explanation of the word. Suffice it to say that Pierre Loti has been
always the nom de plume of M. Viaud.

Loti has no immediate literary ancestor and no pupil worthy of the name.
He indulges in a dainty pessimism and is most of all an impressionist,
not of the vogue of Zola--although he can be, on occasion, as brutally
plain as he--but more in the manner of Victor Hugo, his predecessor, or
Alphonse Daudet, his lifelong friend. In Loti's works, however,
pessimism is softened to a musical melancholy; the style is direct; the
vocabulary exquisite; the moral situations familiar; the characters not
complex. In short, his place is unique, apart from the normal lines of
novelistic development.

The vein of Loti is not absolutely new, but is certainly novel. In him
it first revealed itself in a receptive sympathy for the rare flood of
experiences that his naval life brought on him, experiences which had not
fallen to the lot of Bernardin de St. Pierre or Chateaubriand, both of
whom he resembles. But neither of those writers possessed Loti's
delicate sensitiveness to exotic nature as it is reflected in the foreign
mind and heart. Strange but real worlds he has conjured up for us in
most of his works and with means that are, as with all great artists,
extremely simple. He may be compared to Kipling and to Stevenson: to
Kipling, because he has done for the French seaman something that the
Englishman has done for "Tommy Atkins," although their methods are often
more opposed than similar; like Stevenson, he has gone searching for
romance in the ends of the earth; like Stevenson, too, he has put into
all of his works a style that is never less than dominant and often
irresistible. Charm, indeed, is the one fine quality that all his
critics, whether friendly or not, acknowledge, and it is one well able to
cover, if need be, a multitude of literary sins.