their discretion deserve nothing less at our hands; and
they, who belong already to the unchangeable, would probably disdain to
claim more than this from a mankind that changes its loves and its hates
about every twenty-five years--at the coming of every new and wiser
generation.

One of the most generous of the dead is Daudet, who, with a prodigality
approaching magnificence, gave himself up to us without reserve in his
work, with all his qualities and all his faults. Neither his qualities
nor his faults were great, though they were by no means imperceptible. It
is only his generosity that is out of the common. What strikes one most
in his work is the disinterestedness of the toiler. With more talent
than many bigger men, he did not preach about himself, he did not attempt
to persuade mankind into a belief of his own greatness. He never posed
as a scientist or as a seer, not even as a prophet; and he neglected his
interests to the point of never propounding a theory for the purpose of
giving a tremendous significance to his art, alone of all things, in a
world that, by some strange oversight, has not been supplied with an
obvious meaning. Neither did he affect a passive attitude before the
spectacle of life, an attitude which in gods--and in a rare mortal here
and there--may appear godlike, but assumed by some men, causes one, very
unwillingly, to think of the melancholy quietude of an ape. He was not
the wearisome expounder of this or that theory, here to-day and spurned
to-morrow. He was not a great artist, he was not an artist at all, if
you like--but he was Alphonse Daudet, a man as naively clear, honest, and
vibrating as the sunshine of his native land; that regrettably
undiscriminating sunshine which matures grapes and pumpkins alike, and
cannot, of course, obtain the commendation of the very select who look at
life from under a parasol.

Naturally, being a man from the South, he had a rather outspoken belief
in himself, but his small distinction, worth many a greater, was in not
being in bondage to some vanishing creed. He was a worker who could not
compel the admiration of the few, but who deserved the affection of the
many; and he may be spoken of with tenderness and regret, for he is not
immortal--he is only dead. During his life the simple man whose business
it ought to have been to climb, in the name of Art, some elevation or
other, was content to remain below, on the plain, amongst his creations