List for intellectual and artistic prowess the number of French names would be out of all proportion to the size and wealth of the country.  Furthermore, it is this traditional basis that has kept French culture up to a certain level of excellence.  France has never been without standards.  Therefore it has been to France that the rest of Europe has always looked for some measure of fine thinking, delicate feeling, and general amenity.  Without her conventionality it may be doubted whether France could have remained so long the centre of civilization.

One commonly deplored consequence of French conventionality is that it makes Frenchmen incapable of well understanding or appreciating anything foreign, or of judging acutely between foreigners and themselves.  But is even this a serious misfortune?  French critics can discriminate between French productions with unsurpassable delicacy and precision.  As for the spring of French inspiration, it is so copious that the creative genius of that favoured race seems to need nothing more from outside than an occasional new point of departure, to the grasping of which its imperfect knowledge and unprehensile taste are adequate.  Indeed, the rare endeavours of Frenchmen seriously to cultivate alien methods and points of view more often than not end in disaster.  Shortly before the war a school of particularly intelligent and open-minded writers discovered, what we in England are only too familiar with, the aesthetic possibilities of charity and the beauty of being good.  Dostoevsky began it.  First, they ran after him; then, setting themselves, as well as they could, to study Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, in translations, they soon plunged miserably into a morass of sentimentality.  A gifted novelist and a charming poet, Charles-Louis Philippe and Vildrac, were amongst the first to fall in.  A Wordsworth can moralize, a Sterne can pipe his eye, with impunity; but late eighteenth and early twentieth-century literature prove how dangerous it is for a French author to trespass in pursuit of motives beyond the limits of his tradition.

The reason why Frenchmen are incompetent to judge or appreciate what is not French is that they apply to all things the French measure.  They have no universal standards, and, what is worse, they take for such their own conventions.  To read a French critic on Shakespeare or Ibsen or Dostoevsky or Goethe is generally a humiliating experience for one who loves France.  As often as not you will find that he is depending on a translation.  It seems never to strike him that there is something ludicrous in appraising nicely the qualities of a work written in a language one cannot understand.  Rather it seems to him ludicrous that books should be written in any language but his own; and, until they are translated, for him they do not exist.  Many years ago, at Cambridge, I remember having a sharpish altercation with Rupert Brooke, who had taken it upon himself