ion of our day that comes to us from the France of
Richelieu and Colbert, and is the direct outcome of the 'Grand Siecle,'
the true greatness of which century, as Lady Dilke points out, consists
not in its vain wars, and formal stage and stilted eloquence, and pompous
palaces, but in the formation and working out of the political and social
system of which these things were the first-fruits. To the question that
naturally rises on one's lips, 'How can one dwell on the art of the
seventeenth century?--it has no charm,' Lady Dilke answers that this art
presents in its organisation, from the point of view of social polity,
problems of the highest intellectual interest. Throughout all its
phases--to quote her own words--'the life of France wears, during the
seventeenth century, a political aspect. The explanation of all changes
in the social system, in letters, in the arts, in fashions even, has to
be sought in the necessities of the political position; and the seeming
caprices of taste take their rise from the same causes which went to
determine the making of a treaty or the promulgation of an edict. This
seems all the stranger because, in times preceding, letters and the arts,
at least, appeared to flourish in conditions as far removed from the
action of statecraft as if they had been a growth of fairyland. In the
Middle Ages they were devoted to a virgin image of Virtue; they framed,
in the shade of the sanctuary, an ideal shining with the beauty born of
self-renunciation, of resignation to self-enforced conditions of moral
and physical suffering. By the queenly Venus of the Renaissance they
were consecrated to the joys of life, and the world saw that through
their perfect use men might renew their strength, and behold virtue and
beauty with clear eyes. It was, however, reserved for the rulers of
France in the seventeenth century fully to realise the political function
of letters and the arts in the modern State, and their immense importance
in connection with the prosperity of a commercial nation.'

The whole subject is certainly extremely fascinating. The Renaissance
had for its object the development of great personalities. The perfect
freedom of the temperament in matters of art, the perfect freedom of the
intellect in intellectual matters, the full development of the
individual, were the things it aimed at. As we study its history we find
it full of great anarchies. It solved no political or social problems