For the last sixty years and more one of the rare pleasures of political
philosophers has been to expatiate on "le droit administratif," on the
extraordinary powers enjoyed by Government in France, whatever that
government may be; and another pleasure, which few have denied
themselves, is that of drawing the not very obscure inference that
France is democratic rather than liberal, and that the French genius has
no patience with extreme individualism. If its effects were confined
wholly to politics, to criticize this national characteristic would be
no part of my business; but as it has profoundly influenced French art
as well as French life and thought, the reader, I trust, will not be
unbearably vexed by an essay which has little immediately to do with
the subject on which I am paid to write. "What is the cause of French
conventionality?" "What are its consequences?" These are questions to
which the student of French art cannot well be indifferent; and these
are the questions that I shall attempt to answer.
The cause, I suspect, is to be found in the defect of a virtue. If it
takes two to make a quarrel it takes as many to make a bargain; and if
even the best Frenchmen are willing to make terms with society, that
must be because society has something to offer them worth accepting. All
conventions are limitations on thought, feeling, and action; and, as
such, are the enemies of originality and character--hateful, therefore,
to men richly endowed with either. French conventions, however, have a
specious air of liberality, and France offers to him who will be bound
by them partnership in the most perfect of modern civilizations--a
civilization, be it noted, of which her conventions are themselves an
expression. The bribe is tempting. Also, the pill itself is pleasantly
coated. Feel thus, think thus, act thus, says the French tradition, not
for moral, still less for utilitarian, reasons, but for æsthetic. Stick
to the rules, not because they are right or profitable, but because they
are seemly--nay, beautiful. We are not telling you to be respectable, we
are inviting you not to be a lout. We are offering you, free of charge,
a trade mark that carries credit all the world over. "How French he (or
she) is!" Many a foreigner would pay handsomely to have as much said of
him.
Any English boy born with fine sensibility, a peculiar feeling for art,
or an absolutely first-rate intelligence finds himself, from the outset,
at loggerheads with the world in which he is to live. For him there can
be no question of accepting those conventions which express what is
meanest in an unsympathetic society. To begin with, he will not go to
church or chapel on Sundays: it might be different were it a question
of going to Mass. The hearty conventions of family life which make
impossible almost relations at all intimate or subtle arouse in him
nothing but a longing for escape. He will be reared, probably, in an
atmosphere where all thought that leads to no practical end is despised,
or gets, at most, a perfunctory compliment when some great man who
in the teeth of opposition has won to a European reputation is duly
rewarded with a title or an obituary column in _The Times_. As for
artists, they, unless they happen to have achieved commercial success or
canonization in some public gallery, are pretty sure to be family jokes.
Thus, all his finer feelings will be constantly outraged; and he will
live, a truculent, shame-faced misfit, with _John Bull_ under his nose
and _Punch_ round the corner, till, at some public school, a course of
compulsory games and the Arnold tradition either breaks his spirit or
makes him a rebel for life.
In violent opposition to most of what surrounds him, any greatly gifted,
and tough, English youth is likely to become more and more aware of
himself and his own isolation. While his French compeer is having rough
corners gently obliterated by contact with a well-oiled whetstone, and
is growing daily more conscious of solidarity with his partners in a
peculiar and gracious civilization, the English lad grows steadily more
individualistic. Daily he becomes more eccentric, more adventurous, and
more of a "character." Very easily will he snap all conventional cables
and, learning to rely entirely on himself, trust only to his own sense
of what is good and true and beautiful. This personal sense is all that
he has to follow; and in following it he will meet with no conventional
obstacle that he need hesitate for one moment to demolish. English
civilization is so smug and hypocritical, so grossly philistine, and at
bottom so brutal, that every first-rate Englishman necessarily becomes
an outlaw. He grows by kicking; and his personality flourishes,
unhampered by sympathetic, clinging conventions, nor much--and this is
important, too--by the inquisitorial tyranny of Government. For, at any
rate until the beginning of the war, an Englishman who dared to defy the
conventions had less than a Frenchman to fear from the laws.
I have already suggested that the consequences of this difference
between French and English civilization may be studied in the history of
their literature and thought. For the abject poverty of English visual
art I have attempted to give reasons elsewhere: here I have not space to
say more than that it is rarely good for an artist to be a protestant,
and that a protestant is just what the English attitude to painting
generally forces a genuine artist to be. But consider the literature of
the French Renaissance: Rabelais is the one vast figure. Ronsard and his
friends are charming, elegant, and erudite; but not of the stupendous.
What is even more to the point, already with the _pléiade_ we have a
school--a school with its laws and conventions, its "thus far and no
further." Nothing is more notorious than the gorgeous individualism and
personality of those flamboyant monsters whom we call the Elizabethans,
unless it be the absence of that quality in the great French writers of
the next age. Had Pascal been as bold as Newton he might have been as
big. No one will deny that Descartes was a finer intelligence than
Hobbes, or that his meticulous respect for French susceptibilities gave
an altogether improbable turn to his speculations. In the eighteenth
century it was the English who did the discovering and the French who,
on these discoveries being declared _admissibles_, brought them to
perfection. Even in the nineteenth, the Revolution notwithstanding,
French genius, except in painting, asserted itself less vividly and
variously than the Russian or English, and less emphatically than the
German.
In recording the consequences of this French taste for authority we have
had to register profit and loss. It is true that the picture presented
by French history offers comparatively few colossal achievements or
stupendous characters. With the latter, indeed, it is particularly
ill-supplied. Whereas most of the great and many of the secondary
English writers, thinkers, and artists have been great "characters," the
slightly monotonous good sense and refinement of French literary and
artistic life is broken only by a few such massive or surprising
figures as those of Rabelais, La Fontaine, Poussin, Rousseau, Flaubert,
Cézanne--a formidable list but a short one, to which, however, a few
names could be added. On the other hand, what France has lost in colour
she has gained in fertility; and in a universal Honours List for
intellectual and artistic prowess the number of French names would
be out of all proportion to the size and wealth of the country.
Furthermore, it is this traditional basis that has kept French culture
up to a certain level of excellence. France has never been without
standards. Therefore it has been to France that the rest of Europe has
always looked for some measure of fine thinking, delicate feeling, and
general amenity. Without her conventionality it may be doubted whether
France could have remained so long the centre of civilization.
One commonly deplored consequence of French conventionality is that it
makes Frenchmen incapable of well understanding or appreciating anything
foreign, or of judging acutely between foreigners and themselves. But is
even this a serious misfortune? French critics can discriminate between
French productions with unsurpassable delicacy and precision. As for the
spring of French inspiration, it is so copious that the creative genius
of that favoured race seems to need nothing more from outside than
an occasional new point of departure, to the grasping of which its
imperfect knowledge and unprehensile taste are adequate. Indeed, the
rare endeavours of Frenchmen seriously to cultivate alien methods and
points of view more often than not end in disaster. Shortly before
the war a school of particularly intelligent and open-minded writers
discovered, what we in England are only too familiar with, the æsthetic
possibilities of charity and the beauty of being good. Dostoevsky began
it. First, they ran after _him_; then, setting themselves, as well as
they could, to study Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, in translations,
they soon plunged miserably into a morass of sentimentality. A gifted
novelist and a charming poet, Charles-Louis Philippe and Vildrac, were
amongst the first to fall in. A Wordsworth can moralize, a Sterne
can pipe his eye, with impunity; but late eighteenth and early
twentieth-century literature prove how dangerous it is for a French
author to trespass in pursuit of motives beyond the limits of his
tradition.
The reason why Frenchmen are incompetent to judge or appreciate what is
not French is that they apply to all things the French measure. They
have no universal standards, and, what is worse, they take for such
their own conventions. To read a French critic on Shakespeare or Ibsen
or Dostoevsky or Goethe is generally a humiliating experience for one
who loves France. As often as not you will find that he is depending
on a translation. It seems never to strike him that there is something
ludicrous in appraising nicely the qualities of a work written in a
language one cannot understand. Rather it seems to him ludicrous that
books should be written in any language but his own; and, until they are
translated, for him they do not exist. Many years ago, at Cambridge, I
remember having a sharpish altercation with Rupert Brooke, who had taken
it upon himself to denigrate the art of Racine. Before long it came out
that he had read the plays only in a translation; for at that time--he
was in his second year, I think--he had little or no French. Everyone
laughed, and the argument collapsed. Set the scene in Paris, imagine a
detractor of Shakespeare or Goethe being convicted of similar ignorance,
and ask yourself whether one Frenchman of the party would have felt that
by such an admission the critic was put out of court.
It cannot be denied, I fear, that the conventional habits of the French
mind lead easily to ignorance and self-satisfaction. To be frank, the
complacent aberrations of French taste, with its passion for Poe and its
pathetic confidence in Kipling and Chesterton, have become a standing
joke abroad. There is no great reason why the French should know
anything of foreign thought and literature; but there is every reason
why, knowing nothing, they should refrain from comment. And how many
Frenchmen do know anything? When I reflect that hardly one can quote
a line of English without committing or, at any rate, permitting the
grossest and most nonsensical blunders, I am inclined to suspect that
the answer is, very few. And I suppose it is this combination of
ignorance with an incapacity for handling criteria of universal validity
which gives to the nation that is assuredly the centre of civilization
its paradoxical air of provinciality. A Frenchman discoursing on foreign
peoples or on mankind in general--a favourite topic--suggests to me
sometimes the fantastic vision of a dog-fancier criticizing a steer.
Grant his premises--that whatever he admires in the one must be
essential to the other--and nothing could be more just and luminous than
his remarks. Undeniably the creature is a bit thick in the girth and,
what is worse, bull-necked. Only, as the points of an ox are different
from those of a poodle, the criticism is something beside the mark: and
there is not much more virtue in the objection to Shakespeare's later
tragedies that they are not written in rhymed verse. Blank verse,
however, is not in the great tradition; and the French critic, with
one eye fixed submissively on authority, doubts whether he would
be justified in admiring it unreservedly. Such are the inevitable
consequences of conventionality: and French conventionality is, in its
turn, the inevitable consequence of a civilization so gracious and
attractive that even the most lawless of its children cannot bear to
appear disloyal.