e as jealous of their retirement as was the brave
old man Poquelin; and to have it invaded by a young American who not
only threw their pictures upon his canvas, but standing behind it,
reproduced their eccentricities of speech for applauding Northern
audiences, was a crime unforgivable in their moral code.

Added to this, Mr. Cable stands accused of giving the impression that
the Louisiana Creole is a person of African taint; but are there not
many refutations of this charge in the internal evidence of his work? As
for instance where in 'The Grandissimes' he writes, "His whole
appearance was a dazzling contradiction of the notion that a Creole is a
person of mixed blood"; and again when he alludes to "the slave
dialect," is the implication not unequivocal that this differed from the
speech of the drawing-room? It is true that he found many of his studies
in the Quadroon population, who spoke a patois that was partly French;
but such was the "slave dialect" of the man of color who came into his
English through a French strain, or perhaps only through a generation of
close French environment.

A civilization that is as protective in its conservatism as are the
ten-foot walls of brick with which its people surround their luxurious
dwellings may be counted on to resent portrayal at short range, even
though it were unequivocally eulogistic. That Mr. Cable is a most
conscientious artist, and that he has been absolutely true to the letter
as he saw it, there can be no question; but whether his technical
excellences are always broadly representative or not is not so certain.
That the writer who has so amply proven his own joy in the wealth of his
material, should have been beguiled by its picturesqueness into a
partisanship for the class making a special appeal, is not surprising.
But truth in art is largely a matter of selection; and if Mr. Cable has
sinned in the gleaning, it was undoubtedly because of visual limitation,
rather than a conscious discrimination.

In 'The Grandissimes,' his most ambitious work, we have an important
contribution to representative literature. In the pleasant guise of his
fascinating fiction he has essayed the history of a civilization, and in
many respects the result is a great book. That such a work should attain
its highest merit in impartial truth when taken as a whole, goes without
saying.

The dramatic story of Bras Coupe is true as belonging to the time and
the situation. So is that of