gentlemen of the period 132 ignored the real peasants who were the miserable slaves of the French landlords, and invented in their dramas, poems, and pictures sham shepherds and peasants, who were bundles of conscious unreality, inane imitations of the later classics. This literature and art would be indeed too contemptible Tor mention, if it were not a sign of a society rotting into revolution. The fine arts, which had in the end of the sixteenth century descended from the expression of the people’s faith and aspirations into that of the fancy, ingenuity, and whim of gifted individuals, fell lower still. They lost every atom of beauty and dignity, and retained little even of the ingenuity of the earlier Renaissance, becoming mere expensive and pretentious though carefully-finished upholstery, mere adjuncts of pomp and state, the expression of the insolence of riches and the complacency of respectability. Once again it must be said of the art, as of the general literature of the period, that no reasonable man could even bestow a passing glance at it but for the incurable corruption of society that it betokens.
Here, then, we have in France a contrast 133 to the state of things in England. No constitutionalism was here; nothing but an absolutism despised even by the privileged classes; a government unable to move in the direction of progress, even when, as in the case of Louis XVI, its head had a tendency to the intelligent conservatism above mentioned; bankrupt also amidst a people broken down, and a commerce hampered by the exactions of the hereditary privilege which was its sole support; discredited by unsuccessful wars, so that the door was shut to its ambition on that road; at home it had to face uneasily the new abstract ideas of liberty and the rights of man. These ideas were professed, indeed, by those who had an interest in preserving the existing state of things, but were listened to and pondered over by people who found that state of things unbearable.
The contrast between the condition of England and France, produced in either case by the unconscious development toward essential change, is