least eclectic in the world. Putting it sweepingly, most Continental cities would say: If there is any good play in any foreign language, we want to see it as soon as possible. The French would say: What is the use of translating foreign plays when we have so many good ones of our own? Such a generalization is, of course, unjust; but it roughly represents a point of view.

To me the most interesting daily paper in Paris is Comadia. It is filled with articles of great value and suggestiveness, and its professional dramatic criticisms are penetrating. The other day one of its contributors certainly "started something." M. Pierre Brisson, in an essay called "Le Théâtre Juif," said that the Jews wrote the largest proportion of contemporary plays in Paris. In addition, said he, to two dramatists of commanding importance, Georges de Porto-Riche and Henry Bernstein, there are Tristan Bernard, Pierre Wolff, Francis de Croisset, Edmond Sée, Nozière, Alfred Savoir, André Picard, Romain Coolus, Henri Duvernois, Edmond Fleg, and among the younger men, Jacques Natanson, JeanJacques Bernard, André Lang, Adolphe Orna, Henry Marx. It appears that it is easy to name a long list, perhaps a clear majority of playwrights. But is there anything in his thesis? He believes that the Jews are all alike in a certain downrightness; that they have more force than intelligence; more brutality than subtlety; more sensuality than tenderness. Their works are "stronger" than the works of other Frenchmen, "mais que notre faiblesse m'est chère!"

Naturally this candid article stirred up many writers, both Jews and others; so that finally the editor of the paper had to call a halt on the discussion. Personally, I don't believe there is anything in it. It is true that many plays are written by Jews, but I cannot see that Jewish human nature is really any different from other human nature; any more than I believe that Americans are more materialistic or keener lovers of money than Europeans.

I read Joseph Hergesheimer's latest novel, "Balisand," with admiration for the distinction of its literary style, but without enthusiasm either for the story

or for any of the characters. It is, like all of his work, beautifully written; and of course there is an æsthetic pleasure in savoring so many well-turned phrases. But it is a dead book, and smells of the tomb. It is impossible to read it with gusto, and it takes an effort to read it at all. It is a historical novel, dealing with the period after the Revolutionary War, and the political fight to a finish between the waning Federalists and the waxing Republicans is clearly portrayed. Bale of Balisand is an uncompromising Federalist, and the book is chiefly concerned with a revelation and an analysis of his various moods. But if Mr. Hergesheimer intended Bale to be a representative Southern gentleman, he has lamentably failed; for whatever Bale is, he is most emphatically not a gentleman. Sodden with alcohol, half-drunk most of the time, irritable, quarrelsome, brutal, insulting in conversation, he has hardly a redeeming quality except physical courage. Of that indeed he has a plenty. The tenacity of his political opinions, instead of being the sign of a noble, exalted intellect, that will not compromise to suit a more popular fashion, is, in his case, merely the stupid obstinacy of a mind hermetically sealed.

It is a pity that the attractive heroine fell down-stairs and broke her neck; because that particular dinner party, to which she was descending, would have been filled with excitement, she being engaged to one of the men and in love with another; furthermore, she is the most interesting person in the story, and I regret to see her disposed of in so summary a fashion.

İf Mr. Hergesheimer possessed, together with his indubitable gift of style, more vitality, more humor, more sympathy, more humanity, what splendid works he might produce! There are few living writers who have a better command of the resources of the English language.

"The Old Ladies" is Hugh Walpole's masterpiece. He has surpassed his best previous efforts that is, he has written a book that is better than "The Cathedral" and "The Green Mirror." As a novelist, his specialty has been the Old Lady. Many of his old ladies are more terrible than an army with banners, and as we were walking along Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven one afternoon, I

asked him suddenly-"When you were a child did some old lady scare the life out of you?" He looked at me in the friendliest fashion, and just as I thought I was to receive some important information, he changed the subject. But the Duchess of Wrexe, and the formidable ogre in "The Green Mirror," and the woman who puts ice on your heart in "The Captives," together with other of Mr. Walpole's creations, are enough to form a basis for a theory.

His development as a novelist has been marked by a mellowing process-by a deep, steadily increasing sympathy for humanity. In "The Old Ladies" he shows the tragedy of loneliness, neglect, and poverty in the lives of gentlewomen. The sufferings of the abject poor, of the down-and-outers, have been depicted often enough by novelists; but possibly these wretched wrecks are not so lonely as refined old ladies who have lost their family and their money. It is impossible to read this book without making a vow; without a determination to treat helpless old people with more consideration. There is no solitude in the slums; if misery loves company, misery has it there in abundance. But the solitude and loneliness of the very old who live not in slums, but in remote rooms, up stairs that no one climbs, behind doors where no one knocks -this is the essence of tragedy. In the first part of the novel, I thought all three of the old ladies were to be sweet and lovely in their enforced isolation; but I soon found that one of them was to be as sinister and dangerous a character as the author has ever drawn. It is a picture of horror so chilling that on the last page the reader actually seems to run down-stairs with the fortunate mother and son who escape. "The Old Ladies" shows such power and beauty in characterization that it seems as if it differed from the author's previous work, not merely in degree but in kind; as though he had passed through some phase of development that had changed him from the clever, shrewd, dextrous man that he was into a master, into an interpreter of the deepest things in the human heart.

Mr. M. A. De Wolfe Howe's biography of Barrett Wendell, called "Barrett Wen

dell and His Letters," apart from its general interest, will appeal particularly to the successive generations of Harvard men who studied English Composition under this original and effective teacher. Harvard University is the only institution of learning in America where Mr. Wendell could have lived happily, or where he would have been permitted to live at all. And I, a Yale graduate who admires Harvard for many things-I admire her especially for this: her intellectual hospitality toward men of the widest possible divergence in national, political, social, and religious outlook, and her toleration of men on the Faculty who relieve their minds in the classroom in so bizarre a fashion, that if these obiter dicta were exhaled at the average college, the resulting newspaper notoriety would cause the dismissal of the offending professor.

Mr. Wendell delighted in shocking his student audiences by amazing paradoxes; it is to the everlasting credit of the undergraduates that these were not used in the newspapers. Taken from their context, they would have stirred up what is called "the public mind" to no small degree.

It is curious that the same man who made extraordinary remarks in an extraordinary manner in his lectures on literature, should have been so sensible and efficient in the teaching of English Composition. Yet such was the fact; I saw him in innumerable conferences with students, and his advice was as sound as his manner was strange. I had the best of opportunities for becoming intimately acquainted with him, and I made the most of them. When I was twenty-five years old, I was appointed his assistant at Harvard in his famous course in daily themes. This meant that I visited him in his college office-Grays 18-every day, and saw him in a vast variety of moods. Incidentally, I never saw him when he was not smoking-on one famous occasion, he and the late Winfred R. Martin smoked a box of fifty cigars in one day! I remember a conversation between him and Professor Briggs that was delightfully characteristic of both men. Briggs asked: "How are you getting on with the book?" and Wendell replied: "I shall finish it Sunday." Briggs then expressed surprise that Wendell worked on

Sunday, adding: "I think it best not to work on Sunday, if only for reasons of physical health. I am putting it on the lowest possible ground." Wendell laughed and said: "My dear Briggs, that is the highest possible ground."

One day Wendell was talking with me about his children, and in such an offhand manner that I asked: "Mr. Wendell, do you love your children?" He hesitated, as if the matter required serious reflection. Then he said slowly: "Ye-es; but not when the first one came. It was so exceedingly rudimentary, don't you know."

Mr. Howe quotes a remark of Wendell's which exhibited good self-criticism. "I believe that a great part of whatever success I have had as a teacher is the result of my indiscretion."

But if there were any who chose to think of Wendell as an elegant and shallow dealer in trifles, they were forced to change their minds on closer acquaintance. The letters printed by Mr. Howe exhibit unusual power of thought on many subjects. Though he never professed to be a musical critic, his remarks on "Parsifal" and on "Die Meistersinger," after hearing both at Bayreuth, may truly be called profound.

Richard Hooker, in "The Story of an Independent Newspaper," has written a good book, and one that was needed. The Springfield Republican, owing to a

combination of brains and courage, has always exerted an influence far transcending the circle of its city's population. Like Oxford, it has been the home of lost causes, and like Oxford, it has supported them with fine distinction. The average American, no matter in what part of the country he dwells, when he sees the heading "The Springfield Republican says..." knows that what it says will be worth reading.

Homer Croy's novel, "R. F. D. No. 3," I heartily recommend. It is a truthful, unexaggerated, and interesting tale of the farmer's life in the Middle West. I had a long talk with Mr. Croy in Paris, and he told me that he was born on a farm, was "raised" on a farm, and worked on a farm till he was twenty. The book is worth reading, if only for the one chapter dealing with threshing. The whole story interested me, partly because I know by personal experience the life it describes, for I myself in the summer-time am an R. F. D. . . . No one who studies current American novels can fail to see that there is a steady increase in candor, honesty, and fidelity to fact.

Let me add that the city of Paris, where I am now writing, has some advantages not to be found in the rural districts of Michigan; yet I am by no means free from nostalgia. By the rivers of Babylon I sit down and weep, when I remember Zion.

T happened one day in Paris, long ago, that M. Guillaume-Sulpice Chevalier, then a young artist at the outset of his career, sold a design to the publisher Susse. The latter noticed that it was unsigned and remarked that for the benefit of the public this omission should be corrected. The artist pondered for a moment and then, taking up the pen, made a decision which was to have far-reaching consequences. Perhaps he thought that his name was too long. Perhaps a flood of sentiment rushed through him as there just then rose to his memory the lovely valley of Gavarnie, where he had spent a happy period within the glamour of the Pyrenees. At all events upon this occasion he signed himself "Gavarni" and thus gave immortal syllables to the trumpet of Fame.

It is a name around which cluster some of the most beguiling and suggestive associations in the history of French art, one which has engaged the ardent activity of one pen after another. None was ever more eloquent than that of Sainte-Beuve, who as far back as 1863 consecrated three of his luminous "Lundis" to Gavarni, then within only three years of his death. Not too long after that event the Goncourts wrote their invaluable book, invaluable for the intimate lore which it contains and for the superb etching which Flameng made as frontispiece from Gavarni's celebrated portrait of himself, "L'Homme à la Cigarette." Beraldi gave a particularly skilful little memoir to Gavarni in his well-known catalogue published in the eighties. Only the other day there appeared in Paris under the imprint of Floury the first volume of a work in which M. Paul-André Lemoisne obviously proposes to go most exhaustively into the subject. It is study of his pages that has specifically set me to thinking about Gavarni, but the man and the period have always seemed to me to repay reflection.

THE period is one of those which, in

their very contradictions, have a particular attraction for the analyst. "Victorian," for example, has become a byword, yet if it connotes much that was commonplace, dull, and even ugly, the apotheosis of mediocrity, it also designates a period marked by a positively Elizabethan expansion of the British genius. So it is in France, during that time of transition which stretches from the break-up of the Ancien Régime to the establishment of the Third Republic. Gavarni was born in 1804 and died in 1866. Between those dates French art is constantly in travail, having to reckon with untoward influences. One great classical type survives in Ingres to fertilize one so modern as that which we have in Degas, but in general there blows from the old years of David and the Napoleonic interval a chilling wind inimical in the last degree to the rise of the Romanticists and the naturalistic painters of Barbizon. It was in the sixties and for some time later that the Impressionists had to fight for whatever ground they won. The Second Empire remains a pinchbeck affair in the eyes of most commentators, and the artist could hardly be expected to come to its defense in view of the fact that its favorite portrait-painter was the sentimental, insipid Winterhalter. Yet even while that saccharine journeyman prevailed, there were great spirits on earth sojourning, and they were not without opportunity and stimulus. It is a droll paradox that it was Napoleon III himself who authorized the organization of the Salon des Refusés in the same building that housed the official Salon in 1863. Men like Manet and Whistler, after all, had their chance, and yet I balk a little at the word "chance." Genius has never yet been fortuitously kept down. It will affirm itself, no matter what its surroundings. Sometimes, too, it will ally itself