and the effigies in the campi santi of Italy. But it must be confessed that the quarries of Pentelicus furnished Greek artists with a prodigiously living, gifted material, changing with every hour. The Acropolis is like a nude woman whom one loves in the summer sun, thinking how much more one will love her by firelight in winter. The Greeks did not have to travel ten miles to find the material which was best adapted to their genius. However true it is that real artists always have to hand the materials they deserve, the best of all remains the Athenian sky.
"A brighter Hellas rears its mountains from waves serener far" says Shelley. I took along the new life of Shelley which André Maurois has just published in the form—far less disagreeable than one had first suspected, even quite pleasant, in fact—of a novel (Ariel). What is striking in his Shelley is the constant influence of the French Revolution on this strayed son of the gentry. No more in 1789 than to-day was France gifted in propaganda in the modern, scientific, Germanic sense of the word. The people made fanatical by our national upheaval came to us of their own accord. I need not tell Americans that. Now propaganda consists in making people swallow a dose they do not want; and I believe that if, in 1792, we had organized the diffusion of our ideas abroad, and especially if in England we had spread them with precision, had shown intellectuals, politicians, whigs, the radical petite bourgeoisie, that they could not hate the new doctrines because they were the doctrines of their own thinkers—then Pitt could not have maintained himself in power and the face of the world would have been changed.
To return to the Maurois' agreeable story, Shelley appears like Rimbaud, an Angel on Earth—"enchanted child, born in a world unchildlike," Francis Thompson marvellously writes. Like all the Angels, in default of adaptation, he sows ruin about him, defeats, suicides, death to those whom he loves. Byron, the false demon, drunk with worldly snobbism and literary success which made him look down upon his contemporaries was, on the contrary, adored while Shelley was ignored and despised.
My next letter will contain a picture of the literary return to Paris which will, I trust, be not uninteresting—if one may judge by the number of important works already announced.
