It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being
international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international.
Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we
must be national. And it is largely because those who call themselves
the friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinction
that they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which they
belong. International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace
after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the
destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like
the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each
other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be
each other. And in the case of national character this can be seen in a
curious way. It will generally be found, I think, that the more a man
really appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less he
will attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is
something in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate. The
Englishman who has a fancy for France will try to be French; the
Englishman who admires France will remain obstinately English. This is
to be particularly noticed in the case of our relations with the
French, because it is one of the outstanding peculiarities of the
French that their vices are all on the surface, and their extraordinary
virtues concealed. One might almost say that their vices are the flower
of their virtues.
Thus their obscenity is the expression of their passionate love of
dragging all things into the light. The avarice of their peasants means
the independence of their peasants. What the English call their
rudeness in the streets is a phase of their social equality. The
worried look of their women is connected with the responsibility of
their women; and a certain unconscious brutality of hurry and gesture
in the men is related to their inexhaustible and extraordinary military
courage. Of all countries, therefore, France is the worst country for a
superficial fool to admire. Let a fool hate France: if the fool loves
it he will soon be a knave. He will certainly admire it, not only for
the things that are not creditable, but actually for the things that
are not there. He will admire the grace and indolence of the most
industrious people in the world. He will admire the romance and fantasy
of the most determinedly respectable and commonplace people in the
world. This mistake the Englishman will make if he admires France too
hastily; but the mistake that he makes about France will be slight
compared with the mistake that he makes about himself. An Englishman
who professes really to like French realistic novels, really to be at
home in a French modern theatre, really to experience no shock on first
seeing the savage French caricatures, is making a mistake very
dangerous for his own sincerity. He is admiring something he does not
understand. He is reaping where he has not sown, and taking up where he
has not laid down; he is trying to taste the fruit when he has never
toiled over the tree. He is trying to pluck the exquisite fruit of
French cynicism, when he has never tilled the rude but rich soil of
French virtue.
The thing can only be made clear to Englishmen by turning it round.
Suppose a Frenchman came out of democratic France to live in England,
where the shadow of the great houses still falls everywhere, and where
even freedom was, in its origin, aristocratic. If the Frenchman saw our
aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if
he set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all
know that we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive
little gnat. He would be imitating English aristocracy; he would be
imitating the English vice. But he would not even understand the vice
he plagiarised: especially he would not understand that the vice is
partly a virtue. He would not understand those elements in the English
which balance snobbishness and make it human: the great kindness of the
English, their hospitality, their unconscious poetry, their sentimental
conservatism, which really admires the gentry. The French Royalist sees
that the English like their King. But he does not grasp that while it
is base to worship a King, it is almost noble to worship a powerless
King. The impotence of the Hanoverian Sovereigns has raised the English
loyal subject almost to the chivalry and dignity of a Jacobite. The
Frenchman sees that the English servant is respectful: he does not
realise that he is also disrespectful; that there is an English legend
of the humorous and faithful servant, who is as much a personality as
his master; the Caleb Balderstone, the Sam Weller. He sees that the
English do admire a nobleman; he does not allow for the fact that they
admire a nobleman most when he does not behave like one. They like a
noble to be unconscious and amiable: the slave may be humble, but the
master must not be proud. The master is Life, as they would like to
enjoy it; and among the joys they desire in him there is none which
they desire more sincerely than that of generosity, of throwing money
about among mankind, or, to use the noble mediæval word, largesse—the
joy of largeness. That is why a cabman tells you are no gentleman if
you give him his correct fare. Not only his pocket, but his soul is
hurt. You have wounded his ideal. You have defaced his vision of the
perfect aristocrat. All this is really very subtle and elusive; it is
very difficult to separate what is mere slavishness from what is a sort
of vicarious nobility in the English love of a lord. And no Frenchman
could easily grasp it at all. He would think it was mere slavishness;
and if he liked it, he would be a slave. So every Englishman must (at
first) feel French candour to be mere brutality. And if he likes it, he
is a brute. These national merits must not be understood so easily. It
requires long years of plenitude and quiet, the slow growth of great
parks, the seasoning of oaken beams, the dark enrichment of red wine in
cellars and in inns, all the leisure and the life of England through
many centuries, to produce at last the generous and genial fruit of
English snobbishness. And it requires battery and barricade, songs in
the streets, and ragged men dead for an idea, to produce and justify
the terrible flower of French indecency.
When I was in Paris a short time ago, I went with an English friend of
mine to an extremely brilliant and rapid succession of French plays,
each occupying about twenty minutes. They were all astonishingly
effective; but there was one of them which was so effective that my
friend and I fought about it outside, and had almost to be separated by
the police. It was intended to indicate how men really behaved in a
wreck or naval disaster, how they break down, how they scream, how they
fight each other without object and in a mere hatred of everything. And
then there was added, with all that horrible irony which Voltaire
began, a scene in which a great statesman made a speech over their
bodies, saying that they were all heroes and had died in a fraternal
embrace. My friend and I came out of this theatre, and as he had lived
long in Paris, he said, like a Frenchman: “What admirable artistic
arrangement! Is it not exquisite?” “No,” I replied, assuming as far as
possible the traditional attitude of John Bull in the pictures in
_Punch_—“No, it is not exquisite. Perhaps it is unmeaning; if it is
unmeaning I do not mind. But if it has a meaning I know what the
meaning is; it is that under all their pageant of chivalry men are not
only beasts, but even hunted beasts. I do not know much of humanity,
especially when humanity talks in French. But I know when a thing is
meant to uplift the human soul, and when it is meant to depress it. I
know that ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ (where the actors talked even quicker)
was meant to encourage man. And I know that this was meant to
discourage him.” “These sentimental and moral views of art,” began my
friend, but I broke into his words as a light broke into my mind. “Let
me say to you,” I said, “what Jaurès said to Liebknecht at the
Socialist Conference: ‘You have not died on the barricades’. You are an
Englishman, as I am, and you ought to be as amiable as I am. These
people have some right to be terrible in art, for they have been
terrible in politics. They may endure mock tortures on the stage; they
have seen real tortures in the streets. They have been hurt for the
idea of Democracy. They have been hurt for the idea of Catholicism. It
is not so utterly unnatural to them that they should be hurt for the
idea of literature. But, by blazes, it is altogether unnatural to me!
And the worst thing of all is that I, who am an Englishman, loving
comfort, should find comfort in such things as this. The French do not
seek comfort here, but rather unrest. This restless people seeks to
keep itself in a perpetual agony of the revolutionary mood. Frenchmen,
seeking revolution, may find the humiliation of humanity inspiring. But
God forbid that two pleasure-seeking Englishmen should ever find it
pleasant!”