June A Satirist of Flo ri an. 197 



les buissons a la nuit tombante. Cela fit lever la tte a 

 Sylvinet, et, voyant son f rare, il eut honte et se leva vivement, 

 croyant n'avoir pas ete vu. Alors Landry fit comme s'il 

 1'apercevait, et lui dit sans beaucoup crier, car la riviere 

 ne chantait pas assez haut pour empecher de s'entendre : 

 "He, mon Sylvinet, tu es done la? Je t'ai attendu tout 

 ce matin, et voyant que tu etais sorti pour si longtemps, je 

 suis venu me promener par ici, en attendant le souper, oil 

 je comptais bien te retrouver a la maison : mais puisque te 

 voila, nous rentrerons ensemble. Nous aliens descendre la 

 riviere chacun sur une rive, et nous nous joindrons au gue 

 des Roulettes." ' 



The difficulty of writing well about rustic subjects is 

 twofold. Either the writer may be untrue, as Florian 

 was by a false refinement, or he may be too realist, too 

 terre-a-terre, like a vulgar painter, and be excluded from 

 all access to the ideal. Our knowledge of Nature feels 

 itself insulted by the first, and our sense of artistic con- 

 venance by the second. The two faults, of utterly oppo- 

 site kinds, were very cleverly united in the same song 

 by a writer who felt the absurdity of Florian and the 

 crudeness of the realism that is entirely without an 

 ideal. He makes a poet go into the fields with his head 

 full of Florian's notions, and enter into a conversation 

 with a shepherdess of the least imaginative type. What 

 he says is the 18th-century pastoral, with its false ideal ; 

 what she answers is the gross modern realism that has 

 no Idea whatever. In the chanson the male speaker has 

 entirely the worst of it, yet before the tribunal of a com- 

 petent art-criticism she also would be condemned as 

 unfit for the world of art that world which has laws of 



