700 POETKY 



the compositions resembling groups of dwarfs, that the Empire had 

 bequeathed to the Eestoration." 



To the foreign critic it seems that, as in French politics the central- 

 izing principle has overpowered local liberty, so in French art the 

 native tendency is for logic to prevail over imagination. Whatever 

 literary party has been dominant in the taste of French society has 

 sought to establish its supremacy by imaginative Analysis. The result 

 has been to develop in the art of our neighbors great beauty of ab- 

 stract Form, a splendid capacity of lucid expression, but more and 

 more to turn away the creative impulse of the artist from the imitation 

 of universal ideas of life and action. In the rival theories and prac- 

 tice of the modern French Xaturalists and Impressionists I seem to 

 detect, under a changed form, the old party struggle between the 

 Classicists and the Romanticists. In one direction, I see the disciples 

 of Gustavo- Flaubert, by a new application of the precepts of Boileau, 

 employing all the resources of precise and artistic language to deco- 

 rate the sordid commonplace of bourgeois life; in another. M. Anatole 

 France, as the successor of Kenan, arresting the transient impressions 

 of his own mind in a succession of delicate phrases, which would 

 have been the delight of the Hotel Kambouillet. But, in both direc- 

 tions, Analysis undermines the conscience with the suggestion of sub- 

 jects and idea- which lie at the very foundation of the Family and 

 the State. 



Must these things be ? Is it impossible for the French novelist to 

 contemplate Man under any aspect except that which involves some 

 relation to his neighbor's wife ? impossible for him to transport the 

 imagination into the world of ideal action? Perhaps it may be 

 answered, that all the energies of the nation are concentrated in Paris, 

 where lies its brain, and that Analysis alone can penetrate to the prin- 

 ciple of life underlying the wild excitement of the Parisian Bourse, 

 the gossip of the Parisian journal, the intrigues of the Parisian draw- 

 ing-room. But Paris is not France: the poetry of the people, its 

 historic soul and character, lies elsewhere. Turn away from the dis- 

 solving scene of life in the capital, with its superficial reflection of 

 vulgar materialism, to the bypaths of rural France, where Xature pur- 

 sues her ancient round in the midst of silent labor and elemental 

 pieties. Pause in imagination, for example, in the valley of the Loire, 

 as that noble river flows peacefully amidst historic battle-grounds; 

 through walled towns, where every stone seems to recall some national 

 memory Orleans. Tours, Angers; through fields in which, here and 

 there, peasants mav still be seen, as Millet saw them, listening with 

 bent heads In the voice of the Angelus; under gray chateaux, which 

 perhaps, no longer tenanted by the descendants of their former lords, 

 look down, at fixed -seasons, on popular festivals celebrated around 

 them since the Middle Ages will any man of taste and imagination, 



