jects: as a teacher, he is there to transmit to his pupil the artistic and intellectual heritage of France. The sincerity with which he discharges himself of his task, the intellectual honesty with which he conducts his whole work, make up the moral atmosphere of the school, both collège and lycée. Efforts have been made, to be sure, to give distinctly moral instruction among the lower classes; but the pupil reaches the stage intended for doctrinal teaching only when, having passed the first part of his examination, he takes a philosophy course that constitutes a series of intellectual lessons on private and civic conduct. The baccalaureate has many times been attacked in France; but all examinations have their special vices, even in England. It would be, in my humble opinion, almost a disaster to abolish the second part of the baccalaureate; such as it is, it constitutes a serious study of the map of life for those who are old enough to profit by such a lay catechism.

Of course, in the primary school moral instruction is an essential element, but for the secondary teacher the manners and morals of his pupils, except within the walls of the college, do not concern him directly. If he saw two of his boys pummeling each other beautifully in the street he would probably not consider it his business to intervene.

If my analysis has been sound, it can be said that the English school, with the emphasis it puts upon character, tries to make the pupil the 'captain' of his soul; the French school, with the importance it attaches to the æsthetic and the intellectual values, tries rather to make him the artist of his soul. This does not mean that all English pupils are ignoramuses or Philistines, and still less that all French pupils are necessarily devoid of all morality.

Let me explain my meaning more precisely. Setting aside physical culture, education may be regarded under three different aspects - intellectual, æsthetic, and moral. Then one could say of the French school that the intellectual and aesthetic elements come together to the pot, while the moral element is a bad third. In the English school, on the contrary, it is the education of character that takes the first place; intellectual education comes second, and the aesthetic element, especially in boys' schools, lags far behind.

This distinction between the primacy accorded to the education of character by the English and the primacy accorded to the education of intelligence and æsthetic sense by the French goes very deep. Let me take for comparison the commonest possible example, the words that an English mother and a French mother respectively use to correct their children. What does the English mother say in such a situation? She says, 'Be good.' What does this 'Be good' mean? Surely it means, 'Be good because you can be.' It presupposes, in fact, that, having good intentions, the child can be good. In a slightly different form it is only the old categorical imperative of Kant, who said, 'You must be good because you can be.' It is an appeal purely and simply to the child's will.

Let us now take the appeal of the French mother. Does she say to her child, 'Be good'? Not at all; she says, 'Be wise, be reasonable' (Sois sage, sois raisonnable), an expression which she uses without any feeling for its original meaning, but which is really an appeal to the intelligence of the child to act according to the light of reason an appeal which at bottom is only the fundamental theory of Socrates, who said that one has only to see the truth in order to follow it. And if that does not succeed with the child, what does

she say then? 'You are not doing a very nice thing' - a discreet appeal to the child's aesthetic sense. If this has no effect, there remains a supreme appeal which, for my part, I find infinitely touching. She says to the child, 'You are hurting your mother's feelings' an appeal to the deepest reason of all, the reason of the heart.

Let me dwell a little on this cult of reason which, for more than two hundred years, has impregnated almost all French literature and has passed into the daily vocabulary so completely as to be part of the childish speech. According to Nisard, the great literature of the seventeenth century, with the exception of Molière, is entirely Cartesian. The eighteenth century was above all the age of reason. The French Revolution was a revolt and a triumph of reason against the control of authority, and since then reason has never ceased to mould all books, all social relations, even all conversation. But this infiltration of reason into all the nooks and corners of national life often does injury to the French in the eyes of foreign nations. These expressions, These expressions, sage, raisonnable, and so on, translated more or less literally into a foreign language, are necessarily colored by the dry and abstract sense which their equivalents have, derived as they often are from Latin. They lose that precious contact with daily life which they enjoy in France. Translated, they become, so to speak, devitalized. It is not surprising, then, if foreign critics impute to French ideas the dryness that is the principal attribute of their so-called equivalents in foreign languages. The most striking example is perhaps the French method of teaching morals, which, on this ground, is often unjustly criticized abroad. Now it can be praised or condemned for quite different reasons, but it cannot be accused of being abstract or impractical, for, as

its ill-informed critics do not realize, its vocabulary is essentially that of daily life.

But the evil goes further. One begins by condemning the dryness of misunderstood ideas, and then, on the same ground, blames those who put them forth. So a whole nation is condemned for faults that owe their existence only to mistakes made by a translator. The truth is exactly the opposite. Far from devitalizing the national life, these ideas of reason are constantly revivified in daily use. They attract to themselves all the vitality that in the Middle Ages was acquired by the theological terms of dogmas that were whole-heartedly believed in. They are no longer purely logical, but logical with components of emotion. They assume a moral and even pragmatic coloration.

A rapid examination of French schools shows how recent is the idea of considering the child as a child and not as an homunculus, and this even in the primary schools, which are most open to progress. It is true that as early as 1590 Montaigne wrote: 'Children's games are not merely games, but must be judged as their most serious actions.' Yet France had to wait until 1887 before M. Gréard instituted the first kindergarten in France that realized Montaigne's idea. Even then it often happened that the work was too ambitious. An effort was made to teach subjects as definite as history. Mme. Kergomard tells an amusing anecdote. A school-teacher was trying to give an historical sketch of Jeanne d'Arc to some children about four or five years old. Beginning with Jeanne as a shepherdess, she outlined her whole career from the siege of Orléans to the stake at Rouen. When she had finished the children did not seem to be satisfied. She put some questions to them, and one of them asked: 'What became of

1. The child is taught to express his ideas with clearness and with respect for his mother tongue. Accent, intonation, expression, are equally cultivated. The French know that the spoken word alone can, by its beauty and rhythm, evoke the images, sentiments, and thoughts contained in the written word.

2. Children are taught to admire poems and stories as works of art and to consider them as totalities. Details are studied carefully and obscurities are explained, but the part is always subordinated to the whole. The English are too much inclined to confine themselves to details, whether in discussing poetry, music, a picture, or Parisian costumes, and to praise or blame accordingly. To the French taste no detail seems beautiful if it does not harmonize with the whole. The Frenchman is concerned with the whole, the Englishman with the part, the nuance, the detail. French criticism is inclined to consider the positive side, the Englishman the negative side. The difference can be explained in a couplet that reads as follows:

The French rather see things in wholes;
The English rather see holes in things.

3. French children are taught to love their language and their literature, to see in them the most perfect forms and the finest expression of their national ideal. In that way their national pride is nourished.

4. This national pride is not the pride of a man who owns a famous picture simply because he is its possessor, but the feeling that their country is a part of themselves. They are proud of France, and they want France to be proud of them. When the hour of mobilization struck all the men and women of France rallied to the support of their endangered country with the feeling that their personal pride and honor were as much at stake as the pride and honor of the nation. The Englishman, if I am not mistaken, when he undertakes to defend his country, is moved by a sort of intimate obligation, of instinctive duty-another example of the categorical imperative. The Frenchman has the feeling that he is fighting for the whole of which he is an integral part and not merely a cipher or a cog.

5. The precious thing about French education is the sense of the whole in which the part is not lost. It is indeed the paradox that Christianity always tries to resolve the unity of the spiritual community and the infinite value of the human soul. Perhaps it is not for nothing that the king of France was called in the Middle Ages 'His Most Christian Majesty.'

In short, to speak clearly, to think straight, to love what is beautiful, to respect above all the beauty of the French language, to be proud of France, to have a sense of proportion, of what is becoming, of what constitutes the unity and the infinite variety of things, to cultivate a spirit of logic tempered by æsthetics and

emotion, to rise to a cult of humanity that goes beyond the limits of any particular creed-that is the purpose of French education, that is the atmosphere with which it succeeds, from the first days of school, in surrounding the child. Of the shortcomings of this kind of education I need not speak at length here. I need merely to point out its too exclusively literary character, the indifference it sometimes shows to facts, and in consequence its lack of precision, its tendency to be content with superficial impressions, its sometimes exaggerated taste for tradition which results, not exactly in an embargo on new ideas, but in a discrediting of new forms as they try to express themselves. It is in fact a

summary of the mentality of a man at the age of thirty.

Perhaps if the nation could double the number of its children it would be in a position to bring back into the speech and the life of the country that Celtic sense of mystery and naïve wonder, that adventurous taste for the unknown, that faculty of looking at the world with virgin eyes and not with eyes that reflect tradition, which are the normal birthright of every child. And the presence of two or three children at least in a family is necessary to create the atmosphere of spontaneity in which the spirit of the future can best be developed and realize the diverse forms of its ideal.

LORD CURZON, from his earliest days, was a man who aroused interest and curiosity. Men might like or dislike him, and it was quite possible for the same person to do both, but they could not leave him alone. As a result, much has been written about him without somehow giving any feeling of certitude that we really know the man. He was difficult to understand, perhaps even impossible, and yet, in some respects, quite easy. Milton says that 'nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right,' and throughout his career Lord Curzon possessed and displayed that frank recognition of

1 From the New Criterion (London literary quarterly), April

his own worth which never goes with a servile mind or inferior breeding. Contrary to the vulgar belief, he was neither conceited nor self-satisfied; it was merely that he possessed in an unusual degree self-knowledge and self-respect, and of this combination the man in the street is always a little suspiciousvagueness and illusion being ever instinctively at war with clarity and realism. Curzon (he's great enough for us to drop the prefixes which he sought so assiduously and wore with such magnificence) knew he was remarkably able; he liked high places, — the higher the better, — and it seemed to him quite natural, the average of his contemporaries being but mediocre,

that they should without hesitation and almost without exception - give place to him. Sometimes, having a great deal of human nature, if not a great deal of ability, they did hesitate, and then there was trouble. Then Curzon was baroque, and, almost to the very end of his career, baroque was disliked both by the cultivated and by the crowd. An example of his sympathy with literary rococo was a great and quite undeserved admiration for a poem like Tennyson's 'Blow, Bugle, Blow!' He should have been born a hundred years earlier or thirty years later, because baroque is once more coming into fashion! He was the great nobleman of the eighteenth century to his finger tips, and greatness, in the decorative and spectacular sense, is disliked by modern democracies. The crowd always has and always will distrust anything that does not conform to its own drab standards.

Curzon's inherent feeling of responsibility had deep and rich foundations, as history will one day show; men were overready - they always are to be annoyed and irritated by its outward manifestations, without pausing to consider its deeper consequences. Its greatest result was that, literally from cradle to coffin, it never permitted its possessor to offer anything less than his very best. Is that a little thing in these pinchbeck days? His will, an historic document of the first importance, will remain for all time to prove the truth of this submission.

I first came to know Curzon well when spending Christmas in the same country house in 1910. We had a great subject in common-India. My warm admiration for such servants of the Indian Empire as Lord Dufferin, Lord Lansdowne, and Sir Mortimer Durand aroused his interest and touched, as it happened, the matter that was nearest to his heart. There was also our

common enthusiasm for the gracious lady known as John Oliver Hobbes. Speaking with the highest admiration of her personality as known to the world, and of her published writings, Curzon said she was one of those rare natures that reserve their very best for their friends. He told of treasuring a large correspondence which they had kept up for many years, and said that, although most of the letters were too personal and too frank for publication, they were in many respects superior to anything she had written. Yet I think it was my enthusiasm for the great viceroys who preceded him that really won his approval. Nor did he hide under a cloak of mock modesty his view that, when the records came to be set forth, his own name and work in India would stand as high as any, not even perhaps excluding Warren Hastings and Dalhousie, for both of whom he had the greatest admiration. I was in no wise fatigued by a certitude which others might have found a little cock

sure.

When I enlarged on my sense of the distinguished position Lord Dufferin, in a very crowded career, found time to achieve as a writer and an orator, he made it plain that even there he felt himself no whit behind. Yet I think on this point he was perhaps a little wrong. Dufferin had an Irish heart, a quiet human sympathy, and an ardent nature that gave his eloquence a warmth and an appeal that was, as a rule, beyond Curzon's reach. Not on strictly classical lines the fine orator that Curzon was, Dufferin could make a greater popular appeal; what Curzon once described as 'Dufferin's courtly charm' was as irresistible in public as it was in private.

This meeting in due course led to my undertaking to collect and edit a volume of Curzon's speeches. I worked at it intermittently in the early part of