_La Marchande de Journaux_ and the other little masterpieces of story-telling in verse are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all poems but a lyric or two, now and then, by a happy accident. A translated poem is a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it brutally. But the tales which M. Coppée has written in prose--a true poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, flexible, and firm--these can be Englished by taking thought and time and pains, without which a translation is always a betrayal. Ten of these tales have been rendered into English by Mr. Learned; and the ten chosen for translation are among the best of the two score and more of M. Coppée's _contes en prose_. These ten tales are fairly representative of his range and variety. Compare, for example, the passion in "The Foster Sister," pure, burning and fatal, with the Black Forest _naïveté_ of "The Sabots of Little Wolff." Contrast the touching pathos of "The Substitute," poignant in his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has conquered his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he has fled from that he may save from a like degradation and from an inevitable moral decay the one friend he has in the world, all unworthy as this friend is--contrast this with the story of the gigantic deeds "My Friend Meurtrier" boasts about unceasingly, not knowing that he has been discovered in his little round of daily domestic duties, making the coffee of his good old mother and taking her poodle out for a walk.
Among these ten there are tales of all sorts, from the tragic adventure of "An Accident" to the pendent portraits of the "Two Clowns," cutting in its sarcasm, but not bitter--from "The Captain's Vices," which suggests at once George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ and Mr. Austin Dobson's _Tale of Polypheme_, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table," a sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table," "A Dramatic Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous reproduction of the factitious emotion of the good-natured stage folk, who are prone to overact even their own griefs and joys. "A Dramatic Funeral" seems to me always as though it might be a painting of M. Jean Beraud, that most Parisian of artists, just as certain stories of M. Guy de Maupassant inevitably suggest the bold freedom of M. Forain's sketches in black-and-white.