conveniently divided into three periods.
[Sidenote: Manners in the Eighteenth Century.]
[Sidenote: The French retain old Fashions.]
In the eighteenth century manners were ceremonious in both countries.
English people used “Sir” and “Madam,” they bowed and were punctilious,
they went through complicated little performances of graceful attitudes
and expressions. In the first half of the nineteenth century the
English laid these old fashions aside and became simple in their
manners. The French kept to the ancient ways, and so there was a great
contrast. In the second half of the nineteenth century the French
tendency is towards English simplicity, so that the two nations may
ultimately be as near each other in simplicity as they were once in
ceremony.
[Sidenote: Politeness co-existing with Rudeness.]
[Sidenote: A Future of Mediocrity.]
Another point of resemblance may deserve notice. When the English were
very ceremonious and polite the ordinary manners of the nation were
rude, with occasional explosions of coarse anger between gentlemen.[67]
So the French have been, and still are, at once a very polite and
a very rude nation. Their politeness and their rudeness are now
decreasing together, which leads to the conclusion that ceremonious
politeness is a defence against surrounding barbarism, and therefore
the mark of an imperfect state of general civilisation. There may come,
in the future, in both countries, a uniform mediocrity, when everybody
will have tolerable manners, when a sort of informal serviceableness
will be the universal rule, and all graces, delicacies, and refinements
will be forgotten.
[Sidenote: Mill on French and English Intercourse.]
The reader may remember a passage in John Mill’s autobiography, where
he makes a contrast between English and French manners in connection
with his early residence in France at Sir Samuel Bentham’s house near
Montpellier. “I even then felt,” he says, “though without stating it
clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and
amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of
existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few or
no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true,
the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national
character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in
ordinary intercourse, than in England; but the general habit of the
people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one
towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the
opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper
or middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.”
[Sidenote: English Dignity.]
[Sidenote: English Hospitality.]
This judgment is at the same time bold and true. The English do not
care about any reputation for politeness, but do greatly care about
their dignity, and are extremely afraid of compromising it by being
_incautiously_ amiable. When, however, an Englishman knows you, and
has come to the conclusion that he can be amiable with safety,
that you are not the pushing person he dreads and detests, then his
undemonstrative politeness will go much further than that of the
Frenchman. You may know Frenchmen for twenty years without getting
beyond that first stage of Gallic sociability that gives such a charm
to the beginning of intercourse with them. One cause of this difference
is that the English are an extremely hospitable people, and the French
just the reverse. Acquaintance with French people is therefore very
frequently limited to short formal calls, in which everybody acts a
part in repeating polite commonplaces, leaving any mutual knowledge of
minds and hearts exactly where it was before.
[Sidenote: Excessive Politeness as Defence.]
Here is another point of contrast that may be worth mentioning. French
gentlemen in their intercourse with the middle classes often use an
_excessive_ politeness as a defence against intimacy, and this is
perfectly understood. English habits would make excessive politeness
unnatural, so the Englishman defends himself by a chilling reserve. The
purpose is the same in both cases.
[Sidenote: The Personal Intention in Manners.]
[Sidenote: Dignity, and Polish.]
[Sidenote: Virtues of English Behaviour Negative.]
[Sidenote: Those of French Behaviour Positive.]
Manners always represent an ideal of some kind. The English way of
behaviour seems to stand for dignity, the French for grace. Manners
in both countries are more the representation of self in outward
forms than any evidence of real consideration for the person to whom
they are addressed. The Englishman wishes to convey the idea that he
himself has dignity, that he is a gentleman; the Frenchman is anxious
to show that he is a witty and accomplished man of the world. In
England dignity is maintained by coldness, by repose, by the absence
of effort, including low-toned, indolent enunciation; in France the
notion of polish requires, above all things, brilliance. The English
criticism on a Frenchman’s manners is that he lays himself out too
much for admiration, and seems to beg for sympathy too much. French
criticism on an Englishman’s manners is simply that he is destitute
of manners. It is almost idle to compare two styles of behaviour that
are founded on different principles. Without pretending to pronounce
upon the merits of either, I should say that the virtues of English
behaviour are chiefly of a negative kind, and those of French behaviour
positive. An Englishman is pleasant because he is _not_ noisy, _not_
troublesome, _not_ obtrusive, _not_ contradictory, and because he has
the tact to avoid conversational pitfalls and precipices. The Frenchman
is agreeable because he _is_ lively, _is_ amusing, _is_ amiable, _is_
successful in the battle against dulness, and will take trouble to make
conversation interesting.
[Sidenote: Bad Manners in France and England.]
Bad manners in England are simply boorish; in France they are noisy,
insolent, and full of contradiction. A thoroughly vulgar Frenchman is
overbearing and menacing in his tone, he is loud and positive, and if
you attempt to speak he will interrupt you. In his presence one has no
resource but silence. Even his own more civilised countrymen consider
him unendurable.
[Sidenote: Manners and Locality.]
[Sidenote: Industrialism.]
Manners change greatly with localities in Great Britain and France,
and it is remarkable that they are often worst in the most industrious
and advanced parts of the country. In the Highlands of Scotland,
where industrial civilisation is almost unknown, popular manners are
excellent; in some parts of the Lowlands they are rude, repellent,
and unsympathetic. The best popular English manners are to be found
in certain rural districts, the worst in thriving and energetic
Lancashire. Too much energy seems unfavourable to the best behaviour,
which grows to perfection amongst idlers, or in agricultural and
pastoral communities, where folks work in a leisurely fashion and have
many spare moments on their hands.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Non-national Exceptions.]
[Sidenote: G. H. Lewes.]
In the course of this chapter I have avoided exceptions for the sake
of clearness, which makes it necessary to add that there are people
in both nations whose manners are not national. It is not an English
characteristic to be a lively and brilliant _causeur_, yet there are
Englishmen who have that quality and that art. The manners of George
Henry Lewes were more French than English; he had the openness and ease
of a Frenchman, his frank welcome, his gay cordiality, his abundant
flow of words, his natural delight in conversation, his unhesitating
self-confidence. There is also a small class of Frenchmen who have
those qualities in manners which are believed to be exclusively
English. They are quiet and reserved, they listen well, they never
interrupt, they do not attempt to shine. When they talk, they talk
deliberately, and in the purest language, never condescending to use
the slang which is now rapidly corrupting the French tongue, and they
employ terms accurately without French exaggeration. They are polite,
but with an intelligent moderation, and they make no show of politeness.
These are exceptions on the favourable side. There are also innumerable
exceptions which are nothing but a variety of individual failures to
approach the national ideal. It is useless to attempt the description
of these. All comic and satirical literature takes them for its own.
CHAPTER V
DECORUM
[Sidenote: _Le Décorum anglais._]
The French laugh at the English for their “_décorum anglais_,” as if
the English were alone in having a strict rule about what is becoming.
The French themselves are equally strict, but in other ways, nor is
this strictness confined to the upper classes, for the French peasantry
have it in a marked degree.[68]
[Sidenote: Oversights in Decorum.]
[Sidenote: Japanese Bathing.]
[Sidenote: English Bathing in former Days.]
[Sidenote: A French Bather in England.]
The maintenance of decorum as a principle and a rule is compatible
with astonishing oversights and omissions which strike a foreigner
so forcibly that he thinks there no decorum at all. In these cases,
the foreigner’s mistake is usually to be unaware of some powerful
conventionalism by which decorum is theoretically maintained whilst
it is practically violated. Travellers in Japan are astonished by the
old Japanese system of bathing. One asks for a bath in a Japanese inn,
and it is prepared, perhaps, in the common room or the kitchen, in
the midst of the usual movement of men and women. Here, if anywhere,
is surely a gross violation of decorum. No; it appears that by a
convenient fiction a bather is not seen, and the same fiction allows
the Japanese themselves to bathe together without any separation of
sexes. When I was a boy there existed a certain conventionalism of the
same kind in England. In those days bathing-dresses were only used by
women, men always bathed in a state of complete nudity, and they were
frequently close to the sea-shore whilst ladies were walking about
and looking on. A French author gave, at that time or a little later,
an account of his embarrassment when bathing in a lonely place on the
shores of England. He had left his clothes on the beach, when some
ladies came and pitched their camp-stools on the spot. He splashed to
attract their attention, but they sat on, impassible. At length he
quitted the water and made a bold advance, but with no effect. Finally
he marched past, like a regiment at a review, and the ladies kept
their places. Nothing, in this little adventure, violates the English
decorum of former days. The Frenchman could not have presented himself,
like Adam, in a garden, but on the sea-beach _il n’y avait rien à
dire_. The ladies bravely acted on the fiction that a _sea_-bather is
invisible, and they consistently carried out that fiction to the end.
The Frenchman knew not that he had the ring of Gyges, the talisman of
invisibility.
[Sidenote: French Bathing.]
The French have a conventionalism about bathing-dresses which does not
exist in England to the same degree. French decorum permits men and
women to bathe together freely on condition that they have a costume.
At the sea-side a “full costume” is required, but that is not much, and
the feminine form of it is very pretty--rather too pretty, in fact, as
it is too obviously intended to attract eyes rather than turn them
away. Besides being pretty, the feminine bathing-dresses are extremely
varied, leaving free play to the inventive fancy. A puritan legislator
would feel tempted to replace those charming costumes by the plain old
English bathing-gown, which was doubly useful, as it concealed both
ugliness and beauty with equal impartiality.
[Sidenote: The Frenchman in his _Caleçon_.]
French decorum always requires a man to bathe at least with the minimum
of dress. Attired in his _caleçon de bain_ a Frenchman seems to think
that it covers the whole body, and he does not lose his self-possession
in any society, but will exhibit his short and muscular person to all
observers.
[Sidenote: Cantabridgian Actors.]
It may be noted as a curiosity of modern English decorum, that when the
young men at Cambridge played the _Birds_ of Aristophanes, their legs
and feet were bare in the Greek fashion. This would certainly not have
been done or tolerated in contemporary France, though the imitation of
antiquity went equally far under the first Empire, for example, in the
costume of Madame Tallien and her imitators.
[Sidenote: The Decorum of Classes.]
Every class has its own decorum. Amongst artists’ models there is a
kind of professional dignity which makes it disagreeable for the better
class of them to be seen by any one who is not an artist. A French girl
who was posing in an _atelier_ before thirty students screamed and
wrapped herself in a sheet because an unprofessional man had entered
the room. In this case there was some reason in the model’s conception
of decorum. She was there for her own hard work, but not to be stared
at by strangers.
[Sidenote: Natural Necessities.]
[Sidenote: Foolish Decorum.]
[Sidenote: An English Inconsistency.]
There is a very important practical question of decorum with regard to
natural necessities. Although no human being can escape from that law,
and although by mere healthy living we all openly confess that we have
conformed to it, a foolish decorum refuses to recognise it. In England
this foolish decorum has long been tyrannically prevalent, but railways
have done much to break it down by accustoming travellers of both sexes
to acknowledge without shame the existence of the need, and it has now
become customary in England to provide for it, both at railway stations
and in exhibitions. This is a triumph of reason which acknowledges
the whole of human nature over a conventionalism which would set up a
false and impossible ideal. There still remains the inconsistency by
which a need provided for by all railway companies and organisers of
exhibitions is ignored in the streets of the great English towns. This
way of treating the matter is, in truth, directly contrary to its own
purpose of an ideally decorous life, as these lower wants occupy a very
small space in a man’s time and thought when they can be immediately
satisfied, whereas they become intrusive and importunate when the
satisfaction is denied. In obedience to this unreasonable decorum the
English still inflict upon themselves very frequent inconvenience,
occasionally amounting to torture, and in some cases to serious
physical injury.[69]
[Sidenote: French Simplicity]
The French have always been more simple and natural in regard to these
matters; but they may be justly blamed for cynicism in the sound
original meaning of the word. They are now beginning to imitate the
English by establishing a proper degree of privacy. This is one of
those numerous cases in which the two countries may improve each
other’s customs.
[Sidenote: English Decorum chooses French Words.]
[Sidenote: Plain Language of the Bible.]
English decorum has a weakness in its choice of French words to express
what it will not venture to say in English, as if the French words were
not either equally plain for anybody who knew the language, or useless
for one who did not. There is a good old English word for a woman’s
shirt, the English for it is “shift,” which gives the cleanly idea of
a thing that is to be often changed. This word has been abandoned from
an unpatriotic modesty or prudery, and replaced by the French word
“chemise,” as if “chemise” were more decorous. In the same way “nude”
and “nudity” (French words) are somehow believed to be much more chaste
than “naked” and “nakedness,” and “enceinte” purer than “with child.”
This fancy for French terms is the more remarkable that the English
translation of the Bible, which is considered a model of pure and
dignified language, does not give the slightest encouragement to it,
but says everything in the plainest native way.
[Sidenote: Purification of Talk.]
[Sidenote: The Mayor of Eu.]
Liberty of language in conversation is very much a matter of dates. In
Queen Anne’s time people said things at English tables that would be
thought monstrous under Queen Victoria. In fact, at the present time,
the purification of talk has gone so far in England that people will
neither utter nor listen to what they constantly read in the newspapers
which lie about in their own rooms. In France there still remains a
certain old-fashioned tolerance, an inheritance from the eighteenth
century; but with this reserve or proviso, that every infraction of
strict decorum must be witty. On that condition it is likely to be
pardoned. The most astounding instance I ever heard of was the song
of the Mayor of Eu. That functionary was invited to the Château of
Eu, in the days of Louis Philippe, so he made or learned a song about
his mayoralty, and sang it to the royal family at dessert according
to the old-fashioned French usage. The composition had two senses,
one perfectly innocent and on the surface, the other not immoral but
prodigiously indecorous. The royal family understood, laughed, and
forgave. Such a thing might have been done in England at the court of
Queen Elizabeth. A President of the French Chamber, being annoyed by
one of the members, saw an opportunity for a witticism like those of
the audacious mayor. It was a pun on the member’s name, and all parties
in the House received it with unanimous appreciation.
[Sidenote: Recent Character of present English Decorum.]
[Sidenote: A sign of Maturity.]
To estimate these breaches of decorum justly, we must remember how
extremely recent the present English decorum is. It belongs almost
exclusively to the present century, and is the mark of maturity in
the public mind. In the youth of nations, as in that of individuals,
grossness of a certain kind seems amusing. It makes schoolboys
laugh, even when it is quite devoid of wit; and I have said that in
contemporary French society it is tolerated only on condition of being
witty. English society is older and graver, older by a hundred years,
just as it is more experienced in politics and religion, having got
through its great political and religious crises earlier.
[Sidenote: External Strictness of Immoral Societies.]
[Sidenote: French Reserve.]
Here, as in other things, there are inequalities that quite put out
the inexperienced observer. He is likely to imagine that the French
have no decorum because he believes them to be immoral. He forgets
that decorum is often of itself the morality of immoral societies, as
going to church is the religion of the worldly. Venetian society, in
Byron’s time, was extremely strict, not as to the realities of conduct,
but in regard to certain outward appearances. French society, in the
present day, is more strict in some respects than either English or
Scotch. The behaviour of English girls, and still more that of American
girls, is not positively wrong or immoral in French opinion, but it is
indecorous. Even married ladies, in French country towns, have to be
extremely careful not to incur the censure of public opinion, and in
some towns they live in a kind of half-oriental retirement that English
readers could not realise or believe. Before marriage anything more
intimate than respectful politeness on the part of the gentleman, and
reserve on that of the lady, is looked upon as a sign of ill breeding.
After the marriage the husband’s masculine friends may remain for
twenty years very distant acquaintances of his wife. It is certain
that, in general, French decorum keeps up a much stronger barrier
between the sexes than English decorum does.
[Sidenote: French Decorum in regard to the Dead.]
The French, too, are stricter observers of decorum in regard to the
dead. They are very careful about funerals, and about subsequent
references to the dead, either in ceremonies, such as visits to the
tomb and services for the repose of the soul, or in conversation. The
obligations felt by the living in consequence of a death are more
stringent and more widely spread in France than in England. A French
lady who knew her countrymen well enumerated a few things which were
essential to any one who lived amongst them; and one of the chief
of these was attendance at funerals, just as in Scotland one would
recommend the observance of the Sabbath.
[Sidenote: Decorum and Democracy.]
The principle of decorum being the study of external appearances, it is
not likely to be much observed by an excited and turbulent democracy.
Still, a kind of artistic instinct desires decorum, and re-establishes
it even after the most violent commotions. It is interesting to see
how regularly and inevitably it has been re-established in France, so
soon as a new form of government has been settled. M. Mollard, the
Introducer of Ambassadors, was the Grand Master of Decorum for the
Élysée, and had as much to occupy him as a Lord Chamberlain.
[Sidenote: Decorum in Literature.]
[Sidenote: _Manon Lescaut._]
[Sidenote: Modern French Literature.]
Decorum in literature and the fine arts is quite distinct from
morality. A book may be irreproachably decorous, yet very immoral at
the same time, and this is a combination that many readers seem to
approve of. I could hardly mention a better instance of it than the
famous little novel _Manon Lescaut_, by the Abbé Prévost, a French
classic made still more famous in recent times by the opera which
Massenet founded upon it. That is one of the most immoral books
ever written; the situations are doubly and triply immoral; there
is no sense of conduct in the leading personages, who are vicious
and unprincipled in all their dealings; yet, at the same time, the
author is much more decorous (according to modern ideas) than either
Swift or Sterne. Critics who condemn modern novels as being “filthy,”
because the sexual arrangements in them are lawless, are inexact in the
application of their censure. In the French literature of the present
day the combination of decorum with immorality is very common; and
decorum is so far from acting as an effective restraint upon immorality
that under certain circumstances it positively favours it. Immoral
writers know how to conciliate the slaves of decorum, and win not only
their tolerance, but even their protection.
[Sidenote: English Decency.]
[Sidenote: Divorce Reports in France and England.]
The English deserve great respect for the general decency of their
modern literature, and certainly they get this respect even from the
French themselves. But there are some curious anomalies in connection
with this subject. English decorum permits the publication of details
in the reports of divorce cases which French decorum absolutely
forbids. The French tolerate certain matters provided that they be
fictitious, the English on condition that they be real. The French
admit disgusting art, the English disgusting nature. The French
novelist may be more attractive, but the English newspaper reporter is
a thousand times more impressive, having all the force of reality on
his side. The fictitious adulteress is but a phantom in comparison with
the living beauty who is seen and heard in a court of justice; and what
fall of an imaginary hero ever impressed us like that of the gifted
and ambitious politician who barred his own path to the premiership of
England?
[Sidenote: English Indulgence towards indecorous old Books.]
It strikes one, too, as rather surprising that the English, whose sense
of decorum is so easily offended by modern authors of books, should
still be so indulgent to those who wrote before modern decorum was
invented. Young maids and old maids read Shakespeare in unexpurgated
editions; but what is still more surprising is that many English people
should go out of their way to express admiration for Rabelais. Have
they read him? Can they understand his old French? If they can, and
read him still, they need not be afraid of Zola.
Being in the house of an English clergyman, I found on the shelves of
his library a copy of Byron’s works in the one-volume edition. That
edition includes _Don Juan_, but my clerical friend had excluded the
poem, I found, by cutting every leaf of it out. I do not question
his right to spoil a volume he had paid for, but what struck me as
inconsistent was the reverent preservation, on the same shelves, of a
complete Shakespeare in large print. Byron is incomparably the more
decorous poet of the two, but he is not protected, as Shakespeare is,
by a date. Shakespeare wrote before the invention of decorum, and
therefore could not offend against that which did not exist. Byron
wrote after its invention, and offended against it consciously and
deliberately. The indecency of old authors is not only pardoned in a
decorous age, but valued as a release from contemporary strictness.
Some of them, particularly in France, are now reprinted in luxurious
editions _for_ their indecency, which is highly appreciated now.
[Sidenote: English and French Comic Papers.]
In spite of these and other inconsistencies, and notwithstanding the
recent efforts of some English poets to recover a certain licence,
it is certain that decorum is better observed in English literature
than in French. One of the best signs of matured health in the English
mind is its capacity for wit and humour without the coarse and facile
expedient of indecorous allusion. The far superior decency of the
English comic papers is combined with superior wit. The inanity of the
French illustrations of the _Demi-monde_ is equalled only by their
excessive sameness. Men like Leech and Charles Keene have attained far
more variety by studying respectable Englishwomen, who are occupied
in a thousand ways, than Grévin could ever get out of the monotonous
lives of his French _lorettes_. Nor is the reason for this difficult
to discover. The life of vice is essentially dull, because the women
are usually uneducated; and the men themselves become half idiotic,
not only through excesses of all kinds, but in consequence of their
frivolous waste of time.
[Sidenote: The Naked Figure in Art.]
[Sidenote: Study of the Figure.]
[Sidenote: Sir F. Leighton.]
[Sidenote: French Sculpture.]
In serious art the naked figure is more frequently presented in
France than in England, and it is quite customary in England to look
upon it as a French evil. I need hardly remind the reader that the
country where the naked figure was first studied with attention was
not France, but Greece, and that every nation where art has been a
serious pursuit has sedulously revived that study. It is trying to the
patience to attempt any reasoning with people who can see nothing but
lasciviousness in the higher forms of art. It seems to me natural that
men who have devoted years to the study of the human form should desire
to express their knowledge in works more important than the studies
they make for their private use, in works that may have some possible
chance of immortality. The study itself can never be repressed. The
clothed figures in pictures that the Philistine does not object to can
only be drawn well by a student of the nude. Many artists, like the
President of the Royal Academy, first take the praiseworthy trouble to
draw every figure naked, even when it is draped afterwards. Why the
objection should be so specially raised against French art I do not
know, unless it be for the same reason which makes people cry aloud
against French immorality and pass in charitable silence Italian and
Austrian immorality. As a matter of fact, with a few exceptions, the
French school of sculpture is as dignified as it is learned.
[Sidenote: French Painting.]
[Sidenote: Realism.]
French painting is less dignified because nearer to ordinary nature,
but the fault to be found with it is chiefly that the nude figures of
the present day are insufficiently idealised; it is not indecency as
such, but a low prosaic realism that has established itself in this
art; you do not meet with a nymph or a dryad, but with a portrait of
some model. I remember hearing a French artist (himself an exhibitor
of severely ideal nude figures) maintain that the nude by itself was
decent, and so was clothing, but he abominated the two in the same
picture. There have been plenty of examples of this unnatural union
in past times, and in pictures which are now the pride of the great
galleries; however, the most important contemporary instance is not a
French picture but an Austrian, the _Entry of Charles the Fifth into
Antwerp_, by Hans Makart.
PART VII
SOCIETY
CHAPTER I
CASTE
[Sidenote: Caste not abolished.]
England and France are alike in this, that caste is not yet abolished
in either country, and they also resemble each other in passing through
a state of false caste which appears to be intermediary between true
caste and a future casteless condition of society. The two nations
differ, however, in the kinds of false caste through which they are
passing, and the purpose of the present chapter will be to examine the
nature of the difference.
[Sidenote: True Caste.]
True caste is a social condition existing by authority and general
consent, in which every human being has, by birth, his fixed place in
the social organism, and receives exactly the degree of respect or
contempt which is accorded to the place independently of his personal
efforts or qualities.
[Sidenote: False Caste.]
The state of false caste is a condition of things in which there is
still a sort of social hierarchy, but the positions in it are neither
fixed nor well defended, so that impostors may get possession of them
and enjoy the consideration which formerly belonged only to those
who were born in the caste. This is the present condition of England
and France, in different ways and in different degrees. It is better
than true caste in giving openings to ability, but worse in offering
temptations and prizes to imposture.
[Sidenote: The Aristocratic Spirit.]
The caste spirit is not by any means confined to an aristocracy.
The social state of true caste includes all classes of society,
fixing the relative inferiorities of the humble as strictly as the
superiorities of the great. It will be convenient, however, to consider
the aristocratic spirit first and by itself. Are there still genuine
aristocracies in England and France?
I have observed elsewhere that England has been able to pass through a
highly convenient intermediate stage, that of an aristocratic republic,
preserving monarchical appearances, and that France has not been able
to do this, not having the kind and quality of aristocracy that was
necessary for the work. I said this, but I did not say (what some
Englishmen believe) that France has no real aristocracy at all.
[Sidenote: Aristocratic Spirit in France.]
On the contrary, I agree with Littré in the belief that the real
aristocratic spirit still lives vigorously in France, but only in the
aristocracy itself; and I should say that the great difference between
England and France in this respect is that _what there is_ of the
aristocratic spirit in England is shared by classes outside of the
aristocracy, whereas in France very few people have the aristocratic
sentiment unless it has been implanted in them by the traditions of
an aristocratic house, and cultivated by a training apart from the
ordinary training of Frenchmen.
[Sidenote: English Aristocratic Spirit.]
Again, it does not appear that the aristocratic spirit in England,
though widely diffused, is of a pure or elevated kind. Perhaps it may
be for this very reason, perhaps it is just because it is not pure or
elevated, that it is so general and so commonly understood.
[Sidenote: Title the Sanction of Wealth.]
[Sidenote: The Tennyson Peerage.]
The want of purity and elevation in the present English ideal of
aristocracy is evident from the undeniable fact that title is now
little more than a supreme sanction given to the popular adoration of
wealth. From the idea that it is inconvenient for a peer of England to
be poor, a further advance has been made to the idea that a very rich
man has a sort of claim to a title; and when peerages are bestowed on
obscure men as a reward for having enriched themselves, the proceeding
is thought so natural as to excite no comment, except, perhaps, from
Mr. Labouchere. When, on the other hand, a distinguished man, not
exceptionally rich, is made the recipient of a peerage, his promotion
is a surprise to the public, unless it can be explained as a reward
for political services to the party that happens to be in power. The
Tennyson peerage is a curious example of this. Some friends of the Poet
Laureate thought it rather a degradation for a man of genius to accept
the prize of a lower ambition than that which they had believed to be
his, whilst his enemies made quotations from _Maud_, applicable to new
titles and new mansions. If Tennyson had been a successful brewer or
banker, nobody would have made a remark; his peerage would not have
been considered either above him or below him, but simply the natural
English consecration of new riches.
[Sidenote: Victor Hugo’s Peerage.]
Forty years before the elevation of Tennyson to the English peerage,
his contemporary, Victor Hugo, was made a peer of France. It is
probable that not a single Frenchman perceived anything incongruous in
that promotion, or wondered whether the new peer had money enough to
support his dignity.
[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold on Aristocracy.]
The reader may call to mind a few strong words of Matthew Arnold about
the present condition of aristocracy in England: “Aristocracy now sets
up in our country a false ideal, which materialises our upper class,
vulgarises our middle class, brutalises our lower class. It misleads
the young, makes the worldly more worldly, the limited more limited,
the stationary more stationary.”
These evils are due to the transformation of the English aristocracy
into a plutocracy that is not, as in America, a plainly avowed
plutocracy, but disguises itself in aristocratic costumes.
[Sidenote: Distinction of a true Aristocracy.]
[Sidenote: Money not the highest Object.]
[Sidenote: The Army.]
[Sidenote: The Church.]
[Sidenote: Hostility to the Fine Arts.]
[Sidenote: Commerce.]
The distinction of a true aristocracy is that it is _not_ a plutocracy,
but a noble caste, including poor members as well as rich, and having
certain ideals which, however foreign they may be to the spirit of
the present age, did certainly, in their own time, tend to lift men
and women above vulgarity. The most ennobling of those ideals was the
notion that money was not the highest object of pursuit. The poor
gentleman could be contented with ill-paid service in the army or the
Church, because he did not serve for money; and it was believed within
the caste, rightly or wrongly, that to labour for pecuniary rewards
as the main object had a degrading effect upon the mind. The army was
a chosen profession, because it was the school of courage, obedience,
and self-sacrifice; the Church, because it was the school of piety and
morality, as well as the home of learning. I know that I am describing
a narrow ideal, but most ideals that have had any power in the world
have been narrow, and I am anxious to show how in the old aristocratic
prejudices there were elements of real nobleness, which may have given
them dignity and vitality. Those prejudices were hostile to some things
that we now value. They were hostile, for example, to the pursuit of
the fine arts, but it was from an apprehension, which I now see to have
been only too well founded, that in struggling for the acquirement
of brilliant manual skill, the student might spend his efforts on
a low object. Those prejudices looked doubtfully upon commerce; it
was thought that a gentleman did better not to go into trade; but
the reason was because a heavy business ties a man down so much, and
leaves him so little leisure for study or society, so little liberty
for travel, that it is really somewhat of a misfortune to be fastened
to such a business during the best years of youth and manhood. This
aristocracy was selfish, but its selfishness was of a high kind. It was
not given up either to avarice or to self-indulgence, but it valued
what is best in life.
[Sidenote: Mr. Bagehot’s Defence of Titles.]
The reader may remember how Mr. Bagehot defended titles on the ground
that they counterbalanced in some degree the power of wealth by setting
up something else to be respected, and he even argued that title was a
roundabout means of making intelligence respected:--
[Sidenote: Nobility the Symbol of Mind.]
“Nobility is the symbol of mind. It has the marks from which the mass
of men always used to infer mind, and often still infer it. A common
clever man who goes into a country place will get no reverence, but
the ‘old squire’ will get reverence. Even after he is insolvent, when
every one knows that his ruin is but a question of time, he will get
five times as much respect from the common peasantry as the newly-made
rich man who sits beside him. The common peasantry will listen to his
nonsense more submissively than to the new man’s sense. An old lord
will get infinite reverence. His very existence is so far useful that
it awakens the sensation of obedience to a _sort_ of mind.”
[Sidenote: Objection to Mr. Bagehot’s Theory.]
This passage contains, I think, a condemnation of the very use of
nobility that the author intended to eulogise. If the common peasantry
will listen more submissively to the nonsense of an old squire than
they will to a new man’s sense, it is hard to see how aristocracy, in
this instance, can be really on the side of mind. Again, if the old
lord gets infinite reverence, whether he is wise or foolish, it is a
mere chance whether the reverence is favourable to the influence of
mind or against it. If the old lord is a fool, and there is a wise man
in the neighbourhood who is not listened to because the lord has the
ear of the peasantry, the strength of title is not the candlestick of
mind, but its extinguisher.
[Sidenote: Value of Political Fame in England.]
Frenchmen who write about England usually remark that mind is
overshadowed by aristocracy; that mediocrities with titles get more
consideration, and are listened to more respectfully, than better men
without them. The exact truth is more as follows. Political celebrity
in England is quite as strong as title. Any one who has the ear of
the House of Commons, however humble his birth, is listened to in the
country quite as attentively, quite as respectfully, as a lord. But
title certainly overshadows literary and artistic celebrity. Not that
this is of any real importance, for literary and artistic celebrity
is not in its nature powerful, except over the intelligent, who are a
minority in every population.
[Sidenote: Aristocracy a School of Refinement.]
If the aristocracies have not done much for the intellectual life, or
for art, they have been serviceable in setting up a model of generally
refined life, not for people of culture specially, but for all who
had means enough to copy it. This is not to be despised. A real
aristocracy is a school of national refinement, and nations that are
destitute of an aristocracy have to look to some fluctuating upper
class, less perfectly regulated than aristocracy is by hereditary
custom.
[Sidenote: Also a School of Contentment.]
[Sidenote: Aristocracy favourable to Simplicity of Life.]
Again, an aristocracy is a school of contentment. In conjunction with
its natural ally, the Church, it encourages in every one a spirit
of contentment with his lot in life, an acceptance of the lot as a
settled thing, which, though it is not favourable to progress, is
unquestionably favourable to happiness. A genuine aristocracy is also
favourable to simplicity of life in every _noblesse_ that has poor, yet
honoured members.
[Sidenote: Faults of the French _Noblesse_.]
[Sidenote: It has lost Political Leadership.]
The faults of the French _noblesse_ have not led to its absolute
destruction, for it still survives, but they have deprived it of
political power. Unteachableness, rigidity, want of sympathy with the
rest of the nation, lack of practical sense,--these are some of the
defects that have reduced the French aristocracy to a plight which,
politically speaking, is pitiable and without a future. Since they
allowed themselves to be enslaved by Louis XIV. the nobles have been
out of sympathy with the common people, and since the Revolution they
have been hostile to them, except in the way of charity to the poor. It
would, perhaps, be expecting too much of human nature to hope that an
ancient _noblesse_ could forget the rough treatment it received in the
first unreasoning outburst of popular vengeance; but it would not have
been so dealt with if it had lived less selfishly, and cared for other
interests than its own. It had brilliant intelligence, it had charming
graces, and all the _éclat_ of personal bravery, in combination with
the rarest degree of polish, yet it lost the due rewards of its
admirable superiorities by its unkind scorn of the _manant_ and the
_roturier_. The “_manant_” and the “_roturier_” avenged themselves
roughly when the time came. The people have improved their condition
wonderfully, but it has been entirely by their own efforts, the
consequence being that the aristocracy survives only as a caste, and
has no political leadership.
[Sidenote: Contempt for Work.]
[Sidenote: Contempt for Trade.]
The present influence of the aristocratic caste in France is an evil
influence in its discouragement of work. The caste includes a great
number of people who have all been brought up to despise and abstain
from the labour that earns bread. If the harm were confined to the
caste itself it would be only a limited evil--unfortunately, it extends
to all aspirants to aristocracy, to all the would-be genteel. This
throws a degree of relative discredit on all money-earning occupations
which certainly exceeds the prejudice of English gentility against
them. Even literature and the fine arts become degrading as soon
as they are lucrative,[70] a sentiment quite opposed to the more
intelligent modern opinion in France. All the forms of trade are
despicable for aristocrats, and when they hear of a family that has
been in trade they say, with an air of genteel ignorance about the
nature of the business, “_Ils ont vendu quelque chose_.” Their manners
towards shopkeepers are often unpleasant, and exhibit a degree of
_morgue_ that is peculiarly irritating to a French tradesman.
[Sidenote: The False _Noblesse_.]
[Sidenote: Great Scale of Usurpations.]
[Sidenote: New Recruits.]
An aristocratic caste may be an institution for which there is no
further necessity, it may be a survival that has become useless, but
one likes to see it genuine of its kind, even in its latter days.
Unfortunately the present French aristocracy, whilst encouraging idle
habits by its contempt for work, encourages habits of imposture by the
fatal facility with which it permits the encroachments of the false
_noblesse_. I have often wondered how the old noble families ever
tolerated these intruders, and I believe the only explanation to be
that the intruders are such sure and subservient allies in politics
and religion. It is really a system of recruiting.[71] The false noble
fortifies his position by all available means, and there are none
better than an ardent profession of those opinions that the genuine
aristocracy approves. I said long ago in _Round my House_ that the
particle “de,” which is popularly supposed to indicate nobility, was
extensively assumed by families belonging really to the _bourgeoisie_,
but I was not fully aware at that time on what a prodigiously extensive
scale these usurpations have been made. Here is a single example.
A public functionary, whose duties required frequent reference to
registers in a particular locality, told me that he had at first been
embarrassed by the changes of name in certain families. Plain names
of the _bourgeoisie_ had been laid aside for territorial designations
with the “de” before them, and it was difficult at first sight to
understand and remember these transformations. Having a curious and
investigating disposition, the functionary amused himself by tracing
out as many of these cases as he could discover, and he told me that
in a single neighbourhood he had found no less than fifty families who
had raised themselves into what is ignorantly but generally considered
to be the noble caste by the addition of the “de.” Amidst such an
influx of new recruits the authentic old nobility is, in these days,
completely overwhelmed. There being no strictly-kept peerage, as in
England, there is nothing authoritative to refer to, and an injurious
doubt is cast upon real coronets by the perplexing abundance of false
ones. Besides the “de,” the most positive titles are coolly assumed and
worn. You may meet with people who live in an old château and are very
_comme il faut_, very simple and well bred, without any appearance of
false pretension whatever, yet they have just one little bit of false
pretension--their title. They call themselves Count and Countess, yet
are not Count and Countess at all. Their fortune was made in business
two generations ago, and the château purchased, and the title of the
old family that once lived there gradually assumed by a too familiar
process.
[Sidenote: Absence of a pure Caste in England.]
[Sidenote: Younger Branches.]
[Sidenote: New Peers.]
The French _noblesse_, as a caste, is spoiled by this intrusion and
acceptance of false nobles, but if there were not this fatal objection
it would be much more truly a caste than the British nobility and
gentry. There is, in fact, no pure and well-guarded upper caste in
England except simply the holders of titles. You may belong to the
highest nobility in England by descent, and there will be nothing
to distinguish you from a plebeian unless you are a son of the
representative of the family. In every genuine _noblesse_ noble blood
continues to bear some distinctive mark of caste. The English way is
more convenient, because it constantly throws off the poorer branches
into the general mixture that we vaguely call “the middle classes”;
the continental way of preserving a noble caste, even in its poorer
members, is more faithful to the principle of descent. The way of
selecting new men for the English peerage is also a violation of
the caste principle. They are not usually taken from well-descended
families, but from the new rich, and in this way we constantly see
men of low birth elevated to a position which instantly gives them
precedence over the most ancient untitled families in England. In
short, we live in a time of confusion between the true caste principle
and the true democratic principle, a confusion that will ultimately be
cleared away by the abolition of titles, though that is still in the
distant future. Meanwhile the new rich in France may fairly argue that
as they have not, like their English brethren, a sovereign to ennoble
them, they have no resource but to ennoble themselves.
[Sidenote: Abolition of Caste by Poverty.]
A moderate degree of poverty does not abolish caste in France,
provided that the nobleman is just able to maintain external decency
of appearance without working. In England it is impossible to maintain
high caste without a complete staff of domestics. In both countries
real poverty abolishes caste.
[Sidenote: Armorial Bearings.]
It is impossible in England to assume and maintain falsely the position
of a titled nobleman, but coats-of-arms are constantly assumed without
right, and it is not uncommon in these days for people to take a name
that does not belong to them by inheritance. If a plebeian Englishman
chooses to adopt the name, and the arms too, of an old family, he can
do so in perfect security.
I pass now from the noble to the professional castes.
[Sidenote: The Clergy.]
[Sidenote: Superiority of the Anglican Clergy.]
[Sidenote: The French Clergy.]
[Sidenote: The Religious Orders.]
[Sidenote: Social Position of the French Clergy.]
The clergy in England are said to form part of the aristocracy, but
this is true only of the Anglican clergy. The Dissenting clergy
form part of the middle classes. The Anglican clergy itself is less
aristocratic than it was in the earlier part of the nineteenth century;
in fact, its position has varied greatly from one century to another.
It is now said to be rather declining, as the clergy are recruited from
an inferior class, both as to position and ability. A father may put
his son into the Church because the lad is not keen-witted enough to be
a successful attorney, or because there is not capital enough in the
family to set him up as a manufacturer. There are also ways of entering
the Church without the training of Oxford or Cambridge. Nevertheless,
in spite of this decline, the Anglican clergy are still, as a body,
incomparably superior to the French Roman Catholic clergy in the social
sense. The French clergy are now almost exclusively recruited from
the humble classes. Nine out of ten are sons of peasants, the tenth
may be the son of an artisan or a gendarme. It is curious that the
French aristocracy, which _professes_ such deep respect for the Church,
should no longer supply recruits for the clergy. Fewer and fewer of
the sons of the _noblesse_ become priests every year, and those who
do now become priests shut themselves up in the religious orders, and
are of no use for the common work of the parishes, many of which are
left empty, in country places, for want of working priests to fill
them. It would seem as if it were no longer thought _comme il faut_ to
be a parish priest, whilst it may be _comme il faut_ to belong to one
of the recognised orders, such as the Marists, the Jesuits, etc. The
practical result is that in the country parishes many of the priests
are burdened with extra duty, sometimes far from their homes, merely
from an insufficient supply of ecclesiastics. This plain fact--which
I do not give merely on my own authority, but on that of a French
bishop who deplored it lately in an episcopal charge--is a valuable
commentary on that devotion to the Church which the French aristocracy
still professes so long as it entails no greater inconvenience than
a perfunctory attendance at mass. There is, consequently, a _social
severance_ between the clergy and the aristocracy, though there may be
a _political alliance_. The priest may have patrons in the château,
he may have real friends there, but his relations and his equals are
generally in the farm-houses.[72] The reason lies no deeper than the
obvious fact that the duties of a parish priest are irksome and his
life is austere. He is confined to one place, without amusements, and
with society limited to peasants and to the few gentry who happen to be
there for a part of the year only; his work is a continual servitude,
and it is never done. He is allowed by law to marry, but not by the
rules of his Church or the opinion of society, and his conduct is
watched with the most jealous and unceasing scrutiny. To devote oneself
to such an existence requires not merely the pretence to religious
belief but its reality. That, and that alone, can make a human being
happy in a life which is deprived of all worldly pleasures, and has no
earthly rewards.
[Sidenote: Bishops.]
The difference between the parish priest and the bishop, though great
in England, is much greater in France. In England it is the difference
between a gentleman and a peer, in France it is that between a common
soldier and his colonel. Since royalty is dead, and the great nobles
politically paralysed by universal suffrage, the bishop seems all the
greater as the sole survivor of the splendid personages of the middle
ages. The grandeur of the Church is represented by the bishops, both in
their social position, which, in the absence of royalty, is much higher
than any other, and also in externals, such as the stately residence,
the violet and gold of the costume, and the customary carriage and
pair. It must be remembered, too, that the “Church” in Catholic
language means the bishops, who are alone summoned to Œcumenical
Councils, and not the inferior clergy, who have no vote, direct or
indirect, the bishops not being elected by them.
[Sidenote: French Officers.]
[Sidenote: Position of Officers in England.]
Since the French army has become national, the military caste is not
so much an aristocratic caste as it is in England. It is difficult for
an Englishman to realise the position of officers in a French garrison
town. They live very much amongst themselves, and spend many of their
leisure hours in a café chosen specially by them, and called “_le café
des officiers_.” Some of them are admitted into local society, but on
their individual merits or in consequence of family connections; the
uniform is not the passport that it is, or used to be, in England. I
remember how, on the arrival of a new regiment, the English squires
in the neighbourhood would go and call upon the officers to give
them a welcome, and would very soon ask them to dinner. Before long
the officers were on sufficiently friendly terms to join in country
amusements and invite themselves to lunch. If there was a ball, they
were invited as a matter of course. This intimacy between military
officers and the local gentry was strongly marked in the English
society of the Wellingtonian age. In a French town there is no such
ready welcome on the part of the leading inhabitants. The officers are
treated like strangers staying in the hotels until some accident brings
about an acquaintanceship.
[Sidenote: The Army as a Career.]
Still, although the military class in France is not one with the
aristocracy, it is quite true that the military profession is the only
career, in French opinion, for a gentleman of birth, unless he studies
for the bar, which he generally does without any intent to practise.
[Sidenote: The Official Class.]
[Sidenote: The Prefect.]
[Sidenote: Contempt for Republican Officials.]
The official class of prefects, sub-prefects, and other members of the
administrative hierarchy, form a caste quite apart from high society,
which will not recognise office-holders under the Republic. I have
known several of these officials who were thorough gentlemen, and had
good private fortunes besides, but the higher classes ignored them as
completely as if they had been personally unfit for society. The fact
that the prefect is by virtue of his office the greatest personage in
the department only makes him the more disliked. His rank is officially
equal to that of an English lord-lieutenant, and he is more important
in the sense of having more work to do and more real authority to
exercise.[73] When, however, we compare the social position of the two
we see how France is divided. England is not yet divided in the same
way because the Crown makes the great official appointments, or at
least seems to make them. There is not now any political authority left
standing in France which commands the respect of the upper classes.
They do not respect authorities emanating from the people.
[Sidenote: _Noblesse_, _Bourgeoisie_, _Peuple_.]
[Sidenote: Professional People.]
Now, with regard to the professional and trading classes I should
say that they are nearer to one another in France than in England.
The old division of _Noblesse_, _Bourgeoisie_, _Peuple_, is still in
constant use, and is extremely convenient as a general division of
French classes. The _noblesse_, true or false, lives on its means, and
has generally landed property; the _bourgeoisie_ lives in more or less
comfort, either on private means or on the gains of professions and
trades; the _peuple_ lives by manual labour and on wages. An artist,
a solicitor, a doctor, belong to the _bourgeoisie_, and they are all
three nearer to the shopkeepers and more familiar and friendly with
them than are men who belong to the liberal professions in England.
[Sidenote: Gentlemen.]
A distinction of the greatest importance between England and France
is indicated by the untranslatableness of the word “gentleman.” The
English reader knows what the word means. It is the sign of an ideal
which may constitute caste or something else, for it often traverses
caste. You frequently, in England, meet with men who are not of high
birth, who are not very rich, yet whom all recognise as gentlemen, and
this simple recognition places them on an equality, of a certain kind,
with people of higher rank. In France, this peculiar kind of equality
is unknown. The _bourgeois_ is never the equal of the noble, though he
may be the better gentleman of the two. It is undeniable that, in this
peculiar sense, English society is more _égalitaire_ than French.
[Sidenote: The Teaching Class in France.]
[Sidenote: Severance between Fashionable and Educated Classes.]
The teaching classes are in some respects a lower caste in France
than in England. This difference may be in part due to the clerical
character of English education, which gave a dignity and almost a
sacred character to schoolmasters. In France the numerous professors
in the University are not well paid, and often eke out a slender
income by private lessons. Many of them are cultivated gentlemen,
others are much less refined, as may be expected in a very mixed
class, and an old principal tells me that the body as a whole has less
_tenue_ and self-respect than it had formerly. “In my time,” he said,
“you might always recognise an _universitaire_ by the correctness
of his appearance and bearing, but to-day he is not distinguishable
from anybody else.” In England university degrees confer some social
position, especially if they have been gained at Oxford or Cambridge;
in France they confer little or none, certainly they do not make the
recipient _du monde_. The consequence is more and more a severance
between the fashionable and the educated classes, and it may even come,
in course of time, to this, that a high degree of education may be
taken as evidence that a man does not belong to “good society.”
[Sidenote: Peasant Life in France.]
There is a difference between England and France in the strictness
of rural caste. Amongst the French peasants we find a set of rigid
caste-customs separating the class completely from the _bourgeois_
and the _ouvrier_. There is nothing answering to this with the same
universality and rigour in English rural life. The English farmer
answers more to the French rural _bourgeois_ of different grades; his
life is more the general life of the nation, it is not peculiar and
behind the time. There are signs that the true peasant life, with its
austerity, its self-denial, its patriarchal rules and traditions, will
not, in France itself, very long survive the influences of the town,
the railway, and the newspaper. It will be a severe loss to the country
when it passes away. The peasants do not themselves know how superior
they are to the classes they are beginning to imitate.
The strength of caste may be measured by the degradation of the Pariah.
As the caste-principle declines he rises, and when it dies he is no
longer distinguishable by his vileness, but is lost in the general
equality.
[Sidenote: The Pariah in England.]
[Sidenote: The Pariah in France.]
English intolerance having been chiefly religious, its Pariah has been
the Infidel. France is the country of political intolerance, and there
the Pariah is the Republican. “What!” I may be asked, “you speak of the
Republicans as Pariahs at a time when they hold all the ministries and
receive all the ambassadors?” The answer to this objection is that they
have never been more under the ban of high society than since they won
political power. In England the Infidel is not quite the Pariah that he
used to be when Deists were “pestiferous vermin.” To-day, under his new
name of “Agnostic,” he is beginning to be tolerated. On the contrary,
the French intolerance of the Republican is more intense than ever.
_Canaille_ is the mildest term that the charity of the _bien pensant_
would apply to him--
“E cortesia fu lui esser villano.”
CHAPTER II
WEALTH
[Sidenote: Comparative Wealth of England and France.]
[Sidenote: The Revenue.]
England and France are the richest countries in Europe, and, of the
two, England is generally believed to be the richer. I believe the
same, and yet am unable to give evidence of an entirely satisfactory
character. Considering each country as a vast estate, composed of
land and house property, we meet with our first difficulty in the
uncertainty of the estimates. The French Government is at the present
time (1888) employing its agents in a new and elaborate valuation.
External trade is not a certain guide, as the two populations are
differently situated, the French living much more on home produce
than the English. The revenue is sometimes taken as an indication of
national wealth, and it is so no doubt when nations are extremely
unequal; for example, the vast difference between the revenues of
France and of Greece is good evidence that France is the wealthier
of the two countries. When, however, we make a financial comparison
between two states as nearly equal as France and England, the revenue
ceases to be a criterion. It is true that the French people pay more
money into the national treasury than the English; but they may be
doing it only to their own impoverishment. What we call “revenue” is
not like a private income, it is a burden or a charge, proving only the
power to bear the burden, and such a power may be but temporary. It is
only the most foolish Frenchmen who are proud of the enormous taxation
that afflicts the Republic as a consequence of monarchical errors and
of its own.
[Sidenote: Newness of Everything in France and England.]
[Sidenote: Industrial Plant.]
[Sidenote: War-ships.]
[Sidenote: Exhibitions.]
The wealth, both of England and France, has been vastly increased
by the prodigious creation of new things which has taken place in
the present century. They are both of them very old countries, yet
almost everything in them is new. A man of sixty, travelling about,
is constantly seeing and using things that did not exist when he was
born. The railways he travels upon, the hotels where he stays, the
great industrial buildings, the shipping, are of his own time. The
towns are either recent or in great part reconstructed. The industrial
activity of the present age is so enormous that in the course of a
single generation it has done more in public and private works than
all the previous generations had left behind them. Then there is the
industrial plant; both nations have increased their producing powers by
multiplying _tools_ of all kinds, from colossal steam-engines down to
sewing-machines. England took the lead in this direction, but France
has followed. In some things France has been the leader, notably
in the construction of warships with defensive armour, and in the
manufacture of breech-loading cannon. England set the example of huge
industrial exhibitions, and here again, as in railways, France has been
a successful imitator.
[Sidenote: Excess of the Producing Power.]
[Sidenote: _Ouvriers sans Travail._]
The industrial development of both countries has led to a state of
things in which the producing power surpasses the actual wants. To keep
the working populations in full employment it would be necessary to do
over again all that has been done; but the works accomplished remain as
impediments to future labour. Paris does not need to be reconstructed
every twenty years; a network of railways has not to be made in every
century. Thus industrialism produces both riches and poverty. First, it
creates an army with appliances too elaborate and too efficient for any
permanent need, and then it fails to pay its own soldiers. The present
condition of England and France is discouraging, for the reason that
it is the skilled workman who is so often without employment. The evil
has attracted more public attention in England, but the roads of France
are covered with miserable tramps and vagabonds, many of whom are
well-trained “_ouvriers sans travail_.”
[Sidenote: Success in Industry.]
Success in industry is proved by the attainment of wealth, so that it
becomes, in an industrial age, the evidence of something greater than
itself. It is taken as the proof of ability, of the kind of talent most
valued, and so it comes to pass that people of the most simple habits,
who have really no need for riches, often desire to make a fortune
as a proof of their own energy, and from a dread of being classed
amongst the unsuccessful. This is one of the strongest reasons for
money-getting when the genuine instinct of avarice is absent.
[Sidenote: The Necessity for Wealth.]
[Sidenote: Title and Wealth.]
[Sidenote: The Passion for Style.]
There is a most important difference between England and France in
the necessity for wealth in certain positions, quite independently
of the desire for money as a possession. The expression “a large
income is a necessary of life” is an English expression, and is true
in the country and classes in which it originated. What it means is
not that the Englishman cares much for personal self-indulgence, but
that if his income is not large he finds himself exposed to vexatious
or humiliating consequences, unless his position is otherwise so
insignificant as to escape attention. It is entirely understood that
all titled persons in England ought to be rich, and not only all titled
persons but all who belong to the upper classes. On inquiring into the
causes of this belief we do not find them in the love of money for
itself, as a miser loves it, but in the English passion for style and
state, and in the contempt which is felt for those who cannot afford to
maintain an expensive standard of living.
[Sidenote: England agreeable for the Ambitious Rich.]
Wealth is not only more necessary in England than in France, it is
also more valuable socially; it does more to elevate its possessor,
to give him rank and station. In England the condition of things is,
for the present, singularly agreeable to the rich man who is also
ambitious. It is not like a country without an upper class, and it is
not like a country with a closed and exclusive upper class. England has
a brilliant and attractive upper class that the rich man may aspire
to enter, and which receives him with encouraging cordiality. He has
something to desire, which is at the same time well worth desiring and
not beyond his reach. A true aristocracy would keep him at a distance;
in a genuine democracy he could never become more than a wealthy
citizen; in the present very peculiar condition of English society
there is still an aristocracy for him to enter, and it receives him to
be one of its own.
[Sidenote: The Middle Classes and the Rich.]
He has the advantage, also, of living in a country where the middle
classes are proud of the wealth of the rich. They talk of the large
incomes of the nobility with an interest that may be a survival of
ancient feudal sentiments, a vassal’s pride in his liege lord. It is
a pleasure to them to think that the Duke of Westminster can drive out
with his guests from Eaton Hall in a procession of his own carriages.
Even the freaks of the last Duke of Portland are not displeasing to
them, because his mole-burrowing was done on such a costly scale. The
vast estates of Sutherland and Breadalbane seem to give every Scotchman
a superiority over the comparatively landless French _noblesse_. The
British nature is so inclined to be happy in wealth that when the
individual Briton has little of his own to rejoice in he generously
takes pleasure in that of the nearest lord. This pleasure is the more
pure for him that he is almost incapable of envy.[74]
[Sidenote: French Feeling about Riches.]
[Sidenote: Separableness of Rank and Wealth in France.]
The state of French feeling about riches is more difficult to define
with perfect accuracy. It varies very much with different localities.
In a trading town money is everything, being the sign of superiority
in trade, and the biggest capitalist is the greatest man. In an
aristocratic centre money without caste counts for very little, and
the rich _bourgeois_ keeps his place, retaining the most simple and
unpretending manners. I should say that rank and wealth are much more
separate, or at least _separable_, in France than in England. People
are accustomed to see nobles of high rank with very moderate fortunes,
and they are also accustomed to meet with rich _bourgeois_ who do not
aspire to aristocracy either for themselves or their descendants.
Amongst the _noblesse_ themselves money is regarded merely as a great
convenience, and rank is respected still, and fully recognised, even in
combination with very narrow means. This is the purely aristocratic as
opposed to the plutocratic sentiment.
[Sidenote: French Equality.]
French equality does not bring together the _noblesse_ and the
_bourgeoisie_, as the _noblesse_ is exclusive, except towards the false
_noblesse_ that has once got itself adopted.[75] But equality often
produces a degree of familiarity, astonishing to an Englishman, between
the rich _bourgeoisie_ and the common people. This may be explained by
the absence of the word “gentleman” and of that separation of classes,
without the help of title, which the word “gentleman” implies. The rich
_bourgeois_, in France, is nothing but a _bourgeois_; he has never
thought “I am a gentleman,” and the difference between him and a common
man is but a pecuniary difference.
[Sidenote: Sanctity of Wealth in England.]
Wealth has a dignity and almost a sanctity in England which seems to
be connected with religious beliefs, and especially with the familiar
knowledge of the Old Testament, almost an unknown book in France.
In this respect the English hold a middle place between the French
and the Jews. I certainly have myself known rich English people who
believed that Divine Providence had appointed them, personally, to have
authority over the poor, and that the poor owed them much deference for
that reason. It is a kind of divine right, and it is even capable of a
sort of scientific proof, for wealth is one of the natural forces, and,
in the last analysis, an accumulation of solar energy given into the
hand of a man.[76]
[Sidenote: Sentiments of the Poor towards the Rich.]
[Sidenote: French Respect and Indifference.]
[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold.]
It is sometimes asserted, and perhaps still more generally believed,
that the sentiment of the poor towards the rich is one of adoration in
England and of hatred in France. The truth about English sentiment I
have endeavoured, in a general way, to tell. The peculiar advantage of
wealth in England is that it so soon confers caste--that the rich are
so soon believed to have rank, even without parchments and the royal
signature. They become “gentlefolks,” when in France they would be only
“_gros bourgeois_.” The French sentiment about wealth varies generally
between a kind of respect that is not at all servile, and unfeigned
indifference. The English have a great difficulty in understanding this
indifference. I find, for instance, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s article
in the _Nineteenth Century_ for February 1885, the statement about
France that “wealth creates the most savage enmity there, because it is
conceived as a means for gratifying appetites of the most selfish and
vile kind.” There may, of course, be instances of such feeling amongst
poor French anarchists and radicals. It exists even in England itself,
and was expressed long ago with sufficient vigour by a poet of the
people in fiery stanzas all ending with the refrain--
[Sidenote: Gerald Massey.]
“Our Sons are the rich men’s Serfs by day,
And our daughters his Slaves by night.”
Those two lines express _exactly_ the sentiment attributed by Mr.
Arnold to the French; the last of them, especially, is a precise
translation into poetic form of what Mr. Arnold says about “gratifying
appetites of the most selfish and vile kind.”[77]
When I read very comprehensive statements I always adopt the rather
prosaic method of looking back on my own experience, if I have any
experience that can throw light upon the subject. In this case, having
lived much in the country, both in England and France, and known poor
and rich people in the numerical proportion that they bear to one
another in real life, I may perhaps be accepted as a competent witness.
My testimony is as follows.
[Sidenote: The Author’s Testimony.]
[Sidenote: Lancashire.]
[Sidenote: Aggressiveness of Factory Hands.]
[Sidenote: Their Wit and Sarcasm.]
[Sidenote: Masons.]
When I was a young man in Lancashire the population of mill-hands was
not in a state of “savage enmity” towards the rich, but its sentiments
were not in the least deferential, and they were not friendly. We
cannot call those sentiments friendly which express themselves in
jibes and jeers. It is the simple truth that well-dressed ladies and
gentlemen avoided meeting the hands when they came out of the factories
to escape personal annoyance. They were not in bodily danger, but they
were liable to be openly criticised by the lower classes, whose tongues
were both sharp and merciless. The factory hands had unbounded natural
impudence and a very aggressive disposition. Some of them had the gifts
of wit, humour, and sarcasm, to which the Lancashire dialect is highly
favourable; and it was their delight to exercise these gifts at the
expense of any unfortunate gentleman or lady who fell in their way. A
telling hit at the victim, whom nobody pitied, was hailed with shouts
of satisfaction. A lady, who was a neighbour of ours in Lancashire,
happened to be walking in a muddy street, so she lifted her skirts a
little. This unluckily occurred near a group of factory girls, whose
sharp eyes, of course, noticed the lady’s stockings, which were of
some unbleached material. Thereupon one factory girl cried out, “Well,
afore _Oi’d_ don stockin’s na better weshed nur them theere!”[78]
and there was a general explosion of laughter, before which the lady
was glad to drop the curtain of her skirts. Nor was this critical
disposition confined to the factory operatives. I happened one day to
be wearing a new topcoat, and was passing near some houses in course
of erection. One of the masons shouted out from his ladder something
very coarse and ill-natured about my topcoat; so I stopped to reason
with him and said, “Why cannot you let my topcoat alone? I came by
it honestly; it is paid for.” “_Paid for, is’t?_” he answered, with
a sneer of ineffable contempt. “It woddn’t ’a bin if th’ ad ’ad t’
addle th’ brass.”[79] So I went away defeated, amidst the jeers of
the other workmen. I may perhaps trouble the reader with an anecdote
about another mason, in which there is more real hostility to wealth
and refinement. When I was a boy, an old Lancashire mason was making
an alteration in a room that was to be my bedroom. This involved the
blocking-up of an old window; and instead of building the wall of the
full thickness, the mason contented himself with a thin wall, leaving
a recess. “I shall be glad of this recess,” I said, “it will do to put
the washing-stand in.” The mention of such a luxury irritated the man’s
democratic sentiments, and he swore at the washing-stand and at me
with many a bitter oath, although he was working for my uncle, who too
kindly employed him.
[Sidenote: Sense of Equality in Lancashire.]
[Sidenote: A Lancashire Salute.]
Even when the Lancashire people did not intend to be uncivil, their
manners often asserted a sense of equality that I have never met
with from the corresponding class in France. I have often stayed in
Lancashire with a friend, now no more, who was one of the richest
men in his neighbourhood, and in Lancashire this means great wealth.
As there was an old intimacy between us, we called each other by our
Christian names; he was Henry, and I was Philip. This was natural in
our case; but what seemed less explicable was that when we walked out
together and met the wage-earning people in the neighbourhood, the men
would keep their hands in their pockets, and sometimes, as a sort of
special favour, cock their heads on one side by way of a bow, and say,
“Well, ’Ennery!” in token of friendly recognition. Assuredly there was
not, in such a salutation, any trace of “savage enmity” against wealth,
but neither was there any special respect for it. Either because rich
men were common in Lancashire, or because the people were extremely
independent, wealth used to get but a very moderate amount of deference
there.
[Sidenote: Lancashire Familiarity.]
I lived at one time close to Towneley Park, and remember that although
we always called the then representative of that very wealthy and
very ancient family Mr. Towneley, till he became colonel of the local
militia regiment, after which we gave him his military title, the
peasantry spoke of him either as “Tayunly” or as “Charles,” and his
brother they called “John.” This was not hostile, and it was not
insulting, but it cannot be considered deferential.
[Sidenote: The Author’s Experience in France.]
[Sidenote: French Rural Civility.]
In France I am known by sight to many hundreds of people in the
poorer classes, perhaps I may say to thousands, and they believe me
(erroneously) to be what they call rich, because I live in the manner
of a very small country gentleman. More than that, they all know that I
am an Englishman, a difference of nationality that would not generally
tend to repress any tendency to popular satire. The simple truth,
however, is that I have never once been insulted, never once even
jeered at, by these poor French people, because I had a good coat on my
back. On the contrary, numbers of people, whose names I do not know,
are in the habit of lifting their hats to me; and if I drive along
the road on a market day, when the peasants are returning to their
homes, I have to keep my right hand free to answer their salutations
by lifting my own hat, according to the courteous French custom. One
of my friends, a Frenchman, is really a rich man, and when we walk out
together in the town where he is best known, he is constantly raising
his hat. I find this practice to be much the same in other towns with
well-to-do men who are local notables, and I know an important village
where any one who looks like a gentleman will be saluted by every
inhabitant he meets.
In the French rural districts the aristocracy are very well known
individually, and esteemed or not according to their personal
qualities. When they are just to their tenants and kind to the poor,
these merits are fully acknowledged, and the great folks are regarded
with respect and even affection. “_C’est un bon Monsieur_” the peasants
will say of the squire, or, if they include his family, “_Ce sont de
braves gens, c’est du bon monde_.” I know an honest French gentleman
and his wife who are always ready with kindness and money when there
is any case of real distress, and I do not believe that there is any
country in the world where they would be more esteemed than they are in
their own neighbourhood.
[Sidenote: Absence of Familiarity in France.]
I have never known, in France, anything like the Lancashire familiarity
in speaking of the rich. The greatest landowner is always either called
by his title or at least gets the usual “Monsieur.” He is “Monsieur
le Marquis” or “Monsieur de ----,” and often, with a mixture of local
feeling and respect, he is “Notre Monsieur,” to distinguish him from
other people’s Messieurs. I never in my life heard a French peasant
call a country gentleman by his bare name, or by his Christian name
only. I know all the tenants on an estate where the rents were raised
in a manner that created the greatest dissatisfaction, but, whilst
expressing this dissatisfaction in just and straightforward language,
the tenants never infused any hatred into their talk, nor did they
abandon the usual respectful form in speaking of the landlord. They
said that he was hard with them, and that he was acting against his own
interest, which he did not seem to understand, as it was impossible for
a tenant to work the farms permanently on the new terms. This is the
whole substance of what they said, the complete expression of their
“savage enmity.”
[Sidenote: Wealth not an Objection in Parliamentary Candidates.]
At election times I never found that it was a ground of objection to a
republican candidate that he was a rich man. There has been a sort of
understanding amongst many reactionary rich people in France, of late
years, to give as little employment as possible to the wage-earning
classes, in order to punish them for voting in favour of republican
candidates. The poor resent this attempt to starve them into political
subservience, a feeling which is entirely distinct from hatred to the
rich as a class. Rich men who continue to give employment are, from
contrast, better liked than ever.
[Sidenote: Wealth and National Defence.]
[Sidenote: Unorganised Wealth Valueless in War.]
I cannot close this chapter without some reference to the wealth of the
two nations from the military point of view, that we are all compelled
to consider. To be rich is of no use in actual warfare unless we are
also ready. The French had plenty of money in 1870, as they proved
shortly afterwards by paying two hundred millions sterling to Germany,
yet that money could not win the battles of Gravelotte and Sedan. At
the same time the luxurious establishments of rich French people, the
wines in their cellars, their collections of pictures, their beautiful
books, their pretty carriages, all the pleasant things that are
commonly associated with the idea of wealth, were of no more practical
value than the embroidery on the mocassins of a Red Indian. The truth
is unpleasant, but we have to face it, that wealth itself is valueless
for warlike purposes _unless it has been employed in time_, and that
it is not the richest nation, but the most prepared nation, that lives
best through the day of trial.[80]
CHAPTER III
ALLIANCES
[Sidenote: Marriage as an Alliance.]
[Sidenote: The French Ideal.]
[Sidenote: The English Ideal.]
The notion of marriage as an alliance is more generally prevalent in
France than in England, where it belongs only to the upper, or at least
the wealthier classes. The ideal of a French marriage is the practice
of princes in the middle ages and at the Renaissance, when they were
affianced to ladies whom they had never seen, merely on the ground that
their social position was suitable. The ideal of an English marriage
is that the social position of both parties must be suitable, but that
they ought previously to have some acquaintance with each other and
some appearance of affection. There are, however, many exceptions in
the practice of both countries. In both, there is a strong disapproval
of the _mésalliance_, which goes so far that even in England it is said
that society will condone a seduction more willingly.
[Sidenote: Definition of _Mésalliance_.]
[Sidenote: _Mésalliances_ in England.]
[Sidenote: Ideas of Class in France.]
[Sidenote: Preservation of the Wife’s Surname in France.]
The dictionaries say that _mésalliance_ signifies marriage with an
inferior, but they fail to explain the kind of inferiority indicated.
Would moral or intellectual inferiority in one of the parties
constitute a _mésalliance_ for the other? It would most assuredly in
reality, and bring its own daily and hourly punishment; but opinion
overlooks these trifles, which only concern the parties directly
interested. Does a _mésalliance_ result from a difference of rank?
English opinion is very elastic about rank; we see marriages between
titled and untitled people every day. Does it result from inequality of
wealth? That inequality is far more frequent between married people in
England, an aristocratic country, than under the French Republic. The
rule against _mésalliances_ in England amounts to no more than this,
that the parties to the marriage ought to belong to the same _monde_,
that is, they ought to have been seen in the same houses. In France it
is a _mésalliance_ for a noble to marry a commoner, and this certainly
marks a more trenchant line than any that exists in England, where a
commoner may belong to the aristocracy, which he cannot do in France,
unless he succeeds in making himself a false noble. Marriages with rich
commoners are not infrequent in France, but they are always confessedly
_mésalliances_. On the whole, I should say that so far as marriage is
concerned, ideas of class are decidedly more rigorous in France than in
England. The woman’s name and condition survive more after the marriage
in France. Great numbers of French people put their wife’s surname
after their own, and even if this is not done formally, the linen and
silver may be marked with the two initials. A Frenchman will sometimes
use his mother’s surname instead of his father’s, if it seems to him
more euphonious. In formal announcements of deaths and marriages the
wife’s surname is frequently preserved. The habit of saying Madame
de B. _née_ de C. is a French habit, and she may be called in legal
documents Jeanne de C., wife of Gaston de B., as if her name survived
after marriage, which it really does in the French conception of
marriage.
[Sidenote: Pecuniary Value of the French _de_.]
[Sidenote: Loss of the _Particule_.]
[Sidenote: The New and False Noble.]
After careful observation I have arrived at the conclusion that the
French _de_ before a name, whether rightly or fraudulently borne (for
that makes little perceptible difference), is equivalent to about ten
thousand pounds in the marriage market and will often count for more.
It is wonderful that it should be so, considering that all French
people know how frequently the _de_ is assumed; but it seems to be
valued as a mark that the bearer belongs to the gentry, which, in fact,
he generally does. The genuine nobility who have become too poor to
keep a place in genteel society, and have to work for their living,
seldom retain the _particule_, or retain it only for a short time.
If they did not drop it themselves the world would drop it for them.
I have met with several instances of this. To be able to retain the
_particule_ is therefore a sort of practical evidence that one belongs
to the upper classes. It is also a kind of guarantee that he will not
profess liberal opinions. As a rule the new and false noble is more
royalist than the Pretender himself, and certainly more clerical than
the clergy.
[Sidenote: The London Marriage Market.]
[Sidenote: Worldly Motives elsewhere.]
The rule that marriages are made from inclination in England and from
interest in France requires to be understood with very great reserves.
When English writers have France in their minds they assert the rule
very positively, but when the repellent French influence does not
deflect their judgment they become exceedingly frank about the hunting
after rank and fortune in the great London marriage market. It would be
easy to quote novels and essays and social sketches of all kinds which
paint London society as a vast field of rivalry, where matrimonial
ambition lays itself out continually for high prizes, and either
triumphs in the winning of them or has to taste the bitterness of
defeat. Even the novelists who describe country life appear to believe
that worldly motives operate frequently in the provinces.
[Sidenote: _Le Mariage de Convenance._]
[Sidenote: Byron’s Marriage.]
This is one of the many instances in which the same thing is called
by different names. There is no exact translation of “_mariage de
convenance_” in English. “_Convenance_” would be most nearly translated
by “suitableness,” but the word “_convenance_” has a certain connection
with what is right and proper; “_c’est inconvenant_” means “it is
improper.” The “_mariage de convenance_” is a marriage that appears to
be suitable, I mean _that other people consider to be so_. Of course
they are often egregiously mistaken; they think it perfectly “suitable”
to fasten two people together for life who are quite unfitted for
anything like companionship. Byron’s marriage was a very perfect
“_mariage de convenance_,” and we know what came of it.
In England these are called “prudent marriages,” but when they occur
in France the English speak of them with strong disapprobation as
“business transactions.” This is an example of the great art of
“putting things.”
[Sidenote: Prudent Marriages.]
[Sidenote: A real Case.]
A prudent marriage is not necessarily a business transaction either
in France or England. Let us consider a real case. A young gentleman
(French or English) dislikes the idea of permanent celibacy, yet
his income, though rather more than sufficient for a bachelor, is
inadequate for the expenses of marriage. He marries a woman with some
fortune. This cannot be described as “a business transaction” unless
he gains by it, and in most cases he gains nothing, he only protects
himself against social _déchéance_ or financial ruin. He acts without
a view to profit, purely in self-defence. He wishes to marry without
injuring himself; he does not wish to turn marriage into a profitable
transaction. Nine-tenths of French marriages are made exactly in this
way.
[Sidenote: French Marriage Customs.]
[Sidenote: The _Comme il faut_.]
[Sidenote: Mutual Ignorance of French _Fiancés_.]
[Sidenote: Dowerless French Girls.]
[Sidenote: The Truth about French Marriages.]
[Sidenote: Moderate Expectations.]
[Sidenote: Ordinary French Dowries.]
[Sidenote: Small Dowries.]
French customs in contracting marriage differ from the English customs
chiefly in this, that the French know so little of each other before
they are betrothed (often nothing whatever), the marriage having been
arranged by other people. Here is a real instance. A young gentleman of
my acquaintance was engaged to one of two sisters before he had seen
either, and when he met them together in a drawing-room he asked his
mother which was to be his wife. This is a supremely perfect example
of a genteel arrangement in France, where the less people know of each
other before marriage the more are they _comme il faut_. I remember
being much amused by the indignation of a very beautiful young French
lady about a rumour that she had been wedded for love. She reiterated
her assurance that it was a baseless fabrication, that her husband had
only seen her once before their betrothal, and then quite formally in
the presence of other people, and that their marriage had been entirely
one of “_convenance_.” In short, she repelled the idea of love as if it
had been a disgraceful and unmerited imputation.[81] English writers
who wish to depreciate French people can scarcely exaggerate the
mutual ignorance in which genteel French marriages are usually made.
There are, however, occasional exceptions, and I myself have known a
few French people who condemned the system strongly. As to the lower
classes, especially the peasantry, courtship goes on almost after the
English fashion. There are “_mariages d’inclination_” in all classes,
though they become less and less frequent as you ascend the social
scale. That such marriages _must_ exist will be evident to any one
who reflects that in France there are dowerless girls who get married
nevertheless. Neither does a dowerless girl invariably accept the first
young gentleman who proposes himself. I myself have known several
poor French girls who refused good offers; a very striking instance
came within my knowledge during the composition of this volume.[82] A
French mother said to me, “I have never regretted not to have been able
to give dowries to my daughters. They had several offers which were
addressed to themselves and not to their purses, and they married most
happily.” The expression “marry for money” would apply, no doubt, to
some cases (as in England, for there are fortune-hunters everywhere),
but it does not apply to the great majority of French marriages. The
accurate way of stating the case is this. _A Frenchman generally
expects his wife to bear part of the household expenses._ As it does
not often happen that the wife can follow a profession or a trade, such
an expectation amounts to the expectation of a dowry. In most cases the
amount of this dowry is so moderate that an Englishman would say the
girl had nothing--he would not take such a sum into consideration,
one way or the other, when he married. For me (who know a great deal
more about the inside of French life than can conveniently be printed),
I have come to the conclusion that with the present rate of expenses
a dowry must be much larger than French dowries usually are to give
the young husband the satisfaction of having made a good financial
speculation by his marriage. A few hundreds of pounds or a _very_ few
thousands are the ordinary dowries in the middle classes, and neither
the hundreds nor the thousands are any compensation for the pitiless
pecuniary exigencies of married life. No young gentleman in his senses
imagines that he can improve his financial position by marrying a
young lady of elegant tastes endowed with two hundred a year. Yet that
income, at five per cent, represents a capital of a hundred thousand
francs, which is an exceptionally large dowry for a French girl in the
middle classes. A girl whose father can give four thousand pounds has
probably been brought up in a family living in some style, and she will
expect a considerable expenditure.[83] It might be a better speculation
to take an industrious housewife of simple tastes, without a penny in
the world. The small dowries and the very large ones may be useful to
two different classes of men. The small dowries are often valuable to
people in the struggling classes because they may enable the husband to
advance his trade. A journeyman joiner marries a girl with five hundred
pounds and becomes a master, a very small shopkeeper may take a
larger shop. But what is the good of, say, a thousand pounds to a poor
physician or professor? The money by itself might be acceptable, but a
wife with it can only mean an increase of his poverty. Yet this is the
kind of “marrying for money” that is constantly practised in France.
It is no more than a sort of partial prudence in cases where complete
prudence would be not to marry at all.
[Sidenote: Moderate Prudence rare in England.]
In England this sort of _moderate_ deference to prudential
considerations is comparatively rare. An Englishman marries for
affection decidedly, or for money with equal decision. He despises a
small dowry. The same man may marry for pure love with absolute disdain
of money, or he may sacrifice affection and seek for a wealthy heiress.
He would not, like a Frenchman, be turned aside from a love-match by
five or six hundred pounds.
[Sidenote: Imprudence in the English Lower Classes.]
Nearly all ranks in France are moderately prudent with regard to
marriage, but in England it is only the comfortable classes that are
so. The imprudence of the lower middle classes and of the people is
almost without limit. They talk about marriage, and they enter upon
it, exactly as if pecuniary difficulties had no existence. One of my
friends was invited to a wedding where rather genteel appearances were
observed, but nobody except himself had any cash. At the end of the
ceremony the young bridegroom approached him and borrowed fourteen
shillings to pay the fees. The money was never returned.
[Sidenote: Marrying for Marriage only.]
[Sidenote: A Decision to Marry.]
[Sidenote: Clerical Influence.]
[Sidenote: Orthodoxy.]
[Sidenote: Morality.]
I think it may fairly be said that there is more marrying _simply for
marriage_ in France than in England. What I mean may be made clearer by
a particular instance. A French lady once told me and several other
people that her son was going to be married. “Who is the young lady?”
I inquired. “Oh,” she answered, “I only mean that my son has decided
to marry, he has not yet fixed upon any young lady; that is a matter
for future consideration.” This, I should say, is very characteristic
of French habits of thought about marriage. A young Frenchman will
live on for some years without troubling his head about the matter,
when suddenly, nobody knows why, he will come to the conclusion that
he ought to get married, and then he will very likely ask some old
lady to manage the business for him. In the clerical party marriages
are often made by priests, who have great influence in finding rich
girls for young men likely to be dutiful sons of the Church. Open
unbelievers cannot hope to benefit by these influences. In England also
a reputation for strict orthodoxy is very valuable to a young gentleman
at the time of marriage; it is, in fact, or certainly was some years
ago, more valuable than a reputation for morality. I myself have
known instances of young Englishmen who married well and were known
to be immoral, when they would not have had the most distant chance
of “marrying money” if they had not been regular attendants at divine
worship.
[Sidenote: The Author’s Opinion.]
My own opinions on these matters are of little consequence to any one,
but as a writer is constantly exposed to misrepresentation, I will
state them very briefly in self-defence. It seems to me that marriage
may be undertaken from a variety of motives and be fairly happy,
either in France or England, but that the only foundation of the best
happiness is companionship. How this ideal is to be realised every one
must judge for himself. In my opinion it depends much more upon mental
sympathy than on equality of fortune or rank, or even on identity of
nationality. Marriage is a life-long conversation, and I have never
found that conversation with any lady was more interesting because she
had money in her purse.
[Sidenote: Partial Prudence.]
[Sidenote: Rashness of “arranged” Unions.]
Again, with regard to the use of the words “prudence” and “prudent”
concerning marriage, I should say that these words are employed far too
exclusively, both in France and England, with reference to pecuniary
considerations, which are not the whole of prudence but only a very
limited part of it. To marry a person whom you have never seen, or of
whose character, gifts, and tastes you know only what can be learned
in one or two short and formal interviews, is an act of the wildest
imprudence, however wealthy the person may be, and this kind of utter
rashness is exceedingly common amongst French people, who are prudent
to excess in all that touches fortune. One consideration, especially,
exhibits this rashness in its true character. To marry a woman of whom
you know nothing is to entrust your children to a woman of whom you
know as little.
CHAPTER IV
INTERCOURSE
[Sidenote: Comparative Sociability.]
One of the most prevalent popular errors, for it is prevalent both in
France and England, is the belief that the French are the more sociable
people of the two. The truth is quite the contrary; the English are
much more sociable than the French; the English associate together much
more readily for purposes of business, of culture, and of pleasure; the
force of fellowship is greater in England, and so is the feeling of
subordination towards leaders.
[Sidenote: Repellent English Manners.]
The error seems to have taken its origin in the outwardly repellent
manners of the English towards persons whom they do not know. They look
with suspicion on new or accidental acquaintances; they hate to be
intruded upon, and they have an undefined dread of having acquaintances
forced upon them who may be a little inferior in rank. But towards
all whom they consider safe, that is, well bred and unobtrusive, and
belonging to their own class, they exhibit a degree of sociability
which far exceeds the sociability of the French.
[Sidenote: French Liking for Talk.]
[Sidenote: French Reserve.]
The English very rarely have the temper that can amuse itself with a
little unrestrained intercourse of an accidental kind. Novelists and
philosophers have that kind of openness of interest, but they are a
small minority. It is much more common amongst the French. The ordinary
Frenchman amuses himself with studying human nature, and likes a
conversation with a temporary acquaintance. It serves to pass the time
better, he thinks, than “putting his nose into a book.” Most of what
the French know they have got by conversation, and so far as readiness
to talk is concerned they are sociable. But with all his apparent
openness and frankness the Frenchman has his own reserve too, and
fences his life round in his own way. People say that “the Englishman’s
house is his castle;” if so, the Frenchman’s house may be described as
his armoured turret. “_On ne donne pas la clef de sa maison_” is not an
English expression, and it means more than the material key.
[Sidenote: Restaurant and Home Hospitality.]
[Sidenote: Seclusion of Frenchwomen.]
[Sidenote: Their Aristocratic Sentiments.]
[Sidenote: Social Separation of the Sexes.]
A Parisian invites you to dinner, and will probably take you to an
expensive restaurant; a Londoner will offer his roast-beef in his own
house. The separation of the sexes is much greater in France than in
England. You may know a great number of married Frenchmen and have
a very slight acquaintance with their wives, perhaps not enough to
recognise them in the street. Nay, you may even habitually visit
Frenchmen in their own private apartments without ever seeing their
wives and daughters at all. Frenchwomen (I do not mean in Paris, but
in the provinces) often live in something like oriental seclusion, but
beyond this there is in the feminine mind an extreme tenacity about
real or imaginary rank. The husband may have intimate friends, whom he
respects for their character or admires for their talents, whilst his
wife rejects them because they have not the _particule_, or because
their grandfathers have been in trade. We know that character, talent,
culture, count for nothing whatever in the aristocratic estimate,[84]
and we must remember that in France the spirit of aristocracy, where it
exists, is extremely pure, and does not allow itself to be seduced from
its own principles either by merit or wealth, nor even by such offices
and honours as a republic can confer. It is not exactly convenient for
me to give special instances, because these pages may be translated and
the cases recognised, but I will say, speaking generally and without
special application, that if M. de B. is the intimate friend of M.
C., and if the two call each other Jules and Jacques, it does not at
all follow that Madame de B. will recognise Madame C., or allow their
children to associate.
[Sidenote: Less of it in England.]
There is really very little necessity for this kind of _morgue_ in
France, as the French are not pushing, and care very little about
distinguishing themselves by having fine acquaintances. It might be
more necessary in England, where people are proud to know a lord, yet
in England I have not observed that extreme difference between the
sexes which certainly exists in France. I should say that in England,
as a rule, a man and his wife, in whatever rank, will either repel you
or accept you together. You would hardly, in England, be on terms of
affectionate friendship with a man, and on terms of the most formal
and distant acquaintanceship with his wife--acquaintanceship remaining
equally formal, equally distant, for an unlimited number of years.
[Sidenote: Distance does not diminish.]
[Sidenote: The Dislike to what is “Unfeminine.”]
[Sidenote: Essentially French.]
[Sidenote: Education of French Girls.]
[Sidenote: Further Separation of Men and Women.]
This distance between the sexes does not diminish in provincial France.
I am not speaking of the great cities like Lyons and Marseilles, which
may have something of Parisian openness and ease, but of the country
and especially of the aristocratic parts of it. I should say that if
there is any perceptible change it is rather towards a still wider
separation of the sexes. The French have a very keen sense, perhaps
an exaggerated sense, of what is feminine and what is unfeminine.
Englishmen of the last generation were French in their feelings about
this; they would have considered it unfeminine for a woman to make
political speeches, to deliver sermons, to be a leader in the Salvation
Army, and to press for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts.
They would even have thought it unfeminine to want a grand classical
and mathematical education. All that feeling of objection to the
“unfeminine” is essentially French, and it remains in France whilst in
England it is passing away. I remember talking to some French people
about George Eliot’s extensive education. It did not exalt her in
their eyes, but the contrary; they thought it unfeminine. There is a
partial reaction against this opinion in France, of which one symptom
is the establishment of _lycées_ for girls; but it is only one party,
and but a section of that party, which advocates this, and the real
object is not so much to educate girls as to deliver them from clerical
domination. All the tendencies of modern amusements and occupations
separate men and women in France. As examples I may mention the
increase of smoking and gambling, and the decline of conversation and
dancing. The increase of smoking has the effect of leaving men together
after dinner “to smoke a cigarette.” In former times they went to the
drawing-room with the ladies, and looked upon the English as boors
for doing otherwise. Now, under pretext of a cigarette, Frenchmen
will remain away from ladies almost the whole evening. The increase
of gambling makes the card-table more interesting than feminine small
talk. Young Frenchmen are now becoming too old, too _blasés_, to
enjoy dancing, which is one of the pleasures of healthy and natural
youth. As to conversation, it is difficult to maintain it with ladies
in a country where they have such a small share in the political and
religious opinions of men, and where literature has little interest
for either. In Paris there are the theatres, and the Salon whilst it
is open. Perhaps the best subject in common between men and women in
modern France is business, for which the women often have a natural
aptitude.
[Sidenote: The Want of Amusement in France.]
[Sidenote: The _Cafés_.]
The great want in French provincial life is amusement of a cheap and
innocent kind, that might bring people together. The men have their
_cafés_, but they are only frequented by one sex, and not universally
by that. The clergy, of course, avoid them, and so do the gentry who
pretend to some degree of rank. They are frequented by the middle,
including the professional, classes; and the very existence of _cafés_
is evidence of the small amount of intercourse going on in private
houses. They are at the same time an effect and a cause of the
separation of the sexes. So far as I know, the upper classes are more
sociable in the sense of having more intercourse amongst themselves
than the middle, but they are exclusive, and even amongst the richer
nobles I doubt if there is as much hospitality as in England.
[Sidenote: Balls and Theatres.]
[Sidenote: Rarity of Public Amusements.]
An idea is prevalent in England that Frenchwomen are constantly going
to balls and theatres. In Paris, no doubt, rich women have these
amusements, but in the provinces, where most French people live, there
is very little of them. The provincial town that is best known to me
is situated in an aristocratic neighbourhood, and although the theatre
is very pretty and very well kept, the gentry will not patronise it at
all, and are never to be seen there. Even the middle classes are by no
means regular in their attendance, for the actors often play to empty
benches. There are never any public balls, and those in private houses
are very rare. The only public entertainments patronised in any way by
the upper classes are the charity concerts, which occur perhaps twice
in three years.
[Sidenote: Lunch.]
[Sidenote: The Formal Call.]
The English institution of lunch, to which any friend may come
uninvited, is a great practical help to social intercourse in the
country. It is pleasant from the absence of state and pretension, both
in host and guest, and it gives a convenient excuse for paying a long
call in the middle of the day. There is nothing answering to it in
France. You must be very intimate indeed with a French family before
you could venture to “_demander à déjeuner_;” in fact, that is hardly
possible without relationship. It is astonishing, to an Englishman,
how very much of French social intercourse is absolutely limited to
the formal call between three and six in the afternoon. People go on
calling upon each other in that way for all their lives without an
invitation on either side.
[Sidenote: Invitations to sleep.]
Another great difference between France and England concerns
invitations to sleep. In England, all your friends’ houses are open
to you. It would not occur to an Englishman to go to the hotel in a
town where he had intimate friends. In France the narrowness of town
lodgings acts as an effectual preventive to this kind of hospitality,
except amongst the very rich, and so the habit of it is lost. This
is one of those small matters which have great consequences. The most
unrestrained social intercourse in England takes place when guests are
staying in a house, and the most valuable moments for the interchange
of masculine confidences occur very late at night.
[Sidenote: Increase of Luxury an Impediment to Hospitality.]
I have said elsewhere that the increase of luxury in France acts as a
restraint upon hospitality. People shrink from the disturbance, the
trouble, and the expense of the state dinner, and so they end by giving
no dinners at all. In former times hospitality was more a thing of
the heart than of the purse, more of gaiety than ceremony, and was so
common as to be a weekly, and in some houses almost a daily habit. Now
it is a solemn function occurring at rare intervals.
[Sidenote: Want of Intercourse amongst the French Peasantry.]
My attention has been drawn by the French themselves to the decline of
hospitality amongst the peasantry. I believe that this varies greatly
in different parts of France. So far as I have been able to observe,
the peasants never invite each other except to marriage-feasts,
and then their hospitality is excessive and extravagant. In my
neighbourhood, not only do the peasants abstain from invitations, they
do not even meet for an evening’s chat in each other’s houses. The
farm-houses may be a mile from each other by measurement; socially,
they are a hundred miles apart.
[Sidenote: The Club and the _Cercle_.]
The club is, in a certain sense, a more sociable institution in France
than in England. It exists in France for conversation and gambling,
in England for the individual convenience of the members who may want
a rest in an easy-chair with a newspaper or a review, or who desire a
convenient place for dining in a kind of semi-privacy. The purpose
of the English club is answered in some degree by the cafés and
restaurants in France. They have no privacy, but they are to be found
everywhere. The difference of title between “club” and “_cercle_” is
an indication in itself. “Club” implies an association to meet common
expenses for individual convenience, _cercle_ is a circle of talkers.
[Sidenote: Effects of Religious and Political Bigotry.]
[Sidenote: Internal Division in France and England.]
[Sidenote: Effects of Division in the Provinces.]
The effects of religious and political bigotry in restricting social
intercourse are lamentable enough in both countries, and especially
because the more intercourse is needed the less it is likely to take
place. Real toleration of differences in opinion is possible only for
a few. It comes from largeness of mind, but there are few large minds.
It is dictated by the highest reason, but few people are reasonable.
The ordinary and practical social solution of the difficulty is to
break off intercourse when differences of opinion manifest themselves.
In this way it comes to pass, almost involuntarily, and as if by the
operation of a natural law, that people who visit together have usually
the same political and religious opinions, or, at least, profess them,
which is equally conducive to harmony. And the few who have true
liberality of sentiment, and could bear with the gentle and considerate
expression of a different opinion, are often compelled to adopt the
usual custom that they may not have to resent rudeness. So it happens
that people in the same nation are divided even more trenchantly than
if they belonged to different nations, and you find English people
who will receive Catholic foreigners but not an English dissenter, or
French people who will receive Americans but not a French republican.
The evil resulting from this increases with the smallness of the place.
In London and Paris it condemns nobody to solitude, because every one
may find others who agree with him, but in provincial towns where petty
class distinctions restrict people already to a very limited circle
they may find themselves entirely shut out from social intercourse if
they are even suspected of holding opinions not tolerated there. A want
of delicacy and of hospitable feeling may even permit people to attack
the known opinions of a guest at their own table, a proceeding not
unexampled in civilised countries, though it would be thought barbarous
in the tent of a nomadic Arab. Or, without going so far as that, a
host, in mere weakness, may fail to defend his guest because it would
be impossible to do that without establishing the forbidden principle
that every one has a right to his own views.
PART VIII
SUCCESS
CHAPTER I
PERSONAL SUCCESS
[Sidenote: Success difficult for a French Gentleman.]
The estimate of what constitutes personal success varies so much in
the two countries, and in the different classes of each, that it is
very difficult to arrive at any common standard. There is hardly any
kind of success that a French gentleman desires and which is at the
same time possible for him. He cannot desire success in trade, or even
in any lucrative profession, because all the trades and professions
are beneath him; his former possibilities of success lay in Court
favour, but now there is no Court. It is _bon ton_ to despise official
posts under the Republic. The gentry do not enter the Church, except
occasionally the regular orders, and therefore cannot look for
bishoprics. The fine arts and professional work in literature are of
course infinitely beneath them. Nothing remains but the army and navy,
with the drawback that both of these are already crowded with plebeian
ability.
[Sidenote: Success in the Middle Classes.]
A class that has nothing to look forward to in life, nothing to aim
at, but only to live from day to day in dignity, often on very narrow
means, is deprived of the possibilities of success, and cannot really
know the delightful meaning of the word. The middle classes know
it,--the shopkeepers, manufacturers, professional men. Even the
peasant knows it when he has fought his way to the purchase of a little
farm.
[Sidenote: Middle-class Frenchwomen.]
[Sidenote: Madame Boucicaut.]
[Sidenote: An untitled Queen.]
[Sidenote: A true Success.]
The women in the French middle classes, as is well known, often
understand business quite as well as the men, and show quite as much
energy, and govern great commercial houses with quite as much capacity
both for large affairs and for details. Madame Boucicaut, of the
_Bon Marché_ in Paris, will probably remain the typical Frenchwoman
of business of this century. She attained undeniable greatness, not
merely as the possessor of I know not how many millions, but as an
untitled queen actually reigning over a great number of human beings
and constantly applying a most powerful intellect to answer one
question satisfactorily, “How can I do most good to all these people
who work for me?” A lower nature would have tried to get above the
shopkeeping sphere; her ambition was satisfied with remaining where
she was and being a great worker and a great philanthropist.[85] Her
life was indeed a success, not only in the exercise of power, but in
the development of character. It has sometimes appeared possible that
studious philanthropy may have its origin in a kind of remorse. In the
case of Madame Boucicaut it may have been at first suggested by regret
for the injury done to thousands of petty tradesmen by a colossal
cheap establishment like hers.
[Sidenote: Success in Money-making.]
[Sidenote: Speculation in France.]
[Sidenote: The Desire for Little and for Much Money.]
[Sidenote: Lotteries in France.]
[Sidenote: Private Gambling.]
[Sidenote: Crowding of the French Medical Profession.]
[Sidenote: The Fine Arts as a Profession.]
[Sidenote: Great Numbers of Artists.]
[Sidenote: The Intentions of Nature.]
[Sidenote: Uses of the Unsuccessful.]
The influence of ancient philosophies, and also that of Christianity
(so far as it has been taken seriously), have both been hostile
to money-making; but the influence of all visible realities is so
constantly in its favour that the word “success” in the middle classes
both of France and England means money and nothing else. The phrases
“_Il a réussi, il est arrivé_,” and the expressions “He has done well,
he has risen in the world,” do not mean that one has attained any ideal
excellence, but simply that he has netted money, and in certain classes
a man is considered a poor creature if he has not realised a fortune.
This view of success has led, especially in France, to increased
gambling in all kinds of speculations, because there is hardly any kind
of real work that a man or woman can do which brings in more than a
pittance. The increased cost of living, both in necessary expenditure
and in the useless expenditure that is imposed by the foolish customs
of society, has made the payment for honest work seem even smaller
than it really is. The desire for a little money is an incentive to
work; the desire for much is an incentive to speculation, except in
the few cases where there is capital enough for one to become a leader
of industry on a large scale. The same cause has led to the success of
lotteries in France, and it is this spirit which of late years has so
much increased the amount of private gambling. These tendencies are not
likely to diminish, since professional incomes, instead of increasing,
have gone down as a result of competition. Physicians tell me that
the facilities of cheap general and professional education are now
overcrowding their professions by an immense influx of young men who
settle anywhere, as birds do where they are likely to find food. An
old physician who formerly had a good rural practice in a part of the
country very little known, told me that he was now surrounded by active
young doctors in the adjacent parishes, and saw his income reduced to
£160 a year. Yes, that is about the figure to which competition is
bringing down the gains in the liberal professions. The fine arts,
both in England and France, offer a few very valuable prizes; and as
a few artists live very luxuriously and with considerable ostentation
in their showy houses, they give a false idea of the prosperity of
their profession. As a matter of fact, the majority of artists form a
peculiarly and especially anxious class, whose gains are so precarious
that next year’s income is like the hope of a prize in a lottery.
Nothing is more curious in the history of the nineteenth century than
the prodigious increase in the number of artists both in England
and France. A well-known French painter told me there were twenty
thousand of his profession in Paris, working, of course, chiefly
for exportation, as France produces painting to sell rather than to
keep. The number of sculptors, though not nearly so great, is even
more remarkable, because sculpture is so little bought. An English
academician has an interesting theory about the intentions of Nature
with regard to the fine arts; he says that pictures are produced
now as coal was in prehistoric times, to serve long afterwards for
fuel. Seriously, it appears that Nature follows in this matter her
usual principle of “a thousand seeds for one to bear.” She produces
a thousand workmen in the fine arts that there may be found amongst
them a single artist of genius whose work is truly precious to the
world. In France the great number of semi-artists has had the effect of
infusing an artistic element into several of the handicrafts, and of
disseminating artistic ideas, chiefly amongst the population of Paris.
Artists who have failed as makers of pictures or statues fall back upon
decorative painting or sculpture, upon designing for manufactures, and
upon teaching elementary drawing in public schools. Painters often have
recourse to another of the graphic arts when painting fails. There is
hardly one of the French etchers who has not desired to be a painter.
[Sidenote: Small Worldly Success of the French Clergy.]
[Sidenote: Presents given to Priests.]
[Sidenote: French Canons.]
[Sidenote: Prelates.]
[Sidenote: Poverty of the Catholic Priesthood.]
[Sidenote: Importance of the Pope.]
From the point of view which regards worldly success, and which we are
considering for the present, the French clergy is very inferior to the
English. The highest pay of a parish priest is sixty pounds a year,
the lowest thirty-six. There are some extras for wedding and funeral
fees. There is also a priest’s house, and these dwellings have been
much improved of late. When the parishioners are rich and generous the
priest receives many presents of eatables, and in some parishes his
cellar is kept well supplied with wine; but when the population is
stingy he has to live strictly on his income, or even on less if he
is of a charitable disposition. In towns, a favourite priest is often
embarrassed with gifts for the comfort and elegance of his rooms; in
rural parishes his rooms are likely to be bare. Each priest keeps one
woman servant, usually plain, and, of course, invariably of mature
age--his “rancid virgin,” as one _curé_ wittily called her. It has
always been an insoluble problem for me how the two manage to live
so decently on so little money. A canon has sixty pounds a year, a
bishop four hundred, and an archbishop six hundred, but in the case
of prelates there is the _casuel_ (different fees), which may increase
their means considerably. In England the lowest ecclesiastical incomes
are twice what they are in France, and the highest more than ten times
as much. There are no _prizes_ in the French Catholic Church answering
to the richer English livings; even a bishopric (from the pecuniary
point of view) is not so good as many an English rectory. We hear of
the wealth and splendour of the Church; she is, no doubt, magnificent
in display, but her priests are poor officials, and their celibacy
is not a matter of choice but of necessity, which (from a sense of
prudence) has been converted into a rule. It is only after fully
realising the poverty of the Catholic priesthood that we can estimate
the overwhelming importance of the Pope with his unlimited command of
money. The difference between him and his prelates is not at all that
between an English king and his great nobles, but rather that between
the Emperor Napoleon and ordinary regimental officers, whilst the
priests are relatively in the position of private soldiers and no more.
[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical Incomes in England.]
In England ecclesiastical incomes range between eighty pounds a
year and fifteen thousand. Incomes of two or three hundred a year
are common, and many exceed seven or eight. In fact, the Church
answers with tolerable exactness to other liberal professions, such
as medicine, the law, and painting. A splendidly successful lawyer,
doctor, or painter has the income of the Archbishop of York, and there
may be one in each generation with that of Canterbury, whilst the
unsuccessful layman may equal the earnings of a small incumbent or a
poor curate, and between the two we find all the degrees. It is more
difficult, however, for an energetic man to make his own way in the
Church than in more open professions.
[Sidenote: The Army a Bachelor’s Profession.]
The army, in both countries, is a poor profession except in the highest
grades. It is essentially a bachelor’s profession. In France, officers
are not permitted to marry any woman who has less than a certain dowry,
and in England marriage is restricted to a few amongst the private
soldiers.[86] Here we have an approach to the enforced celibacy of the
Roman priesthood.
[Sidenote: Public Offices in France and England.]
[Sidenote: The Magistracy.]