The French are passionate and pleasure-loving; but they are above all
ascetic and laborious. And it is only out of a union of these supposedly
contradictory qualities that so fine a thing as the French temperament
could have come.
The industry of the French is universally celebrated; but many--even
among their own race--might ask what justifies the statement that they
are ascetic. The fact is, the word, which in reality indicates merely a
natural indifference to material well-being, has come, in modern speech,
to have a narrower and a penitential meaning. It is supposed to imply a
moral judgment, whereas it refers only to the attitude taken toward the
creature comforts. A man, or a nation, may wear homespun and live on
locusts, and yet be immoderately addicted to the lusts of the eye and
of the flesh. Asceticism means the serene ability to get on without
_comfort_, and comfort is an Anglo-Saxon invention which the Latins have
never really understood or felt the want of. What they need (and there
is no relation between the needs) is splendour on occasion, and beauty
and fulness of experience always. They do not care for the raw material
of sensation: food must be exquisitely cooked, emotion eloquently
expressed, desire emotionally heightened, every experience must be
transmuted into terms of beauty before it touches their imagination.
This fastidiousness, this tendency always to select and eliminate, and
refine their sensations, is united to that stoic indifference to dirt,
discomfort, bad air, damp, cold, and whatever Anglo-Saxons describe as
"inconvenience" in the general organisation of life, from the bathroom
to the banking system, which gives the French leisure of spirit for
enjoyment, and strength of heart for war. It enables, and has always
enabled, a people addicted to pleasure and unused to the discipline of
sport, to turn at a moment's notice into the greatest fighters that
history has known. All the French need to effect this transformation is
a "great argument;" once the spring of imagination touched, the body
obeys it with a dash and an endurance that no discipline, whether
Spartan or Prussian, ever succeeded in outdoing.
This fearless and joyful people, so ardently individual and so frankly
realistic, have another safeguard against excess in their almost Chinese
reverence for the ritual of manners. It is fortunate that they have
preserved, through every political revolution, this sense of the
importance of ceremony, for they are without the compensating respect
for the rights of others which eases intercourse in Anglo-Saxon
countries. Any view of the French that considers them as possessing the
instinct of liberty is misleading; what they have always understood is
equality--a different matter--and even that, as one of the most acute
among their recent political writers has said, "on condition that each
man commands." Their past history, and above all the geographical
situation which has conditioned it, must be kept in view to understand
the French indifference to the rights of others, and the corrective for
that indifference which their exquisite sense of sociability provides.
For over a thousand years France has had to maintain herself in the
teeth of an aggressive Europe, and to do so she has required a strong
central government and a sense of social discipline. Her great kings
were forever strengthening her by their resistance to the scattered
feudal opposition. Richelieu and Louis XIV finally broke this
opposition, and left France united against Europe, but deprived of the
sense of individual freedom, and needing to feel the pressure of an
"administration" on her neck. Imagination, intellectual energy, and
every form of artistic activity, found their outlet in social
intercourse, and France created polite society--one more work of art in
the long list of her creations.
The French conception of society is hierarchical and administrative, as
her government (under whatever name) has so long been. Every social
situation has its appropriate gestures and its almost fixed vocabulary,
and nothing, for example, is more puzzling to the French than the fact
that the English, a race whose civilisation they regard as in some
respects superior to their own, have only two or three ways of beginning
and ending their letters.
This ritual view of politeness makes it difficult of application in
undetermined cases, and therefore it often gets left out in emergencies.
The complaint of Anglo-Saxons that, in travelling in France, they see
little of the much-vaunted French courtesy, is not unjustified. The
French are not courteous from any vague sense of good-will toward
mankind; they regard politeness as a coin with which certain things are
obtainable, and being notably thrifty they are cautious about spending
it on strangers. But the disillusion of the traveller often arises in
part from his own ignorance of the most elementary French forms: of the
"Bon jour, Madame," on entering and leaving a shop, of the fact that a
visitor should always, on taking leave, be conducted to the outer door,
and a gentleman (of the old school) bidden not to remain uncovered when
he stops to speak to a lady in the street; of the "Merci" that should
follow every service, however slight, the "Après vous" which makes way,
with ceremonious insistence, for the person who happens to be entering a
door with one. In these respects, Anglo-Saxons, by their lack of "form"
(and their lack of perception), are perpetually giving unintentional
offence. But small social fashions are oddly different in different
countries and vary absurdly in succeeding generations. The French
gentleman does not uncover in a lift or in a museum, because he
considers these places as public as the street; he does not, after the
manner of the newest-of-all American, jump up like a Jack-in-the-box
(and remain standing at attention) every time the woman he is calling on
rises from her seat, because he considers such gymnastics fatal to
social ease; but he is shocked by the way in which Americans loll and
sprawl when they are seated, and equally bewildered by their excess of
ceremony on some occasions, and their startling familiarity on others.
Such misunderstandings are inevitable between people of different speech
and traditions. If French and Americans are both (as their newspapers
assure us) "democratic," it gives a notion of how much the term covers!
At any rate, in the older race there is a tradition of trained and
cultivated politeness that flowers, at its best, into a simplicity
democratic in the finest sense. Compared to it, our politeness is apt to
be rather stagy, as our ease is at times a little boorish.