"SOME writers have intentionally imparted to their prose the flow of verse, as if one should modulate his walk to a dancing step, and have produced a vicious kind in literature, which is as different as possible from the poem in prose,' as the French have cultivated it." In such a happy way Mr. Howells introduces the volume under notice.

right, 1890, by Harper & Brothers.

French, above all lanFrom "Pastels in Prose."-Copy- guages, adapts itself to subtleties of form. As a vehicle for the interpretation of emotions, it has a tone quality, just as certain musical instruments give out peculiar sounds. That Saxon brevity, which stamps a sentence as does the minting press a coin, carries with it to ears philologically sensitive the slight click of the machine. French flows freely, and may be nervous, or the opposite, languid, at the will of the writer. It has a special adaptiveness to passing humors. It can hiss, as when Hugo made it take a serpent's form and bury its fangs, as in "Les Châtiments," or be as gentle as a dove, as when Chénier wrote his verses. It is in its prose that it is so wonderfully malleable. What characterizes the masters of this modern French prose is what Mr. Howells calls their "beautiful reticence." Freed from the trammels of verse, French writers have been put, then, "on their honor, as it were," and are bound" to brevity and simplicity." To be laconic is not to be wanting in delicacy. An idea is expressed, but, the theme once presented, the perfect French writer never gives variations on it. Literature to him, to be artistic, is not piano-playing. Mr. Howells presents this method perfectly when he writes of Heine: "He fashions his pretty fancy in his lovely inspiration, sets it well on the ground, poises it, and goes and leaves it."

"Pastels" is a neat title for this dainty volume. The colored chalks, with all their bloom From "Pastels in Prose."--Copyright, 1890, and color, might be shaken off the paper, but for nicety in securing the tracings. From Louis Bertrand, from Leclercq, Theodore de Banville, from Daudet, Judith Gautier, Huysman, Mikhaël, Quillard, Baudelaire, Mallarmé,

by Harper & Brothers.

Hennequin de Guérin, Paul Masy, Chainaye, Catulle Mendès, Bonin, and de Régnier, short extracts have been taken, and the selection has been most careful. The difficulty in picking and culling must have been very rigorous. Too great uniformity would have rendered such matter monotonous; then, again, no susceptibilities were to be shaken. If a Frenchman wants to be delicate his art is supreme. The sweetest, purest idyls of peasant life are those that flow from the same hand that wrote "Indiana."

You cannot take "Pastels in Prose" and read it appreciatively by beginning at page I and running through it to the finis. It has to be sipped with little tastings. Then the bouquet of it comes out.

sheets,

As to the make-up of this volume, it is black and silver as to binding, with fair white paper and choice typography. In the day of jerry books, with flabby sloppy make-ups and flash engravings, "Pastels in Prose" is indicative of the coming of a better period of taste. The illustrations

by Mr. Henry W. From "Pastels in Prose."--Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers. McVickar are all charming and associate themselves to the text They have lightness of touch, yet help to hold the lines, and then again evince a high poetical feeling. It is not necessary to show taste and fancy by the square foot. It can be made evident to a discriminating artist within the limits of a square inch. (Harper. $1.25.)-N. Y. Times.

The Prose Poem.

I Do not know whether Tourguénief, in his Prose Poems, which sound depths and reach heights untouched by the form before or since, received or gave an impulse in this irregular species of composition; perhaps he did both; but I am sure that the reader of the exquisite pieces in this book will be sensible of qualities and cognizant of traits common to them all, which they have in common with the kindred work of that very great artist. It seems to me that first of everything the reader will notice the beautiful reticence which characterizes them, as if the very freedom which the poets had found in their emancipation from the artificial trammels of verse had put them on their honor, as it were, and bound

them to brevity, to simplicity; as if they felt the responsibility they were under to be even more laconic, more delicate, more refined than they might have been in openly confessing the laws of prosody. What struck me most was that apparently none of them had abused his opportunity to saddle his reader with a moral. He had expressed his idea, his emotion, and then left it to take its chance, in a way very uncommon in English verse, at least, and equalled only, so far as I know, in some of the subtile felicities of Heinrich Heine. One would have thought it must fall out

A RELIC OF ABOUT the middle of the Rue Saint-Denis, and near the corner of the Rue du Petit-Lion, there stood, not very long ago, one of those precious houses which enable historians to reconstruct by analogy the Paris of former times. The frowning walls of this shabby building seemed to have been originally decorated by hieroglyphics. What other name could a passing observer give to the X's and the Y's traced upon them by the transversal or diagonal pieces of wood which showed under the stucco through a number of little parallel cracks? Evidently, the jar of each passing carriage shook the old joists in their plaster coatings. The venerable building was covered with a triangular roof, a shape of which no specimen will exist much longer in Paris. This roof, twisted out of line by the inclemencies of Parisian weather, overhung the street by about three feet, as much to protect the door-steps from the rain as to shelter the wall of the garret and its frameless window; for the upper story was built of planks, nailed one above the other like slates, so as not to overweight the construction beneath it.

On a rainy morning in the month of March, a young man carefully wrapped in a cloak was standing beneath the awning of a shop directly opposite to the old building, which he examined with the enthusiasm of an archæologist; for, in truth, this relic of the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century presented more than one problem to the mind of an intelligent observer. Each story had its own peculiarity; on the first were four long, narrow windows very close to each other, with wooden squares in place of glass panes to the lower sash, so as to give the uncertain light by which a clever shopkeeper can make his goods match any color desired by a customer.

The young man seemed to disdain this important part of the house; in fact, his eyes had not even rested on it. The windows of the second floor, the raised outer blinds of which gave to sight through large panes of Bohemian glass small muslin curtains of a reddish tinge, seemed also not to interest him. His attention centred

in just the other way; that the poet, having all the liberties of prose in his right, could not fail to explain and expound himself, and to make the application. But no; he fashions his pretty fancy on his lovely inspiration; sets it well on the ground, poises it, goes and leaves it. The thing cannot have been easy to learn, and it must always be most difficult to do, for it implies the most cour ageous faith in art, the finest respect for others, the wisest self-denial. The very life of the form is its aerial delicacy. (Harper. $1.25.) W. D Howells in “Pastels in Prose."

OLD PARIS.

on the third story-on certain humble windows, the wooden frames of which deserved a place in the Conservatory of Arts and Manufactures as specimens of the earliest efforts of French joinery. These windows had little panes of so green a glass that had he not possessed an excellent pair of eyes the young man could not have seen the bluechecked curtains which hid the mysteries of the room from the gaze of the profane. Occasionally the watcher, as if tired of his abortive watch, or annoyed by the silence in which the house was buried, dropped his eyes to the lower regions. An involuntary smile would then flicker on his lips as he glanced at the shop, where, indeed, were certain things that were laughable enough.

A formidable beam of wood, resting horizontally on four pillars which appeared to bend under the weight of the decrepit house, had received as many and diverse coats of paint as the cheek of an old duchess. At the middle of this large beam, slightly carved, was an antique picture representing a cat playing ball. It was this work of art which made the young man smile; and it must be owned that not the cleverest of modern painters could have invented a more comical design. The animal held in one of its fore paws a racket as big as itself, and stood up on its hind paws to aim at an enormous ball which a gentleman in a brocaded coat was tossing to it. Design, colors, and accessories were all treated in a way to inspire a belief that the artist meant to make fun of both merchant and customers. Time, by altering the crude colors, had made the picture still more grotesque through certain bewildering changes, which could not fail to trouble a conscientious observer. For instance, the ringed tail of the cat was cut apart in such a way that the end might be taken for an onlooker, so thick, long, and well covered were the tails of the cats of our ancestors. To the right of the picture, on a blue ground, which imperfectly concealed the rotten wood, could be read the name "Guillaume," and to the left the words "Successor to the Sieur Chevrel." (Roberts. $1.50.)-From Balzac's “Fame and Sorrow."

REALISM IN ART.

CONCURRENTLY with the new movement of Science, following Nature's invitation to her intimacies, there has been in all the fields of Art a revolt against Academic traditions-a protest against conventionalism, allegorical conceits, and loose romanticism. It is a plea for Nature and for the ideal worth of all her embodiments, however grotesque or faultful - thus absolving the ideal from formal perfectness, and holding it only to the justification of its own children. Yet, in its highest demand, this Realism would insist upon the spiritual genesis of all artistic representations-upon their faithfulness to an everlasting type, upon their sincerity and spontaneity, and upon their vital sympathy and humor, so that they shall, like all of Nature's growths, have the vital warmth of the sunshine and the freshness of the dew. While holding to reality, these repřesentations transcend not only all mental anticipation, but the real suggestion, having, like the unfoldings of Nature, aspiration, culmination, and, as a final issue, surprises.

Art is preeminently an expression of human nature, yet, though keeping to the type, it transcends and contradicts human experience, sug. gesting in its rhythmic harmonies those of the divine kingdom, so that Imagination is indeed the true sister of Faith. Its free movement following a mysterious vital chemistry, and repudiating conscious regulation, takes us out of ourselves, as we have made ourselves, and within the confines of our heavenly realm. That is not, therefore, a genuine realism which denies to Imagination it's realm of the air and the freedom of its

Madge Rendal

1890, by Little, Brown & Co.)

LOVE-MAKING ON THE STAGE. CONSIDER, too, what love-making on the stage really means. A young girl comes into a theatre to play ingénue parts. She stands in the wing ready to be called upon the stage, and she sees a man and a woman making love. The man says, "Dearest, fly with me." The woman says, "I dare not." The man says, We will go at once. Come." The first time such words as those fall on the ears of a young girl unaccustomed to them, they might, if said with fervor and passion, mean something; but as a rule something of this sort occurs. As soon as the words, "Dearest, fly with me," are uttered, they are interrupted by,

"when

"No, no, no!" from the stage-manager; you say that, you stand at the back of the chair, you lean over Miss Snooks's back; she waves her hand against you. Now, try it."

This is gone over twenty times, until at last the idea of "Fly with me," as understood by the young ingénue, must be of a most appalling kind. The gentleman has had his right arm, his left arm, his right leg, his left leg, his back, his chest, both his hands, his head-all talked over. He has tried it in a high voice, he has tried it in a low voice, he has tried it in a thin voice, he has tried it in a heavy voice, until there is no sense left of what" Fly with me" might under other circumstances mean. All the romance of love-making is gone. Therefore, what effect can it have? In love, is it not the fact that some of the charm lies in treating of an unknown land? (Little, B. $1; pap., 50 c.) - From Mrs. Kendal's "Dramatic Opinions."

from this misfortune. He was a married man, and Providence had been very gracious, very good to him; he had been blessed with eleven children, and they were all growing up well and strong.

Our friend was very much out of sorts one evening when we called on him. It was holiday time, and wet weather. He had been at home al day, and so had all the children. He was telling his wife, when we entered the room, that if the holidays were to last much longer and those twins did not hurry up and get their teeth quickly, he should have to go away and join the County Council. He could not stand the racket.

a third theatre. They were all children there. It was somebody or other's Children's Company performing an opera, or pantomime, or something of that sort.

He also said that he would go out with us and get away from it for a bit, or he should go mad. He proposed a theatre, and we accordingly made our way towards the Strand. Our friend, in closing the door behind him, said he could not tell us what a relief it was to get away from those children. He said he loved children very much indeed, but that it was a mistake to have too much of anything, however much you liked it, and that he had come to the conclusion that twenty-two hours a day of them was enough for any one.

Our friend said he would not venture in another theatre. He said he had heard there were places called music halls, and he begged us to take him to one of these, and not to tell his wife.

He said he did not want to see another child or hear another child until he got home. He wanted to forget that there were such things as children in the world.

We inquired of a policeman and found that there really were such places, and we took him into one.

The first thing we saw were two little boys doing tricks on a horizontal bar.

We got up to the Strand and dropped into the first theatre we came to. The curtain was up, and on the stage was a small child standing in its nightshirt and screaming for its mother.

Our friend looked, said one word, and bolted, and we followed.

Our friend was about to repeat his customary programme of flying and cursing, but we restrained him. We assured him that he really would see a grown-up person if he waited a bit, so he sat out the boys and also their little sister on a bicycle, and waited for the next item. It turned out to be an infant phenomenon who sang and danced in fourteen different costumes, and we once more fled.

We went a little further, and dropped into another theatre. There, there were two children on the stage. Some grown-up people were standing round them listening, in respectful attitudes, while the children talked. They appeared to be lecturing about something.