INTRODUCTION xxi 



French book. Let those who know appraise the 

 style of modern French writers and assign their due. 

 place in the roll of fame to Gautier and Flaubert, 

 Zola and de Maupassant, Stendhal-Beyle and 

 Villiers de 1' Isle- Adam, France and Loti, Huysmans 

 and Barren, Mirbeau and Toulet, de Re*gnier and 

 Louys, Hermant and Renard, Boylesve and Colette- 

 Willy. But who shall appraise the gift to humanity 

 of this amazing literature of beauty and insight, of 

 scorn and pity, and of the humaner charity of laugh- 

 ter ? Not I ; but at the least I place it above all that 

 was ever written in the German language, far above 

 dyes and drugs and all the material progress of 

 Germany. 



So it happened that I was entirely out of sympathy 

 with the coldness to France and the strong pro- 

 German feeling that dominated English society and 

 English politics until the Boer War. This personal 

 feeling was increased as from 1893 onwards I began 

 to take my holidays in France, chiefly in provincial 

 France, and by the opinion I gained from talking 

 to people of all sorts and kinds in France that the 

 national desire of France was to be at peace with all 

 the world. In the early 'nineties I was writing 

 regularly for The Saturday Review, usually on 

 scientific subjects, and in February, 1896, the editor 

 published, under the title " A Biological View of Our 

 Foreign Policy," what I think is the only political 

 article that I have ever written. I refer to it because 

 Prince von Billow, in Imperial Germany, quotes from 

 it as that " famous article published in The Saturday 

 Review in the autumn of 1897," treating it as one of 

 the results of the introduction of the German Navy 



