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years of theatre-going and thirty years of dramatic criticism- quarante ans de théâtre et trente ans de feuilleton sur le corps." A critic of such prolonged and vast experience as M. Sarcey is without his mate in the history of dramatic art.

XII-THE NEWSPAPER PRESS.

To give an adequate account of the Parisian newspaper press would require much space, so many are the details of conception and organization which we should need to explain. For our present purpose it will suffice to consider the newspapers in their relation to literary Paris. In a word, we may say that the newspapers are the bankers of the literary men. The feuilleton and the chronique of the Parisian daily press enable the successful literary man in Paris to gain more notoriety, more public attention, and, on the whole, more money than his fellows in any other capital of the world.

The press has changed greatly within the past thirty years. The few dis

creet and doctrinaire papers of the second empire, impoverished by the censorship, both from the point of view of the publication of news and of the expression of opinion, have gradually been replaced by the numerous news sheets of la presse à informations, where the telegram, the reporter, and the interviewer hold the chief place. Nevertheless, the French reader does not take kindly to the bare laconism of the telegram, to the businesslike narrative of the Anglo-Saxon reporter, or to the interview presented without a certain literary elegance. There is an innate artistic sentiment in the Frenchman which twenty years of brutal democracy and materialism have scarcely impaired, and which no editor can afford to neglect. The traditions of the French press are literary; its most ancient and its most recent organs, Le Journal des Débats, Le Temps, Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, and L'Echo de Paris, are at the same time the most literary.

The features of the Parisian press which first strike the Anglo-Saxon observer are the importance attached to the feuilleton, the prominence of the topical essay called the chronique, and finally the signature of the articles, even those of the reporters and interviewers. Conscious personality attains prodigious developments

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at once to create a demand for his work and increase its market value-all this greatly to the writer's advantage, and to the publisher's also, for the regular collaboration of well-known writers of marked personality and literary eminence is an element of attraction in a newspaper or periodical. M. Sarcey's dramatic criticism in the Sunday issue of Le Temps is one of the strongest and most popular features of the paper, and worth the 20,000 francs a year that the author is paid for it. The article headed "La Vie Littéraire," by M. Anatole France, is another feature of Le Temps. In the Journal des Débats the dramatic feuilleton of M. Jules Lemaître, without having the authority of M. Sarcey's ponderated com

ALBERT WOLF.

mon-sense prose, has the greater charm of brilliancy, fresh wit, and a marvellous abundance of ideas, with which the writer plays and juggles with incomparable virtuosité. Le Figaro until recently boasted the veteran chroniqueur M. Albert Wolf, the ugliest man in Paris, a German, native of Cologne, who was nevertheless for years a personification of Parisian wit and a power in the press. Le Figaro's other chroniqueurs are M. Émile Bergerat ("Caliban "), M. Paul Desjardins, who is also the apostle of neo-Christianity in the Journal des Débats, M. Jules Lemaître, M. Robert de Bonnières, M. Henri Fouquier, whose prose may be found in half a dozen other Parisian papers, M. Octave Mirbeau, and a dozen other brilliant writers who are climbing up the wall of the Garden of Fame with more or less success. In the other papers we should have to cite often the same names, and many others to boot, the list of Parisian journalists being equivalent almost to the list of Parisian literary men. For what French writer is not or has not been a journalist, an essayist of the press, a chroniqueur? Is not the list headed by Renan and Taine? And is not the influence of Renan pre

dominant in the Parisian newspapers, and are not the doctrines of Renanism those of the most eminent chroniqueurs? A man like M. Henri Fouquier, with his brilliant, superficial, and all-embracing inattentiveness, can scarcely be expected to choose a direction and work persistently with a moral purpose and for the public good. M. Francis Magnard, director of Le Figaro, will not choose a direction either, but remains obstinately Renanist and dilettante. Epicurean,

egotist, sceptic to the backbone, familiar with all the disillusionment and ferocious irony of Parisian journalistic and public life, M. Magnard has invented a derivative form of Renanism, called Je-m'en-fichisme, whose sterilizing, desperate, and yet apparently amusing doctrines he professes almost daily in the terse and mordant political bulletin of Le Figaro.

Finally, as regards the feuilleton, its presence, we may say, is necessary in a newspaper in order to secure the patronage of the women. That no French newspaper can dispense with this patronage is proved by the fact that none dispense with the feuilleton novel, while in many cases the feuilleton is the chief element of success. Le Petit Journal, for instance, which prints a million copies a day and circulates all over France, owes half its success to the two sensational and sentimental feuilletons which form one-fourth of its entire reading matter. The commencement of a new feuilleton by one of the favorite modern successors of Dumas, Ponson du Terrail, and Paul Féval will cause, from one week to another, an increase of from 30,000 to 100,000 copies in the circulation of this paper. As for the great Parisian journals, Le Figaro, L'Écho de Paris, Le Temps, Le Gil Blas, their circulation is not sensibly affected by the publication of a novel; but as they cannot dispense with the feuilleton, they make a point of securing the best literature of the day.

The review or magazine does not flourish in France. The only great French review is the famous Revue des Deux Mondes. The great family magazine, whether illustrated or not, has yet to be created. On the other hand, penny weekly publications with illustrations abound.