delicately than Taine himself the racial and
historic conditions affecting lyric poetry in
various periods.

The tendency at present, among critics of
poetry, is to distrust formulas and to keep
closely to ascertainable facts, and this tend-
ency is surely more scientific than the most
captivating theorizing. For one thing, while
recognizing, as the World War has freshly
compelled us to recognize, the actuality of
racial differences, we have grown sceptical
of the old endeavors to classify races in sim-
ple terms, as Madame de Staël attempted
to do, for instance, in her famous book on
Germany. We endeavor to distinguish, more
accurately than of old, between ethnic, lin-
guistic and political divisions of men. We
try to look behind the name at the thing it-
self: we remember that "Spanish" architec-
ture is Arabian, and a good deal of "Gothic"
is Northern French. We confess that we are
only at the beginning of a true science of
ethnology. "It is only in their degree of
physical and mental evolution that the races
of men are different," says Professor W. Z. Ripley
, author of Races in Europe. The late
Professor Josiah Royce admitted: "I am

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