CONCLUSION 129 something equivalent to a marriage between Alcibiades and Saint Genevieve. The "Moyen-age," or, to speak more accurately, the XII, XIII, and XIV Centuries, were not in the least fantastic and freakish; this is the character merely of an occasional generation, such as that of Louis- Philippe. Neither were they mystic, in the present sense of that word. The architecture of those cen- turies grew, stone by stone, plan by plan, out of the most practical of reasons. In their sculpture there was nothing "naive" -the naivete is ours, when we so estimate that sculpture, which is far more realistic than our own; and if, persisting in the contrary opinion, we cling to the weird forms of the gargoyles, it may be said that, born of a symbolism akin to those of Egypt and Greece, they represent analogies equally ingen- ious and profound. In this period arose Thomism, lately called back into a position of honor to combat Positivism, and which realized so happy a harmony between Aristotelianism and Christian faith, between science and theology. In this period, too, were born the natural sciences, and, in the minds of its poets, evolved the laws by which our poetry lives today, tho.se rhythms which through Ronsard we still hear, that Rhyme which we gave to all Europe, and, ;it the same lime, thy groined vaultings, () Utile town of Saint - Denis, suzerain oriflamme, pilot-barque of France! All these were born, and grew, beneath the grave gaze of the same wisdom which, on the Ionian shores, was called Athene. Toward a new aspect of the same logic OUT own age already turns, since, having drunk of that antiquity by whose forces We ruleol KiU'ope a second time in the XVII Century; having drunk of the laiest of great foreign influence-, the Germanic, we .ire returning to reality and to 'he future. Thus, when each Greek city had absorbed the neighboring local cults its "foreign influences") and the Oriental cults the antiquity" of that day , the most beautiful of mythologies were formed. It i . al least, toward an art purely logical,
