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It will be talked of forever. So will that scrofulous Kaiser. Unfortunately he knows it and that pleases him. Last year or the year before he called for the death and destruction of all who opposed him. With singular modesty he added: 'God who speaks through my mouth so orders! Loti claims that what spoke through him was a hyena. Loti is lacking in literary sobriety.
When Rodin was told by Arthur Symons that William Blake saw visions, the sculptor, after looking at the drawings, replied: "Yes, he saw them once; he should have seen them three or four times." Hearn seldom pinned down to the paper his dreams, though he had a gift of suggestion, of spiritual overtones, in a key of transcendentalism, that, in certain pages, far outshines Loti or Maupassant.
But as time went on, despite the sallies of Dick Garstin, the bloodless cynicisms of Enid Blunt, who counted insolence as the chief of the virtues, the amorous sentimentalities of the Turkish refugee from Smyrna, whose moral ruin had been brought about by a few lines of praise from Pierre Loti, the touching appreciations of prison life by Penitence Murray, and the voluble intellectuality of Thapoulos, Jennings and Smith the sculptor, Miss Van Tuyn began to feel absent-minded.
He began his literary life as a worshipper and translator of Théophile Gautier and died in the faith that Pierre Loti had said the last word of modern prose. Gautier attracted him by his sumptuousness of epithet, the perfectly realised material splendours of gold, of marble, of colour.
Whatever of artifice there is in these tales is overcome, one of his most sympathetic critics tells us, by the poetic sincerity of the whole. Taunay, too, has been likened to Pierre Loti for his exotic flavor. In Yerecé a Guaná we have a miniature Innocencia. Yerecé and Alberto Monteiro fall in love and marry. The latter has been cured, at the home of Yerecé, of swamp fever.
There is hardly a fact in the book. It tells not what the child did or what was done to him, but what he felt, thought, dreamed. A record of impressions through the dim years of awakening, it reveals a peculiar and subtle type of personality most necessary to understand. All that Loti is and has been is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child.
And the style? dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with its exquisite music, wakening sad reveries, and hinting of gray days of wind and rain, when the gust around the house wails of broken hopes and ideals so long-deferred as to be half forgotten, the minor sob of his music expresses the spirit of Loti as much as do the moods of the child he describes.
Loti wrote nearly fifty years ago, a decade after their influx: "The Chinese merchants of Papeete were objects of disgust and horror to the natives. There was no greater shame than for a young woman to be convicted of listening to the gallantries of one of them.
Maréchal Bernadotte French to his finger-tips became King of Sweden. Pierre Loti, interviewing the charming and beloved Queen of the Belgians during the present war, remembers that the martyred lady before him is a Bavarian princess. The delicate and painful subject is mentioned. "It is at an end," says the Queen; "between them and me has fallen a curtain of iron which will never again be lifted."
Loti seeks his heroes and his heroines among those antique races of Europe which have survived all conquests, and which have preserved, with their native tongue, the individuality of their character. He met Ramuntcho in the Basque country, but dearer than all to him is Brittany: here it was that he met his Iceland fishermen.
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