we know well enough what masters turned his steps toward the sea and the desert and the wilderness, taught him the luxury of grief and the exile's accents of anguish, the consolations of nature and the pleasures of a quivering sensibility. As a small boy he declares that he had already a clear prescience that he was to have a life of voyages and adventures, with hours of fabulous splendor and hours of infinite misery. Yes, the Arabian Nights, of course. And then Bernardin de St. Pierre, wafting his chaste lovers to an idyllic West Indian isle. Chateaubriand following his dusky maid into the American forest. Mérimée pursuing his brigands among the rocks of Corsica. Gautier inviting to Spain, Greece, and the Mediterranean. Flaubert plucking his melancholy harp above the ruins of Carthage. George Sand and her swarthy peasants among the menhirs of Celtic Brittany. The Goncourts pluming themselves on their exploitation of the acrid savors of dark-skinned races and upon their assimilation of Japan. These are the magicians who presented travel to his lips as one of the higher forms of intoxication. He inherits their taste for the exotic as Yves, in "A Tale of Brittany," inherits dipsomania.
A totally flippant person might summarize his work as thirty-five volumes about the good fortunes of a French Academician who was a larking midshipman before he was a captain, and had a sweetheart in every port. And I suppose that Loti, if asked to speak of love, might have replied like Socrates, "I certainly cannot refuse to speak on the only subject of which I profess to have any knowledge." But Loti, it should be said emphatically, is something infinitely more complex than a mere sailor-lover. His vague rich passion invades and envelops him with a ravishing melan-
