French conventions, however, have a specious air of liberality, and France offers to him who will be bound by them partnership in the most perfect of modern civilizations—­a civilization, be it noted, of which her conventions are themselves an expression.  The bribe is tempting.  Also, the pill itself is pleasantly coated.  Feel thus, think thus, act thus, says the French tradition, not for moral, still less for utilitarian, reasons, but for aesthetic.  Stick to the rules, not because they are right or profitable, but because they are seemly—­nay, beautiful.  We are not telling you to be respectable, we are inviting you not to be a lout.  We are offering you, free of charge, a trade mark that carries credit all the world over.  “How French he (or she) is!” Many a foreigner would pay handsomely to have as much said of him.

Any English boy born with fine sensibility, a peculiar feeling for art, or an absolutely first-rate intelligence finds himself, from the outset, at loggerheads with the world in which he is to live.  For him there can be no question of accepting those conventions which express what is meanest in an unsympathetic society.  To begin with, he will not go to church or chapel on Sundays:  it might be different were it a question of going to Mass.  The hearty conventions of family life which make impossible almost relations at all intimate or subtle arouse in him nothing but a longing for escape.  He will be reared, probably, in an atmosphere where all thought that leads to no practical end is despised, or gets, at most, a perfunctory compliment when some great man who in the teeth of opposition has won to a European reputation is duly rewarded with a title or an obituary column in The Times.  As for artists, they, unless they happen to have achieved commercial success or canonization in some public gallery, are pretty sure to be family jokes.  Thus, all his finer feelings will be constantly outraged; and he will live, a truculent, shame-faced misfit, with John Bull under his nose and Punch round the corner, till, at some public school, a course of compulsory games and the Arnold tradition either breaks his spirit or makes him a rebel for life.

In violent opposition to most of what surrounds him, any greatly gifted, and tough, English youth is likely to become more and more aware of himself and his own isolation.  While his French compeer is having rough corners gently obliterated by contact with a well-oiled whetstone, and is growing daily more conscious of solidarity with his partners in a peculiar and gracious civilization, the English lad grows steadily more individualistic.  Daily he becomes more eccentric, more adventurous, and more of a “character.”  Very easily will he snap all conventional cables and, learning to rely entirely on himself, trust only to his own sense of what is good and true and beautiful.  This personal sense is all that he has to follow; and in following it he will meet with no conventional