I mean beyond his power of giving or
taking away, and I do not believe that those among the poor who
really have this feeling are often found in libraries. They probably
have their "Oxford Book of English Verse"--a gift from their
gentlest acquaintance--just as I have; and, for the rest, they can sell
their school prizes to buy Hardy and Henry James.

Except for "Candide" and a few excerpts from the "Philosophical
Dictionary," I must confess I have no wish to turn over another page
of Voltaire. It is simply incredible to me that human beings
possessed of the same senses as ours could find satisfaction for their
imagination in the sterile moralising, stilted sentiment, superficial
wit, and tiresome persiflage of that queer generation. I suppose they
didn't really. I suppose they used to go off on the sly, and read
Rabelais and Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "social
world" of those days who enjoyed nothing in literature except
pseudo-classic attitudes and gestures; just as it is only the
preposterous "social world" with us who enjoy nothing but Gaelic
mythology and Oriental Mysticism.

Those pseudo-classic writers of the eighteenth century, in England
and France, have their admirers still. I confess such admiration
excites in me as much wonder as the works themselves excite
distaste. What can they find in them that is thrilling or exciting or
large or luminous or magical? I would pile up the whole lot of them
along with those books that are no books--biblia-a-biblia--of which
Charles Lamb speaks so plaintively. Backgammon boards with
lettering behind them should be their companions.

What a relief to turn from contemplation of the works of Voltaire to
that bust of him by Houdon!

Ah! there we have him, there we apprehend him, there we catch his
undying spirit! And what a man he was! As one looks at that face
wherein a mockery more trenchant than the world is able to endure
leers and wags the tongue, one feels certain that the soul of the
eighteenth century was not really contented with its heroic
sentimental mask. The look upon that face, with its aristocratic
refinement, its deadly intellect, its beautiful cynicism, is worth all
the sessions of the Academy and all the seasons of the Salons. It
makes one think somehow of the gardens of Versailles. One seems
to see it as a mocking fragment of heathen marble--some Priapian
deity of shameless irreverence, peering forth in the moonlight from
among the y