s and ideas"; and however ironical and
humorous an egoist may be with regard to other people's
impressions, with regard to his own he is grave, intent, preoccupied,
almost solemn.

When one thinks of it, there is a curious solemnity of preoccupation
with themselves and their own sensations about Wilde, Pater,
Whitman, Stendhal, D'Annunzio and Barres. And this "gravity of
egoism" is precisely the thing which, for all his humorous humanity,
distinguished the great Montaigne and which his early critics found
so irritating.

"What do I care--what does any one care," grumbled the learned
Scaliger, "whether he prefers white wine to red wine?"

The second element in the compound chemistry of the "modern
temper" introduced into the world by Montaigne may be found in his
famous scepticism. The formidable levity of that notorious "que
sais-je?" "What do I know?" writes itself nowadays across our
whole sky. This also--"this film of white light," as some one has
called it, floating waveringly beneath each one of our most
cherished convictions was, not unknown before his time.

All the great sophists--Protagoras especially, with his "man the
measure of all things"--were, in a sense, professional teachers of a
refined scepticism.

Plato himself, with his wavering and gracious hesitations, was more
than touched by the same spirit.

Scepticism as a natural human philosophy--perhaps as the only
natural human philosophy--underlies all the beautiful soft-coloured
panorama of pagan poetry and pagan thought. It must have been the
habitual temper of mind in any Periclean symposium or Caesarean
salon. It is, pre-eminently and especially, the _civilised_ attitude of
mind; the attitude of mind most dominant and universal in the great
races, the great epochs, the great societies.

It is for this reason that France, among all modern nations, is the
most sceptical.

Barbarian peoples are rarely endowed with this quality. The crude
animal energy, which makes them successful! in business, and even
sometimes in war, is an energy which, for all its primitive force, is
destructive of civilisation. Civilisation, the rarest work of art of our
race's evolution, is essentially a thing created in restraint of such
crude energies; as it is created in restraint of the still cruder energies
of nature itself.

The Protestant Reformation springing out of the soul of the
countries "beyond the Alps" is, of course, the supreme example of
this uncivili