in it, through all the poverty of the precipitous Rue des Martyrs. But it is in Axël, and in Axël only, that he has made us also inhabitants of that world. Even in Elën we are spectators, watching a tragical fairy play (as if Fantasio became suddenly in deadly earnest), watching some one else's dreams. Axël envelops us in its own atmosphere; it is as if we found ourselves on a mountain top on the other side of the clouds, and without surprise at finding ourselves there.
The ideal, to Villiers, being the real, spiritual beauty being the essential beauty, and material beauty its reflection, or its revelation, it is with a sort of fury that he attacks the materialising forces of the world: science, progress, the worldly emphasis on "facts," on what is "positive," "serious," "respectable." Satire, with him, is the revenge of beauty upon ugliness, the persecution of the ugly; it is not merely social satire, it is a satire on the material universe by one who believes in a spiritual universe. Thus it is the only laughter of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Swift or Rabelais. And this lacerating laughter of the idealist is never surer in its aim
