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Show THE CITIZEN 8 today. I 9 1 THINGS BOOKISH hear the mighty rumbling of those thousands of horsemen as they left the Danube and raced with fire and sword to the south. To the many who, perhaps, will never find it convenient to read the book, I feel constrained to give a part of this magical description, On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men astride on small horses, clad in coats, monstrous Tartars with enormous heads, fiat noses, chins gullied with scars and gashes, and jaundiced faces bare of hair, rushed at full speed to envelop the territories of the Lower Empire like a whirlwind. Everything disappeared in the dust of their gallopings, in the smoke of conflagrations. Darkness fell, and the amazed people trembled, as they heard the fearful tornado which passed with thunder crashes. The hordes of Huns razed Europe, rushed toward Gaul, overran the plains of Chalons where Aetius pillaged it in an awful charge. The plains, gorged with blood, foamed like a purple sea. Two hundred thousand corpses barred the way, broke the movement of this avalanche which, swerving, fell wtih mighty thunderclaps, against Italy, whose exterminated towns flamed like burning ricks. The Occidental Empire crumbled beneath the shock; the moribund life which it was pursuing to imbecility and foulness, was extinguished. Leaving the Latin books, there is in this library hardly a trace up to the time of Beaudelaire, who was one of the few men whom Husymans adored. Next to this man his favorite poet was Edgar Allen Foe, a man with whom he felt a mental and spiritual kinship. Yet could a mans two idols be more vastly different than the violent giant, Beaudelaire, and the slight, sensitive, sickly Poe? For his contemporary literary brethren, the brothers Goncourt, de Gourmont, Provost, Zola, Paul Verlaine, Anatole France, Husymans, felt a great degree of respect, but he never failed in bitterly and sarcastically denouncing their slightest move with which he did not agree. They, in turn, were equally merciless in caricaturing I s S ii.iiiiuMMiiiiiimiiHiHiuiiiiiiiuimumiiiiiiiiiiiiiMiiMiimiiiiiiiiimniiiiiiiMuiuiwtiiiiiimuMiiiiiHimuimwiiiuMiuiimiiiiwimMiiiwwiiHiiiiiiiiiimMiiitiHM? Edited By WILLIAM C. WINDER, Jr. AGAINST THE GRAIN. There are times when I am to feel, even against my will, that it is doubtless well' for mankind, especially as it exists today, that so few of its members aro ever explorers of the soul, no matter how bold and daring they may seem in their ordinary pursuits of daily existence. To the unthinking masses of people the world is harsh and tragic enough, the masked anguish of millions is too nearly audible. But to the man who dares to follow lifes lures to their logical conclusion, the darkness must be infinite. If man is to continue to live on, it is perhaps best for him not to question the unanswerable unless his nature is strong and fearless, and to such good fortune so few can- lay claim. Until the time of Superman, that time when one will live his bfest simply for the sake of having lived, I repeat again, that the ninety and nine had best close their eyes to the realities and rely, if possible, on the hopes of an ancient faith. It is quite possible that no person has more insistently demanded than I have that all men, both of the classes and the masses, throw off that deadening lethargy of contentment and and seek honestly to answer the questions of the soul, and then face to face with the unanswerable accept their ultimate fate at least stoically, if not gladly. But would the game be worth its attending anguish to the little souls, even if they had the ability to question? Perhaps tomorrow I will again answer Yes, and renew my demand for a revolt against stultifying complacency. Tonight I am content that only the mentally restless carry on their deliberate searchings into all the avenues of human satisfaction and gratification, for I nave been strangely living with Huysmans Des Esseintes through his tortuous paths in search of the verities, and my heart has gone out to him in his final despairing cry. The great Beaudelaire is perhaps considered the most relentless inquisitor of the human soul, but from more than one point of view he has been surpassed by his great admirer, Husy-manJoris-KaHusymans, half Fleming and half French, has written his name high among the great French immortals, and yet he wrote it in words of hatred and loathing. It is probable that among great men of letters a person will seek in vain for another such misanthrope. For two things only he had a kindly feeling, art and religion. For the rest of life and its puppets he reserevd his most vitriolic epithets, Yet his artistic judgments are all unusually sane and and put down indelibly in enameled prose. His A Rebours (Against the Grain) is after all his wonderful confession of aesthetic faith, a long and related 'group of his experiences of the' world com-pele- d - self-satisfacti- fos-sib- on le s. rl clear-sighte- d, and his final artistic judgments. The neurotic Des Esseintes speaks truly the thoughts of his creator; his endless experiments at gratifying his aesthetic sensations, and his reading of his Latin and French favorites and his long contemplations are all but the intimate pictures of Husymans own brain. In no other book have I found the record of such comprehensive searchings to the very foundations of all possible sensations. Next to this rat-ski- n work I would class Widles The Picture of Dorian Gray, but the mad searchings of the young Dorian never carried forward into such dire and logical depths. And in the descriptions of all the fantastic and curious things brought together to gratify the wishes and whims of Des Esseintes, the nearest approach in bizarre knowledge is to be found in Van Vechtens Peter Whiffle, for Peter Whiffle at one period in his artistic life declared that his great book would consist of little more than long catalogues of names of objects, all but loosely related. And into what fascinating mental journeys does this book lead us as we follow Des Esseintes through his neurotic life from one futility to another. But even if he was not granted permanent satisfaction, he made some finely decisive affirmations on art and life and religion. He had his favorites, founded on a thoroughly sophisticated information and experience, and to them he clung desperately. As the interest of Husymans lay largely in the works of the late Latins and the French, so does one find that the library of Des Esseintes contained these books almost to the exclusion of all else. A great scholar of Latin, his favorites were the writers of the Roman Decadence, a time when the whole was made subservient to its beautiful parts, when the individual found expression. For the popular Latin writers he had but little use, nor was this refusal to do them honor based on ignorance of their work, but in their pompous style and threadbare ideas he found little to attract. In every century up to the fifth he had his favorites, the while their language was becoming more corrupt and more mixed with the African a and Barbarian idiom. Then came and his hordes, and the last of the Latin language was driven into the cloisters. In the work of the next four centuries, he found some of the religious writers who were of interest in that they attempted to carry down the old language; although under the influence of the new religion a new language was practically born for the new faith brought the necessity of entirely new forms of expression. After the ninth century, not even the cloisters handed down anything of merit, and Latin ceased as a living language. Right here I must retrace my steps to the coming of the Huns in the fifth century, for in those two or three pages is a great drama so vividly retold that it lives as though it were of At-til- In my mind I can actually . him and his foibles. In the art of painting, the judgments of Huysmans were just as pronounced and discriminating as in his literary criticism. For the Italian primitives he had but little use, claiming that the Flemings were the real primitives. The blood of the Flemish painters flowed in his veins and his eye was true, but he painted in words instead of oils and watercolors. He has written magnificently in various places of the work of Gustave Moreau, and in his A Rebours the description of the two Moreau paintings of Salome is a rare piece of prose. Of Rops he wrot with great intelligence and understanding, and with Whistler he was entirely just in his praise. He was one of the first to announce Cezanne and Gaugin, claiming the former to be' greater than Manet, and in this line as well but few of his judgments have been reversed by time. However, as intimated before, the interests of Huysmans, in this book embodied in his Des Esseintes, were many and varied. He studied and experimented in coIots and their combi nations, in exotic perfumes from the far parts of the world, in rare liquors and their effects on his sensitive mind when taken singly and in strange combination, of bizarre and fantastic flowers and their appeal to the moods and senses, of precious stones, of the ef-fects of light and shadow in his home as affecting his different moods, of rugs and tapestries, etchings and prints. But while each series of experiments in its turn helped to pass a few hours or days, yet they did not bring ultimate satisfaction. Des Esseintes, brought up in the Jesuit school, tried again in later years to recapture the faith of his youth. For the church and its mission he held a deep reverence, but to his mind, which could not throw off its powers of reasoning, it could never bring to him again his peace of mind. His searchings and gropings were at an end; none had yielded to him a blessed peace, not even a sense of satisfaction. He turned and called upon his religion, but it offered him no comforting hand. For his fellow men he had no use, for their society nothing but contempt; his searchings had been vain; his lost faith would not return. The effect of his poignant cry is tremendous, O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of an ancient faith. CIGARET SALES MOUNT. The Tobacco Products Corporation has reported that its January sales of cigarettes have increased from 39.4 per cent to 74 per cent, according to brands, over its sales for the corresponding month of last year. POTATO EXPORTS. The outbreak of the European war in 1914 undoubtedly greatly handicapped our European potato market, for that year we only exported two bushels of potatoes to Europe. Somehow or other both of them managed to get into Belgium. Whether this was before or after the German invasion is not clear. The records of the department of commerce do not state. Probably that is a matter which will always remin in doubt. jailllllimillllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll!: FLOWERS E i For The Garden and all occasions 1 I HOBDAYS I Flower Shop Street (Keith Emporium) 246 South Main Thos. Hobday, Prop. 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