the most sympathetic guides, and none could have been more to
Harland's fancy. He was very like his own favourite heroes, or I ought
to say his own favourite heroes were very like him. For it is Harland
who talks through his own pages with his own charming fantastic blend of
philosophy and nonsense, Harland who refuses to believe in an age of
prose and prudence, Harland who is determined to see the romance, the
squalor, the pageantry, the humour of this jumble-show of a world, not
merely at ease from the stalls, but struggling with the principal _role_
on the stage, or prompting from behind the scenes. When he was bent upon
leading us to the same near, inside, part in the spectacle, it was
extraordinary how, as if by inspiration, he always hit upon the right
expedition for the time of the year and the mood of the moment.

I remember the afternoon he said St. Cloud it seemed as inevitable that
we must go there as if St. Cloud had been our one thought all day long,
the evening reward promised for our day's labour; just as on the boat
steaming down the Seine and in the park wandering under the trees and
among the ruins, I felt that the afternoon was the one of all others
predestined for our delight there. The beauty provided by St. Cloud and
the mood we brought for its enjoyment met at the hour appointed from all
eternity.

Artists, it is supposed, and not without reason, are trained to see
beauty more clearly and therefore to feel it more acutely than other
people. But my long experience has taught me that it is the lover of
beauty who can dare to be flippant in the face of it, just as it is the
devout who can afford to talk familiarly of holy things. Besides,
artists work so hard that they have the sense to know how important it
is to be foolish at the right time. That is the secret of all the
delicious absurdities of what the French called the _Vie de Boheme_
until the outsider who did not understand made a tiresome _cliche_ of
it. The right time for our folly we felt was the golden May evening and
the right place a beautiful Paris suburb, time and place consecrated to
folly by generations of artists and students. Below us, at St. Cloud,
stretched the wide beautiful French landscape, with its classical
symmetry and its note of sadness, in the pure clear light of France, the
Seine winding through it towards Paris; round us was the park as
classical in its lines and masses, and with its note of sadness the
stronger beca