le for us to dispute about the relative greatness of our
national arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies,
but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique
quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this
country or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen only
that the intellectual passion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the
love of the honest man of Moliere or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all.
It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human
experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart,
but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the heart of Lear, that
tempest of the soul, of which the storms of nature are but a faint
reflection, or the exquisite serenity and humanity of the recognition of
Cordelia, these are not the prerogative possessions of England, but they
speak to the heart and soul of the whole world.

We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political,
but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions
and are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and the
heavens above us.

* * * * *

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to the
following works:

_Beowulf_; _The Song of Roland_; _The Nibelungenlied_.

_Tristan and Iseult_ (Thomas, or Beroul); Mary of France, _Lais_.

Dante, _Divina Commedia_.

Boccaccio, _Decameron_; Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_.

Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon.

Defoe, _Robinson Crusoe_; Le Sage, _Gil Blas_.

Marivaux, _Marianne_; Prevost, _Manon Lescaut_.

Richardson, _Clarissa_; Goethe, _Werther_.

Goethe, _Faust_; Wordsworth, _Michael_, &c..

Victor Hugo, _Legende des Siecles_.

There are English translations of the greater number of these.

VII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES

Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form of
human association. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is no
organized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues no
common aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such an
aim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such a
whole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common to
the three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modern
shape to Hegel and his follo