1. VARIETY IN BRITAIN 421
2. VARIETY IN FRANCE 432
EPILOGUE 445
PART I
EDUCATION
CHAPTER I
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
[Sidenote: Not much formal Physical Training in England.]
[Sidenote: English and Greeks.]
In England there is not much physical education of a formal and
methodical nature; the English are not remarkable for a love of
gymnastic exercises, and they seldom train or develop the body
scientifically except when they prepare themselves for boat races.
In saying this I leave out of consideration the small class of
professional athletes, which is not numerous enough to affect the
nation generally. It has been said, and by a French author, that of all
modern races the English come nearest, in the physical life, to the
existence of the ancient Greeks. The difference, however, between the
modern English and the Greeks of classic antiquity is mainly in this,
that the Greeks were a systematically trained people and the English
are not.
[Sidenote: Activity of the English.]
[Sidenote: Their irregular Training.]
[Sidenote: Advantage of Amusements.]
Still, the English are a remarkably active people, and they owe their
activity chiefly to a love of rural amusements and of the open air.
Thus, in an informal manner, they get a kind of unscientific training
which is of immense advantage to their health and vigour. A criticism
of this irregular training (which is not mine, as it comes from a
scientific gymnast) affirms that it develops the legs better than
the arms and chest, and that although it increases strength it does
not much cultivate suppleness. According to scientific opinion, more
might be made of the English people if they took as much interest in
gymnastic training as they do in their active amusements. The advantage
of these amusements is that they divert the mind, and so in turn have a
healthy influence on the body, independently of muscular exertion.
[Sidenote: Professor Clifford.]
There are exceptions to the usual English indifference about
gymnastics, and it may happen that the lover of gymnastics cares
less than others for the usual English sports. This was the case
with Professor Clifford. His biographer says: “At school he showed
little taste for the ordinary games, but made himself proficient in
gymnastics; a pursuit which at Cambridge he carried out, in fellowship
with a few like-minded companions,[2] not only into the performance
of the most difficult feats habitual to the gymnasium, but into the
invention of other new and adventurous ones. His accomplishments of
this kind were the only ones in which he ever manifested pride.”
[Sidenote: Choice of Physical Pursuits.]
[Sidenote: Gladstone.]
[Sidenote: Wordsworth. Scott. Byron.]
[Sidenote: Keats.]
[Sidenote: Shelley.]
[Sidenote: Tyndall.]
[Sidenote: Millais. Bright.]
[Sidenote: Trollope.]
[Sidenote: Palmerston.]
Many distinguished Englishmen have had some favourite physical
amusement that we associate with their names. It is almost a part of an
Englishman’s nature to select a physical pursuit and make it especially
his own. His countrymen like him the better for having a taste of this
kind. Mr. Gladstone’s practised skill in tree-felling is a help to his
popularity. The readers of Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron, all remember
that the first was a pedestrian, the second a keen sportsman, and the
third the best swimmer of his time. The readers of Keats are sorry
for the ill-health that spoiled the latter years of his short life,
but they remember with satisfaction that the ethereal poet was once
muscular enough to administer “a severe drubbing to a butcher whom he
caught beating a little boy, to the enthusiastic admiration of a crowd
of bystanders.” Shelley’s name is associated for ever with his love
of boating and its disastrous ending. In our own day, when we learn
something about the private life of our celebrated contemporaries,
we have a satisfaction in knowing that they enjoy some physical
recreation, as, for example, that Tyndall is a mountaineer, Millais a
grouse-shooter, John Bright a salmon-fisher; and it is characteristic
of the inveteracy of English physical habits that Mr. Fawcett should
have gone on riding and skating after he was blind, and that Anthony
Trollope was still passionately fond of fox-hunting when he was old
and heavy and could hardly see. The English have such a respect for
physical energy that they still remember with pleasure how Palmerston
hunted in his old age, and how, almost to the last, he would go down
to Epsom on horseback. There was a little difficulty about getting
him into the saddle, but, once there, he was safe till the end of his
journey.
[Sidenote: Cricket and Boating.]
[Sidenote: Cricket in France.]
[Sidenote: French _Lycées_.]
Cricket and boating are the trainers of English youth, and foreigners,
when they visit Eton, are astonished at the important place assigned to
these two pursuits. It is always amusing to an Englishman to read the
descriptions of the national game by which French writers attempt (of
course without success) to make it intelligible to their countrymen.
These descriptions are generally erroneous, occasionally correct, but
invariably as much from the outside as if the writer were describing
the gambols of strange animals. Whilst English and French have
billiards and many other games in common, cricket remains exclusively
and peculiarly English. It cannot be acclimatised in France. I believe
that some feeble attempts have been made, but without result. The game
could not be played in the gravelled courts of French _lycées_, under
a hundred windows, but this difficulty would be overcome if there
were any natural genius for cricket in the French race. A few of the
_lycées_ are in large towns, and far from possible cricket fields;
the majority are in small towns, not a mile from pasture and meadow.
The French seem to believe that all English youths delight in the
national game, but that is a foreigner’s generalisation. Some English
boys dislike it, and play only to please others, or because it is the
fashion amongst boys. However, most English boys have gone through the
training of cricket, though many give it up when they abandon Latin. It
is useful because it does not exercise the legs only, like walking, or
the arms and chest only, like rowing, but all the body.
[Sidenote: Tennis.]
[Sidenote: French Affinity for Gymnastics.]
[Sidenote: Military Drill.]
[Sidenote: Consequences of Neglect.]
[Sidenote: Military Exercises.]
[Sidenote: Duelling.]
The French would have had a tolerable equivalent for cricket if they
had kept up their own fine national game of tennis. Unfortunately the
costliness of tennis-courts has caused the abandonment of the game, and
this is the more to be regretted that the French system of education
in large public schools might have harmonised so conveniently with it.
Field tennis, the parent of modern English lawn tennis, might have been
kept up in the country. The present French tendency in exercises is
towards gymnastics and military drill. No one who has observed the two
peoples closely can doubt that the French have more natural affinity
for gymnastics than the English. This may be due in part to their less
lively interest in physical amusements. Not being so ready to amuse
themselves freely in active pastimes, they are more ready to accept
gymnastics as a discipline.[3] As for military drill, it is more and
more imposed upon the French by the military situation in Europe, so
that they would practise it whether they liked it or not; still, it
is certain that they have a natural liking and aptitude for military
exercises. The authorities who have directed public education in France
in the middle of the nineteenth century have treated physical exercise
with such complete neglect that a reaction is now setting in. It may be
doubted whether in any age or country the brain has been worked with
such complete disregard of the body as in France from 1830 to 1870. An
observer may see the consequences of that absurd education even now
in the stiff elderly men who never knew what activity is, the men who
cannot get into a boat quickly or safely, who never mounted a horse,
and who take curious precautions in getting down from a carriage.
The present generation is more active--the effects of gymnastics are
beginning to tell. The comprehensive conscription, which imposes
military exercises on almost every valid citizen, has also been, and
will be still more in the future, a great bodily benefit to the French
race. The maintenance of duelling in France, after its abandonment in
England, gives the French a certain advantage in the habitual practice
of fencing, which is learned seriously, as men only learn those things
on which living or life may one day depend. I need not expatiate on the
merits of fencing as an exercise. It increases both strength and grace,
as it is at the same time extremely fatiguing and exacting with regard
to posture and attitude. I am inclined to believe that fencing is the
finest exercise known.
[Sidenote: Pedestrianism.]
[Sidenote: Englishwomen and Frenchwomen.]
[Sidenote: French Peasants.]
[Sidenote: Riding on Horseback.]
[Sidenote: Cavalry and Artillery.]
[Sidenote: English Hunting.]
In ordinary pedestrianism there is not much difference between the two
countries except in the female sex, and there it is strongly marked.
Englishwomen who have leisure walk perhaps three or four times as much
as Frenchwomen in the same position. Young men in both countries may
be equally good walkers if they have the advantage of rural life. The
French peasants are slow pedestrians but remarkably enduring; they will
go forty or fifty miles in the twenty-four hours, being out all night,
and think nothing of it. Riding on horseback is much more practised in
England; the economy of the carriage, by which one horse can transport
several persons, and the excellent modern roads, had almost killed
equestrianism in France, but now there are some signs of a revival.
Here, too, the large national army has an excellent influence. Great
numbers of Frenchmen learn to ride in the cavalry and artillery, and
the captains of infantry are all mounted. There is not, in France, the
most valuable training of all, that of riding to hounds in the English
sense; and therefore it is probable that England could produce a far
greater number of horsemen able to leap well. As for style in riding,
that is a matter of taste, and national ideas differ. The French style
is derived chiefly from military examples, the English indirectly from
the hunting-field.
[Sidenote: False Ideals of Dignity.]
[Sidenote: French Ecclesiastics.]
[Sidenote: Exercises permitted to English Clergymen.]
[Sidenote: French Notions of Dignity.]
False ideals of dignity are very inimical to effective bodily exercise.
A foolish notion that it is more dignified to be seen in a carriage
than on horseback, has deprived all French ecclesiastics of the use
of the saddle. Their modes of locomotion are settled by a fixed rule;
they may walk (generally with the breviary in their hands, which they
read whilst walking), and the poor curé may now keep a small pony
carriage. A bishop must always ride in a close carriage drawn by a
pair of horses. A curé may drive himself; a bishop may not drive. In
England these rules are not so strict, as the clergy are not so widely
different from the laity. The English clergyman may ride on horseback
and be active in other ways; still, there is a prejudice even in
England against too much healthy activity in clergymen. Being on a
visit to a vicar in the north of England, I found that he possessed a
complete apparatus for archery. “That is a good thing for you,” I said;
but he looked melancholy, and answered, “It would be if my parishioners
permitted the use of it, but they talked so much that I was forced to
give up archery. They considered it unbecoming in a clergyman, who
ought to be attending to his parish. Had I spent the same time over
a decanter of port wine in my dining-room they would have raised no
objection.” The same clergyman was fond of leaping, but indulged that
passion in secret, as if it had been a sin. Still, these prejudices
are stronger in France. I never saw a French priest shoot, or hunt,
or row in a boat. It cannot be the cruelty of shooting and hunting
which prevents him, as he is allowed to fish with hooks; it is simply
the activity of the manlier sports that excites disapprobation. All
Frenchmen who care for their dignity avoid velocipedes of all kinds,
which are used only by young men, who are generally in the middle
class, such as clerks and shopkeepers’ assistants. In England, where
the prejudice against activity is not so strong, velocipedes are often
used by rather elderly gentlemen, who are not ashamed of being active.
[Sidenote: French Prejudice against Boating.]
[Sidenote: Present State of Boating in France.]
There was formerly an intense prejudice against boating in France. It
was considered low, and even immoral, being inextricably associated
in the popular mind with excursions in the worst possible feminine
society. Nobody in those days understood that sailing and rowing could
both be refined and pure pleasures. The first book published on amateur
boating in France appeared to authorise these prejudices by its own
intense vulgarity. Since then boating has gained in dignity, and there
are now regattas at most of the river-side towns, with beautifully
constructed boats and perfectly respectable crews. The whole tone of
the pursuit has changed; it has got rid of vulgar pleasantry, and has
become scientific, an improvement greatly helped by the excellent
scientific review _Le Yacht_. Many French boating men have been led
by their pursuit to a thorough study of construction and nautical
qualities. The only objection I have to make to French boating as
it exists to-day, is that it seems too dependent on the stimulus of
regattas, and carried on too exclusively with that object. The best
lover of boating follows it for itself, as a lover of reading does not
read only for a degree.
[Sidenote: Taste for Boating limited in France.]
[Sidenote: French Regatta Clubs.]
[Sidenote: The Nautical Passion.]
Although the French are now little, if at all, inferior to the English
either in rowing or sailing, the taste for these pursuits is limited
to comparatively few persons in France. If such a marvellously perfect
river as the Saône existed in England it would swarm with pleasure
craft of all kinds, but as it happens to be in France you may travel
upon it all day without seeing one white sail. There are, however,
three or four regatta clubs with excellent boats. I know one Frenchman
who delights in possessing sailing vessels, but never uses them, and
I remember a yachtsman whose ship floated idly on the water from one
regatta to another. Now and then you meet with the genuine nautical
passion in all its strength, with the consequence that it is perfectly
unintelligible to all wise and dignified citizens.
[Sidenote: Swimming.]
[Sidenote: Prevalence of Swimming in France.]
[Sidenote: Swimming in England.]
[Sidenote: Exceptional Excellence.]
[Sidenote: Low Average.]
Swimming is much more cultivated and practised in France than in
England. This is probably due in some degree to the hot French summers,
which warm the water so thoroughly that one may remain in it a long
time without chill. All along the Saône the boys learn swimming at a
very early age. It is the boast of the village of St. Laurent, opposite
Mâcon, that every male can swim. Ask one of the villagers if he is a
swimmer, and he does not answer “Yes,” but smiles significantly, and
says, “_Je suis de St. Laurent_.” Wherever a river provides a deep pool
it is used as a swimming bath. In England the accomplishment is much
more rare, and is usually confined to the middle and upper classes,
especially in the rural districts. When we read in the newspaper that
an English boat has capsized we always expect to find that most of
the occupants were unable to swim and sank to rise no more. Amongst
English sailors the art seems to be nearly unknown, and they have
even a prejudice against it as tending to prolong the agonies of
drowning. In the female sex, also, France takes the lead by the number
of ladies who can swim a little, though they have not a Miss Beckwith
amongst them, any more than Frenchmen can produce a Captain Webb.
It is characteristic of England, with her vigorous race, to produce
the finest and strongest swimmers, though her general average is
so deplorably low. One English family may be long remembered, that
of Vice-Chancellor Shadwell, who progressed grandly in the Thames,
followed by his nine sons.
[Sidenote: Dancing.]
Dancing used to be an essentially French exercise, and as it was
much practised in the open air it was conducive to healthy activity.
The best kind of dancing was that which used to bring together a few
peasant families in the summer evenings. The reader observes that I am
speaking of the past. In the present day dancing of that kind seems to
be almost entirely abandoned. Unhealthy dancing in small crowded rooms
is practised to some extent by the middle classes. As for the _bals
publics_, the fewer of them there are the better. In obvious ways,
and in ways that I can only hint at, they are injurious to the public
health.
[Sidenote: Field Sports.]
[Sidenote: Shooting in France.]
[Sidenote: Game not over-abundant.]
In field sports the chief difference between France and England is
not a difference of taste for sport itself, but a difference in
game-preserving. In England this is carried to the utmost perfection
by the most artificial means and at enormous cost; in France this is
done only on a few estates, and ordinary game-preserving is very lax
and very economical. Often it is merely nominal. Some man with another
occupation is supposed to be the _garde_, and he walks over the estate
occasionally with a gun, killing a hare or a partridge for his private
use, and seldom arresting a poacher. Still, the shootings are supposed
to be worth something, as they are let, though at low prices. The
English believe that there is no game at all in France, except a few
partridges; and they might quote French humorists in support of this
opinion, as they have laughed at the Parisian sportsman and his empty
bags from time immemorial. However, as this is not a comic account,
but an attempt to tell the truth, I may say that for several years my
sons kept my larder very fairly supplied with game in the shooting
season, including hares, partridges, woodcocks, snipes, and wild ducks.
The neighbouring squires occasionally kill a deer or a wild boar, and
one nobleman has killed many wild boars, some of them magnificent
beasts. As a rule, a French sportsman walks much for little game, and
is himself quite aware that the game is a mere pretext; the exercise
is the real object. If the English reader thinks this ridiculous, I
may remind him that English fox-hunting is an application of the same
principle. A hundred horsemen follow a single fox, and when he is
killed they do not even eat him.[4]
[Sidenote: French Hunting.]
There is nothing that resembles English hunting in France. French
hunting is pretty and picturesque, with some remnant of old-world
costume and ceremonial, and it affords some exercise in riding about
the roads through the dense forests, but as a training in horsemanship
it is not comparable to such hunting as I have witnessed in Yorkshire.
French farmers and peasant proprietors would never permit a regiment
of gentlemen to spoil their fences; that can only be done in a very
aristocratic country.
[Sidenote: Contrast between Classes in regard to the Physical Life.]
[Sidenote: The desirable Ideal.]
[Sidenote: Apparatus of the English Aristocracy.]
[Sidenote: Access to Natural Beauty.]
As to the physical life, both England and France present the same
contrasts, but they are more striking in England. There you have an
active and vigorous upper class much enjoying the open air, and a
lower class in the big towns living without either pure air or healthy
exercise. The physical quality of the race is well maintained, and
even improved, at one end of the scale, and deteriorated at the other.
Unfortunately the class which deteriorates, the lowest urban class, is
not only the more numerous, but also reckless in reproduction, so that
its power for degradation is greater than the aristocratic conservative
or improving power. The ideal would be a whole nation physically equal
to the English aristocracy. That aristocracy has undoubtedly set the
example of healthy living, but the objection is that its fine health
costs too much. With its immense apparatus of guns, yachts, and horses,
its great army of servants, its extensive playgrounds, the aristocracy
sets an example that cannot be followed by the poor man, shut up in
the atmosphere of a factory all day and sleeping in an ill-drained
street at night. The rich have another immense advantage in the free
access to natural beauty, which is favourable to cheerfulness and
therefore indirectly to health. The ancient Greeks, who led the perfect
physical life, were surrounded by noble scenery, glorious in colour.
Compare the foul sky and spoilt landscape of Manchester with the purple
hills, brilliant sunlight, wondrously clear atmosphere, and waters of
intensest azure, that surrounded the City of the Violet Crown!
[Sidenote: English and French Middle Classes.]
[Sidenote: Peasants.]
[Sidenote: Factory Population.]
Putting aside the aristocracies of both countries, which may live
as healthily as they please, let us examine the state of the middle
classes and the common people. The middle classes in both take
insufficient out-door exercise, their occupations are too confining
and too sedentary, they stiffen prematurely, and after that are fit
for nothing but formal walks. Their physical life is lower than that
of the aristocracy and lower than that of the agricultural population.
The two greatest blessings in our time for the English of the middle
class have been velocipedes and volunteering. France has one advantage
over England in the numbers of the peasant class, which leads a healthy
and active life, though its activity is of a slow and plodding kind.
The factory population, proportionally much larger in England, is more
unfavourably situated. It undergoes wasting fatigue in bad over-heated
air, but it does not get real exercise; consequently, whilst the
aristocracy keeps up its strength, the factory population deteriorates.
[Sidenote: Comparison of the two Races.]
A comparison of English and French physical qualities leads to the
following conclusions. The English are by nature incomparably the finer
and handsomer race of the two; but their industrial system, and the
increasing concentration in large towns, are rapidly diminishing their
collective superiority, though it still remains strikingly visible in
the upper classes. The French are generally of small stature,[5] so
that a man of middle height in England is a tall man in France, and
French soldiers in their summer fatigue blouses look to an Englishman
like boys. Still, though the ordinary Frenchman is short, he is often
muscular and capable of bearing great fatigue, as a good pony will. His
shortness is mainly in the legs, yet he strides vigorously in marching.
[Sidenote: The Physical Future of the English and French Races.]
One cannot look to the physical future of either race without the
gravest anxiety. Unless some means be found for arresting the decline
caused by industrialism and the rapid using-up of life in large
cities, it will ruin both races in course of time. Already the French
physicians recognise a new type, sharp and sarcastic mentally, with
visible physical inferiority, the special product of Paris. The
general spread of a certain education is indisposing the French for
that rural peasant life which was their source of national health, and
the population of England is crowding into the large towns. There are
two grounds of hope, and only two. The first is the modern scientific
spirit, with its louder and louder warnings against the neglect of the
body; the second is the extension of military training, of which I
shall have more to say in another chapter.
CHAPTER II
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION
England and France have been governed, since the Renaissance, by the
same ideas about intellectual education, though there have been certain
differences in the application of these ideas.
[Sidenote: Latin and Greek.]
[Sidenote: Latin in France.]
Educators in both countries have persistently maintained the
incomparable superiority of Latin and Greek over modern languages,
not only for their linguistic merits, but also on the ground that the
literature enshrined in them was infinitely superior to any modern
literature whatever. French education insisted chiefly upon Latin.
Frenchmen take “learning” to be equivalent to Latin. They call a man
_instruit_ when he has learned Latin, although he may have a very
limited acquaintance with Greek, and they say that one _a fait des
études incomplètes_ when he has not taken his bachelor’s degree, which
implies that bachelors have made _des études complètes_ though they
know Greek very imperfectly.
[Sidenote: Greek in England.]
In England Latin was considered necessary, but Greek was the great
object of achievement. A “scholar,” in England, means especially a
Greek scholar. One may be a scholar without Hebrew or Arabic, but
certainly not without Greek. The ordinary level of French attainment
in Hellenic studies appears contemptible to the English of the learned
class.
[Sidenote: The Principle common to both Countries.]
[Sidenote: Dignity of the Teacher.]
[Sidenote: Antiquity and Mystery.]
[Sidenote: Hieratic quality of the dead Languages.]
[Sidenote: Latin Quotations.]
However, the principle was the same in both countries, and may be
expressed in terms applicable to both. That principle was the choice
of an ancient language that could be taught authoritatively by the
learned in each country. They can never teach a modern language
in that authoritative way, as in modern languages their degree of
accomplishment must always be inferior to that of the educated
native. When the teacher assumes great dignity it is essential to its
maintenance that he should be secure from this crushing rivalry, and
this security can be given by an ancient language alone. Besides this
professional consideration there is the effect of antiquity, and of a
certain mystery, on the popular mind. So long as the people could be
made to believe that a lofty and peculiar wisdom, not communicable in
translations, was enshrined in Latin and Greek words, the learned were
supposed to be in possession of mysterious intellectual advantages.
There was even an hieratic quality in the dead languages. Closely
connected with religion, they were the especial study of priests, and
communicated by them to the highest classes of the laity. They belonged
to the two most powerful castes, the sacerdotal and the aristocratic.
Even yet the French village priest not only says mass in Latin, but
makes quotations in Latin from the Vulgate when preaching to illiterate
peasants. He appeals in this way to that reverence for, and awe of,
mysterious words which belongs to the uncultured man. He knows, but
does not tell his humble audience, that the Vulgate is itself a
translation, and that, were it not for the effect of mystery, he might
equally give the passage in French.
[Sidenote: French Contempt for Modern Literatures.]
In the same way a knowledge, or even a supposed knowledge, of Latin
gave laymen an ascendency over the lower classes and over women in
their own rank. It was easy for a Frenchman who knew no English to
declare to a French audience equally ignorant that the whole vast range
of English literature was not worthy of comparison with what has come
down to us from ancient Rome. He could class English authors in the two
categories of barbarians who knew nothing of antiquity and imitators
who feebly attempted to copy its inimitable masterpieces. The only
education worthy of the name was that which he himself possessed, and
those literatures that he did not know were simply not worth knowing.
[Sidenote: Conventionalism.]
[Sidenote: Inconsistency.]
[Sidenote: Learning and Ignorance.]
The intensely conventional nature of these beliefs, both in France
and England, may be proved by their inconsistency. It was laid down
as a principle that a knowledge of ancient books through translations
was not knowledge, yet at the same time the clergy, with very few
exceptions, were dependent on translations for all they knew of the
Old Testament, and few French laymen had Greek enough even to read
the Gospels. In either country you may pass for a learned man though
destitute of any critical or historical knowledge of the literature of
your native tongue. One may be a learned Englishman without knowing
Anglo-Saxon, or a learned Frenchman though ignorant of the _langue
d’oil_.
[Sidenote: Modern Tendencies.]
[Sidenote: Thoroughness of Modern Study.]
[Sidenote: Proposed Abandonment of the Classics. M. Raoul Frary.]
[Sidenote: Professor Seeley’s Proposal.]
The close of the nineteenth century is marked by two tendencies that
seem opposed yet are strictly consistent, being both the consequence
of an increased desire for reality in education. One is a tendency
to much greater thoroughness in classical studies themselves, and the
other a tendency, every day more marked, to abandon those studies
when true success is either not desired, or in the nature of things
unattainable. The greater thoroughness of modern study is sufficiently
proved by the better quality of the books which help the learner, and
the most remarkable point in the apparently contradictory condition
of the modern mind is that the age which has perfected all the
instruments for classical study is the first age since the Renaissance
to propose seriously its general, though not universal, abandonment. M.
Raoul Frary, himself a scholar, has been so impressed by the present
imperfection and incompleteness of classical studies that he has
seriously proposed the abolition of Latin as a compulsory study for
boys. “Only one thing,” he says, “could justify the crushing labour of
beginning Latin, that would be the full possession and entire enjoyment
of the ancient masterpieces, and that is precisely what is wanting to
the crowd of students. They leave school too soon, and the later years
are too much crowded with work to allow any time for reading.” For the
same reason, the uselessness of partly learned Latin as an instrument
of culture, Professor Seeley wisely proposes to defer the commencement
of that study to the age of fourteen,[6] and spend the time so gained
on English. Greek, I conclude, he would defer for two or three years
longer. Not only M. Frary, but some other Frenchmen who appreciate
Greek for themselves, would exclude it entirely from the _lycées_.
“Amongst the young men,” he says, “who come out of our colleges, not
one in ten is able to read even an easy Greek author, not one in a
hundred will take the trouble. We will not discuss the question whether
our youth ought to cease to learn Greek. They do not learn it, the
question is settled by the fact.”
[Sidenote: Opinion of Masters in French _Lycées_.]
[Sidenote: Mental Gymnastics.]
With my deference on these questions to those who are accustomed to
teaching, I have submitted M. Frary’s book (_La Question du Latin_) to
two or three masters in _lycées_, and their answer to it is this. They
say: “It is quite true that, considered as an acquisition, the Greek
taught in _lycées_ does not count, and though Latin is learned much
better the pupils gain a very small acquaintance with Latin literature,
and that chiefly by fragments; nevertheless, we do unquestionably find
that, as gymnastics, these studies cannot be replaced by anything else
that we know of. There are now pupils who do not study Latin or Greek,
and we find that when they are brought into contact with the others _on
other subjects_ their intelligence seems undeveloped and inflexible. It
is difficult, and often impossible, to make them understand things that
are plain to the classical students.”[7]
[Sidenote: Modern Languages.]
[Sidenote: In French Public Schools.]
[Sidenote: Quality of the Teachers.]
[Sidenote: A Hatter.]
[Sidenote: A Cook.]
[Sidenote: Examination.]
[Sidenote: Experience of F. Sarcey.]
[Sidenote: The _École Normale_.]
Here I leave this _Question du Latin_, regretting only that the
quickened intelligence of classical students should fail to master
their own particular study. The value of modern languages, as a
discipline, cannot easily be ascertained, because they are rarely
studied in that spirit. They have been systematically kept in a
position of inferiority, by giving them insufficient time and by
employing incompetent masters. They were established as a study in the
French public schools by a royal ordinance, dated March 26, 1829, but
M. Beljame[8] tells us that nothing was done to insure the competence
of the teachers. These were picked up entirely by accident. “The
masters of those days were generally political exiles, and even the
best educated amongst them had never previously thought of teaching.
When they were French no better qualifications were required. A member
of the University told me that he had had for teachers of English
in the State schools, first, the town hatter, who had a business
connection with England, then the cook from the best hotel, who had
exercised his art on the other side the Channel. These gentlemen were
good enough to give some of their leisure moments to the University.
No examination was required, either from foreigners or Frenchmen.
Foreigners were supposed to know their language; as for the others,
some functionary, usually quite ignorant of every European tongue,
put the question, ‘Do you know German?’ or, ‘Do you know English?’
The candidate answered ‘Yes,’ and received at once the necessary
authorisation.” Francisque Sarcey, in his _Souvenirs de Jeunesse_,
tells us that in his time the hour nominally devoted to English was
passed at leap-frog, that being the traditional way of spending it.
Even at the _École Normale_ the teaching of modern languages was
entrusted to a pupil, and if no pupil happened to possess a knowledge
of English or German some teacher was sought elsewhere.
[Sidenote: State of Things in 1888.]
[Sidenote: Quality of Present Teachers.]
[Sidenote: Improvement in the Class of Teachers in France.]
These were the miserable beginnings. In the present year (1888) the
study of modern languages is better established in France than in
England. It is obligatory in secondary education. Teachers in the
_lycées_ are required to be either _bacheliers ès lettres_ or to have
a corresponding foreign degree, and it is hoped that before long the
_licence ès lettres_ (equivalent to the English mastership) will be
exacted. They have to pass a special linguistic examination for a
certificate before they can teach in the _lycées_. This examination is
a serious test, but it is much less severe than the competitive trial
for the _agrégation_. The certificate gives the rank of a _licencié_,
the _agrégation_ that of a Fellow of the University. Every year the
candidates are of a better class. M. Beljame says that he knows thirty
teachers of English who were already _licenciés_, and amongst the
candidates in 1884 twelve had already taken that degree. In short, the
teachers of modern languages are now rapidly assuming the same position
in the University as the classical masters; and it is only just that
they should do so, since they have the same general culture, and their
special examinations are more searching. For example, the candidate for
the _agrégation_ has to lecture twice, before the examiners at the
Sorbonne and in public, once in English and once in French.
[Sidenote: Teachers of Modern Languages in England. Their low Status.]
[Sidenote: Supposed Facility of Modern Languages.]
In England the teachers of modern languages pass no examinations and
have no dignity. They are often required to render services outside of
their special work. They are wretchedly paid, have no sort of equality
with classical masters, and are considered to belong to an inferior
grade. When they are foreigners they are looked upon as poor aliens.
The belief that modern languages are easy, although erroneous, is
against them, the truth being that the pupils do not go far enough in
these languages to become aware of the real difficulties. They think
that Italian is easy, not knowing that there are two thousand irregular
verbs, and they think that French is easy, not knowing that French
boys, specially drilled and disciplined in their own tongue, have to be
wary to avoid its pitfalls.
[Sidenote: Quality of the Pupils in France.]
[Sidenote: Rarity of Learning in Modern Languages.]
[Sidenote: The Practical Difficulty.]
The results of the improved teaching of modern languages have not yet
had time to become visible in France. Teachers tell me that amongst
their pupils a certain proportion show a natural taste and aptitude,
and take heartily to their work.[9] The rest count for nothing, and
will retain only a limited vocabulary. In England some knowledge of
modern languages is, as yet, much more general, but it seldom reaches
the degree of what can be seriously called “learning.” The practical
difficulty is that the unripe minds of young students, especially of
young ladies, are not ready for the strongest books, and they take no
interest in the history and development of a language, so they soon
fall back upon the easy and amusing literature of the present, to
the neglect of the great authors. That is the misfortune of modern
languages as an intellectual pursuit.
[Sidenote: Rare Appreciation of Foreign Poetry.]
[Sidenote: Blank Verse.]
[Sidenote: Rhyme.]
[Sidenote: Expletive Phrases.]
[Sidenote: Difficulties in English Poetry for Frenchmen.]
[Sidenote: English Difficulties with French Verse.]
[Sidenote: Technical Workmanship.]
It very rarely happens that a reader of either nationality has any
appreciation of the poetry of the other. We may begin by setting aside
that immense majority of prosaic minds which exist in all countries,
and for whom all poetry must be for ever unintelligible. After them
come those lovers of poetry who enjoy rhyme but cannot hear the music
of blank verse. The French are in that position with regard to English
poetry, though they claim an appreciation of blank verse in Horace
and Virgil. Then, even in rhymed poetry, there remains the prodigious
difficulty of pronunciation. Sound and feeling must go together in
poetry, but the foreigner rarely has the sound. And even if he could
imitate sounds exactly there would still remain the lack of those early
associations to which poets are constantly appealing, both by subtle
allusion and by the affectionate choice of words. The foreigner, too,
has a difficulty in gliding over the unimportant expletive phrases;
they acquire too much consequence in his eyes. The conventionalisms
of the art strike the foreigner too forcibly. When an Englishman,
in reading his own language, follows poetic ideas, a Frenchman is
embarrassed by what seems to him the lawlessness of the versification,
and he seeks for rules. On the other hand, the elaborate rules of
French versification seem pedantic to an English mind, which perceives
no necessary connection between such artificial restraints and the
agile spirit of poetry. Was ever yet English scholar so learned that he
could feel properly shocked by what shocks a French critic in verse?
How is the foreigner to disengage the poetic from the conventional
element? Since both English and French scholars believe that they have
mastered all the secrets of Greek and Latin versification, it might be
inferred that there is no insuperable difficulty in that of a modern
tongue; yet where is the Englishman, except Swinburne, who in reading a
French poem knows good technical workmanship when he sees it?
[Sidenote: Conventionalism of French Ignorance.]
[Sidenote: A proposed English Academy.]
French ignorance of English literature would be amazing if it were not
the result of a conventionalism. It is conventionally “ignorance” in
France not to have heard of Milton; it is not ignorance never to have
heard of Spenser. A Frenchman is ignorant if the name of Byron is not
familiar to him, but he need not know even the names of Shelley and
Keats. He is not required, by the conventionalism of his own country,
to know anything whatever of living English genius. A London newspaper
amused itself with sketching a possible Academy for England, and named
some eminent Englishmen as qualified to be members. The names included
Browning, Ruskin, Arnold, Lecky, and other first-rate men. On this,
certain Parisian journalists were infinitely amused. Their sense of the
ludicrous was irresistibly tickled when they saw that individuals like
these, whom nobody had ever heard of, could be proposed as equivalents
for the forty French immortals.
[Sidenote: Rarity of Conversational Accomplishment in Foreign Tongues.]
[Sidenote: The Foreigner in Society.]
Independently of learning, modern languages are supposed to be useful
for conversation. They are, however, very rarely studied or practised
to the degree necessary for that use. The foreigner may be able to
order his dinner at his hotel and ascertain when the train starts, but
in cultivated society he only pretends to be able to follow what is
said. His impressions about the talk that is going on around him are
a succession of misunderstandings. He sits silent and smiling, and he
endeavours to look as if he were not outside and in the dark; but he
_is_ in the dark, or, worse still, surrounded by deceptive glimpses. It
would be better if French or English were like Chinese for him.
[Sidenote: The Future.]
[Sidenote: Abandonment of Latin and Greek.]
[Sidenote: An _élite_.]
[Sidenote: Modern Languages.]
[Sidenote: Men remain on their own Level.]
[Sidenote: Languages do not elevate the Mind.]
[Sidenote: Mean Use made of Languages.]
The future towards which we are rapidly tending may already be seen in
the distance. Latin and Greek will be given up for ordinary schoolboys,
both in England and France, but the study of them will be maintained by
a small _élite_. This _élite_ will have a better chance of existence in
England, where superiorities of all kinds are not only tolerated but
respected, than it can have in France, where the modern instincts all
tend to the formation of an immensely numerous, half-educated middle
class. When the classical literatures shall be pursued, as the fine
arts are now, by their own elect, and not imposed on every incapable
schoolboy, they will be better studied and better loved. Now, with
regard to modern languages I have no illusions left. You cannot convert
a Philistine into a lover of good literature by teaching him a foreign
tongue. If he did not love it in his own language, he is not likely to
take to it in another. Every man has his own intellectual level, and
on that level he will remain, whatever language you teach him. To make
a Frenchman appreciate Milton or Spenser, it is not enough to teach
him English; you would have to endow him with the poetic sense, with
the faculty that delights in accompanying a poet’s mind--in a word,
with all the poetic gifts except invention. Neither are all men fit to
read noble prose. Minds incapable of sustained attention read newspaper
paragraphs in English, and in French they would still read newspaper
paragraphs. What I mean is that languages do not elevate the mind, they
merely extend the range of its ordinary action. Teach a French gossip
English and she will gossip in two languages, she will not perceive
the futility of gossiping. This explains the poor and mean use that is
constantly made of modern languages by many who have acquired them,
and the remarkable unanimity with which such people avoid every great
author, and even all intelligent intercourse with foreigners, reading
nothing and hearing nothing that is worth remembering.
[Sidenote: Hollow Pretensions.]
[Sidenote: Smallness of the Studious Class.]
[Sidenote: Idleness of the unintellectual.]
[Sidenote: Libraries in French Houses.]
[Sidenote: Expenditure on Books in England.]
In all things connected with education we are in a world of hollow
pretensions. The speeches at prize distributions assume that pupils
will make use of their knowledge afterwards. They are told that the
wonderful literatures of Greece and Rome now lie open before them
like gardens where they have but to wander and cull flowers. If they
have studied modern languages they are told that European literature
is theirs. The plain truth is, that both in England and France, and
especially in France, there is a small studious class isolated in the
midst of masses occupied with pleasure or affairs, and so indifferent
to intellectual pursuits that the slightest mental labour is enough
to deter them. Whatever reading they do is in the direction of least
resistance. They have no enterprise, they find all but the easiest
reading irksome, and the obstacle of the easiest foreign language
insurmountable. They will play cards or dominoes in the day-time
rather than take down a classic author from his shelf. A guest in a
French château told me that on seeing the ennui that reigned there,
whilst nobody read anything, she asked if there were any books in the
house, and was shown into a library of classics formed in a previous
generation but never opened in this. All testimony that comes to me
about French interiors confirms the belief that the number of people
who form libraries has greatly diminished. It was once the custom in
the upper class, but nobody would say that it is the custom now. In
twelve or fifteen country houses known to a friend of mine there was
only one library, and, what is more significant, only one man deserving
the name of a reader. Even in England, where people read certainly
three times as much as they do in France, the expenditure on books
bears no proportion to income, except in the case of a few scholars.
How many English houses are there, of the wealthy middle class, where
you could not find a copy of the representative English authors, and
where foreign literatures are unknown!
[Sidenote: English knowledge of the Bible.]
[Sidenote: Possibility of Future Neglect.]
Unknown--with one exception. The belief that Hebrew literature is one
book, and that it was written by God himself, and that the English
translation of it has a peculiar sanctity, has given the English middle
class a familiarity with that literature which is a superiority over
the French middle class. The French Catholic laity only knows the Bible
through _l’Histoire Sainte_ and selections; the unbelievers take
no interest in it. Nothing surprises an Englishman more than French
ignorance of the Bible; yet it is probable that if ever the English
cease to believe in the dogma of inspiration they will neglect the
whole Bible as they neglect the Apocrypha now.
[Sidenote: Scientific Education.]
[Sidenote: Usefully educated Young Men.]
[Sidenote: Sacrifice of the Superfluous.]
[Sidenote: Effects of the Loss of Literature.]
Science has a stronger basis than literature in modern education
because it offers useful results. In France the usefully educated young
men are well educated in their way. The time spent on their education
is strictly economised with a view to a definite result, and the effect
of it is to turn out numbers of young men from the _École Centrale_ and
other schools who at once enter upon practical duties with a readiness
that speaks much for the system. They are, however, so specially
prepared that they have omitted the useless and the superfluous--“_le
superflu, chose si nécessaire!_” In cutting away the superfluous
the practical educator throws literature overboard. Well, without
literature, it is still possible to sharpen the faculties and store the
mind, but without literature education misses what is best and most
interesting in the world. To a generation “usefully” educated Europe
will be like a new continent destitute of memories and associations, a
region where there are mines to be worked and railways to be made.
[Sidenote: French Secondary Education.]
As the French system of secondary education extends over the whole
country, an account of the most important changes in it may be worth
giving in a few words.
[Sidenote: The Old System.]
[Sidenote: The _Bifurcation_.]
[Sidenote: The _Bifurcation_ did not work well.]
The old system, from the time of Napoleon I. to the middle of the
century, was founded on classical studies, with lighter scientific
studies and those chiefly mathematical. After taking their bachelor’s
degree, those students who were intended for certain Government
schools (_Écoles Polytechnique_, _Centrale_, _Normale supérieure pour
les sciences_) received further scientific instruction in special
classes. This was the old system, but in 1853 an important change was
introduced by M. Fortoul’s ministry, which invented what was long
known as the _bifurcation_. On leaving the fourth class, at the age of
thirteen or fourteen, pupils were required to choose between literary
studies with a slight scientific supplement or the converse. Both kinds
of students continued at that time to attend together the lectures on
history and geography, and so much of modern languages as was then
taught, besides the classes for Latin translation and the French
classes. This was the system known as the _bifurcation_, but it did not
work very well in practice, because the scientific students fell too
far behind the literary students to follow profitably the same Latin
classes.
[Sidenote: The _Enseignement Spécial_.]
In October 1864, under Duruy’s ministry, there was a new departure.
He established the _enseignement secondaire spécial_. This scheme of
teaching excluded Latin, which was replaced by a modern language,
and it embraced rather an extensive programme, outside of classical
studies, with such subjects as mathematical and natural science,
political economy, and law.
[Sidenote: Present State of the _Enseignement Spécial_.]
Under the existing system the _enseignement spécial_ includes two
modern languages instead of one, and of these one is taken as
“principal,” the other as “accessory,” at the student’s choice, he
being more severely examined in that which he selects as “principal.”
The present varieties of public secondary education may be described
under three heads.
[Sidenote: Present Varieties in French Secondary Education.]
1. Ancient languages, with a little science and one modern language.
2. Scientific education, with a little Latin and one modern language.
3. Scientific education, with two modern languages, no Latin.
[Sidenote: Necessity for using Acquirements.]
Enough has been already said in this chapter on the degrees of
proficiency attained. My own belief is that no acquirement whatever
really becomes our own until we make constant use of it for ourselves,
and it is impossible to make a constant use of more than a very few
acquirements. It is here, in my opinion, that is to be found the true
explanation of that perpetual disappointment which attends almost all
educational experiments. They may provide the instrument; they cannot
insure its use. This is what makes professional education, of all
kinds, so much more real than any other, and the scientific professions
do certainly keep up the scientific spirit. There is not any profession
(certainly not school-teaching or hack-writing) which maintains the
pure literary spirit in the same way.
CHAPTER III
ARTISTIC EDUCATION
[Sidenote: Qualities of French Art Education.]
[Sidenote: Serious Nature of French Teaching.]
In both music and drawing the French have shown themselves far better
educators than in languages. Their ways of teaching drawing are
especially marked by seriousness, by the discouragement of false,
ignorant, and premature finish, by the wise use of simple and common
materials, and by the consistent aim at sound knowledge rather than
vain display. As the French have taught painting and sculpture they are
both most serious pursuits; I mean that, if the French may often have
been frivolous in the subsequent employment of their knowledge, they
were assuredly not frivolous in the acquisition of it. For them the
fine arts have been a discipline, a culture that has penetrated beyond
the artist class.
[Sidenote: French Disinterestedness.]
[Sidenote: Generosity of distinguished French Artists.]
The seriousness of French teaching has been accompanied by an admirable
disinterestedness. Artists of the highest reputation, every hour of
whose time was valuable, have been willing to undertake the direction
of private schools of painting on terms that barely paid the rent of
the studio and the hire of models. There they have given the most
sincere and kindly advice to hundreds of students, both Frenchmen
and foreigners, from whom they had nothing to expect but a little
gratitude, and, perhaps, the reflected honour of having aided one or
two youths of genius amidst a crowd of mediocrities.
[Sidenote: Extension of Art Teaching in England.]
[Sidenote: Results in the Improvement of English Taste and Skill.]
In England this kind of teaching is all but unknown, yet a certain
culture of the faculties by means of drawing is incomparably more
general than it was in the beginning of the century. The total number
of “persons taught drawing, painting, or modelling through the agency
of the Science and Art Department” is now approaching a million, and
this independently of the considerable numbers of young English people
who study art privately or in other schools. The result of this culture
is already plainly visible in the wonderful improvement of English
taste and skill in everything that art can influence, an improvement
that nobody could have foreseen in the first half of the present
century.
[Sidenote: French Efforts in Popular Art Education.]
In France, too, great efforts have been made to spread a knowledge of
sound elementary drawing amongst the people. It is now a part of the
regular course of education for the middle classes in the _lycées_,
and there are cheap public drawing schools all over the country. In
England this is a new enterprise, in France it is an attempt to recover
lost ground; as the French workmen of the eighteenth century were
certainly more artistic than their successors, and must have understood
design more thoroughly. Even in the Middle Ages, as we know from the
excellence of the work left to us, the common workmen cannot have been
ignorant of art.
[Sidenote: The real Motive.]
[Sidenote: France and England not Artistic Nations.]
[Sidenote: French Provincial Towns.]
[Sidenote: The Argument for the Beautiful.]
[Sidenote: Value of Beautiful Surroundings.]
The real motive for this modern increase in art-culture is not the
disinterested love of art, it is the desire for commercial success.
France and England are not now really artistic nations. In the French
provincial cities the modern buildings, which are so rapidly replacing
what remains of the mediæval ones, display, as a rule, no artistic
invention whatever, and if the English people were suddenly to awake
one morning with an artist’s passion for the beautiful they would
not be able to endure the prevalent ugliness of their towns. Still,
though the nations are not artistic, both races produce exceptional
persons who are so, and these are allowed to have their own way more
than formerly in the warfare that they wage against the hideous or
the commonplace. Their argument in favour of the beautiful is the
very simple one that it makes life pleasanter and, so far, happier,
and in some of them this argument takes the kindly form of desiring,
especially, to make beautiful things accessible to the poor. They might
even go further, and affirm that beautiful surroundings are favourable
to health, which they certainly are, by ministering to gaiety and
cheerfulness and so increasing the charm of life. The perception of
this truth would produce a very close alliance between philanthropic
and artistic spirits, as we see already in the generous and thoughtful
founders of the Manchester Art Museum.
[Sidenote: Art in Lancashire.]
[Sidenote: A former artistic Condition.]
[Sidenote: The unspoiled Beauty of Nature.]
[Sidenote: The Industrial Epoch.]
Art education is an attempt to return consciously to conditions of
life which have long ago been attained unconsciously and afterwards
departed from. There are now many schools of art in Lancashire by way
of reaction against the ugliness of the industrial age. There was a
time when Lancashire knew neither ugliness nor schools of art. The
habitations of the Lancashire people in the sixteenth century, and for
some time later, were always artistic, whether magnificent or simple,
and so was the furniture inside them. The art was not of an exquisite
or an elevated order, but it _was_ art, and it was interesting and
picturesque. The beauty of nature, too, was quite unspoiled, and though
Lancashire was no more Switzerland than Manchester was Verona, still
there was beauty enough in the county for all ordinary human needs; the
pastoral valleys were green, the trout-streams pure, and if the skies
were often gray it was only with clouds from the sea. The industrial
epoch came and destroyed all this; it destroyed the vernacular
architecture, it filled the beautiful valleys with the ugliest towns
in the world, it fouled both the streams and the sky, it rapidly
diminished even the health and beauty of the race. It is the conscious
reaction against these evils which has made Lancashire a centre of
artistic effort.
[Sidenote: Conditions of Urban Life in France.]
[Sidenote: Artistic Torpor.]
[Sidenote: Inferiority of French Provincial Exhibitions.]
[Sidenote: The French _bourgeois_.]
[Sidenote: His Ignorance of Art.]
[Sidenote: Provincial Building.]
[Sidenote: The Provincial Nobility.]
In France there has never been the same acute consciousness that modern
life was making itself hideous; and, in fact, the conditions of urban
life in France, except in certain quarters of Lyons and Marseilles,
very rarely approach the melancholy imprisonment of an English
manufacturing town. Most of the French towns are comparatively small,
the country is easily accessible on all sides, they all have avenues of
trees (many of them really magnificent), and those which are situated
on the great rivers have spacious and well-built quays, which are the
favourite residence and resort. In a word, the difference between urban
and rural life is seldom painfully or acutely felt. It is, I believe,
a consequence of this comparative pleasantness of French country towns
that the artistic life in them is so torpid. Provincial exhibitions
are, in France, quite incomparably inferior to English provincial
exhibitions. The fine arts are much more successfully cultivated
in Manchester and Liverpool than in Rouen or in Lyons. As for the
smaller French towns, you find in them here and there an intelligent
amateur, here and there a respectable artist, but, by the ordinary
French _bourgeois_, art is not understood, it lies outside of his
interests and his thoughts. He can no more appreciate style in painting
and sculpture than he can appreciate it in literature. He lives in
a country where you can hardly travel fifty miles without meeting
with some remnant of noble architecture, and it has been necessary to
pass a law to protect what remains against his ignorant spoliation.
Contemporary provincial building is, as a rule, only masons’ work, and
whenever an old church or a château is in any way meddled with, the
chances are that it will be ruined beyond remission. The provincial
nobility very rarely give any evidence whatever of artistic culture
or attainment. If they attempt anything, the result is poor and
incongruous, some pepper-box turret added to the corner of a modern
house, or some feeble attempt to imitate the mediæval castle.
[Sidenote: Paris the maintainer of Art in France.]
[Sidenote: English Academical Teaching.]
It may seem a contradiction to have begun this chapter with hearty
praise of French methods in art teaching, and to have continued it
with depreciation of French taste, but, in fact, both praise and its
opposite are deserved. Paris has maintained the light of art in France.
Without Paris, contemporary France would have a very small place in
artistic Europe; with Paris it still maintains, though against powerful
rivals, a leadership. London has not any comparable influence. Many of
the best English Academicians, including the President, have studied
their art abroad. The methods of English Academical teaching, which
require a minute and trifling finish in mere studies, are a waste of
the pupil’s time.
[Sidenote: Exceptional Genius in England.]
[Sidenote: Poetic Art in England.]
[Sidenote: Improvement in English Handicraft.]
[Sidenote: Elevation of the Common Level.]
The English race, usually destitute of any artistic faculty or
perception, produces exceptional geniuses in quite as great numbers
as the French. The faculties that raise art above mere technical
cleverness to the region of poetry are not excessively rare in the
home of poetry itself. In fact, the English tendency has been to rely
upon native gifts too much, to the neglect of handicraft, yet even in
artistic handicraft the English have made surprising progress in the
thirty years between 1850 and 1880. Their art critics go on repeating
the old complaint that there is little above the common level, but the
common level itself has risen, and the complaint amounts merely to the
truism that exceptional excellence is exceptional.
[Sidenote: The General Understanding of Art.]
[Sidenote: Paris and the Provinces.]
[Sidenote: London.]
[Sidenote: Edinburgh.]
[Sidenote: Art in the Middle and Lower Classes.]
The attainments of artists are, no doubt, a matter of national concern,
as are the accomplishments of all workers; nevertheless, it is still
more important, from the intellectual point of view, that art should
be understood by many than that it should be dexterously practised by
a few. Now, as to this separate question of intelligence concerning
the fine arts, I have said elsewhere, and can only repeat, that in
Paris it is wonderfully general, but not in the French provinces.
Intelligence of that kind is common, without being general, in London,
and not very rare in the other great English towns, whilst Edinburgh
is incomparably more important as an art-centre than either Lyons or
Marseilles. Neither the English nor the French aristocracy has ever,
as a body,[10] shown an intelligent interest in art. For some reason
that may be connected with the contempt felt by a _noblesse_ for
manual labour, the understanding of art seems to belong chiefly to the
middle and lower classes, who often find in it a substitute for more
expensive pleasures. As for the future, this kind of intelligence is
likely to increase widely in the same classes, especially if art is
more intimately associated with handicrafts and manufactures.
[Sidenote: The Particular Difficulty of the English.]
[Sidenote: Mr. Ruskin’s Moral Criticism.]
[Sidenote: The Sacrifice of Art to Veracity.]
[Sidenote: Toil in Details.]
If I were asked what is the particular difficulty that usually prevents
the English from understanding art, I should answer, The extreme
energy and activity of their moral sense. They have a sort of moral
hunger which tries to satisfy itself in season and out of season.
That interferes with their understanding of a pursuit which lies
outside of morals. The teaching of their most celebrated art critic,
Mr. Ruskin, was joyfully accepted by the English, because it seemed
for the first time to place art upon a substantial moral foundation,
making truth, industry, conscientiousness, its cardinal virtues. The
English imagined, for a time, that they had subordinated the fine arts
to their own dominant moral instincts. Painting was to abandon all its
tricks and become truthful. It was to represent events as they really
occurred, and not so as to make the best pictures, a sacrifice of art
to veracity that pleased the innermost British conscience. Again, it
was assumed that mere toil in the accurate representation of details
was in itself a merit, because industry is meritorious in common
occupations. In short, all the moral virtues were placed before art
itself, which, in reality, is but accidentally connected with them.
[Sidenote: The English love of Nature.]
[Sidenote: An Impediment to the Appreciation of Art.]
The English love of nature, in itself one of the happiest of all gifts,
has not been altogether favourable to the understanding of art. It
has led many English people to subordinate the fine arts entirely to
nature, as if they were but poor human copies of an unapproachable
divine original. In reality the fine arts can only be understood when
they are pursued and valued for themselves.
[Sidenote: The Parisian Mind.]
The feebler moral sense of the Parisian mind and its less passionate
affection for nature have left it more disengaged and more at liberty
to accept art on its own account, as art and nothing more. There is
a kind of Paganism which is able to rest content without deep moral
problems, and to accept with satisfaction what art has to give without
asking for that which it cannot give.
[Sidenote: Diversity of Ideals.]
The final word on the subject may be that there is a diversity of
ideals, that the English ideal (speaking generally) is moral, and the
Parisian ideal artistic.
CHAPTER IV
MORAL TRAINING
[Sidenote: Difficulty of the Subject.]
[Sidenote: The Effects of Moral Teaching not easily ascertained.]
This chapter is very difficult to write, because I shall have to deal
with what cannot be accurately ascertained. A man can hardly know how
far he has been successful in the moral training of his own sons. As to
the boys in the nearest school, he may ascertain what is taught them by
their masters, but he cannot know the effects of the teaching on the
formation of their characters; that can only be known much later, if
at all. And when we pass to distant schools our knowledge must be so
general and so vague that no trustworthy argument can be founded upon
it.
[Sidenote: Personal Influence.]
The truth is that moral training is chiefly an affair of personal
influence, and that influence of this kind is a special gift. For
example, Dr. Arnold had the gift in the supreme degree, but a man might
be placed in control of the same educational machinery and yet be
destitute of it.
However, some general truths may be taken note of, and they may help us
to understand the subject so far as it can be said to be intelligible.
[Sidenote: Necessity of a National Moral Sense.]
[Sidenote: Want of Freshness of Feeling in France.]
First, you require material to work upon in a national moral sense,
and here I have just said that the English have the advantage. The
moral sense is (on the whole and in spite of many exceptions) very much
stronger in England than in France. The English (except their men of
the world) still retain in a great degree the healthy state of moral
feeling which is capable of being really shocked and horror-stricken
by turpitude and vice; the French lose this freshness of feeling very
early in life, and look upon turpitude and vice very much as an English
man of the world looks upon them, as a part of the nature of things too
familiar to excite surprise. It does not follow that they themselves
are base and vicious, but they know too much, and they know it too
early, about the evil side of life.
[Sidenote: Moral Influence of the Church of England.]
[Sidenote: Authority needed with the Young.]
[Sidenote: Value of Ecclesiastical Institutions.]
[Sidenote: Special Authority of the Clergy.]
The English, too, have a great advantage in the possession of a
national institution which exists far more for moral training than
for anything else. The Church of England is much less of a theocracy
than the Church of Rome, and much more of a moral influence over the
ordinary laity. Its clergy are nearer to the laity than the Roman
Catholic clergy are, and their influence is on the whole a more
pervading and efficient influence. The great difficulty about the moral
training of the young is that it can only be done well and efficiently
by authority. Ecclesiastical institutions invest the teacher with this
authority far better than any others. The clerical teacher, with the
Church behind him, is free from the perplexing task of reasoning about
morals; he has only to require obedience. His very costume separates
him from all laymen, and gives a weight and seriousness to his teaching
that they cannot impart to theirs. For this reason almost all parents,
until recent years, have been anxious to place their children under the
authority of priests, and have often done so when they themselves had
no belief in theological doctrines. They did not seek the theocratic
power, but the moral power that was connected with it.
[Sidenote: The Difficulty of Clerical Education.]
[Sidenote: Effect of it on Unbelievers.]
[Sidenote: Truthfulness especially a Social Virtue.]
[Sidenote: Unbelievers numerous in France.]
[Sidenote: Agnostics in the French University.]
In course of time, however, a most formidable difficulty arises.
Clerical education may be morally most beneficial, but it can only
be so whilst the pupil himself is a sincere believer. If he is not,
the effect of clerical education is not moral, but the contrary, as
it compels him to learn the arts of dissimulation. The clergy do
not say in plain terms that deceit and imposture are virtues; they
class them, nominally, in the category of vices, but the intelligent
pupil soon perceives that he is rewarded for practising them and
punished for not practising them. “Many unbelievers,” said a truthful
Frenchman to me, “come out of our clerical seminaries, but the
acquired habit of dissimulation remains with them, and they are never
plain and straightforward in after life.” Perhaps it may be said
that I attach too much importance to truthfulness, that a certain
degree of dissimulation is necessary in the world, and that it may as
well be learned at school as in practical affairs. I only know that
truthfulness is one of the social virtues, though it is often directly
contrary to the interests of those who practise it. Being a social
virtue, and favourable to public interests, it ought to be encouraged
in public education. Now, it so happens, whether for good or evil, that
the majority of French laymen of the educated classes are unbelievers,
and I say that no moral purpose can be answered by bringing them up
in habits of hypocrisy. I am told by those who are in a position to
judge accurately, that is to say, by intelligent men who have lived all
their lives in the University, that four out of every six professors
are Agnostics, and that the proportion amongst the present generation
of their pupils is even larger. Under these circumstances the idea of
handing over the national University to the priests is inadmissible by
any one who cares for liberty of conscience; and if the reader thinks
that liberty of conscience is a luxury for Protestants only, and that
Agnostics have no right to it, I cannot agree with him.
[Sidenote: Liberty of Thought unfavourable to Moral Authority.]
[Sidenote: Incompatibility of Authority with Reasoning.]
[Sidenote: Principle of the Church of Rome.]
Unfortunately, however, it is found in practice that liberty of
thought in religious matters not being itself founded upon authority,
but on the exercise of individual reason, is unfavourable to moral
authority, especially over the young. In fact, reason and authority are
incompatible. We rule our children by authority when they are young,
without stopping to reason; when they are grown up we endeavour to
influence them by reason, but our authority, as such, has departed. The
Church of Rome avoids this difficulty by founding all her teaching on
authority. Even when she condescends to reason, every one knows that
the principle of authority is behind and can be used, like a royal
prerogative, to cut short discussion at any moment.
[Sidenote: French Lay Teachers wanting in Authority.]
[Sidenote: One Good Effect of Lay Education.]
Now, as a matter of simple fact, it must be admitted that the moral
authority of French lay teachers is inadequate. They have not the power
of the priests, nor even of the English clergy. And the consequence is
that a new generation of Frenchmen is growing up under insufficient
moral control. I make no attempt to disguise the evil, but cannot
see how it was to have been avoided. It is an evil which lies before
every country in Europe as the authority of religion becomes relaxed.
Meanwhile, lay education, if not morally so strong as one might
desire, is at least producing a generation of young men who are frank
and fearless, and have an unaffected contempt for sneaks and hypocrites
of all kinds.
[Sidenote: Dr. Arnold.]
What is wanted is a class of lay principals with something like the
moral authority of Dr. Arnold; but would Dr. Arnold have possessed that
authority, or anything approaching to it, if he had been a layman?
[Sidenote: A French Principal.]
I myself have known very intimately and for many years a French
principal who would have delighted in exercising Arnold’s power for
good if he had possessed it, but he was a layman only, and did not
possess it.
[Sidenote: Sacerdotal Authority in Family Life.]
In family life there may be a kind of sacerdotal authority in the
head of the household when he exercises a sacerdotal function, when
he compels his household to join him in family prayer and to listen
respectfully whilst he reads and expounds the sacred books. The father
assumes in that manner a moral authority that is not easily assumed in
any other way.
[Sidenote: Clerical Jealousy of Family Influence.]
[Sidenote: Value of Home Influence.]
[Sidenote: Manners acquired in the Seminaries.]
Still, in many French families, the father is anxious to do what
he can, and this is one of his strongest reasons against clerical
education in the ecclesiastical seminaries. The clerical teachers, in
their desire to establish an uncontested religious influence over the
boys, look upon the father and mother as rivals, and do not permit
the boys to return home, except during the vacations, even when the
parents live in the very town where the seminary itself is situated.
In this way home influence is almost annihilated, and clerical
influence substituted for it. But the moralising and civilising power
of the home influence may be too precious to be sacrificed, and, as
a matter of fact, when the children are educated by laymen, it is
almost the only influence of that kind that remains. In France it is
especially the mother who civilises boys. Lads who are too much shut
up in the _lycées_ may get what the French call “instruction,” but
they do not get what is called “education.” The pupils imprisoned in
the ecclesiastical seminaries acquire, certainly, an oily smoothness
of manner and a much greater degree of docility than the _lycéens_,
because they have been more thoroughly broken in.
[Sidenote: Home Influences undervalued in England.]
[Sidenote: Parents and Schoolmasters.]
[Sidenote: Brief Duration of Paternal Influence.]
In England the home influences are much undervalued. Wealthy English
parents soon despair of doing anything themselves for the moral
training of their children, so they “pack them off” to some distant
school to be placed under the influence of masters whom they have never
seen and of whom nothing is really known except that they are in holy
orders. If an Englishman has been educated at home, or even near home,
he is generally rather ashamed of it, and unless he is exceptionally
forcible in after life he is likely to be despised for it. Still, the
boy must be born in very unfortunate circumstances whose father and
mother could not, if they chose, do more for his moral training than a
schoolmaster who has perhaps fifty to attend to without the parental
interest in any of them. The worst of the distant-school system is
that it deprives the home residence that remains of all beneficial
discipline, for the boys are guests during the holidays, and the great
business is to amuse them. Then they go away to follow some profession,
and the father, as he thinks over his fond dreams of companionship and
paternal influence, may reckon (if the now useless calculation can
still interest him) for how many months or weeks that influence has
been directly operative in the whole course of his children’s lives.
[Sidenote: English Grammar Schools.]
[Sidenote: Benefits of Rural Life for Boys.]
For this reason the English grammar schools, though despised because
they are cheap and easily accessible to the middle classes, may have a
better effect on the family life of the country than the fashionable
public schools. The idea would be to get both good home education and
good school education at the same time, especially when the parents
have the luck to live in the country. Rural life is good for boys, both
physically and mentally; it gives them a healthy interest in a thousand
things, especially in a rudimentary kind of natural history, and it
prevents them from acquiring the premature cynicism and sharpness that
are amongst the most undesirable characteristics of young Parisians.
[Sidenote: The Root of the Difficulty.]
[Sidenote: The Natural World.]
[Sidenote: The Argument from Social Interests.]
The root of the moral difficulty is that the natural world is
non-moral, and the natural world is all we have to appeal to when the
various forms of the supernatural have all equally been rejected. After
that we may argue that morality, in the most comprehensive sense, is
the only sound basis for human societies, and that all social interests
are on the side of it. That, no doubt, is true, and it is a good
subject for sound reasoning, but reason is not authority, it is only an
attempt to persuade, and the boyish nature detests moral lecturing.
[Sidenote: International Immorality.]
[Sidenote: The English Aristocracy.]
[Sidenote: Want of Rectitude in its Judgment of Foreigners.]
Boys, too, are sharp enough to perceive that all morality is abandoned
by common consent in the dealings between nations. Both England and
France have been thoroughly immoral in their dealings with weaker
States, and in recent times Germany has shown herself no better.
It is difficult to maintain fine moral theories in countries whose
practice so openly contradicts them. Even the authoritative moral
teaching of the English clergy, which may have had a good effect on
the private lives of their pupils, has not given them anything like
stern rectitude of judgment concerning foreigners; for the English
aristocracy admired Louis Napoleon, certainly one of the lowest
characters that ever existed. It was also entirely on the side of the
immoral slave power in the United States.
[Sidenote: Value of Public Opinion.]
[Sidenote: French Disapproval of Debt.]
[Sidenote: American Disapproval of Idleness.]
[Sidenote: English Reprobation of what is Ungentlemanly.]
[Sidenote: Military Professional Virtue.]
[Sidenote: Medical Professional Virtue.]
The one great anxiety that torments thoughtful Englishmen, and still
more thoughtful Frenchmen, in the present day, is the establishment
of an accepted moral authority. I am able to perceive only one that
might be efficacious, and that is a severe public opinion. It may be
answered that public opinion exists already; and so no doubt it does,
but chiefly to reward conformity and punish nonconformity in externals.
We want a public opinion that would sustain and encourage every one
in the practice of unostentatious virtues, especially in temperance,
self-denial, and simplicity of life. As an example of what might be I
may mention the French disapproval of debt. That is extremely strong,
and as it is accompanied by the permission to live simply it does
really operate as an effective restraint upon extravagance, at least
in provincial life. The American disapproval of idleness, even in the
rich, is another case in point, and in the English upper classes there
is a general and salutary disapproval of everything that is held to
be ungentlemanly. Notwithstanding what has been said in this chapter
about the want of moral authority in laymen, they can effect something
by combination. For example, military men are laymen, yet they keep up
amongst themselves a splendid spirit of courage and self-sacrifice, and
so do physicians and surgeons, with the addition of a manly charity and
tenderness.
CHAPTER V
THE EDUCATION OF THE FEELINGS
[Sidenote: Mill’s Opinion on French Feeling.]
[Sidenote: English Stoicism.]
[Sidenote: The Frenchman’s love for his Mother.]
[Sidenote: Euryalus.]
[Sidenote: Ascanius and his Sentiments of Friendship.]
[Sidenote: Un-English.]
John Mill pointed out long ago the advantage that the French have
in the cultivation of the feelings. This is very much an affair of
utterance in language, for it is utterance which best keeps feelings
alive. French sympathy is often, no doubt, assumed; that is inevitable
where so much sympathy is expressed; still, it is certain that in
France all true sympathy does get expressed, and in this way people
live surrounded by an atmosphere in which feeling remains active. In
England the national reserve and the sharp distinction of classes are
both against the cultivation of feelings, but besides this there is
the pride of stoicism, the fear of seeming soft. The Frenchman’s love
for his mother is ridiculous in England; in France it is only natural.
In truth, perhaps, it is not so much the sentiment that is ridiculous
for Englishmen as the association of it with French expressions. The
English do not laugh at it in Latin. The affection of Euryalus for his
mother is thought beautiful in the Æneid, but turn it into French and
it comes in those very phrases that Englishmen cannot abide. “J’ai une
mère issue de l’antique race de Priam, une mère infortunée qui a voulu
me suivre et que n’ont pu retenir le rivage natal d’Ilion ni les mûrs
hospitaliers d’Aceste. _Cette mère je la quitte sans l’instruire des
dangers où je cours et sans l’embrasser. Non, j’en prends à témoin et
la Nuit et votre main sacrée, je ne pourrais soutenir les larmes de
ma mère. Mais vous, je vous en conjure, consolez-la dans sa douleur,
soutenez-la dans son abandon._” The words that I have italicised are so
perfectly French that they might be quoted from the last yellow-backed
novel. The warm promise of friendship from Ascanius is also excessively
French in sentiment. “Pour toi, Euryale, dont l’âge se rapproche plus
du mien, admirable jeune homme, dès ce jour mon cœur est à toi, et je
t’adopte à jamais comme compagnon de ma fortune: sans toi je n’irai
plus chercher la gloire, et, soit dans la paix, soit dans la guerre,
ma confiance reposera sur ton bras et sur tes conseils.” One young
Englishman would never speak like that to another, he might possibly go
so far as to say, “Hope you’ll come back all right.”
[Sidenote: Effect of English Usages.]
[Sidenote: The best constituted Englishman.]
[Sidenote: Sympathy.]
[Sidenote: The tenderer Natures.]
[Sidenote: The Filial Relation in England.]
[Sidenote: The Fraternal.]
[Sidenote: Cousins.]
[Sidenote: Funerals.]
[Sidenote: Neglected Tombs.]
[Sidenote: Friends and Relations.]
Do the English suppress feeling, or have they no feeling to be
suppressed? The true answer to this question cannot be a simple one.
English usages have a tendency to prevent the expression of feeling
where it exists, and therefore they are not favourable to the culture
of the feelings, still these exist naturally as blades of grass
will grow between the hard stones of a pavement. It must, however,
be admitted that although in England a man of feeling may certainly
live, the moral climate is not so favourable to him as it is to one
who feels much less and is therefore hardier. The Englishman who is
best constituted for life in his own country is one who has just
feeling enough to keep him right in all matters of external duty, but
not enough to make him very sympathetic, or to give him any painful
craving for sympathy. If he is sympathetic he will offer his sympathy
where it is not wanted, and be hurt by the chilling acceptance of it,
and if he has the misfortune to crave for sympathy he will suffer. So
it comes to pass that the tenderer natures try to harden themselves by
an acquired and artificial insensibility, whilst those which are not
very tender find the conditions of existence more suitable for them.
I had collected a number of examples, but do not give them, because
instances prove nothing, and because it would be so easy to affirm that
my examples were not truly representative. I prefer to take another
course, and to suggest to the reader, if he is familiar with English
life, the idea of making a little investigation on his own account,
by consulting his own recollections. First, as to family affections,
the reader has probably met with many cases in which the paternal and
filial relations were cool and rather distant, so that separation was
not painful to either party. If he has observed brothers he may have
seen them practically almost strangers, living far apart, in different
spheres, and seldom, if ever, corresponding. He may have known cousins,
even first cousins, who did not remember their relationship so far as
to announce to each other the occurrences of marriages and deaths. He
may have observed that a slight impediment of distance or occupation
is sometimes enough to prevent a relation from coming to a funeral,
and that the tombs of dead relations are sometimes left unvisited,
uncared for, and untended. The reader may have noticed cases in which
a difference of fortune produces a complete estrangement between
very near relations, and finally he may have met with Englishmen
who declared that friends were worth having because they could be
selected, but that relations were a nuisance or “a mistake.”
[Sidenote: Absence of the Culture of the Affections in England.]
[Sidenote: Culture of the Affections in France.]
Cases like these are very numerous in England, because the affections
are left to the chances of accident; they are not sedulously cared for
and cultivated. When they are of great strength naturally, and when the
conditions happen to be very favourable, there is nothing to prevent
their growth, but in less favourable conditions there is nothing to
keep them alive. In France all very near relations write to each other
when they cannot meet personally on their fête days, all friends write
at least a line or two for the New Year, and acquaintances exchange
cards. An intelligent Frenchman said to me, “Our culture of the family
affections is sometimes insincere, we sometimes express sentiments
which are assumed for the occasion, but, on the whole, our customs tend
to keep alive the reality of affection as well as its appearance, by
reminding us of our relations and friends and of our duties towards
them.”
[Sidenote: Cause of the Difference.]
What is the cause of this difference? Do the English really care less
for each other than the French, or is there some hidden reason why they
are less demonstrative?
[Sidenote: English Shyness.]
[Sidenote: Due to a want of Culture.]
[Sidenote: Exceptional Englishmen.]
[Sidenote: The Clergy.]
There is one reason--the English shyness, the English fear of giving
verbal utterance to feeling. Now, this is distinctly a want of culture,
for the due expression of feeling is, in all the higher arts, one of
the best results of culture. There can be no doubt that many Englishmen
feel much more than they are able to express, and they certainly
appreciate the power of utterance in others, as, for example, in their
orators. A few Englishmen boldly go beyond and do express feeling,
even in ordinary life, just as a few venture to talk like intellectual
men. These few are not uncommonly found among the clergy, at least it
has been so in my experience; and this may be due to the culture which
religion gives to feeling, and, in the clergy, to the practice gained
by the utterance of it in sermons and exhortations.
[Sidenote: The Best Education.]
[Sidenote: Queen Victoria.]
[Sidenote: Feeling appreciated in Art but not in Life.]
[Sidenote: English Tenderness for the Lower Animals.]
[Sidenote: French Hardness.]
[Sidenote: English Humanitarianism laughed at. The _Temps_.]
[Sidenote: Influence of the Church.]
[Sidenote: Animals are Infidels.]
[Sidenote: The Scientific Spirit.]
[Sidenote: _La Loi Grammont._]
The idea that feeling is a weakness, and that it is well to suppress
it in the education of boys, is more in accordance with the opinion
of the Red Indians than with that of the ancient Greeks. The best
education would respect all natural and healthy sentiment, such as a
boy’s love for his mother, without ridiculing it, but would at the same
time train the boy in the courage which has always been compatible
with tenderness, ay, and even with tears. Amongst the services of an
unobtrusive kind which Queen Victoria has rendered to the English, one
of the best has been by setting an example of openness in matters of
feeling. She has permitted her subjects to see what she felt on many
occasions, and has done this simply, plainly, and without the dread of
sneering depreciation. The same healthy influence is often exercised
by women in narrower spheres. There is more than ever room for this
feminine influence in an age like ours, when the positivism of the
scientific and industrial temper, and the fierce competition amongst
individual men, as well as between nations, are hardening the heart
of the world. The due exercise and culture of the feelings are always
appreciated at their right value in literature and the fine arts; it
is a strange and striking anomaly that we fail to perceive their equal
importance in the reality of life itself.
[Sidenote: A French Gentleman and his Carriage Horses.]
[Sidenote: Sport and _Gourmandise_.]
[Sidenote: A Horrible Custom at Sens.]
There is one department of the culture of feeling in which the
English are far superior to the French--that of sympathy with the
lower animals. The French are humane enough where human beings are
concerned, but their humanity, as a rule, is confined to pity for the
sufferings of their own species. There are exceptions, of course. I
know several Frenchwomen who are full of sympathy for cats and dogs,
and I have known French grooms who were thoughtful and kind and even
affectionate in their treatment of horses; nevertheless, as a nation,
the French are hard and pitiless in comparison with the English. All
sentiments appear ridiculous when we do not share them, so the French
laugh at English humanitarianism as the British critic laughs at a
Frenchman’s tenderness about his mother. My favourite French newspaper,
the _Temps_, never misses an opportunity for a hit at this English
eccentricity. French hardness dates from the time when the influence of
the Church was universal; and, whether she taught the doctrine formally
or not, her followers believed that animals, being unbaptized, had no
rights. A dog or a horse is an infidel, and therefore cruelty to it is
blameless. The decline of religious influence might have led one to
hope for a broader charity, but there unhappily came the scientific
spirit, which, though not cruel for the sake of cruelty, is heedless of
animal suffering, and ready to inflict tortures on the lower animals
worse than the torments of the Inquisition. So, in fact, the condition
of the poor brutes has gone from bad to worse. There is, indeed, a
French law for the protection of animals, but it is nearly a dead
letter. The great practical difficulty in cultivating the feelings on
this subject comes from the general but most unreasonable idea that
there is something manly in being indifferent to the sufferings of
brutes, and something childish in having pity for them. I remember a
French gentleman who considered himself strong-minded because he made
his carriage horses work when they had raws. In the lower classes
men are proud of overloading and of making their horses go over
unreasonable distances.[11] In both countries men are ready to inflict
pain on animals whenever they think that they can get pleasure out of
it for themselves. The passions for sport and _gourmandise_ are the
two which come next after science for pitilessness. The infliction of
wounds for amusement, and the boiling alive of lobsters, are common
to England and France, but the following is, I believe, peculiarly
French:--When we lived at Sens my wife discovered that it was the
custom, when selling rabbits on the market-place, to put their eyes
out with a skewer, from a belief that this cruelty improved the
flavour.[12] I find that cooks are all convinced that boiling alive is
necessary to the flavour of a lobster, and there is no reasoning with
cooks and gourmands if they believe that cruelty heightens the delicacy
of tortured flesh.
[Sidenote: The Sentiment of Reverence.]
[Sidenote: Veneration of the Priests by Catholics.]
[Sidenote: Absence of Veneration in the Republican Party. Victor Hugo.
Ingres.]
[Sidenote: Chevreul.]
[Sidenote: Extinction of Royalist Sentiment.]
[Sidenote: Want of Reverence for High Officials.]
[Sidenote: Absence of Veneration in Family Life.]
Amongst the sentiments that have been much cultivated in the past
there is one which is less and less cultivated in modern France,
the sentiment of reverence. The difficulty is to find objects for
reverence that can effectually withstand the desecrating light of
modern criticism. Good Catholics have still an object of veneration
in the Pope and, in minor degrees, in the bishops and other priests;
but since the death of the Count de Chambord there is not a single
political personage left who excites veneration even in the mind of a
royalist. The republicans venerate nobody, not even poor ex-president
Grévy. Victor Hugo was, no doubt, regarded with veneration, but he
has left no successor. Father Ingres was also really venerated by a
certain sect of younger artists in his time. Chevreul, the centenarian,
is respected for his achievements and for his hundred years. In this
way two or three individuals in a century may excite some veneration,
but the sentiment, outside of the Church, lacks continuity of culture.
The true royalist sentiment is dead in France, the religious sentiment
survives only in a part of the population, and is failing even there,
whilst the French have not the vulgar veneration for titles which would
at least exercise the faculty, though on low objects. Neither do the
posts occupied by high officials under the Republic excite veneration
in anybody. The royalists unanimously despise them, the republicans
generally want to dismiss the present occupants and put other men in
their places. In family life there is much affection certainly, and no
doubt there is some respect, but there is no veneration. “Your sons,”
I said to an intelligent Frenchman, “treat you with much freedom. They
do not seem to be in the least impressed by any idea of the paternal
dignity.”--“How can we expect them,” he answered, “to be deferential
and reverential to us when we, on our part, have set them, on every
possible occasion, the example of a want of reverence towards the
beliefs and the institutions of our fathers? They have heard nothing
but criticism from our lips, they have grown up in an age of criticism,
when there is nothing for the faculty of veneration to cling to.” In a
word, veneration had never been exercised or developed in their minds.
[Sidenote: Veneration in England. The Bible and the Throne. Houses of
Parliament.]
[Sidenote: Critical Writing.]
[Sidenote: Veneration in Poetry.]
[Sidenote: Effects of the want of Veneration in the Common People.]
[Sidenote: Loss of Faith in the Classics.]
In England this sentiment is less cultivated than in former times, but
there still remain the Bible and the Throne. The House of Commons does
not inspire it, the House of Lords is more and more failing to inspire
it. The critical writing which is most keenly enjoyed is absolutely
destitute of veneration. Looking to the future, a philosopher might
ask himself whether the faculty was not destined to die out as having
become useless. It is poetical, but it is not critical. When a poet
does not feel it he feigns it; the critic knows that to approach a
subject in a reverential spirit is to abdicate his own function. The
misfortune is that when the common people cease to venerate they lose
their interest in things. The fate of the Apocrypha is a significant
illustration. The English no longer believe it to be inspired, they no
longer venerate it, consequently they have ceased to read it. In France
the Bible, for the same reason, is left unread by the Voltairean world.
The old veneration for the Greek and Latin classics is passing away,
and they will soon only be read by a few specialists. The French are
losing their faith in the classics, once so staunch, with a rapidity
that astonishes even those who are most familiar with French impulses.
That was the last-surviving religion in intellectual France, and it is
moribund.
CHAPTER VI
EDUCATION AND RANK
[Sidenote: Education not a Mark of Class in France. Latin a Matter of
Business.]
[Sidenote: Greater Value of English University Degrees.]
France, being a more advanced democracy than England, has made greater
efforts to bring secondary education within the reach of many, and the
consequence is that such education, in that country, having ceased
to be a mark of class, confers very little social position. The
majority of French boys who learn Latin do it simply as a matter of
business, the bachelor’s degree being necessary to every physician and
surgeon, to every barrister and notary, and even to every teacher of
modern languages in the public schools. There are also examinations
to be passed before practising pharmacy as a trade, and for that the
examinations are not confined to the special science itself. In England
the University degree is not absolutely required for the professions
of law and medicine, and therefore it retains more of an ornamental
character. It is more of an intellectual distinction and less of a
matter of business than in France.
[Sidenote: Tendency of Modern French Institutions.]
[Sidenote: The _Bourgeois_.]
[Sidenote: What Education can do in France.]
[Sidenote: Degrees and Society.]
To understand France in this and many other matters we must bear in
mind that the whole tendency of modern French institutions is to
produce, not what the English call the gentleman, but the middle-class
man, or _bourgeois_, in enormous numbers. He is comfortably clothed,
badly lodged, far too well fed, and educated in many studies, but not
quite up to the point at which they would begin to be available for the
intellectual life. The public schools where he gets this education are
both too numerous in themselves and too numerously attended, besides
being too cheap, for purposes of social distinction. All that education
can do for a lad in France, at any school or college, is to place him
in the _bourgeoisie_, that is to say, in the middle class. It does
not, in the least, give him an approach to social equality with the
aristocracy. Sons of peasants frequently rise in the _bourgeoisie_ by
means of University degrees; but that is not much, and there they stop.
There is not any University degree, however elevated, not even the
double doctorate, which is recognised by what is called “Society” as
conferring any claim whatever to come within its pale.[13]
[Sidenote: Choice of School and University in England. Eton and Oxford.]
[Sidenote: English always wrong about French _Lycées_.]
[Sidenote: The Simple Fact.]
[Sidenote: Princely and Humble _Lycéens_.]
[Sidenote: Education of the Orleans Princes.]
In England the choice of school and University has an immense influence
on a boy’s future social position. Educate him at a grammar school or
send him to Eton and Oxford, the difference to his future rank will be
enormous. If an English mother has a son at Eton she is sure to let
you know. All English people associate the idea of class distinctions
with the different English schools, and they have an almost insuperable
difficulty in realising the condition of things in France, where there
is neither an Eton nor an Oxford, nor anything in the least degree
resembling them from the social point of view. In this way the English
are always wrong about the French _lycées_, because they begin by
imagining the English class distinctions. The prevalent English idea
about them is that they are low and cheap places. One English writer
accepted it as evidence of the very humble origin of a distinguished
Frenchman that he had been educated in a _lycée_. He could not realise
the simple fact that the _lycées_ have nothing to do with social rank
_either one way or the other_. My brother-in-law was educated at a
_lycée_, and one of his ordinary class-fellows was a prince who is now
actually reigning; other class-fellows may have been sons of small
shopkeepers or poor clerks. Older Frenchmen are still living who were
class-fellows of the Orleans princes at the _lycée Henri IV._ The
princes worked like the others, and it was only thought a proof of
their father’s good sense that he sent his boys to one of the best
schools in the town where he lived, though he happened to be King of
the French. It was good for them, but it made no difference to the
others, nor to the school. King Milan of Servia was afterwards educated
at the same _lycée_.
[Sidenote: Views of the Reactionary Aristocracy.]
[Sidenote: Religious and Political Reasons.]
A boy gains no rank, and loses none, by being at a French _lycée_.
It is true that the reactionary aristocracy looks upon the _lycées_
with disfavour, but that is not because they are cheap,[14] or because
some of the pupils are poor, for the aristocracy is willing to send
its children to priestly seminaries, which are still cheaper, and
where most of the pupils are poorer. The reasons are not social, but
religious and political. The _lycées_ have lay masters, the seminaries
have priests; the _lycées_ are animated with a republican spirit, the
seminaries are royalist. Everything has a political colour in France.
When a young noble has not been to a seminary he is educated on its
principles by a clerical tutor at home, or else in some Jesuit school
abroad.
[Sidenote: Education itself gives little Position in France.]
[Sidenote: Revival of the Middle-age Idea.]
[Sidenote: The Brilliant Nobility.]
Not only does the place of education give no social position to a
Frenchman, but education itself now gives him very little, because it
has been made accessible to poor men. Eton and Oxford are respected
because they are expensive;--if the same education, or a better, were
given in cheap schools, it would lose its social significance. France
seems to have reached, or almost reached, that point towards which
the whole world is tending, when education will be too common to
confer rank, and it is even possible we may get back to the middle-age
idea that it is lordly to be illiterate. Even now, something of this
sentiment is distinctly perceptible in France. Clever young men in the
middle class are considered to be working creditably for persons in
their line of life, but the nobility do not meet them on that ground;
they outshine them, not in learning, but in field-sports and equipages.
[Sidenote: The Native Language.]
[Sidenote: Clever Frenchwomen in the Middle Classes.]
[Sidenote: Rare Use of the Best English.]
A refined way of speaking the native language does something for social
position in England. English people say of a man, “He has a good
accent, he speaks like a gentleman;” in France so many middle-class
people speak well habitually that pure speech has almost ceased to
be a distinction. Even if the men had not broken down that barrier,
clever Frenchwomen would have removed it. How many of them have I
met with, in the middle classes, who, for enunciation, articulation,
readiness and accuracy of expression, and precision of accent, spoke
quite as well as ladies of rank! This, too, in a country where clear,
and prompt, and accurate speaking is valued and appreciated to a degree
unknown in England. It is only the most cultivated English people who
dare to employ, in conversation, the full powers of their noble tongue;
the others shrink from the best use of it, and accustom themselves to
forms of speech that constitute, in reality, a far inferior language,
in which it is so difficult to express thought and sentiment that they
are commonly left unexpressed.[15]
[Sidenote: Culture _versus_ Rank.]
[Sidenote: French Aristocracy unaccustomed to work.]
[Sidenote: Character of the French Rural Aristocracy.]
[Sidenote: Intellectual Industry of some Retired Tradesmen.]
[Sidenote: Barbarians in the Upper Classes.]
[Sidenote: Devotion to Barbaric Sports.]
[Sidenote: Contempt for Trade and Commerce.]
[Sidenote: Liberty of Primæval Instincts.]
Passing from ordinary education to that higher culture which can only
be attained by a sedulous attachment to intellectual pursuits in mature
life, I should say that here, again, mental elevation has nothing to
do with social rank. In France the time is at hand, if it has not
already arrived, when high culture may be taken as evidence that its
possessor does not belong to the aristocracy. Speaking for the present
of France only, I may offer two or three reasons in explanation of
this curious anomaly. The French aristocracy, disdaining all work
that is remunerative, does not enter the professions, and so misses
the culture that the professions give. But, beyond this, the French
aristocracy is unaccustomed to work of any kind, and as culture is
usually unattainable without work, and as there is not even a high
standard of early education in that aristocracy, it passes its time
in ways that do not tend to culture except so far as polite and
graceful social intercourse favours it. If the reader wishes to be
just he will not think of the minor French rural aristocracy as “a
class of rakes,” but as a very numerous class of more or less wealthy
idlers, living half the year on their estates, four months in some
country town, and a month or two at Paris or the sea-side. Their
life is healthy and natural for the most part, and they often attain
a great age; but they are, as a class, much more addicted to rural
sports than to intellectual or artistic pursuits of any kind. There
are exceptions, of course, yet even the exceptions suffer from the
benumbing influence of their surroundings, and usually stop short of
any noteworthy attainment. I may repeat in this place a remark made
to me by an observant Frenchman. He said, “In our country the men who
cultivate themselves with effect are more frequently retired tradesmen
than men born to independence. The retired tradesman has habits of
industry which he applies to any pursuit that he takes up, and the
want of these habits is fatal to the aristocrat.” Another Frenchman,
himself a man of culture, coincided, quite independently, with Matthew
Arnold’s well-known description of another aristocracy. “It is a
strange result of the wealth and intelligence of the modern world,” he
said, “to give the upper classes the pursuits of the savage without
the necessity which is his excuse for them. Our country gentlemen are
not our intellectual leaders, they live a sort of perfected barbaric
life. They are barbarians armed with the complicated appliances of
civilisation. Their greatest glory is to have killed a large number of
big wild boars, and they exhibit the heads as trophies. Another savage
characteristic is that they despise trade and commerce, and consider
all professions beneath them except that of the warrior. Their ideas
of government by the simple authority of a despotic chief are also
those of primitive man; they have not patience to endure the delays
and the complicated action of parliamentary institutions. In a word,
the liberty that wealth gives in the modern world means for them the
liberty of the primæval instincts.”
PART II
PATRIOTISM
CHAPTER I
PATRIOTIC TENDERNESS
[Sidenote: Tenderness has increased in France and diminished in
England.]
The tender feeling of patriotism, as distinguished from the proud, is
more general in France than in England, and it has increased in France
during the last twenty years, whilst it has diminished in England
in the course of a generation, or during the transition from one
generation to another.
[Sidenote: Causes of the Difference.]
This difference and these changes are due to causes that may easily be
seen in operation. We may be able to fix upon some of them, and whilst
we are so occupied the reader is especially requested to bear in mind
that the tenderness of patriotism is not the whole of patriotism, and
that the Englishman who has little tenderness may be as patriotic in
other ways as the Frenchman who has more.
[Sidenote: Local.]
Tender patriotism in all cases attaches itself to the soil; it is
an affection for the soil, and at first an affection for particular
localities, generally with recognisable characteristics. One of the
first effects of it is to produce a feeling of foreignness with regard
to other parts of the same nation, so that by its particularism it may
seem almost anti-patriotic.
[Sidenote: The Princess of Thule]
“I will never leave Borva,” said the Princess of Thule, yet she did
leave Borva, and sang her old island songs in the strange land and
amongst the strange people “with her heart breaking with thoughts of
the sea, and the hills, and the rude, and sweet, and simple ways of the
old island life that she had left behind her.”
[Sidenote: William Black. His understanding of Patriotic Tenderness.]
Here is an example of tender patriotism, so much localised that the
lover of her own country, which is one of the Hebridean islands,
feels herself a foreigner in London, and it might be argued that
every British subject ought to feel at home in the capital of the
nation. Well, we are coming to that, but the first patriotism is local
and pathetic.[16] No English novelist understands the sentiment of
patriotic tenderness better than does William Black, and he always
represents it as strongest in poor and thinly-peopled places, such as
are to be found in the Western Highlands, and in the bleak archipelago
between the Scottish mainland and the open Atlantic.
[Sidenote: Rural Life favourable to Tenderness.]
Country life is highly favourable to the growth of a tender local
patriotism, especially that kind of country life which remains
stationary and attached to family possessions. Small estates are
favourable to it, large estates less so, because they supply their
owners with the means of living at a distance, and especially for
passing a part of the year in the capital, and other months out of the
country altogether.
[Sidenote: Colonisation Unfavourable.]
Colonisation is unfavourable to a tender English patriotism, because it
diverts the affection of families from the soil of the mother country
by giving them a second country beyond the sea, and by encouraging the
idea that the mother country is but a part of a vast confederation, in
which the colonists may have a patriotic feeling for the confederation
generally, and a specially affectionate patriotism for the State or
province in which they were born.
[Sidenote: Composite States.]
When the State is very heterogeneous in composition, including several
very different nationalities, there may be a tender sentiment in each
nation for itself, but this is not likely to extend to the entire
State. Thus, a Scotchman may have a tender feeling for Scotland, an
Irishman for Ireland, but their tender affection is not likely to
include England, still less Canada and Australia. They may be proud of
belonging to so great an empire, but that is another feeling.
[Sidenote: Effects of Religion and Poetry.]
[Sidenote: Utterance of Feeling.]
[Sidenote: Its Stoical Repression.]
Every influence that increases the sensibility of the feelings is
likely to increase the tenderness of patriotic sentiment. Religion and
poetry are both strong influences in its favour, and a very powerful
constant influence is that of a society in which feeling is habitually
expressed as it is by the Irish and the French. A society in which the
utterance of deep feeling of any kind is repressed by conventional
good breeding, and by a kind of external stoicism, is repressive of
tenderness in patriotic sentiment. This stoical tendency in the English
is more favourable to pride than to love.
[Sidenote: Habits of Travel.]
Habits of travel, habits of living abroad, cosmopolitan experiences on
a large scale, diminish the intensity of local affection by affording
opportunities for comparison, and so destroying illusions, especially
about the grandeur of landscapes that have been dear to us in youth,
and the appearance of houses and towns. After the Alps the English
mountains are seen to be only hills, after Paris the northern towns
look dismal.
[Sidenote: Prosperity, Commercial and Political.]
Lastly, a sustained commercial and political prosperity is unfavourable
to the tenderness of national sentiment, because a very prosperous
nation does not appeal to the pathetic sympathies, does not call for
commiseration. The sons of a powerful and rich mother do not feel
themselves to be so necessary to her as if she were afflicted and
sorrowful.
[Sidenote: Effects of these Causes in Modern England.]
The reader will see at a glance how all these reasons against the
tenderness of sentiment in patriotism tell in modern England.
[Sidenote: Lack of small Proprietors.]
[Sidenote: The Population not Stationary.]
[Sidenote: Facility in changing Residence.]
England is not a country of small proprietors. Without committing the
mistake, so common amongst foreigners, of believing that there are no
small landowners in England, we know that they are not so numerous
as in France, and therefore that the intense local affection of the
peasant has fewer chances of developing itself. Again, the population
of England is less and less a stationary population, it becomes
constantly more urban and more migratory. The lower and middle classes
change their place of residence with a facility unknown to the yeomanry
of former times. It seems to be a matter of indifference to them
whether they will live in one ugly and smoky street or in another ugly
and smoky street, and why indeed should we expect their affections to
take root in a “wilderness of bricks”? Nor do they limit themselves
to the same town. They change towns almost as easily as streets on
the slightest prospect of increased income, and often merely for the
sake of the change itself, to break the monotony of a life destitute
of local interests and local attachments. In its extreme development
the facility in removing that characterises the modern Englishman of
the unsettled class will include not merely the United Kingdom, but
the most remote dependencies of the British Empire. The following is
a case well known to me; it is given here as an extreme case, not as
an average one, but it is thoroughly English, and most remote from the
stay-at-home habits of the French.
[Sidenote: History of an English middle-class Family.]
[Sidenote: Constant Changes of Address.]
[Sidenote: Condition of Feeling incompatible with Local Attachments.]
A middle-class Englishman in a scientific profession began by going to
Scotland in his youth, and there he married early. From Scotland he
emigrated to New Zealand, and thence to Australia, where he prospered
well, but in the midst of his prosperity he determined to return to
Great Britain. He settled first in Glasgow, and afterwards migrated
successively to Hull, Bristol, Cardiff, Southampton, Liverpool, and
London. I pass over a temporary residence in the United States.
When staying in one town it was his habit to change his residence
frequently. During the thirty or forty years of his married life he
made twice as many removals. Since his death his family have gone on
in the same way: they are constantly changing their addresses, and are
dispersed over the British possessions, including New Zealand, Canada,
and British Columbia. A family of this kind is not cosmopolitan,
because it confines itself to English-speaking countries, but its
world is the vast area over which the English language is known. There
was a condition of feeling in that family quite incompatible with
old-fashioned local attachments. The members of it were ready at any
time to leave England and each other and pitch their temporary camp in
distant latitudes. This readiness was reflected in their conversation,
which ranged easily over vast spaces of land and sea.
[Sidenote: English Courage in Emigration.]
I began by saying that this was an extreme instance, and so it is, but
there are thousands of others that show the English facility of removal
in minor degrees. Nothing is more characteristic of the English, or
more unlike the French, than the courage to go and settle in some
place where they know nobody and with which they have no previous
associations. French people do it when forced by necessity, but they
do it with a sad heart; English people of their own free will have the
courage to sever old ties and begin new experiments of life.
[Sidenote: A Recent Characteristic.]
[Sidenote: Local, National, and Imperial Patriotism.]
The extreme readiness of the modern English to change their residence
is a recently-developed characteristic. It has grown with the modern
facilities of communication. Sons and daughters disperse and settle
anywhere. In wealthy families the eldest son retains possession of
the paternal home, but seldom steadily settles down to live in it,
whilst his brothers and sisters scatter themselves over the counties.
The affectionate prejudices of local patriotism have given place to a
broader national patriotism which, in its turn, is even now giving way
to a still more comprehensive Imperial patriotism. It is a change by
which the English have gained in grandeur of conception what they have
lost in tenderness of feeling.
[Sidenote: Irish Tenderness.]
[Sidenote: Pathetic Feeling and its Causes.]
[Sidenote: Pathetic Element in Scottish Patriotism.]