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 List for
intellectual and artistic prowess the number of French names would
be out of all proportion to the size and wealth of the country.
Furthermore, it is this traditional basis that has kept French culture
up to a certain level of excellence. France has never been without
standards. Therefore it has been to France that the rest of Europe has
always looked for some measure of fine thinking, delicate feeling, and
general amenity. Without her conventionality it may be doubted whether
France could have