About books, however, I have not many more confessions that I care to make.  A man’s old self is so far away that he can speak about it and its adventures almost as if he were speaking about another who is dead.  After taking one’s degree, and beginning to write a little for publication, the topic has a tendency to become much more personal.  My last undergraduate literary discoveries were of France and the Renaissance.  Accidentally finding out that I could read French, I naturally betook myself to Balzac.  If you read him straight on, without a dictionary, you begin to learn a good many words.  The literature of France has been much more popular in England lately, but thirty years agone it was somewhat neglected.  There does seem to be something in French poetry which fails to please “the German paste in our composition.”  Mr. Matthew Arnold, a disciple of Sainte-Beuve, never could appreciate French poetry.  A poet-critic has even remarked that the French language is nearly incapable of poetry!  We cannot argue in such matters, where all depends on the taste and the ear.

Our ancestors, like the author of the “Faery Queen,” translated and admired Du Bellay and Ronsard; to some critics of our own time this taste seems a modish affectation.  For one, I have ever found an original charm in the lyrics of the Pleiad, and have taken great delight in Hugo’s amazing variety of music, in the romance of Alfred de Musset, in the beautiful cameos of Gautier.  What is poetical, if not the “Song of Roland,” the only true national epic since Homer?  What is frank, natural verse, if not that of the old Pastourelles?  Where is there naivete of narrative and unconscious charm, if not in Aucassin et Nicolette?  In the long normally developed literature of France, so variously rich, we find the nearest analogy to the literature of Greece, though that of England contains greater masterpieces, and her verse falls more winningly on the ear.  France has no Shakespeare and no Milton; we have no Moliere and no “Song of Roland.”  One star differs from another in glory, but it is a fortunate moment when this planet of France swims into our ken.  Many of our generation saw it first through Mr. Swinburne’s telescope, heard of it in his criticisms, and are grateful to that watcher of the skies, even if we do not share all his transports.  There then arose at Oxford, out of old French, and old oak, and old china, a “school” or “movement.”  It was aesthetic, and an early purchaser of Mr. William Morris’s wall papers.  It existed ten or twelve years before the public “caught on,” as they say, to these delights.  But, except one or two of the masters, the school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own performances.  There was more fun than fashion in the cult, which was later revived, developed, and gossiped about more than enough.