II

In France it was otherwise.

Any one who really wants to understand France must bear in mind that

French culture is the most homogeneous and uninterrupted culture the

world has known. It is true that waves of invasion, just guessed at on

the verge of the historic period, must have swept away the astounding

race who adorned the caves of central and south-western France with

drawings matching those of the Japanese in suppleness and audacity; for

after that far-off flowering time the prehistorian comes on a period of

retrogression when sculptor and draughtsman fumbled clumsily with their

implements. The golden age of prehistory was over. Waves of cold,

invasions of savage hordes, all the violent convulsions of a world in

the making, swept over the earliest France and almost swept her away:

almost, but not quite. Soon, Phoenicia and Greece were to reach her from

the south, soon after that Rome was to stamp her once for all with the

stamp of Roman citizenship; and in the intervals between these events

the old, almost vanished culture doubtless lingered in the caves and

river-beds, handed on something of its great tradition, kept alive, in

the hidden nooks which cold and savages spared, little hearths of

artistic vitality.

It would appear that all the while people went on obscurely modelling

clay, carving horn and scratching drawings on the walls of just such

river-cliff houses as the peasants of Burgundy live in to this day, thus

nursing the faint embers of tradition that were to leap into beauty at

the touch of Greece and Rome. And even if it seems fanciful to believe

that the actual descendants of the cave-painters survived there can be

little doubt that their art, or its memory, was transmitted. If even

this link with the past seems too slight to be worth counting, the

straight descent of French civilisation from the ancient Mediterranean

culture which penetrated her by the Rhone and Spain and the Alps would

explain the ripeness and the continuity of her social life. By her

geographic position she seemed destined to centralise and cherish the

scattered fires of these old societies.

What is true of plastic art must of course be true of the general

culture it implies. The people of France went on living in France,

surviving cataclysms, perpetuating traditions, handing down and down and

down certain ways of ploughing and sowing and vine-dressing and dyeing

and tanning and working and hoarding, in the same valleys and on the

same river-banks as their immemorially remote predecessors.

Could anything be in greater contrast to the sudden uprooting of our

American ancestors and their violent cutting off from all their past,

when they set out to create a new state in a new hemisphere, in a new

climate, and out of new materials?

How little the old peasant-tradition of rural England lingered among the

uprooted colonists, who had to change so abruptly all their

agricultural and domestic habits, is shown in the prompt disappearance

from our impoverished American vocabulary of nearly all the old English

words relating to fields and woods. What has become, in America, of the

copse, the spinney, the hedgerow, the dale, the vale, the weald? We have

reduced all timber to "woods," and, even that plural appearing

excessive, one hears Americans who ought to know better speak of "_a_

woods," as though the familiar word has lost part of its meaning to

them.

This instance from our own past--to which might be added so many more

illustrating the deplorable loss of shades of difference in our blunted

speech--will help to show the contrast between a race that has had a

long continuance and a race that has had a recent beginning.

The English and Dutch settlers of North America no doubt carried many

things with them, such vital but imponderable things as prejudices,

principles, laws and beliefs. But even these were strangely transformed

when at length the colonists emerged again from the backwoods and the

bloody Indian warfare. The stern experience of the pioneer, the

necessity of rapid adaptation and of constantly improvised expedients,

formed a far different preparation from that dogged resistance to

invasion, that clinging to the same valley and the same river-cliff,

that have made the French, literally as well as figuratively, the most

conservative of western races. They also had passionate convictions and

fierce wants, like other peoples trying to organise themselves; but the

idea of leaving France in order to safeguard their convictions and

satisfy their wants would never have occurred to the French Huguenots if

the religious wars of the sixteenth century and the Revocation of the

Edict of Nantes had not made France literally uninhabitable. The English

Puritans left England only to gain greater liberty for the independent

development of their peculiar political and religious ideas; they were

not driven out with fire and sword as the Huguenots were driven from

France.

Why, then, one wonders, did the French people cling to France with such

tenacity--since none are more passionate in their convictions and

prejudices where anything short of emigration is concerned? They clung

to France because they loved it, and for such sentimental fidelity some

old underlying economic reason usually exists. The map of France, and

the climate of France, show what the reason was. France, as her

historians have long delighted to point out, is a country singularly

privileged in her formation, and in the latitude she occupies. She is

magnificently fed with great rivers, which flow where it is useful for

commerce and agriculture that they should flow. The lines of her

mountain-ranges formed natural ramparts in the past, and in the south

and south-west, serve as great wind-screens and sun-reflectors, creating

almost tropic corners under a temperate latitude. Her indented coast

opens into many capacious and sheltered harbours, and the course of the

Gulf Stream bends in to soften the rainy climate of her great western

peninsula, making Brittany almost as warm as the sunnier south.

Above all, the rich soil of France, so precious for wheat and

corn-growing, is the best soil in the world for the vine; and a people

can possess few more civilising assets than the ability to produce good

wine at home. It is the best safeguard against alcoholism, the best

incentive to temperance in the manly and grown-up sense of the word,

which means voluntary sobriety and not legally enforced abstinence.

All these gifts France had and the French intelligently cherished.

Between the Swiss snows and the icy winter fogs of Germany on the one

side, and the mists and rain and perpetual dampness of England on the

other, her cool mild sky shot with veiled sunlight overhung a land of

temperate beauty and temperate wealth. Farther north, man might grow

austere or gross, farther south idle and improvident: France offered the

happy mean which the poets are forever celebrating, and the French were

early aware that the poets were right.