principle of Equality. Just as Mdlle. de Rambouillet and her friends sought to separate themselves from the vulgar world by the nicety of their manners and language, so did Théophile Gautier and his followers seek to shock the instincts of the bourgeoisie by their red waistcoats and outrageous verses. "For us," says Gautier, in his account of the Romantic movement," the world divided itself into Flamboyants' and Neutral Tints,' the one the object of our love, the other of our aversion. We wanted life, light, movement; audacity of thought and execution, a return to the fair period of the Renaissance and true antiquity; we rejected the tame colouring, the thin and dry design, the compositions resembling groups of dwarfs, that the Empire had bequeathed to the Restoration."

To the foreign critic it seems that, as in French politics the centralising principle has overpowered local liberty, so in French art the native tendency is for logic to prevail over imagination. Whatever literary party has been dominant in the taste of French, society has sought to establish its supremacy by imaginative Analysis. The result has been to develop in the art of our neighbours great beauty of abstract Form, a splendid capacity of lucid expression, but more and more to turn away the creative impulse of the artist from the imitation of universal ideas of life and action. In the rival theories and practice of the modern French Naturalists and Impressionists I seem to detect, under a changed form, the old party struggle between the Classicists and the Romanticists. In one direction, I see the disciples of Gustave Flaubert, by

1

a new application of the precepts of Boileau, employing all the resources of precise and artistic language to decorate the sordid commonplace of bourgeois life; in another, M. Anatole France, as the successor of Renan, arresting the transient impressions of his own mind in a succession of delicate phrases, which would have been the delight of the Hôtel Rambouillet. But, in both directions, Analysis undermines the conscience with the suggestion of subjects and ideas which lie at the very foundation of the Family and the State.

Must these things be? Is it impossible for the French novelist to contemplate Man under any aspect except that which involves some relation to his neighbour's wife? impossible for him to transport the imagination into the world of ideal action? Perhaps it may be answered, that all the energies of the nation are concentrated in Paris, where lies its brain, and that Analysis alone can penetrate to the principle of life underlying the wild excitement of the Parisian Bourse, the gossip of the Parisian journal, the intrigues of the Parisian drawing-room. But Paris is not France: the poetry of the people, its historic soul and character, lies elsewhere. Turn away from the dissolving scene of life in the capital, with its superficial reflection of vulgar materialism, to the bypaths of rural France, where Nature pursues her ancient round in the midst of silent labour and elemental pieties. Pause in imagination, for example, in the valley of the Loire, as that noble river flows peacefully amidst historic battle-grounds; through walled towns, where every stone seems to

recall some national memory-Orleans, Tours, Angers; through fields in which, here and there, peasants may still be seen, as Millet saw them, listening with bent heads to the voice of the Angelus; under gray châteaux, which, perhaps no longer tenanted by the descendants of their former lords, look down, at fixed seasons, on popular festivals celebrated around them since the Middle Ages-will any man of taste and imagination, viewing scenes like these in the light not of romance but of history, and thinking of all the movement and animation of the present in its relation to the past, venture to say that Molière and La Fontaine would have found nothing worthy of imitation in the France of this century? Would they not have been able to show us in an ideal form, though it were but in comedy, how much of the historic character of their country has survived the conflict of thirty generations; how many of the primeval springs of national life combine to preserve the unity of French society; to what extent the ancient religion is still a moving power in the hearts of the people? Let it be granted that it is no longer the drama or the poem, but the novel, which is the vehicle of imaginative expression. Yet the novel also can be made the mirror of the ideal imitation of Nature, and the novelist who is able to give a reflection of the true morals and manners of France in the classic language inherited from Pascal and Mme. de Sévigné, will command an European audience as wide and appreciative as in the days of Louis Quatorze.

IV

THE IDEA OF LAW IN GERMAN POETRY

THE same inevitable forces out of which arose the character of French Poetry are seen to be working, though under very different circumstances, to determine the character of German Poetry; and it is this law, or idea of law, in Germany which I propose to make the subject of my present lecture. First of all, let us consider precisely the nature of the facts with which we have to deal. It cannot be said that Germany has expressed the idea of the Universal, either in the creative departments of Poetry or in the plastic Arts, with as much character as Italy, England, France, or even Spain. The Germans have produced no romantic epic of universal European fame, like the Orlando Furioso, no classic epic that can be named with Paradise Lost; no romance like Don Quixote; no tragic drama comparable, I do not say with the tragedies of Shakespeare, but even with those of Corneille and Racine; no comic drama approaching within visible distance of that of Molière. In painting, two German names alone are household words, Holbein and Albert Dürer. To compensate for

hese deficiencies, the Germans are supreme in Music: Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven form a triumvirate whom the united musicians of the rest of Europe would challenge in vain. From Germany have come the great men of contemplation in Religion, Philosophy, and Criticism-Luther, Kant, Lessing. And in lyric poetry -that department of the art which is most akin to Music-their compositions (I am thinking of the ballads of Schiller and Uhland, of Faust, and of Heine's Songs) have roused emotions in the hearts of men untouched by the lyric poetry of any other nation, with the possible exception of the poetry of Byron.

I think that these facts are precisely the results that might be expected to follow from the genius of the German character, and the course of German history. German genius, at least as manifested outwardly up to quite modern times, has been rather contemplative than practical. The German has-or had two generations ago the same strange contrasts in his character as are noted by Tacitus: the love of arms, joined with the tendency to domestic indolence; the passion for intellectual liberty, accompanying the neglect of the arts of society; energy in war, followed

by reverie in peace. In peace, says the practical Roman historian, "ipsi hebent, mira naturae diversitate, cum idem sic ament inertiam et oderint quietem." Something of this contradictory combination of qualities is visible in the characters of many of the greatest Germans; they are content that their bodies shall never travel out of sight of their own hearth-smoke, if their souls have freedom to soar