involuntary Germanizing and vulgarizing of taste. FIRSTLY, the capacity for artistic emotion, for devotion to “form,” for which the expression, L’ART POUR L’ART, along with numerous others, has been invented: — such capacity has not been lacking in France for three centuries; and owing to its reverence for the “small number,” it has again and again made a sort of chamber music of literature possible, which is sought for in vain elsewhere in Europe. — The SECOND thing whereby the French can lay claim to a superiority over Europe is their ancient, many-sided, MORALISTIC culture, owing to which one finds on an average, even in the petty ROMANCIERS of the newspapers and chance BOULEVARDIERS DE PARIS, a psychological sensitiveness and curiosity, of which, for example, one has no conception (to say nothing of the thing itself!) in Germany.