This anecdote may have seemed to take us a long way from France and
French ways; but it will help to show that, whereas the differences
between ourselves and the French are mostly on the surface, and our
feeling about the most important things is always the same, the
Germans, who seem less strange to many of us because we have been used
to them at home, differ from us totally in all of the important things.
Unfortunately surface differences--as the word implies--are the ones
that strike the eye first. If beauty is only skin deep, so too are some
of the greatest obstacles between peoples who were made to understand
each other. French habits and manners have their roots in a civilisation
so profoundly unlike ours--so much older, richer, more elaborate and
firmly crystallised--that French customs necessarily differ from ours
more than do those of more primitive races; and we must dig down to the
deep faiths and principles from which every race draws its enduring life
to find how like in fundamental things are the two people whose
destinies have been so widely different.
To help the American fresh from his own land to overcome these initial
difficulties, and to arrive at a quick comprehension of French
character, is one of the greatest services that Americans familiar with
France can render at this moment. The French cannot explain themselves
fully to foreigners, because they take for granted so many things that
are as unintelligible to us as, for instance, our eating corned-beef
hash for breakfast, or liking mustard with mutton, is to them. It takes
an outsider familiar with both races to explain away what may be called
the corned-beef-hash differences, and bring out the underlying
resemblances; and while actual contact in the trenches will in the long
run do this more surely than any amount of writing, it may nevertheless
be an advantage to the newcomer to arrive with a few first-aid hints in
his knapsack.
The most interesting and profitable way of studying the characteristics
of a different race is to pick out, among them, those in which our own
national character is most lacking. It is sometimes agreeable, but
seldom useful, to do the reverse; that is, to single out the weak
points of the other race, and brag of our own advantages. This game,
moreover, besides being unprofitable, is also sometimes dangerous.
Before calling a certain trait a weakness, and our own opposite trait a
superiority, we must be sure, as critics say, that we "know the
context"; we must be sure that what appears a defect in the character of
another race will not prove to be a strength when better understood.
Anyhow, it is safer as well as more interesting to choose the obviously
admirable characteristics first, and especially those which happen to be
more or less lacking in our own national make-up.
This is what I propose to attempt in these articles; and I have singled
out, as typically "French" in the best sense of that many-sided term,
the qualities of _taste_, _reverence_, _continuity_, and _intellectual
honesty_. We are a new people, a pioneer people, a people destined by
fate to break up new continents and experiment in new social
conditions; and therefore it may be useful to see what part is played in
the life of a nation by some of the very qualities we have had the least
time to acquire.