obstacle that he need hesitate for one moment to demolish.  English civilization is so smug and hypocritical, so grossly philistine, and at bottom so brutal, that every first-rate Englishman necessarily becomes an outlaw.  He grows by kicking; and his personality flourishes, unhampered by sympathetic, clinging conventions, nor much—­and this is important, too—­by the inquisitorial tyranny of Government.  For, at any rate until the beginning of the war, an Englishman who dared to defy the conventions had less than a Frenchman to fear from the laws.

I have already suggested that the consequences of this difference between French and English civilization may be studied in the history of their literature and thought.  For the abject poverty of English visual art I have attempted to give reasons elsewhere:  here I have not space to say more than that it is rarely good for an artist to be a protestant, and that a protestant is just what the English attitude to painting generally forces a genuine artist to be.  But consider the literature of the French Renaissance:  Rabelais is the one vast figure.  Ronsard and his friends are charming, elegant, and erudite; but not of the stupendous.  What is even more to the point, already with the pleiade we have a school—­a school with its laws and conventions, its “thus far and no further.”  Nothing is more notorious than the gorgeous individualism and personality of those flamboyant monsters whom we call the Elizabethans, unless it be the absence of that quality in the great French writers of the next age.  Had Pascal been as bold as Newton he might have been as big.  No one will deny that Descartes was a finer intelligence than Hobbes, or that his meticulous respect for French susceptibilities gave an altogether improbable turn to his speculations.  In the eighteenth century it was the English who did the discovering and the French who, on these discoveries being declared admissibles, brought them to perfection.  Even in the nineteenth, the Revolution notwithstanding, French genius, except in painting, asserted itself less vividly and variously than the Russian or English, and less emphatically than the German.

In recording the consequences of this French taste for authority we have had to register profit and loss.  It is true that the picture presented by French history offers comparatively few colossal achievements or stupendous characters.  With the latter, indeed, it is particularly ill-supplied.  Whereas most of the great and many of the secondary English writers, thinkers, and artists have been great “characters,” the slightly monotonous good sense and refinement of French literary and artistic life is broken only by a few such massive or surprising figures as those of Rabelais, La Fontaine, Poussin, Rousseau, Flaubert, Cezanne—­a formidable list but a short one, to which, however, a few names could be added.  On the other hand, what France has lost in colour she has gained in fertility; and in a universal Honours