NATIONAL ANTIPATHIES
The prejudice we entertain against foreigners is not in the first
instance owing to any ill-will we bear them, so much as to the
untractableness of the imagination, which cannot admit two standards of
moral value according to circumstances, but is puzzled by the diversity
of manners and character it observes, and made uneasy in its estimate of
the propriety and excellence of its own. It seems that others ought to
conform to our way of thinking, or we to theirs; and as neither party is
inclined to give up their peculiarities, we cut the knot by hating those
who remind us of them. We get rid of any idle, half-formed, teazing,
irksome sense of obligation to sympathise with or meet foreigners half
way, by making the breach as wide as possible, and treating them as an
inferior species of beings to ourselves. We become enemies, because we
cannot be friends. Our self-love is annoyed by whatever creates a
suspicion of our being in the wrong; and only recovers its level by
setting down all those who differ from us as thoroughly odious and
contemptible.
It is this consideration which makes the good qualities of other
nations, in which they excel us, no set-off to their bad ones, in which
they fall short of us; nay, we can forgive the last much sooner than the
first. The French being a dirty people is a complaint we very often
bring against them. This objection alone, however, would give us very
little disturbance; we might make a wry face, an exclamation, and laugh
it off. But when we find that they are lively, agreeable, and
good-humoured in spite of their dirt, we then know not what to make of
it. We are angry at seeing them enjoy themselves in circumstances in
which we should feel so uncomfortable; we are baulked of the advantage
we had promised ourselves over them, and make up for the disappointment
by despising them heartily, as a people callous and insensible to every
thing like common decency. In reading Captain Parry’s account of the
Esquimaux Indian woman, who so dexterously trimmed his lamp by licking
up half the train-oil, and smearing her face and fingers all over with
the grease, we barely smile at this trait of barbarism. It does not
provoke a serious thought; for it does not stagger us in our opinion of
ourselves. But should a fine Parisian lady do the same thing (or
something like it) in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the infinite
superiority of the French in delicacy and refinement, we should hardly
restrain our astonishment at the mixture of incorrigible grossness and
vanity. Unable to answer her arguments, we should begin to hate her
person: her gaiety and wit, which had probably delighted us before,
would be changed into forwardness, flippancy, and impertinence; from
seeing it united with so many accomplishments, we should be led to doubt
whether _sluttishness_ was not a virtue, and should remove the doubt out
of court by indulging a feeling of private resentment, and resorting to
some epithet of national abuse. The mind wishes to pass an act of
uniformity for all its judgments: in defiance of every day’s experience,
it will have things of a piece, and where it cannot have every thing
right or its own way, is determined to have it all wrong.
A Frenchman, we will say, drops what we think a frivolous remark, which
excites in us some slight degree of impatience: presently after, he
makes a shrewd, sensible observation. This rather aggravates the
mischief, than mends it; for it throws us out in our calculations, and
confounds the distinction between _sense_ and _nonsense_ in our minds. A
volley of unmeaning declamation or frothy impertinence causes us less
chagrin than a single word that overturns some assertion we had made, or
puts us under the necessity of reversing, or imposes on us the still
more unwelcome task of revising our conclusions. It is easy in this case
to save ourselves the trouble by calling our antagonist _knave_ or
_fool_; and the temptation is too strong, when we have a whole host of
national prejudices at our back to justify us in so concise and
satisfactory a mode of reasoning. A greater fund of vivacity and
agreeable qualities in our neighbours is not sure to excite simple
gratitude or admiration; it much oftener excites envy, and we are uneasy
till we have quieted the sense of our deficiency by construing the
liveliness of temper or invention, with which we cannot keep pace, into
an excess of levity, and the continued flow of animal spirits into a
species of intoxication or insanity. Because the French are animated and
full of gesticulation, they are a _theatrical_ people; if they smile and
are polite, they are _like monkeys_—an idea an Englishman never has out
of his head, and it is well if he can keep it between his lips.[24] No
one assuredly would appear dull and awkward, who can help it. Many an
English _belle_, who figures at home in the first circles of fashion and
is admired for her airy, thoughtless volubility, is struck dumb, and
looks a mere _dowdy_ (as if it were a voluntary or assumed
transformation of character) the moment she sets foot on French ground;
and the whispered sounds, _lourde_ or _elle n’est pas spirituelle_,
lingering in her ears, will not induce her to dissuade her husband (if
he is a Lord or Member of Parliament) from voting for a French war, and
are answered by the thunders of our cannon on the French coast! We even
quarrel with the beauty of French women, because it is not English. If
their features are regular, we find fault with their complexions; and as
to their expression, we grow tired of that eternal smile upon their
faces; though their teeth are white, why should they be always shewing
them? Their eyes have an unpleasant glitter about them; and their
eye-brows, which are frequently black and arched, are painted and put
on! In short, no individual, no nation is liked by another for the
advantages it possesses over it in wit or wisdom, in happiness or
virtue. We despise others for their inferiority, we hate them for their
superiority; and I see no likelihood of an accommodation at this rate.
The English go abroad; and when they come back, they brood over the
civilities or the insults they have received with equal discontent. The
gaiety of the Continent has thrown an additional damp upon their native
air, and they wish to clear it by setting fire to a foreign town or
blowing up a foreign citadel. We are then easy and comfortable for a
while. We think we can do something, that is, violence and wrong; and
should others talk of retaliating, we say with Lord Bathurst, ‘Let them
come!—our fingers tingling for the fray, and finding that nothing rouses
us from our habitual stupor like hard blows. Defeated in the arts of
peace, we get in good humour with ourselves by trying those of war.
Ashamed to accost a lady, we dare face a bastion—without spirit to hold
up our heads, we are too obstinate to turn our backs—and give ourselves
credit for being the greatest nation in the world, because our Jack Tars
(who defend the wooden walls of Old England—the same that we afterwards
see with sore arms and wooden legs, begging and bawling about our
streets) are the greatest _blackguards_ on the face of the globe;
because our Life Guardsmen, who have no brains to lose, are willing to
have them knocked out, and because with the incessant noise and stir of
our steam-engines and spinning-jennies (for having no wish to enjoy, we
are glad to work ourselves to death) we can afford to pay all costs!
What makes the matter worse, is the idle way in which we _abstract_ upon
one another’s characters. We are struck only with the differences, and
leave the common qualities out of the question. This renders a mutual
understanding hopeless. We put the exceptions for the rule. If we meet
with any thing odd and absurd in France, it is immediately set down as
French and characteristic of the country, though we meet with a thousand
odd and disagreeable things every day in England (that we never met
before) without taking any notice of them. There is a wonderful
_keeping_ in our prejudices; we reason as consistently as absurdly upon
the confined notions we have taken up. We put the good, wholesome,
hearty, respectable qualities into one heap and call it English, and the
bad, unwholesome, frivolous, and contemptible ones into another heap,
and call it French; and whatever does not answer to this pretended
sample, we reject as spurious and partial evidence. Our coxcomb conceit
stands over the different races of mankind, like a smart serjeant of a
regiment, and drills them into a pitiful uniformity, we ourselves being
picked out as the _élite du corps_, and the rest of the world forming
the forlorn hope of humanity. One would suppose, to judge from the
conversation of the two nations, that all Frenchmen were alike, and that
all Englishmen were personified by a particular individual, nicknamed
John Bull. The French have no idea that there is any thing in England
but roast-beef and plum-pudding, and a number of round, red faces,
growing fat and stupid upon such kind of fare; while our traditional
notion of the French is that of _soup-maigre_ and wooden shoes, and a
set of scare-crow figures corresponding to them. All classes of society
and differences of character are by this unfair process consolidated
into a sturdy, surly English yeoman on the one side of the Channel, or
are boiled down and evaporate into a shivering, chattering
valet-de-chambre, or miserable half-starved peasant on the other. It is
a pleasant way of settling accounts and taking what we please for
granted. It is a very old method of philosophizing, and one that is
quite likely to last!
If we see a little old hump-backed withered Frenchman about five feet
high, tottering on before us on a pair of spindle-shanks, with white
thread stockings, a shabby great-coat, and his hair done up into a
queue, his face dry, grey, and pinched up, his cheeks without blood in
them, his eyes without lustre, and his body twisted like a corkscrew, we
point to this grotesque figure as a true Frenchman, as the very essence
of a Parisian, and an edifying vestige of the ancient _régime_ and of
the last age, before the French character was sophisticated. It does not
signify that just before we had passed a bluff, red-faced, jolly-looking
coachman or countryman, six feet four inches high, having limbs in
proportion, and able to eat up any two ordinary Englishmen. This
thumping make-weight is thrown out of the scale, because it does not
help out our argument, or confirm our prejudices. This huge, raw-boned,
heavy, knock-kneed, well-fed, shining-faced churl makes no impression on
our minds, because he is not French, according to our idea of the word;
or we pass him over under the pretext that he _ought_ to be an
Englishman. But the other extreme we seize upon with avidity and
delight; we dandle it, we doat upon it, we make a puppet of it to the
imagination; we speak of it with glee, we quote it as a text, we try to
make a caricature of it; our pens itch to describe it as a complete
specimen of the French nation, and as a convincing and satisfactory
proof, that the English are the only people who are of sound mind and
body, strong wind and limb, and free from the infirmities of a puny
constitution, affectation, and old age! An old woman in France, with
wrinkles and a high-plaited cap, strikes us as being quite French, as if
the old women in England did not wear night-caps, and were not wrinkled.
In passing along the streets, or through the walks near Paris, we
continually meet a gentleman and lady whom we take for English, and they
turn out to be French; or we fancy that they are French, and we find on
a nearer approach, or from hearing them speak, that they are English.
This does not at all satisfy us that there is no such marked difference
between the two nations as we are led to expect; but we fasten on the
first _lusus naturæ_ we can find out as a striking representative of the
universal French nation, and chuckle over and almost hug him to our
bosoms as having kindly come to the relief of our wavering prejudices,
and as an undoubted proof of our superiority to such a set of abortions
as this, and of our right to insult and lord it over them at pleasure!
If an object of this kind (as it sometimes happens) asks charity with an
air of briskness and _politesse_, and does not seem quite so wretched as
we would have him, this is a further confirmation of our theory of the
national conceit and self-sufficiency; and his cheerfulness and content
under deformity and poverty are added to his catalogue of crimes![25] We
have a very old and ridiculous fancy in England, that all Frenchmen are
or ought to be lean, and their women short and crooked; and when we see
a great, fat, greasy Frenchman waddling along and ready to burst with
good living, we get off by saying that it is an unwholesome kind of fat;
or, if a Frenchwoman happens to be tall and straight, we immediately
take a disgust at her masculine looks, and ask if all the women in
France are giantesses?
It is strange we cannot let other people alone who concern themselves so
little about us. Why measure them by our standard? Can we allow nothing
to exist for which we cannot account, or to be right which has not our
previous sanction? The difficulty seems to be to suspend our judgments,
or to suppose a variety of causes to produce a variety of effects. All
men must be alike—all Frenchmen must be alike. This is a portable
theory, and suits our indolence well. But, if they do not happen to come
exactly into our terms, we are angry, and transform them into beasts.
Our first error lies in expecting a number of different things to tally
with an abstract idea, or general denomination, and we next stigmatize
every deviation from this standard by a nickname. A Spaniard, who has
more gravity than an Englishman, is an owl; a Frenchman, who has less,
is a monkey. I confess, this last simile sticks a good deal in my
throat; and at times it requires a stretch of philosophy to keep it from
rising to my lips. A walk on the Boulevards is not calculated to rid an
Englishman of all his prejudices or of all his spleen. The resemblance
to an English _promenade_ afterwards makes the difference more
mortifying. There is room to breathe, a footpath on each side of the
road, and trees over your head. But presently the appearance of a
Bartlemy-fair all the year round, the number of little shabby stalls,
the old iron, pastry, and children’s toys; the little white lapdogs,
with red eyes, combing and washing; the mud and the green trees, wafting
alternate odours; the old women sitting like _terra cotta_ figures; the
passengers running up against you, (most of them so taken up with
themselves that they seem like a crowd of absent people!) the noise, the
bustle, the flutter, the hurry without visible object; the vivacity
without intelligible meaning; the loud and incessant cry of
‘_Messieurs_’ from a bawling charlatan inviting you to some paltry,
cheating game, and a broad stare or insignificant grin from the most
ill-bred and ill-looking of the motley set at the appearance of an
Englishman among them; all this jumble of little teazing, fantastical,
disagreeable, chaotic sensations really puts one’s patience a little to
the test, and throws one a little off one’s guard. I was in this humour
the other day, and wanted some object to conduct off a superfluity of
rising irritability, when, at a painted booth opposite, I saw a great
lubberly boy in an ecstacy of satisfaction. He had on a red coat, a huge
wig of coarse yellow hair, and with his hat was beating a monkey in the
face, dressed _en militaire_—grinning, jabbering, laughing, screaming,
frantic with delight at the piteous aspect and peevish gestures of the
animal; while a tall showman, in a rusty blue coat and long pig-tail,
(which might have been stolen from the monkey) looked on with severe
complacency and a lofty pride in the _bizarrerie_, and the ‘mutually
reflected charities’ of the scene. The trio (I am vexed to think it)
massed themselves in my imagination, and I was not sorry to look upon
them as a little national group, well-matched, and tricked out alike in
pretensions to humanity.[26]
I was relieved from this fit of misanthropy, by getting into the shade
of the barrier-wall, and by meeting a man, (a common French mechanic,)
carrying a child in his arms, and the mother by its side, clapping her
hands at it, smiling, and calling out ‘Mon petit ami!’ with unmingled
and unwearied delight. There was the same over-animation in talking to
the child as there would have been in talking to a dog or a parrot. But
here it gave pleasure instead of pain, because our sympathies went along
with it. I change my opinion of the French character fifty times a day,
because, at every step, I wish to form a theory, which at the next step,
is contradicted. The ground seems to me so uncertain—the tenure by which
I hold my opinions so frail, that at last I grow ashamed of them
altogether—of what I think right, as of what I think wrong.
To praise or to blame is perhaps equally an impertinence. While we are
strangers to foreign manners and customs, we cannot be judges; it would
take almost a life to understand the reasons and the differences; and by
the time we can be supposed to do this, we become used to them, and in
some sense parties concerned. The English are the fools of an
hypothesis, as the Scotch are of a system. We must have an opinion—right
or wrong; but, in that case, till we have the means of knowing whether
it is right or wrong, it is as well to have a qualified one. We may at
least keep our temper, and collect hints for self-correction; we may
amuse ourselves in collecting materials for a decision that may never be
passed, or will have little effect, even when it is, and may clear our
eyesight from the motes and beams of prejudice by looking at things as
they occur. Our opinions have no great influence on others; but the
spirit in which we form them has a considerable one on our own
happiness. It is of more importance to ourselves than to the French,
what we think of them. It would be hard if a mental obliquity on their
parts should ‘thrust us from a level consideration,’ or some hasty
offence taken at the outset should shut up our eyes, our ears, and
understandings for the rest of a journey, that we have commenced for no
other purpose than to be spectators of a new and shifting scene, and to
have our faculties alike open to impressions of all sorts.
What Englishman has not seen the _Cemetery of Père la Chaise_? What
Englishman will undertake either to condemn or entirely approve it,
unless he could enter completely into the minds of the French
themselves? The approach to it (a little way out of Paris) is literally
‘garlanded with flowers.’ You imagine yourself in the neighbourhood of a
wedding, a fair, or some holiday-festival. Women are sitting by the
road-side or at their own doors, making chaplets of a sort of yellow
flowers, which are gathered in the fields, baked, and will then last a
French ‘Forever.’ They have taken ‘the lean abhorred monster,’ Death,
and strewed him o’er and o’er with sweets; they have made the grave a
garden, a flower-bed, where all Paris reposes, the rich and the poor,
the mean and the mighty, gay and laughing, and putting on a fair outside
as in their lifetime. Death here seems life’s playfellow, and grief and
smiling content sit at one tomb together. Roses grow out of the clayey
ground; there is the urn for tears, the slender cross for faith to twine
round; the neat marble monument, the painted wreaths thrown upon it to
freshen memory, and mark the hand of friendship. ‘No black and
melancholic yew-trees’ darken the scene, and add a studied gloom to
it—no ugly death’s heads or carved skeletons shock the sight. On the
contrary, some pretty Ophelia, as general mourner, appears to have been
playing her fancies over a nation’s bier, to have been scattering
‘pansies for thoughts, rue for remembrances.’ But is not the expression
of grief, like hers, a little too fantastical and light-headed? Is it
not too much like a childish game of _Make-Believe_? Or does it not
imply a certain want of strength of mind, as well as depth of feeling,
thus to tamper with the extremity of woe, and varnish over the most
serious contemplation of mortality? True sorrow is manly and decent, not
effeminate or theatrical. The tomb is not a baby-house for the
imagination to hang its idle ornaments and mimic finery in. To meet sad
thoughts, and overpower or allay them by other lofty and tender ones, is
right; but to shun them altogether, to affect mirth in the midst of
sighing, and divert the pangs of inward misfortune by something to catch
the eye and tickle the sense, is what the English do not sympathize
with. It is an advantage the French have over us. The fresh plants and
trees that wave over our graves; the cold marble that contains our
ashes; the secluded scene that collects the wandering thoughts; the
innocent, natural flowers that spring up, unconscious of our
loss—objects like these at once cherish and soften our regrets; but the
petty daily offerings of condolence, the forced liveliness and the
painted pride of the scene before us, are like galvanic attempts to
recall the fleeting life—they neither flatter the dead nor become the
living! One of the most heartless and flimsy extravagances of the _New
Eloise_, is the attempt made to dress up the daughter of Madame d’Orbe
like Julia, and set her in her place at the table after her death. Is
not the burying-ground of the _Père la Chaise_ tricked out and
over-acted much on the same false principle, as if there were nothing
sacred from impertinence and affectation? I will not pretend to
determine; but to an English taste it is so. We see things too much,
perhaps, on the dark side; they see them too much (if that is possible)
on the bright. Here is the tomb of Abelard and Eloise—immortal monument,
immortal as the human heart and poet’s verse can make it! But it is
slight, fantastic, of the olden time, and seems to shrink from the glare
of daylight, or as if it would like to totter back to the old walls of
the Paraclete, and bury its quaint devices and its hallowed inscriptions
in shadowy twilight. It is, however, an affecting sight, and many a
votive garland is sprinkled over it. Here is the tomb of Ney, (the
double traitor) worthy of his fate and of his executioner;—and of
Massena and Kellerman. There are many others of great note, and some of
the greatest names—Molière, Fontaine, De Lille. Chancellors and
_charbottiers_ lie mixed together, and announce themselves with equal
pomp. These people have as good an opinion of themselves after death as
before it. You see a bust with a wreath or crown round its head—a
strange piece of masquerade—and other tombs with a print or miniature of
the deceased hanging to them! Frequently a plain marble slab is laid
down for the surviving relatives of the deceased, waiting its prey in
expressive silence. This is making too free with death, and
acknowledging a claim which requires no kind of light to be thrown upon
it. We should visit the tombs of our friends with more soothing
feelings, without marking out our own places beside them. But every
French thought or sentiment must have an external emblem. The
inscriptions are in general, however, simple and appropriate. I only
remarked one to which any exception could be taken; it was a plain
tribute of affection to some individual by his family, who professed to
have ‘erected this _modest_ monument to preserve his memory _forever_!’
What a singular idea of modesty and eternity! So the French, in the
Catalogue of the Louvre, in 1803, after recounting the various
transmigrations of the Apollo Belvidere in the last two thousand years
(vain warnings of mutability!) observed, that it was at last placed in
the Museum at Paris, ‘to remain there forever.’ Alas! it has been gone
these ten years.