In Daudet’s _Contes du Lundi_ I usually begin with the words: _Cette nuit le mistral était en colère_. What a _charmeur_ was Daudet! Vigorous, animated, lovable, and brilliant. The light and power of divine creative energy touches me, makes me clean, whole. Art like his has the life-giving power of God. The weak, the false, the broken, fade beside it, disappear. Then I go on to the description of the boats on the sunny Loire in Spring in _Le Pape est Morte_, the morning he ran away from school, and told his mother a lie about the Pope’s being dead, to escape a thrashing. I have always been glad he ran away! Next, Flaubert’s _L’Education Sentimentale_. The opening lines of short stories by Maupassant, where words have the fine, evocative precision of etching, with that _beauty beyond_ no one can name: “Down there across the bay, that is Corsica you see fading away into the mist.” Maupassant’s story of love in the Eighteenth Century, that eloquent piece of unmoral scorn. I read Chateaubriand, whom Prince Metternich declared was in the habit of saying foolish things in noble prose. Passages from de Guerin, the one beginning. _My old age regrets the rivers._ Loti’s descriptions of the Orient. Passages from the monumental Balzac, who, by the way, was not made for the ear, but for the mind. Sentences of André Gide, and the essays of Nicolas Ségur, the verses of Verlaine which I love: _Rimbaud mort, Mon grand, peché radieux._ Certain frail, pitiful phrases of forgotten love, from Mme. de Sévigné, dead long ago, but whose heart still beats. Mme. de Stael, whom Napoleon hated, never achieved the supreme phrase. She was logical, clear cut, sure, a problem in geometry. And plaintive, poignant Villon. Some of Manuel Galvez’ descriptions of the Argentine, in his novels about South America which are so fine, and Coelho Netto’s word-paintings of Brazil, and the fabulously luxurious life led on vast estates there. The greatness of art of a race, is dependent upon the amount of joy, sweetness, heat stored in its heart by happiness. It can give only what is there. The joy of the ringing, triumphant clarions of the Roman legions, and the passion of Christ, echo in grand creative souls of France. Perhaps great editors, competent critics, had something to do with making word-artists of France. If we have not had great writers in our country, neither have we great editors, at this moment, to sponsor them, great, judging from the _power of perceiving_, (the artist in the editor), not considering regularity of incoming dollars. Here an editor seldom passes judgment upon the thing _per se_. There must be an appetizer, so to speak, to lure him. More or less violent usually. And then there are his personal feelings toward the writer. The writing, itself, counts little.