Almost all public offices in France are paid, but ill paid. In England

they are either well paid or gratuitous. English Members of Parliament,

in both houses, are unpaid; in France they receive a moderate salary.

In England magistrates (except a small special class) are unpaid; in

France they all receive a few thousand francs a year. On the other

hand, English judges are splendidly paid in comparison with French

judges, even when they sit only in the County Courts. The magistracy,

in France, is so little lucrative that judicial functions usually imply

private means.

[Sidenote: Trade.]

The ordinary trades are perhaps equally lucrative in the two countries,

and, with the exception of old landowners, most of the prosperous

people are either tradesmen or the descendants of tradesmen. An

antiquary in a certain neighbourhood told me that the local aristocracy

there was descended, almost exclusively, from tanners of the Middle

Ages. In the wine districts gold is chiefly consolidated, directly or

indirectly, from grape-juice, as in Lancashire it is a concentrated

form of cotton, and in Lyons of silk. Many fine new houses have been

built in France since the Empire, and almost invariably by tradesmen.

[Sidenote: The English Manufacturing District.]

[Sidenote: Manchester.]

[Sidenote: A Plutocratic Atmosphere.]

For rapid increase in wealth and population there is nothing in France

comparable to the manufacturing district within a radius of forty miles

from the Manchester Exchange. The population of that region is greater

than that within forty miles of Charing Cross; and notwithstanding

times of depression it is probable that the wealth in it far exceeds

that of any similar area in France. Manchester, and the congeries of

minor yet still populous towns that crowd round it, are an example of

rapidity in the increase of wealth and population together which is

rather American than European, and there, at least, an American would

find proofs of material success. I, who have lived in Lancashire,

have known many surprising instances, and it is not so much this or

that particular example that strikes one there as the prevalence of a

plutocratic atmosphere. Money is as much in the air of Lancashire as

the smell of flowers about Cannes and Nice, with this difference, that

whilst flowers are delightful to most noses, the odour of money is so

chiefly to those who possess it.

[Sidenote: Cost of Living in France and England.]

[Sidenote: Necessity of a large Income.]

The reader may perhaps imagine that small professional incomes must be

relatively larger in France than in England because living is cheaper

there, but these ideas are founded upon a former state of things.

Before the Second Empire, when there were few railways, living was

very cheap in some out-of-the-way parts of France. Railways equalised

prices, and since then various other causes have combined to raise

them. At present, living is quite as expensive in France as in England.

An Englishman, now settled in Kent after a residence in Burgundy,

tells me that he finds it more economical to live in his own country.

At the same time that prices have risen, the customs of society have

become both more exacting and more costly, so that married people feel

what has been called “the pinch of poverty” on means that would have

seemed an ample competence to their fathers. The one conclusion to

which accumulated experience seems now to be driving mankind is that

without a large income there can be no success, and that a man’s life

is a failure unless he can afford to live in society, to travel, and to

provide handsomely for all the members of his family.

Another estimate of success is held by some, and I think by more people

in France than in England. It is, and always has been, my own view, and

I have never seen any reason to change it.

[Sidenote: Real Success.]

[Sidenote: The true Success of a Priest.]

[Sidenote: Corot.]

[Sidenote: Cox.]

Real success is nothing more, and it is certainly nothing less, than

the happy exercise and development of each man’s faculties, whatever

they may be. Hence the error of supposing that one can be truly

successful by following in the steps of another. Each man has to win

his own happiness, or, in religious language, to work out his own

salvation. The world’s estimate of him is important only just so far

as it enables him to do this, or hinders him from doing it; beyond

that it is no more to him than the wind on a distant sea. Now, this

happy exercise of gifts may no doubt sometimes depend on money, but it

usually depends far more on suitableness of situation. I have mentioned

the poor incomes of French priests, the miserable incomes as they will

appear to the English reader. The very poverty of these men is, in the

best cases, a part of their success. If they want to leave all and

follow Christ, a bare subsistence is all that they require for that.

Their poverty is a part of the dignity and reality of their office.

Success, for a priest, has absolutely nothing to do with money, or even

with preferment; it consists in moral and religious influence, and in

nothing else. The famous _Curé d’Ars_ had immense success, and remained

a poor village priest to the end of his saintly life; what need had

he of wealth and dignities? In the army, as elsewhere, success is to

be fit for the rank one occupies, and to attain exactly the rank that

one is fit for; it is not to get up into a rank above one’s capacity.

In literature, success is merely encouragement to express our genuine

and best selves; it is not to be splendidly rewarded for producing

work adapted for the market. In painting, success is nothing more than

encouragement to paint the pictures that form themselves in the mind;

it is not successful commerce. Corot, the French landscape painter,

produced his own work and succeeded late, yet it was a pure success

for him, and he could wait for it patiently on fifty pounds a year.

Another instance of real though not apparent success is that of the

Englishman David Cox, whom some have commiserated because he did not

pocket the thousands that his drawings afterwards attained. One who

knew him intimately said there was no occasion for pity, that Cox had

enjoyed his life and work, and earned as much as was necessary for his

independence.

[Sidenote: Epicurean and Stoic Views of Success.]

There are two sides to the question whether a successful life must be

in every case a pleasant one. The Epicurean philosopher would say that

without happiness there can be no success; the Stoic would see the

possibility of a high kind of success without anything like happiness;

the Christian thinks life successful if it leads to heaven, though it

be wretched and miserable upon earth. Both Christian and Epicurean

agree in taking happiness as the measure of success, though one places

it on the earth and the other elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Strong Contrasts in France.]

All three are to be found in France in their complete development. The

dominant philosophy is the Epicurean, but Stoicism and Christianity

have their small and great places with their own theories of success.

It is the tendency of the French mind to follow every scheme of life

to the extremity of its logical consequences. France is the country of

the woman of the world, _la mondaine_, and of the Carmelite nun, the

one living in the utmost luxury, the other in the hardest austerity,

and a gleam of hope or a cloud of disappointment in the life of a young

lady may determine for her which of the two she is to be. France is the

country of conversation and of the silent trappists, the land of wine,

and dance, and song, yet at the same time a land where life is often

most dull, and dreary, and prosaic.

[Sidenote: French Tendency to make Life Agreeable.]

[Sidenote: Life as a Succession of little Pleasures.]

Still, if we consider the French nation broadly, after having given

its due place to asceticism, catholic or parsimonious, I think it

is evident that the dominant tendency is to make the present life

agreeable, even to study to make it so, and to take trouble in order

to enjoy a succession of little pleasures. In the care for the

agreeableness of the present life there is a very strong contrast

between the French and the Highlanders of Scotland, for example. The

Highlanders are unsuccessful in making life agreeable, partly on

account of their climate, which discourages effort, but also from their

temperament, which prefers discomfort to trouble and forethought. The

same contrast, in minor degrees, exists between the French and some

other inhabitants of the British Islands. The Frenchman’s object is to

make life _a succession of little pleasures_.

[Sidenote: The Judicious Epicurean.]

If he is able to do this, does that constitute success? It is success

of a kind, if it can be carried on indefinitely and without any

perceptible injury to health. The judicious Epicurean, who knows

the necessity of moderation, arrives at a kind of happiness, and he

includes mental pleasures, such as those of art and elegance, in his

list.

[Sidenote: The Natural Refreshers of Human Life.]

[Sidenote: Manchester and Lyons.]

[Sidenote: Paris.]

[Sidenote: Dismal London.]

Whether a life of little pleasures is a successful life or not, it

seems plain that, from the simply rational point of view, a life of

_felt_ privations is a failure. The ordinary gifts of nature are

sunlight, pure air, pure water, and some degree of natural beauty.

These are the natural refreshers of human life, and without them it is

impossible for it to be complete. The establishment of the industrial

system is not a true success, because it has deprived great populations

of these benefits. In this sense Manchester and Lyons are unsuccessful;

they have not solved the problem of healthy and pleasant existence.

Paris is apparently successful, because there is much external

brilliance, if not beauty, but when we come to examine Parisian life in

its details we find that it is wanting in space and freedom, that only

the rich have elbow-room, and that ordinary existence is fatiguing as

well as narrow. Londoners are rather more at ease, as their town covers

more territory; but it is a dismal place, and if its inhabitants never

left it they would not know the natural colour of the sky, or that of a

flowing river.

[Sidenote: Dulness of French Provincial Life.]

[Sidenote: Lancashire and Yorkshire.]

If we compare the two countries, the most successful quiet life, with

moderate expenditure and some enjoyment of unspoiled nature, combined

with the conveniences of advanced civilisation, is to be found, I

think, in the French provinces. There is, however, a drawback to that

success, otherwise unquestionably considerable, in the intellectual

dulness which afflicts French provincial life as with a kind of torpor.

There is nothing in the French provinces answering to the intelligence

of the English manufacturing districts, with their mechanics’

institutes, their lectures, concerts, and picture exhibitions. In

Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire people are scarcely more

cut off from the intelligent world than if they lived at a short

distance from a metropolis. That perfect life which is so difficult

to attain in modern times would require the union of natural beauty

(including unsullied skies and healthy vegetation) with intellectual

society and opportunities.

[Sidenote: Public and Private Success.]

[Sidenote: Mental Condition.]

[Sidenote: Bodily Condition.]

[Sidenote: Fame.]

The question may be simplified by remembering that although public

success may be measured by outward results, private success is always

strictly personal, and is to be measured, at any particular time, only

by the good mental and bodily condition of the man himself. All else is

merely external. A good mental condition includes just as much culture

as is necessary to the development of the faculties, but not any burden

of erudition heavy enough to diminish (as erudition so often does)

the promptitude or the elasticity of the mind. A good bodily condition

includes health and the training which gives a similar promptitude and

elasticity. Sufficient material well-being for the maintenance of body

and mind in these favourable conditions is essential to true success,

all beyond it is superfluous. Fame, or the opinion of others, is of no

use except as an encouragement or a stimulus, and it has nothing to do

with the reality of success.

[Sidenote: Industrial Civilisation.]

[Sidenote: Not a Complete Success.]

On applying these tests to our modern industrial civilisation we find

evidences of failure on all hands. The poor are not in conditions of

existence favourable to the body, and they have not leisure enough for

the activities of the mind. The rich leaders of industry have far more

wealth than would be necessary to perfect human life, but they have not

enough leisure for intellectual attainments; and they are prevented,

by the presence of the multitudes that industry has called into being,

from leading a life independent of great social cares. In short,

from the purely human and private point of view, without reference

to material results, industrialism has not hitherto proved itself a

success. It is successful in the produce of commodities, but not in the

government of life.

[Sidenote: Cheerfulness.]

[Sidenote: External Gaiety of the French.]

[Sidenote: French Gaiety on the Surface.]

[Sidenote: Wisdom of a light Philosophy.]

[Sidenote: English Gravity not Incompatible with Happiness.]

Mere cheerfulness of disposition is an element in every private

success, and it might be argued that if any one is cheerful, say in

the horrible English “Black Country,” he is living more successfully

than a despondent spirit surrounded by the light and colour of Italy.

The French consider themselves happier than the English because they

have more external gaiety, but I do not accept this gaiety as good

evidence of a happy life. Without looking upon it with any puritanical

disapproval, I think it is very frequently no more than a reaction

against the troubles that beset human existence everywhere, and of

which the French, like others, have their share. A gay philosophy may

seem wanting in seriousness, but a man must have a very superficial

acquaintance with French people if he has not discovered that their

gaiety often conceals many a private anxiety and care. One reason for

it is the feeling, which is certainly healthy, that we ought not to

trouble other people with private causes of sadness, but make an effort

to be cheerful as a social duty. Another and a deeper reason is that

a light philosophy seems wiser and more intelligent than a melancholy

one, because the miseries of life are not worth dwelling upon unless

they can be practically alleviated. The natural gravity of Englishmen

causes them to be misunderstood in France, where it is taken for

sadness. English gravity is not incompatible with happiness. The grave

mind is happy in its gravity as the light mind in its levity; and the

English are not so grave as the French believe them to be. Cheerfulness

(a word for which there is no equivalent in the French language) is an

English characteristic, though the English have not the champagne in

the blood that bubbles up in merriment and nonsense on the top of a

Frenchman’s brain. They had it long ago, in Shakespeare’s time.

CHAPTER II

NATIONAL SUCCESS AT HOME

[Sidenote: Private National Success.]

[Sidenote: Conditions of it.]

There is a private national success as well as a public one. Private

success, for a nation, is to have got the kind of religion and the kind

of government that are suitable to the national idiosyncrasy, to have

sufficient wealth and at the same time a light burden of taxation, to

be free from civil discord of any dangerous acuteness, to pursue the

arts and sciences fruitfully, and to live without dread of an enemy.

Which of the two, France or England, has hitherto reached the highest

point of success in these several ways?

[Sidenote: Religion.]

[Sidenote: Government.]

[Sidenote: Divisions in France.]

[Sidenote: Partial Success of the Republic.]

On the subject of religion and government enough has been said already

in this volume. I think it is clear that on these important points

England has been the more successful nation of the two. The Gallican

Church was a failure, it has had to give way to Ultramontanism; the

Anglican Church has been a great success, it has not only preserved,

it has intensified its national character. It is true that Anglicanism

is surrounded by Dissent; but Romanism is only suited to a part of

the French people, and lives in opposition to its guiding secular

principles. England has also enjoyed a more complete political success

than France. Her system of government has not, as yet, excluded or

alienated any class. Patricians and plebeians sit in the same Cabinet,

speak from the same platforms, appeal to the same public in the same

ways, and that whether they are Conservative or Radical. In England

a popular leader may be associated with great nobles and received by

the Sovereign; in France he would not be recognised by the smallest

aristocrat. No Frenchman with any pretensions to aristocracy would

be seen on the same platform with a French Gladstone. The French

“Conservatives” have not the faintest hope of forming a Cabinet so long

as the Republic lasts. To them the Republican power is like a foreign

occupation, and their only hope is to plot against it and enfeeble

it; for them it is not a national, but only a party government. All

that can be said of the internal success of France, from the political

point of view, is that since the overthrow of the Paris Commune she has

maintained both liberty and order. No previous French Government has

ever maintained _both_. The Republic has done this, but without being

able to effect any reconciliation between parties which live in a state

of latent civil war. The English system of government is accepted by

the whole nation; it is national; whereas the French system is accepted

by a part of the nation, and is national only in the sense of having

the majority on its side.

[Sidenote: Wealth.]

The subject of wealth has been treated in another chapter. It is not

wealth that is wanting. Both nations are enormously rich, France having

the advantage of a more even distribution, England the advantage, if it

is one, of possessing a greater number of prodigiously rich men.

[Sidenote: Taxation.]

[Sidenote: Difference between English and French Finances.]

With regard to taxation, both countries inherit vast debts accumulated

by previous wars. The Franco-German War cost France altogether about

as much as England had to pay for the great contest with Napoleon

the First. Taxation is heavier in France, and every year there is a

deficit. Even if the present peace were to continue indefinitely, it

is so costly that French finances must succumb beneath the strain of

it. The difference between the two nations is that England can go on

indefinitely as she is living now, in times of peace, whilst France

cannot. A great conflict for national existence might utterly ruin

both. Imagine an additional debt, for each, of a thousand millions

sterling, the possible cost of the next European war!

[Sidenote: Freedom from Civil Discord.]

[Sidenote: English Courtesy.]

[Sidenote: French Political Hatred.]

The next condition that I mentioned as essential to national

happiness was freedom from civil discord of any dangerous acuteness.

Now, although the French have shown considerable, even admirable

self-restraint since 1871, so that civil war has never broken out

amongst them in spite of much suppressed excitement, I think it is

evident that there has been, and that there is yet, much less danger

of civil war in England. Such an evil is still possible in France,

though with the present orderly French temper it is not probable; in

England, during this century at least, it seems absolutely out of the

question. Civil discord exists in France to the degree of dangerous

acuteness, in England only to the degree that makes it bitter and

unpleasant. French political dissension leads to personal rancour,

which is constantly breaking forth in insults and in duels; in England

the forms of courtesy between parties are still in some measure

preserved. If a distinguished English statesman dies, or is seriously

ill, his opponents express and feel regret for his loss, or sympathy

with his sufferings; but French political hatred follows a man even

to the grave. In a word, Frenchmen of opposite political tenets are

really enemies; Englishmen who sit opposite to each other in the House

are political adversaries only, and may meet pleasantly at the same

dinner-table.

The superior amenity of English public life is clear proof of its

more successful working. It shows that both parties have something in

common--their country--and that they do not lose sight of the national

welfare, though they differ as to the measures supposed to be most

conducive to it.

[Sidenote: The Arts and Sciences.]

[Sidenote: Applied Science.]

[Sidenote: Railways.]

[Sidenote: Balloons.]

[Sidenote: Military Inventions.]

[Sidenote: Agriculture.]

[Sidenote: Ship-building.]

[Sidenote: Pleasure-boats.]

My next point was that a successful nation would pursue the arts

and sciences fruitfully. Both France and England may look back with

satisfaction to all that has been done during the last fifty years.

There has been absolutely no sign in either country of decadence,

notwithstanding frequent self-depreciation. Of the scientific progress

that has been made I will say little, from simple incompetence to

deal with a subject so vast and so much beyond my grasp. I only know,

as an ignorant yet interested spectator, that hardly any enterprise

now seems to be too great for the intelligence of English and French

engineers, or for the skill of the workmen whom they direct. If they

do not build pyramids greater than those of Egypt and hippodromes more

substantial than the Coliseum, it is only because there is no demand

for them. Ours is the age of communication, and here England takes the

lead with her railways, France with her admirable system of common

roads and her complete inland navigation. France has made the Suez

Canal, has attacked Panama, and is looking forward to a ship canal

from Paris to the sea. Lancashire is making Manchester a seaport, and

Scotland is bridging over the Firth of Forth. A gigantic project for

a bridge from Dover to Calais is on the list of things that French

engineers consider possible. It is difficult to state fairly what has

been contributed by each country to the improvement of the railway

and the telegraph; it is plain, however, that the practical art of

railway travelling first originated in England. The first balloon

rose in French air, and a balloon was for the first time successfully

steered in France. The French are generally a little ahead of the

English in military inventions, as in the use of breech-loading cannon

and improved rifles and gun-powder, as well as other explosives, and

now in the strength and perfection of armour-plating. Almost all the

improvements in scientific agriculture are of English origin, and so

are the machines used in it which are now extensively sold in France.

Whilst the English are the greater maritime nation of the two and have

an incomparably larger carrying trade, improvements in ship-building

have usually originated either with the French or the Americans. In the

construction of pleasure-boats, the English are ahead of the French for

sea-going yachts (though inferior to the Americans), but the French

with their great rivers have studied and brought to perfection the

small centre-board sloop which tacks rapidly.

[Sidenote: Manufactures.]

[Sidenote: Printing.]

[Sidenote: French _Éditions de Bibliophile_.]

[Sidenote: Common French Editions.]

[Sidenote: French Book-buyers.]

[Sidenote: French Carelessness about cheap Work.]

[Sidenote: Careless Correcting.]

I am not a good judge of any kind of manufacture except those connected

with literature or the fine arts, so I will pass by the cottons of

Manchester and the silks of Lyons with the simple observation that

Lancashire has produced the spinning jenny and Lyons the Jacquard

loom. With regard to the printing of newspapers and books, which I

understand better, the French are admirable in the exquisite, but

their common work is not so good as the English. French _éditions

de bibliophile_, such as those of Lemerre, Jouaust, Tross, and the

Société de Saint Augustin, not to mention many publications by Quantin

and others, are equal to the best work of English printers in the

mechanical qualities of type-cutting and clearness of impression,

whilst they are, I think, a little superior to it in taste. All the

French _éditions de bibliophile_ that I possess or have examined are

scrupulously correct in their freedom from typographic errors, whilst

with common French editions it is just the contrary. There is a very

well known Parisian publishing house that issues an immense quantity

of volumes so rich in typographic faults that no English publisher

would own them; yet ordinary French readers, who are very inattentive

and also very patient, either do not notice or do not object to them.

The fact is that there are two distinct classes of book-buyers in

France--_les amateurs_ and _le vulgaire_. The first are hard to please,

and will have nothing to do with ugly or faulty editions, whilst they

will give any price for exquisitely perfect work; the second neither

know nor care anything about the matter, and in producing for them

it does not signify how bad the work may be, provided only that the

price does not exceed three francs fifty centimes per volume. The

carelessness of the French about cheap work used to be very conspicuous

in their newspapers, but these have improved during the last decade.

I well remember the time when it was almost impossible to find a

single English name or quotation, however brief, correctly printed in

a French newspaper. English critics always attributed these faults

to the writers of the articles, but they were more frequently due to

absolute carelessness in correcting.[87] The press-work, too, used

to be disgraceful; it is now fairly good in the daily papers and

excellent in the illustrated weeklies. France is not a good country

for presentable editions at moderate prices. The two most popular

poets--Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset--are not to be had in anything

answering to the readable current editions of Tennyson. There are the

big octavos and the little exquisite Elzevirs for amateurs, and the

vulgar editions for the public.

[Sidenote: The Exquisite and the Vulgar.]

[Sidenote: Qualities of Painting in France.]

[Sidenote: Qualities of English Art.]

[Sidenote: Crudity of Colour.]

[Sidenote: Home Success of Artists.]

[Sidenote: Landseer and Rosa Bonheur.]

[Sidenote: Meissonier.]

[Sidenote: Turner and Claude.]

This contrast between the exquisite and the vulgar is usually very

strong in France. We find it in the most visible form in French

painting, which leads us to the conclusion that art does not refine a

nation, but only expresses, and expresses equally and indifferently,

whatever natural refinement and whatever inborn coarseness and

vulgarity may already be existing in the race. If all the refined work

in a French _Salon_ could be put into an exhibition by itself it would

be delightful; but the _Salons_ as they exist at present are quite as

much an annoyance as an enjoyment. A student with plenty of physical

energy may by sheer hard labour arrive at a kind of noisy performance

which attracts attention to his name, but the delicate and tender

spirit of true art is absent from such work. Painting having been

understood in France very much as a matter of apprenticeship, like

the handicraft trades, all the technical part of it is taught by the

straightest and surest methods to any lad who will be at the pains to

go steadily through them, and the consequence is that a great number

of men in France possess the handicraft without either intellectual

culture or poetic invention, and it is they who have vulgarised the

art. The English have been, and are still, inferior in manual force;

they cannot attack a large canvas with the same certainty of covering

it in a workmanlike manner, and some of their artists, like gifted

amateurs, have not technical ability equal to the realisation of their

ideas. Still there is less of coarseness in the English school, and

more amenity and tenderness; its art is more gentle and nearer to

poetry and music. There was a time when the French had such a horror

of crude colouring that, to avoid it, they took refuge in dull grays

and browns, but that time is now so completely past that the most

glaring colours are admitted into the _Salon_. English painting,

on the contrary, has become more sober than in the early days of

uncompromising naturalism. An art critic who understood the English

and French minds, and who was not himself turned aside from justice by

the perversions of vulgar French or vulgar English patriotism, would

probably say that, on the whole, the artists of both nations had been

equally successful with regard to the interior of their own countries.

As for foreign success, that is quite another thing, and I reserve

it for the following chapter. At present I mean simply that English

artists delight and instruct English people as much as French artists

delight and instruct the French, and that the modern renaissance of the

fine arts has been as effectual, nationally, in one country as in the

other. On the ground of pure merit (always without reference to foreign

estimation) an impartial critic would probably say that there were

more draughtsmen in France and more colourists in England. Technical

comparisons are difficult, because the art of painting contains, in

reality, several different arts according to the ways in which it is

practised, and they cannot be compared with each other. The popular

comparison of Landseer with Rosa Bonheur is foolish, because they have

nothing in common. There is no English artist who might be profitably

compared with Meissonier; he is comparable only with the Dutch. Several

clever Frenchmen have taken up water-colour of late, and some of them

have done interesting work; but not one of them has either the aims

or the qualities of Turner. A comparison can be usefully established

only between artists who paint the same class of subjects in the same

technical manner. The comparison of Turner, as an oil-painter, with

Claude is one that no intelligent critic would ever have made if Turner

had not himself provoked it. Turner proved only that he could imitate

Claude with a part of himself, as a very clever English Latinist might

studiously imitate Virgil. The complete Turner is so much outside of

Claude that the comparison stops short for want of material in the

Frenchman.

[Sidenote: The Revival of Etching.]

[Sidenote: Line Engraving.]

The revival of etching, which has been the most remarkable phenomenon

in the artistic history of our own time, has been common to England and

France, but more vigorously pursued by Frenchmen. This is due to the

great superabundance of young unemployed painters in France who are

happy to turn to anything that does not compel them to abandon art.

It is the peculiarity of etching that men are better trained for it

by the education of a painter than by the hard manual discipline of

the engraver. Line engraving has now died out in England. In France it

still maintains a feeble and precarious existence by the encouragement

of the State (through the _Chalcographie du Louvre_) and a society of

lovers of art who are trying to keep it alive.

[Sidenote: Photographic Processes.]

All the photographic processes for the reproduction of works of art

have been carried to perfection sooner in France than in England, and

France always keeps the lead. Photography, itself, is due to efforts

made by Niepce for the production of engraved plates.

[Sidenote: Literature in the two Countries.]

[Sidenote: Carlyle.]

[Sidenote: John Mill.]

[Sidenote: Ruskin.]

[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold.]

[Sidenote: Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace.]

Literature is probably more influential in England than in France,

because the English read so much more. A great proportion of the

reading done in both countries is, however, only rest, or an escape

from surrounding reality, so that it does little for the true success

of authors, which is the dissemination of ideas. I do not know the

name of any English author who has exercised so much direct power

as either Rousseau or Voltaire. That of Carlyle is thought to have

been considerable, because his personal energy was of the imperative

order; but the English world does not follow his teaching. He was

hostile to the fine arts, and they are more appreciated than ever;

he condemned fiction, and novels were never more diligently read; he

preferred despotism to popular government, and we see the rise of the

English democracy; he was without scientific ideas, and science is

penetrating all the departments of thought and action. The influence

of John Mill is said to be great amongst thinking men in the English

lower classes; but it is purely rational, and can awaken no enthusiasm

beyond the disinterested love of truth. Mr. Ruskin’s influence on art

has been powerful in praise, but feeble in condemnation. He did much

for the fame of Turner, but little or nothing against Constable and

Claude; and notwithstanding his open hostility to etching, that art

is now better appreciated than ever. Contemporary artists go on their

own paths without deference to critical advice. A more interesting

and important subject is Mr. Ruskin’s influence on working men. He

appeals more to the feelings than Spencer or Mill, and is welcome to

many wanderers in search of a moral authority and master. They like

the strength of faith in the master himself, which is ready to carry

theory into practice, even when the theory is ruinous. Matthew Arnold,

though a poet, was more rational, cooler, less fitted for popular

leadership. His influence was directly felt by cultivated readers only;

but it will have consequences not always traceable to the source. I

think he erred in taking certain things to be specially English which

are only English forms of something to be found elsewhere. The best

criticism of this mistake in Arnold was made by Herbert Spencer with

reference to nonconformity.[88] And Arnold’s celebrated division of the

English into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, though it throws

a light upon the nation, has the defect of making it seem an English

peculiarity to be so divided, whereas you find the same characteristics

in the three great and very distinct French classes. The French

aristocracy is more ignorant than the English, the French _bourgeoisie_

more narrow in its concentration of thought upon money matters, and the

populace less easily led and influenced by the possessors of wealth and

culture.

[Sidenote: J. Morley.]

Of Englishmen now living (1888), Mr. John Morley has the best equipment

for a literary influence upon his countrymen; because he is at the

same time a born writer and a man versed in affairs. Unfortunately a

political career like his must have the effect of limiting a writer’s

influence to a single political party. John Morley might be useful

to all Englishmen at the present time because he unites complete

intellectual freedom with a vigorous moral sense. In this he is the

Englishman of the future, the Englishman who will be intellectually

emancipated, yet who will preserve the moral sense of his forefathers

and hate, let us hope, as they did, “that horrid burden and impediment

on the soul,” as Morley describes it, “which the Churches call Sin, and

which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the

moral nature of man.”

[Sidenote: Poetry.]

[Sidenote: Office of Poetry in the Modern World.]

Of the literary influences which consist chiefly in giving æsthetic

pleasure, that of poetry maintains itself more than was expected in the

middle of the century, and it is better understood now than it was then

that poetry must remain itself and not get entangled in the actual.

A poet may, like Victor Hugo and William Morris, be in sympathy with

advanced radicals, but in his verse he is likely to go back to the

past as in the _Earthly Paradise_ and the _Légende des Siècles_, or

to pure mythology with Lewis Morris in the _Epic of Hades_, or to dim

traditions as Tennyson to the Court of King Arthur, or even project

himself into the future state like Sully Prudhomme in _Le Bonheur_. The

office of poetry in the modern world is still its ancient office of

deliverance. It delivers us from the actual by the imagination, and the

older we get the less completely satisfactory does the actual become

for us, and the more we need poetry to help us out of it. Those who do

not read verses may receive their poetry through other channels. They

may receive it in great purity and strength through religion, which

is always successful in exact proportion to the sum of poetry that it

contains, and unsuccessful in proportion to its rationalism. Or, if

not consciously religious, men may get their poetry through music,

architecture, and painting, of which it always was and always will be

the mysterious vital principle, the immortal soul.

[Sidenote: Victor Hugo.]

[Sidenote: Lamartine.]

[Sidenote: Musset.]

[Sidenote: Young Philosophers.]

[Sidenote: Renan.]

[Sidenote: Journalists.]

The immense popularity of Victor Hugo was not so much due to the love

of poetry in Frenchmen as to their gratitude for his fidelity to the

popular cause, and admiration for his steady resistance to Napoleon

III. Had he remained a royalist to the last, his fame would have

been of a quieter kind. The French have a way of taking up a man and

making political capital out of him, increasing his reputation as

much as possible for that purpose. Hugo’s name and his portraits were

familiar to multitudes who knew nothing of his poetry. This deprives

the observer of what might have been otherwise a good opportunity for

appreciating the degree of interest that the French take in poetry on

its own account, but even without political popularity there remained

Hugo’s celebrity as a novelist. The case is a very complex one. Great

vigour in old age is deeply respected and admired in France, and Hugo

was a very fine old man. I am told that the generation now passing

away took a much keener interest in literature than the present. As

for poor Lamartine, his fame has been for a while completely eclipsed,

but there are now some signs of a revival. Alfred de Musset is read

by all French people of a literary turn, especially by young men, who

delight in him as young Englishmen delighted in Byron before Tennyson

became the fashion. The minor French poets of the present day are

numerous, and the tendency amongst them is to a great perfection of

technical finish, which is praiseworthy as a proof of labour and

self-discipline. But it is the novelists and the playwrights who have

the substantial success. They earn ten times more money than that

hard-working man of genius, Balzac, would even have dreamed of as a

possibility in his then wretched profession. There is a young school

of philosophers, very sane and very sage, who are trying earnestly to

win some nearer approach to the hidden truths of life and the universe,

but they only reach the small intellectual class. Renan has literary

qualities of the highest order, but like the majority of first-rate

men of letters he is disgusted with the sight of practical politics,

and more inclined to make the combatants a subject for sarcasm than

to help them out of the sloughs they fall into, either on one side or

the other. Practical influence with the pen appears now to belong, in

France, almost exclusively, to journalists, and they are constantly

under the temptation to get up sensational excitements, to make a fuss,

and convert every little crisis into a great one. As English journalism

is anonymous, the writers cannot aspire to make themselves personally

conspicuous, and are somewhat quieter. That which, in England, now

answers in some degree to French journalism is review-writing with

signed articles.

[Sidenote: The Dread of War in England.]

As for the dread of war, which is the most important of all drawbacks

to national happiness, the inferiority of the English in land armies

subjects them to occasional panics about the possibility of a French

invasion, and has led them, as all know, to forbid the execution of

the Channel Tunnel, though they would not have been more exposed by

its means than the French to an English invasion. Since then, it has

been conclusively proved that the use of the steam-engine in warships

has made the offensive stronger than the defensive by permitting the

choice of a landing-place, and therefore much of the former security

of an insular kingdom has been taken away. The feeling that invasion

was possible formerly afflicted only the timid, but now the bravest are

fully aware that it is so, and sleep, like good watch-dogs, with an eye

open.

[Sidenote: The Dread of War in France.]

The position of France is still more precarious. On both sides of

a perfectly artificial frontier two armies have been watching each

other for seventeen years as they watch for a night in war-time. The

slightest imprudence of one or the other Government, even the zeal of

some subordinate official, may at any moment precipitate that conflict

which both alike look forward to, and which both nations equally dread.

It is impossible, under such circumstances, that life in France can

be happy. The war cloud is perpetually visible on the eastern horizon.

Sometimes it swells and covers half the sky and darkens the land with

gloom, then it lessens and seems to be more distant, _but it never

wholly disappears_.

CHAPTER III

NATIONAL SUCCESS ABROAD

[Sidenote: Vanity of National Success.]

[Sidenote: The French as Judges of English Verse.]

[Sidenote: Blank Verse.]

[Sidenote: The Heroic Couplet.]

[Sidenote: The Spenserian Stanza.]

[Sidenote: Jurien de la Gravière.]

This kind of success is of importance only so far as it affects the

wealth or the independence of a nation. Otherwise, success abroad

is merely a subject of national vanity of a very empty kind. It is

not the same with nations as with individuals. Personal celebrity

is really a legitimate object of ambition for a wise man, because

it makes life pleasanter to him in various very practical ways, and

especially by bringing him into contact with people interested in his

own pursuits. There is no national reward of that kind. It matters

nothing to the English people whether their authors and artists have a

continental celebrity or not. We shall understand the subject better

by considering, at first, the case of England separately, and her

celebrity in France, for different achievements of genius and industry.

Certainly, if English genius is visible in anything it is in poetry,

yet no Englishman who knew the French would attach the slightest weight

to their opinion on the English poets. They often know the language

well enough to read prose of a clear and simple kind; I quite believe

that some Frenchmen of cultivated taste may appreciate Addison’s prose,

or Goldsmith’s prose, and a few, a very few, may perhaps enjoy some

verses of Byron or Pope; but English blank verse is usually quite

beyond French appreciation as to its technical qualities, and so indeed

are the more delicate and subtle cadences of English rhymed metres such

as those which occur, for example, in the “Lotos-Eaters.” I should

think it highly improbable that there are ten Frenchmen with ear enough

to seize upon the very different qualities that artists so different

as Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can give to a metre, blank verse,

which _appears_ to be identical in the three cases, or who would know

the difference between the heroic couplet as employed by Pope and the

same measure in the hands of William Morris. There is the Spenserian

stanza, too, as its inventor used it, and as it has been used by

Thomson and Byron. Try to explain these differences, which in reality

are enormous, to a Frenchman. Try to explain to him anything about the

musical qualities of the English language. He will laugh at you for

your “patriotism”; it being a received opinion in France that English

never is and never can be musical. There is Vice-Admiral Jurien de la

Gravière, for example, probably the most cultivated officer in the

French navy, an Academician, a scholar, a charming and very instructive

writer, altogether a man who would do honour to any nation. Of course

he knows English, and he certainly has no narrow prejudice against

Englishmen, yet in his touching reminiscence of Lieutenant Gore, in the

last _Figaro Illustré_, I find the following passage. He is telling

about an evening on board a French ship of war near Rhodes, spent in

Gore’s society after a separation.

[Sidenote: Anecdote of Lieutenant Gore.]

“La soirée passa comme un songe. Un seul orage faillit la troubler. _Je

soutenais que la langue anglaise était rude, complètement dépourvue

d’harmonie._ ‘Elle est rude pour vous, qui ne savez pas la prononcer,’

ripostait l’insulaire avec véhémence.”

Here we have first the impression of the uneducated French ear, then

the truth about the matter from the Englishman. Another Frenchman

(whose name is not worth mentioning in connection with that of M.

Jurien de la Gravière) says that the English language is scarcely

intelligible when spoken, even for the English themselves, and that is

why they are so taciturn. Another calls English “_cet idiome sourd_.”

How are these Frenchmen to appreciate the “mighty-mouthed inventor of

harmonies”?--how are their ears to hear the “God-gifted organ-voice of

England”?

[Sidenote: French Opinion on different English Writers.]

[Sidenote: The Philosophers.]

What really happens is this. English authors are known in France by

translations, and as neither the music of verse nor the style of prose

can be reproduced in a translation, the author is judged by a criterion

outside of his literary workmanship. His reputation is constructed over

again, without reference to his mastery of language, on the grounds of

thought or invention only. Herbert Spencer has a great reputation in

France as a thinker, Dickens as an inventor. Thackeray is very little

appreciated, because the French can never know how superior he was

in style to Dickens. Of English writers on art, Sir Joshua Reynolds

is appreciated in France because his doctrine contained nothing

particularly English, and his style was simple and clear; Ruskin

has no French readers because his views on art are English and his

style complex, elaborate, ornate. The name of Byron is known to every

educated Frenchman, that of Tennyson is known to students of English

literature only. All the chief English and Scotch philosophers are

familiar to French students of philosophy, and in fact accepted by them

as their great teachers and guides, but they are utterly unknown to the

French public.

[Sidenote: Russian Novels in France.]

[Sidenote: More Nature.]

[Sidenote: Demand and Supply.]

Independently of literary merit, foreign literatures are sometimes

called upon to supply an element of human interest that is wanting

in the home productions. The French are aware that Russian novels

are not so well constructed as their own, yet there is a poignancy,

a profundity of feeling, and a strength of primitive barbaric nature

in the Russian novel that are wanting in the French, and this has

given the foreign novelist a great success even through translations.

The desire for _more nature_ always brings on a reaction against any

conventionalism, and the foreigner who brings more nature has his

assured success. A modern English conventionalism, quite unknown to

our forefathers, forbids the complete portraiture of men and women in

fiction. This has created a desire to see another side of life, and the

French novelist supplies the want. The English want immoral literature

and buy French novels; the French want moral literature and buy English

novels--in translations. It would be better, perhaps, to have for both

countries a kind of fiction that should be simply truthful, rather than

the English novel that makes life better than it is and the French that

makes it worse.

[Sidenote: Painting not Cosmopolitan.]

[Sidenote: French Resistance to English Art.]

[Sidenote: French Estimates of English Painters.]

[Sidenote: M. Chesneau.]

It has been erroneously affirmed that painting is cosmopolitan because

the fame of certain artists is universal. That of others is purely

national. There may be national elements in painting repulsive to other

national elements in the mind of a foreigner. If the reader could

have before him all the French criticisms of English art that I have

read, or all the French allusions to it, nothing would strike him

so much in them as the attitude of stubborn resistance in the French

mind to English artistic influences. Such notices bristle all over

with antagonism. It is not simply that the French usually consider the

English bad artists, they resent the attempt of England to enter the

domain of art as if it were an unwarrantable intrusion, or a ridiculous

attempt to do something for which Englishmen were never qualified by

nature. As _Punch_ looks upon a Frenchman trying to play cricket or

venturing on horseback after English foxhounds, even so the French

critic looks upon the misguided Englishman who attempts to paint a

picture or carve a statue. In a volume of French art criticism on my

table I find two or three allusions to English painters, to Reynolds,

“who imitated everybody,” and to Turner, “the copyist of Claude.” The

latest French critic of London says that in the National Gallery,

with the exception of some portraits by Gainsborough and some dogs by

Landseer, there are no English pictures to detain a visitor. No French

Government has ever yet dared to purchase an English picture for one of

the French galleries. M. Chesneau says that a French collector would

never think of having one in his house otherwise than as a curiosity.

He would not have it “comme une satisfaction esthétique, encore moins

comme un motif d’élévation offert à son âme.”

[Sidenote: _L’Art._]

The one great and honourable exception to this narrowness has been

the illustrated art journal _l’Art_, which has certainly done all

in its power to overcome the narrowness of French prejudice against

English painting, but _l’Art_ is not a purely French enterprise. One

of its editors is a Belgian who speaks English and visits England very

frequently.

[Sidenote: Opinions of French Artists.]

The most cultivated French artists are not insensible to the qualities

of English art. Those who know Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilkie, Turner,

Constable, see that there are some interesting qualities in their

works. Flaxman, too, has considerable reputation in France through his

designs in illustration of Homer. English engravings after Landseer

have been bought in France rather extensively by lovers of animals, and

_la vignette anglaise_, such as the vignettes after Turner, has long

been esteemed as rather a favourable example of the pretty in art as

distinguished from what is serious and elevated.

[Sidenote: Constable in France.]

Constable alone, of all English artists, has had a practical effect

in France. For readers unacquainted with the fine arts I may say that

two of Constable’s pictures, exhibited in Paris during his lifetime,

produced such a revolution in French ways of looking at nature that

they founded the modern French school of landscape. They were, in fact,

much more influential in France than in the painter’s native land.

[Sidenote: Celebrity of French and English Painters.]

[Sidenote: American Opinion.]

With this unique exception, due to French weariness of conventionalism

and thirst for freshness at that particular time, there has never been

any English force in art comparable, beyond the frontier, to that of

the French school which radiates all over the world. The fame of an

English painter is insular, that of a Frenchman, of the same relative

rank, is planetary. Even the United States of America, bound as they

are to England by close ties of language and literature, follow, almost

exclusively, French direction in painting. The Americans appear not

only to have accepted all French painters who have any celebrity at

home, but they have adopted, almost without question, the antagonism of

French critics towards everything that is English in the fine arts.

This is the more remarkable that the inhabitants of the United States

certainly look to English opinion in other matters much more than to

French. They do not greatly respect or esteem the French, and they

_do_ certainly respect and esteem the English, in spite of occasional

differences.

[Sidenote: Influence of French Art in England.]

The most signal triumph of French art has not been its influence on

the continent of Europe but in England itself, where it has modified

the tendencies of the existing school both in choice of subject and

in technical execution. Through French influence English painting has

been brought nearer to continental painting. At the Paris Universal

Exhibition of 1878 there was not that shock of surprise on passing from

foreign sections to the British that seized the spectator in 1855. It

is safe to predict that in 1889 the sense of strangeness will have

still further diminished.

[Sidenote: Absence of Narrowness in England.]

The English are not narrow in opposition to French artistic influences.

Rosa Bonheur’s reputation in England was made quite as easily as if she

had been an Englishwoman. The French Gallery in London has extended the

fame of many a foreign artist. Meissonier, Gérôme, Edouard Frère, are

appreciated in London as in Paris. So it has been with the best French

etchers, Méryon, Rajon, Waltner.

[Sidenote: C. R. Leslie, R.A., on Continental Art.]

[Sidenote: Haydon.]

[Sidenote: Etty on French Painters.]

Still, there exists or has existed amongst some Englishmen a prejudice

against French art. The older Leslie was so patriotic as to believe

that before the peace “the British school had possessed the wine

and the other schools the water only of art, and that the peace, by

mingling these, had strengthened the art of the continent exactly in

the degree in which it had diluted art with us.” The French got the

wine of art from England and mixed it with their water. Leslie thought

too that it would be time enough for the French to talk of “high art”

when they produced pictures that would bear even a distant comparison

with the works of the great old masters, whereas those of a dozen

English painters, _including Fuseli’s and the best of Haydon’s_, could

“hang with credit amongst those of the greatest painters that ever

lived.” Haydon himself said, “The present French artists have immense

knowledge but their taste is bad, they know not how to avail themselves

of what they know, how to marshal, order, and direct it.” Etty said of

the French, “It is lamentable, the narrow nationality of their school;

Titian, Correggio, Paolo, Rubens, throw down their pearls in vain.

The husks of their own school are preferred.” In the five volumes of

_Modern Painters_, modern French painters are treated as if they did

not exist.

[Sidenote: Advantage to Artists of belonging to weak States.]

Italian and Dutch masters had the immense advantage of belonging to

nations that excited no political jealousy. If Titian and Correggio

belonged to the Italy of to-day, the Italy that has a fleet and an

army, and a place in the councils of Europe, they would be judged

in the same hostile spirit as the English. In like manner it was an

advantage for Italian musical composers, as to their fame in France,

that they belonged to feeble principalities. No English musical

composer has a chance of recognition in France. When Germany was feeble

her music was judged on its own merits; since she became strong it has

been found impossible to represent the works of her most recent musical

genius on the French stage; and when an attempt was made to do so there

was almost an _émeute_, whilst his talents and even his morals became

objects of violent attacks in the French press.

[Sidenote: French Patriotic Bias.]

The powerful effects of the French patriotic bias have been noticed

already by Herbert Spencer. He observed, as examples, that in the

picture by Ingres of the “Crowning of Homer” French poets are

conspicuous in the foreground, while the figure of Shakespeare in

one corner is half in and half out of the picture, and the name of

Newton is conspicuous by its absence from those of great men on the

string-course of the _Palais de l’Industrie_, though many unfamiliar

French names are engraved upon it.

[Sidenote: Prejudice diminishes with the Dignity of the Work.]

The intensity of these prejudices always diminishes with the dignity

of the work to be judged. As the French admit the superior quality

of English varnishes for carriages (their coach-builders will use no

other), so they appreciate English cutlery and broadcloth, they even

go so far as to copy English fashions in masculine dress. Most of the

agricultural machines employed in France are of British make. The

horses that run on French racecourses are of English blood, and English

grooms attend to the best French stables. The British, on their side,

know the merits of French gloves, silks, and champagne, and the French

cook is as much a recognised personage in England as the English groom

in France.

[Sidenote: Effect of the Houses of Parliament on Foreigners.]

[Sidenote: The House of Lords.]

[Sidenote: The House of Commons.]

It is a mistake in the people of any nation to suppose that by any kind

of magnificence and splendour, however artistic it may be, they can

exalt their country in the minds of foreigners. The foreigner perceives

the attempt to subjugate him, and resents it. There is that gorgeous

building, the British Houses of Parliament. I do not wish to laugh at

it myself, being one of the few who believe that it has artistic merit,

that it is even a kind of architectural poem intended to glorify

the greatness of England. The foreigner, however, does not want the

greatness of England to be glorified, and no sooner is he aware of

the attempt than he immediately begins to sneer at the building and

to belittle it in every way as much as he can. In reality, the House

of Lords is a chamber of noble dimensions, all the materials used in

it are of the best quality, and the workmanship is thoroughly and

unsparingly good. Although the ceiling is decorated, the wainscot is

simply of carved oak. Well, one French writer compares the House of

Lords to a shop where coloured glasses are sold for a shilling, another

says it is as small as the public room of the _mairie_ in a French

village, a third likens it to a _café concert_, a fourth receives an

impression of _ferblanterie_, that is, of tinner’s work. These French

critics are angry at the costliness and excellence of the sound English

work, and do all they can to cheapen it. In the House of Commons the

Speaker’s chair is compared to an organ in a Dutch beer-house, and the

Speaker himself, when adorned with his wig, to an actor in a comic

opera. If the French will not venerate the Speaker’s wig, what is there

on earth that they will venerate?

[Sidenote: A Victorious Army.]

[Sidenote: Moral Eminence of the Conqueror.]

[Sidenote: Napoleon III and his beaten Army.]

There is but one unquestioned and unquestionable superiority in great

things--that of a victorious army. And that brings other superiorities

with it. Nothing could be more encouraging to the spirit of conquest

than the exalted moral eminence which the Germans attained in Europe

after Sedan, and the moral degradation of the French when they had

been compelled to pay two hundred millions sterling. God had rewarded

German virtue with victory and had chastised the wicked Frenchmen for

their sins. And not only does victory exhibit moral worth, but it

glorifies the intelligence of the victorious nation, making all its

statesmen wise. Their mistakes are all forgotten; the evidence of their

sagacity remains. It is now almost unimaginable that Napoleon III was

held to be the profoundest statesman in Europe until he had been beaten

in the field. After Sedan there was an immediate discovery of his

weakness, dreaminess, ineptitude. All the faults of the beaten army,

in all ranks, became suddenly apparent in the same way. During the

Crimean war, and the campaign that ended in Solferino, the absence of

stiffness in the French soldiers, and the comparatively easy relations

between them and their officers, were considered signs of the practical

qualities of the French. After Sedan the same characteristics were

treated as evidence of a want of discipline.

[Sidenote: Military Displays in Time of Peace.]

It is an error to suppose that displays even of military power in

time of peace will produce a subjugating effect on the imagination of

foreigners. The only utility of them is to make the taxpayers at home

believe that they have something for their money. The foreigner carps

and sneers. The English made a great naval display at the time of the

Queen’s jubilee, and there have been English naval manœuvres since. The

effect of the review outside of England was to provoke a depreciating

analysis of the shipping, by which it was shown that most of the

vessels were either badly armed or of an obsolete construction. As to

the manœuvres, they demonstrated, to the satisfaction of foreigners,

how easily the English coast might be ravaged by a hostile fleet.

[Sidenote: Difference between England and France.]

There is this difference in the present situation of England and

France, that whilst the defeat of England has hitherto, at any rate

since the Norman Conquest, been nothing more than a subject of prophecy

welcome to the jealousy of other nations, that of France has actually

taken place. England is always _to be_ humiliated, France really _has

been_ humiliated. The difference is considerable--it is that which

exists between a vase that has been broken and another that might be

broken if it were not properly taken care of. And the French have no

longer the consolation which cheered them a little after Waterloo, of

having yielded to Europe in arms. They have been beaten fairly in a

duel with one nation, or at least with one people that became a nation

before the war was over, and they have submitted, not willingly,

but in fact, to all the consequences of the war. The situation will

be equalised whenever a foreign Power shall surround London with an

impassable ring of troops and dictate terms of peace in Windsor Castle,

holding the English Sovereign as a prisoner in some fortress or palace

on the continent.

[Sidenote: Former French Confidence.]

[Sidenote: Present English Anxiety.]

[Sidenote: The Common and the Intelligent English.]

The English are in a very peculiar state of mind with regard to the

possibility of a great national disaster. They have not anything

like the blind confidence, the foolish security in ignorance, that

the French had before 1870. I well remember how the French in those

days looked forward to European wars. They felt as safe as if God

Himself had guaranteed the inviolability of their frontier. A war

meant sending troops out of the country with affectionate kisses and

hand-shakings, and receiving them with the honours due to a victorious

army on their return. The present English temper resembles that kind

of anxiety which troubles people in private life when their money

matters are not satisfactory or they have a painless but incurable

disease. The anxiety comes on at odd times, one cannot say when or why,

and occupies the mind for a while. Then, as no real remedy presents

itself, the anxiety is thrust aside and forgotten as much as possible,

till it becomes importunate in the same accidental way again. The

common English people alternate between times of false security, or

forgetfulness, and panics, the intelligent English know always that the

situation is precarious, and do what they can to remedy it, regretting

that they can do so little.

[Sidenote: The only unanswerable Superiority.]

[Sidenote: What a victorious Enemy would do.]

It is useless to argue about success in literature with people too

uneducated to read English. It is useless to affirm the greatness

of English art, for that can be systematically denied. There is but

one kind of greatness that need give England a thought or a care in

reference to foreign countries, and that is her power of offence

and defence by sea and land. The only unanswerable superiority is

superiority in arms. Commercial and colonial greatness is but the

filling of the sponge; a victorious enemy would squeeze it. If ever

the day should unhappily come when an enemy clutches England by the

throat as Germany held France in 1871, he will make her sign away the

Colonies, and India too, and Malta, and Gibraltar, as France made

“proud Austria” sign away Lombardy and Venice, and as France herself

signed away Alsatia and Lorraine. Commercial prosperity, at such a

time, is as vain as poetry and painting, or that insular music that

French ears will not listen to. It is useless as a showman’s profits

when his skull is cracking between the lion’s jaws.

PART IX

VARIETY

CHAPTER I

VARIETY IN BRITAIN

[Sidenote: Europe one Town for Orientals.]

European travellers in the more benighted parts of Asia, such, for

example, as the interior of Arabia, have sometimes had to contend with

a peculiar difficulty in making their nationality clear. The ignorant

Orientals class all Europeans together as one nation. Mr. Palgrave even

found, in his Eastern travels, that the people imagine all Europeans to

be citizens of one town. “Europe they know to be Christian, but they

conceive it to be one town, neither more nor less, within whose mural

circuit its seven kings--for that is the precise number, count them how

you please--are shut up in a species of royal cage to deliberate on

mutual peace or war, alliance or treaty, though always by permission

and under the orders of the Sultan of Constantinople.” These ideas, it

may be supposed, could exist only in the most unenlightened regions of

central Arabia, where the European traveller hardly ever penetrates.

Not so. Mr. Palgrave tells us that this admirable geographical and

political lesson was inculcated on him “not once, but twenty times or

more, at Homs, Bagdad, Mosool, and even Damascus,” In central Arabia

ignorance about foreigners went a little further, as might be expected

from the ignorance of that part of the world. There he was often

asked, with the utmost seriousness, “whether any Christians or other

infidels yet existed in the world.”

[Sidenote: English and French one People.]

This is an extreme case, but we find in the writings of other

travellers the statement of a natural difficulty in distinguishing

English from French, for example. English and French are men of the

same nation; they have the same character, the same habits, the same

faults, and when one of the two peoples has committed some injustice,

the other is held responsible for it.

[Sidenote: No Variety across the Channel.]

In England and France a sharper distinction is established. In both

these countries it is clearly understood that the English are people

of one nationality and the French of another. When, however, we pass

from the nations considered only as two great masses, and try to find

what each knows of the other in detail, we discover the existence of

a quiet conviction that there is no variety in the human species on

the opposite side of the Channel. Each nation is well aware that there

is now, and always has been in past times, an infinite variety of

character within its own borders, but it fails to imagine that a like

variety can exist in a foreign country. Not only is this inability

common amongst those who have travelled little and read little; it

may also be found in writers of eminence, who frequently fall into

the error of describing the inhabitants of a foreign country as if

they were all alike, especially when the description is intended to be

unfavourable.

[Sidenote: Causes of Internal Difference.]

I propose to point out a few of the chief causes of internal difference

which act both in England and France. The first and most obvious is

that neither of the two nations is homogeneous. They are formed by the

joining together of old nations, they have not grown as single nations

from the first.

[Sidenote: _La Grande Bretagne._]

[Sidenote: The Scotch Highlanders.]

[Sidenote: Their Inertia.]

[Sidenote: Lack of Enterprise.]

[Sidenote: Highlanders naturally Gentlemen.]

The power which acts politically in Europe, and which is called

_l’Angleterre_ or _la Grande Bretagne_ in diplomatic correspondence,

is composed of four distinct nationalities. If we take one of these,

the most northerly, we find that it is inhabited by two distinct races,

the Highlanders and Lowlanders. They are spoken of equally as Scotch,

yet the difference is not less marked, in reality, than if they were

separate nations. The Highlanders still retain, or did retain when I

knew them, many of the characteristics of a social state from which

the Lowlanders have long since emerged. They were noble rather than

industrial in their tastes and instincts, disposed for field sports

rather than for the improvement of their condition by labour. Dr.

Macculloch’s description of their inertia at the beginning of the

century was still applicable. The people did not move, of themselves,

towards a better condition; they had not the spirit of improvement.

They were surrounded, it is true, by natural circumstances of some

difficulty, especially those caused by the severity of their climate,

but they were far from making the most of such opportunities as they

possessed. For example, in gardening, they did not grow, and they

could not be induced to grow, the vegetables which the climate allows,

even although the want of them brought on scurvy. Their habitations

were wanting in every comfort, being almost in the lowest stage of

cottage-building, irregular walls of rude stone, with a small hole

(glazed, however) for a window, and a low thatch, the fire very

commonly on the floor, and the peat reek escaping through an opening

in the roof. There was no spirit of enterprise to improve the ground

about the habitations, or to make communication easier when the

public road (itself due to English military energy) did not happen

to be close at hand. In a word, there was nothing of that fruitful

discontent which leads the advancing races to incessant improvements.

Without the neighbourhood of the Lowland Scotch and the visits of the

English, the Highlanders would certainly have remained in a very early

stage of civilisation. That early stage has its qualities and merits.

The Highlanders have good manners. Poor or rich, they are naturally

gentlemen, and they show a fine endurance of hardship which, from the

stoic and heroic side, is evidently superior to the love of luxury that

develops itself so wonderfully in the South.

[Sidenote: Absence of the Fine Arts in the Highlands.]

[Sidenote: Poverty of Highland Literature.]

The Highlanders have, of themselves, no fine arts. Their degree of

civilisation has developed no ecclesiastical architecture; they got

no further than the building of a few rude small castles. They have

not any graphic arts, and in those industrial products which are

akin to art they have never got beyond the design of a brooch or the

arrangement of the crossing stripes in a plaid. Their vernacular

literature consists of little more than a few poems, said to be

touching and pathetic in their simplicity. The one literary success in

connection with the Highlands has been Macpherson’s _Ossian_.

[Sidenote: The Lowlanders.]

[Sidenote: Repugnance to Polish.]

[Sidenote: Sabbatarianism.]

Now, on all these points, let us compare the Lowlanders. We see at

once that the difference of race is accompanied by a difference of

aptitudes and of traditions. Good manners are not inbred in them,

though they are acquired in the superior classes as a part of culture.

In the lower classes there is a sluggish indisposition to be polite,

a sort of repugnance to polish of manner as if it were an unmanly

dandyism, a feeling that answers to a plain man’s dislike to jewellery

and fine clothes. Even in religion the difference is discernible. It

is true that the Highlanders are not Roman Catholics like the Irish,

but they have little of the Protestant Pharisaism which is common in

the Lowlands. If a map of Scotland were shaded in proportion to the

malignity of Sabbatarianism, the darkest places would not be far north

of the Clyde, nor west of the Kyles of Bute.

[Sidenote: Industrial Triumphs of the Lowlanders.]

[Sidenote: Their Intellectual Distinction.]

[Sidenote: Fine Arts at Edinburgh.]

[Sidenote: French Ideas about Scotland.]

The Lowlanders are intensely industrious and of a very constructive

genius. They have made the Clyde navigable up to Glasgow, they are

bridging over the Forth and the Tay, they build great manufacturing

towns, and are famous for all kinds of shipping. On the side of

intellect and art we all know what they have done. In proportion to

their small numbers, they are the most distinguished little people

since the days of the ancient Athenians, and the most educated of the

modern races. All the industrial arts are at home in Glasgow, all the

fine arts in Edinburgh, and as for literature, it is everywhere. The

contrast with Highland indolence, apathy, and neglect, could scarcely

be stronger if London itself were transported to the banks of the

Clyde. Yet a Frenchman lumps together Highlanders and Lowlanders

and calls them “_les Écossais_,” and thinks that they all wear the

tartan and the kilt. It is true that he knows little else about them

except that their beautiful Queen was beheaded, and that “_en Écosse

l’hospitalité se donne_.”

There is a greater difference, in the essentials of civilisation,

between the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland than there is between

the Lowlands and the county of Lancaster.

[Sidenote: Lancashire.]

[Sidenote: Population of Lancashire.]

Lancashire has so strong a character of its own that it may almost be

considered a nation. The accident by which it is a Royal Duchy, as

Wales is a Principality, may be an additional excuse for considering

Lancashire, for the present, as a little nation within its own

frontiers. It is fairly comparable in wealth and population, not

only to the Lowlands but to the entire Kingdom of Scotland. The

population of Lancashire in 1881 was to that of Scotland as thirty-four

to thirty-seven, and to that of Switzerland as thirty-four to

twenty-eight, in round numbers.

[Sidenote: Lancastrian Characteristics.]

[Sidenote: Energy.]

[Sidenote: Encouragement of Literature and Art.]

[Sidenote: Protestantism in Lancashire.]

All the characteristics that mark southern Scotchmen reappear in

Lancashire, whilst those characteristics that belong especially to

the Highlands are absent from Lancashire. The Lancastrians, like the

Lowland Scotch, are a most energetic race, that would never rest

contented with a low degree of material civilisation,--a race with

a remarkable genius for industry and trade, having a great love of

comfort, and yet at the same time a remarkable willingness to sacrifice

personal ease for the attainment of greater wealth. I suppose there

are more rich men in Lancashire with resolution enough to get up at

five o’clock on a winter’s morning than in all the rest of England.

Again, although Lancashire has not produced authors and artists of such

fame as the greatest that have illustrated Scotland, it has given warm

encouragement to literature and the fine arts, especially to modern

painting. If you pass to the comparison of religion and manners, you

find manners independent and often rude, as amongst the Lowlanders,

and religion inclining to the severer forms of Protestantism, with a

marked Sabbatarian tendency. I visited London once with a friend from

Lancashire, who was truly representative of the county, which he had

hardly ever quitted, and I well remember that he was quite as much put

out by the London Sunday as a Scottish Lowlander could have been.

[Sidenote: Old Strathclyde.]

[Sidenote: The Roman Example.]

[Sidenote: European Influences.]

Some light may be thrown on these similarities by the recollection

that the western Lowlands of Scotland and Lancashire are parts of

old Strathclyde, so that the inhabitants may have an ethnological

affinity, like the descendants of the true ancient Scots, who equally

inhabited the West Highlands and the north of Ireland. Again, the Roman

occupation of Britain included the north of England and the Lowlands

of Scotland up to the firths of Clyde and Forth, so that the men of

Lancashire and the Lowlands had the benefit of the same Roman example,

whilst the Highlanders were left to develop a social state of their

own. In later times Lancashire and the south of Scotland were equally

open to the influences of European civilisation, whilst the Highlands

remained completely outside of it, like the interior of Arabia to-day.

[Sidenote: The Nation of London.]

[Sidenote: A Provincial in London.]

[Sidenote: London a State within the State.]

[Sidenote: London a Democracy.]

[Sidenote: Its Standard of Civilisation.]

If Lancashire has many of the characteristics of an independent nation,

is there no other part of England which in recent times has developed

characteristics of its own? Yes, there is the great nation of London,

more populous than Scotland, Holland, or Switzerland, and destined to

surpass Belgium in population before the end of the century. In London

the English character has certainly undergone a great and astonishing

modification. London is geographically in England, but intellectually

one can only say that it is in the world. A provincial coming to London

has not quitted the island, yet otherwise he hardly knows where he is.

At first he does not belong to the place at all; after some experience

of it he finds out whether he belongs to London naturally or not--that

is to say, whether there is the degree of adaptability in him which

may enable him to breathe the open intellectual atmosphere of the

place. Physically, London may be as big as Loch Lomond; socially and

intellectually, it is larger than Russia, and may well form, not only

a county by itself, but a state within the State. I have said that

in London the English character has undergone a modification. It has

become more open, more tolerant, better able to understand variety

of opinion, and much more ready to appreciate talent and welcome

thought of all kinds. The nation of London is essentially modern and

democratic, not caring who your grandmother may have been if only you

yourself are to its taste; but at the same time it does not desire

to be a coarse and uneducated democracy; it values culture and taste

far too highly to sacrifice them to a low equality. In a word, London

clings to its own standard of civilisation. If you come up to that

standard, if you have refinement and just money enough for housekeeping

of unpretending elegance, you may be an infidel and a radical, yet

London will not disown you, London will not cast you out into the cold.

[Sidenote: London not Insular.]

[Sidenote: Number of Travellers in London.]

Although London happens by chance to be situated on an island it

is not insular. The nation of London is of all nations the most

cosmopolitan, the most alive to what is passing everywhere upon the

earth. It seems there as if one were not living so much the life of

a nation as the world’s life. You speak of some outlandish place at

a London dinner-table, and are never surprised if somebody present

quietly gives a description of it from personal knowledge. There are

more people in London who have travelled and are ready to start on

travels than in any other place on the whole earth. It is there that

all the ocean telegraphs converge and steamers are arriving daily from

all parts of the world. Switzerland is London’s playground, Cannes and

Nice are its winter garden, and so comprehensive do our ideas become in

London that those places seem actually nearer to us there than they do

in the heart of France.

[Sidenote: Effects of the Railway System.]

The railway system is having the effect of making all the English

aristocracy Londoners. I am old enough to remember the time when there

were still provincial people of rank in the north who spoke sound

northern English, not dialect, but English with vowels and consonants,

including the letter _r_. Their successors talk the half-articulate

London language. It is said that some young Highland chieftains of the

present day speak southern English only too beautifully.

[Sidenote: National Differences.]

[Sidenote: Irish.]

[Sidenote: Scotch.]

[Sidenote: Welsh.]

Still, the national differences remain deep seated in the people and

show no sign of losing their ancient strength. The Irish may become

friendly fellow-subjects, but they will not be Anglicised. Neither

will the Scotch be Anglicised, nor the Welsh. The present tendency

is to accentuate nationality, not in hostility to England, but from

the sentiment of a special patriotism. This is most significant, for

hostility to England might pass away, but special patriotism is not

likely to pass away.

[Sidenote: Variety of Individual Character.]

[Sidenote: Shakespeare.]

[Sidenote: Scott.]

In addition to these causes of variety there must ever remain the

infinite differences of individual character. Shakespeare lived

only in the English midlands, then scantily populated, and in the

little London of his time. He had not travelled abroad, nor learned

Italian,[89] nor talked like Milton with the _literati_ of the

Continent; he had not, like Spenser, lived in the north of England

and in Ireland; yet the diversities of character in his plays are as

numerous as the _dramatis personæ_. Scott lived at the northern end of

the island, in or near a minor capital city; he could speak no foreign

tongue,[90] he knew England and London only by brief occasional visits,

and hardly anything of the Continent, yet his novels abound in a

variety like that of Shakespeare. These writers got their knowledge of

human nature from the variety visible around them. Imagine, then, what

must be the presumptuous _outrecuidance_ of the Frenchman who thinks

that all the inhabitants of Great Britain have one character, and that

he--the Frenchman--has got to the bottom of it, and can describe it,

and tell his countrymen all about it, though he knows neither the land,

nor the language, nor the people!

Besides the denial of any æsthetic quality to English art, we find

in French critics a peculiar disposition to describe it as being all

alike. Eminent English artists (Reynolds, Gainsborough, De Wint,

Müller, Cox, and many others) have preferred breadth to detail,

yet French critics delight in representing the English painter as

studying nature with an opera-glass, and representing all details with

a wearisome and unnatural minuteness. Patriotic hostility, in art

criticism as in the criticism of character, closes the eyes to variety.

There used to be a ridiculous monument of the Duke of Wellington on

Constitution Hill, and now there is a very noble one by Alfred Stevens

in St. Paul’s. The same terms of utter contempt were applied by a

French critic to the work of the man of genius that Frenchmen formerly

applied to the monstrosity. He could not endure any kind of monument to

Wellington.

CHAPTER II

VARIETY IN FRANCE

The _Rue de Rivoli_, the _Champs Elysées_, and the _Boulevard des

Italiens_ are familiar to the travelling English, but they know little

of provincial France, and they reciprocate, in a great degree, the

French indifference about provincial England. Both nations prefer

travelling in Switzerland and Italy to visiting each other. This

encourages the notion of uniformity which would be greatly modified by

a more detailed acquaintance with the provinces.

[Sidenote: Physical Geography.]

[Sidenote: Effects on Population.]

The variety in the physical geography of France, and in the climate,

would be enough already to lead one to expect a corresponding variety

in human characteristics. We find in the British Islands that the

mountaineers are unlike the inhabitants of the plains, that the

people of the north, whose climate is severe, are in some respects

unlike those of the south, whose climate is milder, that the maritime

population differs from the inland population and the manufacturing

from the agricultural. The Englishman is familiar with these contrasts

in his own country, yet instead of expecting them in France he supposes

French people to be all alike.

[Sidenote: The Size of France.]

[Sidenote: The French Highlands.]

[Sidenote: French Coasts.]

[Sidenote: Atlantic.]

[Sidenote: Mediterranean.]

[Sidenote: Varieties of French Climate.]

The mere size of France might lead one to expect diversity. It is

about three times the size of Great Britain, so that the distances in

France are greater and the parts of the population more separated.

It is not the custom in England to think of France as a mountainous

country, because English impressions of it are chiefly derived from

railway journeys across the French Lowlands. I may therefore remind

the reader that the French Highlands cover an area equal to the whole

of Great Britain, that they include fifty peaks above eleven thousand

feet, and a much greater number higher than Ben Nevis, a dozen of them

in the department of the Ardèche alone. On the other hand, the French

plains are so vast that they include the area of three Irelands. Here

is evidently one great cause of variety in the conditions of human

life, but France has also nearly two thousand miles of sea-coast, with

two very distinct maritime populations, one brought up on the shore

of the Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, subject to the same influences

as those on the English and Irish coasts, the other by the tideless

Mediterranean, under the same influences as the sailors and fishermen

of Genoa. Now, with regard to climates, French meteorologists tell us

that there are seven distinct climates in France. The most northerly

differs little from that of the south of England, whilst the most

southerly is Spanish towards the west and, to the east, Italian.

You may write a list of French towns, Paris, Tours, Lorient, Lyons,

Marseilles, Bordeaux, each of which has a climate perfectly distinct

from every one of the others. I believe it is not an exaggeration to

say that all these towns differ from each other as much as Amiens does

from London, for example, and in some cases the difference is much

greater. The difference between Marseilles and Lorient is greater than

that between London and Inverness.

[Sidenote: Brittany and Provence.]

It would be difficult to imagine two modern nations more different from

each other, both in country and people, than are Brittany and Provence.

Brittany has a rainy, temperate climate with sea-breezes; Provence, a

fierce dry heat, with almost perpetual sunshine and very strong and

lasting continental winds. Brittany is the land of the apple-tree,

Provence the land of the olive. The shores of Brittany are washed

by the tides of the Atlantic, those of Provence by the waves of the

tideless Mediterranean. It is like comparing Wales with Italy and the

Welsh with the Italians. The Bretons have their ancient language still,

the Provençaux retain their beautiful soft modulated Latin, one of

the most exquisitely perfect instruments for poetry in the world. The

Bretons preserve their costumes; their ways of living, their temper,

their ideas, are all different from those of Provence.

[Sidenote: Diversity in Neighbourhood.]

[Sidenote: The Morvan.]

[Sidenote: Les Morvandeaux.]

The great distance between north-western and south-eastern France

may lead us to expect wide differences. The variety that exists in

great nations is still more striking when we observe the trenchant

differences that often divide populations which, geographically, are

near neighbours. The Morvan is a district about fifty miles from north

to south by thirty from east to west. It is not marked on the maps of

France, but the reader will understand its situation when I tell him

that it embraces portions of four departments: the Yonne to the north,

the Côte d’Or to the east, the Nièvre to the west, and Saône-et-Loire

to the south. In shape it resembles the Isle of Man, but it includes

about five times as much territory. Autun is just outside of it to the

south-east, and Avallon just inside it to the north. This district, or

region, is marked by a peculiar physical character. It is a land of

hills (not mountains), woods, and running streams, and the inhabitants,

until their country was opened by good roads, were scarcely less a

people apart than the Bretons. They have a language of their own,

which, though akin to French, is not French, and the people are now

for the most part able to speak French or Morvandeau at will (just as

in the Highlands of Scotland they speak English or Gaelic), and their

French is remarkably pure.

[Sidenote: The Morvan Race.]

[Sidenote: Material Civilisation.]

[Sidenote: Cookery in Burgundy.]

[Sidenote: Gardening.]

Now, if you compare the people of the Morvan with those of the plain

of Burgundy and the Saône, which is quite near, you find the most

striking differences. First there is a difference of race and of

physical constitution, the Morvan race being the smaller of the two,

the women more frequently pretty and well made on their small scale,

with a predominance of dark hair and eyes, and a rich rather than a

fair complexion. Besides this, there is a great disparity in material

civilisation. The art of cookery has been accounted one of the most

effectual tests of human advancement; when the people are clever cooks

they are usually, it is said, clever in other arts besides, and they

set a value on civilised life generally, and will be at great pains to

maintain it. Such an art as cookery may have nothing to do with the

intellectual side of life, and the Muse may exist on a little oatmeal,

though she generally does her work better on a more varied and more

interesting diet; but cookery is of great economic importance, because

a cooking people will appreciate all the alimentary gifts of Nature

and master the arts that procure them, whilst the non-cooking races

are negligent and careless providers. The French are reputed to be a

cooking race, but the Morvan people scarcely understand cookery better

than the Scottish Highlanders. Servants from the Morvan are often sharp

and active, honest, willing, laborious, cheerful, contented, amiable,

yet with all these fine qualities invariably unable to cook a dinner.

In the Burgundy wine district and the plain of the Saône a talent for

cookery is very common in both sexes, and there are plain unpretending

wives of small inn-keepers or wine-growers who would be perfectly

capable of serving a royal feast, and not in the least disconcerted

by the undertaking. All the Saône bargemen are said to be clever

cooks, and they live extremely well. In the Morvan the peasants live

with severe self-denial, chiefly on potatoes and thin soup flavoured

with a morsel of bacon. Their drink is often a poor kind of perry or

cider; they indulge in wine on market-days and sometimes sparingly at

home, but then it is of a meagre quality. Near the Saône the people

are a gardening as well as a cooking race; the Morvan people are not

gardeners; a rich man may have a garden as a matter of luxury, but the

peasants do not cultivate vegetables or fruit-trees. In some parts of

the Morvan the spring comes six weeks later than at Chalon on the Saône.

[Sidenote: The Fine Arts.]

Lastly, in the Morvan there are no fine arts. There may be occasional

artistic genius, like that of Gautherin, the sculptor, who began life

as a poor Morvandeau shepherd boy, but such gifts find no natural

development in the district. The Burgundy wine country, on the other

hand, has always been favourable to art of all kinds, and to learning.

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and all kinds of scholarship

have flourished at Dijon in an association (perhaps not altogether

accidental) with good cookery and the richest of all French vintages.

[Sidenote: Departments.]

[Sidenote: Provinces.]

[Sidenote: Districts.]

[Sidenote: Local Climates.]

I have dwelt somewhat disproportionately on this contrast, because

I know the country well. It is offered to the reader merely as one

example out of many. I am told by those who know other parts of France

familiarly that contrasts equivalent to this are to be found in various

other regions and districts of that extensive country. There are three

ways of dividing France, into departments, provinces, and districts.

The departments, although taking their names from physical geography,

as a help to the memory for locality, are in reality nothing more than

artificial divisions for administrative convenience. The provinces

(Burgundy, Normandy, Guienne, etc.) are convenient in another way,

because of their connection with history, and also because it is

believed still that the population of each province has a character of

its own. Districts, though without any definite political or historical

character, and often with rather vaguely defined limits, are useful

in fixing local characteristics in the mind. Only local antiquaries

could enlighten us about their obscure history; but one thing is

always noticeable about them which is that the characteristics of each

district are of a special nature. For example, the Morvan is a land

of hills, woods, and streams; the Sologne is a woody plain, perfectly

flat and interspersed with sandy pools and marshes; Les Dombes are an

insalubrious region, full of fish-ponds; and Rouergue (in Guienne) is a

land of hills and streams, like the Morvan, but with greater altitudes

and wilder scenery. The population of each of these districts takes a

certain character from the nature of its surroundings and from the

local climate, which in one place may be dry, in another rainy, in

one very equable and mild, in another extreme in heat and cold. Even

within a distance of fifteen or twenty miles you discover, from the

meteorological registers kept by the road surveyors, that twice as much

rain falls in one village as in another. You have the wet and woody

regions, the arid, hot, rocky regions, the lands of pasture and meadow,

the vine lands, the country of extinct volcanoes, the peat morasses,

the unprofitable sand countries by the sea where only the maritime pine

can resist the invasion of sterility.

[Sidenote: The Spirit of Towns.]

[Sidenote: An Aristocratic Centre.]

[Sidenote: A Commercial Town.]

Then there is the spirit of towns; each town has a certain

individuality, each has a spirit of its own derived from its historic

past, and from its occupations in the present. One town may be a

clerical and aristocratic little centre, where a republican (even

under the Republic) has not the faintest chance of getting into

society; a place where all public functionaries under the Government

are socially boycotted; a place where all modern ideas are quietly

ignored or despised, where reputations have no currency, and nothing

is valued but conformity to a narrow local standard of the _comme il

faut_. Thirty miles away, there is, perhaps, a busy commercial town,

where all ideas are centred upon a pecuniary success, and people are

esteemed exactly in proportion to their capital without regard to other

considerations,--a town where all the fortunes are recent, and all have

been acquired in trade.

[Sidenote: Extremes in the same Place.]

[Sidenote: Nîmes.]

[Sidenote: Lyons.]

[Sidenote: Michelet’s Description.]

Another variety, very little understood out of France, is that of

extremes meeting in the same town. This is sometimes especially

striking in the southern towns, and it may be of very long standing,

like the conflict between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism at Nîmes,

a city that cannot be correctly described as either Protestant or

Catholic; and yet there is more of each religion in it than there would

be if the rival faith were extirpated. But the best example in France

of a city combining the most opposite characteristics is Lyons. It

is at the same time most republican and most clerical. “There is one

town above all,” wrote Michelet, “where the antagonism of two ages,

of the spirit of old times and the new spirit, strikes even the eyes

in all its grandeur--that town is Lyons.... I leaned on the parapet

on the steep of Fourvières, and said to myself, as I looked upon the

opposite hill, gloomy, black below, under the cypresses of the Jardin

des Plantes, colossal above in its piles of work-people’s houses,

ten or fifteen storeys high,--I said, _These are not two hills; they

are two religions_. The two towns of Lyons, that of the convents and

that of the workshops, are the goals of pilgrimage for the poor. Some

of them come to the Lyons of miracles and seek charity; these come

to Fourvières.[91] But thou, good workman, wilt come to the hill of

labour, the serious Croix Rousse. The part in the banquet which thou

desirest is bread won by thine own hands.” I was reminded of these

words of Michelet when, at Lyons, I said to a mechanic who was working

on Sunday, “This task prevents you from going to mass.” The man paused

an instant in his labour, looked up at me seriously, and answered, “It

is not my custom to go to mass. He who works prays.” He then resumed

his prayer with hearty strokes of a hammer.

[Sidenote: The Nation of Paris.]

As in England, London is a kind of nation in itself, so in France we

have the nation of Paris. The word is so little of an exaggeration

that Paris has often, on the most momentous occasions, acted quite

independently of the country, and did actually proclaim its right to

autonomy under the Commune, whilst the constant effort of the municipal

council ever since has been to erect itself into a parliament at the

Hôtel de Ville, and have its own way in spite of the assemblies at the

Palais Bourbon or the Luxembourg.

[Sidenote: Character of Paris Local.]

The Parisian nation has not the same characteristics as the nation of

Londoners. The distinguishing character of London is to be, not local,

but world-wide; the character of Paris is to be as local as ancient

Athens, and as contemptuous of all that lies outside. It is commonly

believed that Paris is France, but how can it be France when it is so

utterly unlike the provinces? This error comes from the foreigners’

habit of staying in Paris only, so that Paris is very really and truly

all France to them, being the only France they know. Yet the character

of the French capital, so far from being representative, is all its own.

[Sidenote: Paris Artistic.]

France is not, generally speaking, an artistic country. In the

provinces few care for art or know anything about it, whereas Paris

is the most artistic city in Europe; and that not simply as the place

where pictures and statues are produced in the greatest numbers, and

architects find most employment, but as the place where art sentiment

is most generally developed, so that it runs over into a thousand minor

channels, till the life of the capital is saturated with it.

[Sidenote: French Provincial Life.]

[Sidenote: Intellectual Paris.]

[Sidenote: Level of Studies in Paris.]

France is not, generally speaking, an intellectual country. The

people are quick in small things, and they are very intelligent up

to a certain point, but life in the French provinces is far less

intellectual than in England or America. Parisians say that provincial

French life is absolutely and hopelessly stupid. They may think

that sincerely, for such an opinion would only, in their case, be a

natural effect of contrast, but it is an exaggeration. Provincial life

is not exactly stupid, French people can hardly be that under any

circumstances, but it is mentally very small and narrow, owing to the

extreme isolation of the few superior intelligences, and the prodigious

ignorance by which they are surrounded. Unless tied down to provincial

life by property, professions, or kindred, an intellectual Frenchman

gravitates naturally to the capital, which in this manner drains the

provinces of the best men. It is an exaggeration of French vanity to

believe that Paris is the light of the world, but it is really the

light of France. The provincials believe themselves to be more moral

and more serious than the Parisians, but they admit that provincial

life is dull without making any effort to enliven it, and the clever

provincial speaks of Paris as that paradise from which he is an exile.

Notwithstanding their apparent levity, I am told by all who are

competent to form an opinion, that the Parisians study better than the

provincials. The ordinary level attained in all studies is much higher

in Paris than in the provincial cities. The Parisians are the most

laborious and best disciplined art students in Europe. In the French

University the best professors are reserved for Paris, or promoted to

the capital in course of time, and they all say that the boys work

better there than in the provinces.

[Sidenote: Reputation in Paris and the Provinces.]

The difference between the Parisian and the provincial mind is shown

in nothing more conspicuously than in its different estimates of

human superiority. In Paris the question is what you are, in the

provinces what your family is, or what you possess. Reputation in

literature, art, or science, is relatively more valuable in Paris

than it is even in London, though it is very valuable there; in the

French provinces it counts for nothing, or next to nothing. Many

Parisian reputations never reach the provinces. The provincial habit

of respecting the idlest people most, is in itself antagonistic to

fame, which is usually the consequence of hard work. Then there is the

indifference, or semi-contempt, towards the pursuits that lead to fame,

towards literature, science, and the fine arts. The fame of political

celebrities penetrates everywhere like an unpleasant noise--unpleasant,

at least, to all but their own following.

[Sidenote: Parisian Manners.]

The French temper is not generally very sociable, yet in Paris there

is great openness of manner, and a charming readiness to enter into

that kind of intercourse which is lightly agreeable without involving

much beyond the passing hour. For the free play of the mind, without

any pretension to make it more than play, there is no place in the

world like Paris. It is a great art or a great gift to make social

intercourse bright and truly a relaxation equally removed from pedantry

on one side and the dulness of indifference on the other. There is an

ease, an apparent simplicity, and a clearness of expression in Parisian

talkers that we rarely meet with in provincials, yet these same

provincials acquire the Parisian polish after a few years’ _frottement_

in the capital.

[Sidenote: The Moral Contrast.]

I have said elsewhere that there is a contrast in the moral code

between Paris and the provinces. Paris now resembles, at least in

some degree, the Italy of Byron’s day, where illicit _liaisons_ were

tolerated if there was a certain deference to appearances; provincial

France, as a rule, resembles provincial England in the severity of

public opinion.

[Sidenote: Aristocracy in Paris and the Provinces.]

Aristocracy is of immense weight in the French provinces, even when

accompanied by very little wealth; in Paris it counts for nothing

unless accompanied by great wealth. Like London, Paris is democratic,

and takes each man for what he _is_ (famous, rich, talented, witty),

without inquiring what his ancestors were.

[Sidenote: Contrasts of Individual Character.]

[Sidenote: The Englishman’s Frenchman.]

[Sidenote: French Notions of English Character.]

Besides these local differences there remain in France as in England

all the contrasts and varieties of individual character. Some of these

varieties are known in England through the historians and novelists,

but many more are totally unknown there. It is useless for me to

refer to them in an English book without elaborate descriptions for

which there is no space in this volume. I need only say that as the

Frenchman’s Englishman is not an exact representative of all Englishmen

taken individually, so it is with that curious ideal type that may

be called the Englishman’s Frenchman. In my own limited experience I

have known a certain number of French people of whom English writers

would say, if I described them accurately and elaborately in a work of

fiction, that they had not a single French characteristic, and the less

the English critics knew of France the more positive they would be.

So, if you were to describe a talkative and genial Englishman, such as

G. H. Lewes, for example, French readers who had never been in England

would tell you that he was not English, that they knew better, that

the real Englishman is stiff, grave, proud, awkward, and reserved, so

that he can never have the flexibility of mind that Lewes possessed,

nor be, like him, an amiable and delightful _causeur_.

[Sidenote: Causes that diminish Variety.]

Notwithstanding the great variety that still exists in France,

certain modern tendencies are steadily diminishing it. The army is

silently making the peasantry more national, less local. Railways

take people from one province to another, and from all provinces to

Paris. Public education is the same for all France. The University is

not a local institution, like Oxford or Cambridge, but ubiquitous in

the nation, like the Anglican Church in England. Cheap postage and

telegrams make the nation itself seem smaller, and Parisian newspapers

penetrate everywhere. External habits are now almost the same in all

French towns; the hotel system is the same everywhere, the cafés are

all alike. Besides this, the French nature is not very tolerant of

individuality in character, but tends to reduce it to one dead level

of uniformity. “_Être comme tout le monde_” has long been the rule of

French civilisation, and there is nothing more contrary to its spirit

than to be “singular” or “original.”

EPILOGUE

What is called the “national character” of the French and English has

never been fixed, and it is now perceptibly changing.

[Sidenote: Changes in English National Character.]

The English were at one time not in the least Puritanical. They

afterwards became moderately Puritanical in the upper classes and

intensely so in the middle classes. They are now slowly but steadily

passing out of Puritanism.

The English were at one time more European than insular. After that

they became intensely insular, truly a peculiar people. Now, again,

they are slowly becoming, chiefly through the influence of London, less

insular and more European.

[Sidenote: Artistic and Scientific Ideas.]

The most powerful agents of change in recent times have been scientific

and artistic ideas. These ideas are continuing their work unceasingly,

and are even entering into the education of the young. To judge

of their importance as new powers we have only to remember that

artistic and scientific ideas formerly lay almost entirely outside of

aristocratic and middle-class thinking, and were confined to persons

specially devoted to artistic or scientific pursuits.

[Sidenote: Extent of Scientific Influence.]

[Sidenote: Its Result.]

The change may easily be under-estimated. The love of art and science

may be called a taste for pictures or a fancy for shells and minerals,

and so made to appear no better than an amusement. In reality,

however, the change is most momentous. Science has taught a new way

of applying the mind _to everything_. It has affirmed the right and

duty of investigation and verification, it has set up a new kind of

intellectual morality which has substituted the duty of inquiry for

the duty of belief. The immediate result has been, in England, a

sudden and amazing diminution of intolerance, a wonderful and wholly

unexpected increase of mental freedom. The people of England have

now become tolerant to a degree which could have been hoped for by

no one who knew the formerly oppressive and aggressive character of

religious majorities in that country. The boast of the national poet,

that England was a country where men freely said their say, is now

losing its apparently ironical aspect and may be true for the coming

generation. The bigotry that still remains is only an inheritance of

the past, it does not really belong to the present, still less to the

more enlightened future.

[Sidenote: The Influence of Art.]

[Sidenote: Art and Puritanism.]

The influence of art is less visible than that of science, and seems

inferior in this, that art is associated with ideas of pleasure and

relaxation in the public mind, though it is more associated with ideas

of study and hard work in the minds of artists. However this may be,

the influence of art is important in England as one of the forces

which are weakening the spirit of Puritanism. Art and Puritanism are

antagonistic forces. The true Puritanical spirit always instinctively

feels and knows this; for example, it shuts up the National Gallery on

Sundays, and would shut up the Louvre if it could.

[Sidenote: The Study of Nature.]

Another important influence of the fine arts is in directing the

national mind more to the love and study of nature. Art and nature are

not the same, yet art gives a new delight in nature. I am not aware

that this goes much beyond a refreshment of the faculties, yet, in

an age when men are jaded by over-work and by the peculiar fatigue

of life in large towns, a refreshment of this kind may be, and is,

more important than in simpler times. One of the modern modifications

of English character is that it seeks for natural beauty with a

new desire. The modern love of nature is connected with a certain

independence of conventionalism, and this is important, because

conventionalism includes so much.

[Sidenote: Changes in the French Character.]

[Sidenote: Modern Industrial Enterprise.]

As the English character is changing in these and other ways, so the

French character is changing by its passage from the military to

the industrial epoch. It is unfortunate that the enterprise of the

Panama Canal seems doomed to failure, because it afforded exactly the

outlet that was desirable for French industrial ambition. It was by

treating it as a patriotic enterprise and playing upon the patriotic

chord that M. de Lesseps attained a delusive appearance of success.

The exhibition of 1889, the Eiffel Tower, and the proposed bridge

over the Channel, are also proofs of French industrial enterprise

on a scale intended to attract attention. The ambition to excel is

still in French imaginations, but it is diverted in great part from

military to peaceful pursuits. There is no reason why French democracy,

which is really averse to war, should not take a legitimate pride in

undertakings that require as much science and energy, and almost as

much treasure, as the greatest military operations.

[Sidenote: Common Sense in Education.]

[Sidenote: Desire for Physical Improvement.]

Another change in the French estimate of things is the increasing

tendency to apply common sense to education in spite of old habits

and traditions, to discard what cannot be mastered, and to learn more

thoroughly what is practically possible and worth learning. The French

are also inclined to attach more value to physical exercises. The

English have lately become aware of this in consequence of M. Paschal

Grousset’s very laudable efforts as a journalist in favour of more

active amusements in the _lycées_; but the movement began several years

earlier, and that writer would not have succeeded as he did without

a public opinion already prepared to be favourable. I have shown

elsewhere that the French are by no means indisposed to gymnastics

and military drill. They are ignorant of cricket, as were the ancient

Greeks, certainly not the most inactive people of antiquity.

[Sidenote: Dominant Tendencies.]

The dominant tendencies in the two countries appear to be these. The

English are becoming more open-minded and the French are gaining in

practical sense and prudence. The English are advancing in religious,

and the French in political liberty. Material progress of all kinds is

obvious and conspicuous in both.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Here is an instance of misleading by mistranslation. The English

newspapers speak of Parisian “Communists” when they ought to say

Communards. A Communist is a Socialist of a particular kind, who wants

to have goods in common after the fashion of the early Christians. A

Communard is a person who wishes for an extreme development of local

government. He thinks that the Commune (something like a township)

ought to have more autonomy--be more independent of the State. M.

Charles Beslay, an old friend of mine, became a Communard and was

Governor of the Bank of France under the Commune. He was a most upright

and honourable gentleman, and so far from being a Communist that he

defended the treasure of the Bank of France throughout the civil war of

1871, and afterwards handed it over intact to the proper authorities.

I do not accuse English journalists of intentional dishonesty in this

case; there is no English equivalent for _Communard_, the nearest

English rendering would be _township home-rule-man_.

[2] Observe that the like-minded companions were “few.”

[3] It is curious that the French gymnastic societies should be rather

discouraged by the Church, as giving too much attention to the body.

I have seen formal expressions of clerical disapprobation. There may

be some other reason. Everything has a political colour in France, and

I believe that the gymnastic societies, now very numerous, are mainly

republican.

[4] A French friend of one of my sons was invited to shoot at

Ferrières, on the preserves of Baron Rothschild, but he said he soon

had enough of it, as the game was so abundant that the interest in the

pursuit of it was entirely destroyed. He compared it, as an amusement,

with the shooting of fowls in a poultry yard.

[5] There are some remarkable exceptions. It would be possible to form

one French regiment of very fine men, but I doubt if there are enough

for two regiments. Napoleon’s _Cent Gardes_ were specimens.

[6] “In that case,” it may be objected, “boys who left school at

fourteen would miss Latin altogether.” Yes, it is Professor Seeley’s

desire that they should omit Latin, and those who left at sixteen would

omit Greek. The time so gained would be devoted to real culture through

English.

[7] Since the above paragraph was written I have consulted a very able

_Professeur de Faculté_ and Latin examiner on this _Question du Latin_.

He says: “The young men who come up for examination have an imperfect

knowledge of Latin, and the standard of attainment falls lower and

lower. The remedy that I should propose would be to reduce to fifteen

the number of _lycées_ where Latin and Greek are taught. In those

fifteen _lycées_ I would maintain a really high standard of genuine

scholarship. That would be sufficient for all the real scholars that

the country wants, and then the teaching in the ordinary _lycées_,

being relieved of false pretension about Latin and Greek, might itself

become genuine in other ways.”

[8] In an article in the _Revue Internationale de l’Enseignement_ for

April 13, 1885. The article contains many interesting details.

[9] The following is a genuine English address from pupils in a

Parisian _lycée_ to their master:--

“My dear and respected Professor--I take the liberty of testifying the

feelings of gratitude which animate us all since we have been under

your tutorship.

“No doubt we have been lacking in zeal and attention, but we

nevertheless appreciate fully the pains you have evidently taken for

our benefit. We therefore assure you that if you are not satisfied, we

take the engagement to strive to do better hereafter; and you shall see

that we will be faithful to our word.

“We terminate with the desire that you will sincerely accept this as a

true testimonial of our real affection and respect.”

Creditable, though not faultless.

[10] There have been a few exceptions, such as Lord Egremont and the

Duc de Luynes.

[11] French carters are superior to English in providing two-wheeled

carts with breaks. I remember seeing the horses suffer very much for

the want of them in steep roads and streets in England. The French,

too, are usually very careful about balancing loads so as not to press

heavily on the shaft-horse, but they are merciless in first overloading

a cart and then beating the horse because the weight is beyond his

strength.

[12] My wife had no rest till she had procured the abolition of this

custom by an edict from the Mayor of Sens, but very likely it went on

in private afterwards.

[13] The University decorations of _Officier de l’Instruction Publique_

and _Officier d’Académie_ confer no social position. The fellowship of

the University confers none either outside of the University itself.

[14] The reason for the cheapness of the _lycées_ is because they are

not intended to be paying concerns (deficits being filled up by the

State), and because the pupils benefit by the wholesale scale of all

purchases, on which, of course, no profit is made. The buildings, being

supplied by the towns and the State, are rent free. Some of the newer

ones are magnificent. The _Lycée Lakanal_, near Paris, cost £400,000,

and is a model of practical modern arrangement.

[15] An English friend of mine, himself a man of the very highest

culture, says that the cultivated English keep their talk down to a

low level from a dread of the watchful jealousy of their intellectual

inferiors. They only dare venture to talk in their own way between

themselves in privacy.

[16] I can speak from experience on this matter, having had in youth

an intensely strong local affection for the wilder parts of northern

England, a feeling that afterwards extended itself to Scotland, but

I remember that when this feeling was strongest, the midland and

southern counties were quite like a foreign country to me--a very dull,

uninteresting foreign country--and I had no home feeling whatever in

London, nor any desire to revisit it.

[17] It is needless to quote Moore, but the reader may thank me for

stealing for his benefit a short lyric by an Irish poet, Mr. Robert

Joyce, which is full of the tender sentiment of patriotism, associating

love and death in the most touching manner with the often-repeated name

of one Irish valley--Glenara.

[Sidenote: An Irish Poet.]

I

O, fair shines the sun on Glenara,

And calm rest his beams on Glenara;

But O! there’s a light

Far dearer, more bright,

Illumines my soul in Glenara--

The light of thine eyes in Glenara.

II

And sweet sings the stream of Glenara,

Glancing down through the woods like an arrow;

But a sound far more sweet

Glads my heart when we meet

In the green summer woods of Glenara,--

Thy voice by the wave of Glenara.

III

And O! ever thus in Glenara,

Till we sleep in our graves by Glenara,

May thy voice sound as free

And as kindly to me,

And thine eyes beam as fond in Glenara,

In the green summer woods of Glenara!

[18] During the Franco-German war I knew French people who could not

utter the word “_Patrie_” with dry eyes.

[19] During and after the invasion the intensity of the patriotic

sentiment was always in exact proportion to the harm done by the

invader. It was very feeble where he did not appear, and stronger

in proportion to the duration of his presence and the harm that he

inflicted. It is still intense in Alsatia and Lorraine, and especially

intense in the French who have been expelled from those provinces.

[Sidenote: Varying Intensity of Patriotic Sentiment.]

[20] I regret not to have preserved some letters written to the English

newspapers by private soldiers, in which they described how they were

avoided by civilians even of the humbler classes. They appear to have

felt themselves more despised in uniform than if they had been out of

uniform. This is simply because the English people have never witnessed

the sufferings undergone by soldiers in time of war.

[21] For example, at the time when I am writing these pages, a young

gentleman, who is an intimate friend of mine, and who has received

a scientific education, is diligently preparing himself to pass an

examination for a commission in the artillery next month. Being

obliged to serve in the army in any case, and having a right degree of

_amour-propre_, he wishes to be an officer, and in a scientific branch

of the service.

[22] The throne of Louis Philippe was itself a democratic institution.

[23] For the reader’s convenience I quote four passages from Dicey on

the sovereignty in England. The references are to the first English

edition.

“If the true ruler or political sovereign of England were, as was once

the case, the King, legislation might be carried out in accordance with

the King’s will by one of two methods.”--_The Law of the Constitution_,

p. 354.

“Parliament is, from a merely legal point of view, the absolute

sovereign of the British Empire.”--_Ibid._

“The electorate is, in fact, the sovereign of England. It is a body

which does not, and from its nature hardly can, itself legislate, and

which, owing chiefly to historical causes, has left in existence a

theoretically supreme legislature.”--_Ibid._, p. 355.

“Our modern mode of constitutional morality secures, though in

a roundabout way, what is called abroad ‘the sovereignty of the

people.’”--_Ibid._

[24] The American system would not have succeeded in France. If

the president had exercised the authority of an American president

the Chamber would not have endured it, and there would have been a

presidential crisis, with a new presidential election, every six

months. The present system is not ideally perfect, but it suits the

French temper better than any other that modern ingenuity can devise.

[25] It may be answered that this could be done by refusing to vote the

supplies, but if the Sovereign were perfectly obstinate the House of

Commons could not long put a stop to the working of the public service.

[26] It is an English habit to represent _égalité_ as an Utopian

aspiration for equality in all things. The French understand it to mean

nothing more than equality before the law.

[27] Article in the _Contemporary Review_ for March 1888.

[28] The reader will observe that I have substituted “nobility”

for “House of Lords,” as there is no House of Lords in France,

and “clerical” for “academical” education, as there is nothing

corresponding to Oxford and Cambridge.

[29] _Popular Government_, Essay III.

[30] An English critic once said that the decimal monetary system had

not yet been accepted by the French people because they counted in

sous. They do not invariably count in sous, but they often do, and that

without being unfaithful to the decimal principle, as may be seen by

the following table:--