and movement of ideas, than when he is writing prose!  With a Frenchman of like stamp, it is just the reverse:  set him to write poetry, he is limited, artificial, and impotent; set him to write prose, he is free, natural, and effective.  The power of French literature is in its prose writers, the power of English literature is in its poets.  Nay, many of the celebrated French poets depend wholly for their fame upon the qualities of intelligence which they exhibit,—­qualities which are the distinctive support of prose; many of the celebrated English prose writers depend wholly for their fame upon the qualities of genius and imagination which they exhibit,—­qualities which are the distinctive support of poetry.

But as I have said, the qualities of genius are less transferable than the qualities of intelligence; less can be immediately learned and appropriated from their product; they are less direct and stringent intellectual agencies, though they may be more beautiful and divine.  Shakespeare and our great Elizabethan group were certainly more gifted writers than Corneille and his group; but what was the sequel to this great literature, this literature of genius, as we may call it, stretching from Marlowe to Milton?  What did it lead up to in English literature?  To our provincial and second-rate literature of the eighteenth century.  What, on the other hand, was the sequel to the literature of the French “great century,” to this literature of intelligence, as by comparison with our Elizabethan literature we may call it; what did it lead up to?  To the French literature of the eighteenth century, one of the most powerful and pervasive intellectual agencies that have ever existed,—­the greatest European force of the eighteenth century.  In science, again, we had Newton, a genius of the very highest order, a type of genius in science if ever there was one.  On the continent, as a sort of counterpart to Newton, there was Leibnitz; a man, it seems to me (though on these matters I speak under correction), of much less creative energy of genius, much less power of divination than Newton, but rather a man of admirable intelligence, a type of intelligence in science if ever there was one.  Well, and what did they each directly lead up to in science?  What was the intellectual generation that sprang from each of them?  I only repeat what the men of science have themselves pointed out.  The man of genius was continued by the English analysts of the eighteenth century, comparatively powerless and obscure followers of the renowned master.  The man of intelligence was continued by successors like Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, and Laplace, the greatest names in modern mathematics.

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

From ‘Culture and Anarchy’