or themselves by an instinct the necessary confines without which such
energy is wasted--and wasted the more from its excess. They canalise for
their own security a torrent which, undisciplined, would serve but to
destroy. Such an instinct is apparent in every department of French
life. To their jurisprudence the French have ever attempted to attach a
code, to their politics the stone walls of a Constitution, or, at the
least, of a fundamental theory. Their theology from Athanasius through
St. Germanus to the modern strict defence against all "liberals" has
glorified the unchanging. Every outburst of the interior fires in the
history of Gaul has been followed by a rapid, plastic action which
reduced to human use what might otherwise have crystallised into an
amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured
to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth:
so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary
unstable grandeur of the Gironde, but the schools and laws and roads and
set government we see to-day. So the spring storms of the Renaissance
settled, I say, into that steady summer of stable form which has now for
three hundred years dominated the literature of the country.

Caught on with this aspect of energy producing the Classic is the truth
that energy alone can dare to be classical. Where the great currents of
the soul run feebly a perpetual acceleration, whether by novelty or by
extravagance, will be demanded; where they run full and heavy, then,
under the restraint of form, they will but run more proudly and more
strong. It is the flickering of life that fears hard rules in verse and
may not feel the level classics of our Europe. Their rigidity is not
that of marble; they are not dead. A human acquaintance with their
sobriety soon fills us as we read. If we lie in the way of the giants
who conceived them (let me say Corneille or the great Dryden),
re-reading and further knowledge--especially a deeper experience of
common life about us--reveal to us the steadfast life of these images;
the eyes open, the lips might almost move; the statue descends and
lives.

The man who imposed design and authority and unity upon the letters of
his country, and who so closed the epoch with which I have been dealing,
was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic,
uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method
only, he corr