is not a little, as goes with the ideal of l'homme sensuel moyen. And from her ideal of the average sensual man France has deduced her famous gospel of the Rights of Man, which she preaches with such an infinite crowing and self-admiration. France takes 'the wishes of the flesh and of the current thoughts' for a man's rights; and human happiness, and the perfection of society, she places in everybody's being enabled to gratify these wishes, to get these rights, as equally as possible and as much as possible. In Italy, as in ancient Greece, the satisfying development of this ideal of the average sensual man is broken by the imperious ideal of art and science disparaging it; in the Germanic nations, by the ideal of morality disparaging it. Still, whenever, as often happens, the pursuers of these higher ideals are a little weary of them or unsuccessful with them, they turn with a sort of envy and admiration to the ideal set up by France,—so positive, intelligible, and, up to a certain point, satisfying. They are inclined to try it instead of their own, although they can never bring themselves to try it thoroughly, and therefore well. But this explains the great attraction France exercises upon the world. All of us feel, at some time or other in our lives, a hankering after the French ideal, a disposition to try it. More particularly is this true of the Latin nations; and therefore everywhere, among these nations, you see the old indigenous type of city disappearing, and the type of modern Paris, the city of l'homme sensuel moyen, replacing it. La Bohéme, the ideal, free, pleasurable life of Paris, is a kind of Paradise of Ishmaels. And all this assent from every quarter, and the clearness and apparent reasonableness of their ideal besides, fill the French with a kind of ecstatic faith in it, a zeal almost fanatical for propagating what they call French civilisation everywhere, for establishing its predominance, and their own predominance along with it, as of the people
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