before he reached their end, he would be confronted by one of those bogeys before which the stoutest French heart quails—­“C’est inadmissible,” “C’est convenu,” “La patrie en danger.”  One day he may be called upon to break bounds, to renounce the national tradition, deny the preeminence of his country, question the sufficiency of Poussin and the perfection of Racine, or conceive it possible that some person or thing should be more noble, reverend, and touching than his mother.  On that day the Frenchman will turn back.  “C’est inadmissible.”

France, the greatest country on earth, is singularly poor in the greatest characters—­great ones she has galore.  Her standard of civilization, of intellectual and spiritual activity, is higher than that of any other nation; yet an absence of vast, outstanding figures is one of the most obvious facts in her history.  Her literature is to English what her painting is to Italian.  Her genius is enterprising without being particularly bold or original, and though it has brought so much to perfection it has discovered comparatively little.  Assuredly France is the intellectual capital of the world, since, compared with hers, all other post-Renaissance civilizations have an air distinctly provincial.  Yet, face to face with the rest of the world, France is provincial herself.  Here is a puzzle:  a solution of which, if it is to be attempted at all, must be attempted in another chapter.

II

For the last sixty years and more one of the rare pleasures of political philosophers has been to expatiate on “le droit administratif,” on the extraordinary powers enjoyed by Government in France, whatever that government may be; and another pleasure, which few have denied themselves, is that of drawing the not very obscure inference that France is democratic rather than liberal, and that the French genius has no patience with extreme individualism.  If its effects were confined wholly to politics, to criticize this national characteristic would be no part of my business; but as it has profoundly influenced French art as well as French life and thought, the reader, I trust, will not be unbearably vexed by an essay which has little immediately to do with the subject on which I am paid to write.  “What is the cause of French conventionality?” “What are its consequences?” These are questions to which the student of French art cannot well be indifferent; and these are the questions that I shall attempt to answer.

The cause, I suspect, is to be found in the defect of a virtue.  If it takes two to make a quarrel it takes as many to make a bargain; and if even the best Frenchmen are willing to make terms with society, that must be because society has something to offer them worth accepting.  All conventions are limitations on thought, feeling, and action; and, as such, are the enemies of originality and character—­hateful, therefore, to men richly endowed with either.