Renascence did mean this, or half meant this; so disgusted was it with the cowled and tonsured Middle Age. And it died of it, this brilliant Ishmael died of it! it died of provoking a collision with the homely Isaac, righteousness. On the Continent came the Catholic re-action; in England, as we have said elsewhere, 'the great middle class, the kernel of the nation, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two hundred years.' After too much glorification of art, science, and culture, too little; after Rabelais, George Fox.
France, again, how often and how impetuously for France has the prayer gone up to Heaven: 'Oh that Ishmael might live before thee!' It is not enough perceived what it is which gives to France her attractiveness for everybody, and her success, and her repeated disasters. France is l'homme sensuel moyen, the average sensual man; Paris is the city of l'homme sensuel moyen. This has an attraction for all of us. We all have in us this homme sensuel, the man of the 'wishes of the flesh and of the current thoughts;' but we develop him under checks and doubts, and unsystematically and often grossly. France, on the other hand, develops him confidently and harmoniously. She makes the most of him, because she knows what she is about and keeps in a mean, as her climate is in a mean, and her situation. She does not develop him with madness, into a monstrosity, as the Italy of the Renascence did; she develops him equably and systematically. And hence she does not shock people with him but attracts them; she names herself the France of tact and measure, good sense, logic. In a way, this is true. As she develops the senses, the apparent self, all round, in good faith, without misgivings, without violence, she has much reasonableness and clearness in all her notions and arrangements; a sort of balance even in conduct; as much art and science, and it
