They will return to it,
perhaps, under the pressure of war waged by some not Christian
civilization, but they will return. In the meanwhile, of those acts not
final, yet of immediate necessity in the task of establishing unity, is
the act of introducing one national soul to another.
Now this is best accomplished in a certain way which I will describe.
You will take that part in the letters of a nation which you maturely
judge most or best to reflect the full national soul, with its
qualities, careless of whether these be great or little; you will take
such a work as reproduces for you as you read it, not only in its
sentiment, but in its very rhythm, the stuff and colour of the nation;
this you will present to the foreigner, who cannot understand. His
efforts must be laborious, very often unfruitful, but where it is
fruitful it will be of a decisive effect.
Thus let anyone take some one of the immortal things that Racine wrote
and show them to an Englishman. He will hardly ever be able to make
anything of it at first. Here and there some violently emotional passage
may faintly touch him, but the mass of the verse will seem to him dead.
Now, if by constant reading, by association with those who know what
Racine is, he at last sees him--and these changes in the mind come very
suddenly--he will see into the soul of Gaul. For the converse task,
to-day not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of presenting
England to the French intelligence--or, indeed, to any other alien
intelligence--you may choose the play "King Lear.
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