to-day and by Hayley to-morrow. If the critic says that the verse of
Blake is beautiful and that of Hayley is not, he merely "expounds
case-made law." The result seems to be that no canons of taste exist;
that what are called "laws" of style are enacted only for those who make
them, and for those whom the makers can bully into accepting their
legislation, a new generation of lawbreakers being perfectly free to
repeal the code. Southey yesterday and Keats to-day; why not Southey
again to-morrow, or perhaps Tupper? Such is the cynical _cul-de-sac_
into which the logic of a philosopher drives us.

We have had in France an example of _volte-face_ in taste which I
confess has left me gasping. I imagine that if Mr. Balfour was able to
spare a moment from the consideration of fiscal reform, he must have
spent it in triumphing over the fate of M. Sully-Prudhomme. In the month
of September 1906 this poet closed, after a protracted agony, "that long
disease, his life." He had compelled respect by his courage in the face
of hopeless pain, and, one might suppose, some gratitude by the
abundance of his benefactions. His career was more than blameless, it
was singularly exemplary. Half-blind, half-paralysed, for a long time
very poor, pious without fanaticism, patient, laborious, devoted to his
friends, he seems to have been one of those extraordinary beings whose
fortitude in the face of affliction knows no abatement. It would be
ridiculous to quote any of these virtues as a reason for admiring the
poetry of Sully-Prudhomme. I mention them merely to show that there was
nothing in his personal temperament to arouse hatred or in his personal
conditions to excuse envy. Nothing to account for the, doubtless,
entirely sincere detestation which his poetry seemed to awaken in all
"the best minds" directly he was dead.

As every one knows, from about 1870 to 1890, Sully-Prudhomme was,