As literary luck would have it, the subject of French Love follows
naturally upon the subject of the last chapter, the _Remedia Amoris_.
The French are too clever a nation to leave to individual effort the
difficult task of curing the mind of such an obstinate thing as Love.
All the papas and mammas in the land have put their heads together and
devised two methods of _killing Love wholesale_, compared with which all
the remedies named in the last chapter are mere fly-bites.
These two methods are Chaperonage and Parental Choice, as opposed to
Courtship and Individual Sexual Selection.
Paradoxical as it may seem, there is in the midst of modern Europe a
nation which, in the treatment of women, Love, and marriage, stands on
the same low level of evolution as the ancient, mediæval, and Oriental
nations.
This is not a theory, but a fact patent to all, and attested by the best
English, German, and French authors.
One of the deepest of French thinkers, whose eyes were opened by travel
and comparison, De Stendhal, in 1842, says in his book _De l’Amour_:
“Pour comprendre cette passion, que depuis trente ans la peur du
ridicule cache avec tant de soin parmi nous, il faut en parler comme
d’une maladie”—"To understand this passion, which during the last thirty
years has been concealed among us with so much solicitude, from fear of
ridicule, it is necessary to speak of it as a malady."
But Stendhal greatly understates the case. It was not only within thirty
years from the time when he wrote, and by means of ridicule, that the
French had tried hard to kill Love. They have never really emancipated
themselves from mediæval barbarism. Pure Romantic Love between two young
unmarried persons has never yet flourished in France—because it has
never been allowed to grow. To-day, as in the days of the Troubadours,
the only form of Love celebrated in French plays and romances is the
form which implies conjugal infidelity.
“Marriage, as treated in the old French epics,” says Ploss, “is rarely
based on love;” the woman marries for protection, the man for her wealth
or social affiliations. In the eighteenth century girls were compelled
from their earliest years to live only for appearance sake: “The most
harmless natural enjoyment, every childish ebullition, is interdicted as
improper. Her mother denies her the expression of tender emotion as too
bourgeois, too common. The little one grows up in a dreary, heartless
vacuum; her deeper feelings remain undeveloped.... Real love would be
too ordinary a motive of marriage, and therefore extremely ridiculous.
It is not offered her, accordingly, nor does she feel any.”
Heine wrote from Paris in 1837 that “girls never fall in love in this
country.” "With us in Germany, as also in England and other nations of
Germanic origin, young girls are allowed the utmost possible liberty,
whereas married women become subjected to the strict and anxious
supervision of their husbands.
"Here in France, as already stated, the reverse is the case: young girls
remain in the seclusion of a convent until they either marry or are
introduced to the world under the strict eye of a relative. In the
world, _i.e._ in the French salon, they always remain silent and little
noticed, for it is neither good form here nor wise to make love to an
unmarried girl.
“There lies the difference. We Germans, as well as our Germanic
neighbours, bestow our love always on unmarried girls, and these only
are celebrated by our poets; among the French, on the other hand,
married women only are the object of love, in life as well as in
literature.”
The difficulty of becoming acquainted with a young lady, Mr. Hamerton
tells us, is greatest “in what may be called the ‘respectable’ classes
in country-towns and their vicinities. In Parisian society young ladies
go out into _le monde_, and may be seen and even spoken to at
evening-parties.”
“And even spoken to” is good, is very good. What a privilege for the
young men! The iron bars which formerly separated them from the young
ladies have actually been removed, and they are allowed to speak to
them—in presence of a heart-chilling, conversation-killing dragon. No
wonder Parisian society is so corrupt!
Mr. Hamerton has given in _Round My House_ the most realistic and
fascinating account of French courtship and marriage-customs ever
written. He is a great admirer of the French, always ready to excuse
their foibles, and his testimony is, therefore, doubly valuable as that
of an absolutely impartial witness. He had an opportunity for many years
of studying French provincial life with an artist’s trained faculties;
and here are a few sentences culled from his descriptions:—
“It is not merely difficult, in our neighbourhood, for a young man in
the respectable classes to get acquainted with a young lady, but _every
conceivable arrangement is devised to make it absolutely impossible_.
Balls and evening-parties are hardly ever given, and when they are given
great care is taken to keep young men out of them, and young
marriageable girls either dance with each other or with mere children.”
Whereas in England “a young girl may go where she likes, without much
risk to her good name,” a French girl “may not cross a street alone, nor
open a book which has not been examined, nor have an opinion about
anything.” “The French ideal of a well-brought-up young lady is that she
should not know anything whatever about love and marriage, that she
should be both innocent and ignorant, and both in the supreme
degree—both to a degree which no English person can imagine.”
“The young men are not to blame; they would be ready enough, perhaps, to
fall in love if they had the chance, like any Englishman or German, but
the respectable parents of the young lady take care that they shall
_not_ have the chance of falling in love.”
The only opportunity a young man has of seeing a girl is at a distance,
at church or in a religious procession. Here he may see her face; her
character he can only ascertain through gossip, a lady friend, or the
parish priest. It is much more respectable, however, to show no such
curiosity, for its absence implies the absence of such a ridiculous
thing as Love. “_There is nothing which good society in France
disapproves of so much as the passion of Love_, or anything resembling
it.” “When Cœlebs asks for the hand of a girl he has seen for a
minute, he may just possibly be in love with her, which is a degrading
supposition; but if he has never seen her, you cannot even suspect him
of a sentiment so unbecoming.”
There is but one way for the young man to gain admission to a house
where there is a marriageable young lady: “He must first, through a
third party, ask to marry the young lady, and, if her _parents_ consent,
he will then be admitted to see her and speak to her, but not otherwise.
_The respectable order of affairs is that the offer and acceptance
should precede and not follow courtship._”
Would it be possible to conceive a more diabolically ingenious social
machinery for massacring Romantic Love _en gros_?
“Marriages in France are generally arranged by the exercise of reason
and prudence, rather than by either passion or affection.” Mr. Hamerton
gives an amusing account of how he was asked to be matrimonial
ambassador by a young man who had never seen the girl he wanted to
marry. Mr. Hamerton obliged the young man, but was told by the mother
that if the young man would wait two years he might have a fair chance,
provided a _richer_ or _nobler_ suitor did not turn up in the meantime.
Money and Rank _versus_ Love. French mammas have at least one virtue.
They are not hypocrites.
The Countess von Bothmer, who lived in France a quarter of a century,
says in her _French Home Life_: “Where we so ordinarily listen to what
we understand by love—to the temptations of the young heart in all their
forms (however transitory), to our individual impressions and our own
opinions—the French consult fitness of relative situation, reciprocities
of fortune and position, and harmonies of family intercourse.”
To annihilate the last resource of Love—elopement—the _Code Napoléon_
forbids all marriages without either the consent of the father and
mother, or proof that they are both dead. “It is very troublesome to get
married in France; the operation is surrounded by difficulties and
formalities which would make an Englishman stamp with rage.”
Social life, of course, suffers as much from this idiotic system as
Romantic Love. French hospitality “does not extend beyond the family
circle,” we are informed by M. Max O’Rell, who also gives this amusing
instance of the imbecility or mental slavery (he does not use these
words) produced by the French system of education and chaperonage:—
“I remember I was one day sitting in the Champs Elysées with two English
ladies. Beside us was a young French girl with her father and mother.
The person on the right of papa rose and went away, and we heard the
young innocent say to her mother: ‘Mamma, may I go and sit by papa?’ It
was a baby of about eighteen or twenty. Those English ladies laugh over
the affair to this day.”
Boys suffer as well as girls. As the author of an article on “Parisian
Psychology” remarks: “There are no mothers in France; it is a nation of
‘mammas,’ who, in the most unlimited sense of the word, spoil their
boys, weaken them in body and soul, dwarf their thought, dry their
hearts, and lower them to below even their own level, hoping thereby to
rule over them through life, as they too often do. Frenchwomen having
been at best but half-wives, regard their children as a sort of
compensation for what they have themselves not had; and after the
mischievous fashion of weak ‘mammas’ prolong babyhood till far into
mature life.”
The French, in fact, are a nation of babies. Their puerile conceit,
which prevents them from learning to read any language but their own,
and thus finding out what other nations think of them, is responsible in
part for the mediæval barbarism of their matrimonial arrangements. The
Parisian is the most provincial animal in the world. In any other
metropolis—be it London, New York, Vienna, or Berlin—people understand
and relish whatever is good in literature, art, and life, be it English,
American, French, German, or Italian. But the Parisian understands only
what is narrowly and exclusively French. And this is the dictionary
definition of Provincialism.
The consequences of this mediævalism and provincialism in modern France
are thus eloquently summed up by a writer in the _Westminster Review_
(1877):—
“Such education as girls receive is not only not a preparation for the
wedded state, it is a positive disqualification for it. They are not
taught to read, they are not taught to reason; they are _launched into
life without a single intellectual interest_. The whole effort of their
early training goes to fill their mind with puerilities and
superstitions. As regards God, they are instructed to believe in relics
and old bones; as regards man, they are instructed to believe in dress,
in mannerisms, and coquetry. Their love of appreciation, after being
enormously developed, is bottled up and tied down until a husband is
found to draw the cork. What else, then, can we look for but an
explosion of frivolity? Can we expect that such a provision of
coquettishness will be reserved for the husband’s exclusive use? He will
be tired of it in three months—unless it is tired of him before; and
then the pent-up waters will forsake their narrow bed and overflow the
country far and wide.”
No wonder Napoléon remarked that “Love does more harm than good.” And
right he was, most emphatically, for the only kind of Love _possible_ in
France does infinite harm. It poisons life and literature alike.
We can now understand the fierceness of Dumas’s attacks on _mariages de
convenance_: “The manifest deterioration of the race touches him; it
does not touch us. Nor do we at all realise the next to impossibility of
a man ever marrying for love in France. There are those who have tried
to do it, but they can never get on in life; they are reputed of ‘bad
example’” (_St. James’s Gazette_).
And now we come upon a paradox which has puzzled a great many thinkers.
The Countess von Bothmer, while deploring the absence of Love in French
courtship, endeavours to show that domestic happiness and conjugal
affection are, nevertheless, not rare in France. French husbands “are
ordinarily with their wives, accompany them wherever they can, and share
their friendships and distractions.” Mr. Hamerton likewise bears witness
that French girls “become excellent wives, faithful, orderly, dutiful,
contented, and economical. They all either love their husbands, _or
conduct themselves as if they did so_.” He says the notion fostered by
novels “that Frenchmen are always occupied in making love to their
neighbours’ wives” is nonsense; that there is no more adultery than
elsewhere. “There exists in foreign countries, and especially in
England, a belief that Frenchwomen are very generally adulteresses. The
origin of the belief is this,— the manner in which marriages are
generally managed in France leaves no room for interesting love-stories.
Novelists and dramatists _must_ find love-stories somewhere, and so they
have to seek for them in illicit intrigues.”
This is all very ingenious, but the argument is not conclusive. Even
granted for a moment that Mr. Hamerton is right in his defence of French
conjugal life, is it not a more than sufficient condemnation of the
French system of “courtship” that one-half of the nation are prevented
from reading its literature because it is so foul and filthy—because
Love has been made synonymous with adultery?
But Mr. Hamerton’s assertion loses its probability when viewed in the
light of the following considerations. He himself admits that the French
are anxious to read about Love, that the novelists and dramatists _must_
find stories of Love somewhere—mind you, not of conjugal but of Romantic
Love—and the Paris _Figaro_ not long ago denounced the French novelists
of the period for devoting their stories to Love almost exclusively,
whereas Balzac, Dumas, Thackeray, and Scott, at least introduced various
other matters of interest. Now French novels have the largest editions
of any books published; and if so vast an interest is displayed by the
French in reading about Love, is it likely that their interest is purely
literary? Certainly not. They will seek it in real life. And in real
life it can only be found in one sphere, which elsewhere is protected
against such invasions, by the young being allowed to meet one another.
“It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will
love where they do not marry.’” In _this_ respect human nature is the
same the world over. The testimony of scores of unprejudiced authors on
this head cannot be ignored.
This, however, is only one of the evils following from the French
suppression of pre-matrimonial Love. The parents may or may not suffer
through conjugal jealousy and infidelity, one thing is certain,—that the
children suffer from it, in body and mind. It is leading to the
depopulation of France. It was M. Jules Rochard who called attention to
the fact that “France, which two centuries ago included one-third of the
total population of Europe, now contains but one-tenth”; although the
death-rate is smaller in France than in most European countries, and
although there has been a gradual increase of wealth throughout the
country.
That the suppression of Romantic Love and of all opportunities for
courtship is the principal cause of the decline of France, is apparent
from the fact that the countries in which population increases most
rapidly—as America and Great Britain—are those in which Romantic Love is
the chief motive to marriage.
Romantic Love goes by complementary qualities, the defects of the
parents neutralising one another in the offspring; so that the children
who are the issue of a love-match are commonly more beautiful than their
parents. In France there is no selection whatever, except with reference
to money and rank. Not even Health is considered, the _sine qua non_ of
Love as well as Beauty. Hence the absence of Love in France has led to
the almost absolute absence of beauty. And it would be nothing short of
a miracle if the offspring of a young maiden, still in her teens, and an
old broken-down sinner, chosen by her parents for his wealth or social
position, were any different from the puny, hairy men and
coarse-featured, vulgar women that make up the bulk of the French
nation.
In Paris one does occasionally see a fine figure and a rather pretty
face, but they almost always belong to the lower classes. As the lower
classes allow the young considerable freedom, it would seem as if beauty
in this class ought to be as common an article as in England or the
United States. But the incapacity of the young women for feeling and
reciprocating Love neutralises these opportunities. For of what use is
it for a man to feel Love if the woman invariably bases her choice on
money? This matter is most clearly brought out by Mr. Hamerton:—
“Amongst the lower classes, the peasantry and workmen ... girls have as
much freedom as they have in England. The great institution of the
_parlement_ gives them ample opportunities for becoming acquainted with
their lovers; indeed the acquaintance, in many cases, goes further than
is altogether desirable. A peasant girl requires no parental help in
looking after her own interests. She admits a lover to the happy state
of _parlement_, which means that he has a right to talk with her when
they meet, and to call upon her, dance with her, etc. The lover is
always eager to fix the wedding-day, the girl is not so eager. She keeps
him on indefinitely until a richer one appears, on which No. 1 has the
mortification of seeing himself excluded from _parlement_, whilst
another takes his place. In this way a clever girl will go on for
several years, amusing herself by torturing amorous swains, until at
length a sufficiently big fish nibbles at the bait, when she hooks him
at once, and takes good care that _he_ shall not escape. Nothing can be
more pathetically ludicrous than the condition of a young peasant who is
really in love, especially if he is able to write, for then he pours
forth his feelings in innumerable letters full of tenderness and
complaint. On her part the girl does not answer the letters, and has not
the slightest pity for the unhappy victim of her charms. After seeing a
good deal of such love-affairs I have come to the conclusion that in
humble life young men do really very often feel
“‘The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love.’”
And they ‘wear the chain’ too. Young women, on the other hand, seem only
to amuse themselves with all this simple-hearted devotion—
“‘And mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.’”
Schopenhauer pointed out that the French lack the _Gefühl für das
Innige_—the tenderness and emotional depth which characterise the
Germans and Italians. It is this that accounts for the inability of the
French to appreciate Love, and for the fact that even vice is coarser in
France than elsewhere, as remarked by Mr. Lecky, who, in his _History of
European Morals_, contrasts “the coarse, cynical, ostentatious
sensuality, which forms the most repulsive feature of the French
character,” with “the dreamy, languid, and æsthetical sensuality of the
Spaniard or Italian.” And it remained for the French to attempt to deify
vice as in that over-rated and repulsive story of _Manon Lescaut_.
Mme. de Staël, who suffered so much from the provincialism (_alias_
patriotism) of her countrymen, saw clearly the immorality of the French
system of marrying girls without consulting their choice. Brandes
relates the following anecdote of her: “One day, speaking of the
unnaturalness of marriages arranged by the parents, as distinguished
from those in which the young girls choose for themselves, she
exclaimed, ‘I would _compel_ my daughter to marry the man of her
choice!’”
An attempt is being made at present in Paris to introduce the
Anglo-American feminine spirit into society. The word _flirter_ has been
adopted, and the thing itself experimented with. But the French girl
does not know how to draw the line between coquetry and flirtation. She
needs a better education before she can flirt properly. This education
the Government is trying to give her at present; but it meets with
stubborn resistance from the priests, and from the old notion that
intellectual culture is fatal to feminine charms and the capacity for
affection. If this book should accomplish nothing else than prove that
without intellect there can be no deep Love, it will not have been
written in vain.