nd to Paul Verlaine; and this is an
indication to me that what my own soul requires is not philosophy or
psychology or wit or sublimity, but a certain delicate transmutation
of the little casual things that cross my way, and a certain faint, low,
sweet music, rumouring from indistinguishable horizons, and
bringing me vague rare thoughts, cool and quiet and deep and
magical, such as have no concern with the clamour and brutality of
the crowd.

The greater number of the writers who have dominated us, in the
pages that go before, belong to the Latin race, and I cannot but feel
that it is to this race that civilisation must come more and more to
return in its search for the grandeur and pathos, the humanity and
irony of that attitude of mind which serves our spirits best as we
struggle on through the confusions and bewilderments of our way.

There is a tendency observable here and there--though the genuinely
great minds who give their adherence to it are few and far between
--to speak as though the race-element in literature were a thing better
away, a thing whose place might be taken by a sort of attenuated
idealistic amalgam of all the race-elements in the world, or by
something which has no race-element in it at all--something
inter-national, inter-racial, humanitarian and cosmopolitan.

People to whom this thin thing appeals often speak quite lightly of
blending the traditions of East and West, of Saxon and Celt, of Latin
and Teuton, of Scandinavian and Slav.

They do not see that you might as well speak of blending the
temperaments of two opposite types of human personality. They do
not see that the whole interest of life depends upon these contrasts.
You cannot blend traditions in this academic way, any more than
you can blend two human souls that are diametrically different, or
two soils or climates which are mutually excluding. This ideal of a
cosmopolitan literature that shall include all the local traditions and
racial instincts is the sort of thing that appeals to the type of mind
which remains essentially dull to the high qualities of a noble style.

No; it is not cosmopolitan literature that we want. It was not of
cosmopolitan literature that Goethe was thinking when he used that
term "I am a good European," which Nietzsche found so suggestive;
it was of classical literature, of literature which, whatever its racial
quality, has not lost touch with the civilised traditions of Athens and
Rome.

In art, a