PIERRE LOTI
The first appearance of Pierre Loti\'s works, twenty years ago, caused a
sensation throughout those circles wherein the creations of intellect and
imagination are felt, studied, and discussed. The author was one who, with
a power which no one had wielded before him, carried off his readers into
exotic lands, and whose art, in appearance most simple, proved a genuine
enchantment for the imagination. It was the time when M. Zola and his
school stood at the head of the literary movement. There breathed forth
from Loti\'s writings an all-penetrating fragrance of poesy, which liberated
French literary ideals from the heavy and oppressive yoke of the
Naturalistic school. Truth now soared on unhampered pinions, and the
reading world was completely won by the unsurpassed intensity and
faithful accuracy with which he depicted the alluring charms of far-off
scenes, and painted the naive soul of the races that seem to endure in the
isles of the Pacific as surviving representatives of the world\'s infancy.
It was then learned that this independent writer was named in real life
Louis Marie Julien Viaud, and that he was a naval officer. This very fact,
that he was not a writer by profession, added indeed to his success. He
actually had seen that which he was describing, he had lived that which he
was relating. What in any other man would have seemed but research and
oddity, remained natural in the case of a sailor who returned each year
with a manuscript in his hand. Africa, Asia, the isles of the Pacific, were
the usual scenes of his dramas. Finally from France itself, and from the
oldest provinces of France, he drew subject-matter for two of his novels,
/An Iceland Fisherman/ and /Ramuntcho/. This proved a surprise. Our
Breton sailors and our Basque mountaineers were not less foreign to the
Parisian drawing-room than was Aziyade or the little Rahahu. One
claimed to have a knowledge of Brittany, or of the Pyrenees, because one
had visited Dinard or Biarritz; while in reality neither Tahiti nor the Isle of
Paques could have remained more completely unknown to us.