When one is too old, the heart has gone dry, campaigns have ended, advice and sour ironies are what’s left. And when one is too young, the heart is generous, but usually only to oneself or to another mirroring oneself. He is a man who doesn’t “believe there are such things as absolute truths,” but who does “believe in absolute human qualities”-generosity, most especially. The particulars of experience and of character, the particular consequences of choosing-these are for him the only absolutes. In the best of his films-even the Indian exoticism of The River, where three nubile girls stand on the threshold of love, the elegant eleventh-hour romps of The Rules of the Game, the last flings and follies of Boudou Saved from Drowning-there’s always that typical Renoir ripeness, the authority of natural forces, natural events, those strains of lyric simplicity and dark but mellow accountability which Renoir makes so much his own. These summer and autumn moods where perhaps one is most aware of the poignancy of what has been or what is to come, these seasons of accommodation where one plants and where one reaps, seem to me the apt setting, the characteristic boundaries, of Jean Renoir’s gently radiant, gravely humorous art. Hugo says that forty is the old age of youth and that fifty is the youth of old age.