It may seem curious to have chosen the instance of the blackberry as the
text of a homily on "Reverence." Why not have substituted as a title
"Prejudice"--or simply "Stupidity"?
Well--"Prejudice" and "Reverence," oftener than one thinks, are
overlapping terms, and it seems fairer to choose the one of the two that
is not what the French call "péjorative." As for "Stupidity"--it must be
remembered that the French peasant thinks it incredibly stupid of us not
instantly to distinguish a mushroom from a toadstool, or any of the
intermediate forms of edible funguses from their death-dealing cousins!
Remember that we Americans deprive ourselves of many delicious dishes,
and occasionally hurry whole harmless families to the grave, through not
taking the trouble to examine and compare the small number of mushrooms
at our disposal; while the French avoid blackberries from a deep and
awesome conviction handed down from the night of history.
There is the key to my apologue. The French fear of the blackberry is
not due to any lack of curiosity about its qualities, but to respect for
some ancient sanction which prevents those qualities from being
investigated.
There is a reflex of negation, of rejection, at the very root of the
French character: an instinctive recoil from the new, the untasted, the
untested, like the retracting of an insect's feelers at contact with an
unfamiliar object; and no one can hope to understand the French without
bearing in mind that this unquestioning respect for rules of which the
meaning is forgotten acts as a perpetual necessary check to the
idol-breaking instinct of the freest minds in the world.
It may sound like a poor paradox to say that the French are traditional
about small things because they are so free about big ones. But the
history of human societies seems to show that if they are to endure they
must unconsciously secrete the corrective of their own highest
qualities.
"Reverence" may be the wasteful fear of an old taboo; but it is also
the sense of the preciousness of long accumulations of experience. The
quintessential is precious because whatever survives the close filtering
of time is likely to answer to some deep racial need, moral or æsthetic.
It is stupid to deprive one's self of blackberries for a reason one has
forgotten; but what should we say of a people who had torn down their
cathedrals when they ceased to feel the beauty of Gothic architecture,
as the French had ceased to feel it in the seventeenth century?
The instinct to preserve that which has been slow and difficult in the
making, that into which the long associations of the past are woven, is
a more constant element of progress than the Huguenot's idol-breaking
hammer.
Reverence and irreverence are both needed to help the world along, and
each is most needed where the other most naturally abounds.
In this respect France and America are in the same case. America,
because of her origin, tends to irreverence, impatience, to all sorts of
rash and contemptuous short-cuts; France, for the same reason, to
routine, precedent, tradition, the beaten path. Therefore it ought to
help each nation to apply to herself the corrective of the other's
example; and America can profit more by seeking to find out why France
is reverent, and what she reveres, than by trying to inoculate her with
a flippant disregard of her own past.
The first thing to do is to try to find out why a people, so free and
active of thought as the French, are so subject to traditions that have
lost their meaning.
The fundamental cause is probably geographical. We Americans have
hitherto been geographically self-contained, and until this war did away
with distances we were free to try any social and political experiments
we pleased, without, at any rate, weakening ourselves in relation to our
neighbours. To keep _them_ off we did not even have to have an army!
France, on the contrary, has had to fight for her existence ever since
she has had any. Of her, more than of any other great modern nation, it
may be said that from the start she has had, as Goethe puts it, to
"reconquer each day the liberty won the day before."
Again and again, in the past, she has seen her territory invaded, her
monuments destroyed, her institutions shattered; the ground on which the
future of the world is now being fought for is literally the same as
that Catalaunian plain (the "Camp de Châlons") on which Attila tried to
strangle France over fourteen hundred years ago. "In the year 450 all
Gaul was filled with terror; for the dreaded Attila, with a host of
strange figures, Huns, Tartars, Teutons, head of an empire of true
barbarians, drew near her borders. Barbarism ... now threatened the
world. It had levied a shameful tribute on Constantinople; it now
threatened the farthest West. If Gaul fell, Spain would fall, and
Italy, and Rome; and Attila would reign supreme, with an empire of
desolation, over the whole world."[A]
"The whole world" is a bigger place nowadays, and "farthest West" is at
the Golden Gate and not at the Pillars of Hercules; but otherwise might
we not be reading a leader in yesterday's paper?
Try to picture life under such continual menace of death, and see how in
an industrious, intelligent and beauty-loving race it must inevitably
produce two strong passions:
Pious love of every yard of the soil and every stone of the houses.
Intense dread lest any internal innovations should weaken the social
structure and open a door to the enemy.
There is nothing like a Revolution for making people conservative; that
is one of the reasons why, for instance, our Constitution, the child of
Revolution, is the most conservative in history. But, in other
respects, why should we Americans be conservative? To begin with, there
is not much as yet for us to "conserve" except a few root-principles of
conduct, social and political; and see how they spring up and dominate
every other interest in each national crisis!
In France it is different. The French have nearly two thousand years of
history and art and industry and social and political life to
"conserve"; that is another of the reasons why their intense
intellectual curiosity, their perpetual desire for the new thing, is
counteracted by a clinging to rules and precedents that have often
become meaningless.