e. If the
man-in-the-street be one who approaches the obvious in the spirit of a
pioneer, we must admit that Montaigne rises superior to his class, for
he not only explored that country, but possessed and cultivated it too,
and forced it to yield an ampler harvest of good sense and humanity than
any other husbandman before or since. France has ever been rich, and is
as rich as ever, in men who have known how to sacrifice the shadow to
the substance; in fanatics who have pursued without pause or divagation
dreams of impossible Utopias and unattainable good; in idealists who
have joyfully given all to love, to art, to religion, and to logic. It
is not inappropriate, therefore, that France should have produced in an
age of turmoil and terrible madness the man who exalted the cult of
moderation to the heights of sublime philosophy.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] "Reproduction en Phototypie de l'Exemplaire, avec Notes manuscrites
marginales, des Essais de Montaigne appartenant a la Ville de Bordeaux."
Publiee, avec une Introduction, par Fortunat Strowski. 3 vols. (Paris,
Hachette.)

IBSEN[2]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum June 1912_]

Was it chance made Mr. Ellis Roberts mention Cezanne on the fourth page
of a book about Ibsen? One cannot think so. Similarities in the work and
circumstances of the two men can hardly have escaped him. Born within a
dozen years of each other (Ibsen was born in 1828), both matured in a
period when the professions of writing and painting were laboriously
cultivated at the expense of art. Each, unguided except by his own sense
of dissatisfaction with his surroundings, found a way through the
sloughs of romance and the deserts of realism, to the high country
beyond them. Both sought and both found the same thing--the thing above
literature and painting, the stuff out of which great literature and
painting are made.

The Romantics and Realists were like people coming to cuffs about which
is the more important thing in an orange, the history of Spain or the
number of pips. The instinct of the romantic, invited to say what he
felt about anything, was to recall its associations. A rose made him
think of quaint gardens and gracious ladies and Edmund Waller and
sundials, and a thousand pleasant things that, at one time or another,
had befallen him or some one else. A rose touched life at a hundred
pretty points. A rose was interesting because it had a past. On this the
realist's comment was "Mush!" or words to