t did not
exist, as a germ at least, in Balzac.

I have just said that Chateaubriand sought in Nature an accompaniment to
the movements of his soul: this was the case with all the romanticists.
We do not find Rene, Manfred, Indiana, living in the midst of a tranquil
and monotonous Nature. The storms of heaven must respond to the storms
of their soul; and it is a fact that all these great writers, Byron as
well as Victor Hugo, have not so much contemplated and seen Nature as
they have interpreted it through the medium of their own passions;
and it is in this sense that the keen Amiel could justly remark that a
landscape is a condition or a state of the soul.

M. Loti does not merely interpret a landscape; though perhaps, to begin
with, he is unconscious of doing more. With him, the human being is a
part of Nature, one of its very expressions, like animals and plants,
mountain forms and sky tints. His characters are what they are only
because they issue forth from the medium in which they live. They are
truly creatures, and not gods inhabiting the earth. Hence their profound
and striking reality.

Hence also one of the peculiar characteristics of Loti's workers. He
loves to paint simple souls, hearts close to Nature, whose primitive
passions are singularly similar to those of animals. He is happy in the
isles of the Pacific or on the borders of Senegal; and when he shifts
his scenes into old Europe it is never with men and women of the world
that he entertains us.

What we call a man of the world is the same everywhere; he is moulded
by the society of men, but Nature and the universe have no place in
his life and thought. M. Paul Bourget's heroes might live without
distinction in Newport or in Monte Carlo; they take root nowhere, but
live in the large cities, in winter resorts and in drawing-rooms as
transient visitors in temporary abiding-places.

Loti seeks his heroes and his heroines among those antique races of
Europe which have survived all conquests, and which have preserved,
with their native tongue, the individuality of their character. He met
Ramuntcho in the Basque country, but dearer than all to him is Brittany:
here it was that he met his Iceland fishermen.

The Breton soul bears an imprint of Armorica's primitive soil: it is
melancholy and noble. There is an undefinable charm about those arid
lands and those sod-flanked hills of granite, whose sole horizon is the
far-stretching sea. Europe ends her