They

according to him, are carelessly writ- ridiculous habit of bragging.
ten, shallow, and deficient in wit.
This was near the close of the eigh-
teenth century; but how about Des-
cartes, Pascal, and Bossuet? "Man's
highest quality," Gioberti goes on to
say, "is will." Now the will, among
Frenchmen, is weak and variable.
The genius of Napoleon Bonaparte,
who was "every inch an Italian,"
found in France the most facile and
convenient instrument for his gigantic
designs. The French, "who go by
leaps and bounds, and pique them-
selves on their initiative" appreciate
keenly in others the tenacity of pur-
pose which they do not possess, and
by which alone they can be governed.
"Characters which are both impres-
sionable and indolent are always those
which are easiest dominated and en-
slaved by strong and obstinate na-
tures." Gioberti adds that after a
few years Napoleon became intoxi-
cated by success; so that, whereas, at
the outset he had pursued the Italian
method, which consists in uniting
great prudence to great audacity, later,
in his blindness, he attempted to gov-
ern with true French furia; that is to
say by abrupt, extravagant, disorderly
and destructive methods; the conse-
quence being that it took him fewer
months to lose his crown than it had
taken him years to win it. Gioberti
represents the French as "absolutely
deficient" in the two qualities needful
for wielding the sovereignty of the
world; and which Italy, be it observed,
possesses, namely: "in the intellectual
order, creative power combined with
profound reflection; and, in the prac-
tical judgment, tenacity, patience and
resolution." The Italians, it appears,
are made of “aristocratic stuff;" the
French, of "plebeian.” The French-
man belongs to the populace, by his
light and mobile temper, his versatil-
ity and inconstancy. Moreover vanity,
"the daughter of levity," is a defect
peculiar to inferior beings, "women,
children, and the lower orders gen-
erally." "The Romans did not expa-
tiate; they acted; while the French, the
champion liars of the world, have a

describe their own revolutions as
Cosmic." Gioberti says furthermore
that we have replaced love of country
by love of the antipodes; and are al-
ways parading our adoration of the
human race. This merciless indict-
ment concludes by saying that France
enjoys in Europe, and especially in
Italy, "a reputation for mendacity
which is due in part to the character
of the French language, a poor, weak,
unmelodious, ineffective, idiom, and
partly to the ingenuity which the
French have displayed in appropriat-
ing the thoughts and discoveries of
others, and marking them with the
stamp of their own frivolity."

Leopardi, who hated us almost as bitterly as Gioberti, speaks of the "superficiality of that charlatan among the nations," and elsewhere in a famous verse, of Francia Scelerata e nera. The milder judgments of Cavour are well known. He defined the French intellect as "logic subservient to passion" and the Italian diplomatist added ironically that it is a mark of French logic to fly into a passion; especially after circumstances have changed.

According to Joseph de Maistre the most prominent feature of the French character, is its readiness to adopt new ideas; its chief defect, the impatience which prevents it from examining them severally and minutely in order to form general theories upon them. The Frenchman, he says, proceeds after a fashion directly the reverse of the only sound philosophical method,

that of induction. "They begin by stating what they call general truths. founded upon vague perceptionsthose glimmerings of ideas which so often cross the mind, and hence they draw endless conclusions. Hence those forms of expression so common among them, 'great thought,' 'great idea,' 'to see broadly,' 'to think largely.'" This quality of mind is always impelling a Frenchman to begin with results. He regards his defect as a mark of genius; and it is by no means uncommon to hear it said, in

France, of some system or other, "It teem" the English, for instance, while may be erroneous, but it is none the the Englishman, particularly if he less a vast conception. It argues has never left home "hates and degenius in the author. And after re- spises" a Frenchman. Rousseau had calling the fact that Newton pondered already described France "that amiafor twenty years over the problem of ble and gentle people which is hated gravitation, our satirist adds: "No by all other nations but which hates such miracle of patience and wisdom none"(!) The reverse of the medal, will ever be wrought in France." But according to the German philosopher, he never knew Le Verrier, Claude Ber- is "a vivacity not sufficiently controlled nard or Pasteur. by sound principles and, in spite of luminous intelligence, a certain levity of mind." This was true enough in the eighteenth century. The philosopher goes on to remark upon "a passion for change which tends to the abolition of certain things merely because they are old; or rather perhaps, because they have been over-estimated" and on that "spirit of revolt from authority which involves reason itself," and which "generates an unbridled and all-destructive enthusiasm."

The opinion of Bonaparte is highly important, for, as a matter of fact, he was an Italian, who began by detesting France, and ended by identifying himself with her genius. "You Frenchmen," said Bonaparte to his contemporaries, "You are incapable of desiring anything strongly except equality; and you would readily renounce even that, if each one of you could be first. Every man ought to have the hope of rising; something on which to feed his vanity. The austerity of a republican régime would have wearied you to death. . . . Liberty is only a pretext. It is the need of a small class endowed by nature with gifts above the common and for that very reason susceptible of restraint." These profound reflections, tending to slightly Machiavellian applications, reveal one of the ruling methods of the Napoleonic policy.

The German philosophers have done us more justice-all except Schopenhauer with his famous gibe. "The other quarters of the globe have apes. Europe has Frenchmen." But Schopenhauer has said worse than that, of his own countrymen! The true regenerator of German philosophy, the admirer of Rousseau and the French Revolution, the great Kant, was content with no snap-judgment. He went into the question thoroughly and he describes the French as "essentially communicative, not from motives of self-interest but by a spontaneous impulse." Hence "graceful attentions," "a helpful kindliness," and "the universal philanthropy which renders such a people worthy to be loved." The French are usually fond, he thinks, of other nations. They "es

According to Kant, the merits of the French national character are especially conspicuous in all that concerns woman. "In France," he says, "women might have a greater influence over the conduct of men, in the way of inspiring them to noble deeds, than anywhere else in the world, if only the national spirit were a little more carefully cultivated." And after regretting that the French woman of his day had not kept up the tradition of Jeanne d'Arc and Jeanne Hachette, he adds the charming bon-mot, "It is a pity the lilies do not spin." Kant was full of confidence in the future of feminine influence and the admirable effect woman was to have upon national morality, and his last word upon the subject is, "Not for all the world would I say with Rousseau, that a woman is but an elder child."

But

Now the question is whether that national character, upon certain of whose traits, all the various witnesses whom we have called, agree, has changed in the second half, and particularly in the last quarter of the present century. This is in fact the charge preferred by those who accuse us of psychological degeneracy. On

the one hand we have an Italian soci- all French romances, you will find a ologist, and on the other a

It is, however, our contemporary literature, our poets and our novelists, who have procured us the heaviest accusations of degeneracy. Let it be granted that our decadents,-who are already out of fashion!-would have taken us back to the literature of the most primitive savages; to those vague successions of visions which may just as well be read backward as forward; to those alliterations and assonances and verbal quibbles, which abound in the songs of Papuans, Hottentots and Caffirs. This is literature fallen into its second childhood. But who cares for experiments like these; very few of which, moreover, are made in good faith, deliberate nonsense, delirium in cold blood? A literature should not be judged by the antics of a few blasé individuals, rather than by its ordinary undress garb.

light upon the hidden purpose of his by the lack of sufficiently powerful own rulers, than upon ours; while as impressions; and a vast predominance to protecting the Oriental Christians, of organic sensations over representait might have been well for Italy if tive images." This is why your daughshe had relieved us of that duty, with- ter is born deaf and dumb. What out considering whether or no such possible information is to be derived action would have been inconsistent from this "tableau nosologique" worthy with her Anti-papal policy. In any of Molière? Are our poets and men of case, if we had shown no other sign letters any more egotistical than they of psychical degeneracy than this, the were in the days of René and Werther? murdered folks might all be in good In any case it is only a natural consehealth to-day. quence of the uncertainty in which all objective and impersonal doctrines are involved at the present time. The absence of a common faith turns men's thoughts inward upon themselves. "Pathology" has nothing to do with it. As to the "obscene realism"which cannot be too strongly denounced, and to which our police are culpably indifferent, go back to the Middle Ages, or even to the latest centuries. Review the popular and middle-class literature of the olden time. Think of the hardness, the radical immorality of the "veine gauloise!" Even the choice spirits of other days had innumerable vices alongside their virtues. Was the literature of the most cultivated classes, especially in the eighteenth century, any less immoral than now? Finally, under the rubric of mysticism, M. Nordau classes among our maladies, every aspiration toward an ideal world, all pre-occupation with anything outside the narrow round of positive science. To those who claim that science has shown itself wanting upon the moral and religious side, he replies by reciting a catalogue of all the latest discoveries concerning the constitution of matter, heat, the unity of force, spectrum-analyses, geology, paleontology, "chromo-photography," instantaneous photography, and all the rest of it, winding up with the exclamation, "And still you are not satisfied!"

The well-known indictment of M. Max Nordau against our contemporary literature is hardly more convincing than M. de Bella's of our national character. According to M. Nordau, our worst symptoms, which, however, he finds prevalent all over Europe, appear in an aggravated form in our poets and novelists. They are egotism, mysticism, and the false realism of obscurity. M. Nordau defines mysticism "an incapacity for attention, clear thought, and the control of sensation produced by an enfeeblement of the higher cerebral centres." Under this pompous phraseology, borrowed from the sciences, there appears to be something not quite scientific. Again: "Egotism is the result of imperfectly conductive sensorial nerves; dull centres of perception; instincts perverted

No, we are not; for we have a higher ambition. Spectrum analysis gives us some information about the metals present in the stars, but none concerning the true worth and end of existence. "He," says M. Nordau, "who demands of science a bold and confi