Independently of literary merit, foreign literatures are sometimes called upon to supply an element of human interest that is wanting in the home productions. The French are aware that Russian novels are not so well constructed as their own, yet there is a poignancy, a profundity of feeling, and a strength of primitive barbaric nature in the Russian novel that are wanting in the French, and this has given the foreign novelist a great success even through translations. The desire for _more nature_ always brings on a reaction against any conventionalism, and the foreigner who brings more nature has his assured success. A modern English conventionalism, quite unknown to our forefathers, forbids the complete portraiture of men and women in fiction. This has created a desire to see another side of life, and the French novelist supplies the want. The English want immoral literature and buy French novels; the French want moral literature and buy English novels--in translations. It would be better, perhaps, to have for both countries a kind of fiction that should be simply truthful, rather than the English novel that makes life better than it is and the French that makes it worse. [Sidenote: Painting not Cosmopolitan.] [Sidenote: French Resistance to English Art.] [Sidenote: French Estimates of English Painters.] [Sidenote: M. Chesneau.] It has been erroneously affirmed that painting is cosmopolitan because the fame of certain artists is universal. That of others is purely national. There may be national elements in painting repulsive to other national elements in the mind of a foreigner. If the reader could have before him all the French criticisms of English art that I have read, or all the French allusions to it, nothing would strike him so much in them as the attitude of stubborn resistance in the French mind to English artistic influences. Such notices bristle all over with antagonism. It is not simply that the French usually consider the English bad artists, they resent the attempt of England to enter the domain of art as if it were an unwarrantable intrusion, or a ridiculous attempt to do something for which Englishmen were never qualified by nature. As _Punch_ looks upon a Frenchman trying to play cricket or venturing on horseback after English foxhounds, even so the French critic looks upon the misguided Englishman who attempts to paint a picture or carve a statue. In a volume of French art criticism on my table I find two or three allusions to English painters, to Reynolds, “who imitated everybody,” and to Turner, “the copyist of Claude.” The latest French critic of London says that in the National Gallery, with the exception of some portraits by Gainsborough and some dogs by Landseer, there are no English pictures to detain a visitor. No French Government has ever yet dared to purchase an English picture for one of the French galleries. M. Chesneau says that a French collector would