The sentimental, the scholastic, the
speculative temperament may look before or after with longing or regret;
but that sanity of mind which is practical and productive must find its
most agreeable sensations in the data to which it is intimately and
inexorably related. The light upon Greek literature and art for which we
study Greek history, the light upon Roman history for which we study
Latin literature and art, are admirable to us in very exact proportion
as we study them for our ends. To every man and every nation that really
breathes, true vitality of soul depends upon saying to one's self, with
an emotion of equivalent intensity to the emotion of patriotism
celebrated in Scott's familiar lines, This is my own, my native era and
environment. Culture is impossible apart from cosmopolitanism, but
self-respect is more indispensable even than culture. French art alone
at the present time possesses absolute self-respect. It possesses this
quality in an eminent, in even an excessive degree; but it possesses it,
and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it
from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism.
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