Paris; and within a few weeks it became
the chief topic of conversation at a thousand dinner tables. In a few
months I had seen the play acted by three different companies--all
admirable, scholarly productions, of which the most famous and most
"authorised" was by no means the best--and soon thereafter I came to
England, for a short visit, but with the determination to find time to
make the trip to Paris to see M. Coquelin as "Cyrano." I found
Englishmen--educated Englishmen, including not a few authors and
critics to whom I spoke--practically unaware of the existence of such a
play. Of those who had heard of it and read _critiques_, I met not one
who had read the work itself. Some time after, Sir Charles Wyndham
produced it in London and it was, I believe, not a success. To-day
_Cyrano de Bergerac_ (I am speaking of it not as an acting play but as
literature) is practically unknown even to educated Englishmen, except
such as make French literature their special study.

_Cyrano_ may or may not be on a level with any but the greatest of
Shakespeare's plays (it is evident from his other work that M. Rostand
is not a Shakespeare) but that it was an immeasurably finer thing than
ninety-nine per cent of the books of the year which English people were
reading that winter on the advice of English critics is beyond question.
The nation which was reading and discussing M. Rostand's work was
conspicuously better engaged than the nation which was reading and
discussing the English novels of the season.

Again when poor Vasili Verestschagin met his death so tragically off
Port Arthur, his name meant little or nothing to the great majority of
educated Englishmen, though there had been exhibitions of his work in
London--the same exhibitions as were made throughout the larger cities
of the United States. In America regret for him was wide-spread and
personal, for he stood for something definite in American eyes--rather
unfortunately, perhaps, in one way, because Verestschagin, too, had
painted those miserable sepoys being eternally blown from British guns.

The general English misapprehension of the present condition of art and
literature in America sometimes shows itself in unexpected places. I
have a great love for _Punch_. Since the time when the beautifying of
its front cover with gamboge and vermilion and emerald green constituted
the chief solace of wet days in the nursery, I doubt if, in the course
of forty years, I have miss