still be a sound Tory and Churchman. Rousseau, on the other hand, was to become the mouthpiece of the most ardent revolutionists. Instead of promoting a religious revival in the British manner, he was to convert the revolutionary movement itself into a kind of new religion. Rationalism was not to be his enemy, but to be converted into a creed to be preached with all the fervour of a fresh gospel.
The difference corresponds to another contrast, of which M. Texte has something to say. If Shakespeare appeared to be half a lunatic to the admirers of French tragedy, it was partly because he is so deeply impressed by the greatest riddles of human life—by the silences and the eternities, as Carlyle would say. The French drama, says M. Texte, held aloof from such thoughts; 'where, in the plays of Racine and Corneille, are we to look for their philosophy?' They have nothing to say of the 'problems which bring anguish to lofty souls.' This, he thinks, is because in France there was a divorce between secular and religious literature. The conventions of the French stage confined the drama to a sphere of emotion from which the profoundest poetical sentiments were excluded. It was certainly not that Frenchmen
