342 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



once or twice a month " pour parler Francais." Yet, we regret to say 

 that America, for whom we fought, America, our sister republic, is, of 

 all great nations, the most indifferent to French culture. The small 

 number of Frenchmen in this country, the bad reputation of a few 

 international places of amusement in Paris — some under English man- 

 agement — a small, noisy literature exclusively for the Boulevards and 

 the export trade, perhaps also the enormous influence of Germany, 

 whose friendliness to France was none of the warmest — all these factors 

 have led many Americans to neglect France, her people and her lan- 

 guage. America was, I believe, the first great nation to restrict the use 

 of French as the diplomatic language, and she is perhaps the only one 

 at the present day where more students learn German than French. 



However, in the rest of the world — for there is a rest of the world 

 — French maintains its position. It is curious to notice that foreigners 

 are much more sanguine than the French themselves about its future. 

 At the Liege congress for the diffusion of the French language, a 

 Bussian, Novicow, led the optimists, against our great medieval philolo- 

 gist, Paul Meyer, probably lost in his regrets for the glorious thirteenth 

 century. Kivarol was never more complimentary to us than H. G. 

 Wells, Gubernatis, Valera or Max Nordau. 



Professor Brand er Matthews believes that the larger intellectual and 

 financial opportunities of English will lure ambitious writers away from 

 their language and their people. He gives Maarten Maartens as an 

 example. This tendency is not new, and French, in the past, could 

 point with pride to many such transfuges, from Brunetto Latini to 

 Frederic of Prussia. And that power of attraction is not spent. For 

 anything except a sensational novel or a volume of sermons, French 

 offers at least as good financial opportunities as English, a more inde- 

 pendent and better trained body of critics, a more open-minded, more 

 discriminating reading public. That is why, not only in the days of 

 Chaucer and in the days of Gibbon, but in this twentieth century of 

 ours, so many foreign authors have adopted French as their vehicle. 

 And not only critics and novelists, but poets — which supposes an ex- 

 traordinary degree of familiarity with the language: Belgians of Teu- 

 tonic origin, like Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, Eodenbach ; Eumanians, like 

 Bolinteano, Hasdeu, Macedonsky, Stourdza, Helen Vacaresco; Greeks 

 like Parodi and Papadiamantopoulos (Jean Moreas) ; the Cuban Jose- 

 Maria de Heredia, perhaps the greatest of them all; English poets — 

 Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Mary Eobinson (Mme. Darmesteter- 

 Duclaux) ; finally true-born Americans — Francis Viele-Griffin from 

 Virginia, Stuart Merrill from Long Island, both doing excellent work : 



. . . J'en passe, et des meilleurs! 

 Pour trois qui vous viendraient, il m 'en viendrait soixante. 



