THE FRENCH ACADEMY. 293 



Your exquisite tact has saved you from making this 

 mistake, and I detect in the tone of your observations 

 the geniality and the contagious warmth which are 

 the charm of your conversation. I was sorry to note 

 the absence of certain anecdotes which are familiar to 

 you, and I miss, for instance, certain details that you 

 know about Abraham and Sarah, and about Joseph 

 and the Queen of Sheba. A number of things which 

 you know more about than any one else are absent 

 from your speech, but nothing which is yourself is 

 missing. You possess the greatest and the rarest 

 literary quality of the present day that of being 

 natural. You never went in for declamation. Your 

 eloquence consists of that manly and straightforward 

 way of communicating with the public of which the 

 example has been set by England and America. No 

 one, assuredly, in our age, has been more persuasive 

 than you, and in consequence no one has been more 

 eloquent. Yet no one has taken less account of the 

 artifices of language, or of the empty forms which are 

 animated by no ardent conviction. 



" You remarked upon one occasion: 'I approve of 

 Latin and Greek being taught to our children, but what 

 we must not neglect is to teach them to think wisely 

 and to speak bravely.' That is what I so admire. 

 You abhor rhetoric, and you are perfectly right. 

 Ehetoric is, in addition to poetics, the only error we 

 have to reproach the Greeks with. After having pro- 

 duced masterpieces themselves, they thought that they 



