rply questioned by the experts. "Saxon" and
"Norman," for example, no longer seem to us such simple terms as
sufficed for the purpose of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ or of Thierry's _Norman
Conquest_, a book inspired by Scott's romance. The late Professor
Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, remarked of the latter book:
"Thierry says at the end of his work that there are no longer either
Normans or Saxons except in history.... But in Thierry's sense of the
word, it would be truer to say that there never were 'Normans' or
'Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages of romances like his own."

There is a brutal directness about this verdict upon a rival historian
which we shall probably persist in calling "Saxon"; but it is no worse
than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's essay on "The Celtic Spirit"
made to-day by university professors who happen to know Old Irish at
first hand, and consequently consider Arnold's opinion on Celtic
matters to be hopelessly amateurish.

The wiser scepticism of our day concerning all hard-and-fast racial
distinctions has been admirably summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race
psychology," he declares, "is still a science for the future to
discover.... We do not scientifically know what the true racial
varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such varieties.
The judgment day, or the science of the future, may demonstrate what
they are. We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter."

Nowhere have the extravagances of the application of racial theories to
intellectual products been more pronounced than in the fields of art
and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz which the programme
declares to be an adaptation of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they
may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shakespeare was of Bohemia, they
have no hesitation in exclaiming: "How truly Hungarian this is!" Or,
it may be, how truly "Japanese" is this vase which was made in
Japan--perhaps for the American market; or how intensely "Russian" is
this melancholy tale by Turgenieff. This prompt deduction of racial
qualities from works of art which themselves give the critic all the
information he possesses about the races in question,--or, in other
words, the enthusiastic assertion that a thing is like itself,--is one
of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. It is travelling in a
circle, and the corregiosity of Corregio is the next station.

Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece usually betrays some to