sour, the author of _Carmen_ was a sentimentalist sheathed in irony. To
Gustave Flaubert the world was hideously ugly, and he wished it
strangely and splendidly beautiful, and he detested it the more because
of his impossible ideal. To Prosper Merimée the world was what it is,
to be taken and made the best of, every man keeping himself carefully
guarded. Like Merimée, M. Halévy is detached, but he is not
disenchanted. His work is more joyous than Merimée's, if not so vigorous
and compact, and his delight in it is less disguised. Even in the
Cardinal sketches there is nothing that leaves an acrid after-taste,
nothing corroding--as there is not seldom in the stronger and sterner
short stories of Maupassant.

More than Maupassant or Flaubert or Merimée, is M. Halévy a Parisian.
Whether or not the characters of his tale are dwellers in the capital,
whether or not the scene of his story is laid in the city by the Seine,
the point of view is always Parisian. The _Circus Charger_ did his duty
in the stately avenues of a noble country-place, and _Blacky_ performed
his task near a rustic water-fall; but the men who record their
intelligent actions are Parisians of the strictest sect. Even in the
patriotic pieces called forth by the war of 1870, in the _Insurgent_ and
in the _Chinese Ambassador_, it is the siege of Paris and the struggle
of the Communists which seem to the author most important. His style
even, his swift and limpid prose--the prose which somehow corresponds to
the best _vers de société_ in its brilliancy and buoyancy--is the style
of one who lives at the centre of things. Cardinal Newman once said that
while Livy and Tacitus and Terence and Seneca wrote Latin, Cicero wrote
Roman; so while M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet on the
other, may write French, M. Halévy writes Parisian.

BRANDER MATTHEWS.