to denigrate the art of Racine.  Before long it came out that he had read the plays only in a translation; for at that time—­he was in his second year, I think—­he had little or no French.  Everyone laughed, and the argument collapsed.  Set the scene in Paris, imagine a detractor of Shakespeare or Goethe being convicted of similar ignorance, and ask yourself whether one Frenchman of the party would have felt that by such an admission the critic was put out of court.

It cannot be denied, I fear, that the conventional habits of the French mind lead easily to ignorance and self-satisfaction.  To be frank, the complacent aberrations of French taste, with its passion for Poe and its pathetic confidence in Kipling and Chesterton, have become a standing joke abroad.  There is no great reason why the French should know anything of foreign thought and literature; but there is every reason why, knowing nothing, they should refrain from comment.  And how many Frenchmen do know anything?  When I reflect that hardly one can quote a line of English without committing or, at any rate, permitting the grossest and most nonsensical blunders, I am inclined to suspect that the answer is, very few.  And I suppose it is this combination of ignorance with an incapacity for handling criteria of universal validity which gives to the nation that is assuredly the centre of civilization its paradoxical air of provinciality.  A Frenchman discoursing on foreign peoples or on mankind in general—­a favourite topic—­suggests to me sometimes the fantastic vision of a dog-fancier criticizing a steer.  Grant his premises—­that whatever he admires in the one must be essential to the other—­and nothing could be more just and luminous than his remarks.  Undeniably the creature is a bit thick in the girth and, what is worse, bull-necked.  Only, as the points of an ox are different from those of a poodle, the criticism is something beside the mark:  and there is not much more virtue in the objection to Shakespeare’s later tragedies that they are not written in rhymed verse.  Blank verse, however, is not in the great tradition; and the French critic, with one eye fixed submissively on authority, doubts whether he would be justified in admiring it unreservedly.  Such are the inevitable consequences of conventionality:  and French conventionality is, in its turn, the inevitable consequence of a civilization so gracious and attractive that even the most lawless of its children cannot bear to appear disloyal.

MARQUET [P]

[Footnote P:  Marquet.  Par George Besson.]

The best picture by Marquet I ever saw was in the Grafton Gallery exhibition of 1912.  It represented a naked woman sitting in a rocking-chair.  Since then I have seen scores of things by him, admirable, as a rule, and invariably brilliant, but never one that was quite first-rate.  And here comes M. George Besson, with an essay and an album of photographs, to show us a few works which, surpassing anything of which we had supposed him capable, emerge triumphantly from that stream of clever variations on a theme which Marquet has made only too much his own.