form and expression, both unique and universal in its appeal. Its clear-cut phrases, its precision of form, are illuminated by the light of a people's mystic soul.

Could we know as we know our own poetry, the poetry of many races, we should see that "in spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manner, of laws and customs— in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society as it spreads over the whole earth, and over all time... Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge... It is as immortal as the heart of

"Wordsworth: Preface to Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads.

NATIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH ART

BY AARON SCHAFFER.

The prevalent fashion in certain circles is to sneer at nationalism as at a something outworn, antiquated, which must be cast aside, along with religion and all other established forms that have developed under the dual yoke of authority and tradition. The cry for the past hundred and fifty years has been for freer play for the individual, for complete selfexpression, and this cry is being carried to its inexorably logical conclusion in our own age. Now the battle is not merely between radicals and reactionaries; for it is very simple for the radical to exclaim that whoever does not believe as does he is a reactionary, and vice-versa. Nor can one sum up the entire dispute by saying that there are three theories at constant war with one another-namely, the ethical, which believes that only that is good which is moral; the aesthetic, for which only that is good which is beautiful; and the utilitarian, which would have only that good which is useful. For one may be firmly convinced that the poems of Oscar Wilde are bad either because they are immoral (or, to use the expression current with a certain class of thinkers, "amoral") or because they are of no material benefit to mankind; and, at the same time, feel that they are good, because they have an element of outer harmony that allies them with the beautiful things of all time. In other words, very few men are pure moralists or pure utilitarians or pure aesthetes. Neither the first nor the last, we might be safe in assuming, would deny the value of sanitary plumbing.

One of the reliable criteria in this determination of values is clearly furnished by art-standards and by what I may be permitted to term art-attitude. Your pure social radical (of whom Tolstoi may be taken as the epitome), with his harebrained schemes for the betterment of mankind, has little sympathy with art, not only as something almost wholly useless in a world which needs bread for the hungry and shoes for the barefooted, but as something which, with its tendency

to lift the individual-even the sufferer-out of and above himself, actually prevents man from seeing his immediate physical needs and thus retards the establishment of the world-utopia. The man who believes that the appreciation of the super-sensuous is at least as important as the necessity for food and sleep is at once either mildly termed a "highbrow" or is branded, with the most formidable epithets at the command of the radical, as a conservative if not even a reactionary.

One of the radical's most vehement accusations against art is that it is a conservator of nationalism, and that nationalism like everything else that tends to raise barriers between men, is reactionary. Such people refuse to admit that there is any middle path at all; for them, the "golden mean" of Aristotle is anathema, and anyone attempting to defend classicism as the undying exponent of measure and proportion is a philistine. It is, therefore, fortunate that men still exist who have the courage to throw down the gauntlet to the ultra-moderns, and who boldly state that, "at the risk of being styled philistine," they are for classicism in life and art as opposed to the countless schisms and upheavals that both art and life have witnessed during the past century and a half. From this point of view contemporary France must be studied to be properly evaluated.

The assertion is often made that the France of our day is wallowing in a veritable mire of nationalism. Now, there are nationalisms and nationalisms, and one of these nationalisms is chauvinism. It is undoubtedly true that there runs today in France, as there ran throughout the nineteenth century, a strong current of chauvinism. Some in France would make the silly claim that no culture exists on earth that can take rank beside the French. But it remains to be seen whether this is the spirit that really dominates France.

During the theatrical season of 1919-20, the Comédie-fran

See the work of Professor Irving Babbitt, passim, but more especially his Rousseau and Romanticism, Boston and New York, 1919.

çaise brought out a one-act play by the well-known writer and critic, Georges Bourdon, entitled Les Chaînes. Of the four characters of the "dramatis personae," only two are of importance, and the play soon simmers down into a duologue between these people-Robert Piérard, a "poilu" who has returned after four years of fighting, and his mistress, Lydia Vladimirovna. Robert has come back haunted by a vision of France triumphant and filled with an overpowering love for the country for which he has endured so much misery, and for which he had been ready at any moment during those four years to lay down his life. Lydia, however, a pacifist already before August, 1914, has been inspired with an allembracing pity by the horrors of those years of struggle, and has become an internationalist of the most rampant and militant kind. Here, then, is the duel. On the occasion of the "répétition générale" of Les Chaînes, the audience went into an uproar almost comparable to that which accompanied the first performance of Hugo's Hernani about a century ago. Every nationalistic utterance of Piérard (who, among other things, calls his "briquet Boche" unworthy "d'allumer un cigare français") was greeted with roars of disapproval by the pacifists, and every impassioned outburst of Lydia was hissed and howled down by the chauvinists. Bourdon, the author of the play, was forced to introduce numerous alterations before it could be made palatable to all members alike of the audiences of the Comédie-française; however, his play has since been published in its original form, and the playwright, in a vigorous preface, levels a scathing indictment at a thoughtless nation which, on the very morrow of a great triumph in its history, is unable to stomach outspoken discussion of its fundamental problems.

The crux of the whole matter, of course, is that it is useless to try to teach by employing extremes. Both a rabid chauvinism and an impracticable internationalism are bad. The Aristotelian mean would demand a nationalism tempered by a sympathy for all nations, a self-esteem that is moderated by the readiness to believe that good is to be

found in others. A nation that attempts to develop its own genius for good to the highest point will not refuse to accept such elements that, though entering it from other nations, may yet assist in this development. And such a nationalism is good, all the radicals to the contrary notwithstanding.

If we apply our criterion of art, and use France as the country of our experiment, we shall see the proof of the theorem just stated. For, in despite of the chauvinists and the ultra-ardent patriots who have tried to gain the ascendancy over their fellow-countrymen, France has been pursuing "the even tenor of her way," sympathetic towards the productions of other countries (though not always as receptive as she might be), and giving free play to the manifold forms of the native spirit that has been hers since the days of the Chanson de Roland. And no other nation on earth today can show such magnificent artistic strivings as those which are stirring in France. Whether in literature or in music or in painting or in sculpture-it is to France that we must offer profound thanks for assuring to art and artists the world over a safe domicile. Perhaps not since the end of the seventeenth century has the French drama flourished as it is flourishing today; and in the drama the "esprit gaulois," in all its manifestations, shines out most vividly. At the same time, fiction, poetry, criticism, all genres of literature find fertile soil in France and strike deep root there. It is no accident that Paris is the most cosmopolitan city on earth; for this very cosmopolitanism, advantageously offset by the indigenous vigor of the provinces, brings about the "golden mean" which is the artistic endeavor of contemporaneous France.