y 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. Coppee'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. Coppee probably thinks of ethics rather than aesthetics; 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
Moliere, 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 aesthetic 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 Merimee. 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."