ould say. Even at
the present time, then, the Italians are preeminent in feeling the power
of beauty. The power of knowledge, in the same way, is eminently an
influence with the Germans. This by no means implies, as is sometimes
supposed, a high and fine general culture. What it implies is a strong
sense of the necessity of knowing _scientifically_, as the expression
is, the things which have to be known by us; of knowing them
systematically, by the regular and right process, and in the only real
way. And this sense the Germans especially have. Finally, there is the
power of social life and manners. And even the Athenians themselves,
perhaps, have hardly felt this power so much as the French.

Voltaire, in a famous passage[462] where he extols the age of Louis the
Fourteenth and ranks it with the chief epochs in the civilization of our
race, has to specify the gift bestowed on us by the age of Louis the
Fourteenth, as the age of Pericles, for instance, bestowed on us its art
and literature, and the Italian Renascence its revival of art and
literature. And Voltaire shows all his acuteness in fixing on the gift
to name. It is not the sort of gift which we expect to see named. The
great gift of the age of Louis the Fourteenth to the world, says
Voltaire, was this: _l'esprit de societe_, the spirit of society, the
social spirit. And another French writer, looking for the good points in
the old French nobility, remarks that this at any rate is to be said in
their favor: they established a high and charming ideal of social
intercourse and manners, for a nation formed to profit by such an ideal,
and which has profited by it ever since. And in America, perhaps, we see
the disadvantages of having social equality before there has been any
such high standard of social life and manners formed.

We are not disposed in England, most of us, to attach all this
importance to social intercourse and manners. Yet Burke says: "There
ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind
would be disposed to relish." And the power of social life and manners
is truly, as we have seen, one of the great elements in our
humanization. Unless we have cultivated it, we are incomplete. The
impulse for cultivating it is not, indeed, a moral impulse. It is by no
means identical with the moral impulse to help our neighbor and to do
him good. Yet in many ways it works to a like end. It brings men
together, makes them feel the need of