not dead-he that spoke to you so sweetly, as his heart overflowing with adoration bade him speak -and he will be with you in thought forever, even though he disappear."

The killing of Ophelia is the most useless and the most monstrous of all the cruelties of Hamlet. I cannot understand how a single soul can have forgiven him for this. His rambling frenzy at her tomb does not suffice to obliterate the crime. She, at least, was pure and innocent; yet through the fault of him who loved her there came to her the greatest unhappiness and the most unjust fate. To her, the one pure being, the one innocent heart-and her only fault was that she had trusted love!

IV

The other persons of the drama are as incoherent as the Prince. Claudius is at heart a cowardly moralist who sins through blindness and terror-yet knows that he is sinning, and is capable of remorse. Gertrude is still more inexplicable. Either she was so wicked as to have formed the resolve to be the accomplice and wife of the assassin-and in that case one cannot understand her dismay at the first harsh words of Hamlet or she was at heart weak and affectionate and in that case one cannot understand

why she obeyed Claudius and allowed the death of a loving husband whom she loved. The little that we can infer from the conversation of this sinister pair leads us to think that Hamlet would have wreaked a nobler and a far more terrible vengeance if he had let them live with their memories and their fears, guarding himself against their terror, but letting them realize that he knew and judged.

Poor Polonius, a ridiculous victim, despite his skeptical and time-serving courtly wit, does not know what the pother is all about, and persists in regarding Hamlet's madness as an impossible amatory delusion.

Nor can we save the famous thoughts of Hamlet-not even that "To be or not to be" which, after all, amounts merely to this superficial commonplace: life is evil, and if we were sure that the other life is not worse, we would do well to commit suicide. What better can one say of his banal reflections in the cemetery-the matter of men's bodies is but dust, and may return to foul places and to base uses-and his easy, vulgar invective against the falseness of woman?

Never has any rereading been for me so sad as this appropriate in its very sadness to the natural melancholy of a commemoration. For me today not only is Shakespeare dead, but in my spirit his restless son has died also.

XIV

REMY DE GOURMONT I

I

HE too is dead. He was the most intelligent man in France, and one of the keenest intellects in the whole world. His brain was an instrument of precision. His thought had the lucidity of distilled alcohol, as clear as the water of a mountain spring, yet drawn from purple clusters, and carrying the inebriation, the vertigo, the wild fancy of a year's experience compressed into a single hour.

He died several days ago. The Parisian paragraphers said of him, as they would say of the meanest scribbler of a mean Matin, that "les lettres françaises ont perdu un estimable écrivain et un homme de goût.'

His death was little heeded-because of the war, and because he did not die at the front. There was much talk about the death of Péguy, because Péguy was more the man of the hour, was more vivid, of a fresher fame, of more serious

1 Written in 1915.

and more reassuring features-and because Péguy was killed by a Prussian bullet in the defense of the fields and the rights of France.

There was much talk even about Fabre, the friend of Mistral and of insects, who died, full of days and honors, at almost the same time. But an observer of insects is nearer the level of our journalists than an observer of men. Especially if the observer of men is a poet as well, and does not live on the ideas of Monsieur Delarue. It was Remy de Gourmont who uttered these profound and bitter words: "Il faut flatter les imbéciles et les flatter dans leurs facultés les moins nocives. C'est peut-être un instinct de conservation qui pousse la société à conférer provisoirement la gloire à tant de médiocres esprits." Provisionally. Let us hope for the ultimate revision.

II

Remy de Gourmont died too soon. He was only fifty-seven years of age, and he had never swung incense before any fool. Modest and alone in a great dark house full of books-how well I remember a luminous morning in November, 1906, in the Rue des Saints Pères!-he read books, read men and women, read the ancients and the moderns and les jeunes, and sought truth, clear French truth, pitiless contemporary

European truth. And he set forth that truth ceaselessly, without cosmetics, without reticence or omission. The truth-that hard and unpleasant other side of the shield of illusion. "Je ne ferai que dire la vérité," said Flaubert, "mais elle sera horrible, cruelle et nue." One who takes the vows of obedience to such truth loses all right to earthly beatitude, loses all hope of swift glory, all sympathy. From the days of Socrates to those of Nietzsche, the man who analyzes and dissociates, the man who breaks through the surface of useful and convenient beliefs to reveal the fierce and injurious truths that lie beneath, has been ostracized and condemned as an enemy to the State and to the gods.

Remy de Gourmont was of this ill-regarded family. Less serene and profound than Socrates, less violent and grand than Nietzsche, he resembled more closely the great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century. He had the malice of Voltaire (with Voltaire's apparently innocent narrative simplicity); he had d'Alembert's passion for disinterested exactness; he had the goodnatured frivolity of Fontenelle; he had the branching curiosity of Bayle. But the man he most closely resembles is Diderot, who has always seemed to me the most complete and vigorous genius among the Encyclopedists. In Diderot, as in Remy de Gourmont, one may find a natural inclination toward general ideas, an enjoyment