Doubtless there is some measure of compensation for this willing narrowness of outlook, even though to-day one can hardly believe in Emerson’s neat pattern of balance, life appearing to us too confused and rich. Something of the French sureness, something of the French clarity, probably derives from the Frenchman’s persistent cultivation of his own garden and refusal to allow himself to be intrigued by the vast variety of exotic plants to be found elsewhere. He does know his own garden better than any of the rest of us know ours. And it is true that wide acquaintance with the varying minds of many different groups often leads to sterility, a poised inaction. Often, but not always. Here it seems to me that the French sacrifice a possible rare greatness to a moderate average of success. One admires French achievement for being so French, and yet, even while admiring, is faintly dissatisfied that it is not something other than that, and greater. One wearies of so much perfection. It does not seem an adequate interpretation of a chaotic world. French art is noble; yet it has never produced a Tolstoy, a Wagner, a Shakespeare, or a Michelangelo. It is not universal enough; it is too French. At an earlier day, when it was still but half formed, it came perhaps closest to such heroic stature in Rabelais. Probably more than any other one factor, it is their language that cuts the French off from other peoples and renders them so circumscribed. For it is, when spoken, very different from other languages. The whole system of voice production is different. A foreigner with no knowledge of any language save his own might mistake Spanish for Italian or Italian for Spanish, but he could not possibly mistake either for French. Its system of prosody is so different from that of other related languages that foreign poetry simply cannot be even approximately translated into French poetry. You can translate Shakespeare into German or into Italian and hear some echo of the original sonority--not into French. It is curious that the spoken language should have developed into this unique isolated instrument, since written French is extremely like any of the other Latin languages; but so it is.