In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street. We
talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is the
man in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with these
lamp-posts and pavements; everything from his meals to his martyrdoms.
When first an Englishman looks at a French town or village his first
feeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town or village;
when he looks again he sees that this comparative absence of the
picturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain, precipitous frontage
of the houses standing up hard and flat out of the street like the
cardboard houses in a pantomime--a hard angularity allied perhaps to
the harshness of French logic. When he looks a third time he sees quite
simply that it is all because the houses have no front gardens. The
vague English spirit loves to have the entrance to its house softened by
bushes and broken by steps. It likes to have a little anteroom of hedges
half in the house and half out of it; a green room in a double sense.
The Frenchman desires no such little pathetic ramparts or halting
places, for the street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him.
.....
The French have no front gardens; but the street is every man’s front
garden. There are trees in the street, and sometimes fountains. The
street is the Frenchman’s tavern, for he drinks in the street. It is his
dining-room, for he dines in the street. It is his British Museum, for
the statues and monuments in French streets are not, as with us, of the
worst, but of the best, art of the country, and they are often actually
as historical as the Pyramids. The street again is the Frenchman’s
Parliament, for France has never taken its Chamber of Deputies so
seriously as we take our House of Commons, and the quibbles of mere
elected nonentities in an official room seem feeble to a people whose
fathers have heard the voice of Desmoulins like a trumpet under open
heaven, or Victor Hugo shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of the
second Republic. And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines in
the street so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, so
that the street can never be commonplace to him.
Take, for instance, such a simple object as a lamp-post. In London
a lamp-post is a comic thing. We think of the intoxicated gentleman
embracing it, and recalling ancient friendship. But in Paris a lamp-post
is a tragic thing. For we think of tyrants hanged on it, and of an
end of the world. There is, or was, a bitter Republican paper in Paris
called LA LANTERNE. How funny it would be if there were a Progressive
paper in England called THE LAMP POST! We have said, then, that the
Frenchman is the man in the street; that he can dine in the street, and
die in the street. And if I ever pass through Paris and find him going
to bed in the street, I shall say that he is still true to the genius
of his civilisation. All that is good and all that is evil in France is
alike connected with this open-air element. French democracy and French
indecency are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors.
Compared to a café, a public-house is a private house.
.....
There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through the
mind in the streets of this especial town of Belfort. First of all, it
lies close upon the boundary of France and Germany, and boundaries are
the most beautiful things in the world. To love anything is to love its
boundaries; thus children will always play on the edge of anything.
They build castles on the edge of the sea, and can only be restrained by
public proclamation and private violence from walking on the edge of the
grass. For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to the
beginning of it.
Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the very
margin of Germany, and although there were many German touches in
the place--German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatrical
barmaids dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants--yet
the fixed French colour seemed all the stronger for these specks
of something else. All day long and all night long troops of dusty,
swarthy, scornful little soldiers went plodding through the streets with
an air of stubborn disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised
you, but French soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even
more than you. It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nation
which has made it good at war and science and other things in which what
is necessary is combined with what is nasty. And the soldiers and the
civilians alike had most of them cropped hair, and that curious kind of
head which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call a
bullet-head. Indeed, we are speaking very appropriately when we call it
a bullet-head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen have
been bullets--yes, and explosive bullets.
.....
But there was a second reason why in this place one should think
particularly of the open-air politics and the open-air art of the
French. For this town of Belfort is famous for one of the most typical
and powerful of the public monuments of France. From the café table at
which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town on which hangs the high
and flat-faced citadel, pierced with many windows, and warmed in the
evening light. On the steep hill below it is a huge stone lion, itself
as large as a hill. It is hacked out of the rock with a sort of gigantic
impression. No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a common
statue; no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish
the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises, shaking the
world. The face of the lion has something of the bold conventionality
of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left like a shapeless cloud of
tempest, as if it might literally be said of him that God had clothed
his neck with thunder. Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and
in some sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago.
It commemorates the fact that this town was never taken by the Germans
through all the terrible year, but only laid down its arms at last at
the command of its own Government. But the spirit of it has been in
this land from the beginning--the spirit of something defiant and almost
defeated.
As I leave this place and take the railway into Germany the news comes
thicker and thicker up the streets that Southern France is in a flame,
and that there perhaps will be fought out finally the awful modern
battle of the rich and poor. And as I pass into quieter places for the
last sign of France on the sky-line, I see the Lion of Belfort stand at
bay, the last sight of that great people which has never been at peace.