This book is essentially a desultory book, the result of intermittent
observation, and often, no doubt, of rash assumption. Having been
written in Paris, at odd moments, during the last two years of the war,
it could hardly be more than a series of disjointed notes; and the
excuse for its publication lies in the fact that the very conditions
which made more consecutive work impossible also gave unprecedented
opportunities for quick notation.
The world since 1914 has been like a house on fire. All the lodgers are
on the stairs, in dishabille. Their doors are swinging wide, and one
gets glimpses of their furniture, revelations of their habits, and
whiffs of their cooking, that a life-time of ordinary intercourse would
not offer. Superficial differences vanish, and so (how much oftener) do
superficial resemblances; while deep unsuspected similarities and
disagreements, deep common attractions and repulsions, declare
themselves. It is of these fundamental substances that the new link
between France and America is made, and some reasons for the strength of
the link ought to be discoverable in the suddenly bared depths of the
French heart.
There are two ways of judging a foreign people: at first sight,
impressionistically, in the manner of the passing traveller; or after
residence among them, "soberly, advisedly," and with all the vain
precautions enjoined in another grave contingency.
Of the two ways, the first is, even in ordinary times, often the most
fruitful. The observer, if he has eyes and an imagination, will be
struck first by the superficial dissemblances, and they will give his
picture the sharp suggestiveness of a good caricature. If he settles
down among the objects of his study he will gradually become blunted to
these dissemblances, or, if he probes below the surface, he will find
them sprung from the same stem as many different-seeming characteristics
of his own people. A period of confusion must follow, in which he will
waver between contradictions, and his sharp outlines will become blurred
with what the painters call "repentances."
From this twilight it is hardly possible for any foreigner's judgment to
emerge again into full illumination. Race-differences strike so deep
that when one has triumphantly pulled up a specimen for examination one
finds only the crown in one's hand, and the tough root still clenched in
some crevice of prehistory. And as to race-resemblances, they are so
often most misleading when they seem most instructive that any attempt
to catch the likeness of another people by painting ourselves is never
quite successful. Indeed, once the observer has gone beyond the happy
stage when surface-differences have all their edge, his only chance of
getting anywhere near the truth is to try to keep to the traveller's
way, and still see his subject in the light of contrasts.
It is absurd for an Anglo-Saxon to say: "The Latin is this or that"
unless he makes the mental reservation, "or at least seems so to me";
but if this mental reservation is always implied, if it serves always as
the background of the picture, the features portrayed may escape
caricature and yet bear some resemblance to the original.
Lastly, the use of the labels "Anglo-Saxon" and "Latin," for purposes of
easy antithesis, must be defended and apologised for.
Such use of the two terms is open to the easy derision of the scholar.
Yet they are too convenient as symbols to be abandoned, and are safe
enough if, for instance, they are used simply as a loose way of drawing
a line between the peoples who drink spirits and those who drink wine,
between those whose social polity dates from the Forum, and those who
still feel and legislate in terms of the primæval forest.
This use of the terms is the more justifiable because one may safely
say that most things in a man's view of life depend on how many thousand
years ago his land was deforested. And when, as befell our forbears, men
whose blood is still full of murmurs of the Saxon Urwald and the forests
of Britain are plunged afresh into the wilderness of a new continent, it
is natural that in many respects they should be still farther removed
from those whose habits and opinions are threaded through and through
with Mediterranean culture and the civic discipline of Rome.
One can imagine the first Frenchman born into the world looking about
him confidently, and saying: "Here I am; and now, how am I to make the
most of it?"
The double sense of the fugacity of life, and of the many and durable
things that may be put into it, is manifest in every motion of the
French intelligence. Sooner than any other race the French have got rid
of bogies, have "cleared the mind of shams," and gone up to the Medusa
and the Sphinx with a cool eye and a penetrating question.
It is an immense advantage to have the primæval forest as far behind one
as these clear-headed children of the Roman forum and the Greek
amphitheatre; and even if they have lost something of the sensation
"felt in the blood and felt along the heart" with which our obscurer
past enriches us, it is assuredly more useful for them to note the
deficiency than for us to criticise it.
The French are the most human of the human race, the most completely
detached from the lingering spell of the ancient shadowy world in which
trees and animals talked to each other, and began the education of the
fumbling beast that was to deviate into Man. They have used their longer
experience and their keener senses for the joy and enlightenment of the
races still agrope for self-expression. The faults of France are the
faults inherent in an old and excessively self-contained civilisation;
her qualities are its qualities; and the most profitable way of trying
to interpret French ways and their meaning is to see how this long
inheritance may benefit a people which is still, intellectually and
artistically, in search of itself.