clearly what European culture has lost through that breaking down of tradition. Once for all, Voltaire was the last of the great dramatists who with Greek proportion controlled his manifold soul, equal even to the greatest storms of tragedy,--he was able to do what no German could, because the French nature is much nearer akin to the Greek than is the German; he was also the last great writer who in the wielding of prose possessed the Greek ear, Greek artistic conscientiousness, and Greek simplicity and grace; he was, also, one of the last men able to combine in himself the greatest freedom of mind and an absolutely unrevolutionary way of thinking without being inconsistent and cowardly. Since that time the modern spirit, with its restlessness and its hatred of moderation and restrictions, has obtained the mastery on all sides, let loose at first by the fever of revolution, and then once more putting a bridle on itself when it became filled with fear and horror at itself,--but it was the bridle of rigid logic, no longer that of artistic moderation. It is true that through that unfettering for a time we are able to enjoy the poetry of all nations, everything that has sprung up in hidden places, original, wild, wonderfully beautiful and gigantically irregular, from folk-songs up to the "great barbarian" Shakespeare; we taste the joys of local colour and costume, hitherto unknown to all artistic nations; we make liberal use of the "barbaric advantages" of our time, which Goethe accentuated against Schiller in order to place the formlessness of his _Faust_ in the most favourable light. But for how much longer? The encroaching flood of poetry of all styles and all nations _must_ gradually sweep away that magic garden upon which a quiet and hidden growth would still have been possible; all poets _must_ become experimenting imitators, daring copyists, however great their primary strength may be. Eventually, the public, which has lost the habit of seeing the actual artistic fact in the _controlling_ of depicting power, in the organising mastery over all art-means, _must_ come ever more and more to value power for power's sake, colour for colour's sake, idea for idea's sake, inspiration for inspiration's sake; accordingly it will not enjoy the elements and conditions of the work of art, unless _isolated,_ and finally will make the very natural demand that the artist _must_ deliver it to them isolated. True, the "senseless" fetters of Franco-Greek art have been thrown off, but unconsciously we have grown accustomed to consider all fetters, all restrictions as senseless;--and so art moves towards its liberation, but, in so doing, it touches--which is certainly highly edifying--upon all the phases of its beginning, its childhood, its incompleteness, its sometime boldness and excesses,--in perishing it interprets its origin and growth. One of the great ones, whose instinct may be relied on and whose theory lacked nothing but thirty