mpathetic and imaginative artist who does or does not create, in the
unfamiliar atmosphere of a court, first the collective life and spirit
of a caste long trained to formalize its life and suppress its emotions,
then a group of human characters who stand out compelling and vital
against the posturing, shadowy kings and queens of romance.

To the composition of _Majesty_ go the understanding and the historic
sense, the irony and tenderness that enable Couperus in later books to
draw with unfaltering touch his exquisite portraits of old age and
youth, of men and women, in their moments of solitude and in their
reactions upon one another. Few men have stepped so lightly and surely
across the confines of the centuries and the continents; his intuition
makes him equally at home in Alexandria and the Hague, with women and
men, in the second century and in the twentieth; and it is not benumbed
by the surface inhumanity of a court. When the Archduchess Valerie had
lost her lover, the crown-prince could not understand her being able to
talk as usual at dinner.

_"It irritated him, his want of penetration of the human heart: how
could he develop it? A future ruler ought to be able to see things at a
single glance.... And suddenly, perhaps merely because of his desire for
human knowledge, the thought arose within him that she was concealing
her emotions, that perhaps she was still suffering intensely, but that
she was pretending and bearing up: was she not a princess of the blood?
They all learnt that, they of the blood, to pretend, to bear up! It was
bred in their bones."_

Perhaps it was bred in his bones, perhaps it was his mere desire for
human knowledge that gave Couperus his penetration into the emotions
which they of the blood were taught to conceal. In none of his books has
he lavished more sympathy than in his painting of Prince Othomar's
vacillation and passionate good-will, his timidity and desperate
courage; nowhere has he used greater tenderness than in his sketch of
the chivalry and gratitude which did duty for love in the passionless
union of Valerie and the crown-prince.

STEPHEN MCKENNA.

LINCOLN'S INN, LONDON, 7 _October_, 1920.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

My first translation of _Majesty_ was written in collaboration with my
dear friend Ernest Dowson and published in the year 1895. A small
edition was sold by the London publisher to Messrs. D. Appleton