h, to us already a hint of their philosophy.

I think you believe, as I do, that the return has begun.

We shall not live to see that fine unity of the west which lent the
latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their classical repose. No
common rule of verse or prose will satisfy men's permanent desire for
harmony: no common rule of manners, of honour, of international ethics,
of war. We shall not live to see, though we are young now, a Paris
reading some new Locke or Hume, a London moved to attentive delight in
some latter trinity of Dramatists, some future Voltaire.... The high,
protected class, which moved at ease between the Capitals of the World,
has disappeared; that which should take its place is not yet formed. We
are both of that one Faith which can but regard our Christendom as the
front of mankind and which, therefore, looks forward, as to a necessary
goal, to the re-establishment of its common comprehension. But the
reversion to such stability is slow. We shall not live to see it.

It is none the less our duty (if I may use a word of so unsavoury a
connotation) to advance the accomplishment of this good fatality.

Not indeed that a vulgar cosmopolitan beatitude can inspire an honest
man. To abandon one's patriotism, and to despise a frontier or a flag,
is, we are agreed, the negation of Europe. There are Frenchmen who
forget their battles, and Englishmen to whom a gold mine, a chance
federal theory, a colonial accent, or a map, is more of an inheritance
than the delicate feminine profile of Nelson or the hitherto unbroken
traditions of our political scheme. To such men arms are either
abhorrent, or, what is worse, a very cowardly (and thank God!
unsuccessful) method of acquiring or defending their very base
enjoyments. Let us forget them. It is only as nationalists, and only in
an intense sympathy with the highly individual national unities of
Europe that we may approach the endeavour of which I have spoken.

With us, I fear, that endeavour must take a literary form, but such a
channel is far from ignoble or valueless. He that knows some part of the
letters of a foreign nation, be it but the graces or even the vagaries
of such letters, knows something of that nation's mind. To portray for
the populace one religion welding the west together, to spread a common
philosophy, or to interpret and arrange political terms, would certainly
prove a more lasting labour: but you will agree with me that mere
sym