on, which may serve as a real light on this remarkable novelist.
The way in which I have already spoken of _La Course a la Mort,_ which
was a very early book, may be referred to. Even earlier, or at least as
early, M. Rod wrote some short stories, which were published as _Scenes
de la Vie Cosmopolite_. They include "Lilith" (the author, though far
from an Anglophile, had a creditable liking for Rossetti), which is a
story of the rejection of a French suitor by an English governess; the
ending of a liaison between a coxcomb and a lady much older than himself
("Le Feu et l'Eau"); "L'Ideal de M. Gindre," with a doubtful
marriage-close; a discovery of falseness ("Le Pardon"); "La Derniere
Idylle" (which may be judged from some of its last words: "I have made a
spectacle of myself long enough, and now the play is over"), and "Noces
d'Or," the shortest and bitterest of all, in which the wife, who has
felt herself tyrannised over for the fifty years, mildly retaliates by
providing for dinner _nearly_ all the things that she likes and her
husband does not, though she effects a reconciliation with _pate de
canard d'Amiens_. I wonder if they ate duck-pies at Amiens in the spring
of 1918?

The purpose of this postscript-account, and of the reference to _La
Course_, should not be very obscure. It is clear that, at first and from
the first, M. Rod's vocation was to be a prophet of discouragement and
disappointment. You may be this and be quite a major prophet; but if you
are not a major prophet your minority will become somewhat painfully
apparent, and it will often, if not always, go near to failure. I think
this was rather the case with M. Rod.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Catulle Mendes.]

It is with reluctance that I find myself unable to give more than praise
for admirable French, and "form" in the strict sense, to the work in
prose fiction of M. Catulle Mendes, sometime Gautier's son-in-law[556]
and always, I think, his disciple. His early verse-work in the _Parnasse
Contemporain_ fifty years ago, was attractive and promising, though
perhaps open to the exception which some took to the _Parnasse_
generally, and which may be echoed here, _not_ with that general
concernment, but as to his own novel and tale-work. His late critical
survey of modern French poetry was a really difficult thing admirably
done. But his fiction leaves me cold, as Parnassian poetry did others,
but not me. A friend of mine, w