It is easy to detect the influence of Rowlandson and of Hiroshige and the other Japanese designers in the methods of these French artists of to-day, and there could be no better influences. Rowlandson's _Dr. Syntax_ was the delight of my childhood, and is equally a solace to-day when I am better able to understand what that great artist accomplished; Hiroshige's daring and lovely visions of some remote Japanese fairyland are always consoling to take out and gaze at when one is weary or depressed or disgusted. There could be no better influences.
But while it is not difficult to detect such influences in _Le Hire's_ best artists at their best moments,--not so very often attained,--they are yet always themselves and true to their own spirit and vision, or they would have no message to deliver. These pictures have their supreme value because, whether or not they are a true picture of French life, they are a true presentation of the essential French spirit, so recklessly gay and so daringly poignant, so happily exquisite in its methods, and so relentlessly direct in its moral. For some people, who take what they are able to receive, the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity which worried the pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life, wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of art. The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and Molière--if these are your superficial men!--but also in Pascal. Was there so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit of Pascal in some of these pictures in _Le Rire_, but sometimes even his very phrases used as the titles of them.
_December_ 9.--The Australians, it appears, have been much worried over Chidley. Here was a man who would not fit into their conventional moulds. He was stern, resolute, inflexible, convinced that he carried a Gospel which Australia and the world at large needed. It was a Gospel so eccentrically related to the accepted scheme of things that only he himself could accept it in its entirety. His method of preaching this gospel, moreover, was as eccentric as the gospel itself. It seemed to him that men need to live closer to Nature, that a simpler diet is necessary to salvation, and less clothing, and greater sexual continence. He approved his gospel by being a model of physical muscular fitness. As I have sometimes seen a Rifian from the hills, with bare magnificent limbs, striding down from the heights carolling a song, to enter the bastardly-civilised city of Tangier, so, it would seem, Chidley descended on to the city of Sydney. Having written a book in which to contain the pith of his message, he proceeded to clothe himself in a sort of scanty bathing dress, to lecture the public in the most fashionable streets of the city, and to sell his book to those who might desire it.