June — A Satirist of Florian. 197 



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

 Sylvinet, et, voyant son frere, il eut honte et se leva vivement, 

 croyant n'avoir pas £te* vu. Alors Landry fit comme s'il 

 l'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 £tais 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 allons 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-d-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 



