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