when Rembrandt was painting, a few years later, a Frenchman heard the soul of woman like the gentle whisper of a streamlet. Racine, it would seem, not only conceived great woman characters, but into them he poured the inmost soul of woman to the most hidden secrets of her heart. I say "it would seem," for my friends tell me so, and I trust to their judgment. I cannot do anything else, for reading Racine tells me nothing, no more than seeing him acted. It is with regret I confess that the literature which Frenchmen call their Grand Siècle is wholly sealed against me, and Racine and Corneille most of all. I say I regret it, for it is always mournful to lack a sense. But since the misfortune weighs only on myself, no one will expect me to cast ashes upon my head and to rend my garments. To arrive at a friendly understanding, it would be enough for me to say that that cesura and the rhyme keep the psychology of the characters from reaching me. Rhymed verse I find delicious as long as the subject be light and fanciful. But I perceive I am setting my foot on the way of the explainer, and I cry a halt. In any case Racine's women were all princesses, noble, far from common, every-day griefs, living in a world of abstract emotion; and when I think of woman it is of the being that remains at home, sad and resigned, and who, like Eugénie Grandet, has had once in her life-time a single love-affair; I forget for the moment the circumstances that made her lose her happiness; I recall her as a creature drifted upon the rocks.

Rembrandt clearly divined the melancholy of the unloved woman, the woman alone in life; and Balzac, who divined. everything, divined her, too. The odalisque still survives in our literature, but in bad literature; we can see her also in the Salon, but always in bad art, and I am sure you will share my opinion that when we do anything a little better than usual, our minds turn to Eugénie Grandet. She is the one woman among the people that flock to our memory when we think of the Comédie Humaine. There are other women in it, but I forget the name of the old maid, and the name of the pretty creature in "Les parents pauvres"; it is unpardonable to forget her. Is her name Pierrette? What does it matter? There are not many more women in Balzac than

in Shakspere, and Balzac is the last writer who was enough interested in the eternal masculine to base his work on it. Since Balzac, the eternal feminine sprawls over everything, absorbing all arts, all crafts, and now seeking to take hold of politics and winning the martyr's crown by one or two or three months in jail, as the daily papers have informed us.

The faith of Balzac and of Shakspere in the eternal masculine is a bond between them. There are other bonds as well. Shakspere, like Balzac, understood that a writer finds his "stuff" in the world of common folk rather than in high society; among the unclassed of every kind, old soldiers, chimney-sweeps, bullies, harlots, and bawds.

It grieves me always to find myself of one mind with Tolstoy, yet I am with him when he says that Falstaff is the most universal and the most original thing in Shakspere; but I turn my back on him when he says that Falstaff is the only character in all Shakspere who always speaks the tongue that is proper to himself, and whose acts and words are in tune. That criticism is Tolstoy in a nutshell-a false idea well disguised; for beyond all contradiction Hamlet is every man's secret, Tolstoy's perhaps oftener than any other's. The moment intelligence dawns in any man he is ready to believe he is Hamlet. Hamlet is the hieroglyph and symbol of the intelligence. Falstaff is the symbol and arabesque of the flesh. But the flesh of Falstaff is interpenetrated with Hamlet's intelligence. Falstaff's flesh chatters, and its chattering is as taking and delightful as the chatter of birds waking in the dawn; it is half unconscious, for Falstaff loves his belly, knowing it is that which links him to the world of his superiors and the world of his inferiors. His belly makes him in some sort a pantheist, for the belly is what we all have in common; it is the base of the very life of animals as well as of men. The birds have wings, fish have their fins, but to every living thing alike his belly; and so Falstaff. But who is belly, and only belly, is the epitome of terrestrial life. The ancients had Silenus, but he was mute, while Falstaff flowed in speech; and Shakspere saw to it that his language was naturalistic. There was a great danger that he might become an empty symbol, but Shakspere's

genius has safeguarded his individuality to the hour of his dying. The lyrical muse of Shakspere, who hid from Falstaff, came forth at the moment when the gross man was about to die and set him talking of flowers and fields; but even so, until his last breath Falstaff remains Falstaff. Hamlet is the center of one play; Falstaff shows himself in several. To lose him would be an irreparable misfortune. If we had to choose between them, to hesitate, were it only for an instant, would be unforgivable.

After singing mountain-peaks and forests, Wagner composed the "Meistersingers" because he must sing the hearth as well. It seems to me that Shakspere must have felt the necessity of describing intellect after describing that mass of materialism. What a poet he must have been to describe that mountain of jolly flesh! In the scenes of extravagant comedy we could not do without the poet for a single minute; he must be in every word, and when the speech is gross, it must be Shakspere's or Aristophanes's. It took more genius to write the Grave-digger's scene in "Hamlet" than the famous "To be or not to be." Never was Shakspere so great as when he depicted comic characters, such as Touchstone, the mountebank who followed the lovers in the Forest of Arden. I don't know if any of the charm of the scene between Touchstone and the shepherds transpires in the French translation. I hope so, but I can think of no poet who could turn it into French except it might be Banville. The whimsy of the scene would have captivated the whimsical mind of your poet, and the clown's marriage with the dreadful peasant Audrey would have exalted him beyond himself, for he would have understood at once that Touchstone realizes how repulsive Audrey is, but finds it pleases his ironic humor to marry her. After exhausting irony in words, he seeks it now in life, and the poor ninny follows him, lured by the jingle of his belled cap.

We recall "Twelfth

Night," in which the ass Malvolio dons a ridiculous rig to please the women, and in which the three cronies-Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek, and the clown— question one another. In these comedies we have hardly got away from folk, and Banville would have been the one man to translate them, for he was the only poet

among you who dared to set logic packing, and his Muse would have skipped about the raging Katharine and frolicked in seventeenth-century cadences round Falstaff in his courtships of the Merry Wives.

You will tell me that there is nothing of all this in Balzac. I do not agree; there are more invention and more fancy in the Comédie Humaine than in any other writer. Did he not in the "Contes drôlatiques" make the sixteenth century live again in its spirit and its speech? And is he not almost the only Frenchman who has known how to write boniment, that splendid word impossible to render in English except by the miserable. word "patter"? But what is boniment? The dictionary tells us that it is the charlatanesque advertisement the mountebank makes in front of his booth; well, you must get the true signification of the word. Boniment is original inspiration. Possessed of words, the mountebank sloughs his every-day reality, and in his ecstasy he becomes the brother, or at least first cousin, to the prophet and the poet. All three speak without knowing what they are saying, but the man of talent knows it very well. The word becomes the master of the thought, and drags it into the forest glades, forcing it to turn somersaults on the grass and to dizzy leapings toward the stars. Prophet, mountebank, or poet, the word is thy guide, and thou dost rejoice in the tumult of words and images without knowing how or whence they come. The rest is reason, logic, talent. Patter is the crown, the cloak, the scrip, the staff of the olden masters; the rouge, the wig, the gold-topped cane of the masters of to-day.

Perhaps there is more patter in English literature than in French. Good heavens! what am I saying? Rabelais, the lord of patter, lived a century before Shakspere. But among French modern writers I do not remember even one-yes, Victor Hugo. So great a master of the language could not but have written some wonderful patter. I should have liked to open one of Balzac's tales and quote certain passages, but points of art are not decided with texts; art appeals to our instinct rather than to our reason. Our feeling changes from day to day and depends upon circumstances.

The passages of Balzac that once brought Shakspere to my mind might

seem different if I read them aloud today. Yet I should not like to leave it at a simple affirmation, and you would think it a poor jest if I counseled you to shut yourselves up in your homes to read Shakspere and Balzac. There are fifty volumes in the Comédie Humaine; Shakspere left thirty-seven plays behind him; years upon years would roll away, and you would still be looking for the texts I lit upon by chance and long ago. I shall make a clean confession. One night I was reading Shakspere, and a scene between carters and grooms so delighted me that for days I could think of nothing but the beauty of the dialogue, that speech both erudite and of the common people. At the end of the week, by one of the chances of literature, I opened "César Birotteau" at the page where the perfumer goes to the market to buy nuts to make his celebrated oil. Instead of being satisfied with relating, like many another writer, how after bargaining he decided to buy some thousands of francs' worth of nuts, Balzac describes the whole scene with the nutseller. Note that the nut-seller is not a character in the story; we never see her again. It was, therefore, simply and solely for the pleasure of talk that Balzac made her talk; and how often does Shakspere make his grooms and carters talk for the same excellent reason! A few pages farther on Balzac brings his reader to call on the illustrious Gaudissart, the wonderful commercial traveler, and makes him utter all his craft in a dreadful, charming jargon. It is not shorthand, but a literary reconstruction penetrated by Balzac's mind.

All of you know that Shakspere wrote a great deal in prose, and that his prose is as beautiful as his verse. His verse is rarely rhymed, and he passes easily from prose to verse, and from verse to prose. In writing verse he is as masterly as Balzac was feeble. In his study on the great story-teller, Gautier picks out a verse extraordinary beyond belief, for within its twelve syllables Balzac has managed to commit three errors in prosody. In "Les illusions perdues" Balzac gives Lucien de Rubémpré three sonnets written in widely different styles. "The Tulip" is

Gautier, "The Daisy" is Mme. de Girardin; I don't think it is known who wrote the third. the third. He had perhaps the least feeling of anybody in the world for the beauty of verse, and as he lived at a time when everybody loved poetry except himself, it is quite likely that his hatred-for he cannot but have hated verse, else he never would have drawn Canalis has helped considerably to create the legend that Balzac could not write French, for it takes very little to set a legend going. Balzac wrote with the greatest abundance, he wrote with the greatest ease; in forty nights he wrote "La cousine Bette" with his own hand. His style is sometimes loose, sometimes even incorrect. So was Shakspere's. To be incorrect is always regrettable, but it does not prove that an author is not a man of letters of the true stock. Worse than incorrectness is strain; the moment the critic perceives that the writer is straining after effect he is nearly always right in coming to the conclusion that the book was not written by a great writer.

Once upon a time I imagined that talent consisted in the quest of the rare epithet, but I think so no longer; now I know whither that path leads. Shall I give you an example? In the opening chapters of "Salâmmbo," Flaubert makes desperate efforts to find phrases for the sounds of the different tongues heard among the mercenaries. He says one "heard side by side with the heavy Dorian patois Celtic syllables, rattling like warchariots, and Ionian terminations clashed upon desert consonants, harsh as the cries of jackals." No longer can I subscribe to his moonlight, which in the great lovescene in "Madame Bovary" mirrors itself in the river, at first like a candelabra and then like a serpent with silver scales. But it seems to me that I am wandering away from my theme. The pangs of Flaubert as he wrote would make the theme for another lecture. I hope some one will write it soon; it will give me a great deal of pleasure to hear it. Mine upon Balzac and Shakspere is at an end; but before we part, I should like to thank you for the very indulgent way you have listened to a barbarian.

·A

LTHOUGH Aunt Ruth had been

dead over forty-five years, and was only four when she succumbed to whooping-cough, pneumonia, scarlet fever, or mumps, she had them all, but I can never remember which one finished her,her personality influenced our entire early life. This was because she had been perpetuated by a very sizable portrait in oils. In this painting Aunt Ruth perched on one end of a shiny haircloth sofa, underneath a window through which marooncolored morning-glories peeped. She wore a pale-drab silk, traced with a tiny plaid pattern of darker drab,-pieces of it still survive in the log-cabin quilts my grandmother made, she clasped a stiff magenta rose in one small hand, and dangled a mustard-colored specimen of the sunbonnet family in the other. Her black-slippered feet rested lightly upon a "cricket," which position was distinctly favorable to the flaunting of some very long, very white pantalets. Obviously, pantalets had just come into fashion at that time; otherwise the artist would never have emphasized them so.

My name is Joe, and I had two sisters younger than I; one, Ann, who in her extreme youth was rather fat and stupid, and the other, Emma, who was, and always has been, a good sport. We three We three possessed still another sister, Ruth, named of course for the aunt in the painting; but as she was seven years older than I, she did n't count at all in my earliest recollections of the portrait.

It was when we were all very little indeed, before our reasoning faculties were more than rudimentary, that we three youngsters accepted those pantalets of Aunt Ruth's as one of the charming assets of this odd and entertaining world into which we had been born. In fact, we not only accepted Aunt Ruth, but we made a great companion of her on account of her sociable eyes. Those eyes were painted in such a way that they followed us all

about. As long as we could see Aunt Ruth, she was always gazing interestedly at us. Even if we jumped out at her suddenly, we never managed to surprise her; she never could be caught napping. Aunt Ruth's most fascinating trait, however, consisted in her ability to stare at all three of us at once when we stood far apart, in different corners of the large front hall where she hung. This uncanny gift of being able to watch many persons simultaneously, and without looking the least bit cross-eyed, endeared her to us unspeakably. And although I am years older now, and know better, still, in those days I often thought that I could discern a faint grin of approving delight from Aunt Ruth when I surreptitiously slid down the balustrade. Once, I swear, she laughed. That was on the disgraceful day when, not having heard the front door-bell I shot down the railing, and all but upset our richest relative, Aunt Ida Morse, who was in the act of paying her annual call. I not only saw Aunt Ruth laugh, but I heard a smothered giggle. And Emma always declared that she was not even in the house at the time, so it could n't have been she.

Our first disillusion about Aunt Ruth occurred when the Moseley children came with their mother to spend the day with us. Up to that time, as I have said, we had supposed that every one kept an Aunt Ruth with pantalets in the front hall. But, alas! when the mothers were both safely out in the garden, and we hastily took that Heaven-sent opportunity to invite the Moseleys to taste the delights of banister-coasting, they caught sight of Aunt Ruth. After that they could only stand and gaze at her in scarlet silence. At length they refused to remain in the same hall with our aunt, and as we took them up-stairs, they sobbed aloud at her indecency. Even when we were all safely ensconced in the attic, the Moseleys kept on being very haughty, and looked at us

as if we had purposely committed the most heinous of sins. Although we knew that we were in no way responsible for our aunt, nevertheless we felt unutterably disgraced. When the interminable day came to an end, and the Moseleys sought their own pure home, we revived. They were such goody-goody prigs! They had refused to join in several of our choicest games, such as throwing water at the postman. We told them that we liked the postman, and that we did n't want to get him wet, but that it was fun to see how near you could come without hitting him. Their indifference indicated that they were spoil-sports whose opinion was worthless.

It was when we gave our first real party, however, that the consensus of opinion among the fifty children present drove home the fact that Aunt Ruth's portrait was a family skeleton. The children were all dreadfully shocked at it, and, in consequence, snubbed us for weeks. They treated us worse than they did Maud Pearson, whose father had embezzled, and been sent to prison. Maud, with her papa in jail, was romantically interesting; we were merely low. It took us months to live down that party.

Much as we suffered from our social ostracism, we never dared ask the family to shut away the skeleton in the closet. It would have done no good. We had learned from experience that, outside our playroom, inanimate objects were to stay where we found them when we were born. Our only possible revenge, therefore, was to make the most horrible faces at our aunt every time we were forced by circumstances to pass through the front hall. After the party, we had almost exclusively used the back stairs.

For hundreds and hundreds of years, from the ages of six to twelve, we were steadily ashamed of our aunt. We could never be coerced into having another party. No, indeed, not with that disgrace in the hall! Emma, who, as I have mentioned, is a sport, one day took a bottle of liquid shoe-blacking and effaced the pantalets. For one whole day we knew perfect happiness; then the pantalets were carefully restored by a local art dealer, and his work was paid for out of Emma's bank. Besides that, Emma had to go without dessert for a month.

We lived on in shame, year in, year out, until one Sunday when our richest relative's son, Cousin Alonzo Morse, came to dine with us. Cousin Alonzo was a freshman at Yale, and was, as we thought, of a ripe old age. It was after dinner, when our dear, tottery little grandmother led him up in front of that portrait of Aunt Ruth, that we discovered that the same object can strike different people very, very differently. Our grandmother, with some big, clear tears running down her flushed cheeks, and with fond eyes on the awful aunt, said:

"This, Alonzo, is the picture of your dear, dead little aunty."

We, cowering in the background, expected to see Cousin Alonzo put on his hat and coat, and march dignifiedly out of our house forever. Instead of that, he sank weakly upon a sofa that stood opposite the portrait and burst into a loud fit of laughter. Terrified, we turned expectantly to grandmother. How on earth would she ever punish a big, old man like Alonzo?

"You ought to have respect enough for the dead not to laugh," said grandmother, whose feelings were awfully hurt.

"I just can't help it," roared Alonzo, rolling about the sofa in glee. "Look at those pantalets!"

Grandmother looked.

"They were very pretty," she said, “and I knitted and sewed on the edging myself."

And so, after all, it was she, not Alonzo, who left the hall in offended wrath. He pursued her with heartfelt apologies, but it was only when he coaxed her out in his new touring-car, and promised to drive her round the park at ten miles an hour, and to reduce the speed to six going downhill, and kept his word, that grandmother forgave him.

Our very old sister Ruth happened to be away visiting when Cousin Alonzo came and laughed at the portrait. When Ruth returned, she had somewhere absorbed the ancestor craze, which enthusiasm included Aunt Ruth. This was a decided jolt. Since the visit of the admirable Alonzo, we had decided simply to laugh at our aunt, and we had found on experiment that this scheme worked well on friends we took through the front hall. When we, laughing, pointed out the por