IV

It will be remembered that Paolo and Francesca are met by Dante just

beyond the fatal gateway, in what might be called the temperate zone of

the infernal regions. In the society of dangerously agreeable

fellow-sinners they "go forever on the accursed air," telling their

beautiful tale to sympathising visitors from above; and as, unlike the

majority of mortal lovers, they seem not to dread an eternity together,

and as they feel no exaggerated remorse for their sin, their punishment

is the mildest in the poet's list of expiations. There is all the width

of hell between the "Divine Comedy" and the "Scarlet Letter"!

Far different is the lot of the dishonest man of business and of the

traitor to the state. For these two offenders against the political and

social order the ultimate horrors of the pit are reserved. The

difference between their fate and that of the lovers is like that

between the lot of an aviator in an eternally invulnerable aeroplane

and of a stoker in the burning hold of an eternally torpedoed ship. On

this distinction between the two classes of offences--the antilegal and

the antisocial--the whole fabric of Latin morality is based.

The moralists and theologians of the Middle Ages, agitated as no other

age has been by the problem of death and the life after death, worked

out the great scheme of moral retribution on which the "Divine Comedy"

is based. This system of punishment is the result of a purely Latin and

social conception of order. In it individualism has no place. It is

based on the interests of the family, and of that larger family formed

by the commune or the state; and it distinguishes, implicitly if not

outspokenly, between the wrong that has far-reaching social consequences

and that which injures only one or two persons, or perhaps only the

moral sense of the offender.

The French have continued to accept this classification of offences.

They continue to think the sin against the public conscience far graver

than that against any private person. If in France there is a

distinction between private and business morality it is exactly the

reverse of that prevailing in America, and the French conscience rejects

with abhorrence the business complaisances which the rigidly virtuous

American too often regards as not immoral because not indictable.

"Business" tends everywhere to subdue its victims to what they work in,

and it is not meant to suggest that every French financier is

irreproachable, or that France has not had more than her share of

glaring financial scandals, but that among the real French,

uncontaminated by cosmopolitan influences, and especially in the class

of small shopkeepers and in the upper bourgeoisie, business probity is

higher, and above all _more sensitive_, than in America. It is not only,

or always, through indolence that France has remained backward in

certain forms of efficiency.

It would be misleading to conclude that this sensitiveness is based on

a respect for the rights of others. The French, it must be repeated, are

as a race indifferent to the rights of others. In the people and the

lower middle class (and how much higher up!) the traditional attitude

is: "Why should I do my neighbour a good turn when he may be getting the

better of me in some way I haven't found out?" The French are not

generous, and they are not trustful. They do not willingly credit their

neighbours with sentiments as disinterested as their own. But deep in

their very bones is something that was called "the point of honour" when

there was an aristocracy to lay exclusive claim to it, but that has, in

reality, always permeated the whole fabric of the race. It is just as

untranslatable as the "panache" into which it has flowered on so many

immortal battle-fields; and it regulates the conscience of one of the

most avaricious and least compassionate of peoples in their business

relations, as it regulated the conduct in the field of the knights of

chivalry and of the _parvenu_ heroes of Napoleon.

It all comes back, perhaps, to the extraordinarily true French sense of

values. As a people, the French have moral taste, and an ear for the

"still small voice"; they know what is worth while, and they despise

most of the benefits that accrue from a clever disregard of their own

standards. It has been the fashion among certain of their own critics to

inveigh against French "taste" and French "measure," and to celebrate

the supposed lack of these qualities in the Anglo-Saxon races as giving

a freer play to genius and a larger scope to all kinds of audacious

enterprise. It is evident that if a new continent is to be made

habitable, or a new prosody to be created, the business "point of

honour" in the one case, and the French Academy in the other, may

seriously hamper the task; but in the minor transactions of commerce and

culture perhaps such restrictive influences are worth more to

civilisation than a mediocre license.

V

Many years ago, during a voyage in the Mediterranean, the yacht on which

I was cruising was driven by bad weather to take shelter in a small

harbour on the Mainote coast. The country, at the time, was not

considered particularly safe, and before landing we consulted the

guide-book to see what reception we were likely to meet with.

This is the answer we found: "The inhabitants are brave, hospitable, and

generous, but fierce, treacherous, vindictive, and given to acts of

piracy, robbery, and wreckage."

Perhaps the foregoing attempt to define some attributes of the French

character may seem as incoherent as this summary. At any rate, the

endeavour to strike a balance between seemingly contradictory traits

disposes one to indulgence toward the anonymous student of the Mainotes.

No civilised race has gone as unerringly as the French toward the

natural sources of enjoyment; none has been so unashamed of instinct.

Yet none has been more enslaved by social conventions, small complicated

observances based on long-past conditions of life. No race has shown

more collective magnanimity on great occasions, more pettiness and

hardness in small dealings between individuals. Of no great people would

it be truer to say that, like the Mainote tribesmen, they are generous

and brave, yet fierce and vindictive. No people are more capable of

improvising greatness, yet more afraid of the least initiative in

ordinary matters. No people are more sceptical and more religious, more

realistic and more romantic, more irritable and nervous, yet more

capable of a long patience and a dauntless calm.

Such are the deductions which the foreign observer has made. It would

probably take kinship of blood to resolve them into a harmonious

interpretation of the French character.

All that the looker-on may venture is to say: Some of the

characteristics I have noted seem unamiable, others dangerously

disintegrating, others provokingly unprogressive. But when you have

summed up the whole you will be forced to conclude that as long as

enriching life is more than preserving it, as long as culture is

superior to business efficiency, as long as poetry and imagination and

reverence are higher and more precious elements of civilisation than

telephones or plumbing, as long as truth is more bracing than hypocrisy,

and wit more wholesome than dulness, so long will France remain greater

than any nation that has not her ideals.

Once again it must be repeated that the best answer to every criticism

of French weakness or French shortcomings is the conclusive one: _Look

at the results!_ Read her history, study her art, follow up the current

of her ideas; then look about you, and you will see that the whole world

is full of her spilt glory.