The very significance--the note of ridicule and slight contempt--which
attaches to the word "culture" in America, would be quite unintelligible
to the French of any class. It is inconceivable to them that any one
should consider it superfluous, and even slightly comic, to know a great
deal, to know the best in every line, to know, in fact, as much as
possible.
There are ignorant and vulgar-minded people in France, as in other
countries; but instead of dragging the popular standard of culture down
to their own level, and ridiculing knowledge as the affectation of a
self-conscious clique, they are obliged to esteem it, to pretend to have
it, and to try and talk its language--which is not a bad way of
beginning to acquire it.
The odd Anglo-Saxon view that a love of beauty and an interest in ideas
imply effeminacy is quite unintelligible to the French; as
unintelligible as, for instance, the other notion that athletics make
men manly.
The French would say that athletics make men muscular, that education
makes them efficient, and that what makes them manly is their general
view of life, or, in other words, the completeness of their intellectual
honesty. And the conduct of Frenchmen during the last four and a half
years looks as though there were something to be said in favour of this
opinion.
The French are persuaded that the enjoyment of beauty and the exercise
of the critical intelligence are two of the things best worth living
for; and the notion that art and knowledge could ever, in a civilised
state, be regarded as negligible, or subordinated to merely material
interests, would never occur to them. It does not follow that everything
they create is beautiful, or that their ideas are always valuable or
interesting; what matters is the esteem in which _the whole race_ holds
ideas and their noble expression.
Theoretically, America holds art and ideas in esteem also; but she does
not, as a people, seek or desire them. This indifference is partly due
to awe: America has not lived long at her ease with beauty, like the old
European races whose art reaches back through an unbroken inheritance of
thousands of years of luxury and culture.
It would have been unreasonable to expect a new country, plunged in the
struggle with material necessities, to create an art of her own, or to
have acquired familiarity enough with the great arts of the past to feel
the need of them as promoters of enjoyment, or to understand their value
as refining and civilising influences. But America is now ripe to take
her share in the long inheritance of the races she descends from; and it
is a pity that just at this time the inclination of the immense majority
of Americans is setting away from all real education and real culture.
Intellectual honesty was never so little in respect in the United
States as in the years before the war. Every sham and substitute for
education and literature and art had steadily crowded out the real
thing. "Get-rich-quick" is a much less dangerous device than
"get-educated-quick," but the popularity of the first has led to the
attempt to realise the second. It is possible to get rich quickly in a
country full of money-earning chances; but there is no short-cut to
education.
Perhaps it has been an advantage to the French to have had none of our
chances of sudden enrichment. Perhaps the need of accumulating money
slowly leads people to be content with less, and consequently gives them
more leisure to care for other things. There could be no greater
error--as all Americans know--than to think that America's ability to
make money quickly has made her heedless of other values; but it has set
the pace for the pursuit of those other values, a pursuit that leads to
their being trampled underfoot in the general rush for them.
The French, at any rate, living more slowly, have learned the advantage
of living more deeply. In science, in art, in technical and industrial
training, they know the need of taking time, and the wastefulness of
superficiality. French university education is a long and stern process,
but it produces minds capable of more sustained effort and a larger
range of thought than our quick doses of learning. And this
strengthening discipline of the mind has preserved the passion for
intellectual honesty. No race is so little addicted to fads, for fads
are generally untested propositions. The French tendency is to test
every new theory, religious, artistic or scientific, in the light of
wide knowledge and experience, and to adopt it only if it stands this
scrutiny. It is for this reason that France has so few religions, so few
philosophies, and so few quick cures for mental or physical woes. And it
is for this reason also that there are so few advertisements in French
newspapers.
Nine-tenths of English and American advertising is based on the hope
that some one has found a way of doing something, or curing some
disease, or overcoming some infirmity, more quickly than by the accepted
methods. The French are too incredulous of short-cuts and nostrums to
turn to such promises with much hope. Their unshakeable intellectual
honesty and their sound intellectual training lead them to distrust any
way but the strait and narrow one when a difficulty is to be mastered
or an art acquired. They are above all democratic in their steady
conviction that there is no "royal road" to the worth-while things, and
that every yard of the Way to Wisdom has to be travelled on foot, and
not spun over in a joy-ride.
V