black-and-white.

An ardent admirer of the author of the stories in The Odd Number has protested to me that M. Coppée is not an etcher like M. de Maupassant, but rather a painter in water-colors. And why not? Thus might we call M. Alphonse Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does he suggest the very bloom of color. No doubt M. Coppée’s contes have not the sharpness of M. de Maupassant’s, nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet’s—but what of it? They have qualities of their own; they have sympathy, poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by those of either M. de Maupassant or M. Daudet. M. Coppée’s street views in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the shadows of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful. They are intensely to be enjoyed by those of us who take the same keen delight in the varied phases of life in New York. They are not, to my mind, really rivalled either by those of M. de Maupassant, who is a Norman by birth and a nomad by choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a native of Provence, although now for thirty years a resident of Paris. M. Coppée is a Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose he is a poet; perhaps this is why his pictures of Paris are unsurpassable in their felicity and in their verity.

It may be fancy, but I seem to see also a finer morality in M. Coppée’s work than in M. de Maupassant’s or in M. Daudet’s or in that of almost any other of the Parisian story-tellers of to-day. In his tales we breathe a purer moral atmosphere, more wholesome and more bracing. It is not that M. Coppée probably thinks of ethics rather than æsthetics; in this respect his attitude is undoubtedly that of the others; there is no sermon in his song—or at least none for those who will not seek it for themselves; there is never a hint of a preachment. But for all that I have found in his work a trace of the tonic morality which inheres in Molière, for example, also a Parisian by birth, and also in Rabelais, despite his disguising grossness. This finer morality comes possibly from a wider and a deeper survey of the universe; and it is as different as possible from the morality which is externally applied and which always punishes the villain in the fifth act.

It is of good augury for our own letters that the best French fiction of to-day is getting itself translated in the United States, and that the liking for it is growing apace. Fiction is more consciously an art in France than anywhere else—perhaps partly because the French are now foremost in nearly all forms of artistic endeavor. In the short story especially, in the tale, in the conte, their supremacy is incontestable; and their skill is shown and their æsthetic instinct exemplified partly in the sense of form, in the constructive method, which underlies the best short stories, however trifling these may appear to be, and partly in the rigorous suppression of non-essentials, due in a measure, it may be, to the example of Mérimee. That is an example we in America may study to advantage; and from the men who are writing fiction in France we may gain much. From the British fiction of this last quarter of the nineteenth century little can be learned by any one—less by us Americans in whom the English tradition is still dominant. When we look to France for an exemplar we may find a model of value, but when we copy an Englishman we are but echoing our own faults. “The truth is,” said Mr. Lowell in his memorable essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners—“the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism.”

Brander Matthews.