to write English—a point about which George Moore and others have raised doubts—certainly he learned to feel like an Englishman the burden of those self-imposed obligations which one carries in order to retain one's own respect. In his austere scrutiny of the point of honor, the ethical scruple, there is something almost "puritan," something that links him with Hawthorne, Henry James and Mrs. Wharton, writers who get their "fun" out of refining and multiplying the more or less artificial problems of life, like the proverbial Englishman who preserves the integrity of the blond Nordic by donning evening clothes and dining in solitary state in the Indian jungle.
Pierre Loti is not in that gallery. Though an officer himself, as a man of letters he has shown little interest in what men do under the stress of code and convention. As an author he is incurious about Occidental society. He wishes to forget all that. His friends and his heroes, for literary purposes, are men of the people, peasants, common sailors, whose ungovernable propensity for drink, brawling, and desertion prevents their ever winning more than a woolen stripe to their sleeves. The crises in their experience are not crises of the will but crises of the emotions. For Loti all the possibilities of romance depend upon the hero's susceptibility to seduction, depend upon his surrendering himself utterly to the deep inebriation of strange loves and lands. "This price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing." Before Loti interprets Tahiti he wishes a Tahitian baptism; before he speaks of Japan he must have a Japanese marriage. Transient unions, but while they last he craves the deepest possible impregnation of his spirit by the spirit which he woos, the utmost expatriation and self-dis-
