Avril | Page 2

other countries, we
marvelled that France in particular should have remained unknown.
We were willing, in an earlier youth, to read this riddle in somewhat
crude solutions. I think we have each of us arrived, and in a final
manner, at the sounder conclusion that historical accident is principally
to blame. The chance concurrence of this defeat with that dynastic
influence, the slip by which the common sense of political simplicity
missed footing in England and fell a generation behind, the marvellous
industrial activities of this country, protected by a tradition of political
discipline which will remain unique in History; the contemporaneous
settling down of France into the equilibrium of power--an equilibrium
not established without five hearty civil wars and perhaps a hundred
campaigns--all these so separated the two worlds of thought as to leave
France excusable for her blindness towards the destinies and nature of
England, and England excusable for her continued emptiness of
knowledge upon the energy and genius of France: though these were
increasing daily, immensely, at our very side.
We have assisted at some straining of such barriers. A long peace, the
sterility of Germany, the interesting activities of the Catholic Church,
have perhaps not yet changed, but have at least disturbed the mind of
the north, and ours, a northern people's, with it. The unity, the
passionate patriotism, the close oligarchic polity, the very silence of the
English has arrested the eyes of France. By a law which is universal
where bodies are bound in one system, an extreme of separation has
wrought its own remedy and the return towards a closer union is begun.
I do not refer to such ephemeral and artificial manifestations as a
special and somewhat humiliating need may demand; I consider rather
that large sweep of tendency which was already apparent fifteen years
after the Franco-Prussian War. An approach in taste, manners and
expression well defined during our undergraduate years, has now

introduced much of our inmost life to the French, to us already a hint of
their philosophy.
I think you believe, as I do, that the return has begun.
We shall not live to see that fine unity of the west which lent the latter
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their classical repose. No common
rule of verse or prose will satisfy men's permanent desire for harmony:
no common rule of manners, of honour, of international ethics, of war.
We shall not live to see, though we are young now, a Paris reading
some new Locke or Hume, a London moved to attentive delight in
some latter trinity of Dramatists, some future Voltaire.... The high,
protected class, which moved at ease between the Capitals of the World,
has disappeared; that which should take its place is not yet formed. We
are both of that one Faith which can but regard our Christendom as the
front of mankind and which, therefore, looks forward, as to a necessary
goal, to the re-establishment of its common comprehension. But the
reversion to such stability is slow. We shall not live to see it.
It is none the less our duty (if I may use a word of so unsavoury a
connotation) to advance the accomplishment of this good fatality.
Not indeed that a vulgar cosmopolitan beatitude can inspire an honest
man. To abandon one's patriotism, and to despise a frontier or a flag, is,
we are agreed, the negation of Europe. There are Frenchmen who
forget their battles, and Englishmen to whom a gold mine, a chance
federal theory, a colonial accent, or a map, is more of an inheritance
than the delicate feminine profile of Nelson or the hitherto unbroken
traditions of our political scheme. To such men arms are either
abhorrent, or, what is worse, a very cowardly (and thank God!
unsuccessful) method of acquiring or defending their very base
enjoyments. Let us forget them. It is only as nationalists, and only in an
intense sympathy with the highly individual national unities of Europe
that we may approach the endeavour of which I have spoken.
With us, I fear, that endeavour must take a literary form, but such a
channel is far from ignoble or valueless. He that knows some part of
the letters of a foreign nation, be it but the graces or even the vagaries

of such letters, knows something of that nation's mind. To portray for
the populace one religion welding the west together, to spread a
common philosophy, or to interpret and arrange political terms, would
certainly prove a more lasting labour: but you will agree with me that
mere sympathy in letters is not to be despised.
We have observed together that the balance in this matter is heavily
against the English. M. Jusserand is easily the first authority upon
popular life in England at the close of