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the bodily charm of a real woman. youth could understand the varying mind of Beatrice, and would be well able to represent it. In the creation of Lady Macbeth, Shakspere avoided, one might say sedulously avoided, showing her mastery over her husband. Our good friends the professors will tell me that the sway she exercised is exclusively of the intellect. Yes, but why? Because Shakspere knew that the part would be played by a young man. Katharine, in "The Taming of the Shrew," could very well be played by a man; it is a simple part, a woman in a rage. Portia interests us only when she disguises herself as a barrister. In "Twelfth Night" Shakspere again seeks to flee from the feminine. Viola disguises herself as a boy to be with the Duke she loves, and in our own time the part has been played by a young man. Painters and musicians have insisted so strongly upon Juliet's femininity that I dare not say anything about it; but even so, if we apply ourselves to the text, we cannot fail to see that Shakspere never tries to differentiate between Romeo's love for Juliet and Juliet's love for Romeo. Desdemona is vaguer still, a little packet of submissiveness, nothing more; and yet to Desdemona an eminent professor devoted several pages of a book called "The Women of Shakspere," pursuing this lovely phantomperhaps one of the loveliest in the world of letters-and other sweet phantoms hardly less lovely, adorning them with subtleties of which they are innocent and which their creator would not accept.

Professor Dowden never grasped the fact that if Shakspere had elaborated his women, his work would be less perfect; that a work of art cannot be all peaks, that it must have plains and vales. Of all the books upon Shakspere this is perhaps the one I most deplore, for in order to penetrate the poet's mind and his epoch, it is essential to realize that Shakspere's women are of wholly secondary interest, and that for reasons both historical and practical, and perhaps, too, a matter of temperament. But stay! To make that admission would be to admit that Shakspere's art was not complete and perfect. Neither Phidias nor Michelangelo would satisfy some critics; these enthusiasts demand an artist combining the genius of both. The product would be a monster

from which we would turn away horrified, and I should turn in horror from the Shakspere that is the creation of English criticism for the last twenty-five years. I should be glad to rescue Shakspere from the booby empyrean where they mean to perch him. He is so interesting as an Englishman who lived at the end of the sixteenth century that it is a pity to hoist him into those lonely heights. The man has genius enough for his worshipers to have no need to turn him into a god knowing all the past and directing a piercing eye upon the future, divining even the soul of woman, which did not come into being till fifty years later, in the middle of the seventeenth century, and then not in literature, but in painting.

In my judgment it was Rembrandt who was the first to conceive that woman had an individual existence, that, like man, she thought, dreamed, asked herself if life was a great misfortune only death could appease, or if it was a delicious stroll through the world, for which, according to Renan, we must be grateful to the Lord. Woman is seen for the first time in Rembrandt. The woman washing her feet in the Louvre is a woman and not an odalisque. I cannot now recall the name of the picture, but remember very distinctly that her sadness is a woman's sadness. And the portrait of Rembrandt's wife in the Salle Carrée is a still more striking example. How easily we read her soul in her eyes! She acknowledges her weakness and her dependence; and almost unconsciously she knows that she is the satellite of a man of genius. If Rembrandt were to return to earth (luckily we cannot bring back the departed on so slight a pretext; but if he were to return for serious reasons), and were to be shown the lines I have just written, I think he would say, "Well, the gentleman may possibly be right, but it never entered my head." If it had entered Rembrandt's head, he would not have had so clairvoyant a perception of the feminine soul. He painted it unconsciously, and it is quite likely that none of his contemporaries saw what haunts the canvases. That which we call truth dwells not in things themselves, but in the eyes that behold it. Yet it is rare for one man to have a vision without some other having the same vision as well, and it appears that at the period

genius has safeguarded his individuality to the hour of his dying. The lyrical muse of Shakspere, who hid from Falstaff, came forth at the moment when the gross man was about to die and set him talking of flowers and fields; but even so, until his last breath Falstaff remains Falstaff. Hamlet is the center of one play; Falstaff shows himself in several. To lose him would be an irreparable misfortune. If we had to choose between them, to hesitate, were it only for an instant, would be unforgivable.

After singing mountain-peaks and forests, Wagner composed the "Meistersingers" because he must sing the hearth as well. It seems to me that Shakspere must have felt the necessity of describing intellect after describing that mass of materialism. What a poet he must have been to describe that mountain of jolly flesh! In the scenes of extravagant comedy we could not do without the poet for a single minute; he must be in every word, and when the speech is gross, it must be Shakspere's or Aristophanes's. It took more genius to write the Grave-digger's scene in "Hamlet" than the famous "To be or not to be." Never was Shakspere so great as when he depicted comic characters, such as Touchstone, the mountebank who followed the lovers in the Forest of Arden. I don't know if any of the charm of the scene between Touchstone and the shepherds transpires in the French translation. I hope so, but I can think of no poet who could turn it into French except it might be Banville. The whimsy of the scene would have captivated the whimsical mind of your poet, and the clown's marriage with the dreadful peasant Audrey would have exalted him beyond himself, for he would have understood at once that Touchstone realizes how repulsive Audrey is, but finds it pleases his ironic humor to marry her. After exhausting irony in words, he seeks it now in life, and the poor ninny follows him, lured by the jingle of his belled cap. We recall "Twelfth Night," in which the ass Malvolio dons a ridiculous rig to please the women, and in which the three cronies-Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek, and the clownquestion one another. In these comedies we have hardly got away from folk, and Banville would have been the one man to translate them, for he was the only poet

among you who dared to set logic packing, and his Muse would have skipped about the raging Katharine and frolicked in seventeenth-century cadences round Falstaff in his courtships of the Merry Wives.

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You will tell me that there is nothing of all this in Balzac. I do not agree; there are more invention and more fancy in the Comédie Humaine than in any other writer. Did he not in the "Contes drôlatiques" make the sixteenth tury live again in its spirit and its speech? And is he not almost the only Frenchman who has known how to write boniment, that splendid word impossible to render in English except by the miserable word "patter"? But what is boniment? The dictionary tells us that it is the charlatanesque advertisement the mountebank makes in front of his booth; well, you must get the true signification of the word. Boniment is original inspiration. Possessed of words, the mountebank sloughs his every-day reality, and in his ecstasy he becomes the brother, or at least first cousin, to the prophet and the poet. All three speak without knowing what they are saying, but the man of talent knows it very well. of the thought, and drags it into the forest glades, forcing it to turn somersaults on the grass and to dizzy leapings toward the stars. Prophet, mountebank, or poet, the word is thy guide, and thou dost rejoice in the tumult of words and images without knowing how or whence they come. The rest is reason, logic, talent. Patter is the crown, the cloak, the scrip, the staff of the olden masters; the rouge, the wig, the gold-topped cane of the masters of to-day.

The word becomes the master

Perhaps there is more patter in English literature than in French. Good heavens! what am I saying? Rabelais, the lord of patter, lived a century before Shakspere. But among French modern writers I do not remember even one-yes, Victor Hugo. So great a master of the language could not but have written some wonderful patter.

I should have liked to open one of Balzac's tales and quote certain passages, but points of art are not decided with texts; art appeals to our instinct rather than to our reason. Our feeling changes from day to day and depends upon circumstances.

The passages of Balzac that once brought Shakspere to my mind might

seem different if I read them aloud today. Yet I should not like to leave it at a simple affirmation, and you would think it a poor jest if I counseled you to shut yourselves up in your homes to read Shakspere and Balzac. There are fifty volumes in the Comédie Humaine; Shakspere left thirty-seven plays behind him; years. upon years would roll away, and you would still be looking for the texts I lit upon by chance and long ago. I shall make a clean confession. One night I was reading Shakspere, and a scene between carters and grooms so delighted me that for days I could think of nothing but the beauty of the dialogue, that speech both erudite and of the common people. At the end of the week, by one of the chances of literature, I opened "César Birotteau" at the page where the perfumer goes to the market to buy nuts to make his celebrated oil. Instead of being satisfied with relating, like many another writer, how after bargaining he decided to buy some thousands of francs' worth of nuts, Balzac describes the whole scene with the nutseller. Note that the nut-seller is not a character in the story; we never see her again. It was, therefore, simply and solely for the pleasure of talk that Balzac made her talk; and how often does Shakspere make his grooms and carters talk for the same excellent reason! A few pages farther on Balzac brings his reader to call on the illustrious Gaudissart, the wonderful commercial traveler, and makes him utter all his craft in a dreadful, charming jargon. It is not shorthand, but a literary reconstruction penetrated by Balzac's mind.

All of you know that Shakspere wrote a great deal in prose, and that his prose is as beautiful as his verse. His verse is rarely rhymed, and he passes easily from prose to verse, and from verse to prose. In writing verse he is as masterly as Balzac was feeble. In his study on the great story-teller, Gautier picks out a verse extraordinary beyond belief, for within its twelve syllables Balzac has managed to commit three errors in prosody. In "Les illusions perdues" Balzac gives Lucien de Rubémpré three sonnets written in widely different styles. "The Tulip" is "The Tulip" is

Gautier, "The Daisy" is Mme. de Girardin; I don't think it is known who wrote the third. He had perhaps the least feeling of anybody in the world for the beauty of verse, and as he lived at a time when everybody loved poetry except himself, it is quite likely that his hatred-for he cannot but have hated verse, else he never would have drawn Canalis-has helped considerably to create the legend that Balzac could not write French, for it takes very little to set a legend going. Balzac wrote with the greatest abundance, he wrote with the greatest ease; in forty nights he wrote "La cousine Bette" with his own hand. His style is sometimes loose, sometimes even incorrect. So was Shakspere's. To be incorrect is always regrettable, but it does not prove that an author is not a man of letters of the true stock. Worse than incorrectness is strain; the moment the critic perceives that the writer is straining after effect he is nearly always right in coming to the conclusion that the book was not written by a great writer.

Once upon a time I imagined that talent consisted in the quest of the rare epithet, but I think so no longer; now I know whither that path leads. Shall I give you an example? In the opening chapters of "Salâmmbo," Flaubert makes desperate efforts to find phrases for the sounds of the different tongues heard among the mercenaries. He says one "heard side by side with the heavy Dorian patois Celtic syllables, rattling like warchariots, and Ionian terminations clashed upon desert consonants, harsh as the cries of jackals." No longer can I subscribe to his moonlight, which in the great lovescene in "Madame Bovary" mirrors itself in the river, at first like a candelabra and then like a serpent with silver scales. But it seems to me that I am wandering away from my theme. The pangs of Flaubert as he wrote would make the theme for another lecture. I hope some one will write it soon; it will give me a great deal of pleasure to hear it. Mine upon Balzac and Shakspere is at an end; but before we part, I should like to thank you for the very indulgent way you have listened to a barbarian.