The reasons I have just mentioned for the new political attitude of men of letters arise from the changes in their social status. Those I am about to mention arise from changes in the structure of their minds, in their literary desires, in their aesthetic cults, in their morality. These reasons seem to me even more worthy of the historian’s attention than those which have gone before. First of all, we have their Romanticism, taking that word to mean the desire which arose in the writers of the nineteenth century (but which has become greatly perfected in the last thirty years) to treat themes which lend themselves in a literary manner to striking attitudes. About 1890 the men of letters, especially in France and Italy, realized with astonishing astuteness that the doctrines of arbitrary authority, discipline, tradition, contempt for the spirit of liberty, assertion of the morality of war and slavery, were opportunities for haughty and rigid poses infinitely more likely to strike the imagination of simple souls than the sentimentalities of Liberalism and Humanitarianism. And as a matter of fact, the so-called reactionary doctrines do lend themselves to a pessimistic and contemptuous Romanticism which makes a far deeper impression on the common herd than enthusiastic and optimistic Romanticism. The pose of a Barrès or a d’Annunzio strikes naïve persons far more than that of a Michelet or a Proudhon. Moreover, these doctrines are to-day given forth as founded upon science, upon ‘pure experience’, and thereby permit a tone of calm inhumanity (the Romanticism of Positivism) whose effect on the herd has not escaped the sagacious eye of the man of letters. (Of course, I am only speaking of the elegant herd; Romantic pessimism has no value whatsoever for the people.)