Victory under arms conferring the right to command in the intellectual order--that is professed to-day by French thinkers! One remembers the Roman writers, from whom these thinkers claim descent, who took as the leader of their minds Greece, which had been conquered by force of arms; one also remembers the German teachers of 1871 who also claimed intellectual hegemony for their ‘victorious’ nation, which they too claimed as ‘the guardian of civilization’.[188] When this manifesto was published, somewhat similar reflections seem to have occurred to the mind of one of our great writers. In a letter concerning this document,[189] Marcel Proust deplores the proclamation of ‘a kind of “Frankreich ueber alles”, the policeman of the literature of all nations.’ As a true priest of the mind, he goes on: ‘Why take this peremptory attitude towards other countries in such matters as literature, where a man only reigns by persuasion?’ I am happy to take this opportunity to do homage to this true ‘clerk’, and to say that I know that there are still other writers in France beside those who only believe in the virtue of cold steel. Note Q (Page 138) _Those who base their judgments on their artistic sensibilities._ This artistic origin of the political attitudes of so many men of letters has been pointed out with great ability by M. Daniel Halévy in the case of M. Maurras. In an old article (_La Grande France_, 1902) M. Halévy quotes this beautiful passage from M. Maurras’s _Anthinéa_ on the walk of women carrying a clay pot balanced on their heads:-- ‘The bosom swells and is modelled like a vase, it opens like a flower. The neck settles, the loins strain nervously. Their walk becomes graver and more supple, is measured with an inestimable sobriety; it unrolls in the mind like a piece of music. This living pillar moves, glides, advances, without being interrupted by any sudden jerk or any break. It follows the undulations of the ground, adapts itself to the slightest rises, and thus resembles the stem of a beautiful young tree set free from its roots, moving over the ground without leaving it for a fraction of an inch. An infinite multitude of half-pauses make the jerks imperceptible, or one is only conscious of their succession, a continual harmony which leaves its curves in the air....’ M. Daniel Halévy adds:-- ‘I quote the whole passage because it gives the very idea of Charles Maurras. For his classical way of thought, things are beautiful, not from the shocks of feeling and passion, but from the form and rhythm which give them continuity, or rather existence in the human sense of the word. M. Charles Maurras applies this taste for form to the study of history, and that is the whole of his “sociology”.’