To the world's caricaturists, when Paul Mario, at the age of
twenty-six, had swept across the literary terrain, storming line after
line, the white knot had proved a boon. _Delilah_, a lyrical drama,
written in French, and first published in Paris, achieved for this
darling of Minerva a reputation which no man is entitled to expect
during his lifetime. Within twelve months of the date of publication it
had appeared in almost every civilised language, and had been staged in
New York, where it created a furore. Of _Madame Caligula_, a novel,
which followed it, thirty-one editions were subscribed in six days!

The miracle of Paul Mario's success was perhaps to be explained by the
neutrality of his genius. A passionate, elemental sympathy with all
nature, a seeming capacity to hear the language of the flowers, the
voices of the stars and to love and understand the lowliest things that
God has made, bore him straight to the heart of England as surely as it
swept his name into the holy of holies of artistic France, spoke to
Russia's sombre soul and temporarily revolutionised the literature of
the United States. His work belonged to no "school," and its charm was
not due to "style"; therefore his books lost little in translation, for
true genius speaks to every man in his own tongue.

Sympathetic atmosphere was as necessary to Paul Mario as pure air to the
general. Deliberate ugliness hurt him, and the ugliness which is the
handiwork of God aroused within him a yearning sorrow for poor humanity
who might be of the White Company, were it not for avarice, hate and
lust. The war, even in its earlier phases, stirred the ultimate deeps of
his nature, and knowing himself, since genius cannot be blind, for what
he was, a world power, a spiritual sword, he chafed and fretted in
enforced inactivity, striving valiantly to reconcile himself to the
ugliness of military life. Courted as only poets and actors are courted,
he was offered posts and commissions in bewildering variety; but all of
them he scornfully rejected. The insane injustice of such selection
enraged him.

A severe nervous lesion freed him from the galley-bench of a
training-camp, and sent him on a weary pilgrimage through the military
hospitals to discharge--and freedom; freedom, which to that ardent
nature proved to be irksome. For whilst the very springs of his genius
were dammed by the agony of a world in travail, he found himself outside
the mighty theatre, a mere by