scorn of an age or a people destroy the faculty of observation, much more of description, even in the historic mind; what then will they do in the poetic? Doubtless there has been, as doubtless there is now, much that is hateful and contemptible in social matters, English or other; much also, as certainly, that is admirable and thankworthy. Doubtless too at one time and another there has been more visible of evil and shameful than of noble and good. But there can never have been a time of unmixed good or evil; and he only who has felt the -pulse of an age can tell us how fast or slow its heart really beat towards evil or towards good. A man who writes of a nation or a time, however bad and base in the main, without any love for it, cannot write of it well. A great English poetess has admirably said that a poet's heart may be large enough to hold two nations.[1] Victor Hugo's, apart from its heroic love of man, a love matchless except by Shelley's, holds two nations especially close, two of the greatest; it has often been said he is French and Spanish; that is, he loves France and Spain, the spirit of them attracts his spirit; but he does not love England. There are great Englishmen whom no man
- ↑ I know not if it has been remarked how decisive a note of the English spirit there is in Molière, a Frenchman of the French: an English current, as recognisable as indefinable, passing under and through the tide-stream of his genius. There is a more northern flavour mixed into his mind, a more northern tone interfused, than into any other of the great French writers, Rabelais excepted. Villon, for instance, in so many ways so like them both, is nothing if not Parisian. And if I am not wrong no third great Frenchman has ever found such acceptance and sympathy among Englishmen unimbued with the French spirit as Rabelais and Molière. For them instinct breaks down the bar of ignorance.
