thoughts, like Emerson,--this it is to pursue literature as an art.

There is apparently something in the Anglo-Saxon mind which causes a
slight shrinking from art as such, perhaps associating it with deception
or frivolity,--which tolerates it, and, strange to say, even produces it
in verse, but really shrinks from it in prose. Across the water, this
tendency seems to increase. Just as an Englishman is ashamed to speak
well, and pooh-poohs all oratory, so he is growing ashamed even to write
well, at least in anything beyond a newspaper; and we on this side have
emancipated our tongues more than our pens. What stands between
Americans and good writing is usually want of culture; we write as well
as we know how, while in England the obstacle seems to be merely a
boorish whim. The style of English books and magazines is growing far
less careful than ours,--less finished, less harmonious, more slipshod,
more slangy. What second-rate American writer would see any wit in
describing himself, like Dean Alford in his recent book on language, as
"an old party in a shovel"? These bad examples are to be regretted; for
doubtless ten times as many original works are annually published in
England as in America, and we have an hereditary right to seek from that
nation those models of culture for which we must now turn to France.

In a late English magazine, there is an elaborate attempt to prove the
inferiority in manliness of the French mind as compared with the
English. "Frenchmen are less manly, and Frenchwomen less womanly, than
English men and women." And one of the illustrations seriously offered
is this: "In literature they think much of the method, style, and what
they themselves call the art of making a book."

The charge is true. In France alone among living nations is literature
habitually pursued as an art; and, in consequence of this, despite the
seeds of all decay which imperialism sows, French prose-writing has no
rival in contemporary literature. We cannot fully recognize this fact
through translations, because only the most sensational French books
appear to be translated. But as French painters and actors now
habitually surpass all others even in what are claimed as the English
qualities,--simplicity and truth,--so do French prose-writers excel. To
be set against the brutality of Carlyle and the shrill screams of
Ruskin, there is to be seen across the Channel the extraordinary fact of
an actual organization of good