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when the host expressed the hope that she had not been pained by the criticism: ‘Why should I be pained?
I have not the honor to be among the intimate friends of M. de Voltaire.’
Even at this day the French journalists are quite bewildered by the Pall Mall Gazette's lists of English immortals; and ask who Tennyson is, and what plays Ruskin has written.
Those who happened, like myself, to be in Paris during the Exposition of 1878 remember well the astonishment produced in the French mind by the discovery that any pictures were painted in England; and the French Millet was at that time almost as little known in London as was his almost namesake, the English Millais, in Paris.
If a foreign nation represented posterity, neither of these eminent artists appeared then to have a chance of lasting fame.
When we see the intellectual separation thus maintained between England and France, with only the width of the Channel between them, we can understand the separation achieved by the Atlantic, even where there is no essential difference of language.
M. Taine tries to convince Frenchmen that the forty English ‘immortals’
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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