one jot or one tittle of its inexorable
facts.

[Footnote 14: _Doctrine of the Mean_, ch. xxxiii, v. 2.]

Following Rousseau and Chateaubriand come a striking group of
Frenchmen who passed on this torch of ethical and aesthetic rebellion.
Some of them are wildly romantic like Dumas and Hugo; some of them
perversely realistic like Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier, Zola. Paul
Verlaine, a near contemporary of ours, is of this first number; writer
of some of the most exquisite lyrics in the French language, yet a man
who floated all his life in typical romantic fashion from passion
to repentance, "passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin in
perpetual alternation." Guy de Maupassant again is a naturalist of
the second sort, a brutal realist; de Maupassant, who died a suicide,
crying out to his valet from his hacked throat "_Encore l'homme au
rancart_!"--another carcass to the dustheap!

In English letters Wordsworth in his earlier verse illustrated the
same sentimental primitivism. It would be unfair to quote _Peter
Bell_, for that is Wordsworth at his dreadful worst, but even in
_Tinlern Abbey_, which has passages of incomparable majesty and
beauty, there are lines in which he declares himself:

"... well pleased to recognize
In nature, and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being."

Byron's innate sophistication saves him from the ludicrous depths to
which Wordsworth sometimes fell, but he, too, is Rousseau's disciple,
a moral rebel, a highly personal and subjective poet of whom Goethe
said that he respected no law, human or divine, except that of the
three unities. Byron's verse is fascinating; it overflows with a sort
of desperate and fiery sincerity; but, as he himself says, his life
was one long strife of "passion with eternal law." He combines both
the romantic and the realistic elements of naturalism, both flames
with elemental passion and parades his cynicism, is forever snapping
his mood in _Don Juan_, alternating extravagant and romantic feeling
with lines of sardonic and purposely prosaic realism. Shelley is a
naturalist, too, not in the realm of sordid