Une Vie

Excerpt from Une Vie

IT is so embarrassing to speak of the writers of one country to the readers of another that I sometimes won der at the complacency With which the delicate task is entered upon. These are cases in which the difficult art of criticism becomes doubly difficult, inasmuch as they compel the critic to forfeit What I may call his natural advantages. The first of these natural advantages is that those Who read him shall help him by taking a great many things for granted; shall allow him his general point of view and his terms-terms Which he is not obliged to define. The relation of the American reader to the French writer, for instance, is, on the contrary, so indirect that it gives him who proposes to mediate between them a great deal more to do. Here he has in a manner to dehne his terms and establish his point of view.