indispensable even than culture.  French art alone at the present time possesses absolute self-respect.  It possesses this quality in an eminent, in even an excessive degree; but it possesses it, and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism.  It has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the primitive and inchoate known in England and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism.  It has escaped also that almost abject worship of classic models which Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy—­not to speak of its echoes elsewhere.  It has always stood on its own feet, and, however lacking in the higher qualities of imaginative initiative, on the one hand, and however addicted to the academic and the traditional on the other, has always both respected its aesthetic heritage and contributed something of its own thereto.

Why should not one feel the same quick interest, the same instinctive pride in his time as in his country?  Is not sympathy with what is modern, instant, actual, and apposite a fair parallel of patriotism?  Neglect of other times in the “heir of all the ages” is analogous to chauvinism, and indicative of as ill-judged an attitude as that of provincial blindness to other contemporary points of view and systems of philosophy than one’s own.  Culture is equally hostile to both, and in art culture is as important a factor as it is in less special fields of activity and endeavor.  But in art, as elsewhere, culture is a means to an actual, present end, and the pre-Raphaelite sentiment that dictates mere reproduction of what was once a genuine expression is as sterile as servile imitation of exotic modes of thought, dress, and demeanor is universally felt to be.  The past—­the antique, the renaissance, the classic, and romantic ideals are to be used, not adopted; in the spirit of Goethe, at once the most original of modern men and the most saturated with culture, exhibited in his famous saying:  “Nothing do I call my own which having inherited I have not reconquered for myself.”

It would indeed be a singular thing were the field of aesthetics the only one uninvaded by the scientific spirit of the time.  The one force especially characteristic of our era is, I suppose, the scientific spirit.  It is at any rate everywhere manifest, and it possesses the best intellects of the century. A priori one may argue about its hostility, essential or other, to the artistic, the constructive spirit; but to do so is at the most to beat the air, to waste one’s breath, to Ruskinize, in a word.  Interest in life and the world, instead of speculation or self-expression, is the “note” of the day.  The individual has withered terribly.  He is supplanted by the type.  Materialism has its positive gospel; it is not at all the formulated expression of Goethe’s “spirit that denies.”  Nature has acquired new dignity.  She cannot be