but almost inconceivable, in a purely spectacular universe, where no such disagreeable necessity can possibly arise.  It is sufficient for me to say (and I am saying it at some length in these pages):  “J’ai vecu.”  I have existed, obscure amongst the wonders and terrors of my time, as the Abbe Sieyes, the original utterer of the quoted words, had managed to exist through the violences, the crimes, and the enthusiasms of the French Revolution.  “J’ai vecu”, as I apprehend most of us manage to exist, missing all along the varied forms of destruction by a hair’s-breadth, saving my body, that’s clear, and perhaps my soul also, but not without some damage here and there to the fine edge of my conscience, that heirloom of the ages, of the race, of the group, of the family, colourable and plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks, the acts, and even by the silences and abstentions surrounding one’s childhood; tinged in a complete scheme of delicate shades and crude colours by the inherited traditions, beliefs, or prejudices—­unaccountable, despotic, persuasive, and often, in its texture, romantic.

And often romantic! . . .  The matter in hand, however, is to keep these reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of literary activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying his own existence; for that such was his purpose is palpably, even grossly, visible to an unprejudiced eye.  But then, you see, the man was not a writer of fiction.  He was an artless moralist, as is clearly demonstrated by his anniversaries being celebrated with marked emphasis by the heirs of the French Revolution, which was not a political movement at all, but a great outburst of morality.  He had no imagination, as the most casual perusal of “Emile” will prove.  He was no novelist, whose first virtue is the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of his time to the play of his invention.  Inspiration comes from the earth, which has a past, a history, a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven.  A writer of imaginative prose (even more than any other sort of artist) stands confessed in his works.  His conscience, his deeper sense of things, lawful and unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world.  Indeed, every one who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers (unless a moralist, who, generally speaking, has no conscience except the one he is at pains to produce for the use of others) can speak of nothing else.  It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and just of French prose writers, who says that we must recognise at last that, “failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only talk of ourselves.”