istory, the light upon Roman history for which we study
Latin literature and art, are admirable to us in very exact proportion
as we study them for our ends. To every man and every nation that really
breathes, true vitality of soul depends upon saying to one's self, with
an emotion of equivalent intensity to the emotion of patriotism
celebrated in Scott's familiar lines, This is my own, my native era and
environment. Culture is impossible apart from cosmopolitanism, but
self-respect is more indispensable even than culture. French art alone
at the present time possesses absolute self-respect. It possesses this
quality in an eminent, in even an excessive degree; but it possesses it,
and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it
from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism. It
has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the primitive and
inchoate known in England and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism. It
has escaped also that almost abject worship of classic models which
Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy--not to speak
of its echoes elsewhere. It has always stood on its own feet, and,
however lacking in the higher qualities of imaginative initiative, on
the one hand, and however addicted to the academic and the traditional
on the other, has always both respected its aesthetic heritage and
contributed something of its own thereto.

Why should not one feel the same quick interest, the same instinctive
pride in his time as in his country? Is not sympathy with what is
modern, instant, actual, and apposite a fair parallel of patriotism?
Neglect of other times in the "heir of all the ages" is analogous to
chauvinism, and indicative of as ill-judged an attitude as that of
provincial blindness to other contemporary points of view and systems of
philosophy than one's own. Culture is equally hostile to both, and in
art culture is as important a factor as it is in less special fields of
activity and endeavor. But in art, as elsewhere, culture is a means to
an actual, present end, and the pre-Raphaelite sentiment that dictates
mere reproduction of what was once a genuine expression is as sterile as
servile imitation of exotic modes of thought, dress, and demeanor is
universally felt to be. The past--the antique, the renaissance, the
classic, and romantic ideals are to be used, not adopted; in the spirit
of Goethe, at once the most original of modern men an