I
Most people, in their infancy, have made bogeys out of sofa-pillows and
overcoats, and the imaginative child always comes to believe in the
reality of the bogey he has manufactured, and toward twilight grows
actually afraid of it.
When I was a little girl the name of Horace Greeley was potent in
American politics, and some irreverent tradesman had manufactured a pink
cardboard fan (on the "palmetto" model) which represented the
countenance of the venerable demagogue, and was surrounded with a white
silk fringe in imitation of his hoary hair and "chin-beard." A Horace
Greeley fan had long been knocking about our country-house, and was a
familiar object to me and to my little cousins, when one day it
occurred to us to make a bogey with my father's overcoat, put Mr.
Greeley's head on top, and seat him on the verandah near the front door.
When we were tired of playing we started to go in; but there on the
threshold in the dusk sat Mr. Greeley, suddenly transformed into an
animate and unknown creature, and dumb terror rooted us to the spot. Not
one of us had the courage to demolish that supernatural and malevolent
old man, or to dash past him into the house--and oh, the relief it was
when a big brother came along and reduced him into his constituent
parts!
Such inhibitions take the imagination far back to the childhood of the
human race, when terrors and taboos lurked in every bush; and wherever
the fear of the thing it has created survives in the mind of any
society, that society is still in its childhood. Intellectual honesty,
the courage to look at things as they are, is the first test of mental
maturity. Till a society ceases to be afraid of the truth in the domain
of ideas it is in leading-strings, morally and mentally.
The singular superiority of the French has always lain in their
intellectual courage. Other races and nations have been equally
distinguished for moral courage, but too often it has been placed at the
service of ideas they were afraid to analyse. The French always want to
find out first just what the conceptions they are fighting for are
worth. They will not be downed by their own bogeys, much less by anybody
else's. The young Oedipus of Ingres, calmly questioning the Sphinx, is
the very symbol of the French intelligence; and it is because of her
dauntless curiosity that France is of all countries the most _grown up_.
To persons unfamiliar with the real French character, this dauntless
curiosity is supposed to apply itself chiefly to spying out and
discussing acts and emotions which the Anglo-Saxon veils from publicity.
The French view of what are euphemistically called "the facts of life"
(as the Greeks called the Furies the "Amiable Ones") is often spoken of
as though it were inconsistent with those necessary elements of any
ordered society that we call purity and morality. Because the French
talk and write freely about subjects and situations that Anglo-Saxons,
for the last hundred years (not before), have agreed not to mention, it
is assumed that the French gloat over such subjects and situations. As a
matter of fact, they simply take them for granted, as part of the great
parti-coloured business of life, and no more gloat over them (in the
morbid introspective sense) than they do over their morning coffee.
To be sure, they do "gloat" over their coffee in a sense unknown to
consumers of liquid chicory and health-beverages: they "gloat," in fact,
over everything that tastes good, looks beautiful, or appeals to any one
of their acute and highly-trained five senses. But they do this with no
sense of greediness or shame or immodesty, and consequently without
morbidness or waste of time. They take the normal pleasures, physical
and æsthetic, "in their stride," so to speak, as wholesome, nourishing,
and necessary for the background of a laborious life of business or
study, and not as subjects for nasty prying or morbid self-examination.
It is necessary for any one who would judge France fairly to get this
fundamental difference fixed in his mind before forming an opinion of
the illustrated "funny papers," of the fiction, the theatres, the whole
trend of French humour, irony and sentiment. Well-meaning people waste
much time in seeking to prove that Gallic and Anglo-Saxon minds take the
same view of such matters, and that the _Vie Parisienne_, the "little
theatres" and the light fiction of France do not represent the average
French temperament, but are a vile attempt (by foreign agents) to cater
to foreign pornography.
The French have always been a gay and free and Rabelaisian people. They
attach a great deal of importance to love-making, but they consider it
more simply and less solemnly than we. They are cool, resourceful and
merry, crack jokes about the relations between the sexes, and are used
to the frank discussion of what some one tactfully called "the
operations of Nature." They are puzzled by our queer fear of our own
bodies, and accustomed to relate openly and unapologetically the
anecdotes that Anglo-Saxons snicker over privately and with apologies.
They define pornography as a taste for the nasty, and not as an interest
in the natural. But nothing would be more mistaken than to take this as
proving that family feeling is less deep and tender in France than
elsewhere, or the conception of the social virtues different. It means
merely that the French are not frightened by the names of things; that
they dislike what we call coarseness much less than what they call
pruriency; and that they have too great a faith in the fundamental
life-forces, and too much tenderness for the young mother suckling her
baby, for Daphnis and Chloe in the orchard at dawn, and Philemon and
Baucis on their threshold at sunset, not to wonder at our being ashamed
of any of the processes of nature.
It is convenient to put the relations between the sexes first on the
list of subjects about which the French and Anglo-Saxon races think and
behave differently, because it is the difference which strikes the
superficial observer first, and which has been most used in the attempt
to prove the superior purity of Anglo-Saxon morals. But French
outspokenness would not be interesting if it applied only to
sex-questions, for savages are outspoken about those, too. The French
attitude in that respect is interesting only as typical of the general
intellectual fearlessness of France. She is not afraid of anything that
concerns mankind, neither of pleasure and mirth nor of exultations and
agonies.
The French are intrinsically a tough race: they are careless of pain,
unafraid of risks, contemptuous of precautions. They have no idea that
life can be evaded, and if it could be they would not try to evade it.
They regard it as a gift so magnificent that they are ready to take the
bad weather with the fine rather than miss a day of the golden year.
It is this innate intellectual honesty, the specific distinction of the
race, which has made it the torch-bearer of the world. Bishop Butler's
celebrated: "Things are as they are and will be as they will be" might
have been the motto of the French intellect. It is an axiom that makes
dull minds droop, but exalts the brain imaginative enough to be amazed
before the marvel of things as they are.