be respected, but of a social harmony to be maintained. It
is composed not of more or less degenerate airs of the court, but of
more or less faithful reflections of the heart. Its refinement is such
as the race who lived on the surface of earth never even dreamed of. It
permeates like a fragrant oil all the complicated and delicate machinery
of our existence. No unsociableness, no misanthropy can resist it. The
charm is too profound. The single threat of ostracism, I do not say of
expulsion to the realms above, which would be a death sentence, but of
banishment beyond the limits of the usual corporate life, is sufficient
to arrest the most criminal natures on the slope of crime. There is in
the slightest inflexion of voice, in the least inclination of the head
of our women a special charm, which is not only the charm of former
times, whether roguish kindness or kindly roguishness, but a refinement
at once more exquisite and more healthful in which the constant practice
of seeing and doing beautiful things or loving and being loved is
expressed in an ineffable fashion.

VI

LOVE

Love, in fact, is the unseen and perennial source of this novel
courtesy. The capital importance it has assumed, the strange forms it
has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the
most significant characteristics of our civilisation. In the glittering
and superficial epochs, age of paper and electro-plating, which
immediately preceded our present era, love was held in check by a
thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and
cumbersome luxury or of ceaseless globe-trotting, and by that other form
of madness which has now disappeared, the so-called political ambition.
It suffered accordingly an immense decline, relatively speaking. To-day
it benefits from the destruction or gradual diminution of all the other
principal impulses of the heart which have taken refuge and concentrated
themselves in it as banished mankind has done in the warm bosom of the
earth. Patriotism is dead, since there is no longer any native land, but
only a native grot. Moreover the guilds which we enter as we please
according to our vocations have taken the place of Fatherlands.
Corporate spirit has exterminated patriotism. In the same fashion the
school is on the road not to exterminate but to transform the family,
which is only right and proper. The best that can be said for the
parents of old was that they were