I should like to be told by one of the accomplished critics of the day what is--or rather what is not--a pastel? Dictionaries, with their wonted rigidity, define the word as “a colored crayon,” ignoring its literary significance, and affording us no clue to its elusive and mutable characteristics. When Mr. Stewart Merrill christened his pretty little volume of translations “Pastels in Prose,” he gave us to understand, with the assistance of Mr. Howells’ prefatory remarks, that the name was an apt one for those brief bits of unrhymed, unrhythmical, yet highly poetic composition in the execution of which the French have shown such singular felicity and grace. Some of these delicate trifles have the concentrated completeness of a picture, and for them the name is surely not ill-chosen. Sombre, or joyous, or faintly ironical, they bring before our eyes with vivid distinctness every outline of the scene they portray. “Padre Pugnaccio” and “Henriquez,” by Louis Bertrand, and that strange lovely “Captive,” by Ephraïm Mikhaël, are as admirable in their limitations as in their finish. They show us one thing only, and show it with swift yet comprehensive lucidity. But if “Padre Pugnaccio” be a pastel, then, by that same token, “Solitude” is not. It is a moderately long and wholly allegorical story, and its merits are of a different order. As for Maurice de Guérin’s “Centaur,” that noble fragment has nothing in common with the fragile delicacy of the pretty little picture poems which surround it. It is a masterpiece of breadth and virility. Its sonorous sentences recall the keener life of the antique world, and it stands among its unsubstantial companions like a bust of Hermes in a group of Dresden figures, all charming, but all dwarfed to insignificance by the side of that strong young splendor. To call “The Centaur” a pastel is as absurd as to call “Endymion” an etching.
However, Mr. Merrill’s translations are far from defining the limits of the term. On the contrary, we have M. Paul Bourget’s group of stories, “Pastels of Men,” which are not prose poems at all, nor brief pen pictures; but tales of a rather elaborate and unclean order, full of wan sentiment, and that cheerless vice which robs the soul without gratifying the body. Occasionally, as in the sketch of the poor old teacher living his meagre life from hour to hour, M. Bourget draws for us, with melancholy skill, a single scene from the painful drama of existence. This is perhaps a pastel, since the word must be employed; but why should an interminable and shifting tale about a rich young widow, who cannot make up her mind in less than a hundred pages which of her four lovers she will marry, be called by the same generic title? If it be equally applicable to every kind of story, short or long, simple or involved, descriptive or analytic, then it has no real meaning at all, and becomes a mere matter of capricious selection. “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” and “The Cricket on the Hearth” could with propriety have been termed pastels.