s deposited in the common treasury of the human race.
Thus, to this one we owe the sense of mystery, and we might say the
revelation of what is beautiful, in that which remains obscure and
cannot be grasped. To another we owe the sense of art, and what may be
called the appreciation of the power of form. A third one has handed to
us what was most heroic in the conception of chivalrous honor. And to
another, finally, we owe it that we know what is both most ferocious and
noblest, most wholesome and most to be feared, in human pride. The share
that belongs to us Frenchmen was, in the meanwhile, to bind, to fuse
together, and as it were to unify under the idea of the general society
of mankind, the contradictory and even hostile elements that may have
existed in all that. No matter whether our inventions and ideas were, by
their origin, Latin or Romance, Celtic or Gallic, Germanic even, if you
please, the whole of Europe had borrowed them from us in order to adapt
them to the genius of its different races. Before re-admitting them in
our turn, before adopting them after they had been thus transformed, we
asked only that they should be able to serve the progress of reason and
of humanity. What was troublous in them we clarified; what was
corrupting we corrected; what was local we generalized; what was
excessive we brought down to the proportions of mankind. Have we not
sometimes also lessened their grandeur and altered their purity? If
Corneille has undoubtedly brought nearer to us the still somewhat
barbaric heroes of Guillem de Castro, La Fontaine, when imitating the
author of the Decameron, has made him more indecent than he is in his
own language; and if the Italians have no right to assail Moliere for
borrowing somewhat from them, the English may well complain that
Voltaire failed to understand Shakespeare. But it is true none the less
that in disengaging from the particular man of the North or the South
this idea of a universal man, for which we have been so often
reviled,--if any one of the modern literatures has breathed in its
entirety the spirit of the public weal and of civilization, it is the
literature of France. And this ideal cannot possibly be as empty as has
too often been asserted; since, as I endeavored to show, from Lisbon to
Stockholm and from Archangel to Naples, it is its manifestations that
foreigners have loved to come across in the masterpieces, or better, in
the whole sequence of the history of our