We are accustomed to laugh at the French for their braggadocio
propensities, and intolerable vanity about La France, la gloire,
l'Empereur, and the like; and yet I think in my heart that the British
Snob, for conceit and self-sufficiency and braggartism in his way, is
without a parallel. There is always something uneasy in a Frenchman's
conceit. He brags with so much fury, shrieking, and gesticulation; yells
out so loudly that the Francais is at the head of civilization, the
centre of thought, &c.; that one can't but see the poor fellow has a
lurking doubt in his own mind that he is not the wonder he professes to
be.
About the British Snob, on the contrary, there is commonly no noise, no
bluster, but the calmness of profound conviction. We are better than all
the world; we don't question the opinion at all; it's an axiom. And when
a Frenchman bellows out, 'LA FRANCE, MONSIEUR, LA FRANCE EST A LA TETE
DU MONDE CIVILISE!' we laugh good-naturedly at the frantic poor devil.
WE are the first chop of the world: we know the fact so well in our
secret hearts that a claim set up elsewhere is simply ludicrous. My dear
brother reader, say, as a man of honour, if you are not of this opinion?
Do you think a Frenchman your equal? You don't--you gallant British
Snob--you know you don't: no more, perhaps, does the Snob your humble
servant, brother.
And I am inclined to think it is this conviction, and the consequent
bearing of the Englishman towards the foreigner whom he condescends to
visit, this confidence of superiority which holds up the head of the
owner of every English hat-box from Sicily to St. Petersburg, that makes
us so magnificently hated throughout Europe as we are; this--more than
all our little victories, and of which many Frenchmen and Spaniards have
never heard--this amazing and indomitable insular pride, which animates
my lord in his travelling-carriage as well as John in the rumble.
If you read the old Chronicles of the French wars, you find precisely
the same character of the Englishman, and Henry V.'s people behaved with
just the cool domineering manner of our gallant veterans of France
and the Peninsula. Did you never hear Colonel Cutler and Major Slasher
talking over the war after dinner? or Captain Boarder describing his
action with the 'Indomptable?' 'Hang the fellows,' says Boarder, 'their
practice was very good. I was beat off three times before I took her.'
'Cuss those carabineers of Milhaud's,' says Slasher, 'what work they
made of our light cavalry!' implying a sort of surprise that the
Frenchman should stand up against Britons at all: a good-natured wonder
that the blind, mad, vain-glorious, brave poor devils should actually
have the courage to resist an Englishman. Legions of such Englishmen
are patronizing Europe at this moment, being kind to the Pope, or
good-natured to the King of Holland, or condescending to inspect the
Prussian reviews. When Nicholas came here, who reviews a quarter of a
million of pairs of moustaches to his breakfast every morning, we took
him off to Windsor and showed him two whole regiments of six or eight
hundred Britons a-piece, with an air as much as to say,--'There, my boy,
look at THAT. Those are ENGLISHMEN, those are, and your master whenever
you please,' as the nursery song says. The British Snob is long, long
past scepticism, and can afford to laugh quite good-humouredly at those
conceited Yankees, or besotted little Frenchmen, who set up as models of
mankind. THEY forsooth!
I have been led into these remarks by listening to an old fellow at the
Hotel du Nord, at Boulogne, and who is evidently of the Slasher sort. He
came down and seated himself at the breakfast-table, with a surly
scowl on his salmon-coloured bloodshot face, strangling in a tight,
cross-barred cravat; his linen and his appointments so perfectly stiff
and spotless that everybody at once recognized him as a dear countryman.
Only our port-wine and other admirable institutions could have produced
a figure so insolent, so stupid, so gentleman-like. After a while our
attention was called to him by his roaring out, in a voice of plethoric
fury, 'O!'
Everybody turned round at the 'O,' conceiving the Colonel to be, as his
countenance denoted him, in intense pain; but the waiters knew better,
and instead of being alarmed, brought the Colonel the kettle. 'O,' it
appears, is the French for hot-water. The Colonel (though he despises it
heartily) thinks he speaks the language remarkably well. Whilst he was
inhausting his smoking tea, which went rolling and gurgling down his
throat, and hissing over the 'hot coppers' of that respectable veteran,
a friend joined him, with a wizened face and very black wig, evidently a
Colonel too.
The two warriors, waggling their old heads at each other, presently
joined breakfast, and fell into conversation, and we had the advantage
of hearing about the old war, and some pleasant conjectures as to the
next, which they considered imminent. They psha'd the French fleet; they
pooh-pooh'd the French commercial marine; they showed how, in a war,
there would be a cordon ['a cordong, by---') of steamers along our
coast, and 'by ---,' ready at a minute to land anywhere on the other
shore, to give the French as good a thrashing as they got in the last
war, 'by ---'. In fact, a rumbling cannonade of oaths was fired by the
two veterans during the whole of their conversation.
There was a Frenchman in the room, but as he had not been above ten
years in London, of course he did not speak the language, and lost the
benefit of the conversation. 'But, O my country!' said I to myself, it's
no wonder that you are so beloved! If I were a Frenchman, how I would
hate you!'
That brutal, ignorant, peevish bully of an Englishman is showing himself
in every city of Europe. One of the dullest creatures under heaven, he
goes travelling Europe under foot, shouldering his way into galleries
and cathedrals, and bustling into palaces with his buck-ram uniform.
At church or theatre, gala or picture-gallery, HIS face never varies.
A thousand delightful sights pass before his bloodshot eyes, and don't
affect him. Countless brilliant scenes of life and manners are shown
him, but never move him. He goes to church, and calls the practices
there degrading and superstitious: as if HIS altar was the only one that
was acceptable. He goes to picture-galleries, and is more ignorant about
Art than a French shoeblack. Art, Nature pass, and there is no dot of
admiration in his stupid eyes: nothing moves him, except when a very
great man comes his way, and then the rigid, proud, self-confident,
inflexible British Snob can be as humble as a flunkey and as supple as a
harlequin.