also. In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the ordinary types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary man, and in this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside this art, however, founded on the variations which are a condition and effect of all vigorous life, there is another art—sometimes confounded with it—founded on the freak of nature, in itself a mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust, in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only.
It is well to consider all his characters in the light of this statement, I think, and to re-read, keeping in mind a possible further application of it, those phrases in the plays that so outrage many at their hearing in the theatre, I would not for a moment seem to want to soften the hardness of the life he pictures or to explain away his delightfully sardonic humor as in reality a reconciling sort of humor, but I do wish to say that the more I read him the less cruel and sardonic that humor seems. The impersonality of the man as dramatist grows on you as you read, you realize more and more his abstention from playing chorus to his characters, and you come to know that the seeming cruelty and sardonic joy are largely only the direct outcome of his courage in allowing Nature to speak for herself. If you turn again to the plays after learning of their background from his travel sketches, you see many things in a new light. The irony, the grotesquerie, the tonic earthiness never grow less, but one learns to discount somewhat the effect of the hardness of speech on
