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FRENCH TRAITS
FRENCH TRAITS

AN ESSAY IN COMPARATIVE CRITICISN

d BY
aw
W. ©. BROWNELL

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1889
COPYRIGHT, 1888, 1889, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

TROW'S.
PRINTING AND BOOKBINOING COMPANY,
NEW York,
TO RICHARD WHITEING
II.
ITI.
IV.
Vv

VI.

VII.

VIII.
IX.

CONTENTS

THE SoctaL Instinct,
MoRatity, . a
INTELLIGENCE, .

SENSE AND SENTIMENT,
MANNERS,

WoMEN, ‘ ‘ 3
Tae ART INSTINCT,

THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT, .

DEMOCRACY, ‘ *

. New YORK AFTER PARIS,.

PAGE

41

83
. 125
- 1638
. 201
. 248
» 279
. 313
. 375
I
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT

Tue apparent contrast between modern French-
men and the crusaders, between the “ café-haunt-
ers” and the cathedral-builders, stimulates specula-
tion as to whether the present interest of France is
commensurate with her historic importance. The
noblest monuments in the world attest the part she
once played in the drama of civilization. Were
Rheims and Aniiens, Bourges and Beauvais, the em-
bodied aspiration of the race whose activities one
observes along the Paris boulevards to-day? Are
there any signs in the actual Normandy of the spirit
which dotted the North coast with the stone temples
beside which their differentiation across the Channel
seems often flimsy and superficial? Or, at the other
end of France, as one descends the magnificent
thoroughfare which consoles the Marseillais for the
greater general splendor of Paris, does any linger-
ing reminiscence reach one of the instinct which
covered the Midi with the massive monuments of
Provencal Romanesque? As one observes the audi-
ence which listens to Guignol, it seems fabulous
that the Frank ever crossed the Rhine. As one
notes the gayety, the bonhomie, the bright gracious-
4 FRENCH TRAITS

ness of a Parisian or provincial crowd, the Merovin-
gian epoch seems a myth. Is there any traceable
relationship between St. Remy at Rheims and St.
Augustin at Paris, between St. Jean at Lyons and
the Nouvel Opéra, between the Sainte Chapelle and
the Panthéon? The difference is as vast as that
between gloom and gayety, between the grandiose
and the familiar, the mystic and the rational. From
the Palace of the Popes at Avignon to the Marseilles
Cannebiére, from the Chartres sculpture to M. Fal-
guiére, from Plessis-les-Tours to the Tuileries, is a
long way. The contrast seems not in epoch, but in
character. In no other country is it marked in any-
thing like the same degree. In England the same
character is traceable in the London Law Courts
and the ruins of Kenilworth ; Oxford Street and
Piccadilly but deepen the impression of Chester and
Warwick ; there is a subtle sympathy between West-
minster and St. Paul’s. One is sure that the ances-
tors of the shopmen in the Burlington Arcade and
of the owners of the West End palaces fought side
by side at Crécy and Poictiers, where they occupied
pretty much the same reciprocal relations and en-
tertained, mutatis mutandis, pretty much the same
notions of life, art, and foreigners. In Germany it
is not very different. The cavalrymen of 1870-71,
who sabred the damask and stole the clocks of the
French chateaux, were lineal descendants of the
lanzknechts of the Rhine. Just as, no doubt, Ger-
man “probity,” directness, and simplicity remain
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 5

what they were in the time of Luther—not to men-
tion that of Arminius, whom even at this distance
of time Professor Mommsen finds it difficult to
refer to without emotion. Cologne Cathedral was
finished within the decade, after the original designs.
Bavaria goes wild to-day over the stories of the meis-
ter-singers. Hven Dresden figurines and Saxon ba-
roque in general are gothic in the last analysis—
quite without the grace born of the Renaissance pas-
sion for the beautiful, and still as clumsy as per-
fected knowledge will permit. The succession to
Winckelmann is certainly as little frivolous as Burgk-
mair and Schongauer, and German criticism is still
metaphysical and scholastic. Italy, from the time
of the Pisans down to the decline of the high Renais-
sance, and from the return of the popes to the French
Revolution, visibly illustrates a natural evolution.
The same may be said of Spain. And since the
Revolution, whatever is distinctly modern in Italian
or Spanish character and culture, any note of dis-
cordant modification, is to be attributed in no small
degree to the French occupation. Only in France|
does there seem to be a break.

The times change, and the most acutely alive
change most in them. Since the days of Louis le
Gros, when the national unity began, France haa
most conspicuously of all nations changed with the
epoch ; in those successive readjustments which we
call progress she has almost invariably been in the j
lead. She was the star of the ages of faith as she |
6 FRENCH TRAITS

is the light of the age of fellowship. The contrast

between her actual self and her monuments is,
therefore, most striking ; but at the same time it is
superficial only and perfectly explicable. And its

explanation gives the key to French character ; for
there is one instinct of human nature, one aspira-

\ tion of the mind, which France has incarnated with

‘unbroken continuity from the first—since there
‘was a France at all France has embodied the social
instinct, It was this instinct which finally triumphed

over the barbaric Frankish personality ; which dur-
ing the panic and individualism of the Middle Ages
took refuge in the only haven sympathetically dis-
posed to harbor it and. produced the finest monu-
ments of Kurope by the force of spiritual solidarity ;
which, so soon as the time was ripe, extended itself
temporally and created a civil organism thatrescued
the human spirit from servitude, and which, fin-
ally, in the great transformation of the Revolution,
obtained the noblest victory over the forces of an-
archy and unreason that history records. Thus in
the days when the medieval spirit of authority, of
concentration, of asceticism, of individualism was
almost all-powerful in Europe, the French social
instinct triumphed in the only sphere in which
exalted effort was productive; and now that this
instinct has been brought into harmony with the
Time-Spirit, now that solidarity is not only secular-
ized but popularized, France illustrates its new
phases as perfectly as she did the old. There has
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 7

really been no break in her historic continuity. The!
cathedrals are not feudal. They were the product
of a spirit partly ecclesiastical, partly secular, but
always social—the true Gallo-Roman spirit which,
great as was the perfection attained by German
feudalism in France, constantly struggled against
and finally conquered its foreign Frankish foe. The
cathedrals, in a word, are merely the bridge by
which France clears the Middle Age. They are gran-
diose links in the chain which unites the Revolu-
tion to the twelfth century communal movement for
equality. They mark a phase of the long struggle
of solidarity with anarchic forces, as do the anti-
ecclesiastical movement of Philippe-le-Bel, the na-
tional condensation of Louis XI., the Renaissance
reversion to classic social as well as artistic ideals,
and finally the burial at the -Revolution of moral
and material Byzantinism.

There is accordingly even a closer spiritual iden-
tity between the Nouvel Opéra and Notre Dame de
Paris than there is, for example, between the Eng-
lish Cathedral and its perfunctory reproduction in
the British Houses of Parliament—the identity of
instinct differing only in phase. And this instinct
is, as I said, the key to French character and the
most conspicuous trait whereby French character
differs from our own. French history is the history |
of this instinct. The fusion of Gallic characteris-
tics with Roman institutions apparently developed
a disposition of Athenian interdependence and soli-
8 FRENCH TRAITS

darity, all of whose accomplishments were to be
organically wrought, and whose failures were to
come from the subordination of the individual mem-
ber involved in the supremacy of the general struct-
ure. The Catholic Church came next and contrib-
uted an influence to the moulding of modern France
which it is impossible not to recognize on every hand.
No one can pass from a Protestant to a Catholic
country without being struck by the numerous
characteristic differences which force themselves
upon the sense and the mind. The two shores of
the English Channel, of Lake Geneva, of the Hol-
landsch Diep, the two sides of the Vosges—wher-
ever the two systems come into contact the contrast
is marked. To a Protestant entering France the
influence of Catholicism is especially striking, be-
cause in France, owing to French clearness and
method, what elsewhere are only Latin tendencies
become perfectly developed traits. It is indefinite
at first, but very sensible nevertheless, Long fam-
iliarity deepens the impression. The absence of the
individual spirit, the absence of the sense of per-
' sonal responsibility, the social interdependence of
_ people, the respect for public opinion, the conse-
quent consideration for others, the free play of mind
compatible only with a certain carelessness as to
deductions, and a confidence that society in general
will see to it that the world roll on even if one’s own
logic be imperfect—a dozen traits characteristic and
cardinal one associates at once with the influence of
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 9

the Catholic Church. The great work of the Refor-
mation was to « quicken the sense of personal respon-
sibility by awakening the conscience. The predom-
inant influence of the Catholic Church has been to
enforce the sense of social interdependence among
men, to destroy individualism by organizing and
systematizing, and then itself assuming entire charge
of the domain of the conscience. The conscience is,
of course, the most important of the springs of hu-
man action. In proportion as the individual charges
himself ‘ith soliciting and following its oracles his
character is fortified and concentrated, his individ-
uality intensified. In proportion as he resigns this
charge into other hands, he places the true centre of
his moral nature outside himself, his individuality be-
comes less marked, and his relations to others more
sensible, more important. Is he not, indeed, vitally
connected with something external which charges it-
self with the direction of the most powerful moral
agent of his nature, and are not all his fellows thus
connected also? The bond of union between men is
thus infinitely stronger in Catholic communities than
in Protestant, and in this way directly comes about,
by gentle gradations of logical consistency, that con-
siderateness, that deference, that sense of dependence
upon others, that feeling that one’s true centre is
outside of one and in a safer place, so to speak, the
respect for public opinion, the harmony with one’s
time and environment—all the fruits in fine of the
social instinct re-enforced by religious system.
10 FRENCIL TRAITS

This is the direct, sensible influence of Catholicism,
as on the other hand the direct, sensible influence of
-Protestantism has been to isolate and to individual-
ize. But the indirect influence of each system for
being less sensible is not the less real or important,
and the indirect influence of Catholicism has tended
to social expansion as potently as its direct influence
to social concert. Renunciation and asceticism, ec-
stacy and elevation, the mediaeval virtues, in fact, are
often called especially Catholic virtues. They are,
indeed, eminently virtues of the Catholic Chirch, but
they have never been virtues of a Catholic society.
Renunciation shines out beautifully and bountifully
from the pages of the Legends of the Saints. His-
tory is full of instances of the divine self-forgetting
of monks and nuns. Even Catholic fanaticism has
always been marked by it. Ignatius had as much of it
in his way as St. Theresa. But in Catholic societies
themselves, the Catholic Church in this regard has
always strictly separated itself from the world. It
has been in them, but not of them. It has, so to
speak, organized its renunciation, and its “organized
renunciation has sold indulgences to society in gen-
eral. The result has been, of course, that society
in general—that is to say, everyone with no clear
vocation for thorough-going renunciation—improves
its opportunity and uses its indulgences freely.

\ That in France it never did, and certainly does not
| now, use these to their utmost limit.is due to the
; native French talent for sobriety, but it is evident
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 11

that the instinct for social expansion has been forti-
fied by Catholicism, as it has been repressed by
Protestantism, in the-same way that one system has
quickened and thé other lessened the sense of mu-
tual interdependence among men. Just as, in con,
trast to the separatism of Protestantism, Catholicism
has tended to unify and nationalize, to render organic |
the structure of society, so it has tended to develop}
all those sides of man’s nature which relate him to'
the external world, and we have in France, as a re-
sult in great part of Catholic influences, not only a-
people intensely organic and solidaire, but a people
possessed of the epicurean rather than the ascetic
ideal in morals, its unmoral nature harmoniously
evolved without restraint from a higher spiritual
law, its intelligence so highly cultivated as some-
times to supplant the soul in the sphere of senti-
ment, and its social and mutual activities carried to
an extent and refined in a degree of which we have
ordinarily a very inadequate idea.

The preponderance thus of unifying over contro-
versial and separatist forces has rendered it the
most homogeneous in the world, and, accordingly, |
if it be ever excusable to speak of a people in the |
mass, it is excusable in the case of the French.
‘What one notes in the individual is more than any-
where else apt to be a national trait." There is, of
course, differentiation enough, but it begins further
along than with us, and is structural rather than
fortuitous. They vary .by types rather than by
12 FRENCH TRAITS

units. The.class only is specialized. Their homo-
geneousness is not uniformity, but it is divided
rather in the details than in the grand construction.
The Parisians so bore each other often by force of
mutual sympathies and identical ideas, that ennut
itself has probably had a large share in the variety
of their political experimentation and in the evolu-
tion of their elaborate epicureanism. They are
infinitely civilized. Individuals are of less import
than the relations between them ; hence manners
and art. Character counts less than capacity ; hence
the worship of the intelligence. They have little or
none of our introspectiveness. They understand
themselves thoroughly, but by instinct, and not as
the result of examination. They are far more inter-
ested in you than in themselves, and contemplate
you much more closely. This indeed they do very
narrowly, and an American who is himself enough
addicted to “taking notes” to remark the practice
under its skilful veil of interest and civility is apt to
find it irksome. But even in your personality their
interest is never pushed to the extent of ‘consider-
ing such of its complexities as arise from counter-
currents of mind and feeling and will—such as a
writer like George Eliot, for instance, or Hawthorne,
or Thomas Hardy, is so greatly attracted by. They
seem always to fancy youa “ plain case,” and only
solicitous to learn what label to take from their
assortment (an assortment, by the way, far more
comprehensive than any other people’s) with which
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 13

to ticket you. If your complexity is the chief thing
about you, they ticket you “fin” (for which our
word is “subtle ”), and so pigeon-hole you without
further examination. It is humiliating to the Am-
erican sense to note how often this is really all that
the case calls for; the suggestion is irresistible
that much of our personal “hair-splitting” is as
nebulously unprofitable as the refinements of Teu-
tonic metaphysics. With the French, at all events,
the process of working out any social equation is
always marked by the use of the personal factor as
a known term. “X” is never you, but your capa-
cities, your manifestations, what you, with your
Anglo-Saxon self-concentration, describe as your
mere “phenomena.”

Idiosyncrasy, in a word, has little interest eal
them. Until it has been embalmed in legend it is
rather resented than tolerated, even in its grandiose
manifestations. There is little hero-worship that is
either blind or vague. There is absolutely no
French sympathy with the notion that heroes are
made of essentially different stuff from the rest of
mankind. Great men are, if “nobler brothers,”
most of all “one in blood ;” and it is by sufferance
only that they are permitted to “lord it o’er” their
fellows, in Sterling’s phrase, by either “looks of
beauty” or “words of good.” There is the Hugo,
the Millet, as there was the Napoleonic légende, but
their inspiration is mainly decorous and conformed
to the prevalent regard for the fitness of things
14 FRENCH TRAITS

rather than emotionally sincere. ‘Cher maitre” is
a title borne by scores. M. Dumas fils is a “cher
maitre.” And the popularity of this attitude is
ascribable to the vanity which seeks association or
identification with celebrity, not at all to the Ger-
manic quality of admiration. Of Goethe's three
kinds of reverence—for what is above us, for our
equals, and for what is beneath us—the second
only, that is to say what is more properly called
deference, is commonly illustrated by Frenchmen.
Such a book as Mr. Peter Bayne’s “Lessons from
my Masters” would be a solecism in France. The
proceedings of the Browning Society would excite
amazement. The spirit of the Moliéristes and that
of the Goethe adorers are in complete contrast. The
intense emotion which led one of Carlyle’s secre-
taries publicly to express a sense of spiritual indebt-
edness to him next after his “Lord and Saviour,
Jesus Christ,” would seem whimsically excessive. No
Frenchman so surrenders himself to any personal
influence; awe and abjectness are equally un-
French. The anecdote of one contemporary Eng-
lish poet going, footstool in hand, to sit at the feet
of another, indicates rather the French order of
hero-worship, which if less cockney in its expression
is characterized by the same sense of the impor-
tance of the impersonal function discharged in com-
mon by the hero and his worshipper.

Character, being thus less considered, develops
less energy. “That which all things tend to educe
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 15

—which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolu-
tions go to form and deliver—is character,” says
Emerson, with transcendental confidence. Yes!
but not character as we understand it, not indi-
vidual character independent of its environment.
Freedom goes to form and deliver that, most assur-
edly, but not necessarily intercourse, cultivation,
revolutions—of which the French have had far
more than they have had of freedom. ‘ Trust thy-
self !—every heart vibrates to that iron string.” In
France every heart thus vibrates only when the said
string sounds a harmonious strain in concerted
music. ‘The giants must live apart. The kings
can have no company,” says Thackeray. In France
the ‘giants are as rare as the pygmies. The social
instinct is inimical to both. The great Frenchmen,
it has been acidly remarked, are apt to be Italians,
and in effect the way in which individual Italians
and the entire French people have united, at vari-
ous epochs in history, in the accomplishment of
great works is exceedingly instructive as to the
tendencies of either civilization. The great French-
men are generally great on their human and social
sides, by distinction rather than by energy. They
are never monsters. No ascetics are numbered
among them. Their minds are lofty, but they are
not self-gathered in them. Even the French heroes
have less egoism than vanity ; it is Henry IV., not
Napoleon, that is truly national. And, as history
reminds us, they are not found isolated but in
16 FRENCI TRAITS

groups, whose members are mutually dependent
and supporting. But for this, and for the general
elevation of the subsidiary groups around them, the
eminence of many of them would be more conspic-
uous than it is; many merely eminent names in
French history would shine heroic and grandiose
on the roll of almost any other nation, because of
this difference in perspective. But the great ac-
complishments of France have, in general, been the
work rather of the nation than of those heroes who
“look at the stars with an answering ray.” Wher-
ever the task of progress has demanded intellectual
inspiration or moral energy, it is the Spaniard, the
Italian, the Englishman who excels, but it is the

' French people entire. The individual work of its

exceptional voleanic spirits like Mirabeau, like
Danton, is apt to be incomplete. Solider building
is done by the nation organized—despotically un-
der the Corsican Bonaparte, autonomously under
the Genoese Gambetta. The Revolution, the con-
quering of Europe, the freeing of the human spirit,
which the kings of the Continent and the aristoc-
racy of England could only temporarily reimprison,
in 1815, at Vienna, were Titanic works wrought by
the social instinct of the most completely organic
people in history.

In the familiar and every-day, as well as in the
exceptional and heroic work of life, the power and
importance of the social instinct show themselves
in France in a way of which we have no experience,
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 17

The relations between individuals being exalted
into a distinct social force, apart from the person-.
alities therewith connected, these relations are regu-
lated, utilized, and decorated to very noteworthy
ends. They are used with us mainly for business
purposes ; it is chiefly, perhaps, the commercial
traveller who-exploits them. The rest of us enjoy
them or neglect them as the case may be, but take
no thought to organize and direct them. The social
instinct, nevertheless, being native to man, even to
man in our environment of riotous individualism, it
incurs the risk of becoming depraved if it be not
developed. ‘This, indeed, is its very frequent fate
in many of our communities, and the amount of
positive debauchery due to a perversion of this in-
stinct, which perversion is itself due to neglect, is
very suggestive. And positive debauchery aside,
the pathetic failure of genial but weak natures that
in a truly social miliew would certainly have suc-
ceeded is still more significant because it is still
more hopeless. In France social capacity is a prin- |
cipal part of the youth’s equipment for his journey’
through life. In virtue of it young men rise in
the world, obtain “ protection,” and acquire vantage
ground. With us, hitherto, a turn for what is
called society is fully as likely to be a bar as an aid,
to a young man’s success, being accepted often as
indicating frivolity, if not extravagance and dissipa- ;
tion, and, at all events, hostile to the industry and
severe application which pass for credentials of
2
18 FRENCIIL TRAITS

solidity. Success in an industrial society does not
depend on the favor of women, and we are wont @
little to contemn the large and interesting class of
petits jeunes gens of which French society makes so
much. On the other hand, we have many accentu-
ated types wholly peculiar to ourselves and gener-
ated by the struggle of the ambitious and intensely
concentrated individual with an amorphous and un-
developed society which he can in a measure mould
as well as figure in, provided only his energy be
sufficient to the task. Never was there such a field
for the parvenu as that we furnish. Never was the
parvenu so really estimable and distinguished a
person. With energy and persistence, a man who
only yesterday ate with his knife may to-morrow
lay down rules of etiquette, a beneficiary dispense
charity, a country merchant regulate a railway sys-
tem—merely by the force through which strenu-
ous personality imposes itself on a society whose
solidarity is too feeble to protect it against assault
from without and treachery from within, In most
instances, indeed, our pretense of solidarity is pure
snobbishness, and our parvenus really—as was said
of Napoleon—arrivés.

The Frenchman’s instincts and impulses receive,
on the contrary, a social rather than an egoistic
development. His position in the world, the esteem
of his neighbors, everything, in fact, except looking
for the resurrection of the dead, which prevents
him from being of all men most miserable, are ob-
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 19

tained by a far more complex exercise of talent than
that ascetic concentration of effort known among us
as “looking out for Number One.” Look out for
“Number One,” the Frenchman certainly does in the.
most unflinching and devoted manner ; but the pro-
cess is with him adapted to gregarious rather than
insulated conditions. He easily spares more time
from business than we do from idling to expend in
the expansiveness necessary for elaborate social
development ; furthermore, social conditions with |
him prevent time so expended from being, even in'
an indirect sense, wasted, so that he is never more’
profitably occupied than when he is, so to speak, '
least concentrated. He conquers in love, war,
affairs, and society, not as with us, with the Ger-
manic peoples generally, in virtue of strenuous)
personality, but through many-sidedness, appreci-''
ativeness, perception, sympathy—in a word, less by
energy than by intelligence. And this intelligence
itself is socially developed. The late M. Caro said
of the Abbé Roux that his genius, “formed in-soli-«
tude, outside of all intellectual commerce, of. all
expansion,” is characterized by “an inner spring
and source of ideas in their native state, charged
with parasitical elements neither purged by essay nor
filtered by discussion; by ignorance which aston-
ishes in connection with certain points of view truly
striking ; by faults of taste unavoidable in the ab-
sence of all exterior control and points of compari-
son ; by a certain awkwardness, sometimes a singular
20 FRENCH TRAITS

want of discernment, and hence a defect of propor-
tion and development between thoughts really new
and those which seem so only to the eyes of the
artist who believes himself to have discovered them.”
One could not better describe the traits which, in
our life, as well as in our literature, our individual-
ism throws into sharp relief in contrast with those
of the French.

In his “Pensées d’un Solitaire” the Abbé Roux
himself observes that ‘‘men of talent, so long as
they have only intuitive experiences, are bound to

ommit follies,” and the universal prevalence of this
conviction in France secures great openness and
. }spiritual reciprocity. There are no people whom it
is “difficult to know,” who are very “reserved” in
_ [the presence of strangers, who are particularly “ret-
ficent” about their own affairs, who have “secrets”
and resent familiarity. A high development of the
social instinct makes short work of these varieties
of a type well known and rather highly esteemed
among ourselves. It unmasks them at once as in
some sort pretenders, as people who devote a large
share of their attention, while the battle of life is
raging, to keeping open the communications in
their rear, either for opportunities of retreat or in
order to execute some brilliant flank movement.
In other words, either their self-distrust or their
self-conceit is shown to be excessive. In France
the battle of life is, socially speaking, nearly a pure
figure of speech. The foe is at any rate impersonal.
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 21

No one’s individual attitude is hostile or suspicious.
There is none of the exciting competition which|
with us exists among friendly rivals even. Hence,
beyond those matters which are essentially private,
being nobody’s business and rightfully appealing to
nobody’s interest, people generally have nothing to
conceal, The milieu is not only friendly, but it is
intelligent. Neither timidity nor strategy, of the
kind we are familiar with, would avail much with
it. It would be impossible to disguise them. The
“reserve” of our young ladies, their true opinions
on public questions, the secret they are thinking
about, which young men are rewarded by being
permitted gradually to discover as they become
better and better acquainted, are, for example, pe-
culiar to ourselves; but in France, especially, they
would be purposeless for the same reason that in-
quiries as to the secrets of freemasonry or the com-
position of patent medicines are—namely, - not
because they are undiscoverable, but because what
is worth knowing about them can be divined.
There is, of course, the contrast between the bavard
and the nature condensée, but the latter is none the
less a frank and not a secretive nature. There are
no prigs.

Competition is a great word with us, but socially
it implies a solecism. It means egoism, and the
difference between our individualism and French
social interdependence is very well shown in the
correspondence of our egoism to French vanity.
22 FRENCH TRAITS

How far egoism may be carried, what bleakness it
may introduce into life, and how it may blight
existence one may easily guess; but its baleful in-
fluence has never been so vividly shown as in that
very remarkable book published a few years ago
land entitled “The Story of a Country Town.” A
more important contribution to sociology has not
been made within the decade. No one can have
read it without being affected by its gloom, its moral
squalor, its ashen tone. There is nothing more
depressing in Russian fiction, and, like Russian
fiction, it is wholly unfactitious. It is a picture
entirely typical, and typical of one hesitates to say
how many American communities. And no one can
have read it attentively without perceiving that the
| secret of its dreariness is its picture of the excesses
of individualism. Lack of sympathy with each other ;
a narrow and degrading struggle for “success;” a
crying competition; a dull, leaden introspection ;
no community of interest, material or ideal, except
of a grossly material religious ideality ; duty igno-
rantly conceived ; sacrifice needlessly made ; gener-
ous impulses leading nowhither, and elevated effort
clogged by the absence of worthy ends; the human
spirit, in fine, thrown back on itself and operating,
80 to speak, in vacuo ; and the partly tragic, chiefly
vulgar, wholly sterile conclusion of all this Mr.
Howe has painted for us with a master-hand. Be-
side his picture the wild orgies and bacchanalian
frenzy of a society in decadence appear sane.
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 23

septic. Vanity has its origin in approbativeness,
and te study to please is a safeguard against many
evils in morals as well as in manners. It is, to be:
sure, mainly through their vanity that the French
show to us their weak side. It is a characteristic ;
that in excess causes character to atrophy. It .
stimulates cowardice in the face of ridicule, and
leads infallibly to puerile confusions of shadow and
substance. And the French have far more of it
than any other people. Stendhal never tires of
reproaching his countrymen with it, and declares it
responsible for his exile in Italy. Only the other
day M. Albert Wolff, whose competence is conspicu-
ous, declared it epidemic, affirming French society
entire to be frappée_par_le fléau_de la vanité. But
vanity as the French possess it, and modified as it
is by their all-informing intelligence, is a not too
unpleasant, as it is an inevitable, concomitant of the
spirit of society. Its absence would mean, logically,
infinitely more loss than gain in social relations.
“Nothing,” says Voltaire, ‘is so disagreeable as to
be obscurely hanged,” and together with its obvious
vanity it is impossible not to see in the remark a
feeling of fraternity as well.

Beside it, at all events, French vanity seems anti- }

air. This sentiment, which is the poetic side of the
notion of equality, to which the French have been
so profoundly attached since the very beginnings of
modern society, during the break-up of the Middle
24 NS FRENCH ‘TRAITS

‘Ages, is to be read in the expression and demeanor
of everyone to be met with in the streets as unmis-
takably as it is stamped on all the buildings belong-
ing to the state. Insensibly you find yourself set-
ting out with the feeling that every stranger is ami-
cably disposed. Arriving from London, either at
Paris or at the smallest provincial town—Calais it-
self, say—the absence of individual competition, of
personal preoccupation, of all the varied oi ees
the stony, inaccessible self-absorption which depress
the stranger in London whenever he is out of hail .
of an acquaintance, the conspicuous amenity every-
where suffuse with a profoundly grateful warmth
-the very cockles of the American’s heart. At first
it seems as if all the world were really one’s friends.
People with such an aspect and deportment would
be, certainly, in New York ; in New York you would
feel almost as if you could borrow money of them
without security. You look for the personal feeling,
the warmth, the glow which such evident amenity
stimulates in your own breast. You find,no real
response. You feel somehow imposed upon and
resentful. Nothing is less agreeable to the Anglo-
Saxon heart than to discover that it has beaten with
unreasonable warmth, that the occasion really called
| for no indulgence of sentiment. You understand
Thackeray’s feeling toward the “distinguished for-
eigner” whom he met crossing the Channel, and
who “readily admitted the superiority of the Briton
on the seas or elsewhere,” only to discover himself,

Tr
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 25

the voyage over, in his real character of a hotel-
runner—or, as Thackeray puts it, “(an impudent,
sneaking, swindling French humbug.” Nothing
could be more unreasonable ; you are not in London
or New York transformed by the millennium, but in
Paris—or Calais, as I said. The Apocalyptic thou-
sand years’ reign of absolute satisfactoriness is still
in the distant future. Self-interest is still a motive,
and if a cabman is less extortionate than in New
York, or a policeman more specific and personal in
his directions, or a fellow “bus passenger more affabl
communicative, it is not to greater delicacy of mor al,
fibre that it should be attributed, but to a universal |
feeling that mankind is a fraternity instead of a vas
mass of armed neutrals, and that, ceteris paribus,
there is greater pleasure to be got out of the lubri-
cation than the friction of points of contact betwee
individuals. This, elevated into a positive system,
produces the amenity which is as clearly a boule
vard as it is a salon characteristic in France.
Bonhomie is not necessarily bonté, but it is an ex-
tremely pleasant trait to find on every hand—in the
promenade, in shopping, travelling, theatre-going,
gallery-visiting, wherever, in fact, one encounters
his fellow-men closely. It is pleasant not to be
jostled and elbowed in crowds, to be greeted in en-
tering a shop, to be spoken to civilly and copiously
by a casual companion on a bench of the Champs
Elysées, to be treated in every way, in fine, humanely
and urbanely. Urbanity is a Latin word, and still

 
   
  
 
 
26 FRENCH TRAITS

retains its significance in Latin cities, notably in
France ; whereas with us it is in general “fine old
country gentlemen ” who chiefly illustrate the qual-
ity, and except in the interior of houses, urban and
urbane are epithets of broadly differing significance.
But charming as the urbanity of French out-door
existence is, that other quality of bonhomie, of good-
humor, with which it isin France so closely asso-
ciated—and of which it is, indeed, more the out-
ward expression than the twin trait even—is quite
as charming. Urbane the citadins of Spain and
Italy are, almost invariably ; but their urbanity dec-
orates a different quality—a high-bred chivalry, or,
among the lower classes, a fine natural simplicity,
Fernan Caballero’s vaunted naturalidad in Spain;
and in Italy a rich geniality which sometimes breaks
quite through the urbanity and recalls our own
Westerner. The French good-humor seems idio-
syncratic. SS.

It is not very deep. Often, in fact, it shows itself
to be so shallow that very bad humor is easily per-
ceived to lie in some cases disagreeably near the
surface. There is a good deal of varied light and
shade about the social instinct. Mr. Henry James
permits the “roaring Yankee ” of his “The Point of
View ” to speak of the Parisians in the mass as “ little,
fat, irritable people.” In many respects Paris isnot
France, and probably nearly all the genus irritabile
to be found in France is concentrated in the capital.
At Paris you certainly hear, first and last, a good
TIIE SOCIAL INSTINCT 27

deal of scolding. Your landlady is sure to scold
the servants from corridor to corridor, and these
latter—such is the spirit of fraternity—are sure to
scold back. More or less scolding is sure to force |
itself upon your attention out of doors. The cocher |
scolds his horse, the gendarme scolds the cocher ;
now and then you see groups actively engaged in
this kind of mutual remonstrance. It isto be borne
in mind that they never come to blows. “It costs
a lot to punch a Frenchman’s head,” I heard a com- :
patriot remark one day—this condition of affairs
demonstrating a high state of civilization, or a deca-'
dence of manly spirit hedging cowardice about with |
tyrannical regulations, as one chooses to consider it.
Certainly one might pass a lifetime in Paris without
witnessing anything similar to a scene of which in
London once I was an excited—until I observed
that a nearer policeman was a placid—spectator :
namely, 2 young man choking and cuffing a erying
young woman who exhibited every sign of pain and
anger, but no sense of outrage. Individualism fails
in various ways to decorate and render attractive
the daily life of a great city ; below a certain rank,
composed of the surviving fittest, moves an amor-
phous mass of units, specifically unattractive owing
to their profound lack of interest in themselves and
their conspicuous moral dejection, and—owing to
the prevalent individualism—destitute in the mass
of any organic or homogeneous interest. Even
where individualism has to contend against the kind
28 FRENCH TRAITS

of fraternity with which it is not inconsistent—the
kind we illustrate in contrast with the English, the
kind born of large human sympathies exercised
under a democratic system and over a continent's
extent—even in New York I remember a character-
istic incident which one could never expect to see
paralleled in Paris. Two friends had quarrelled in
a Bowery saloon, and having, in reporter’s phrase,
‘adjourned to the sidewalk,” one was speedily on
top of the other, who, unarmed himself, clutched
desperately his foe’s uplifted hand which held a
knife over him. A crowd quickly gathered and a
stalwart fellow rushed toward the struggling pair,
apparently to interfere, but drawing a clasp-knife
from his poche américaine (as it is called by French
tailors), he opened it and thrusting it into the hand
of the under-dog, exclaimed: ‘“‘ Here's a knife for
you, too, young fellow!” A policeman supervened
and closed the incident. At Paris this would have
seemed savage to a ‘ professional” assassin. In five
cases out of six the passion which produces in Lon-
don and New York blows and pistol-shots, and in
Naples and Seville knife-thrusts, exhales itself in
vocables, and expends its force in gesticulation.
The French nature is frivolous and superficial, is
the explanation given in all the English books—the
books which, having none of our own, and knowing
no other language, we read exclusively ; querulous-
ness takes the place of passion, bluster and storm-
ing the place of blows, adds the American observer
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 29

—the implication being the same; indeed, Mr.
Henry James sums it up in so many words in one of
his sketches of travel: “The French are a light,
pleasure-loving people, and the longest study of
life on the Boulevard des Italiens does not change
the impression.” Certainly not, in fair weather ;
when the skies are clear and life is good there is no
evidence of moping along this thoroughfare. But,
seated at one of the innumerable little tables that
fringe its gay terraces, the sentimental traveller
may read in his Baedeker the suggestive statement
that the asphalt beneath him was substituted by the:
crafty Napoleon III. for stone pavement because of
the chronic disposition of the Parisians to transform
the latter into barricades. Cela donne @ penser.
Readiness to get yourself killed upon slight provo-
cation hardly attests frivolity, but seriousness in the
English sense ; readiness to sacrifice one’s life in
defence of ideas witnesses the same quality in the
French sense. A gradual and cumulative progress '
in every revolution of importance since the days of
Divine Right testifies to the seriousness of the
Parisian people in every sense. Having regard sim-
ply to separate municipalities, that of Paris, in fact,
seems the only serious one since the Middle Ages.
Nothing is more common with us, however, than
to treat this same characteristic of the Parisian as
not only marked evidence of his frivolity, but as
merely the occasional exaggeration of his habitual
querulousness. But nothing also is more superficial,
30 FRENCH TRAITS

and one cannot live long in Paris without perceiving
that the querulousness which at first strikes one is
itself simply the defect of the quality of amenity,
which is, after all, universal if not profound; just
as blows and general brutality are the defect of the
estimable quality, so highly prized in Anglo-Saxon
communities, of absolute and profound personal
sincerity. There is nothing absolute or profound
about French amenity. Rightly apprehended the
nature of the quality excludes the notion of pro-
fundity. It is rather a gloss, a veneer, a mere out-
ward husk, but the veneer and husk of that very
solid feeling of fraternity which is so integral a
part of the French gospel. In England, and among
the large and increasing class of anglicized Ameri-
cans in this country, fraternity is still, of course, a
subject of philosophic controversy; the school of
Mill on one side, thinkers like Mill’s implacable
critic, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, on the other.
Sir James Stephen, for example, whose feeling com-
parison of the Comtist regard for humanity to “a

childless woman’s love for a lap-dog ” is a fair meas-
ure of his sympathetic quality, maintains that ‘the
French way of loving the human race is the one of
their many sins which it is most difficult to forgive,”
and that “it is not love that one wants from the
great mass of mankind, but respect and justice.”
But the brutality of the Anglo-Indian is apt to be as
mistaken as it is brilliant. Respect and justice are

| precisely the qualities of French fraternity, and the
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 31

“love” with which Sir James Stephen objects to
being “daubed ” is quite foreign to it. The propa-
gandism of the Revolution was rational, not senti-
mental. No doubt it and other manifestations of
French feeling toward foreigners shine in friendli-
ness and kindliness by contrast with the respect and
justice accorded by Sir James Stephen’s compatriots
to their fellows in India and Ireland, but impatience
with prejudice and tradition and an ardor for the
rational and the real are their central characteristics.
The Frenchman feels under no necessity of either
disliking you or else becoming familiar by intruding
his personality—which seems a not uncommon An-
glo-Saxon affliction. We know best, perhaps, how
to treat each other in intimacy ; Frenchmen, in the
general situation. raternité has slight relations to
“Friendship,” as Thoreau rhapsodizes about it,
and as the classic examples illustrate it. In friend-
ship the individual element is intensified, in frater-
nity it is extenuated. Fraternity, in a word, is not
a mnilitant virtue ; it is simply the unfailing accom-
paniment of the social instinct, and in France, there-
fore, is universally accepted so much as a matter of
course, as the necessary and natural basis of human
relations, that its praise is become merely subject-
matter for perorations, political and other, as the
praise of freedom, for example, is with the English
and with us. And when such a sentiment becomes
a common-place, when such an idea comes popu-
larly to be esteemed a platitude rather than a prin-
32 FRENCH TRAITS

ciple, men no longer fall upon one another’s necks
in illustration of its potency and in witness of their
personal adhesion to it. All the same, it loses little
of its vitality. The members of those large families
which, as an English writer astutely remarks, are
not apt to be very “ civil-spoken things,” certainly
do not act among us as if they had constantly in
mind the precepts of the 133d Psalm, with which,
nevertheless, they may be presumed to be in full
accord. ‘A good father in conversation with his
children or wife is not perpetually embracing them,”
says Thackeray ; but the fact of relationship is none
the less potent as a pervasive influence on conduct

and demeanor. And so the mutual activities of a
: society which, like that of France, resembles very

7s

' closely a large family are thus influenced in a very

delightful way, if not to an intense degree, by the
decorous and decorative virtue of fraternal kindli-
ness and good feeling. The home, the interior, may

_ mean less to Frenchmen than it does to us, but the
- community means incontestably more, and the feel-

a

ing for country easily becomes supreme.
Patriotism in fact, takes the place of religion in

| Fvance. In the service of Ja patrie the doing of

one’s duty is elevated into the sphere of exalted
emotion. To say that the French are more patriotic
than other peoples would be to say what is in its
nature incapable of substantiation. But I think it
incontestable that, more than any other people, they
make patriotism the source and subjéct of their
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 33

profoundest emotional life. Only here do they lay
aside reason and abandon intelligence to surrender
themselves voluntarily to the sway of instinct and
passion. Only in regard tola France do they per-
mit themselves illusions. Only here does sentiment
triumph freely and completely over calculation.
Patriotism thus plays a far larger part in their
national existence than in that of other peoples.
None of its manifestations seem absurd to them.
The classic remark regarding the charge of Bala-
clava, “‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas Ja guerre,”
is, to be sure, a protest against the excesses of cor-
poralism. But such a sacrifice in direct illustra-
tion of patriotism would be regarded in France
almost as an opportunity; it would be looked
upon as the early Christians looked upon martyr-
dom.

Sir John Fortescue, exiled in France during the
Wars of the Roses, writes: “It is cowardise and
lack of hartes and corage that kepith the French-
men from rising, and not povertye : which corage
no Frenche man hath like to the English man. It
hath been often seen in Englond that three or four
thefes for povertie hath set upon 8 true men and
robbed them al. But it hath not been seen in
Fraunce that vii or viij thefes have been hardy to
robbe iii or iv true men. Wherefor it is right seld
that Frenchmen be hanged for robberye for that
they have no hertys to do so terrible an acte. There
be therefor mo men hangyed in Englond in a yere

3
34 FRENCH TRAITS

for robberye and manslaughter than there be
hangid in Fraunce for such crime in vij yers.” Sir
John writes, you will observe, very much in the
spirit of modern English criticism of the French.
This is the feeling of which Thackeray, for example,
can never free himself, which inspires “Punch,” which
all the Paris correspondents display, which underlies
every French allusion in our own anglicized journals.
In citing Sir John, however, M. Taine, who shame-
_lessly ‘records as current statistics “42 cases of high-
‘way robbery in France against 738 in England,” ex-
-plains, in a footnote, the reason for this lamentable
‘lack of “hertys” on the part of his countrymen.
-“The English,” he says, “ always forget to be polite,
and miss the fine distinctions of things. Under-
-stand here brutal courage, the disputatious and inde-
pendent instinct. The French race, and in general
| the Gallic race, is perhaps among all the most prod-
igal of its life.”
That is the difference, exactly. The social and
the individual instinct operate here, we perceive,
' each.in its.own way. One has only to think of the
title of France to be called a military nation (even
Prussian military terminology is French), or of the
suggestions contained in the word “barricade” to
| appreciate how reckless of everything men selfishly
| prize in this world are all Frenchmen when patriotic
‘ takes the place of personal feeling. No country, it
is probable, except'perhaps our own Southern States,
ever made such immense sacrifices of life and treas-
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 35

ure, after all reasonable hope was over, as France
did between the fall of Metz and the Treaty. of
Frankfort. In no other country would such resist-
ance to overwhelming force as that of Gambetta
have proved a statesman’s chief title to fame ; no-
-where else would even the enemies of such a man
so readily admit that to raise ill-armed, half-starved,
under-aged, raw levies, and oppose them to dis-
ciplined troops of twice their numbers with a stead-
fastness that had outlived hope, was to save the
honor of the country. The public opinion which
thus magnifies patriotism into a religion is a force
of which it is difficult to appreciate, and impossible
to exaggerate the strength. A vivid illustration of
it is given in an incident of one of the stories.
grouped by M. Ludovic Halévy under the title,
“T/Invasion.” A poor woman, whose husband and
son had been taken by the last conscription, ejacu-
lates, as the mobiles are leaving the village: ‘“‘ What
cowards the French must be to let themselves be
dragged to war like that!” The utterance was
a ery of individualism wrung from the egotism of a
mother’s heart, but M. Halévy chronicles it as ex- .
_traordinary, and it only serves thus to emphasize ‘
the strength and universality of the feeling against
which it protested, and of striking instances of
which M. Halévy’s little volume is full.

It is, indeed, a record of heroic self-sacrifice on
the altar of country which in certain qualities it
would be hard to match, The tone is low and
36 FRENCH TRAITS

quiet, there is no exaggeration, and there is no dis-
guise of the near proximity to gayety in which Gal-
lic gravity always exists. I venture to translate the

_ following incident related in M. Halévy’s words by
‘a nurse in the military hospital at Vendéme: “I

remember especially,” says the infirmier, “a young
man, almost a child—he was eighteen years old. He
was brought to us, with a ball in the chest, Decem-
ber 16th. He had been wounded quite near Ven-
déme. He died three days afterward. He must
have suffered much, for his wound was very deep
indeed. He made no complaint, however. He told
us that he was an only son—that he had volunteered
in July, at the beginning of the war. His mother op-
posed his project, wept bitterly, and tried to retain
him. But he had done that as a duty. He had set
out in the Army of Sedan ; he had succeeded in escap-
ing through Belgium ; he had continued the campaign
in the Army of the Loire ; he had become a sergeant.
Before dying he confessed, and in the presence of
everybody he received the sacrament with a wonder-
ful tranquillity. During the three days in which he
was dying—for we had seen at once that he was lost
—he gave way only when he spoke of. his mother;
then the tears stood in his eyes and he gazed long
ata photograph of her which he had taken with
him. He asked pardon of her for the chagrin his
death would cause her. He had asked us to lay
aside his tunic with his chevrons of sergeant to be
sent to his mother after the war. He died kissing
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 37

his little photograph. We were greatly embarrassed.
We did not know whether we ought to keep this pho-
tograph for the mother or to put it in the coffin. It
seemed to us better to put it with him in the bier,
and that is what we did.”

I think no one can fail to remark the admira-
ble simplicity of this, quite unalloyed either with
the solemn intensity that is undoubtedly Germanic
or with the bravado we are ludicrously apt to fan-
cy natural to the Frenchman. There is a distinct
shade of elasticity of spirit noticeable in the moral
attitude of this youth that is typically French. A
contained exaltation quite unassociated with what
we ordinarily mean by conscious renunciation seems
to be his support or rather his stimulus. He is not
a hero in any explicit way; his social side is up-
permost. The same phenomenon is observable in
death-bed scenes in which for the sacraments of the
church the decoration of the state is substituted.
And this discloses the real truth about this patriot-
ism which is the religion of Frenchmen, in whose
sphere calculation is lost in sentiment and interest
is transmuted into self-sacrifice—namely, that it is
the sublimation of the social instinct in a more emi-
nent ‘degree ‘and more conspicuous manner than the
patriotic sentiment of any other people in the world.
All purely personal feeling is absorbed in it. Every
personal aspiration is satisfied by it. To an American
dying of a wound received in the defence of his coun-
try the presentation of a bit of red ribbon by the
38 FRENCH TRAITS

government of his country would undoubtedly seem
a barren performance enough. His personal sense of
duty discharged, of a supreme sacrifice unselfishly
made, would in such an hour fill his mind to the ex-
clusion of any demonstrations of a social order that
the compatriots whom he was about to leave forever
could make. Dying with us is a private affair; the
association with it of the paraphernalia of life is apt
to jar upon oursense. ‘The world has been my
country, to do good my religion,” is a more con-
soling dying thought than the dulce et decorum est
of Horace, even on the battle-field. We have been
from our youth up so accustomed to personal con-
centration, so habituated to being in the world but
not of it, so used to considering our environment
hostile, that this feeling remains even if we have

‘ceased to look upon heaven as our true home and

the celestial hosts as our real family. Emerson’s

‘breezy lines,

**Good-by, proud world, I’m going home,
Thou’rt not my friend, and I’m not thine,”

find an echo in all our hearts, but wherever one
meets with anything of the kind in French litera-
ture the strain is factitious, the sentiment borders
on bravado, and we feel instinctively that what dis-

_ guises itself as longing is really lament.

Now, the moment we appreciate that i in the char-
THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 39

the individual instinct which predominates, we can
see how this is the secret of the French, how it ac-
counts for the differences between them and us as
individuals, and for our inveterate misconception of
them ; how they in distinction from ourselves live
for the present world, are alive to actuality, desire
passionately to please, are passionately pleased with
admiration, have no talen} for renunciation, but
a very genius for expression and expansion ; how
practical and prosaic is their disregard for certain
ideal qualities of the soul which are with us of a
‘sacred and secret” nature; how little personal life
they have; how much more manners count with
them than does character, beyond those points
where both are tolerable. And we can see also how,
nationally and organically, they have, since the com-
munal revolution of the twelfth century, been not
merely the chief but the only highly organized peo-
ple which has succeeded to the civilizing work of
the Roman Empire in itself essaying social experi-
mentation, if not in the interest, at least to the
profit, of mankind. ‘“ There are no questions,” said
Gambetta, superbly, ‘but social questions.” The
apothegm formulates the spiritual instinct of France
since the days of her national beginnings. It for-
mulates also, I think, the instinct of the future.
That is why France is so inexhaustibly interesting
—because in one way or another she, far more than
any other nation, has always represented the aspira-
tions of civilization, because she has always sought
40 FRENCH TRAITS

development in common, and because in this re-
spect the ideal she has always followed is the ideal
of the future. Itis, at any rate, inseparable from
the visions which a material age permits to the few
idealists of to-day.
II
MORALITY
MORALITY

Sivcz Professor Lounsbury’s not too sympathetic
but admirably thorough-going biography, it has
become possible to cite Cooper again. In one of
his sea-stories, a masterpiece in every way, but
quite as remarkable for its’ “international”. as for
its purely dramatic and human interest, Cooper
contrives a trifling incident which felicitously illus-
trates the habitual Anglo-Saxon attitude toward
the French whenever there is any question of moral-
ity. The bluff, hearty, “thoroughly English” com-
mander of a seventy-four during the wars against
the first Republic has just succeeded, as he imagines,
in burning the little French privateer Le Feu Fol-
let, with all on board, after the fashion becoming a
successor of Drake and Raleigh, and better adapted
to the end of Britannia’s ruling of the waves than
reminiscent of the spirit which is supposed once to
have animated what Mr. Frederic Harrison trench-
antly calls “the, rotten carcass of chivalry.” As
the fire-ship was bearing down on the French vessel,
strains of music had reached the ears of the English.
Ghita Caraccioli—a relative of the Prince whom
Nelson was to hang the following day—was singing
44 FRENCH TRAITS

to the strumming of her guitar on the Frenchman’s
deck in the moonlight, her lover Raoul, the hand-
some young privateersman himself, by turns listen-
ing with delight and abstractedly reflecting on the
perverse piety which forbade his Italian mistress to
wed a confessed unbeliever—one of the prettiest and
most delicately touched love scenes to be found in
fiction. The sincere and unsentimental Captain
Cuffe ends his report of his exploit to the Admi-
ral: ‘The lugger was filled with loose women ; our
people hearing them singing their philosophical and
irreligious songs as they approached with the fire-
vessel.”

Cooper was very happy in this way. A genera-
tion ago he furnished an excellent corrective to the
then popular notion of the ex vi termini baseness of
American Tories during the Revolutionary period ;
and his portraiture of American character includes
types which for intimately unflattering verisimili-
tude were a liberal education in catholic temper
and the faculty of seeing one’s self as one really is.
At the present moment, while English influences
are permeating our political and social activities
from philosophy to fashion, we have certainly little
need of Cooper to persuade us that Englishmen
have the qualities of their defects. But his treat-
ment of French character, as in ‘Le Feu Follet,”
for example, and the slight stress he lays on it—as
if it were not at all a novel view that he was taking
—reminds one of an epoch in American feeling
MORALITY 45

when Franklin’s reception in France and Lafayette’s
generous enthusiasm were more than memories;
when the circumstance that “the streets of Paris
rang with the name of Washington” was not as-
cribed to Versailles diplomacy, and when liberal
spirits, at least, appreciated that even in such funda-
mental matters as morality, la différence need
not—as Stendhal asserts that it does in fact—pro-
duce la haine.

Morality is indeed a fundamental matter, and
French morality differs fundamentally from our
own. But this is only all the more reason for re-
placing censoriousness by candor in any considera-
tion of it. And the first admission which candor!
compels us to make is the unfairness of estimating |
the French moral fibre by what ours would be if |
subjected to the same standards and influenced by
the same circumstances. Yet this is an error that
we make continually. Consciously or unconsciously
we conceive our manners and character as a con-
stant quantity, and reflect on the fate which indis-
putably would overtake our morals if we should
adopt French ethics. And by retaining our man-
ners and character, and adopting their ethics, we
should no more attain the French moral result than,
to turn the case around a little, Sophocles, Solomon, .
Horace, Raphael, Goethe, would have attained their
success had they committed their characteristic in-
discretions amid the environment which produced
Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather. The truth,
46 FRENCH TRAITS

of course, is, that the French differ from us as much
in constitution and manners as in ethics. French
morality is a direct derivative of the social instinct.
Owing to the development of this instinct among
them morality is rather a social than an individual
force, and the key to its nature is to be found in
the substitution of honor for duty as a main-spring
of action and a regulator of conduct. The distinc-
tion is a very plain, a very real one. Between the
two there is all the difference that there is between
the inspiration, say, of Lovelace’s fine lines: |

**T could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honor more,’’

and that of Wordsworth’s apostrophe,
“Stern daughter of the voice of God!"

Carlyle indicates very forcibly what seems to us
the inadequacy of the French ethical ideal in con-
cluding one of the brilliant papers now buried fora
positive generation under the title “Past and Pre-
sent.” He says: “*‘These poor, persecuted Scotch
Covenanters,’ said I to my inquiring Frenchman, in
such stinted French as stood at command, ‘ils s’en
appelaient’°—‘A la postérité, interrupted he, helping
me out. ‘Ah! Monsieur, non, mille foisnon! They
appealed to the eternal God, not to posterity at all.
Cétait different !’” Every Anglo-Saxon reading
this instinctively agrees with Carlyle that it was
différent indeed. Any Frenchman, on the other.
MORALITY 47

hand, would ascribe the distinction to the vague ex-
altation of fanaticism. To the French sense such a
distinction indicates a lack of sanity, of that measure |
to which—if one may say so without paradox—th
French are almost fanatically attached. “In al
questions concerning the conscience,” the French-|
man would say, “the important point is whether or |
no the conscience decides aright. The immense |
value Anglo-Saxons attach to its activity, its sensi-
tiveness, becomes at once a misleading and fatal |
estimation whenever it decides wrongly ; in such
instances the value attached to it only gives author-
ity to error. Fanaticism, that most unpleasant and
least useful condition of the mind, instantly ensues.
The only real appeal in cases of disputed decision—\
cases like that of.the Scotch Covenanters just men- |
tioned—is to posterity, to time, to the universal con-
science, the common consciousness of mankind. In
any other sense than this—the sense in which vox
populi and vox Dei are really identical—any talk
about the arbitrament of the eternal God is too
vague to be useful, and being vague too solemn not
to-be harmful. Even one of your writers who, as M.
Challemel-Lacour has testified, seems to us to put
an altogether exaggerated estimate upon conduct
and morality, a writer who observes that a Methodist
navvy ‘deals successfully with nearly the whole of
life,’ while the ‘dissolute, gifted, brilliant grandee,’
whom he compares with him, ‘is all abroad in it,’ is
nevertheless forced to say that with conscience one
48 FRENCH TRAITS

has ‘done nothing until he has got to the bottom of
conscience and made it tell him right.’”

One never talks with a Frenchman on these mat-
ters without perceiving that to be right, to be at the
centre of things, not to be duped, is to his mind the

‘summum bonum. It is the premise from which he

invariably sets out; it is, in fact, a passion with him ;
of many Frenchmen it can even be said, as Taine
said of Mérimée, that they are the dupes of their
distrust. To rely implicitly upon one’s conscience
is, of course, a famous way of being profoundly
duped. It is the infallible accompaniment of fana-
ticism ; fanaticism is bée ; to be béte is impossible—
the very notion of it insufferable. In this way the
Frenchman comes naturally to think very little of
conscience, to have very little to do with it. His
reliance is upon an outward, not the inward monitor,
the voice of society i in ‘general, the suggestions of
culture, the dictates of science. His literature con-
tains no analogue of Bunyan or of Johnson. To
him the admonition, “ the kingdom of God is within
you,” is addressed to the heart, the emotions, the
soul—an aphorism consolatory and religious, but
having less than nothing to do with the grand ob-
ject of daily life, the great secret of success in this
world—namely, the certainty that one’s light is not
darkness,

It is well known that our view, the Anglo-Saxon
view, is just the reverse of this. We exalt the func-
tions of conscience, and we are not concerned, so
MORALITY 49

long as we obey its behests, whether or no at some
future time it may not give us different counsel and
so, to a greater or less degree, stultify itself as a
guide. We admit its fallibility in advance, and it
surprises us that this should surprise the French
observer. Where is infallibility to be found, we
ask ; it seems credulous and simple to seek it. The
important thing is to act up to the best light that
you have, in accordance with the first part of Bishop
Wilson’s celebrated maxim; the other part will in
this way, we vaguely feel, gradually come to take
care of itself. We have no passion for pure reason.
We have, in fact, so little sympathy with mere clev-
erness, as we call it, with exclusive devotion to the
things of the mind, that it is difficult for us to ap-
preciate how a society can be great and distinguished
which is, like France, wholly given over to them,
and which in matters of personal conduct, to us the
allimportant concern of life, obeys not the inward
monitor of conscience but the outward constraint of
public opinion. This view the French themselves
invariably ascribe to Puritanism, which is not to be
wondered at considering the substantial unanimity
with which the partisans of Puritanism among us
make the same ascription. But what is the origin
of Puritanism itself? The truth is that Puritanism
is merely the excess of the individual spirit mani-
fested in the exaltation of conscience. It is itself an
effect. The intimate, personal view of morality is
held by peoples and persons who never came into

—
= — at
50 FRENCH TRAITS

contact with Puritanism. It is as common in Nor-
way as in New England, and is as firmly held where
Luther re-enthroned the individual conscience as
it is wherever the Shorter Catechism is expounded.
Its only foes are the Catholic Church, which absorbs
the devotion of the communities in which it reigns,
and that extremely elaborate social development
which the humanity of Catholicism indirectly fos.
ters. Everywhere in Protestant and personal com.
munities public opinion itself shares Owen Mere-
dith’s sentiment : ‘‘The Crowd-made Conscience is
a Harlot bold ”—a sentiment fairly swaggering with
individual dignity.

M. Renan calls glory ‘‘ the thing which, after all,
has the best chance of being not altogether vanity.”
That would indeed be news to the Preacher, would
it not? The Preacher’s social instinct was far less
developed than M. Renan’s. How often have we
not, all of us, ridiculed the French respect for la

| gloire, having ourselves an intimate conviction that in
' the entire catalogue of vanities there is none so hol-
low as this same extrinsic applause. No one would
of course deny that there are individuals among us
who care a great deal for this vanity, but it is, in
fine, distinctly not our ideal, and we are saved in
great measure from any danger of becoming openly
enamoured of it by the abundance, the universality—
and one might add the sincerity—of our cant upon
the subject. But the French are unblushing about
it, and probably incorrigible. It is another phase of
MORALITY 51

their anxiety to be in the right—that is, to think
rightly, without passion or personal prejudice, about
any given matter—which leads them to place a high
value upon extrinsic opinion, and to shun the eccen-
tricity and whimsical fanaticism which are so often
the concomitants of concentration and which, what-
ever the verdict of Carlyle’s eternal God, they
think posterity at all events will disapprove, even if
current public opinion be mistaken. Thus by the
operation of a natural law public opinion becomes in
its turn much more worthy of being followed than
itis where it occupies the subordinate place we as-
sign it; its qualities increase in proportion to its
dignity. It should be remembered that the pursuit
of lagloire in France is a very different thing from
the analogous seeking of the bubble reputation with
us, and that in proportion as the prize becomes im-
portant the effort to obtain it becomes laudable.
And the substitution of honor for duty as a moral
standard has, generally, one immense sAlvatiinal
which, as the most superficial acquaintance with
them discloses, the French unquestionably enjoy.
Honor’s dictates are plain. Those of duty are eee
obscure. Society knows what it esteems and what
it despises. Conscience is often confused, often in
need now of enlightenment now of quickening.
The result is that in the moral sphere the French
escape, that vacillation so characteristic of ourselves.
All is plain-sailing before them ; their chart is dis-
tinct and they mean to follow it. Morally speaking
52 FRENCH TRAITS

we illustrate Mr. Lincoln’s caution, on the other hand,
and never “cross Fox River before we come to it.”
The difference is that between a written and un-
written political constitution ; we have an immense
amount of common-law morality, so to speak.
Many of our conscientious: people do things which
other conscientious persons would not do; the lar-
gest publisher of one of our cities publishes Zola
for all America; the largest bookseller of the same
city will not vend Zola ; yet he, again, sells freely the
‘Memoirs of Cora Pearl.” You feel that we cannot
all of us be hitting the mark. Many of us do things
at one moment that we would not at another; many
of us justify in ourselves to-day conduct of which
yesterday we disapproved. Our Standard wavers
because it is upheld by a grace that is intermittent.
The conscience, finding itself deceived by some false
alarm, relaxes its vigilance in some parallel instance
with unhappy results, Our temptations vary. Our
ae life becomes-a struggle, in comparison with
which the Frenchman's is serene. We may say, I
think, that the prayer “lead us not into temptation ”
is rarely on his lips or in his heart. His attitude
toward temptation is not one of timorousness. He
believes rather with La Bruyére that “ everything is
temptation to him who fears temptation.” He does
not seek to fortify himself against it by acquiring
the habit of self-denial. He does not contemplate
the notion of yielding in spite of himself, of being
assailed by the tempter in an unguarded moment,
MORALITY 53

of the necessity of always having one’s armor on.
Neither does he comprehend the relaxation and
relief all of us know so well of those moments dur-
ing which we put this armor off for the nonce, when
we are sure temptation cannot assail us; nor our
occasional excesses when we find ourselves in error
as to this security. Discipline in this direction he
does not practise. He substitutes philosophy for it.
His philosophy may now and then be stoic, but it is
not ascetic. He does not strive to obey his itched
and control his lower nature. He appears, in fact,
to have no higher nature—and no lower ; to have,
morally speaking, a nature that is simple and single.
The result is twofold. He yields to temptation
more frequently and more easily, but his yielding is
of far less consequence. He does not suffer the
abasement involved in “sinning against light,” as
the phrase is. His taking temptation so lightly as
he does prevents his attaching the same value to a
surrender to it that we do; his fall is specific, tempo-
rary, and trivial, so to speak, and does not have the
general lowering effect on the whole nature which
succumbing after a resistance in which the whole
nature has been intensely interested does not fail to
have. It does not leave the same scar. The man is
morally on his feet again much sooner. Often, in-
deed, he has not fallen at all, only tripped. Society
in consequence takes moral errors much more lightly
than it does with us, as those who have not observed
it in French life cannot have escaped noticing in
54 FRENCH TRAITS

French literature. That favorite incident in modern
romance round which the story of “‘ Adam Bede”
eentres, for example, is (minus the infanticide, of
course, which would be foreign to either) in French
literature and French life almost never taken grim-
ly, but gently, not tragically but simply, not as a
monstrous but as a natural error ; in fine, it is still
in France considered as remediable as it was in
Galilee “twenty ages since.” Similarly with other
yieldings to temptation. The main consideration
is to have the heart right; until that is corrupt
nothing occurs which can be called irreparable ;
that is the French feeling. And it is a wonder-
ful simplifier. Moral complexity beyond a certain
point, the point at which the influence of jarring in-
terests and clashing temptations ceases, is accepted
in France as curiously factitious. The air is too
clear, the sky too bright. George Eliot could never
have written there.

On the other hand, an impartial observer would
notice that yielding to temptation is apt to be
pretty strictly proportioned to the strength rather
of the temptation than of the tempted. When this
presents itself in attractive form there is often
scarcely a pretence of resistance. In fact, in this
matter of resistance, the French strike us as having
2 certain curious helplessness, born doubtless of in-
experience. They seem like the militia of the army
of morality, not its regular soldiers, They show
the lack of drill—at least in skirmishes and recon-
MORALITY 55

noissances if not in pitched battles where courage
and general intelligence are more serviceable. As
to these it will, of course, be understood that I am
here speaking mainly of peccadilloes and not
erimes; of those offences which their own society |
cordially condemns Frenchmen commit as few, it '
need not be said, as any other people. But I should
say, for example, there were vastly more white lies
told in France than in America. There is a whim-
sical felicity in the circumstance that the scene of
Charles Reade’s novel of that name is laid there.
The white lie is tremendously convenient, and is, I
think, destined to greater popularity with us than
it at present enjoys. In France its abolition would
revolutionize society. Society there owes to it
much of the smoothness with which its machinery
moves. The white lie of causing yourself to be de-
clared at your door ‘not at home,” it does not re-
quire a seared conscience to commit even among
ourselves. We say it is mere civility, it prevents
friction, and it deceives no one. It is in the same
tone of whiteness as certain customary forms of
signing letters. The same principle and practice
are merely carried much further in France. They
are carried, to be sure, to the n4+1th power, but
their identity is not lost. The excess is chargeable
to the approbativeness characteristic of extreme
social development. Candor and courtesy, the de-
sire to please and perfect openness, are mutually
inimical. French approbativeness is hostile to that
56 FRENCH TRAITS

frankness which impels the truthful Earl of Elles-
mere, for example, to notify visitors to his galleries
by an announcement, printed at the head of his
catalogue, that, notwithstanding an absurd rumor to
the contrary, he is not legally obliged to have them
there at all—that frankness, in fact, which makes of
the average Englishman everywhere so concrete a
personality.
The result, however, is a noticeable difference in
‘the relations between people. A certain scepticisin
takes the place of confidence. A person is believed
in trivial statements just in so far as he is obviously
disinterested in making them. The gobe-mouche
abounds; a sense of the prevailing scepticism and
his consequent irresponsibility develop him rapidly.
No subject is too grave to secure immunity from
him. By way of compensation he is rewarded with
sympathetic attention or artistic interest instead of
with credence. Much the same views and gossip
about the French Republic are to be found in the
“Figaro” or the ‘“Gaulois,” and in the English and
American papers, but the latter only impose upon
their readers. In private a Frenchman expects his
neighbor to be courteous, companionable, sincere
in essentials, frank and open with him, but he does
not expect him to tell him the exact truth on mat-
ters of no moment if he has any motive for conceal-
ing it. The truth to him ig nota fetich. It is not
lt not to be spoken at all times, but it is now and
! hen to be perverted ; the great thing is to have
MORALITY 57

sufficient tact to know when, and sufficient elasticity
to do it with aplomb. He can thus venture audaci.
ties from which we are debarred, and enjoy an i
munity from impertinence to which we are strangers.
His quick wit spares him the embarrassment of.
blushin# on many occasions, and his pees |
saves him from the discomfort of remorse. You
quite envy him, at times, for the moment, but you
are sure to end by preferring your own way. I
shall always recall with a certain ridiculous pang a
small, unobtrusive, but morally brilliant white lie’
once told me by a charming Frenchwoman with
the sole motive of sparing my feelings. But to
have betrayed how much more acutely they were
piqued by the discovery that I had been the victim
of this kind of considerateness would have been an
immense indiscretion. {
It is certainly not calumniating the French to af-
firm that they have no genius for renouncement, \
Renouncement is in France, for the most part, con-
fined to the religious orders. It is opposed to the
French ideal of expansion. He that taketh a city is
decidedly more esteemed than he that ruleth his
spirit—unless the ruling be to the end of city-taking
or some such specific accomplishment. His success
or failure in life when “divine, everlasting Night, with
her star-diadems, with her silence and her veraci-
ties” is come, is measured rather by the career he has
run than by the character he has carved for himself.
To be worthy instead of to have been fortunate, in-
58 FRENCH TRAITS

stead of to have hit some definite mark or other, is
to him an ambition of vague significance ; it is not an
aim of the social instinct. ‘Worthy of what?” one’s
French friend always rejoins; ‘‘of eternal life, no
doubt: c'est subtil.” Scott's dying injunction to
Lockhart could hardly be translated into hi®tongue,
without the risk of appearing insipid. “Est-ce que
tous les honnétes gens ne sont pas good alors?”
Certain individualities, with us comparatively fre-
quent, whose main object in life seems to be to ef-
face themselves most completely in order to be of
service to others, with whom the proffer of those an-
cillary attentions so exasperating to their victims is
relentlessly systematic, in whose eyes one can per-
ceive the gleam of triumph when a coarse nature is
‘imposing upon their goodness—like the legendary
martyr'’s smile of beatification as the flames mount
higher—this kind of person is unknown in the three
parts of all Gaul. The nearest French analogue is
a bonasse person, a person weakly amiable by dispo-
sition, not by system, a person of a radically differ-
ent moral fibre and far more infrequent. Self-sacri-
fice to the general end of spiritual perfection, ‘which
however little it may be practised among us is-nev-
ertheless a principle in which we profoundly believe,
and which affects profoundly our judgment of our-
selves and others, is not at all so esteemed by the
French. They have no instinctive confidence in
its salutariness. They believe it, on the contrary,
, misleading, narrowing, retarding—a sort of burial
MORALITY 59

of one’s talent in a napkin—unless it be strictly
presided over and efficiently directed by the intel-
ligence, by tact, by the sense of measure, of relative
importance.

And not only does their estimation of the disci-
pline of character differ from ours, but we have dif-
ferent conceptions of character itself, of what con-
stitutes character. We mean by character integrity ;
we mean what the New York “Sun” means when it
affirms that character and brains are necessary to a
newspaper’s success. In France temperament, dis-
position, is what is meant. When we say of such.
and such a man that he has a great deal of charac-’
ter, we generally mean that he has disciplined his
temperament, his disposition, into strict obedience to -
the behests of duty; that he has clear and peremp- .
tory ideas about right and wrong ; in short, we think
of his honesty rather than of his energy. On the
other hand, it is his energy, his willy his volonté, that
is meant when the Frenchman attributes du carac-‘
tére to a person. Napoleon, for example, was a man
of prodigious character in the French view, and
making “his way to empire over broken oaths and
through a sea of blood ” only the more clearly illus-
trates it. In fact the French and ourselves see each
his own side in the same man. Michelet, for ex-
ample, speaks of Turgot’s férocité: Mr. Matthew
Arnold, having to compare Turgot to Butler in just
this respect, says he should rather call the qual-
ity “seva indignatio.” Nothing could better indi-
60 FRENCH TRAITS

cate the two points of view—the scientific and
impersonal, and the moral and sympathetic. The
French attitude is critical, descriptive. M. Scherer
calls M. Halévy cruel. M. Taine applies the same
epithet to Thackeray. In each instance the word is
used, wholly without reference. to its moral signifi-
cance, to characterize the fidelity with which base-
ness is portrayed. Bon, méchant, d’un mauvais ca-
ractére—a dozen epithets are used in this sense,
more as we would apply them to children or the
domestic animals than to persons supposably re-
sponsible themselves for their characters. Balzac’s
conception of Christianity, which he advocates with
naif ardor, is of a social police system. On the other
hand, we not only bring everything moral at once
into the ethical sphere, but we are apt to bring ethics
, themselves immediately into the sphere of religion,
\ of emotion, of poetry—that is to say, our considera-
tion of them is practically as far as possible re-
moved from the scientific.

Where a people has thus the virtues not of disci-
pline but of disposition, it at least partially atones
for some of its shortcomings by avoiding the defect
apparently inseparable from that personal moral-
ity which sets so much store by character as we
, conceive it—the defect of cant, of hypocrisy. The
‘French disesteem for cant is as great as is ours for
i falsehood. Courage, candor, lack of vanity, egotism,

contemptuousness, are all characteristics favorable
. to truthfulness, but they are the natural prey of

 
MORALITY 61

hypocrisy. The constant danger of attaching ex-
traordinary value to character, to conscientiousness,
is the danger of misconceiving one’s own. Innate
optimism and self-respect contribute powerfully to
prevent us from actual realization in many instances
and on many occasions. Only rarely, for example,
does such a journal as the conservative London
“Morning Post” avow that “there is more licentious
effrontery in a single London thoroughfare than in
the whole of Paris.” What you are most anxious
not to do you are extremely slow to admit, even to
yourself, that you have actually done. French cafar-
dise is quite a different trait from cant. It is hyp-
ocrisy of a gross, colossal order that never takes in
any one, least of all that inevitable victim of cant,
the hypocrite himself, The tribe of Tartuffe is al-
most professional in its cafardise, which is, like the
false humility of the Hebrew of literature, a special,
a cultivated, not an integral and general quality.
The French frankness in intimacy about falsehood
of the “ harmless” sort seems to us cynical only be-
cause we forget they have no cant. They are aston
ishingly sincere, amazingly unpretending, in point o:
character. The Orleanist’s jeer at the Bonaparte

conveyed in the boast that of the family he serve

‘all the men were brave and all the women virtu-
ous,” was taken as a mot rather than as an affront—
a mot plein @esprit, et plein de malice, nothing to
make any one’s blood boil except that of Plon-Plon,
which was abnormally cool. How many of us are
62 FRENCH TRAITS

in the habit of protesting, as the French continually
do, that we areno better nor worse than our fellows ?
Are not the worst of us apt to cherish a faint hope
that we are a trifle better than the average, not to
say the majority—have a little finer feeling, a little
more scrupulousness, or if not that, at any rate a
little less Pharisaism ? And these psychological con-
volutions, his frankness with himself and with others,
spares the Frenchman. In crises which really touch
him he shows a great deal of self-abnegation ; gene-
rosity, charity, are French virtues. If he does not
willingly ‘lose ” his life, if, on the other hand, his
ideal is to sell it as dearly as possible, he at least
sells it. And he sells it without any pretence, with-
out any braggart sentimentality and self-deception,
but with an intellectual and often even an artistic
consciousness of what he is doing that is almost as
refreshing to the moral sense as it is to the intelli-
gence. The soul may remain unsatisfied; but his
social, business, and public virtues may well, in his
esteem, be set over against our private ones,

Lack of personal, discipline, however, means yield-
ing to one’s instincts, whether one mean by this
being in harmony with nature or really running
counter to her steadfast undertakings. The first
and finest of our instincts, setting aside the super-
natural, is undoubtedly love, and it isin his aban-
donment to this instinct that the Frenchman is usu-
ally believed by us to be less successful in morality
than elsewhere. Certainly more distinctly and uni-
MORALITY 63

versally than anywhere else is it felt in France that
love vincit omnia—that it is, as Thackeray affirms,
“immeasurably above ambition, more precious than
wealth, more noble than name,” and that “he knows
not life who knows not that.” I say this feeling is
more distinct and universal in France than among
us, because there love not only conquers all things
but one may almost say excuses everything. It is
the passion of youth and eld, men and women. The
young girl looks forward to an experience of its di-
vine grace with an emotion excited in the breast
of her American sister only by the supernatural.
Of all the activities of his prime the old man re-
grets most the’ abandonment, the enthusiasm, the
absence of calculation, the spiritual exaltation of the
least egoistic of human impulses. Never to have
made the voyage to Cythera is to have lived in vain.
“ Love isa thing too young to know what conscience
is,” says Shakespeare, and the sacrifices made to
avoid thus missing the end of one’s emotional ex-
istence are often very great; sometimes they are
grotesque ; now and then they are tragic to the last
degree, and the misery and demoralization resulting
from mistaking the factitious for the genuine in this
momentous matter colder temperaments may well
congratulate themselves upon avoiding. But these
mistakes are often the defects of a generous ideality,
and weare prone to exaggerate their number and
gravity ; the nature that passes its life in resisting
temptation is indisposed to judge fairly those who
64 FRENCH TRAITS

evade the struggle. We keep forgetting that our
manners are different from French manners, and our
natures constitutionally unlike. The French ideal
is not that of St. Francis, of Thoreau. Mr. Arnold
cites Paley to show how especially and organically
corrupting is any swerving from Hippolytan pu-
dicity. Undoubtedly for all dispositions to whom
Paley is a sympathetic moralist. But the whole
problem is different in the country of Stendhal, who
finds in Paley the last refuge of moral and intellect-
ual mediocrity. Sainte-Beuve, of whom Mr. Arnold
never spoke without something akin to reverence,
for example, says quite frankly of himself, when his
integrity was attacked—like Hamilton’s—: “J’ai mes
faiblesses. J’ai pu regretter sentir quelquefois que
jy éteignais ma flamme, mais jamais je n’y ai perverti
mon coeur.” A society which substitutes personal,
or at most domestic, for social virtues, where women
ara free from pursuit because men are indifferent,
whose manners permit flirtation and prohibit gal-
lantzy, whose only demi-monde is a dissipated and
defiant bachelordom, runs far more risk of perver-
sion if it allows itself. any relaxation in this regard
‘than a society like that of France, whose qualities
tend to humanize everything short of vice itself. _
What would be vice among us remains in France
social irregularity induced by sentiment. The dis-
tinction is, I think, the most important of all that
can be observed in any judgment of France by
Americans. The irregularity may be very great and

4
MORALITY 65

the sentiment very dilute, but between these and
such vice as social irregularity of the kind generally
means with us the distance is very great and the
distinction very radical. To avoid misjudgments in
this matter, to avoid talking of the French being
“given over to the worship of their Goddess Lubri-
city,” for instance, it is necessary constantly to
remind one’s self of this. When Madame de Chev-
reuse complains of Anne of Austria’s austerity, and
says she had all the trouble in the world to awaken
in her some taste for the glory of being loved, when
La Rochefoucauld affirms that ‘there are few
honest women who are not sick of their trade,”
when M. Sarcey exclaims that the rejection of a
suitor because he has had a mistress is a solecism,
when Mr. Henry James recounts the tavern raillery
of a Languedoc dinner-table, speculating in the
presence of the blushing and good-natured servant
herself as to whether or no she is sage, when, in
short, either in French books or French life one
encounters suggestion ‘of the sensual triumph over
correctness, it is to be remembered that the error
has almost always an element of ideality. As tol
actual and recognized vice, international compari-
sons are very sterile as well as very odious.
Institutions have nowhere more influence than in
France, and, | given the French belief in the divine
instinct of love, the lengths to which it may lead
are easily seen to depend much upon marriage and
divorce laws. We at all events find no difficulty,
5
66 FRENCH TRAITS

in self-reproachful moments, in admitting the im-
portant influence of divorce upon national morals.
Marriage being what it is, monogamy being so
eminent a witness of the race’s development and
such an integral part of its highest attainment, the
compromise in this respect of any society’s ideal is
easily seen to be inexpressibly vulgarizing. Hasy
| divorce, at any rate, is express and legalized aban-
| donment of one of the most precious conquests we
‘have won from original anarchy. But I think our
recognition of this, emphasized a posteriori as with
_ us such recognition is, prevents us from conceiving
readily the enormous effect which the complete
absence of divorce has upon a Catholic society. A
Catholic society is, as I have already said, far less self-
concentrated, far more expansive and natural than a
Protestant, and yet in regard to one of the most arti-
ficial of -institutions—which in the sense of later
development monogamy certainly is—it permits no
elasticity whatever. Be the tension never so preat itis
never formally recognized. The result is inevitably
that informally its rupture is too readily excused. It
is, to be sure, possible to say to a Frenchman, who
objects that he only does illegally what, were he an
American, he would have abundant warrant of law
for, and what neither the church nor the world would
reprove in him, that offences against pure legality,
unjustified by the compulsion of a higher law, are
sin; that if he does not instinctively feel this reflec-
tion will prove it to him, and that his worthiness,
MORALITY 67

not his happiness, is the important matter for him
and his people. You may even add commiseration
at his misfortune in not being an American, so that
he might be happy and worthy at the same time.
He will be certain to esteem you a pedant. And,
in fact, between easy divorce and no divorce there ;
is not, morally speaking, anything like the abyss
that closet philosophy is apt to imagine. In the
effect upon society at large there is far more differ-
ence between strict divorce and either. The con-
version of the Jews, according to Launcelot Gobbo,
merely increased the number of pork-eaters, and,
speaking practically and prosaically, the effect of
exchanging easy divorce for no divorce at all, would
be mainly, I imagine, to increase the number of
natural children ; whereas it is highly probable
that the recent re-enactment of divorce in France
will ere long be found to have produced a salutary
disturbance in the vital statistics of the country.
If this and certain corollaries of the proposition
which will occur to every one more readily than
they can be expressed be true, it is easy to under-
stand how marriage—erected by the church into a
sacrament, and yet frequently found to be actually
intolerable—has hitherto, in France, found less
virtual and sincere acquiescence in its sacred char-
acter than elsewhere. Formal respect for it abounds.
Nothing is more shocking to a Frenchman than the |
records of our divorce cases. And yet it is as a:
convention simply that indissoluble marriage im- |
68 FRENCH TRAITS

i poses itself on his respect, because its sanction is
‘external, ecclesiastical, and legal, and not spiritual
and natural. He has accordingly the less care for
the fidelity which elsewhere is inextricably associ-
ated with it in theory. It would hardly be an
exaggeration to say that for this fidelity he cares,
absolutely speaking, nothing at all. He excuses
himself, or rather he explains his position, by a
reference to nature. The great thing is to be
in harmony with nature, he thinks. In all these
matters he takes very little account of what Goethe
calls culture-conquests except as social institutions,
decorous conventions. Fickleness in women he
admits as a defect, venial or not as the heart hap-
pens to be interested, but as much less natural
than the same trait in man as polyandry is less
usual than polygamy. As to man, the universal
French feeling is very well expressed by Mr. How-
ells in an obiter dictum of his “Indian Summer.”
In Mr. Howells’ public it is always place aux dames.
He has so completely won the affection of his women
readers by betraying women’s secrets that he is
now and then emboldened to brave their indigna-
tion by divulging a secret of the opposite sex, as
he does in this paragraph wherein he represents his
hero, who is in love with two women at the same
time, as “struggling stupidly with a confusion of
desires which every man but no woman will under-
stand.” “After eighteen hundred years,” he says,
“the man is still imperfectly monogamous.” That
MORALITY 69

strikes us all, male and female alike, as the quintes-
sence of humor. It is not precisely of the same char-
acter as that of Tom Jones, a laugh from whom, says
Lamb, “clears the air,” but it performs a similar ser-
vice. Mr. Howells is the enfant terrible of realistic fic-
tion, and we can no longer go on pretending that even!
American men are strangers to polygamous instincts.
But as an American humorist once remarked of his
church-going propensities, they “can restrain them-
selves.” And doubtless until we have our Flaubert
or our Fielding, as well as our Howells, we shall be-
lieve that they do, just as even after that distant
event we shall continue to believe that they should.
But the Frenchman replies that all this is based on
a Puritan systematization of St. Paul’s separation of
the law of the members and the law of the mind,
and that it is fantastic. Only in an atmosphere as
colorless and passionless as that in which the char-
acters of “Indian Summer,” for example, move, he
maintains, is it possible to carry the question of
rectitude into the region over which the heart pre-
sides alone. To Violate the heart’s dictates, which
are the direct behests of nature, is, in his eyes, either
pedantry or folly ; at all events, an esoteric concern |
of monks and nuns. It is not a question at all of a:
higher law and the law of the members, but of the;
natural instincts of man, which on the one hand he is
to preserve from that depravity universally stigma-|
tized as unnatural, and on the other to organize in
such a way as to benefit that highly artificial insti-
70 FRENCH TRAITS

| tution known as society in the direction of natural

‘ development and not natural restraint.

| Hence, plainly, the French idea of marriage as an
institution mainly social. It becomes a convention
like another. Ifit be combined with a love whose
character guarantees its permanence—a flame which
does not, unlike Campbell’s,

ee : ‘i . need renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel”

—so much the better. But love is one thing and
marriage another. This being distinctly understood
ae will at once be perceived that the stronger a
| people’s instincts for social order the more disposi-
‘tion there is to make marriage indissoluble. If

marriage is understood by an entire society not to

bea contrivance to “bind love to last forever,” the
principal objection to binding marriage to last for-
ever disappears. Every instinct of form, of propri-
ety, of regularity, every instinct which shrinks from
social disturbance counsels the permanence of marri-
age, which thus becomes purely an affair of reason.
Family relations, property interests, children’s fut-
ure, the organic solidarity of communities are in
this way distinctly served. It is personal morality
which suffers, because society is immediately ad-
justed to the notion that marriage is a convention
merely, and that offences against marriage appeal to
the tribunals of manners rather than of morals.
, And not only does morality suffer, but marriage un-
MORALITY WJ

questionably tends to become materialized. The/
two things interact with mutual intensity—marriage

is made material by being indissoluble, and it is the

material conception of marriage as a social conven-

tion which renders its indissolubility attractive.

Thus we have both the effect of no divorce and the

explanation of it.

I think, therefore, the recent re-enactment of di-
vorce by the French democracy, hedged about as it is
with precaution against abuse, cannot fail to have a
salutary effect on the personal morality of the com-
munity, and that it will also tend to spiritualize the
community's conception of marriage. There will be
more marriages, and they will be less an affair of
reason and more an affair of the heart. This will
be the effect, because in taking an irreparable step,
however an Anglo-Saxon may prefer the guidance
of his instincts and affections, the Frenchman pre-
fers to be directed by his intelligence. And though
no one probably thinks of divorce potentialities on
his wedding-day, the permanence or dissolubility of
the contract undoubtedly makes a great difference
in the bachelor’s chronic and constitutional attitude
toward marriage. One has only to regard the two
extremes presented by some of our communities and
a Catholic one in this respect. In Southern Europe
man is notoriously reluctant to “ surrender his lib-
erty ;” in some of our communities he can hardly
wait to become of age before he crystallizes some
passing fancy into matrimony.
72 FRENCH TRAITS

On the whole, marriage, divorce, and cognate
questions aside, to find the French lacking in moral
sense is, I think, to betray confusion. The French
themselves, accustomed as they are to such a verdict
at our hands, always ascribe it either to prejudice of
aparticularly unintelligent kind or else to hypocrisy.

| “The English,” says a recent reviewer of George
| Eliot's life in the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes,” “are no
\ better than other people, but they have a singular
. desire to appear so.” The French, generally, would
accept this as a temperate expression of their feel-
ing that any arrogation of superior morality on the
art of the Anglo-Saxon is unjustified. We under-

} stand morality in many different ways. Some of
our most conspicuously moral people believe indeed
that it is a rational substitute for religion. A less
frigid school finds it impossible to conceive of true
morality except as a religious result. Except that
the former of these profess the utilitarian ideal and
permit themselves little emotion, save of a severely
ethical kind, whereas the Frenchman has his suscep-
tibility in constant exercise though under perfect
control—except, in other words, that sceptical Puri-
tanism is sui generis, and can ill be said to have
relations to anything Latin—the French view of
morality, the Latin view, may be said to stand mid-
way between these two. French morality is moral-
ity in the etymological sense. But because the
standard is exterior rather than of conscience, be-
cause, as I have already said, the idea of honor to a
MORALITY 73

very considerable degree takes the place of the idea
of duty among Frenchmen, because what is there-
fore venial with them is sometimes grave with us
and vice versd, it by no means follows that the French,
notion of what is right and what is wrong is any the}
less strict, precise, and universally binding than ou
own. And so far as the accord between theory and\,
practice is concerned I suppose it is needless to
point out the perfection which has been attained in
France in the sphere of morals as well as every-
where else, In the sense in which it has been aptly
observed that ‘‘ Coleridge had no morals,” French
morality is a conspicuous national characteristic.

No, French morality is simply misconceived when
it is summarily depreciated as it is our vice to de-
preciate it. It isas systematic as our own, and by
those most interested believed to be as successful ;) ;
‘itis in France that life is longest and |
greatest, and well-being most widely diffused. The
great distinction between us, the chief characteristic
which in this sphere sets off the Frenchman from
the Anglo-Saxon, and from the Spaniard also, and the
Italian, over whom he triumphs morally, perhaps, is
his irreligiousness. I refer of course to the mass of
the nation, not to the few who are absorbed by
devotion, which is religion intensified. To-day, at
all events, the great body of the French people is
Voltairian. A better epithet could not be found for
irreligious morality. ‘‘To Voltaire,” says Mr. John
Morley, very felicitously, “reason and humanity

}
"4 FRENCH TRAITS

were but a single word, and love of truth and passion
for justice but one emotion.” Yet as Emerson ob-
serves: “He said of the good Jesus even, ‘I pray
you never let me hear that man’s name again’ ”—
formidable utterance, however interpreted or ex-
plained, for disclosing a lack of the religious sense.
Nevertheless he has read to little purpose the
greatest humanist of the century of Kant, of Hume,
and of Rousseau, who does not perceive the positive
force of Voltaire as a moralist. The undercurrent,
or rather the substance of all that infinite wit which
nearly every English critic of Voltaire warns us to be
on our guard against, is moral earnestness, and that
he should have been mistaken for a literary artist
would have exasperated him as much as a similar
popular error grieved the prophet Ezekiel. His
word to his fellow-men is this: “‘Do not make the
mistake of thinking life is all of a piece or men:
either. The world is larger than your philosophy.
God is inscrutable but infinitely kind and good. Sin
is either stupidity or else a metaphysical invention.
Truth is better than the fairest seeming falsehood,
and the fanaticism which lurks in propagandism of
all sorts is fatal to it. Absolute happiness is an
abstraction. The exaltation which pretends to its
possession is either empty or hypocritical. Be con-
tent not to be happy, or at least be happy in miss-
ing bliss. Be cheerful, be clairvoyant, be kind and
good; avoid pedantry even in renouncement, be
simple, and above all things remember i faut
MORALITY 5

cultiver notre jardin.” The lack of such philosophy
is plainly spirituality ; its virtue is clearly good sense.
Ii is not the predominance of the mind over the
heart that it teaches, but of both over the soul. Of
the two commandments whereon “hang all the law
and the prophets,” it forgets the first in its devotion
to the second. The two are indeed “like unto”
each other, and have inextricable mutual relations.
But as the second is, except abstractly, not so inev-
itable a corollary of the first as to render its state-
ment needless, so it is plain that one’s duty toward
one’s neighbor may in practice be very sufficiently
performed under the sanctions of a social morality
which is nevertheless unillumined by that personal
spiritual experience and uncrowned by that “ inward
glory ” particular to the performance of one’s duty
toward God—particular, that is to say, to religion.
It is the personal insufficiency of his philosophy
that is responsible for those weaknesses which make
M. Scherer call Voltaire “a pitiful character.” Vol-
taire, at all events, could not dispense with religion.

In fine, the French have not the religious a

 

perament, as they have not the analogous poetical
or sentimental temperament. The moment one re-
moves from religion the theological element one per-
ceives how differently, differently constituted souls
may be affected by it; how, instead of varying like
morality with energy of character, it varies with
temperament; how some natures are perpetually
feeling after and finding its supreme consolations,
16 FRENCH TRAITS

and how others are infinitely less satisfied by these.
In general, I think the French temperament fails to
vibrate responsively to them. There is something
Socratic and self-sustaining about it which demands
the adjustment of life to health and activity, and re-
sents the prominence of solace and healing in an
ideal that contemplates the drawing nigh of evil
days. As Carlyle said of Socrates, indeed, the
‘French temperament is “terribly at ease in Zion.”
Its ideal is the Epicurean ideal. Aristotle is its
moralist, not St. Paul—Aristotle asserting, as ex-
posited by Condorcet, that ‘“ every virtue is one of
our natural inclinations which reason forbids us
both to resist too much and to obey too implicitly.”
All Condorcet’s ethics, which are French ethics,
even his sympathetic account of Epicureanism,
which he finds least distant from the truth, are
vitiated for us by our profound conviction that the
maxim, ‘‘he that loveth his life shall lose it,” is as
empirically sound as it is mysterious. But that is
religion, and Condorcet and his countrymen con-
centrate their attention in this sphere on morality.
Instead of conquering the passions they utilize
them. Instead of resignation they seek distraction ;
and they have so ordered life that such distraction
as with our self-centred indjvidualism we do not
dream of, is within their easy reach.
The gayety we too often associate with levity of

character is, as the French illustrate it, a necessity
‘of mental health anda kind of goodness, By no
MORALITY 77

means is it a mere yielding to sensation, which is
the beginning of dissipation ; but there is about it
something of tension. To be gay a man must live
well, must order his life aright. In many cases
there is a real dissipation in not seeking the means
of gayety, in letting the whole physical system lose
tone for lack of the tension which gayety imparts.
The leading motive of Pere La Chaise has a distinct
note of gayety in it. ‘Man is a sporting as well as
a praying animal,” says Dr. Holmes. And, growing
old, M. Renan regrets that in his youth he did not
play enough; which, to be sure, the “St. James’s
Gazette” takes to mean regret for “ the serious occu-
pations of the café, the fencing-school, the naviga-
tion of the silvery Seine on Sunday beneath beauty’s
favoring smile, and the other occupations of brisk
Parisian adolescence.” But every one hasn’t the
cockney idea of leisure, of gayety, of every state
which is not the only original Carlylean antidote
for human misery. You see what Satan would find
for the editor of the “St. James’s Gazette” to do in
case of idleness, but this does not imply that M.
Renan means debauch, or that French gayety im-
plies it. Ifthe French are deficient in spirituality
and conceive spiritual things materially, it is none
the less true that they look at material things in an
extremely spiritual way. The result is a pervasive
vivacity, a sustained blitheness, whose high key is
preserved with the same delightful ease that one
observes in a painting by Fortuny ; the local color
18 FRENCH TRAITS

may have less richness, less variety, but the picture
is more effective ; the individual may “ wither,” but
the world is indisputably more and more—more and
more important, more and more worthy. And this
ensemble cannot be obtained by frivolous means.
“Tl faut souffrir pour voir la comédie,” says Doudan.
The French are ready to make any sacrifices in
' order to enjoy the utmost attainable. Occasionally
these sacrifices have been of the substance in grasp-
ing at theshadow. Occasionally French good sense
has been at fault. During the Second Empire,
whose army imposed one side of Paris on France
entire, the French ideal of the development of the
entire man, under liberal but decorous mcurs, was
here and there lost in the “ocean of excess.”’ The
present generation shows marks of this enervation,
but the recovery of moral tonicity after the Napole-
onic debauch is most noteworthy and most con-
spicuous. The rejection of the Reformation is a
still more signal instance of wrong choosing in a
great crisis. We repeat after Michelet, that France
rejected the Reformation because “ she would have
no moral reform ;” and we do not enough remem-
ber the political necessities of Francis I. and
Catharine de’ Medici, and the French origin of
the pollen that fructified the soil out of which
sprang Huss and Wyckliffe. But by France, in this
instance, we really mean, though we are perpetu-
ally forgetting it, not the sound heart and core.of
the nation, but a luxurious and elegant aristocracy
MORALITY 79

in the direct current of Renaissance laxity and
expansion—such as existed in Germany no more
in Luther’s time than in any other. Doubtless
with an ideal of personal morality, France, even
then, would have accepted the Reformation, but
she is so solidaire that she had to await organic and
communal agencies. Republican France, that is,
France genuine and articulate, has, however irre-
ligious, never been conspicuously immoral.

‘When we see a people whose qualities are thus
national and whose defects are individual, when we
consider that the whole is, everywhere but in mathe-
matics, something other than the sum of all its parts,
it seems singular that the distinction I have dwelt |
on between social and personal morality should be
so constantly lost sight of. Losing sight of it
is, philosophically, the source of that absurd mis-
conception of French morality with which I began,
and to lose sight of it both schools of our philosophy
are prone. Let me refer once more to Condorcet—
an admirably representative Frenchman. ‘“ Prog-
ress,” in Condorcet’s mind, says Mr. John Morley,
“ig exclusively produced by improvement in intel-
ligence”—progress of course being taken to mean
progress in morality as well as in enlightenment.
Both our metaphysicians and our utilitarians deny
this theory. To the former nothing seems more
clearly self-evident, or more clearly verified empiri-
cally, than the maxim “ Education cannot make men
moral.” Morality depends upon the will; you can \
80 FRENCH TRAITS

reach the springs of the will only through the heart.
Sanctification is therefore scientific, as well as reli-
gious, doctrine. Progress consists in spreading
sanctification. Systematic minds, ultramontane
avowedly or in disguise, identify Church and State
in the organic unity of mankind whose saving grace
is piety and whose development thus depends on the
centralized and authoritative teaching of religion.
This philosophy, whether illustrated at Rome or
Geneva, at Smithfield or at Salem, has generally
shown itself to be associated with practical disad-
vantages which, whatever its merits or however per-
fect its reasoning, have put the Zeitgeist out of con-
ceit with it. For the moment, at all events, this
tyrant is more favorably disposed to the ethics of
the utilitarians, as illustrated in Mr. Morley’s criti-
cism of Condorcet for omitting “ the natural history
of western morals,” which he regards as ‘“a result
of evolution that needed historical explanation” as
much as the evolution of the intelligence—or, as
caricatured by Mr. Adler in finding the ethics of
the shepherds and fishermen of Galilee, two thou-
sand years ago, rudimentary beside the elaborate re-
sults reached by Societies of Ethical Culture to-day.
Condorcet would reply to both these positions by
accusing both of confusing social with personal mo-
rality. He would perhaps assure Mr. Morley that
as personal morality depends solely upon obedience
to the dictates of a conscience however little enlight-
ened, any mention of its separate evolution as an
MORALITY 81

element of progress is misleading. In reply to the -
metaphysicians he would certainly maintain that, ©
although it is perfectly true that “education cannot
make men moral,” it is equally true that nothing but
education can make mankind moral. He would
argue with President Gilman: ‘There is no better
way known to man for securing intellectual and
moral integrity than to encourage those habits, thosé
methods and those pursuits which tend to establish
truth.” He would probably point out the dangers
to social, of a too exclusive devotion to personal;
morality ; and indicate the unhappy ethical result of
a passionless, unintellectual, unpersonally-investi-
gated, conventional morality, of which the springs
are accepted commonplaces. He would assert that,
whereas an ignorant man might be as moral asa
savant, there is no record of any unenlightened
moral community ; that though the existence of an
_ Alexander VI. is compatible with learning it is incon-
sistent with common schools ; that moral develop-
ment goes on in the community as a spontaneous
concomitant of general intellectual growth, the dis-
covery of one age being the morality of the next ;
that the “progress of morality ” does not mean the
spread of the disposition to do one’s duty as one
sees it, but the growth of the conception of what
duty really is, ‘Does this or that community con-
ceive this or that to be right or wrong? Is its moral
ideal salutary or not?” are questions whose answers
furnish the test of social morality and depend on
6
82 FRENCH TRAITS

illumination rather than on conscience. Which best
serves the cause of social morality, the Salvation
Army or Girard College, Mr. Moody or Harvard Uni-
versity? A community which compasses the preven-
tion of cruelty to animals may conceivably contain a
smaller proportion of eminently righteous men than
one which burns witches or sanctions the suttee,
but its social morality is distinctly higher. As to
communities, it is the French notion that the
attempt to anticipate the census of the New Jerusa-
lem is idle ; and the discovery, through mental con-
fusion, of Sodoms and Gomorrahs in other epochs
and distant lands, a difficult and dangerous proceed-

ing.
II
INTELLIGENCE
INTELLIGENCE

Tue sensation which France produces on the im-
pressionable foreigner is first of all that of mental
exhilaration. Paris, especially, is electric. Touch
it at any point and you receive an awakening shock.;
Live in it and you lose all lethargy. Nothing stag-
nates. Everyone visibly and acutely feels himself
alive. The universal vivacity is contagious. You
find yourself speaking, thinking, moving faster, but
without fatigue and without futility. The moral
air is tonic, respiration is effortless, and energy is.
unconscious of exertion. Nowhere is there so
much activity ; nowhere so little chaos. Nowhere:
does action follow thought so swiftly, and nowhere:
is there so much thinking done. Some puissant
force, universal in its operation, has manifestly so
exalted the spirit of an entire nation, here centred
and focussed, as to produce on every hand that
phenomenon which Schiller admirably characterizes
in declaring that ‘the last perfection of our quali-
ties is when their activity, without ceasing to be
sure and earnest, becomes sport.” The very monu-
ments of the past are as steeped in its influences as
the boulevard Babel of the present. The grandiose
86 FRENCH TRAITS

towers and severe facade of Notre Dame speak the
same thought, in the dialect of their epoch, that the
Panthéon uttered to the eighteenth and the Are de
VEtoile declares to our own century. The pano-
rama which spreads out before one from Mont-
martre or St. Cloud is permeated with this thought
—as distinct to the mental as the scene itself is to
the physical vision. Paris seems to stand for it—as
did the Athens of Pericles and the Florence of the
Renaissance. Like them, she seems to symbolize
the apotheosis of intellect. The present everywhere
asserts itself with superb confidence; the entire
environment is modern, untraditional, self-reliant ;
the past steps down from the tyrant’s chair and as-
sumes with dignity the pose of history, while stu-
dents, not votaries, keep it free from the dust of the
hospitable museums that harbor it. Is not each
generation, every moment, provided with the light of
its own mind—that light which Carlyle himself un-
warily calls “the direct inspiration of the Al-
mighty?” Is not consciousness the greatest of
divine gifts to man? Is not intelligence the meas-
ure of his distance from the brutes, the bond which
unites him to the gods, the instrument of his sal-
vation ?

This confidence in the syllogism, this belief in the
human intelligence, this worship of reason, has been
characteristic of France ever since the nation be-
came conscious of itself as a nation. And the fact
that its special distinction is highly developed in-

¥
INTELLIGENCE 87

telligence is perhaps equally a cause and an effect
of this. The form taken by the Revolution, that
great purge and renewer of the modern world, was
thus wholly natural. It embodied the nation’s belief ;
in the saving power of reason and its impatience.
with anomalies and absurdities. The desecration |
of the churches, the revolt against religion, the en-
deavor to infuse life into antique formularies as
jejune as they were classic, the mad terror at the
threatened reimposition by Europe of the old an-
archy, Napoleon’s career of conquest carrying the
Revolution to all neighboring peoples, whether they
wanted it or not—every feature, in fact, of the great;
upheaval is significant of the nation’s confidence in
the competence of mind in every crisis. That the |
mutual relations of long-existent phenomena could
constitute a subtle harmony quite apart from the
absurd and anomalous character of the phenomena
themselves, and wholly beyond the power of mind
to see, though within the circle of instinctive feel-
ing, France did not feel, and has never felt. The
belief that the “increasing purpose” running
through the ages operates through any other agency
than that of the human intelligence seems fantastic
to French reason. Working out the harmony of
the universe through the “ways of the wicked” or
the unconsciousness of the good it views with com-
plete scepticism. Even now the reactionary French-
man who would restore the ancien régime feels as he
does because he likes the monarchic ideal, and not
S eS

838 FRENCH TRAITS

because he resents the rude manner of its taking
off, .And it is this confidence in the efficacy of the
intelligence which makes the French so swift to
execute their ideas, so anxious to press and impose
them. The trait is as noticeable in personal as .in
public matters, in the social as in the political arena.
It is this which makes them so enamoured of the
positive and practical truths; and it is their pas-
sionate attachment to these, and their desire to-
make them prevail, which splits parties into groups,
reverses ministries, produces revolutions. That a
thing should be admitted and not adopted is in-
comprehensible to the French mind ; that it should
not be admitted after having been proved, after all
that may be said against it has been answered, and
simply because of an instinctive distrust in the hu-
man reason, is inconceivable to it.

In finding intelligence thus universal in France,
and integral in the French nature, I mean, of course,
to confound it with neither culture nor erudition.
I mean such intelligence as Mr. Hamerton notes in
the French peasant when he says that the interval
between the French peasant and a Kentish laborer
is enormous, densely ignorant as both may be. Or
that quality, to take a distinguished example, which
enabled Pascal, who had no reading, to anticipate in
the seventeenth century such a light of the eigh-
teenth as Kant, and such a light of the nineteenth
as Charles Darwin. It is the quality in virtue of
which rich and poor, educated and illiterate, priest
INTELLIGENCE 89

and sceptic, can meet on common ground and un-
derstand each other. There is, intellectually speak-
ing, far more disinterestedness than elsewhere.
People divide upon ideas, and not upon prejudices,
or even upon interests. Mind enters into everything. |
Even the fool reasons—which is perhaps why he is
the most intolerable fool on the footstool. The
“crank” is unknown. Respect for the embodiment;
of intelligence in books, science, or art, and for the |
distinguished in these lines of effort, pervades all
ranks. M. Prudhomme himself cherishes a deep re-
gard for them. One of his commonplaces is: “La
seule aristocratie, c’est l’aristocratie du talent.” The
heroes of French society, taken in the large sense,
are the men who have excelled in some intellectual
field. English qualities, English accomplishments,
are never extolled to them without reminding them
of the contrast in this, to their sense, vital regard
between the materialism of England and their own
civilized ideal. Yet such is the elasticity and sup-
pleness of the French intelligence that whereas Mr.
Froude exclaims bitterly, “In England the literary
class has no standing or influence,” M. Philippe Da-
ryl states the phenomenon with much more ration-
al explicitness in saying, “Our neighbors regard
their men of letters simply as specialists fulfilling
their functions in the general work, and having a
just claim, in the division of profits, to their rightful
share of pay and esteem.” <

It is impossible, in short, to read French books, \
90 FRENCH TRAITS

to meet French people, to study French history,
without perceiving that the unvarying centre of the
national target is the truth, the fact, the reality.
This is the shining disk at which the Frenchman
aims, in criticism as in construction, in art as in
science. Milton’s grandiose and beautiful images
strike M. Scherer especially because they are true
as well—because they are, as he says, “toujours
justes dans leur beauté.” The drawing, the values,
justness of tone, redeem any picture, however frivo-
lous its meaning ; errors in these respects condemn
any, however noble its sentiment. Far inferior to
Donatello and the Greeks, is M. Rodin’s judgment
of Michael Angelo. Far superior to all painters, is
Fromentin’s verdict on the Dutch masters. The
concluding lines of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
sum up the French belief with exactness, as they
do ours only by extension ; and it is at once the
distinction and the defect of French literature that
it may be justly called a splendid and varied formu-
lation of this belief. Familiar as well as classic
literature bears the same witness. Compare, from
the point of view of the intelligence, the ‘‘Causeries”
of Sainte-Beuve with those of Thackeray. The
“ Roundabout” chat may have more charm, more
philosophy, but the charm and the philosophy are
both sentimental. But for their magical style they
would be doomed to oblivion long before Sainte-
Beuve’s judgments reached the fulness of their
fame. A great deal has been said—and said in France
INTELLIGENCE 91

itselfi—in praise of the English essay, its delightful
indiscretions, its personal intimacy. But when a
Frenchman has anything analogous to do, he does
it on a plane of the intelligence distinctly higher
than that of the vast majority of English essays
since their origin in the sentimental “Spectator.”
M. Renan, M. Pailleron, M. Anatole France, the
most diverse French essayists, even in a department
of effort which is regarded rather as a digression
and diversion, agree in dealing quite exclusively
with the thinking power. In this field, as in others,
there is undoubtedly a great deal of inferior work,
done, but it is inferior in a different way from our;
inferior productions of the kind ; it is pedantic, or
superficial, or prosy, or stilted—it is not flat, emo-
tional, and unintelligent. And of the really supe-
rior work it is difficult to overestimate the amount
or the superiority. For one English or American,
German or Italian novelist, feuilletoniste, chroniqueur,
critic of dignified capacity, there are a dozen, a
score, French ones. In Spain and Italy French wares
visibly outnumber the native ones in the book-stores.
Commerce carries French books to as remote regions
as it does Sheffield cutlery or Manchester cotton-
ades. In America we have simply no notion of how
in this way the French ideal disseminates itself from
Tangier to St. Petersburg. In every country it is
an affectation to talk French; the dullest prig thus
feels himself at once artistically occupied. The
whole intellectual movement of Latin Europe is
92 FRENCH TRAITS

French. Scientifically, of course, France follows

\ the lead of the Germans, of the English. The emi-
i nence of M. Pasteur is somewhat solitary, perhaps.
“But science and erudition are special provinces of
accomplishment, and it is in the development, and
| diffusion of native intelligence in its general and
‘humane aspects that the French strength lies. If
M. Pasteur is not one of a group of which he is
primus inter pares, a3 might have been said of Mr.
Darwin, and as may perhaps be said now of Helm-
holtz, his vogue is far greater than that of any of his
foreign contemporaries. Millions of Englishmen
never heard of Professor Huxley. Millions of Ger-
mans are ignorant of Helmholtz’s existence. There
are, in comparison, few Frenchmen, probably, who
do not know that M. Pasteur is one of “les gloires
de la France.”

And the national turn for intellectual seriousness
is as conspicuous in the periodical press as in liter-
ature. The press, in fact, is literature to a degree
unknown in England and among ourselves. The
“journalist” and the lttérateur are not distinct, as
one has only to read the journals that flourish and
the journals that struggle to perceive that they are
here. Indeed, our most eminent “journalists,” who
seem now to be getting the upperhand of the
“merely literary ” writers and establishing them-
selves as a class, resent being confounded with the
latter, and hold the same opinion of them as Mr.
Cameron, of Pennsylvania. They address them-
INTELLIGENCE 93

selves very little to the intelligence and exercise
their own wits, which are unsurpassed, in providing
attractive bait for that popular variety of gudgeon
known as “the average man” and “the general
reader,” and known to be endowed with only a rudi-
mentary digestive apparatus for the things of the
mind. They have a corresponding disregard for
French journalism, to which “enterprise” is un-
known, and which appeals far more exclusively to
the intelligence. “A new idea every day,” Emile de
Girardin maintained was the secret of successful
journalism ; following it, he became the most suc-
cessful journalist of his time. And ideas are, in
Paris, so far more numerous and fecund than are
our kind of sensations, even manufactured sensa-
tions, that Paris has on an average some eighty
odd daily papers. If the “Figaro” desires to be es-
pecially startling, it gets M. Mirbeau, or M. Grand-
lieu, or M. Saint-Genest, to exalt some disquieting
ineptitude into plausibility ; it does not procure bo-
gus interviews, or print a broadside of private let-
ters, or invent a puerile hoax. The police reports
are fewer and infinitely less elaborate. Names and
dates are no more important to the interest of an
actual than to that of an imaginary drama. The
law imposes respect for privacy, but the law has
the full support of the public, which would find
our “Personal” columns, our “Here and There,”
our “ Men of To-Day,” our “Society ” news, and, in
fine, our entire pre-occupation with vapid person-
94. FRENCH TRAITS

ality, simply unreadable. The gossip of the French
press is pompous and pretentious, but it is not
pitched in either the lackey or the parvenu key. In-
terviewing is still an occasional eccentricity. Who
ever has anything interesting to say is able and pre-
fers to say it himself in his own way. And all that
is not “enterprise” is very much better done than
with us. Criticism follows the movement in art, in
literature, and in science far more closely and more
discreetly. Of even tolerable criticism we have,
speaking strictly, very little; and the best, the very
best, is apt to consist of the specific judgment of the
specialist concerning the immediate case in hand—
a high-class and conscientiously executed ‘“ Guide to
Bookbuyers,” in a word ; excellent in its way, but
also eloquent of the lack of the humanized public
which demands real criticism—criticism of scope,
full of generalizations, bringing to bear trained fac-
ulties and stored wisdom to the task of that con-
structive work which shows the relations as well as
the character of its subject. Even in political and
social discussion our journals show a gingerliness in
dealing with generalization, which indicates clearly
that itis an article suspected of their customers.
The attitude toward it of the latter is evidently very
much that of O’Connell’s fish-wife to the word
“‘parallelopipedon.” Yet of that amplification, his-
. torical allusion, elementary erudition, and cheap
rhetorical embroidery which some of our successful
editorial writers assimilate from their text-book, Ma-
INTELLIGENCE 95

caulay—of that kind of writing, in short, which ad-
dresses unintelligent admiration of the things of the
mind, the veriest Gradgrinds of our public seem
never to tire. Of course, the system of signing ar-
ticles which obtains in France would prick these
bubbles, were they blown there, but it is evident
that the public has no taste for them. The French
public is pleased with its own follies and fatuities ;
it has its own superficiality and its own variety of
provincialism. It suffers especially from that hyper-
trophy of the intelligence, chronic esprit, as one of
the prominent but hardly serious journals shows in
melancholy distinction ; every morning it gives one a
picture of the mental wreck, the state of irresponsi-
bility, reached by a concentrated and exclusive de-
velopment of a talent for esprit, of which the first-
fruits were immensely clever, but which culminated
with the Second Empire, whose hollowness it had
done somuch toexpose. But imagine the subscrib-
ers of “L/Intransigeant,” or of “ L'Autorité,” reading
our journals of the same grade of seriousness. And it
is impossible to take up a French paper of the better
class without being struck by the way in which it is
written, by the security which the writer evidently
feels in the capacity of his readers to understand
him completely, and by his equally evident con-
sciousness that emotional appeals, dialectical so-
phisms, ingenious beggings of the question, insin-
cere extenuations, impudent exaggerations, and a
rest of this order of artillery which plays so promi-'
96 FRENCH TRAITS

nent a part in our newspaper-warfare, will avail him
nothing if his reader be not in sympathy with him
or his presentation of his case be neither sound nor
attractive. There is, in consequence, a sort of
“take it or leave it” air about the French newspa-

' per article that speaks volumes for the intelligence of

its readers. Its moral attitude is that of M. Halévy’s
“Insurgé,” to whom, even in the supreme crisis of
mortal peril, the idea of influencing his judges by
emotional appeal, or by sophistical distortion of a
plain case, does not even occur.

Very superficial observation, very slight intro-
spection, suffice to assure us, on the other hand,
that we need not go to the press for illustration of
the opposite attitude. In every circle the most
singular paradoxes are current. They are amply
sustained by that ingenuity of dialectic which is a
perversion of one’s own and an affront to others’ in-
telligence. “Things are what they are,” says Bishop
Butler, ‘and the consequences of them will be what
they will be. Why, then, should we desire to be
deceived?” Simply because there are other con-
siderations more valuable in our eyes than avoiding
being deceived. If we did not suffer ourselves to be
duped, if we did not at need elaborately dupe our-
selves, such is our idea of duty that conscience
would not permit us to do certain things, an irre-
sistible impulsion towards which, according to a
reverend theory, we owe to the momentum of the
fall of our progenitor, Adam. Hither these things
INTELLIGENCE 97

do not tempt the Frenchman, or his intelligence
perceives their noxiousness, or he yields to them
with his eyes open and does not seek to elude pun-
ishment in sophistication. LEthically speaking, he
thus escapes cant ; but he escapes also, in the entire
moral sphere, the dangers arising from mental con-
fusion, He feels that talking, writing, argument,
cleverness, can change nothing in the constitution}
of things, that emotional seriousness will not trans-
form intellectual levity, and consequently he -de-
velops no taste for that Anglo-Saxon passion known ‘:
to him as thése—that is to say, argument for argu- |
ment’s sake. He is not attracted by the suppositi-
tious. His mind has no “Pickwickian” phases. His
triumph in a contest in intellectual dexterity would
be empoisoned by fear lest his skill be taken for
sincerity, and his mind, accordingly, supposed in-
genious rather than acute, imaginative rather than
sure and sound. He avoids thus the confusion of
temper and passion in all discussion. Temper and
passion mean deviation from the end in view; they
prevent the object from being seen “in itself as it
really is ;” emotion is quite dissociated with getting
at that, and, therefore, though the social and artistic
impulses lead the T'renchman to express a great
deal of emotion at times, to become apparently ex-
cited in a way which would in our case indicate the
submersion of the intelligence by a flood of passion,
his emotional expression is generally decorative, so
to speak, rather than structural. Withal the French
7
98 FRENCH TRAITS

intelligence seems to have almost no frivolous side.
The different varieties of mental arithmetic, guéssing-
games, puzzles, puns, spiritualism, theosophy, fa-
naticisms, have no attractions for it. It instinctively
shrinks from all such desultory and futile manifes-
tations of the scientific spirit. When a famous
‘‘ mind-reader,” who has excited the earnest interest.
of both branches of our great race, was in Paris, a
few years ago, one of the papers expressed the gen-
eral feelimg in the suggestion that a pin be hid on a
transport about to sail for Tonquin in order that
the mind-reader’s success in finding it might be
the means of taking him definitively away from a
wearied public.

Life is almost never in France taken en amateur,
as it is so largely with us at the present epoch. It
is taken, rather, en connatsseur. People do not do
things merely from the love of them, without regard
to their capacity for doing them. Every lover of
literature does not make verses. Every lover of the
drama does not write a play. It is not in France a
distinction for a person of particularly literary’ tastes
not to have attempted a novel. The love of knowl-
edge is not perhaps as insatiable as with us, but it
is infinitely more judicious, Interest in a wide range
of subjects is not accepted by its possessor as the
equivalent of encyclopedic erudition, any more than
it is so accepted with us by the acquaintances of its
possessor. ‘Aspire to know all things,” says M.
Renan to the French youth; “the limits will appear
INTELLIGENCE 99

soon enough.” No American Chiron could wisely
give such advice to our Achilleses. And to many
of our universal aspirants the word “limits” can
have really no meaning, since to the appetite of the
pure amateur it has no application. The true con-/
noisseur, on the other hand, the Frenchman, pro-
ceeds by exclusion. To enjoy, he needs to know;
and to know, everyone needs to select. We geti\
along very well without selecting, because even in,
the intellectual sphere it is our susceptibility, rather
than our intelligence, that seeks satisfaction. But
about. a thousand practical and positive topics the
Frenchman, who speaks from experience and ex-
amination, finds our views speculative and imma-
ture. We, who have enough Teutonism in us to en-
joy the vague, and of ourselves demand only that it
be also the vast, find him in turn a trifle hard, a
trifle narrow, a trifle professional. He is, in fact,
terribly explicit. His exactness, were it not relieved
by so many humane qualities, would be excessively
unsympathetic. It is not, however, the exactness of
the pedant. It is the precision of perfect candor
and clairvoyance exercised on objects wholly within
its range of vision and undisturbed by anxiety as to
what lies outside. Of that the intelligence gives no
report, and to the Frenchman the “immediate be-
holding ” of Kant and Coleridge is the same pure
abstraction that it was to Carlyle. In this way, and
owing to the professional view taken of it, life be-
comes an exceedingly specialized affair, It lacks
100 FRENOH TRAITS

the element of uncertainty. That of each individual
is in great measure prearranged. Given the cir-
cumstances, which in France it is not difficult to
predict, and it may even easily be foretold. It will
not be deflected by whim or fancy. Only in rare
instances will it be transfigured by passion. The
individual is too rational to be swerved by senti-
ment, and it is sentiment that is the great source of
the unforeseen and the unexpected.

Mr. Matthew Arnold was not long ago praising us
for our straight-thinking, or at all events telling his
countrymen that our thinking is straighter than
theirs. The compliment is a gracious one, but to
be told that we think “straighter” than Englishmen
ought not to make us conceited. A comparison of
our own with French thinking, in this respect of
straightness, could not fail to have a less flattering
result. We are not, to be sure, like the English,
handicapped by the dilemma of either thinking
crookedly or else admitting that much of the consti-
tution of our society, its ideals and its ambitions, its
objects of admiration and of ridicule, is anomalous
and antiquated. But to fancy our thinking as free

‘from prejudice and confusion as that of a society
where cant is unknown, even though its substitute
be fatuity, would be clear optimism. Upon a vast
body of intellectual matters our thinking is not —
straight because it-is, in these matters, dependent
upon certain firmly held notions which would be
seriously compromised if we were not careful to
INTELLIGENCE 101

keep one eye on them, whatever subject we may be
dealing with at the moment. If I admit this in re-
gard to A, what will be the effect of the admission
upon the opinion I hold in regard to X? is a com-
mon mental reflection with us when brought face to
face with certain topics. This is never the mental
attitude of the Frenchman, who looks at the matter
in hand with absolute directness. He has an in-
stinctive dislike of the confusion which results from
thinking of more than one thing ata time, an in-
stinctive disposition to look at it simply and post-
pone all consideration of its consequences—about
which we are in general deeply concerned. He
readily makes sacrifices to insure clearness. The
American habit of hedging in advance against a pos-
sible change of opinion in the event of later in-
formation (a clumsy device for avoiding the brutality
of downrightness, much in vogue with our “sub-
tler ” writers) is unknown to him. One remarks all
this in the first discussion among Frenchmen that
he listens to or shares. Possibly owing in part to
temperament, to a certain insouciance, to a cnr
tion that the destinies of empires are not really be-
ing decided, the admissions made, the easy acknowl-
edgment of mistake, are surprising. But, mainly,
these phenomena are to be ascribed to the straighter
thinking of the French mind, to its unembarrassed
poise, its genius for clearness, its confidence in it-|
self.
At the bottom of our own peculiarities in the

 

 
apis

102 FRENCH TRAITS

matter of thinking lies certainly an inherited dis-
trust in the intelligence working thus simply and

{freely. Of Butler’s saying, before cited, namely,

that “things are what they are, and the conse-
quences of them will be what they will be,” Mr.
Arnold admirably affirms that “to take in and to
digest such a sentence as that is an education in
moral and intellectual veracity.” Every Frenchman
is thus educated, however, and Mr. Arnold’s further
remark, that “intensely Butlerian as the sentence
is, Butler came to it because he is English,” seems
fantastic. He came to see the importance of saying
it because of his English environment. Toa French-
man it is an accepted commonplace. Aud, indeed,
we, if we withdraw our attention for a moment from
the ingrained Anglo-Saxon indisposition to credit it
in practice, and look at the maxim clearly and
straightiorwardly, as at a mere intellectual proposi-
tion—as a Frenchman looks at all maxims or other
arrangements of words in sentences—we can feel
that it loses something of its apparently sensational
profundity. But in practice, owing to our English
hereditament, we do not simply bring our conscious-
ness to bear upon any point and, after listening to
its report, deem our whole duty discharged—even
if the point be a maxim which we can, on close in-
spection, perceive to be axiomatic. In practice our

i English instinct warns us against being sure that

things are what to the unaided intelligence they
seem to be; we have no confidence that there is any
INTELLIGENCE 108

predetermined law governing their consequences ;
and if there be, we are not at all sure there is not
some excellent reason why we should wish to be de-
ceived. The entire history of the development of
the British constitution, which we, in common with
Englishmen, admire not more for its results than
for the method by which these have been attained,
is a conspicuous illustration of this. No more
forcible example of the difference between the
French attitude toward the intelligence and our
own could be adduced. The French way of arriv-
ing at their constitution we, in fact, do not recog-
nize as a development—as, indeed, for the past two
centuries and a half it has not been; the Tiers Ltat
knew nearly as well what it wanted in 1615 as it
does to-day, and since then the “development” of
French society has consisted largely in converting
its intelligence into statutory enactments. But
whenever we think of what little we know of this
growth of French institutions it is with either con-
tempt or compassion for the French inability to
make haste slowly, for their unwise hurry to draw
the conclusion after both premises are settled, for
their conviction that the order of nature insures
things being what they are, for their blindness to
Burke’s ingenious tabling of discussion in insisting
that regard should only be had to “man’s nature as
modified by his habits,” for, in a word, their over-
weening and short-sighted confidence in the , efficacy

of the intelligence. We philosophize in this way
104 _ FRENCH TRAITS

about matters of large importance, just as our Eng-
lish cousins do about all matters—from the blessings
of inequality to the speciousness of the decimal sys-
tem.

Nothing, of course, is more foreign to the French
mind than this attitude, which it is probably as in-
capable of appreciating in others as of assuming
itself. It never even affects “the humility becom-
ing such doubtful things as human conclusions,” to
use an English writer’s phrase.® It regards such
“humility” very much as metaphysicians regard
the similar distrust of the authority of consciousness
which sometimes distresses the beginner in psychol-
ogy—as distrust, namely, of “the measure,” in Cole-
ridge’s words, ‘‘of everything else which we deem
certain.” In virtue thus of their taking intelligence
seriously, the French make, it must be acknowledged,
very much more frequent use of it than we do; and
as nothing develops and polishes a quality so much
as cultivation, it is not surprising that they strike
unprejudiced observers as in this respect our ,supe-
riors. Englishmen do not in the least mind this, as
arule. An American is perhaps less philosophic.
The things of the mind are more esteemed by us.
We have more respect for professors and “ literary
fellows.” And although these and their congeners
are more humerous in England, and in quality also
“average higher” there no doubt, they certainly
make less impression upon the pbilistine mass which
surrounds them, and are more completely a class by
INTELLIGENCE 105

themselves than with us. Our_vulgarity is of quite
a different type from English vulgarity ; having no
“brutalized ” class below it, it is less contemptuous, |
and having no “materialized” class above it, it is |
not obsequious and pusillanimous. It is perhaps, :
for these reasons, louder, more full of swagger, more

offensive; but it is manly and intelligent. Our!
rapidly increasing leisure class is itself felt to be

more conspicuously lacking in other qualities than

intelligence when it is compared or, rather, con-

trasted (for of course nothing can be so compared)

with the British upper-class. On the whole, occu-

pied in the main as our intelligence may be with

purely material subjects, and ignorant as it may

be of the importance of any others—deficient,

that is to say, as it may be in culture—it is never-|

theless one of the great American forces, and is re-)
spected as such and gloriedin. The ordinary Eng-i
lishman finds the ordinary American thin, sharp,

stridulous, eager, and nervous, but he also unques-

tionably finds him clever as well; the defects he

notes are not defects of intelligence.

But after all is said that need be said of us in
this respect, and however greatly our esteem for
intelligence may excel that of the English, the fact
remains that we are in no sort of danger of allowing
this esteem to become excessive. We have nothing
like the confidence in the intelligence which the;
French have. It is one of our tools in the work of:
society building. With the French it is a talisman.

 
106 FRENCH TRAITS

We do not in a word begin to take it as seriously
as the French do. The Frenchman would probably
address us on this subject somewhat in this wise:
_ “Your intelligence is certainly agile and alert, es-
_pecially when compared with your English cousins’,
but you certainly exhibit it frivolously. No extrava-
gance is too great for your thinking. You are con-
stantly trying experiments in thinking, constructing
for yourselves notions of this and that—not at all
with reference to ‘any experience, but wilfully.
Moreover, you have an opinion upon every imagin-
able topic, and you do not consider it at all neces-
sary to give any substantial reason for it. You
have, it is true, a nervous dread of inconsistency,
and exercise a great deal of ingenuity to avoid the
appearance of it. But the exercise of ingenuity in
this way is itself frivolous ; it demonstrates a lack
of confidence in the intelligence as such, one of
whose chief qualities is flexibility. Flexible, thus,
you rarely are, though you are certainly, spite of
all your ingenuity, not a little variable. And it is
not new light, but a different emotion, which makes
you so. Your opinions are very apt to be partis pris
—not, d Vanglaise, out of, habit and tradition, but
out of pure freak and whim, You are not, in our
sense, sincere. You are, of course, perfectly honest,
but in importing whim and fantasy into the domain
of pure intelligence you are not serious ; you are
guilty of intellectual levity. You tell us (or, out of
caution, the habit of business reserve, civility, or
INTELLIGENCE 107

what not, you do not tell us) your notions about
ourselves, for example. You have, at all events, no
hesitation in forming opinions of the most positive
kind as to our character, our manners, our art and
politics. To mention politics alone, you have strong.
doubts as to the continuance of the present repub-
lic; fancy us in danger of anarchy from unrestricted
socialist agitation, yet condemn our cruelty toward
Louise Michel; alternately predict a king and a
Radical dictator for us ; pronounce us grasping in
Madagascar, faithless in Tunis, pusillanimous in
Egypt; attach weight to M. Rochefort’s utterances ;
anticipate cabinet crises ; become ‘ humorous’ over
the unexpected duration of the present ministry—
all without any such acquaintance with us, our in-
stitutions, history, and present condition, as would
be necessary really to justify you, if you took such
matters seriously, in holding any notions at all in
regard to us. You think a great deal. Your intel-
ligence is very active. But you will forgive my
frankness in saying that it is, to our sense, a shade
lacking in self respect. Doubtless you have some
other touchstone for discovering truth, of which we
are ignorant, or perhaps some substitute for truth
itself. Your inventiveness is immense. You are“
the people of the future.” =
The French quick-wittedness, again, differs from
our own as much as their straight-thinking does.
Clearness is not more characteristic of French
thought than celerity. The constant, unintermittent
108 FRENCH TRAITS

activity of the French consciousness assists power-
fully to secure this. It keeps the intelligence free
at once from preoccupation and from distraction.
With us the man who sees quickly is apt not to see
clearly. He is rather the man of imagination than
of clairvoyance. He divines, guesses, feels what you
mean. He runs ahead of your thought, anticipates
it wrongly often, if the data of his augury as to
your probable meaning are insufficient. Sometimes
he makes ludicrous errors; sometimes he becomes
very expert at concealing his misconceptions and
appearing acutely sympathetic, with really very
slight title thereto ; his agility of appreciation ri-
vals the artificially developed memory of the habit-
ual liar. But all this is presence of mind rather
than quick-wittedness. There is a perversion of
the pure intelligence about it that is almost tragic.
Our truly clairvoyant man sees slowly in compari-
son with the Frenchman, though I think we may
say in comparison with the Frenchman alone. His
solidity of character gives him an instinctive dis-
like, an instinctive mistrust, of fragmentariness. He
must first make the circuit of any object before per-
mitting himself really to perceive any of its facets ;
he must reflect upon its relations before he can
realize its existence. The Frenchman meantime
has contemplated, comprehended, and forgotten.
Not only is his own intelligence singly developed,
but he lives in an atmosphere in which care for the
intelligence is almost exclusive. He is thus en-
/ INTELLIGENCE 109

abled to treat propositions by themselves. He does
not ask what the propounder is driving at in gen-
eral, before consenting to comprehend the specific
statement at the moment. He would not, for ex-
ample, before opening his mind to the subject of
national characteristics, require to know which ones
were personally preferable to the chronicler and
commentator. In listening to a speech, in hearing
a *emark, or in reading a book or an article, he
never inquires what are the maker or author's sen-
timents or opinions on cognate cardinal points.
He is a stranger to impulses which impel us to seek
Mr. Darwin’s views concerning a future life as a
preliminary to even apprehending the principle of
natural selection, or the positive credo of Carlyle
before enjoying Carlyle’s destructive criticism of
Coleridge. As to any important object of mental
apprehension, therefore, his road is much shorter
and his arrival much quicker. To him, at any rate,
it would not be necessary to add that this involves
‘no question of the relative worthiness of the two
ways of seeing and thinking.

But it is only the French that we find especially
quick-witted, and generally we reach France via
England ; and, remembering Thackeray’s definition
of humor as “ wit and Jove,” we are apt to express
one difference between ourselves, as Anglo-Saxons,
and the French in respect of intelligence as the dif-
ference between humor and wit. Such a distinc-
tion is flattering to us, and it is therefore become
‘

110 FRENCH TRAITS

classic. It has, however, to be stretched to the
utmost of its elastic extent in candid hands to be
made to apply in many instances, unless by the
“love,” which to make humor Thackeray adds to
wit, something more intense than geniality and
evident kindliness is intended. And more and
more this is seen to be the case. Few Anglo-Saxon
critics nowadays, of anything like Carlyle’s insight,
for example, would be tempted to turn an essay on
Voltaire, the great destroyer of the old, bad order
of things, into a sermon on persiflage. To many
French writers it would be impossible to deny the
possession of a subtle charm qualifying their unmis-
takable wit, in a way which renders it very cordial
and good-humored, if not humorous. Merely “ wit-
ty,” in our sense of the term, they certainly are not.
They have an indubitable flavor which is, if not
genial, assuredly kindly. Where can even an Anglo-
Saxon laugh as he can at a French theatre? Mirth-
provoking qualities will, on the French stage, ex-
cuse any absurdity. ‘Say what you like ; I admit it,”
M. Francisque Sarcey, the famous ‘Temps ” critic,
repeats a hundred times, “ Mais, cest si amusant ;
cest si amusant!” An American would so speak of
negro-minstrelsy. “ Witty” is a wretched transla-
tion of spirituel. To be spirituel is to be witty in a
spirttual way. It involves the active interposition
of mind, and what is known as the light touch.
Our humor does not depend upon lightness of
touch, it need hardly be said. A genial imagina-
INTELLIGENCE 111

tion suffices in many instances. Often this need

only be possessed by the auditor or the reader

to make humor successful. Heartiness on one

side, and good-will, on the other, go far toward

creating it out of nothing sometimes. Nothing will

atone for the lack of this in our eyes; nothing will

atone for the lack of wit in French eyes. This at

least it is fair to say. A Frenchman would find Cclo-

nel Sellers as ennuyeua as Paris found Dundreary.

An Anglo-Saxon finds something cynical alloying

the mirth of such a master-piece as ‘‘Georges Dan-

din ;” we cannot comfortably enjoy the ridicule of

inisfortune if it be due to stupidity rather than to

moral error. The French attitude is the exact con-

verse, and the fact is exceedingly instructive.

: But the French lack of sympathy for our humor |
does not chiefly spring from the lack of this ele-

ment of “love” in French esprit, for which, indeed,

it substitutes a fairly satisfactory geniality; nor

does it proceed altogether from impatience with the

voulu character of this humor, with its occasional

heaviness of touch, its ceaseless vigilance for oppor-

tunities of exercise, its predominance of high spirits

over mental alertness, of body over bouquet. It is

in the main due to French dislike of, and perplexity _
in the presence of, whatever is thoroughly fantastic, :
unscrupulously exaggerated, wilfully obscure. To
illustrate this distinction, a better definition of hu-

mor than Thackeray’s is quoted by his daughter

from Miss Anne Evans, who describes it (wittily,
112 FRENCH TRAITS

not humorously) as ‘Thinking in fun, while we feel
in earnest.” Such procedure is in the teeth of
French habit and tradition—does violence to every
French notion of right feeling and thinking. ‘With
them thinking corresponds as exactly to feeling as
talking does to thinking. This is not at all
inconsistent with the subtilest suggestion, intima-
tion, and even a certain amount of superficial indi-
rectness. Suggestion, nevertheless, however sub-
tile, is always strictly and logically inferrible from
the statement which suggests and which may itself
be so delicate as to be easily missed. And however
superficially indirect an intimation may be, it is
never obscure. But we look for the serious feel-
ing beneath the fun in French wit, and it is only by
long practice that we come to perceive that there
isnone. “All fables have their morals,” says Thor-
eau somewhere, “but the innocent enjoy the story.”
In any department of comedy the French are bound
to seem to us “innocent” in this way. An Anglo-
Saxon reading or witnessing Moliére, and inevitably
associating serious feeling with all merriment of
anything like such intellectual eminence as Mo-
liére’s, is sure to find his amusement alloyed with a
certain dissatisfaction. On the other hand, in the
presence of English or American humor the French-
man is infallibly at fault. He is accustomed to the
classification and minute division of a literature
highly organized and elaborately developed, where
wit and philosophy have each its province—as dis-
INTELLIGENCE 113

tinctly as history and romance, which with us are
so frequently (and in Macaulay’s view, it may be
remembered, so advantageously) commingled. In
the presence of that portion of our American hu-
mor which is unaccompanied by any “feeling in
earnest,” and which is so popular in England, we
may perhaps excuse his perplexity, remembering his
partiality for lightness of touch.

What I have been saying is merely another and a
striking attestation of the French sense for propor-
tion, order, clearness. French wit, like everything
else in French character, is exercised under scien-
tifically developed conditions. It is never exagger-
ated in such a way as to lose its strict character as
wit. “Smiling through tears,” after the fashion of
the English comic muse, is little characteristic of
her French cousin: The French genius for measure
dislikes uncertainty and confusion as thoroughly
ag Anglo-Saxon exuberance dislikes being labelled
and pigeon-holed. Thus, with all their play of
mind, the French seems to us literal, almost terre-d-

terre at times—their play of mind is manifested |

within such clearly defined limits and exercised on

such carefully classified subjects. They, in turn, ;
find us vague, mystic, fantastical. Our fondness |

for viewing things in chance and passing lights

they share in no degree whatever. What they know

they possess. For bias, however brilliant, or im-

perfect vision, however luminous, they have a native

repugnance. Therefore we find them frequently defi-
8
114 FRENCH TRAITS

cient in imagination, and thus even lacking in their
great specialty of appreciation, apprehension, acute:
observation. M. Taine’s criticism of Carlyle, for
example, appears to us the very essence of misap-
preciation. M. Taine is quite blind to that over-
mastering side of Carlyle’s genius, his humor. He
takes him too seriously, and not seriously enough ;
he takes him literally. At once we say to ourselves,
nothing that this critic can say of Carlyle can have
real interest and value. And we err on our side ;
M. Taine can help us to see how necessary Carlyle’s
genius is to preserve from triviality, from merely
passing interest, all that exaggeration and fantasti-
cality which are just as characteristic of him as his
genius and humor.

On the other hand, it is in virtue, rather than in
spite of their distaste for mysticism, that the French
display such a rare quality for dealing with subjects
whose native realm is the border-land between the

i positive and the metaphysical. Here their touch is
invariably delicate and intuitively just. They pre-
fer the positive ; they deal with the metaphysical
positively, or not at all—witness Pascal, witness
Descartes, witness the deists of the Encyclopedia,
witness Michelet’s definition of metaphysics as “ Tart
de s'égarer avec méthode.” But they show immense
tact, which can only come from highly developed
intelligence unmixed with emotion, in ‘treating that
entire range of topics the truth concerning which
seems so accessible and is yet, as experience and
INTELLIGENCE 115

candor warn us, so elusive—the nebulee lying, as it
were, within the penumbra of perception, neither
quite outside its range in the clear light, nor wholly
within the shadow where search is as stimulating to
the imagination as it is otherwise barren. The field
of thought, where the light touch is the magician’s
wand that opens the mind, though it affords little
actual sustenance, and that fortifies the judgment in
keeping it within bounds ; where plump statements
and definite opinions are out of place ; where the
logical conclusion is divined to be incomplete and
misleading ; where scores of practical questions
concerning love, marriage, manners, morals, criti-
cism are to be discussed without dogmatism, and
the clearest view of them is seen to have qualifica-
tions—the field, in fine, of airy and avowed paradox,
where any emotion is an impertinence and-any hard
and fast generalization an intrusion, belongs almost
wholly to the French. This field they never mis-
take for the positive. They are no more uncon-
sciously vague here than in the positive field. They
treat fancifulness fancifully. They preserve all their
perspicacity in dealing with it. Some refinement.
of the intelligence secures them against the imposi-
tion of illusion, and enables them to enjoy and illus-
trate its art.
The passion for clearness appears nowhere more
manifest than in the French language itself, the
clearness of which is a commonplace. It is for this.
reason, rather than because it is the earliest settled i
i
i

116 FRENCH TRAITS

European idiom, and because of French preponder-
ance in European affairs, that it is the language of
diplomacy. It is impossible to be at once correct
and obscure in French. Expressed in French, a
proposition cannot be ambiguous, Any given col-
location of words has a significance that is certain.
Permutation of words means a change of ideas.
Spanish may have more rhetorical variety ; English
a choice between poetic and prose phraseology ;
German may state or, rather, ‘“ shadow forth” more
profundity ; Italian be “richer,” as the Italians,
who find themselves constrained in French, are al-
ways saying ; the synthetic languages may express
more concisely certain nuances of thought and feel-
ing. None of them is so precise as the French.
And this is far from being felt as a defect by the
French themselves. One of Victor Hugo’s chief
titles to fame is his accomplishment in moulding
the French language to his thought, in developing
its elasticity by making it say new things. This is
indeed, perhaps, the only one of his accomplish-
ments that may be called unique. It is universally
ascribed by Frenchmen to the miracle of Hugo’s
genius. Except Gautier, the other romanticists,
even, whatever violence they did to traditions of
propriety, worked with the old, time-honored tools.

' Alfred de Musset and Keats are often compared.

They have indeed many traits in common. English
stylists, admitting at once with Mr. Lowell that
Keats is “overlanguaged,” nevertheless do not hesi-
INTELLIGENCE 117

tate to find in his luxuriant freedom, and even his
license of tropical intensity, one of his most distin-
guished merits. In Musset’s case a French critic,
who “hesitates less and less,” he says, to term Mus-
set the greatest of French poets, is specially im-
pressed by the correctness, the propriety, of Mus-
set’s diction, the grace and power which he exhibits
within the lines of conventional grammar. Boileau
could reproach him with nothing. His past defin-
ites—where Racine himself is weak—are all right.
In other words, his precision is faultless; and
whereas this would be nothing in a mere gramma-
rian, in a poet of Musset’s spiritual quality it is
deemed a merit simply transcendent—so easy is it
to give the reins to one’s afflatus, and so be hurried
beyond the limits of that perfection of style which,
whatever else may be present, is absolutely essential
to the truest distinction. One sees at once how dif-
ferent the point of view is from our own. One ap-
preciates how the French language itself, with such
an ideal as this, conduces to the measure of the
French temperament, the clearness of the French
mind,

‘‘La Raison,” says Voltaire, “n’est pas prolixe.”
And whether or no the literature in which this
admirably clear language is embodied be as impor-
tant to mankind as other modern literatures, the
most superficial study of it reveals the source of that
terseness, for which it is known, even of the ignorant,
to be remarkable, in its devotion to the qualities of
118 FRENCH TRAITS

the intelligence rather than to those of the imagina-
tion. Inspired by and appealing to the intelligence
more exclusively than any other literature, it rarely.
sins by elaborateness, which is due to the dross.of
thought, or by an abruptness and inelegance whose
conciseness is by no means inconsistent with.obscur-
ity. It is thus full without being fragmentary. In-
elasticity of form is not a concomitant of its conden-
sation of substance. It is neither vague in idea nor
ejaculatory in expression. Borna Frenchman, Emer-
son, who would surely lose no essential conciseness
in a larger sweep and freer flow of phrase, would
have been as great a writer as he isa thinker. As
for that fulness which is rather over-explicit than
fragmentary, and which is indeed rather thinness
than fulness, which in every relation but that of
teacher and pupil is so relentlessly fatiguing, and of
which we enjoy a surfeit in pulpit, platform, press,
periodical, and private conversation, it simply does
not existin France. Such analogues of it as do exist
are rewarded with the esteem in which all. bores are
held in a country whose nightmare is ennui. Noth-
ing says more for Frenchintelligence. Nothing says
more for our own preference of instruction to intelli-
gence than the opposite attitude on our part, which
prompts the acceptance of much that is stale and flat
in the hope that somehow it may be found not
wholly unprofitable.

tion of rounded and complete perfection, has great
INTELLIGENCE 119

charm for persons of a quite different temperament
and training. Take as an instance, among the mul-
titude it would be easy to cite, the conspicuous one
of so thorough an Englishman as Mr. John Morley
in his character of publicist and critic. The direct
influence of French Encyclopeedism upon European
thought has perhaps ceased to be powerful; but as
one of the chief lights of that English school whose
performance is probably mainly responsible for the
late Kar] Hillebrand's’ opinion that the English at
present enjoy the intellectual supremacy in Europe,
Mr. John Morley is an interesting illustration of the
indirect influence which the methods and mental
habits of French rationalism still exert. Spite of a
thoroughly English temperament and training, Mr.
John Morley’s study of the French rationalistic
epoch, upon which he is the authority in English,
induces him to find it “a really singular trait” in
Burke that “to him there actually was an element
of mystery in the cohesion of men in societies, in
political obedience, in the sanctity of contract.”
This is certainly a striking instance of the potency
of the French influence in favor of clearness. But
-we have all felt its power and the exhilaration which
comes from submitting to it—all of us who have come
in contact with it. There is something stimulating
to the faculties in withdrawing them from exercise
in the twilight of mysticism and setting them. in
motion in the clear day, and, to cite Mr. Morley again,
‘upon “matter which is not known at all unless it is
120 FRENCH TRAITS

known distinctly.” About many things and in many
ways a man fond of France and French traits easily
gets into the same mode of thinking. Yet there is
hardly anything less characteristic of the Anglo-
i Saxon genius than this purely rationalistic habit of
mind. We are, asa rule, a thousand times nearer
to Burke than to his critic in native sympathy, and
the idea that there is actually an element of mystery
in the cohesion of men in societies seems far from
singular to us. We not only have a tendency toward
:the mysticism so foreign to the French mind and
_temper, but we maintain asa distinctly held tenet
the wisdom of taking account of the unaccountable,
‘and find French completeness incomplete in this, to
our notion, vitally important regard. But it would
be difficult to convince a Frenchman of this wisdom.
The rationality of considering only those phenomena
of which the origin and laws are discoverable, of
eliminating the element of confusion introduced in-
to every discussion by taking, with Wordsworth,
“blank misgivings” for “the fountain-light of all
our day,” accords with his notion of wisdom far more
closely. Cardinal Newman’s remark, which we find
so happy, to the effect that after you have once de-
fined your terms, and cleared your ground, all
argument is either needless or useless, seems to him
curiously amiss. Then, he thinks, is the very time
for argument, when the terms have been defined
and the ground cleared, so that candor and clair-
voyance may without obstruction be brought to bear
INTELLIGENCE 121

upon those natural or social phenomena which will
always seem different to different minds until, in this
way, the science of them is attained, ‘But you are
not in search of the science of things, you others,”
he adds ; “in virtue of your turn for poetry and
your love of mysticism you are, as your Wordsworth
says, ‘creatures moving about in worlds not realized,’
where argument is either useless or needless; and
when you do descend to the practical and the ac-
tual your mysticism accompanies you even into this
realm ; and even in occupying yourselves with so
actual and practical a matter as social and political

-reform you refuse, with your Burke, to consider
man’s nature except as ‘modified by his habits,’
which, in your fancy, have some mysterious sanction.
You wonder that we know so little of your greatest
modern poet and your greatest publicist. In literal
truth they can be of no service to us. They are too
irrational themselves, and they are too contemptuous
of merely rational forces.” There is indeed little in
either Burke or Wordsworth to appeal to the French
mind, and the fact itself is as significant as a chapter
of analysis.

Let us not take Burke or Wordsworth as witness
of the insufficiency of the human intelligence, how-
ever. Let us take the clairvoyant Frenchman him-
self, and let us select two such wholly different wit-
nesses as the late Ximenés Doudan and M. Taine—
the sympathetic and the scientific critic, the esprit
délicat and the incisive and erudite scholar. They
122 FRENCH TRAITS

are quite in accord. ‘We cannot get along without
vague ideas, and an able man who has only clear
ideas is a fool who will never discover anything,”
says M. Doudan. “When the Frenchman conceives
an object,” says M. Taine, “he conceives it quickly
and distinctly, but he does not perceive it as it really
is, complex and entire. He sees portions of it only,
and his perception of itis discursive and superficial.”
Thus, even in the sphere of the intelligence, we find

; that discovery and perception are not always, even

in French eyes, the fruits of French clairvoyance,
Nevertheless, nothing is more idly self-indulgent for
us whose defects lie in quite other directions than to
dwell on the defect of the French quality of clear-
ness ; the French criticisms of clearness themselves,
while they illustrate the quality in being made at all,

_ and thus triumphing over prejudice, may be said to

illustrate also its defect in being a little too simple
and definite. Truth never shows herself to mortals
except by glimpses ; concentration and intensity of
attention at these moments tend to create forgetful-.
ness of their number and variety—that is, perhaps,.

all we can truthfully say. It may be impossible to.

be clear without being limited, but it is entirely
possible to be limited without being clear. Limita-.
tion belongs rather to the conscious exclusion of
essentially vague topics; clearness, to the uncon-
scious operation of the spirit of order and system.
“Clearness,” says M. Doudan himself, “not only
helps us to make ourselves understood ; it serves,
INTELLIGENCE 123

also as a demonstration to ourselves that we are not
being led astray by confused conceptions.” When
we consider much of our over-subtle writing, two
things are plain—first that there is an unintelligent
awkwardness of expression, and, second, that there
is an unintelligent confusion of ideas. Reduced to
coherence, the meaning is often discovered to be
very simple. And the meaning is, after all, what is
significant. Yet the emotion associated with its
discovery has so heated and fused a fancied new
truth that it is distorted to the writer’s own view,
and he sees it far larger than it is—he sees it unin-
telligently. French writing is so different from ours
in this regard—it is such easy reading, in a word—
that, recalling Sheridan’s “mot,” we are forced to
perceive that it may have been hard writing, after
all, instead of merely due to limited vision. About,
in his “Alsace,” prettily reminds Sarcey of a time
when he had not “le travail facile, Pesprit rapide, et
la main sire comme aujourd’hui.” M. Sarcey’s style
is limpidity itself ; and when we consider what ideas,
what nuarices, what infinite delicacy, are disguised in
this limpidity, and in that of others comparable to
it, we can see that French clearness by no means
necessarily means limitation, but implies a prodigi-
ous amount of work done, of rubbish cleared away, a
long journey of groping victoriously concluded, and
the slough in which our over-subtlety is still strug-
gling left far behind. Clearness! Do we not all
know what a badge of intelligence it is; how wearily
124 FRENCH TRAITS

we strive to attain it ; how depressingly we fail ; how,
when we succeed, we feel a consciousness of triumph
and of power? Admit its limitations. The French
apotheosis of intellect has its weak side. But it
argues an ideal that is immensely attractive because
it is perfectly distinct.
IV
SENSE AND SENTIMENT
SENSE AND SENTIMENT

So that “after all,” as M. Taine says, ‘in France
the chief power is intellect.” More specifically,
however, one is tempted to add, it is good-sense.
Good-sense is universal, There is no national trait
more salient in every individual. One comprehends
Franklin’s French popularity ; bis incarnation of
good-sense inevitably suggested to the Parisians the
propriety of divine honors. Measure is a French
passion. Excess, even of virtue, is distinctly disa-
greeable to the French nature. Philinte’s line in
‘Le Misanthrope,”

‘Et veut que l'on soit sage avec sobriété,””

defines the national feeling in this regard with pre-
cision. Exaggeration, exaltation, the fanatic spirit,
are extremely rare. Temperance is the almost uni-
versal rule in speech, demeanor, taste, and habits.
Nothing is less French than eccentricity. The nor-
mal attitude is equipoise. Any shock to this French-
men instinctively dislike. The unknown has few
attractions for them. The positive and systematic
ordering of the known absorbs their attention.
Their gayety itself is consciously hygienic. Pleasure |
128 FRENCH TRAITS

is their constant occupation mainly because they
can extract it out of everything, and make it such
an avowed motive. But that intensification of pleas-
ure which, either by attaining joy and bliss, on the
one hand, or degenerating into riot, on the other,
involves a complete surrender of one’s self to im-
pulse, they rarely experience. They organize their
amusement, and take it deliberately. They cultivate
carefully a capacity for enjoyment. They strike us
as, one and all, calculators. They leave nothing to
chance, and trust the unforeseen so little that the
\ unexpected disconcerts them. They are alert rather
than spontaneous. To our recklessness they appear
to coddle themselves, but we speedily discern that
in nothing is their good-sense more salutary; they
conceive hygiene’as we do therapeutics. Similarly
with their economy, which is conspicuous and all-
pervading. If you are bent on pleasure, a frugal
mind is a necessity. Frugality is noticeable every-
where. It is the source of the self-respect of the
poor ; it keeps Paris purged of slums ; it decorates
respectability, and sobers wealth ; it. enables the
entire community to get the utmost out of life.
Economy extends even into the manner of eating.
Les Américains gdchent tout is a frequent French re-
flection upon our neglect of the gravy and lack of
thoroughness in the matter of mutton-chops. With
, them good-sense triumphs over grace itself. In dress,
economy is as common as sobriety of taste. French-
women would no more pay for, than they would
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 129

wear, our dresses. Frenchmen make the opera-
hat do duty in the afternoon promenade, and
would resent the rigor of our “spring and fall
styles.”

This wide-spread diffusion of good-sense has, how-
ever, one inevitable concomitant—namely, a corre-
anan ting deficiency of sentiment. So preponderant
is rationality in the French nature that Frenchmen
strike us, sometimes, as a curious compound of the
Quaker and the Hebrew. We are used to less alert-
ness, to more relaxation. Bathos, enervation are
foreign to their atmosphere, and are speedily trans-
formed amid its bracing breezes. But it is impos-
sible to be so completely unsentimental as the
French are without missing some of the quality of
which sentimentality is really but the excess. The
perfume of this they certainly miss. There are
characters in Anglo-Saxondom—not to seek the Ge-
miuthlichkett of Germany—that are completely pene-
trated with this fine aroma. Neither are they rare ;
every man’s acquaintance includes such. Their lives
are full of a sweet, indefinable charm. "Whatever
the exterior, and often it is rugged and forbidding,
the real nature within glows with a delightful and
temperate fervor that irradiates everywhere the
circle in which they exist and move. Whatever, in-
deed, the intellectual fibre or equipment, the “ mel-
low fruitfulness” of disposition and demeanor is
potently seductive. Still further, one may find the
quality in question illuminating and rendering

9
130 FRENCH TRAITS

subtly attractive most deviously tortuous moral im-
perfections, And in France this quality hardly
exists. In very few varieties of French type is it to
be found, even in dilution. Even then itis apt to be
imported. Rousseau was Swiss, and his heart and
imagination had been touched by the deep colors
and mysterious spaces of the Jura with a magic
which it is vain to seek under the gray skies of
Northern, or amid the “ sunburnt mirth,” the “dance
and Provencal song,” of Southern Gaul. Passion-
ately patriotic as wasthe chief of Rousseau’s succes-
sors, it is undoubtedly to her Northern blood that
she owes her sentiment, About her French side,
the side which came to the surface chiefly in her life,
as the other did in her books, there was, if we may
believe M. Paul de Musset and other chroniqueurs,
very little sentiment indeed. In any event it is an
exception, and not a type, that George Sand illus-
trates asa Frenchwoman. Her great contemporary,
Balzac, remarkable and original as he was, is a
thousand times moré French. But it is idle to cite
instances. After all one may say of the De Guérins,
of Sénancour, of Joubert, Doudan, Renan, the fact
remains that the French one meets, the people we
mean when we think of Frenchmen, the great mass
of the nation and its characteristic racial types, strike
our Anglo-Saxon sense too sharply and clearly, with
too ringing and vibrant a note, to appear to us otb-
erwise than distinctly, integrally, and ineradicably
| unsentimental. It is this principally, I think, which

 
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 131

makes the Anglo-Saxon feel so little at home in
France—that is to say, the Anglo-Saxon who does
thus feel, and who, I suspect, is in the majority.
Paris is certainly very agreeable. Americans espe-
cially, having none of the jealousy of French institu-
tions which makes a Tory of the most liberal Eng-
lishman while he is in Paris, find all sorts of agré-
ments there as well as en province. But it is noto-
rious that of both those who merely make fiying
visits, and those who form the American colony and
move about in its rather narrow circle, there are
very few who come into close contact with French-
men or make acquaintances of any degree of intimacy
among them. And both to the few who do and to
the many who do not come to know them well, I
suppose that French people are not, in general,
acutely sympathetic.

The reason is not the difference in manners or in
morals. Italian mceurs are as unlike American as
are French habits and character. There are a dozen
points of reciprocity between Frenchmen and our-
selves which do not exist between us and the rest of
the Latin race. Indeed, from our -excessively in-
dustrial point of view, it seems as if it were only
since 1870 that the Italians had belonged to the
modern world at all—that world of which, from the
same point of view, we are the present light and
the future hope. Yet Ido not doubt that nine out
of every ten travelling Americans find the Italians
more sympathetic, and that those who cross the
132 FRENCH TRAITS

Pyrenees get a more cordial feeling for the Span-
iards. The reason is that the moral atmosphere
south of the Pyrenees and the Alps is saturated
With sentiment. As, journeying northward, one
passes into the vine-clad prairie of Languedoc, or
into the rose-decked arbor of Provence, one ex-
changes the deep Iberian tone and intense color,
and the soft sweetness and suave grace which but
gather substance without changing character in
their crescendo from Naples to Turin, for a flood of
bright light and clear freshness that fall somewhat
chill on American relaxation. One exchanges the
air of sentimental expansion for that of mental ex-
hilaration, and only when some definite work is to
be done do we, in general, enjoy external bracing
of this sort. And in France, where industry, sobri-
» ety, measure, good-sense, hold remorselessly unre-
| mittent sway, where the chronic state of mind seems
. to him keyed up to the emergency standard, where
‘no one is idle in Lamb’s sense, where day-dreams
are unknown and pleasure is an action rather than
: a state, where “ merely to bask and ripen ” is rarely
“the student’s wiser business "—where, in a word,
everything in the moral sphere appears terribly
dynamic, the American inevitably feels himself
somewhat at sea.

We have, of course, our_unsentimental man, but
he differs essentially from the Frenchman He is
practical, pragmatical—his enemies are inclined to
add, pharisaical. To any one of a radically different
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 1338

intellectual outfit he is intensely unsympathetic. He
constantly expresses or betrays scorn for sentiment,
which he associates with weakness of character ; and
for weakness of character he has nothing but con-
tempt. Yet it is plain that he has, at bottom, more
sentiment than the most sentimental Frenchman.
His contempt for sentimentality, in fact, is thor-
oughly sentimental, and due to an instinctive dread
of cheapening a force and a consolation which he se-
cretly cherishes and jealously guards. And the con-
trast is as marked among the vicious as among the
virtuous or along the commonplace level of respec-
table merit. The well-known association of Thack-
eray’s Rebecca with Balzac’s Valérie Marneffe, by
which M. Taine illustrates radical differences-in the
art of the respective authors, serves better still, to
my sense, to mark the radical difference in respect of
~ sentiment between the French and English variants
of the same type. Madame Marneffe is far less com-
plex, far colder, more deliberately designing, more
cynical, less remorseful. She is cleverer and infi-
nitely more charming, to be sure, but the charm is
wholly external. Rebecca’s perversion is deeper,
because her nature is more emotional. She is a hyp-
ocrite in a sense and to a degree that would undoubt-
edly surprise Madame Marneffe, about whom there
is no cant at all. Her circumstances develop none.
Her victims succumbed to other weapons. The ab-
sence of cant is itself unfavorable to sentiment, from |
which, at all” events, cant is inseparable—an invari- :
134. FRENCH TRAITS

able excrescence, if not in one form or another and
to some degree a more integral accompaniment. As
a matter of fact, the social naturalist infers it where
sentiment is found in luxuriant growth, and from its
absence argues the certain presence of cynicism.
No two things are more reciprocally hostile than cyn-
icism and cant, unless it be cynicism and sentiment.
We come logically, thus, to find the absence of senti-
ment, involved in the French freedom from cant,
express itself in what strikes the Anglo-Saxon as
positive cynicism. Examples are abundant in con-
temporary literature. The Parisian widow of his
“ Four Meetings, ”—one of Mr. Henry James’s mas-
terpieces, and designated by him, with malicious fe-
licity, “quelque chose de la vieille Europe” —sur-
passes Madame Marneffe; but easily the mistress of
both, and here a marvel of pertinence, is the inimit-
able, the irresistible Madame Cardinal.

“Who has not the inestimable advantage,” says
Thackeray, ‘of possessing a Mrs. Nickleby in his own
family?” Morals apart, what French family, one may
inquire in a similarly loose and approximate spirit,
cannot boast’ at least a distant connection with Ma-
dame Cardinal. This creation of M. Ludovic Halévy
merits the high praise of association with Mrs. Nick-
leby. Morals apart, she is quite as frequent a French
type as Mrs. Nickleby is an Anglo-Saxon one ; and
it is to be remarked that she is as unmixed an em-
bodiment of sense as Mrs. Nickleby is of sensibility.
There is a side of French nature, and of French na-
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 135

ture alone, which Madame Cardinal illustrates in an
eminent degree and with a désinvolture that is de-
lightfully indisereet. In his Academy address of
welcome to M. Halévy, M. Pailleron spoke with
sternness of the Cardinal ménage, and praised its
chronicler as a moralist. But for a foreigner the
moral is evident enough without insistence upon it,
and the point of her portrait—aside from its exqui-
site technic—is not that Madame Cardinal is deeply
perverted, but that she is national. She is national
to this extent, that in the vast majority of her com-
patriots who are, in correctness of conduct and re-
spectability of position, wholly removed from her
sphere, who are as worthy as she is scandalous,
there is, nevertheless, something acutely sympathet-
ic with that trait of her character in virtue of which
her rationality infallibly triumphs over the subtlest
attacks of sentiment. Strictly from the point of
view of sentiment, we may say, I think, that the aver-
age Frenchman makes the same impression on us
that she probably makes on the average Frenchman.

Be the situation never so sentimental, it. never
overpowers her omnipresent good-sense. La santé
avant tout is not only her watchword, but that of
millions of ber countrymen. It is as potent to con-
jure with as the Marseillaise—and in the same way ;
one would say it aroused the same kind of feeling.
The famous scene at table on Good-Friday, when
Madame Cardinal takes a hand in the conversation,

and brings the most delicate and elusive topics
136 ; FRENCH TRAITS

into the cold, relentless light of reason, is exquisite
comedy, but it is satire as well. This brief two
pages of genre will live as long as any masterpiece
of the kind in literature, but its interest is not
merely artistic. It is a contemporary national
document of the first-class, beside which M. Zola’s
are often trite and superficial. There are present
M. and Madame Cardinal, their two daughters,
both danseuses at the Opéra, and the Italian mar-
quis, who has a wife and children in Italy, but who
prefers living with the elder Mademoiselle Cardinal
in Paris—an arrangement secured by the maternal
solicitude of Madame Cardinal herself. Frequent
quarrels disturb the serenity of this interior, how-
ever, despite the exclusively practical and unsen-
timental origin of the relationship. The marquis
is reactionary. M. Cardinal is radical. The oc-
easion of Good-Friday provokes a clerical discus-
sion, M. Cardinal abuses priests. The marquis
forbids him to speak ill of his religion, announcing
that he is a Catholic and has two bishops in his
family. ‘“Tenez,” breaks in Madame Cardinal,
“vous nous faites pitié avec votre religion! Ayez
done de la morale avant d’avoir de la religion.

Comment, voila un homme marié, quia une
femme, trois enfants, qui laisse tout ga végéter en
Italie pour venir vivre 4 Paris avec une danseuse.
Et puis il parle de ses sentiments religieux. Non,
vrai! ga me coupe lappétit ;”—‘‘ See here, you make
us perfectly sick with your religion! Get some
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 137

morality before having so much religion.

What! a married man with a wife and three ate.
dren who lets all that vegetate in Italy, while he
himself comes to Paris to live with an opera-dancer.
And he talks about his religious sentiments! It
spoils my appetite.” Sentimentally speaking, this
has the sublime irrelevance of Mrs. Nickleby’s com-
mon-sense. Otherwise considered, it is the very
acme of sense, reached under what, to anyone but
Madame Cardinal, would be extremely discouraging
conditions. How great must be the tension and
how constant the alertness in which it is necessary
to keep the purely intellectual faculties in order not
to be distracted from impulsively denouncing in
another the contemptible conduct for which you
have rendered yourself expressly responsible by far
greater baseness. In what a pitiful light does the
sentimental marquis appear beside this victorious
imperviousness to the sophisms of mere délicatesse !
His exculpatory talk about his wife’s wrongs toward
him takes away our appetite as well as that of Ma-
dame Cardinal. As Périchole says, “ Oui, bonnes
gens, sautez dessus;” he is, in effect, “par trop
béte.”

It is, indeed, very noticeable that the social cir-
cumstances responsible for the evolution of such
creatures as the Cardinals should have succeeded in
debasing merely the emotional side of their nature.
The willis not enervated, the conscience is doubt-
less readjusted rather than repudiated altogether,
138 FRENCH TRAITS

and the mental faculties are, to a perfectly sane sense,
perhaps, abnormally developed. No one would
think of calling Madame Cardinal béte. She has the
whole jargon of sentimentality at her tongue’s end,
and makes artistic use of it. The effect is somewhat
hard and brassy ; but justness of tone in such mat-
ters is for people of Madame Cardinal’s station an
affair of the susceptibility. A Madame Cardinal of
any other nationality would be simply abominable,
since to her moral obliquity she would inevitably
add the mental degradation fatal to the last vestiges
of self-respect. As it is, the caricature of one side
of the French nature which M. Halévy’s admirable
portrait furnishes serves the purpose of a lens of
high magnifying power in exhibiting the weakness
of the French ideal of délicatesse. Its weakness ap-
pears equally clear when Madame Cardinal is gross-
ly and absurdly flouting it, as in the above boutade,
and when, as is generally the case, she is grossly
and absurdly affecting it. Délicatesse is a social and
intellectual virtue—not a personal and moral one.
It is the refinement of good-sense under the direc-
tion of the art instinct. It is, in a word, conscien-
_ tiousness minus sentiment. What is the quality of
conséiénitiousness—almost as frequent with us as its
. correlative opposite, cant—but the result of adding
sentiment, that is, serious emotion, to a disposition
to right conduct? And the French lack of consci-
entiousness in its deeper and subtler sense, and their
substitution for it of délicatesse, indicates very strik-
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 139

ingly a profound lack of sentiment also—an adjust-
ment of the susceptibility to social expansion instead
of to personal concentration. Rousseau’s notion of
gaining a fortune by pressing a button which should
kill 2 mandarin has no attractions for us. The irre-
sponsible levity of M. Sarcey’s chagrin at having killed
a servant of brain-fever, by trying vainly to teach
him to read, gives us a slight shack. We have, very
likely, too much conscientiousness. Everyone will
recall absurd instances of its unhappy exaggeration.
But our possession of both the quality and its defect
is one of our differences from the French. -Délicat-
esse, of which unquestionably we have too little, is
in comparison decidedly an external and rational
quality. Violation of its precepts results in morti-
fication, but not remorse. A coarse person may be-
come thoroughly délicat' by careful observation of
his acts, by considerateness, by attention, by intel-
lectual conviction of its worldly wisdom. The
chances are against his success, of course, because
of the well-known difficulty of making silk purses
out of anything but silk—but it is not impossible ;
whereas to “‘ become” conscientious is a nonsense
except through a change of heart and the aid of
sentiment and emotion.

Certainly the frequency of French allusions to so
delicate a thing as delicacy jars on a sensitiveness
that is acute rather than rational—rude rather than
civilized the French would perhaps say. You feel
like the little boy who, being taken to visit a family
140 FRENCH TRAITS

of very articulate piety, protested in confidence to
his mother that so much open talk about God
sounded to his sense too much like “bragging.”
Such words and phrases as honneur, gloire, excessive-
ment scrupuleux, tres honorable, extrémement délicat
seem to us over-frequent in French usage, because
we always use them with emotion, and with personal
emotion (sincere or perfunctory), and so fail to see
that the French use them scientifically. An Amer-
ican miner—not such a one as the grotesque Clark-
son of M. Dumas fils’s imagination, but such an un-
cut diamond as Bret Harte’s Kaintuck—would un-
doubtedly find M. Augier’s Marquis de Presles lack-
ing in true sensitiveness in boasting of his pedigree
and prating of his honor. On the other hand, the
delicacy of Una’s lion itself probably seems a little
fantastic to the Frenchman, who would be sure also
to share the feeling of the Marseillais for that of
Inghomar. His highly developed social instinct,
his remarkable intelligence, his good-sense, his lack
of sentiment, enable him to disport freely and even
gracefully on what appears to our eyes the thinnest
of thin ice ; he talks with great frankness of intimate
things, makes confidently all manner of delicate al-
lusions, seems to menace an assault upon the very
citadel of your privacy, asks with inimitable aplomb
questions of an indiscretion which makes your own
awkwardness fairly gasp—all because his interest in
these things is purely impersonal and uncolored with
a tinge of sentiment. Take, for example, the in-

’
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 141

stance of money. The French consider America
El Dorado ; and having regard to the comparative
ease with which money is made here, they are quite
right. But they entirely mistake our interest in
money, which they imagine to be intensely philis-
tine, whereas it is not so much that we care for
money as that we care as a nation for little else.
Money is, on the other hand, only one of the far
more numerous and multifarious interests of the
French ; but they talk about it as we never do, and
as, in fact, sounds cynical to American ears. Money-
making is so much a matter of course with the vast
majority of our people that without being paradoxi-
cal we may call our preoccupation with it in a meas-
ure disinterested. We pursue the end of money-
getting more or less artistically, in a word, and the
extravagance and recklessness with which we spend
it proceeds from this and not from vulgarity, as
Europeans, whose experience tells them nothing on

this point, believe. It is, in fine, with us an end /

rather than a means, and consequently enables us
to escape that sordidness which does not fail to
shock us abroad. Our attitude is thusirrational be-
side that of the French, and causes their frank eager-
ness of acquisition and undisguised economy of
spending to seem extremely terre-d-terre to us.
“‘Coal-oil-Johnny” is really a less vulgar figure than
the more sensible Pére Grandet, and he is perhaps
a less frequent type with us than Balzac’s miser is in
France. As business is a less definite pursuit with
142 FRENCH TRAITS

the French, it becomes in dilution even more gen-
eral; it is followed as art is with us—not only by
the profession, but by an innumerable army of
amateurs, And it is largely with these that the
American visitor comes into contact. His mental
note-book is naturally, thus, crowded with disagree-
able and exasperating data of what seems to his
haste indelicacy carried beyond the honorable limit.
But it is to be observed that these instances rarely
illustrate an offence committed against the unwrit-
ten law of the French community itself, and that
therefore dishonorable is an inapplicable epithet.
To expect a community to change its customs in
these regards for the benefit of your naiveté would
be to exhibit still greater naiveté; but it is impos-
sible not to argue from them an indisposition to per-
mit good-sense any sentimental relaxation whatever,
even in circumstances of the utmost seductiveness to
a sensitive nature.
| The French community is destitute of many sen-
timental influences which are very potent with us.
The home, for instance, in England and among our-
selves is a nursery of sentiment to a degree which
it certainly is not in France—right as the French
are in resenting our absurd misconception of their
home-life. Mother and children are not, in France,
brought into such sympathetic and sentimental re-
lations. The reciprocal affection is, of course, just
ag sure and puissant, but its sinews are rational.
She does not efface herself so much, and aspire to
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 143

live only in them. They are educationally and
otherwise occupied instead of developing emotional
precocity. There are no long readings winter even-
ings, and none of that intimate companionship so
often productive of what, physiologically speaking,
has been so aptly termed “emotional prodigality.”
Our society is in considerable measure leavened by
young men who, chiefly through this prodigality,
have at one time or another contemplated entering
the ininistry, and have abandoned the notion only
after the momentous struggle which leaves lasting
traces on the sensibility. French youth do not know
what solitude is; their only “communings” are
communication. They naturally have less aptitude
for the spiritual side of life than for its sensual and
rational sides. The heart and the passions are of
course as highly, if not as exclusively, developed in
France as elsewhere, but in the elevation I have al-
ready mentioned—in considering French morality
—of the mind over the soul the tendency to mate-
rialism is never far from the surface.

In fine, when the French enter the realm of sen-
timent they do not seem quite at home. They are
in danger of becoming either fantastic or conven-
tional. ‘Les deux tours de Notre Dame sont le H
de Hugo!” exclaims, one day, Auguste Vacquerie to
Jules Claretie, and Claretie chronicles the remark
as an impressive one. Similar extravagances pass
muster in the sphere of art, though only where sen-
timent is concerned. On the other hand, though
144 FRENCH TRAITS

nowhere is beauty admired more fanatically—adored
more abjectly, one may almost say—the idea of it is
often conventional enough. Expression, sentiment,
do not count for so much as regularity. Le charme
prime la beauté is a French adage, but what consti-
tutes charm is the real question. As the vocabular-
ies disclose, a single French word answers to
“beautiful, fine, handsome.” Sometimes charm is
mere chic, cachet, style, order and movement in car-
riage. That at any rate is, as a , matter of fact, the
great Parisian substitute for beauty, and has doubt-
less become so by natural selection. Accordingly,
for the most part they confine their activities to the
sphere of the intelligence, where they are never fan-
tastic and rarely perfunctory ; and they find no diffi-
culty whatever in doing this, because the atmosphere
of the intelligence is their natural element.

It is tlre sense and not the sentiment of the verse or
prose that is savored by the actor and the audience.
The voice never caresses the emotion evoked by the
significance of the lines beyond the point needful for
complete expression. The personal feeling by which
such an actor as Salvini infuses warmth and glow
into his most polished impersonations the boards of

- the Comédie Frangaise never witness. It is an im-
, personal, that is to say, a purely intellectual enjoy-
ment that one obtains from the delicious voice and

| admirable acting of Madame Sarah Bernhardt, when
‘ she is at her best, when she is most contained, when
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 145

she appeals most strongly to the Parisian. There is
absolutely no sentiment whatever in that quintes-
sence of the exquisite which has made Madame Judic
the most popular actress of Paris. An American or
Englishman, and I should suppose, a fortiori, a Ger-
map, is infallibly much impressed in his early stages
of French theatve-going at the absence _of intensity
in the love passages ; the absence of all that kissing,
clasping, ‘enfolding, rushing together, gazing into
the depths of each other’s eyes—in fine, all that effort
to enact the unutterable which is so characteristic of
our stage as to have become thoroughly perfunctory.
That this sort of thing does not exist on the French
stage is partly due, to be sure, to a nicer sense of
propriety, which dictates the limits of what is fit
subject for artistic representation ; but mainly it is to
be ascribed to the predominance of good-sense over
sentiment in the French appetite. One of the most
refined pleasures that this world furnishes to the ed-
ucated intellectual palate is the acting of Mademoi-
selle Susanne Reichemberg. It is not only delicious
in its ingénue quality, but it has an ampleness—what
the French call envergure—wholly remarkable in this
kind of art. Yet the foreigner undoubtedly, during
a long apprenticeship, finds Mademoiselle Reichem-
berg’s art a little faint, a little thin, a little elusive,
because of the ethereality with which it hovers over
the region of sentiment, without ever alighting so
that he may repose his apprehensive faculties an in-
stant and devote himself to purely sensuous enjoy-
10
146 FRENCH TRAITS

ment, There is no pause, no intermission in which to
meditate, as we say—the word often being a euphem-
| ism for “dream.” In the presence of a worthy ob-
‘ject, the Frenchman’s pleasure is produced by the
act of apprehension itself ; ours by the stimulus ap-
prehension gives to the sensibility. We like the
light touch, but we like it to linger. Take sucha
piece as M. Augier’s charming trifle, called “Le
Post-Scriptum.” It is impossible for the American
to repress a wish that there were more of it; the
dénowement occurs just as sentiment enters the
scene. The Frenchman can imagine the rest; so
can we, but we want it imagined for us all the same
—we are more sentimental. The French public
would never have demanded the epilogue of ‘‘ The
Newcomes.”
Pathos and grandeur and their adequate presen-
tation are by no means unknown to the French
stage, though assuredly they are not its strong
points. But it is always unmistakably apparent that
these are never pursued outside the realm of pure
intelligence, and driven to a refuge in that of pure
emotion. Even in such a torrent of passion as that
which Got portrays in ‘‘Les Rantzau,” for example
—certainly, as he presents it, one of the most pow-
erful scenes to be found in the contemporary drama—
the spectator is throughout acutely conscious of the
illusion in virtue of which art is art and not a vul-
. garization of nature. In other words, however the
feelings may be stirred, the mind is maintained in
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 147

continuous activity, and never abdicates in favor of.
the momentum of pure emotion. Exactly the oppo-
site is the experience of the spectator who witnesses
Miss Morris’s remarkable impersonation of Cora, in
“ Article 47,” say—in seeing which the nerves vibrate
long after the moral susceptibility is too benumbed
to react. Similar contrasts are noticeable in every
department of activity.

The absence of anything answering to our negro-
minstrelsy presents a very striking one. Few things
could be less alike than the sensations obtainable
from the café-concert entertainment and those pro-
duced by the melancholy songs and the burnt-cork
buffoonery under whose benign influence the Anglo-
Saxon sensibility isso wontto expand. ‘‘ They have
gazed,” said Thackeray of his spectacles, “at dozens
of tragedy-queens, dying on the stage and expiring
in appropriate blank verse, and I never wanted to
wipe them. They have looked up, with deep respect
be it said, at many scores of clergymen in pulpits,
and without being dimmed ; and behold! a vaga-
bond, with a corked face and a banjo, sings a little
song, strikes a wild note which sets the whole heart
thrilling with happy pity.” It would be difficult, I
think, to explain to a Frenchman the significance of
“ thrilling with happy pity ;” or the value in general
of idle tears drawn from the depths of never so divine
a despair ; or the connection of this kind of emotion
with that with which Thackeray associates it in say-
ing, in the same paragraph which records the dim-
148 - FRENCH TRAITS

ming of his spectacles by a sentimental ditty, “I have
seen great, whiskered Frenchmen warbling the
‘Bonne Vieille,’ the ‘Soldats, au pas, au pas,’ with
tears rolling down their mustaches.” “Is there
then,” one can fancy him asking in perplexity, “no
difference between the respective ways in which
Béranger and a banjoist affect the English sensibil-
ity?”

We miss unction in the expression with which the
French read even the lyric and emotional verse and
prose of their own authors. A Frenchman seems to
see in such idyls as Daudet’s “‘ Lettres de Mon Mou-
lin” a wholly different kind of charm from that
which penetrates us. What we call unction would
undoubtedly seem to him unctuousness—especially
should he listen to some of our professional elocu-
tionists, who bear on so hard as to make the ten-
derer sentiments fairly squeak. Even in personal
matters, sentiment with the French does not outlast.
the intellectual occasion of it. In the sincerest grief
they are easily consoled. Their sanity comes speedily
to their rescue from the peril of morbidness, which,
from their point of view, it is so clearly a duty to
avoid that they devote themselves to it consciously
and expressly. Inconstancy is therefore not a trait
to be ashamed of, Certain forms of constancy, on
the other hand, seem puerile and rudimentary. Be
constant just so long as instinct, reason, and passion
dictate. L’amour becomes Vamitié with appalling
swiftness. There are, perhaps, as many “John An-
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 149

dersons ”—Daudet's “Les Vienx” is as touching as
the Scotch poem—but they are not given to senti-
mentalizing. In the average Parisian the horror of .
old age has something almost hysterical about it.
For them, more than for anyone else, the days of
their youth are the days of their glory.

The feeling for landscape is said to be a modern
sentiment. In a Wordsworthian degree of intensity
it may be; though from Sophocles to Shakespeare
there is not wanting abundant evidence of the power
of nature over human emotions... But here, at any
rate, is a field in which the imagination has full sway,
in which the feeling for what ts can be indulged un-
hampered by what is made, where the mind is led
‘captive by the sense and the sense itself seduced by
the fancy, where sentiment, uncurbed by either the
intellect or the will, reacts under the effect of nature’s
beauty in such a way as to transfigure the cause it-
self of so much emotion and transform the actual
aspect of nature into celestial mirage. Mention that
phenomenon to the Frenchman, and you will be
sure to find his civility hardly capable of concealing
his scepticism. You will discover in him something
of the feeling you yourself experience in the pres-
ence of certain manifestations of German sentiment.
It has been said, indeed, of Théodore Rousseau that
whereas other men loved nature, he was in love with
her; but Rousseau was a specialist, and, like George
Sand, remains wholly exceptional. Daudet’s Bom-
pard, who finds Switzerland “un paysage de conven-
150 FRENCH TRAITS

tion,” is the type. In the presence of nature even
‘the Provencal is recueilli. The true Frenchman,

who is socially and intellectually expansion itself, is

no more touched by green fields and new pastures

than such English exceptions as Sydney Smith or
: Doctor Johnson. Only by an excess of sentiment

over the thinking power can one surrender himself
4 - fully to the pantheistic oe of landscape, or share
' that passion for “‘ scenery ” which rules strongly in
\ the breast of even our philistine.

As with nature, so in art—a domain wherein the
modern Frenchman believes himself supreme, and
wherein, indeed, he is on many sides unrivalled. In
architecture, painting, sculpture, and poetry, one
may almost say that whereas the antique and the
Renaissance art appealed to the mind through the

. sense, the French genius reaches the sense through
‘the mind. The mind at all events is first satisfied.
It is the science rather than the sentiment of per-
haps the most emotional plastic art in the world—
medisval architecture, namely—that strikes most
‘powerfully its most eminent expositor, M. Viollet-le-
‘Due, as appears not merely in his admirable “ Dis-
courses,” but especially in his restorations, which
are as cold asthe stone that composesthem. French
esthetic criticism in all departments is pervaded by
this spirit. And as criticism far more than imagina-
tive writing demands standards and canons in order
to attain coherence and effectiveness, it is perhaps
for this reason that French criticism is altogether
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 151

unequalled. Competence may be measured, but |
sentiment is less palpable; accordingly, in every
‘artistic province competence mainly is what is
looked for, seen, and discussed. Accordingly, too,
it mainly is what is found. Not only is the technic
more interesting as a rule than the idea, the treat-
ment worthier than the motive. This is a conse-
quence of highly developed education, which, though
it may not stifle inspiration, yet infallibly disturbs
the relation which, under more rudimentary condi-
tions of training, conception and execution recipro-
cally sustain. But what is more noteworthy and
more natively characteristic of French art is that a
technic itself is sapient rather than sensuous. Your
respect for it reaches admiration ; but exceptions like
Vollon, whose touch seduces you by its charm, are
rare. Manet and the whole impressionist school,
Degas apart, whose art begins and ends in technic,
are in the last analysis admirable rather than mov-
ing ; the mass of the school, indeed, still handles its
brush polemically. Observe the difference between
Diaz (who is essentially not Spanish but French) and
Monticelli (who is essentially not French but Italian)
in the matter of sentiment. There can be no doubt
which is the saner painter, which. has the larger
method, but there are chords of infinite refinement in
the other’s poetic register that Diaz never reaches ;
his fine ladies and gallants are very courtly, they
have the grand air, but they have not the exquisite
suavity of Monticelli’s, and do not breathe the same
152 FRENCH TRAITS

ether. The great annual exhibition at the Palais de
lIndustrie contains no sentiment like that of the
Venetian Nono, the English Burne-Jones, the Ameri-
can Martin ; there is no tone like Segantini’s, no
‘color like La Farge’s. Even in the crucial in-
stances of Corot and Millet—not to mention Troyon
and Daubigny—even in the case of the Fontaine-
bleau coterie, which contrasts so strongly with the
mass of French art, and: which is thoroughly poetic,
there is still visible the high, clear prevalence of
French style, French distinction, French reserve,
order, measure. Corot is, I think, yet more em-
inent for style than for sentiment. Millet’s sen-°
timent is a trifle morbid; his melancholy is not
intense and spontaneous, but pervasive and discour-
aged. It is not quite, I think, the spontaneous,
natural note which produces the poetry of ‘“ Turnev’s
seas and Reynolds’s children,” comparatively impo-
tent as the technic is in either English case. It has
a philosophical touch in it; it is mentally preoccu-
pied. The French peasant is, in fine, too exclusively
Millet’s subject. Even in the Fontainebleau coterie
the thinking power dominates.

Of course the same characteristic is quite as no-
ticeable in poetry as in plastic art. French tragedy
is not what the younger Crébillon called it—‘ the
most perfect farce ever invented by the human
mind ”—but it has incontestably the qualities of
‘prose ; it has even the defects of prose. Asa rule
it is clear, placid, measured, the emotional element
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 153

quite lost in its contained and cadenced expression ;
or else it is emphase. We, at least, cannot quite un-
derstand what is meant by what the French say
about the rude grandeur of Corneille, except by con-
trasting him with the ingenious and refined but, to
our notion, not deeply poetic Racine ; and, of course,
such a contrast has nothing in the way of positive
judgment in it. Still it is the fashion to misappre-
ciate French classic poetry in English, and to misap-
preciate it very grossly and absurdly ; the affecta-
tion of over-estimating it is very recent and, as yet,
very little disseminated. We have far more to learn
from the French admiration of it than we commonly
imagine, It is singular that we should be as temer-
arious as we are in judging an art with whose
medium of expression we are so little familiar.
Plastic art is a universal language. The French
idiom is perhaps the modern tongue whose idio-
syncrasies are most highly developed, in the first
place, and, in the second, the most inaccessible to
the foreigner. But one thing is plain, an English-
speaking person is apt to underestimate its poetic
capacity because of the peculiar composition of his
own language. How much of the poetic quality of
English verse and prose is due to the fact that we
have a double vocabulary it would be difficult to de-
termine. It is certainly very considerable. The
play of mind and emotion afforded by this easy
method of avoiding prosaic associations by using
the Saxon or the Latin word or phrase, or both, or
154 FRENCH TRAITS

varying their proportions, as the shade of sense may
prompt, is very great. We rely so unconsciously on
this advantage that we feel its absence as the French,
who do not know it, of course cannot, and as it is,
equally of course, wholly unjust to feel in the case
of French poetry. When Creon exclaims to Gidipus,
who has the madness to appear in Thebes, “ Quelle
imprudence extréme!” the English-speaking spec-
tator, who misses the value of the tone, adjudges
the poetic quality of the ejaculation about equiva-
lent to that of a reproach addressed to a man who
should have had the imprudence to brave the night-
air without an overcoat. He does not see that such
a word as imprudence is, so far as its poetic quality
is concerned, a totally different word from “ impru-
dence.” Even a critic of so nice a sense and a
French scholar of such distinction as Mr. Arnold
complains that the only word the French have for
‘“fustian” is emphase—our word for emphasis.
But emphase in the proper circumstances means to 2
Frenchman precisely what fustian means to us; it
does not mean emphasis at all. It would be as per-
tinent to find the French lack of musical instinct at-
tested by their making chanticleer chanter instead of
“crow.” We cannot proceed too cautiously where
the shades of the French language are concerned.
There is no feu follet which equals it.

Nevertheless, let us note that this applies mainly
to technic: and that after we have admitted our
incompetence to pronounce npon the poetic quality
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 155

of the medium, and come as directly as thus we
may to the substance of French poetry, we almost
infallibly find this to have the quality of rhetoric
rather than of absolute poetry, as we understand
the term. Its stuff is assuredly not star-dust.
-Keats’s conjunction of the two words “Cold pasto-
yal!” shows the power of the alchemist who fuses
thought and emotion at the white heat requisite for
producing the quintessence of poetry. Beside them
Victor Hugo’s naively admired characterization of
death as “‘La grande endormeuse ” is the rhetorical
variant of a classic commonplace. On the other
hand, where elevation rather than intensity of poetic
emotion is in question, the rhetorical quality of
French poetry is still more apparent; it is perfect
-rhetoric, but its rational and finite alloy is still more
noticeable. Is there anything in Victor Hugo’s
trinity of Rabelais, Moliére, and Voltaire, or in
“soft Racine and grave Corneille,” that strikes pre-
cisely the same note as Lear turning from his dead
Cordelia with “Pray you, undo this button—thank
you, sir!”? Yet you may find in English prose the
same sudden poetic harmonizing with the calm and
simplicity of nature herself when personal emotion
has spent its exaltation; for example, where Henry
Esmond, after his tirade to the Prince, turns to his
cousin with “Frank will do the same, won’t you,
cousin ?”

Lack of sentiment, too, seems to me directly re-
sponsible for that intrusion of philosophy into the
156 FRENCH TRAITS

domain of art, which is a French eccentricity—just
ns, perhaps, to an excess of sentiment is to be at-
tributed the tendency of the Anglo-Saxon artist to
infiltrate his work with moralizing. Balzac and
Thackeray contrast in illustration of this as in so
many other respects.. In either instance art loses—
in the one because sentiment overshadows the artis-
tic sense, in the other because there is no qualify-
ing sentiment to prevent paradox through the me-
dium of tact and feeling. Dreary pages of Balzac
would have been spared his readers had his intelli-
gence been sentimentally modified. But it is in
such instances as that which the younger Dumas
presents that this characteristic effect is best seen.
The younger Dumas is taken very seriously in
France. He is the first of French social philoso-
phers. He uses the stage as a professor does his
desk. His plays are philosophical deliverances ;
and, in spite of their immense cleverness of artistic
artifice, they are invariably artistic paradoxes. In-
variably the sentiment revolts at the first act, and
the rest of the piece is an acted argument to prove
the illogicality of this repugnance, its philosophical
unsoundness. A similar note is observable in much
of Hugo’s work. The catastrophe of ‘‘ Hernani” is
very powerfully buttressed, but sentimentally it is
paradoxical and sterile. The same is true of the
way in which the King wins the love of his victim
in ‘Le roi s’amuse;” it is very likely sound em-
pirical philosophy, but artistically it is an intrusion.
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 1457

“Les Misérables” is full of analogous error, owing
to the same cause. And in fact, nothing is so hos-
tile to the emphase which is admittedly the great
bane of Hugo’s writing, as the subtle sense of fitness
born of feeling alone; where he is instinctive and
truly sentimental, Hugo is superb. Finally, take
the still more conspicuous instance of a writer who
passes in general for very nearly: pure sentiment-
alist, and who is certainly an artist of the first class
—M. Renan. He is quite right in classing that
curious part of his work, of which “ L’Abbesse de
Jouarre” may figure as the most striking repre-
sentative, as pure diversion; it’ is related to the
mass of his admirable accomplishment on no side.
French criticism itself finds “L’Abbesse de Jou-
arre” displeasing ; and it is displeasing because in
it M. Renan virtually reverses his usual process, and
instead of philosophy penetrated with sentiment,
gives us art invaded by philosophy. The philoso-
phy of “L’Abbesse de Jouarre” is, perhaps, not
fantastic as philosophy, but as art the piece is fatally
lacking in sentiment; although it deals with love
itself, it deals with it argumentatively ; it defends
a thesis ; it is what the French call thése. Perhaps
did the world believe its last hour come there would
be a universal outburst of sexual love. Perhaps for
people in general love is a passion capable of enough
sublimity for supreme crises. But though we may
grant this, we do not feel it. Yet with the most
sentimental of French philosophers the intellect so
158 FRENCH TRAITS

dominates the susceptibility that in a professed’
work of art the subject is taken on its curious side,
even at the expense of revolting the sentiment.
And if we examine in this regard a great deal of
current French literature—the immensely clever
and impressive work of M. Guy de Maupassant and
M. Richepin, for example—it is impossible not to
note the frequency with which this motive recurs :
namely, illustration of the warfare between truth
and sentiment, of the incompatibility between zest
for the real and affection for the attractive, and, as
a constant undertone, the superior dignity of the
former in either instance. The spirit and temper
of this literature are eccentric only in degree; they
are only accentuations of the national turn for the
domination of sentiment by sense.

What has become of the Celtic strain in the
French nature? How superficial of Karl Hillebrand
to assert, ‘‘Grattez le Frangais et vous trouverez
VIrlandais!” And how little impression the Frank
seems to have made on the true French character !
When Sieyés exclaimed of the aristocracy, “Let us
send them back to their German marshes!” he had
not only the nation, but the French nature itself, at
his back. The fusion of the Gaul and Roman seems
to have been as complete in character as in institu-
tions. Whatever is runic, bardic, weird, barbaric,
is as repugnant to the Frenchman of to-day as to
the Roman of the age of Augustus. It was even
repugnant to the Frenchman of the epoch of “ The
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 159

Romaunt of the Rose.” The romance and chivalry
of Francis I.’s time were in great measure, doubt-
less, a Merovingian legacy; and their survival in
duels and deliberate gallantry nowadays, amid so
much that is ¢erre-d-terre and eminently unromantic,
constitutes an odd conjunction. Of the Renaissance
ideals, nearly the only one spared by the Revolution
is the substitution of honor for duty in the sphere
of morals. Otherwise even the jeunesse dorée of the
day is more bourgeoise than cavalier. It does not
include many Bayards. As equality, tolerance,}
civilization, material comfort move forward, seit
ment evaporates. Rabelais gives place to Zola.:
Where esprié prevails, sentiment necessarily suffers.
Wit is hostile to the penumbra of poetic feeling
inseparable from humor. Fond as the French are
of intellectual nuances, they have in the sphere of.
sentiment singularly few. And for such sentiment
as may be divined or anticipated—for axiomatic or
commonplace sentiment, in fine—their contemptu-
ousness is marked. Voltaire’s peevish reproach to
the rival responsible for his mistress’s death is a
characteristic illustration; the circumstances so
plainly justified indignation that the only resort of
the intellectual instinct was in petulance. A soci-|
ety’s need of sentiment, we may perhaps say, having}
regard at any rate to its expression, varies inversely
with its solidarity, with its homogeneity of feeling ;
and it is the highly developed social instinct of the
French that dispenses them from all dependence
160 FRENCH TRAITS

upon that épanchement, that sentimental effusion,
which we find so necessary to the enjoyment of so-
cial intercourse—of which with us, indeed, it is the
very essence.

This certainly is the notion of the French theim-
selves. The abandon of feeling and impulse, which
is characteristically Celtic, they regard as unciv-
ilized. Their apparent excitement on occasion, po-
litical and other, contains a large artistic element,
even when it is not the natural accompaniment of
deliberate action. Their entire sentimental attitude
they themselves believe to be the antique attitude.
According to De Maistre, Racine is simply a Greek
talking French. M. Taine points out the similarity
between the prominent Athenian traits and those
of his countrymen. The parallelism indisputably
holds good in many points; but there is an impor-
tant difference. The French have the antique san-

ity; they have neither the serenity nor the spiritu-

ality of the antique world. The immense complex-

. ity of the modern world ; the tremendous task of
- clearing away the débris of the Middle Age, which

has left permanent scars, and is still incomplete ;
the substitution of diffusion for concentration of
culture and intelligence—are all hostile to national
serenity, to national spirituality. The force which
overwhelmed the antique civilization was a prodi-
gious effusion of feeling. The people that issued
soonest and farthest from the night that succeeded
naturally freed itself most completely from the
SENSE AND SENTIMENT 161

medieval trait of mind dominated by emotion. So,
amid all the gayety and brilliant verve of French
life at its flood, we feel inevitably with Arnold, ex-
claiming in Montmartre, that “amiable home of the
dead ”—

So, how often from hot

Paris drawing-rooms, and lamps
Blazing, and brilliant crowds,
Starred and jewell’d, of men
Famous, of women the queens

Of dazzling converse—from fumes
Of praise, hot, heady fumes, to the poor brain
That mount, that madden—how oft
Heine's spirit, outworn,

Long’d itself out of the din,

Back to the tranquil, the cool,

Far German home of his youth!

And Heine, who belonged plainly to Paris by his
intellectual side, had undoubtedly that un-Parisian
sentiment which, when he was sick unto death and
everything external seemed trivial to him, drew him
irresistibly toward his old German grandmother, in
spite of the exasperation with which, in his prime,
her ingrained philistinism had filled. him. How
much more, then, do we, about whose intelligence
there is very little that is Parisian, who have no such
capacity as Heine for breathing with exhilaration-
the rarefied French atmosphere, feel therein the lack
of that sentiment which is to us the universal sol-
vent and the supreme consolation.
11
162 FRENCH TRAITS

But do not imagine that the French themselves
feel this insufficiency. Do not even fancy that they
quite respect our contentment with vague emotion,.
however exquisite, as a substitute for the bracing
air of those heights where the mind exerts itself
freely and the consciousness disports itself at its
ease. To them Parnassus—or the Parisian variety
of it—is far more attractive than the fireside. They
are no more “maddened” by the “heady fumes of
praise ” than the eagle is blinded by the sun, or the
owl dismayed by the darkness, or any other creature
disabled by its natural element. One of Edmond
About’s eulogists exclaimed at his funeral, with a
fine burst of eloquence, referring to his Alsatian
birth : “Peut-il étre le produit d’une terre alle-
mande!” I think if we take Heine as an evidence
that the French ideal is unsatisfactory to the Ger-
manic foreigner best disposed thereto by nature and
training, About may be taken as the type of the
highly organized and really noble nature to which
this ideal seems complete, and which reminds us

/that if the French are the least poetic, they are the

\ganest: of modern peoples. The nation itself de-
serves Hugo’s praise of Paris: “Paris a été trempé
dans le bon sens, ce Styx qui ne laisse point passer
les ombres ”—‘‘ Paris has been dipped in good-sense
—that Styx which lets no phantoms pass.”
Vv
MANNERS
MANNERS

_ French manners are artistic, they are systema-
. tized and uniform; they are not excessive as we
| erroneously imagine ; they are frank; they are gay
‘and gentle, but they are above all else impersonal.
In this sense the French are not merely the most
‘polite nation in the world. They are the only peo-
ple who of the communication of man with man
distinctly and formally make a recognized medium,
an objective “third somewhat,” in metaphysical |
phrase, in which the speech and action of each com-:
municant encounter those of the other without in!
any degree involving either individuality behind
them—which is, on the contrary, left pointedly alone
in its separate and independent sphere. With re-
gard to this last indeed, there is never, except in
violation of the social code, any curiosity mani-
fested, unless the degree of intimacy is such that
manners themselves are of no importance, or the
individuality is of so accentuated a type as to es-
cape divination—both of which contingencies are
rare. And it is perhaps this indifference that is
mainly accountable for the general Anglo-Saxon posi-
tion concerning French politeness, for our esteeming
166 FRENCH TRAITS

it incurably artificial. We no more like to submit
to the perfect unconcern as to the subtler points
of our individuality which we cannot fail to remark
in the way in which the politest Frenchman treats
us, than we like the persistence with which he ap-
pears to esteem his own personality a matter of no
moment to anyone but himself. We are as solici-
tous to impress him with our qualities as he seems
to be to impress us with his accomplishments ; and
we resent what we insist on considering his careful-
ness to conceal his real opinions, disposition, charac-
ter in the same measure in which we are piqued
by his concentration upon our own superficial
graces—or our lack of any. Ingrained frivolity, ab-
solute superficiality, is invariably our verdict—se-
cret or outspoken according to the degree of our
weakness for seeing the charm of purely objective
and impersonal intercourse illustrated by others in
a perfection only consistent, as we profoundly,
though perfunctorily, believe, with a lack of deep
and large sincerity of character. It is so difficult
for us to realize that in manners, as the French un-
derstand them, there is no more question of charac-
ter than there is in any other fine-art. They illus-
trate the individual’s ideal, not himself; his aspira-
tions, not his qualities; and his ideal and aspira-
tions in an absolutely impersonal sphere where
what serves as stimulus, and all that is at stake are
the sense of external propriety and the artistic fit-
ness of things.
MANNERS 167

How exquisitely adapted the French are to excel
in precisely this sphere is indicated, I think, by the
thread of this essay, The social instinct which sub-
ordinates the individual and suppresses eccentricity,
the social and tolerant nature of a morality which
dictates conformity to general rather than personal
standards, a highly developed intelligence and the
absence of that sentimentality in conjunction with
which it is impossible to find the refinement of man-
ners which is based on reason, however it may inspire
that politesse de ceur in which Prince Bismarck finds
the French lacking, afford precisely the conditions
for producing in perfection an impersonal, artificial,
graceful, and efficient medium of social intercourse.
And, in fact, of manners, as the French understand
and illustrate them, it may be said that we lack even
the conception. Of other manifestations of the ar-
tistic spirit we at least permit ourselves the luxury
of an ideal. It does not ‘cost much anyhow,” we
say ; and indeed it does not, much of it ; our paint-
ing and sculpture and poetry and music have cost
as little probably as the fine-art of any nation of the
world that has devoted any attention whatever to
fine-art. Our amateurs and artists are nevertheless
active and numerous, and it can no longer be said
of us that fine-art does not occupy a considerable
share of our attention. In what is sometimes eso-
terically called “household art” we are even already
distinguished. A few New York palaces vie with
those of Genoa—whose “ household art” had a simi-
168 FRENCH TRAITS

lar origin ; on the other hand the chromo and the
Christmas-card have penetrated social strata which
in France enjoy only white and blue wash. But
as for the manifestation of this same artistic expan-
siveness in social life and manners, the idea simply.
never occurs to us. It would be a pardonably fan-
ciful exaggeration to say that by manners we are
very generally apt to understand “table manners ;”
it is at least true that we use the terms manners
and etiquette interconvertibly, and in a narrowly
specific sense. In “table manners,” as a rule, we
excel. We are not perhaps so distinguished as the
English, from whom we inherit the conception, but
it is generally conceded in France I suppose that the
English and Americans “eat better” than the rest’
of the world. “Table manners,” however, as Anglo-
Saxons illustrate them, are rather a department of
science than of fine-art. A solecism in them has a
fatal importance, and a mistake is mathematically
| an error; they offer no field for that human quality
| which is necessary to constitute art. The French
| certainly do not “eat well ;” that is to say, as a rule.
' French people would at table permit themselves,
and overlook in others, phenomena which Anglo-
Saxons of the same social grade would not permit
4 ; themselves and still less overlook in others. But
in other ways they certainly carry manners to an
extent we but vaguely appreciate and perhaps a
j little disapprove. It is indeed noteworthy that all
other manifestations of the artistic spirit they are
MANNERS 169

apt to make subsidiary and subservient to manners ;
whereas we consider these ends in themselves very
often, as the Talmud does study, and the English
neopagans consider dress. In France they are pop-|
ularly regarded as humanizing agents, a. higher’
class of social influences perfecting the mind and
temper and preparing them for success in the one
great art of life from the French standpoint—social
intercourse. The opera, the Salons, the expositions
rétrospectives, the concours hippiques and agronom-
iques, classical concerts, the theatre itself afford to
countless people—secondarily, to be sure, a great
deal of indirect enjoyment, more intelligent enjoy-
ment, very certainly, than is anywhere else to be
witnessed, as the occasion of it is almost invariably
superior to such things elsewhere—but, primarily
and directly, social rendezvous on a large scale and
of a gay character. Artists complain loudly of this.
The Théadtre Frangais is, two days in the week,
transformed into a social court, as it were, before
which the actors play as, mutatis mutandis, their
predecessors used to before Louis XIV. ; the play
is distinctly not “the thing ;” the thing is the ren-
dezvous. The two arts in which the French excel
all peoples, ancient or modern, with possibly the ex-
ception of the Athenians for a brief period, comedy
and conversation, namely, are particularly adapted
to French excellence because of their intimate and
inextricable connection with manners, Painting ;
and music and poetry are all very well, but they :
170 FRENCH. TRAITS

necessarily take the second rank after manners in
French esteem, and French proficiency as well, be-
cause as professions they are limited, whereas in
manners all Frenchmen are artists.

What degree of perfection comedy has reached in
France it would be a wholly superfluous undertak-
ing to point out. It is conceived in a larger, more
universal way than elsewhere. The muse of comedy
presides over every Thespian temple. Tragedy still
has her stilts on, not because the French have never
heard of Euripides and Shakespeare, but because
everything not distinctly grandiose falls naturally
into the domain of comedy. The mere titles la
Comédie Frangaise, la Comédie Humaine, POpéra
Comique—where Auber and Hérold dominate Offen-
bach and Lecocq—indicate the extension given to
the term which thus includes every mimic represen-
tation of reality from Le Misanthrope to the veriest
vaudeville. And the stream of French comedy in-
undates and fertilizes all Kurope. From Stockholm
to Seville and from London to Moscow it is a com-
monplace that every stage-manager and every dra-
matic author looks constantly toward Paris, where
each has learned his trade and whence most have
borrowed their substance. And in the art of con-
versation, which plays in private lifes the part of
colloquy on the stage, the nation is equally unri-
valled. All the French activities are called into
exercise, and all French qualities are illustrated in
the conversational crackle and sparkle of daily in-
MANNERS 171

tercourse, in which constant practice and ceaseless
pleasure lead to a marvellous artistic proficiency.
At the table, in the drawing-room, in the cafés, in
the open-air public rendezvous which abound every-
where and vary in importance but hardly in charac-
ter from the Champs Elysées or the potiniére of
the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne to the little place
or boulevard extérieur of a village en province, at
every leisure moment of the day—and overflowing
into the hours of industry, which themselves, indeed,
are never, even in their most secret recesses, shel-
tered from its spray—the stream of conversation rip-
ples ceaselessly on and on. All Frenchmen breathe
the atmosphere thus affected and, however great
their differences, are thus subject in commen to a
potent unifying influence ; so that each individual,
even supposing him to have no natural bent there-
for, no Gallic alertness and lingual felicity, be-
comes an educated artist in the great French art.
To be convinced of this, one does not need to re-
mind himself of the Hétel Rambouillet, of the salons
which since Richelieu’s time have flourished on every
hand, of the society of the grand. siécle ; one has
only to enter a café or even a cabaret, or chat with
an omnibus-driver, or one’s next neighbor in black
coat or blouse on a seat in a public square.

About this conversation there are two striking pe-
culiarities : It is in the first place literally conversa-
tion, and in the second it is, like any other fine-art,
practised for its own sake. It need hardly be said ;
—

172 FRENCH TRAI7S

that in each of these respects French conversation
differs from our own. What in general passes for
good conversation with us is really monologue—
sometimes, in fact, so circumscribed as to consti-
tute a sort of informal lecture ; what the French, in-
deed (who are strangers to our lyceum, for which
they substitute a considerable higher education), call
a conférence. This is the sense in which it is dis-
cussed by Dr. Holmes, than whom no one has
touched the subject with a lighter charm. Dr.
Holmes’s view of conversation is extremely auto-
cratic, and would be intolerable to a democratic peo-
ple like the French. In his opinion the cardinal
offence is interruption ; the literal and unimaginative
interrupter is the individual he denounces, but it
is plain that it is the fact of the interruption not the
interruption of fact (as he might say) that really ex-
asperates him. French conversation is in great part
made up of interruptions. Its essence consists in
* give and take.” The most brilliant conversation-
alist is he, or she (for in France women practise
this art as well as men) who succeeds best in don-
mer la réplique. Hence epigram and repartee
abound. With us the analogous triumph is to state
some truth, sentiment, fact most felicitously and to
draw from it some apposite conclusion. Hence the
little preachments, anecdotes, sermonettes which sea-
son our dinners. As for post-prandial eloquence, in
which our prandial conversation so often culminates
upon the slightest excuse, to which it is merely the
MANNERS 173

modest prelude, and toward which it tends with in-
creasing momentum from the soup on, it is nearly
unknown in France. Imagine Mr. Evarts at a
French dinner. On such an occasion his “speech”
(for which the French language has no word) would,
we may be sure, be qualified with an epithet for
which the English tongue has no equivalent ; it
would be pronounced assommant. And after the
formal speaking atra Delmonico dinner, say, is over,
and the toasts (another word which illustrates the
poverty of the French vocabulary) have all been
drunk, and what we understand by general conver-
sation again sets in, conducted by General Horace
Porter, that prince of anecdotists, the Frenchman
would certainly find himself at fault. In an analo-
gous position at home he would be sure to interrupt.
The French raconteur is, it is true, a well-known
type, but he is oftener than not, perhaps, a bore, ow-
ing in great measure to the perfection to which he
has carried his style, which tempts him to apply it
to the decorative presentment of wholly trivial sub-
stance. And in France when a man isa bore the
fact is discovered with electric promptitude. And
in any event, bore or not, the raconteur never enjoys
the esteem of our ‘‘ good-story-teller,” who fre-
quently possesses not merely a local but a national
reputation, as it is called. The introduction of the
personal note is distinctly disagreeable. The force
of our “ good-story-teller ” though always personal
is often histrionic, and the French have, it is true, a

Ad
174 FRENCH TRAITS

talent and a passion for acting. But even in act-
ing they care most for the ensemble. On the stage
an actor who should force his part into the fore-
ground would displease, however admirable in it-
self his performance might be. And in actual life
the social comes to the aid of the artistic instinct
in protecting an entire company from resolving
itself into a lyceum audience and an amateur lec-
turer. =

| French conversation thus is social and artistic
- first of all—never personal and utilitarian. Commu-
nication being its end, it is moreover always admir-
ably clear. Precision is as eminent a characteristic
of spoken as of written French. Each nuance, and
nuances abound, is unmistakable. More even than
by its grace and its vivacity it contrasts with our
own more serious conversation in absolute exactness.
The exactness is in expression merely ; it never be-
comes literal and exacting. When a trivial mistake
is made, a sophism uttered, a person or thing un-
fairly ridiculed or ridiculously praised, the French-
man does not experience the temptation, so irresist-
ible with us, to set wrong right at any expense to
the conversation. The conversation itself is the ob-
ject of hissolicitude. Besides, he realizes that out of
the pulpit persiflage is as potent as preaching. His
expertness in treating serious subjects with the
light touch that avoids flippancy has its moral side
as, imitating Carlyle’s obtuseness about Voltaire,
we are slow to perceive. With us it is the essential
MANNERS 175

levity of the subject discussed rather than a deft and
lively treatment of it that causes the superficial
sparkle. We associate the two things so closely as
to infer one from the presence of the other, an error
which French clearness avoids. Hence French
conversation is far freer than ours. It not only
compromises no personality, and essays no ulterior
result, but its scope and style are in consequence
very extensive and very varied. It has terms sum-
ming up phases of social life, to characterize which
we should need long phrases, and employs them as
counters, as bankers do checks and drafts instead of
exchanging coin. It tends naturally out of its abun-
dance to include topics with which we easily dis-
pense, in mixed company at all events. It is very |
outspoken without being brutal. It makes, indeed,
such a specialty of suggestion for the sake of the
art itself as sometimes to lose all sense of the sub-
stance suggested ; otherwise at least some allusions
are unaccountable. And this freedom, which occa-
sionally no doubt fringes license—but probably less
often than with us offends the proprieties conven-
tionally determined—helps to confer the great
charm of naturalness upon French intercourse.
One’s impulses find themselves less restrained in
being more explicitly directed. The manner is as‘
artificial as you choose, the matter is apt to be gen-
uine and to lack the quality which constitutes pose.
On a high level and in a rarefied atmosphere there
is far more naturalness because there is a greater
176 FRENCH TRAITS

sense of freedom than in the lower regions, amid
denser air, in which the sense of freedom is really
the lack of energy and to issue out of which demands
discipline and attention.

“But are they sincere?” is the universal Anglo-
Saxon demand in reply to all that one can say in
characterization of French manners and of their ar-
ticulate manifestation in the exquisite art of French
conversation. On this point we are, apparently, all
agreed. Charming, intelligent, graceful, everything
else you will that is admirable; at that vague
quality known to us as sincerity we draw the line.
A recent clever book makes a character say that
“French sincerity is a subject he never cares to
enter upon. He likes too many French people.”
That is the utmost concession I at least have ever
seen made. Yet an intelligent observer familiar
with the French must, I think, whether he like them
or not, feel disposed to plead weariness whenever the
time-honored question of French sincerity is mooted
anew. One sympathizes with Hawthorne’s exasper-
ation at the public curiosity concerning the ears
of his Donatello. In this instance also a delightful
and delicate thing is being brutally treated. The
stupidity is carried so far as to awaken that sense
of helpless resentment which one feels in the
presence of wilful wrongheadedness on a large scale
among intelligent people. The truth is the French
are as sincere as any other people, only they mani-
fest the virtue in their own way. French manners
MANNERS 177

include a great deal of compliment, and compliment
is taken literally only by the savage. To argue in-
dividual insincerity from the perfection which com-
pliment has reached among the French is like
arguing that every American who pays his bills
in silver dollars is personally corrupt. Compliment
is merely the current coin of the French social
realm. Nor in nine cases out of ten is it actually
debased. Very slight familiarity with French com-
pliment is sufficient to enable one to see that the
French sense of intellectual self-respect almost in-
variably prevents them from trusting solely to the in-
telligence of the complimented for a complete under-
standing of the fact that the accuracy of compliment
is not that of algebra. Somewhere in most es
compliments you are sure to find the intellectual cor-
rective of their sensuous charm. Your unfamiliarity
with this circumstance and your failure to notice
it may lead you to blush at the moment of receiving
a genuine French compliment yourself, but subse-
quent reflection is apt to make you blush at having
blushed ; there was really, you will infallibly per-
ceive, less cause for confusion.than you imagined.
Take, for example, a typical compliment by a char-
acteristically courteous and sincere Frenchman.
During a visit to England in 1868 the late Prévost-
Paradol was received ‘“‘avec ces empressements
flatteurs,” says a French writer, “que la société
anglaise sait si bien prodiguer pour peu que
Venvie lui en prenne ”—“ with those flattering at-
12
178 FRENCH TRAITS

tentions which English society knows so well how
tolavish when it happens to take a notion to do so.”
Ladies contended for the honor of being taken down
to dinner by the brilliant French journalist. The
London press commenting on this engouement, and
on its striking contrast with the lack of considera-
tion manifested for English journalists of equal
parts, called attention anew to the important réle
which the esteem of his compatriots permits the
French journalist personally to play in his own coun-
try ;—to which the Frenchman naturally replied by
a compliment. “Un Frangais,” said he, ‘a rare-
ment une passion réelle pour le véritable pouvoir
ou pour la fortune. Son ambition vise surtout a
la réputation, 4 V’éloge, 4 l’espoir de donner une
haute idée de lui 4 ses concitoyens, ou méme 4 un
cercle étroit de familiers ; il se console aisément de
bien des déboires s'il peut croire que ceux qui
Yentourent le considérent comme supérieur a sa for-
tune. . . . Il donne le premier rang aux plai-
sirs de Vesprit ;”—A Frenchman rarely has a
sincere passion for real power or for fortune. His
ambition is above all else to achieve a reputation, to
win eulogiums, to succeed in giving a high idea of
himself to his fellow-citizens, or even to a narrow
circle of intimate friends. He is easily consoled
for many mortifications if he can convince himself
that those who surround him consider him superior
to his fortune. He gives the first place to the
pleasures of the mind.” Fancy the audience to
MANNERS 179

which that compliment was addressed speculating
as to its sincerity !

The truth is that the matter of personal genuine-
ness is not at all in question. So far as sincerity in
compliment is concerned it depends upon the spe-
cific truth or falsity of the words employed and
their impersonal suggestion. Of course the French
do intrude the personal equation into this sphere ;
they do occasionally endeavor to make one believe
they mean what they say in a special and intense
sense ; the phenomenon is not absolutely unknown.
But it is far less common than with us; and it in-
variably denotes in the practitioner a lower grade of
person. The large part played by the emotions in
our activities of this kind causes us to regard the
passage from compliment to flattery as venial when-
ever the heart is in the right place. The circum-
stance that compliment is in France a fine-art makes
the same error there far more grave, and conse-
quently far less frequent. It becomes a ‘sign of
grossiéreté—which is the French unpardonable sin.

Furthermore the French compliment never means
more than it says. The national turn for intelli-
gence serves as a great safeguard for sincerity here,
whereas if we examine closely our own way of allow-
ing the heart to dictate to the judgment we cannot
fail to see how inexact our sincerity often becomes.
The Frenchman if he wishes to compliment you will
select some point about you that will bear it. His
language regarding this may at first (and, as I have
180 FRENCH TRAITS

indieated, only at first) seem exaggerated, but the
basis of it will be sound. With us in sincere in-
stances the process is this: a genuine esteem pre-
cedes the desire to please ; the desire to please takes
the form of an expression of this general feeling of
esteem ; this form itself has nothing more to do
with the facts it states than had the compliant ad-
missions of Polonius to Hamlet, ‘very like a whale,”
“it is backed like a weasel ”’—which furnish a not
bad illustration indeed of our ordinary form of com-
pliment, all question of Polonius’s fundamental sin-
cerity, of course, aside.

The foreigner’s notion that the French “do every-
thing with an air” is perfectly sound. The author
of “Living Paris,” who is an unusually liberal ob-
server, adds that “they do it all the same.” This is
quite true. If there was ever a practical and posi-
tive people under the sun itis the French. But it
answers only an elementary vulgar error. A moro
plausible yet equally erroneous notion is that this
“air” is affected and theatrical. Theatrical it may
sometimes become in that excess which is unconge-
nial to the French character and therefore rarc.
But the noticeable thing about it is that it is not
theatrical. Such poses, tones, and gesture as are
common to our stage and occasionally overflow into
80 opposite a place as our pulpit would excite
amazement at a thédtre de banlieue. Dramatic is
the true epithet for that systematization ‘of expres-
eion noticeable in the French. The “air” with
MANNERS 181

which they do everything has nothing of ill-regu-
lated emotion in it; nor, on the other hand, is it
often characterized by that sensuous magic insepara-
ble from Italian native grace. It is in nowise senti-
mental; it is simply expressive. It may be more or
less ornate, now structural, now decorative, as indi-
viduals differ. But what is to be noted is that it is
invariably the “air” which the individual deems ap-
propriate, and that fitness is his sole criterion. The
reason for our failure to perceive this is that in every
serious matter we rely on the impression produced
by personal character to convey its importance to
the listener or spectator. The more weighty the
substance the more condensed the statement, the
more poetic the theme the balder, or at least the
briefer, its expression. In fine our idea of expres-
sion is repression. We appeal to the imagination,
not to the sense orthe reason. We find the French
“air” theatrical instead of logically and aptly dra-
matic because our ideal is to have no “air” at all,
We are egoists, not artists ; it is not what we say or |
do that we wish to count, but ourselves.

Hence manifestly the confusion of which we are
guilty in accusing the French of affectation at the
same time that we speak of them as naturally theat-
rical. But they are no more affected than they are
theatrical. By our exaltation of character over man-
ners, by our adjusting of manners to personal expres-
sion, by our sentimental and inartistic substitution
of a thoroughly contained and intense air for the nat-
182 FRENCH TRAITS

ural and spontaneous one which fits the thought, we
are in far graver peril from this subtle foe than is
the Frenchman, whose manner alone, at any rate, is
attacked and whose character escapes. ‘Tell over
scrupulously the list of your friends, American or
English. How many of them are there who do not
affect some character or other, some moral réle for-
eign to their native disposition, with which their
effort to harmonize their demeanor is quite as ob-
vious as it is successful? In one’s own case this may
" be aspiration, but in that of others it is invariably
affectation. And the attempt to impose it results in
a kind of pervasive and general hypocrisy beside
which the explicit and definite cafardise of the
French has the merit of being a frank foe. In
France a man’s valuation of himself is much more
nearly that which his friends set upon him. Even
in the French manner what we mistake for affecta-
tion is merely intention. To bring all one’s physi-
cal activities into the sphere of culture and reason,
to suit the gesture to the word and the word, to the
thought, to stand and walk and sit decorously, to
enter a room, to bow to a lady, to carry on a téte-d-
téte, or share a general conversation, to avoid con-
troversy, to attain repose—to do all this respectably
requires intention. So far as communities are con-
cerned fine natural manners are a myth, but this
probably does not prevent the Sioux and Apaches
from considering our manners artificial, or us from
finding affectation in those of the French, owing to
MANNERS 183

the distinctness which unfamiliarity gives to inten-

tion in either instance, and to the failure in each

case to appreciate the importance of intention in

everything of importance.

« In fine the vulgar mistrust of French sincerity is |
based on nothing more nor less than the fact that |
French manners are studied, artificial, conventional, '
which does not of course mean that they are of
necessity inelastic or excessive or superficial, but
that the French put the same intention into manners

that all civilized peoples do into language, and have.

systematized them with the same care for correctness

on the one hand and pliability on the other. We

have no exactly equivalent word for what the French

call tenue, and if we have exactly the thing it is in-

finitely less developed and less nearly universal than

in France, where it is as characteristic of manners as

are the impersonal and artistic spirit. Tenue means

restraint, order, measure, style, consciousness, in-

tention in demeanor and bearing. Owing to his nat-

ural turn for these qualities the Frenchman is rarely

tempted to permit himself indiscretions. He is not

solicited by whimsical impulses. He has no desire

for relaxation, and does not chafe under restraint.

It is not difficult for him to feel at ease in an erect

posture ; he supports the greater muscular tension

involved with less evident fatigue ; his hands do not

automatically seek his trousers’ pockets nor his knees

cross oneanother. Consciousness and self-conscious-

ness are not identical terms to him. Nor does the
184 FRENCH TRAITS

artificiality of the drawing-room atmosphere oppress
him and entice him into mistaking buffoonery for
the talismanic touch of thawing nature, into spas-
modic laughter, into long stories, into that amuse-
ment of the ensemble, which involves neglect of the
members, of the company. Of course perfect breed:
ing is perfect breeding the world over. But the per-
fectly bred man is born, not bred, if the paradox
may be permitted. The mass of mankind have no
more genius for manners than for tight-rope danc-
ing, but it is easy to see that the mass of Frenchmen
have a talent for them in adding a talent for tenue to
the social and the artistic instincts.

It would be difficult to find in any bourgeois inte-
rior the entire absence of form characteristic of many
of our own average homes. Not that in moments—
or hours—of mutual ennui and common délassement,
the average bourgeois interior does not, from the
point of view of pure form, leave something to be de-
sired. But, in seasons of entire sanity, the respec-
tive shapes expansiveness takes ina French home
and in one of our own differ prodigiously. Take a
large French family reunion. Few social pictures
are prettier. There is very likely an entire absence
of 'that hearty familiarity which characterizes our
Thanksgiving or Christmas gatherings. The chil-
dren do not romp, the grown people do not appear
as if at last the moment had come when all outward
restraint and formality could be thrown aside with a
clear conscience. The visitors do not “make them-
MANNERS 185

selves perfectly at home,” the hosts do not invite
them to do so, or treat them as if such were the casc.
There is everywhere perfectly apparent the French
veneer of artificial courtesy. Children are treated
with politeness and not hugged ; babies are banish-
ed—are generally, in fact, in a state of chronic exile;
if at times everyone is talking at once it is evidently
because of the social desire to contribute to the con-
versation, rather than because of the unsocial dis-
position to neglect one’s neighbor’s appreciations—
an abysmal difference in itself; there are no uncom-
fortable silences passed in simply “ sitting round ”
and cudgelling one’s brains as to what to do next ;
the great art and enjoyment of social life being con-
versation—exchange of ideas, or notions, original or
trite, but always cast in more or less careful form—
games are far seldomer than among us resorted to
as a substitute, and being invariably for money
probably owe their popularity to the ingrained French
disposition toward avarice; an avarice which always
seems curious to us but about which in its milder
manifestations there is never any concealment.
Games themselves are never conducted in silence.
The solemn stillness that with us accompanies the
rubber of whist which is more and more tending to
become, even as played by the young and frivolous,
a tremendously serious thing, and which indicates
clearly that the game is an end in itself and nota
pastime, is unknown outside the clubs in France.
An occasional old gentleman, who when the stakes
186 FRENCH TRAITS

are high: insists on a subordination of talk and vig-.
orously represses his partner’s tendency to discursive-
ness, is voted a nuisance. Naturally thus, there is
nowhere to be seen, perhaps, such wretched whist-.
playing as in French salons.

Universally in French interiors an American per-
ceives at once the absence of effort at “ entertaining
people,” in our phrase. The entertainmentis a phe-
nomenon spontaneously generated when people come
together. The various social amusements are cer-
tainly cultivated ; dancing and singing and the piano
are, of course, merely subordinated, not suppressed
—one cannot converse forever. But dancing is no-
where the passion that it is with us; if it were, the

‘French, who dance detestably, would perhaps dance
| better. People dance, but then, also, occasionally,
‘they desist from dancing ; in the cotillion the pretti-
‘ness of the figure occupies much more attention than
‘its duration. As for music the French are decidedly
ahead of us. They already very generally recognize
,, the caricature which ordinary amateur effort is; they
are well known to have far less respect than our race
for what bores them; and now that so much pro-
fessional effort is had at soirées they have become ex-
acting and only extraordinary amateur skill is toler-
ated. As for our readings, Browning societies, and
in general the class of literary entertainment pro-
vided by the thousands of provincial and rural
“sociables” from one end of our country to the
other—many of these half-acknowledged pisallers
MANNERS 187

would seem grotesque to the most long-suffering
Latin ; in France, especially, elocution and erudition,
general and special information and all cognate
acquiremenis are taken seriously. The end and
aim of society is in fact simply human intercourse,
decorated with infinite variety but never needing to
be buttressed—recognized as a natural satisfaction ;
of a profound instinct and needing no extraneous”
stimulus, only a careful and elaborate development |
and ordering.

This ordering necessarily results in uniformity of
manners, and uniformity is as foreign to our manners
as is the impersonal, artistic, or conventional spirit.
But it is to be observed that uniformity of manners
is a great humanizer. It is perhaps the simplest
means of bringing persons of different idiosyncra-
sies into sympathetic relations. Our own diversity
is grotesque and is responsible for much estrange-
ment between our different sections. A Chicago
journal, for example, treating of courtship, apos-
trophizes plaintively ‘the turned-down light, the
single chair,” but it would be idle to pretend that
the milieu thus briefly characterized is congenial to
all of us, As yet with us every man is his own
Chesterfield. We have individuals with the charm
which in Emerson struck Carlyle as elaborate, not
to say excessive. We have the average rural New
Englander whom Emerson found picturesque, but
whose charm is distinctly not excessive. We have
the entire gamut run by the Southron describing a
188 FRENCH TRAITS

dinner party composed to his sense of “an elegant
gentleman from Virginia, a gentleman from Ken-
tucky, a man from Ohio, a fellow from New York,
and a galoot from Boston.” Our society thus has
the advantage of not being monotonous to the artist ;
but the dead level of steel rails has this superiority
over the interesting diversity of corduroy roads that
it makes travel easier and arrival more hopeful.
The avoidance of friction secured is incaleulably de-
lightful. The social machinery so scrupulously
attended to runs far more smoothly than ours, which
we imagine will quite take care of itself if we fulfil
the condition that made such a carver of men’s cas-
ques of the sword and such a sure-thruster of the
lance of the pure-hearted Sir Galahad. No French-
man to whom you talk punctuates your sentences
with an eager and admonitory “ yes, yes, yes.” Nor
does appreciation of his own wit or of yours involve
distracting excursions. Nor does he show you
plainly how hard it is for him to wait till you have
finished, or let his attention wander, or try to save
time by the surreptitious reading of a letter or a
glance at a newspaper heading, or indicate in any
way as so many of us do, the manner varying with
individual character, that conversation is not the
most important affair in the world. He knows that
for the moment it is.

On the other hand susceptibilities escape wound-
ing with a completeness that seems as wonderful as
the means by which it is secured is seen to be simple.
MANNERS 189

In France it is in the first place bad manners to be too |
susceptible ; in the second place it is a mark of that

conceit always ascribed to a lack of intelligence; in

the third place one’s susceptibility is justly wounded |
only when an offence has been committed against the ,
code of manners. These sound like commonplaces.

But they are practically not accepted by us. Practi-

cally we believein “taking no offence where none is

intended ;” and we really think that when the social

‘code of the Golden Age comes to be discovered this,
will be found to have been its spirit too. On the
contrary giving unintentionally just ground for
offence is precisely what the French find it impossible
to support. Provided with a conventional and uni-
form code, they concentrate their attention upon the
grossiéreté—to them the most repugnant quality in
the world—of the offence, and whether or no it be
accompanied by design, by malhonnéteté, is a sub-
ordinate consideration. Accompanied by mathon-
néteté it may or may not be, but aggravated by it or
by anything it cannot. In this way the French
avoid the habit so prevalent with us of always seek-
ing the motive of everyone’s speech or behavior and
the suspicion, the morbid sensitiveness, which is the
inevitable result of this habit. So long as the con-
venances remain undisturbed people’s motives are
assumed to be amiable. It is our notion on the con-
trary that observance of conventions can mean very
little, and our own experience, in fact, teaches us
that they are often extremely deceptive indices of
190 FRENCH TRAITS

both the feelings and the character. So long,
accordingly, as we are sure that a person is well-
disposed and worthy, he may, within certain ill-de-
fined limits, say and do what he chooses; so long as
we are convinced that right feeling presides at their
sacrifice our solicitude for conventions ceases, We
do not in this way reach much eminence in what is
strictly defined as civility, but that is a common-
place which does not greatly disturb us; we readily
reconcile ourselves to the impeachment ; we easily
console ourselves with the notion that we possess
what is far more important and perhaps after all
inconsistent with that “outward grace” which Mr.
Lowell assures us we know to be but “dust.” But
this attitude compels us to be continually ‘ making
allowances” for people who are, though kind, still
uncouth or inconsiderate ; and uncouthness and
inconsiderateness, are, however tolerable, nowhere
agreeable qualities in a positive sense. And one
cannot continually “make allowances” or have
them made for him without great detriment to his
dignity. Consequently we do feel a vague discom-
fort, which the French with their concentration on
the dust of outward grace are spared, in a hundred
more or less trifling details of social intercourse.
And occasionally, when an individual of either of the
two great branches of our race contemplates such
an individual of the other as chance may be trusted
now and then to bring into contact with him—in en-
counters of this sort with which every travelled
MANNERS 191

American or Englishman is familiar, scales seein to
fall from his eyes. French manners appear trans-
figured to him. Mere “outward grace” rises pro-
digiously inhisesteem. Few cultivated Englishmen
probably have escaped a shock when subjected for
the first time to the unrestrained familiarity and the
empty-headed effusiveness characteristic of many of
our compatriots. Few Americans probably have
not flushed with a sense of outrage at the tactless
incivility of the worthy but forbidding Briton. The
American “ drummer ” narrating his experiences and
making his “‘ effect ” ata Continental table d’héte, and
the English lady opposite him visibly wondering how
he can eat butter with hot meats and carefully mani-
festing an exaggerated disgust in consequence, tend,
for example, to excite in each other a feeling of tol-
eration for manners as the French conceive them—
manners which in seasons of calmer weather they
find excessive. 4
Nothing, however, could be more erroneous than
the popular Anglo-Saxon notion that French man-
ners are excessive. Like all our notions about the
French this is with us an inheritance. English
manners are in general reserved, brusque, embar-
rassed perhaps in reality, if you choose to examine
into the real nature of puerilities, but superficially—
that is to say in the sole sphere of their action—
splenetic, bald, absurdly uncivilized as manifested
toward strangers, and characterized in intimacy by
what Emerson calls “ unbuttoned ease.” By force
192 FRENCH TRAITS

of contrast French manners are bound to appear ex-
cessive to Englishmen. Positively speaking, of all
possible qualities that of excess is the most foreign
to French demeanor as it is to the French mind.
The Italian manner is excessive, if you choose—and
are ill-natured enough to mention it And curi-
ously enough our own and that of the English—
when any value is attached to it, when account is
really taken of it, when we wish to be “especially
polite,” as the singular phrase is—may certainly be
thus described. But French manners are saved
from excess by the very fact that they are so thor-
‘ oughly conventional. Nowhere is convention more
esteemed, although nowhere are its terms more elas-
tic. Nowhere, as one has occasion to remark there
at every turn, is a given convention so frankly ac-
cepted as the formulated opinion of mankind con-
cerning the subject of it. To dispute it, to advance
individual notions in modification of it, is clearly
regarded as more naif than even courageous, That
“common consent of mankind ” which certain mor-
alists make the arbiter in ethics is in France ap-
plied to almost every conceivable act of man with an
elaborateness and system that rival those of the
Code Napoléon. itself. Nowhere, perhaps, outside
the precincts of the Court of Castile, is etiquette,
that codified system of manners, carried so far ; no-
where is an offence against it more quickly noticed.
Violations of it are readily excused if justifiable ;
there is no pedantry: there is even a special inter-
MANNERS 193

est exhibited in originalité—a word which it is sig-
nificant that we have to render by eccentricity.
But violations are invariably remarked and the
proper deduction made therefrom.

Nevertheless, etiquette itself being not a court af-
fair but something thoroughly understood and prac-
tised by everybody, French manners are thereby
saved from excess, as they are from every other
form of eccentricity. They strike one, rather, as
being almost business-like ; at any rate their design
is clearly to remove friction as well as to decorate
intercourse. The “‘grimacing dancing-master,” the
“bowing and scraping” simply do not exist; not
because the French are incapable of such insincere
artificiality, but because they do not like it. It does
not seem to them a good thing in itself. The de-
gree to which they have carried the evolution of
manners has left it far behind. It is an offence
against measure and it is undemocratic—either cir-
cumstance being enough to condemn it in French
esteem, In Peking, doubtless, the French manner
would seem meagre. In Virginia, “before the war,”
the Frenchman would certainly have found much in
that courtly and elaborate bearing of which we still
read in Southern literature and of which we observe
the majestic remains whenever a Southern orator
delivers a set speech, which would have seemed to
him Oriental. Indeed, one may remark in passing,
Claverhouse himself would have been greatly sur-
prised at the abundance of manner in the “de-

13
194 FRENCH TRAITS

scendants of the cavaliers.” The grandiose is al-
most never to be encountered in France—except in
art or literature where it is sought of set purpose
and expressly, as who should say ‘let us now in-
_tone instead of simply speaking.” On the other
hand the sincerely familiar manner, that manner
; which is the absolute absence of manner, is quite as
uncommon. Drop into the little stuffy hall in the
Boulevard des Capucines of a Thursday evening,
and listen to one of M. Francisque Sarcey’s charm-
ing conférences on the stage, on poetry, on literature.
M. Sarcey’s manner is admirably free from pose of
any kind ; it passes in Paris for the manner suited
to a bonhomie almost, if not quite, bourgeoise. It is
familiar in a sense unknown to our lyceum; M.
Sarcey, who is in the first place seated, stops over a
citation to laugh or admire with his auditors : oc-
casionally one of these hazards a suggestion to
which the conférencier bows agreement or shrugs
dissent; one is almost en famille. But the family is
clearly a Freneh family. There is no relaxation,
no unbending, no flaccid abandon. Of familiar-
ity as we understand the term and as we illustrate
it on the rostrum, as well as in the “ back-store,”
there is none at all. Quite as watchful a guard is
kept over the moral muscles as if the oeeasion were
a wholly different one. M. Sarcey and his auditors
are as much on “dress-parade,” as we sometimes
say of this attitude, as the soldiers at a Longchamps
review. They have simply, morally speaking,
MANNERS 195

learned so well to use their faculties by the habit
which is a second nature that that first nature which
as Pascal observed is perhaps only a first habit,
seems to them rudimentary rather than specifically
natural, as it appears to us. Suppose—if such a
thing can be supposed—M. Sarcey forming one of
the late Mr. Beecher’s audience at Plymouth Church
on a Sunday morning. The time, the place, the
theme are sacred, but he would be certain to find a
lack of correspondence between this fact and the
manners of the occasion—he would be sure to es-
teem unfair any criticism of French manners as ex-
cessive which should be based on the standard
there confronting and surrounding him. He would
be sure, on the other hand, to find excess in the oc-
casion’s absence of fenue. He would reflect: “ Our
manner is business-like rather than Italian ; it is di-
rect rather than rococo. We are familiar, we are
free, we are frank, we are gay; but we are not gay
like that.”

Finally, French manners are gentle. A certain
mildness of demeanor, which is; among us, mainly
confined to such individuals as do not fear the con-
sequences of failure in self-assertion, is everywhere
observable. The fiercely mustachioed concierge
shares it with the bland academician. It is the
rarest imaginable chance to hear an oath. There is
something feeble and inefficient, an acknowledgment
of inarticulateness, about the intenser sort of exple-
tives, which are wholly foreign to the French tem-
196 FRENCH TRAITS

per, accustomed to perfect facility and adequacy of
expression. Similarly with slang. French argot is
almost a language by itself. Slang as we compre-
hend the term, and as Walt Whitman eulogizes and
employs it—namely, as the riotous medium of the
under-languaged, is unknown. One may in a week
lear more oaths and more slang of the coarse and
stupid sort in Wall Street, at the seaside, in the
hotel corridors and street-cars and along the side-
walks of New York and Philadelphia, say, and in
public generally among us than in the length and
breadth of France in a year. There is not the same
burlesque of “ heartiness,” the same slapping on the
back, the same insistent invitations to drink, the
same brutalité ; in fine there is infinitely more gen-
tleness. Their occasional savagery strikes us as in-
effective and amateur, their fury seems fustian.
The “ rapier-thrusts” of sarcasm, the kind of writ-
ing and talking to which some of our newspapers
apply their most eulogistic epithet, “scathing,” the
bitter banter to which not a few of the best bred of
our young girls seem just now especially addicted
would excite amazement in France. Persiflage,
there, is never personal when it is not also good-
natured. In any event there is far less of it than
of compliment; and this compliment is less facti-
tious than are our personalities of the uncompli-
mentary kind. The difference shows an important
temperamental distinction as well as anything can.
| The French are as inclined to the amiable, the agree-
MANNERS 197

able, the social, the impersonal as we are to se
being the dupe of these qualities ; perhaps they are
less duped than we are, and at any rate the amount
of fruitless friction which they save over us is very
great. Indeed with us this friction grows by natu-
ral selection ; it is popular because, conscious of im-
mense kindliness at bottom and our own withers be-
ing for the moment unwrung, we like to see the
galled jade wince. The Chamber of Deputies is
sometimes a bear garden, and the air is thick with
denunciation, but such a speech as Mr. Blaine’s
famous characterization of Mr. Conkling or Mr.
Conkling’s of Mr. Curtis was never heard there. In
private life there is more refined malice, more gayety,
and more gossip—if possible—in a Paris salon than
in a Fifth Avenue drawing-room, or on a Newport
piazza ; but there is nothing of what we have come
to know as personal “rallying,” and the gossip is
about the absent.

We, on the other hand, are all familiar, Mr. Ar-
nold reminds us, with the notion of “ hewing Agag
in pieces,” and our ungentleness of manners pro-
ceeds largely from the astonishing way in which
this Teutonic and Puritan passion has penetrated
our very nature. How English literature witnesses
this from the time of Milton to the very latest number
of “The Saturday Review” weallknow. The great-
est and kindliest natures are not exempt from it on
the other side of the water. Not only does Ma-
caulay riot in it, but such a good-natured soul as
198 FRENCH TRAITS

Mr. James Yellowplush indulges in many a swing of
the axe—when Agag is for the moment personated
by Bulwer, let ussay. Not only is the hewing done
with the grandiose strokes of Carlylean brutality,
but it is amiably and dexterously performed by the
advocate par excellence of ‘‘sweet reasonableness ”
and the chief critic of the custom, Mr. Matthew Ar-
nold himself. The description of Mr. Swinburne as
“sitting in a sewer and adding to it,” attributed to
Carlyle, differs mainly by its outrageousness from the
implacable way in which a long catalogue of saints
and sinners is subjected at the hands of Mr. Arnold
to an illumination as indiscreet as it is discriminat-
ing. There is much discussion as to whether it is as
a critic or a poet that he will appeal to “the next
ages,” but there is a side of his admirable and ele-
vated genius in virtue of which it is not difficult oc-
casionally to fancy him gracing the Pantheon of the
future in the harmonious guise of Apollo flaying
Marsyas. No Anglo Saxon would wish Mr. Arnold
different, but it is worth pointing out that the re-
spectably sized and felicitously executed ‘‘ Dunciad ”
which might be collected from his works is incon-
testably due to the personal attitude, the personal
way of looking at many questions and discussing
many subjects. His gentleness in consequence is
rather express than ingrained, and now and then
has something feline in its velvety caress.

In this country, I think, we are less disposed to
censoriousness. At any rate our more refined spir-
MANNERS 199

its are—from the various reasons which spring from
the American differentiation of the race. We have
more room, and more equality. Our manners are
affected by our greater amenity. But we do not
need the abundant testimony of the daily journals to
assure us how thoroughly personal is, in general,
our point of view, how instinctive is our protest
against the impersonal and artistic way of discussing
and deciding any serious problem, how distrustful
we are of the earnestness of whatever bears no per-
sonal indorsement. “It makes a great difference to
a sentence,” says Emerson somewhere, “whether or
no there be a man behind it.” That is our univer-
sal feeling. It is impossible to conceive the serene
and charitable Emerson finding the flaying of
Marsyas work so congenial as to be worthy his best
and most vivacious effort, but it cannot be doubted
that the operation would awaken his interest and, if
neatly performed, win his approval. To the most
malicious Frenchman on the other hand, the flaying
of Marsyas by Apollo would seem a work of super-
erogation. Neither in literature nor in life does he
practise it. ‘That isa fine legend, a most signifi-
cant myth,” he would remark to us, “ but you ma-
terialize it atrociously. The only part of it with
which we are directly and actively concerned is the
contest—that part which Raphael painted with a
real personal feeling, as you may see in the Louvre.
The consequences to incompetence of its insolence
are, as he has conventionalized them in the Vatican,
200 FRENCH TRAITS

natural and necessary ; they follow without the in-
terposition of the god, who was born for higher
things. Agag is sure to be satisfactorily hewn in
pieces, and the work is accomplished by the matter-
of-course operation of impersonal forces. Individ-
ually and socially we are only concerned with recog-
nizing Agag when we see him and with showing our-
selves superior to him. He is so little liked among
us, his following is so entirely inconsiderable com-
pared with that he can boast among you that his
fate, indeed, is sealed from the beginning. To de-
nounce him would be to utter platitudes.”
VI
WOMEN
WOMEN

Waitine over a hundred years ago, Sébastien Mer-
cier, whose “Tableau de Paris” was once a very
popular work, says of his countrywomen : ‘“ French-
women are remarkable for piercing, mischievous
eyes, elegant figures, and sprightly countenances,
but fine heads are very rare amongst them.” The
type has not varied greatly since then and it may
be safely asserted that at present large eyes and
beautiful faces are as rare among Frenchwomen as
are poor figures. They are admired, too, in France
with an intensity not -untinctured with envy. For
large eyes especially this admiration is universally
unmeasured—no woman's eyes seem too large to be
beautiful; from the lay-figures of fashion plates to
the goddesses of the Salon, Grévin’s beauties, the
wax-figures of shop-windows—every ideal type
whether vulgar or refined is sure to possess large
eyes. American girls have not this peculiarity, it is
well known, as frequently as those of several other
races, but in Paris they are nearly as noted for it as
for any other feature of their pretty faces. An
American returning bome after a long sojourn in
France is himself struck by the number of “ ox-eyed
204 FRENCH TRAITS

Junos” in which his country may glory and which
he had not before suspected. Pretty faces are not,
perhaps, more abundant in France than large eyes.
They are rarer among women of a certain age than
among young girls—so much rarer indeed than is
the case with us that one naturally infers the de-
teriorating effect of French life and manners upon
the fresher and more delicate beauties of feature
and color. Of this Frenchwomen seem themselves
convinced, and they begin early the endeavor to
circumvent the ungallant influences of passing years.
It is a bold thing to say, they are themselves such
excellent judges in these matters, but it is probable
that in this they commit a grave error, and, by
meeting them half-way, really aid in the ungra-
cious work of these influences. Balzac cynically
divides Parisians into the two classes of the young
and the old who attempt to appear young. As to
women alone’ he does not seem, to a foreign ob-
server, very far out of the way. There are doubt-
less large numbers of men who do not attempt to
regain the youthful aspect they could not retain,
but almost no women.

It is not by any means exclusively vanity that fur-
nishes the motive for this unequal struggle with
nature. Partly, to be sure, it is a poignant repug-
nance to loss of consideration which, in a society
where the great prize of life is the esteem of others,
is of great importance. But in the main it proceeds
from a passionate desire to preserve even the sem-
WOMEN 205

blance of the period when one feels at one’s best,
when one can enjoy most thoroughly, and when one
wastes one’s life the least. Some day perhaps gray
hair will become as fashionable in Paris as it is in
New York, but hitherto there are no signs of its fa-
vor. The number of women one sees who have
dyed hair is very large, and, till one remarks a cor-
responding rarity of gray hair, very odd. At first
one’s respect for Parisian taste receives a severe
shock. The dye used, however—apparently the
same all over Paris—is far superior to the hideous
russets we are accustomed to note in the beard and
hair of an occasional under-bred old man, and when
fresh is, except for its evident artificiality, a not at
all bad looking dark-chestnut. After a few days it
becomes easily-less beautiful, and it is certainly not
renewed often enough. The ennui of the process
and economy, the sense for both of which is quite
as keen as that of coquetry in France, are against
its frequent renewal. Before long one becomes
used to the general phenomenon and is in two
minds about agreeing with the Parisians as to its
preferability to gray hair, which certainly does not
suit all complexions and makes the person not ‘natu-
rally distinguished appear insignificant ; and except
in rare cases it ages rather than renders piquant the
youthfulness it sometimes accompanies. As for the
mauvaise honte of resorting to artificial aids to
beauty, one inclines to get over that in breathing
the Parisian atmosphere where such a feeling is
206 FRENCH TRAITS

wholly unknown and would probably be incompre-
hensible. Women with us certainly resort to wigs
in case of baldness and to rice powder in the event
of any grave defect in complexion. The line be-
tween the palliation of natural blemishes and the
adornment of natural features is difficult to draw.
A society which has a great deal of regard for form
will insist on the latter, while a society perpetually
on its guard against permitting form to out-weigh
substance will hardly excuse the former.

The truth is that coquetry, which is a defect in
our eyes, is a quality of the Frenchwoman. It isa

' virtue which consecrates as it were the possession of

natural attractions. In France always le charme
prime la beauté, and coquetry there is the science of
charm in women. Charm in this special sense our
women do not greatly study ; and its crude exhibi-
tions oftener than not occur in conjunction with an
absence of those natural attractions so much better
and so universally appreciated by the opposite sex
that there is no atoning for the lack of them nor any
need of enhancing them. But in France to paint
the lily is not regarded as a paradox. The result is
not without a certain specious felicity, it must be
confessed ; as indeed many American men who have
been honored in any degree with French feminine
society could probably testify. On the other hand
it is not to be inferred that from our point of view
the French lily needs to be painted. Her natural
charms are many and great, and they would be po-
WOMEN 207

tent even in a milieu which would distinctly frown
upon her mobilization and manceuvring of them, so to
speak. Her complexion is, in general—before it has
submitted to the inexorable necessities arising from
competition with the heightened and accentuated
tints that best sustain the gaslight (or rather can-
dle-light) splendor of opera, balls, and soirées—very
nearly perfection. Less florid than the red and
white freshness so greatly admired as witnessing
quite as much as decorating the superb health of
English women, it is nevertheless full of color, read-
ily changeable, and of a purity unaffected either by
its occasional leaning toward olive or by its more
frequent shading into pink. Muddy or sallow it
never is. The Parisienne is perhaps often étiolée—
there is much croaking in the journals about the ef-
fect of the vie fiévreuse et excitante of Paris ; but ane-
mia asa chronic condition is infrequent. She has
a disgust for invalidism rare among American wo-
men, who would find her on this score terribly un-
sympathetic—“cold and hard” in fact. Unlike so
many American women, i case her blasée in
consequence, elle n’est pas hee dhier, in French
phrase, and she perfectly appreciates the intimate
connection between invalidism and hysteria. To be
pitied forms no part of her programme, and to be
pitied on such grounds would be unendurable to
her. The “rest cure” is probably unknown in
France.

But quite as much as such commiseration she
208 FRENCH TRAITS

undoubtedly dreads the loss of physical attractive-
ness which invalidism involves. She devotes indeed
a share of attention to the conservation of her
beauty in every respect which the American woman
would esteem excessive. Her hand, oftener expres-
sive perhaps than mignonne, but in general shapely
and well-attached, shows the advantages of this at-
tention. Her foot on the other hand shows its dis-
advantages ; it is asa rule if larger than the cor-
responding American foot (which is not to be denied)
smaller by a greater discrepancy still than that of
the Englishwoman, and there seems really no excuse
for compressing it, as is so universally done, into
the fashionable but transparent deception known as
the Louis Quinze boot. Under this treatment, little
different in kind from that which is de rigueur in
China, it assumes an aspect totally devoid of grace-
ful contour, to be characterized only by what Car-
lyle would describe as “mere hoofiness.” Still for
a moment—the moment during which alone perhaps
the feminine foot should be remarked—the effect is
possibly to diminish apparent size ; and here again,
as in the instances of paint and powder and dyes,
one should hesitate before proffering advice to so
excellent a judge as the Frenchwoman. The point
remains, in Candide’s words, ‘une grande question.”
‘Coquetry itself, however, can offer nothing to en-
hance what is beyond all question the Frenchwo-
man’s most admirable physical endowment, namely
her incomparable figure. Embonpoiné, it is true, is
WOMEN 209

a danger to be contemplated as one approaches
middle age. Beyond this period of life France un-
doubtedly possesses her full share of ample and ma-
tronly femininity. The opposite tendency may safe-
ly be scouted ; Madame Bernhardt herself is well-
known to be what is called a fausse maigre. But in
any assemblage of Frenchwomen from a ball in the
Faubourg St. Germain to a bal de I’ Opéra the number
of admirable figures is very striking ; the face may
be positively common, but the figure is nearly sure
to be superb. The wasp-waist so much affected
across the Channel is apparently confined to fashion-
plates designed for exportation. The unwisdom of
. tight-lacing is evidently not more perfectly appre-
ciated than its unsightliness, though the relations of
hygiene to beauty are thoroughly understood ; it is
doubtless often resorted to, but mainly as a correc-
tive. With this excellence of figure generally goes
a corresponding excellence of carriage; in this re-
spect the skill with which the Louis Quinze heel is
circumvented is beyond praise. And with regard
to the tact and taste displayed in the garb which
decorates this figure and carriage the world is, I sup-
pose, as well agreed now as in the time when the Em-
press Eugénie set its fashions for it in a more inexor-
able way than the women of the present republic can
pretend to. France is still, if not the only country
in the world where dress is an art, at least the only
one where the dressmaker and the milliner are art-
ists.
14
210 FRENCH TRAITS

It is as unquestionably the country in which wo-
men think most of dress. The fact is often enough
made a reproach to the Frenchwoman, and nothing
is commoner than to hear Englishmen, Germans,
Spaniards, and Italians, as well as Americans, in
Paris referring to it as indicating her character and
defining the limit of her activities. Her toilet oc-
cupies the Parisienne too exclusively, is nearly the
universal foreign opinion—even among those for-
eigners who are themselves most attracted by the
graces and felicities of the toilet in question as well
as least serious themselves. The difficulty of trans-
muting such a trait into that domesticity which the
Southern Latin ready to se ranger prizes as highly
as the Teuton or Anglo-Saxon who makes it a part
of his feminine ideal, is a frequent theme of purely
disinterested speculation among these social philos-
ophers. It is a difficulty nevertheless which does
not puzzle the Frenchman. The conditions of
French life are such that domesticity is either not
understood in precisely the sense in which it is
accepted elsewhere, or is not given the same over-
mastering importance as an absolute quality. The
domesticity aimed at by the Spanish convent and cul-
tivated by the Germanic hearth and chimney-corner
is in no sense the object of the Frenchman’s ambi-
tion for the Frenchwoman. Here as elsewhere his
social instinct triumphs over every other, and he re-
gards the family circle as altogether too narrow a
sphere for the activities of a being who occupies so
WOMEN 211

much of his mind and heart, and in whose consider-

ation he is as much concerned as she in his. Tobe ,
the mother of his children and the nurse of his de- —
clining years is a destiny which, unrelieved by the
gratification of her own instincts of expansion, he
would as little wish for her as she would for herself.
To be the ornament of a society, to awake perpetual
interest, to be perpetually and universally charming,
to contribute powerfully to the general aims of her
environment, never to lose her character as woman
in any of the phases or functions of womanly exist-
ence, even in wifehood or maternity—this central,
motive of the Frenchwoman’s existence is cordially.
approved by the Frenchman. In fact it is because’
he approves and insists upon it that she is what she
is. It is for this reason that she devotes so much
attention to dress, which in her thus, spite of those
surface indications that mislead the foreigner, is al-
inost never due to the passion for dress in itself to
which similar preoccupation infallibly testifies in the
women of other societies. A New York belle dresses
for her rivals—when she does not, like the abori-
gines of her species, dress for herself alone. Mr.
Henry James acutely represents the Mrs. Westgate
of his “International Episode” as “sighing to
think the Duchess would never know how well she
was dressed.” To induce analogous regret in a
Frenchwoman a corresponding masculine obtuse-
ness would be absolutely indispensable. And this
ainong her own countrymen she would never en-
212 FRENCH TRAITS

counter. Her dress, then, is a part of her coquetry
—one of the most important weapons in a tolerably
well-stocked arsenal; but it is nothing more, and it
in no degree betokens frivolity. Like her figure
and her carriage it is a continual ocular demonstra-
tion and a strong ally of her instinct, her, genius, for
style. In these three regards she is unapproachable,
and in every other attribute of style she is certainly
unsurpassed. In elegance, in intelligence, in self-
possession, in poise, it would be difficult to find ex-
ceptions in other countries to rival the average
Parisienne. And her coquetry, which endues her
style with the element of charm (of which it is, as I
said, the science), is neither more nor less than the
instinet to please highly developed. It is not, as
certainly coquetry elsewhere may sometimes be
called, the instinct to please deeply perverted. The
French coquette does not flirt. Her frivolity, ler
superficiality, may be great in many directions—in
religion, in moral steadfastness, in renunciation, in
constancy, even in sensibility—but in coquetry she
is never superficial ; the dimly veiled, half-acknowl-
edged insincerity of what is known as flirtation
would seem to her frivolous to a degree unsuspect-

,ed by her American contemporary. To her as to

her countrymen the relations of men and women are
too important and too interesting not to be at bot-
tom entirely serious.

In fine to estimate the Frenchwoman’s moral na-
ture with any approach to adequacy it is necessary
WOMEN 213

entirely to avoid viewing her from an Anglo-Saxon
standpoint. Apart from her milieu she is not to be I
understood ‘at all. The ideals of woman in general
held by this miliew ave wholly different from our
ideals. To see how and wherein let us inquire of
some frank French friend. ‘We shall never agree
about women,” he will be sure to admit at the out-
set ; and he may be imagined to continue very much
in this strain: “We Frenchmen have a repugnance, |}
both instinctive and explicit, to your propensity to
make companionability the essential quality of the
ideal woman. Consciously or unconsciously this is .
precisely what you do. It isin virtue of their being
more companionable, and in an essentially masculine
sense, that the best of your women, the serious ones,
shine superior in your eyes to their frivolous or pe-
dantic rivals. You seem to us, in fact, to approach
far more nearly than your English cousins to the
ideal in this respect of your common Gothic ances-
tors. Your ideal is pretty closely the Alruna wo-
man—an august creature spiritually endowed with
inflexible purity and lofty, respeot-compelling vir-
tues, performing the office of a ‘ guiding-star’ amid
the perplexities of life, whose approval or censure
is important in a thousand moral exigencies, and
one’s feeling for whom is always strongly tinctured
—even in the days of courtship—with something
akin to filial feeling. In your daily life this ideal
becomes, of course, familiarized—you do not need
to be reminded that ‘ familiarized ’ is, indeed, an ex-
214 FRENCH TRAITS

tenuating term to describe the effect upon many of
your ideals when they are brought into the atmos-
phere of your daily life, that the contrast between
American ideals and American practice frequently
strikes us as grotesque. In the atmosphere of your
daily life the Alruna woman becomes a good fellow.
‘She despises girls who flirt, as you yourselves de-
spise our dandies and our petits jeunes gens. She
despises with equal vigor the lackadaisical, the hys-
terical, the affected in any way. She plays a good
game of tennis; it is one of her ambitions to cast a
fly adroitly, to handle an oar well. She is by no
means a Di Vernon. She has a thoroughly mascu-
line antipathy to the romantic, and is embarrassed
in its presence. She reads the journals; she has
opinions, which, unlike her inferior sisters, she
rarely obtrudes. She is tremendously efficient and
never poses. She is saved from masculinity by
great tact, great delicacy in essentials, by her beauty
which is markedly feminine, by her immensely nar-
rower sphere, and by Divine Providence. She is
thus thoroughly companionable, and she is after all
a woman. This makes her immensely attractive to
e you. But nothing could be less seductive to us than
this predominance of companionableness over the
feminine element, the element of sex. Of our
women, ideal and real (which you know in France,
the country of equality, of homogeneity, of averages,
is nearly the same thing) we could better say that
they are thoroughly feminine and that they are,
WOMEN 215

after all, companionable. Indeed, if what I under-
stand by ‘companionable’ be correct, i. ¢., rien que
sentendre, they are quite as much so as their Amer-
ican sisters, though in a very different way, it is
true.

“Let me explain. The strictness of your social
code effectually shuts off the American woman from
interest in, and the American girl from knowledge
of, what is really the essential part of nearly half of
life; I mean from any mental occupation except in
their more superficial aspects with the innumerable
phenomena attending one of the two great instincts
from which modern science has taught us to derive
all the moral perceptions and habits of human life.
This is explainable no doubt by the unwritten but
puissant law which informs every article of your so-
cial constitution that relates to women: namely, the
law that insures the precedence of the young girl
over the married woman. With you, indeed, the
young girl has le haut du pavé in what seems to us
avery terrible degree. Your literature, for exam-
ple, is held by her in a bondage which to us seems
abject, and makes us esteem it superficial. ‘Since
the author of “Tom Jones” no one has been per-
mitted to depict a man as he really is,’ complains
Thackeray. With you it is even worse because the
young girl exercises an even greater tyranny than
in England. Nothing so forcibly illustrates her po-
sition at the head of your society, however—not
even her overwhelming predominance in all your
216 FRENCH TRAITS

social reunions within and without doors, winter
and summer, at luncheons, dinners, lawn-parties,
balls, receptions, lectures, and church—as the cir-
cumstance that you endeavor successfully to keep
her a girl after she has become a woman. You de-
sire and contrive that your wives shall be virgins in
word, thought, and aspiration. That this should
be the case before marriage everyone comprehends.
That is the end of our endeavor equally with yours.
In every civilized society men wish to be themselves
the introducers and instructors of their wives in a
realm of such real and vital interest as that of which
marriage, everywhere but in your country, opens
the door. But with us the young girl-is constantly
looking forward to becoming, and envying the con-
dition of, a woman. That is the source of our re-
strictions, of our conventual regulations, which seem
to you so absurd, even so dishonoring. You are
saved from having such, however, by the fact that
with you the young girl is the rounded and com-
plete ideal, the type of womanhood, and that it is
her condition, spiritually speaking, that the wife
and even the mother emulate. And you desire
ardently that they should. You do not ‘see any
necessity,’ as you say in your utilitarian phraseol-
ogy, of a woman’s ‘losing’ anything of the fresh
and clear charm which perfumes the existence of
the young girl. You have a short way of disposing
of our notion that a woman is the fower and fulfil-
ment of that of which the young girl is the bud and.
WOMEN 217

the promise. You esteem this notion a piece of {
sophistry designed to conceal our really immoral
desire to rob our women of the innocence and na-
iveté which we insist upon in the young girl, in order
that our social life may be more highly spiced.
Your view is wholly different from that of your race
at the epoch of its most considerable achievements
in the ‘criticism of life’ and antecedent to the
Anglo-Saxon invention of prudery as a bulwark of
virtue. It is a view which seems to spring directly
from the Puritan system of each individual man-
aging independently his own spiritual affairs with-
out any of the reciprocal aids and the division of
labor provided for in the more elaborate scheme of
Catholicism, in consequence of which each individ-
‘ual left in this way wholly to himself is forced into
a timid and distrustful attitude toward temptation.
Nothing is more noticeable in your women, thus,
than a certain suspicious and timorous exclusion
from the field of contemplation of anything unsuited
to the attention of the young girl. It is as if. they
feared contamination for virtue if the attitude and)
habit of mind belonging to innocence were once:
abandoned. They probably do fear vaguely thati
you fear it for them, that your feminine ideal ex-
eludes it.

“Now, it is very evident that however admirable
in its results this position may be, and however
sound in itself, it involves an important limitation
of that very companionableness which you so much
218 FRENCH TRAITS

insist on in your women. In this sense, the average
Frenchwoman is an equal, a companion, to a degree
|; almost never witnessed with you. After an hour of
feminine society we do not repair to the club for a
relaxation of mind and spirit, for a respiration of
expansion, and to find in unrestrained freedom an
enjoyment that has the additional sense of being a
relief. Our clubs are in fact mere excuses for
gambling, not refuges for bored husbands and home-
less bachelors. Conversation among men is per-
haps grosser in quality, the équivogue is perhaps
not so delicate, so spirituelle, but they do not differ
in kind from the conversational tissue in mixed
company, as with you they do so widely. With
you this difference in kind ig notoriously an abyss.
In virtue of our invention of treating delicate topics
with innuendo, our mixed society gains immensely
in interest and attractiveness, and our women are
more intimately companionable than yours. You
Americans take easily to innuendo from your habit
of mind, which is sensitive and subtile. You are
unaccountably unlike the English in this respect.
As a rule, one of you who should know French and
understand French character as well as Thackeray,
would not like him be depressed by what he was
pleased to call ‘all that dreary double-entendre.’
Still, when you attempt the application of it to deli-
cate topics, I can myself recall instances of your
leaving, as we say, something to be desired. In
such an instance it is natural that a feeling of ill-
WOMEN 219

success should produce a conviction that the topic
is too delicate to be handled at all; seeing another
person handle it with triumphant gingerliness does
not unsettle such a conviction—the double-entente
becomes irretrievably ‘dreary.’ But, in point of
fact, it is only a contrivance of ours to extend the
range of conversation in mixed company; you can
do without it because you limit any conversation
with a wide range to one sex, to your clubs and
business offices—where, apparently, it is not needed.
It seems to many of you, doubtless, a device for con-
fining the talk in mixed company to what are called
delicate topics. But that side of our talk really ap-
pears maenified to you because of its absolute
novelty. In strictness there is in mixed company
quite as much conversation upon politics, letters,
art, and affairs in Paris as even in Boston. Our
équivoque simply takes the place of your silences.
The point is that from the circumstance that we do
not exclude it, the conversational tissue in mixed
company is with us immensely varied, and that
when a Frenchman finds himself in the presence of
a woman—-in ‘ladies’ society’ as you express it—
whether ¢ deux orin a general gathering, he experi-
ences no more restraint—except that which polishes
his periods and refines his expression—than an
American does at his club or office. His ‘instinct
for expansion’ suffers no repression. Society be-
comes a very different thing from ‘ladies’ society.’
It is not a medium for the exploitation of the young
220) FRENCH TRAITS

girl and the woman who emulates and follows
her haud passibus cequis ; nor is it a realm ‘pre-
sided over’ by ‘the fair sex’; it is an association
of men and women for the interchange of ideas
on all topics, and the texture out of which the
drama of life is woven. In saying that your ideal
of companionableness in woman was defective
this was what I had in mind. Even in compan-
ionableness we find our women much more to our
mind.

“But this is, after all, a detail. Even if your
women were intimately companionable they would
none the less radically differ from our own; we
should still reproach them with a certain masculine
quality in the elevated, and a certain prosaic: note in
the familiar types. By masculine, I certainly do
not here intend the signification you give to your
derisive epithet ‘strong-minded.’ In affirming
that there is a generous ampleness in the feminine
quality of our women unobservable in yours, I do
not mean to charge them with inferiority in what
you call ‘pure mentality ;’ in intelligence and capa-
cities we believe them unequalled the world over.
But they are essentially less masculine in avoiding
strictly all competition with men, in conserving all
their individuality of sex and following their own
bent. Nothing is more common than to hear Amer-
ican women lament their lack of opportunity, envy
the opportunity of men. Nothing is rarer with us.
It never occurs to a Frenchwoman to regret her
WOMEN 221

sex. It is probable that almost every American ,
woman with any pretensions to ‘pure mentality,’
feels, on the contrary, that her sex is a limitation
and wishes, with that varying ardor and intermittent
energy which characterize her, that she were a man
and had a man’s opportunity. In a thousand ways
she is the man’s rival, which with us she never is. |
Hence the popularity with you of the agitation for
woman-suffrage, practically unknown in France.
Your society probably wholly undervalues this
movement, and frowns upon it witha forcible feeble-
ness that is often ludicrously unjust. You do not
perceive that it furnishes almost the only outlet for
the ambition and the energy of such of your women
as are persistently and not spasmodically energetic
and ambitious, and that its worst foe with you is the
great mass of women themselves, which is governed
by timorousness, by intellectual indolence, and by
the habit born of long-continued subordination in
all serious matters. To a disinterested observer
of the complacence with which your society con-
templates ‘Folly set in place exalted,’ in this mat-
ter, it is impossible not to remark the secret sym-
pathy with the movement entertained by serious
women and concealed in deference to the opinion of
the mass whose fiat in all matters related to ‘good
taste’ is necessarily final. They probably fear that
the mass of their countrywomen, spite of the indefi-
nite multiplication of female colleges, will never be-
come really and responsibly intelligent without the
222 FRENCH TRAITS

suffrage ; and in effect with you this must become
the great practical argument for it. Animated as
the most serious of American women unquestionably
are by a sense of rivalry with men, they instinctively
feel this handicap, and instinctively desire for their
sex the dignity and seriousness conferred by power
and the sense of responsibility power involves. But
I wish I could make plain to you how differently
the Frenchwoman feels, how radically different the
Frenchwoman is. Being in no sense, and never
feeling herself to be the rival of man and the emu-
lator of his opportunities, to her seriousness and
dignity the suffrage could add nothing whatever.
Her power and responsibility lie in quite another
direction, and that they do is quite clear to her. It
lias in fact been so clear to her in the past, that we
have hitherto made the mistake of giving her in
general an extremely superficial education. Madame
Dubarry got along very well without any ai all.
This is an error we are just now systematically re-
pairing. And we have our croakers who oppose the
reform, entitle their gloomy vaticinations ‘Plus de
femmes,’ and predict that our women will become
Americanized. They are needlessly alarmed ; for
this Americanization involves the quality of mascu-
linity which does not exist at all, either in the nat-
ure or in the ideal of our women. It is neither
their disposition nor their aspiration to enter that
condition of friendly rivalry with men, to become
members of that ‘mutual protective association,’
WOMEN 223

which plays so large a part in the existence and im-
agination of your more serious women.

“The difference is nowhere so luminously illus-
trated as in the respective attitudes of French and
American women toward the institution of marriage.
With us from the hour when she begins first to think
at all of her future—an epoch which arrives prob- j
ably much earlier than with you—marriage is the
end and aim of a woman’s existence. And itis so\
consciously and deliberately. A large part of her
conduct is influenced by this particular prospect.
It is the conscious and deliberate aim also of her
parents or guardians for her. They constantly re
mind her of it. Failure to attain it is considered b
her and by them as the one great failure, to avoid
which every effort should tend, every aspiration be
directed. In its excess this becomes either ludi-
crous or repulsive as one looks at it. ‘Si tu veux
te marier, ne fais jamais ga ’—‘ Cela t’empéchera de
te marier ’—who has not been fatigued with such
maternal admonitions which resound in interiors by
no means always of the basse classe. But the result
is that marriage occupies a share of the young girl’s
mind and meditation which to your young girls
would undoubtedly seem disproportionate, and in-
deed involve a sense of shame. There is no more
provision in the French social constitution than in
the order of nature itself for the old maid. Her
fate is eternal eccentricity, and is correspondingly
dreaded among us who dread nothing more than ex-
224 FRENCH TRAITS

clusion from the sympathies of society aud a share
in its organized activities. Marriage once attained,
the young girl, though become by it a woman, is
not of course essentially changed but only more
highly organized in her original direction. You
may be surprised to hear that sometimes it suffices
her—as it suffices English, and used to American
women ; though it must be admitted that our society
does not make of even marriage an excuse for ex-
acting the sum of a woman’s activities which it is
the Anglo-Saxon tendency to do, and that thus her
merit is less conspicuous. If marriage do not suf-
fice her, it is not in ‘Sorosis’ or Dorcas or Browning
societies, or art or books that she seeks distraction,
but in the consolation strictly cognate to that of
marriage, which society offers her. Accordingly,
_ whatever goes to make up the distinctively feminine
side of woman’s nature tends with us to become
highly developed. It acquires a refinement, a sub-
tlety, of organization quite unknown to societies
whose ideal women inspire filial feeling. We have
asa rule very few Cornelias. Our mothers them-
selves are far from being Spartan. The Gothie god-
dess is practically unknown in France. ‘Woman's
sphere,’ as you call it, is totally distinct from man's.
-The action and reaction of the two which produce
the occupation, the amusement, the life of society
are far more intimate than with you, but they are
the exact reverse of homogeneous.
“Tt is an inevitable corollary from this that that
WOMEN 225

sentimental side which you seem to us to be en-
deavoring to subordinate in your more serious
women, receives in the Frenchwoman that greatest
of all benefits, a harmonious and natural develop-
ment. Before and after marriage, and however
marriage may turn for her, it is her disposition to
love and her capacity for loving which are stimulated
constantly by her surroundings, and which are really

the measure of the esteem in which she is held. To

love intensely and passionately is her ideal. It is so
much her ideal that if marriage does not enable her
to attain it, it is a virtue rather than a demerit in
her eyes to seek it elsewhere. Not to die before
having attained in its fulness this end of the law of
her being is often the source of the Frenchwoman’s
tragic disasters. But even when indubitable dis-
aster arrives to her if is at least tragic, and a tragedy.
of this kind is in itself glorious. To remain spirit-
ually an ére incomplet is to her nearly as dreadful a
fate as to become a monstrosity. Both are equally
hostile to nature, and we have a national passion for
being in harmony with nature. It is probably im-
possible to make you comprehend how far this is
carried by us. Take the life of George Sand as an
instance. It was incontestably the inspiration of
her works, and to us it is the reverse of reprehensi-
ble, ‘for she loved much ;’ it is not her elopement
with Musset but her desertion of him that indicates
to our mind her weak side. In this way the atti-
tude of the Frenchwoman toward love is one of
15

arent
226 FRENOH TRAITS

perfect frankness. So far from dissembling its na-
ture—either transcendentally or pietistically, after
the fashion of your maidens, or mystically, after
the fashion in the pays de Gretchen—she appreciates
it directly and simply as a passion, and for her the
most potent of the passions, the passion whose praise
has been the burden of all the poets since the morn-
ing stars first sang together, and whose possession
shares equally with the possession of superior in-
telligence the honor of distinguishing man from the
lower animals. This is why to our women, as much
as to our men, your literature, your ‘criticism of
life,’ seems pale, as we say—pale and superficial.
This is why we had such an engouement for your
Byron and never heard of your Wordsworth. This
is why we occupy ourselves so much with cognate
subjects as you will have remarked.

«And the sentimental side, being thus naturally
and harmoniously developed, becomes thus natur-
ally and spontaneously the instrument of woman’s
power and the source of her dignity. Through it
she seeks her triumphs and attains her ends, To
it is due not her influence over men—as with your
inveterate habit of either divorcing the sexes into
a friendly rivalry or associating them upon the old-
fashioned, English, harem-like basis, you would in-
evitably express it—but her influence upon society.
This results in a great gain to women themselves—
increases indefinitely their dignity and power. It
is axiomatic that anything inevitable and not in it-
WOMEN 227

self an evil it is far better to utilize than to resist.
Everyone acknowledges the eminence of the senti-
mental side in woman’s nature, the great part which
it plays in her conduct, the great influence it has
upon her motives. And since it has, therefore, in-
evitably to be reckoned with, its development ac-
complishes for women results which could not be
hoped for if sentiment were merely treated as an
inevitable handicap to be modified and mitigated.
Your own logic seems to us exceedingly singular.
You argue that men’ and women should be equal,
that the present regrettable inequality with you is
due to the greater influence of sentiment on wo-
men’s minds in viewing purely intellectual matters
(you are constantly throwing this up to your wo-
man suffragists), and that therefore the way in which
women are to be improved and elevated (as you cu-
riously express it) is clearly by the repression of
their sentiment. It is the old story: you are con-
stantly teaching your women to envy the opportu-
nities of men, to regret their ‘inferiority’ hitherto,
and to endeavor to emulate masculine virtues by
mastering their emotions and suppressing their
sentiment ; that is to say, you are constantly doing
this by indirection and unconsciously, at least, and
by betraying the fact that such is your ideal for
them. You never seem to think they canbe treated
as a fundamentally different order of capacity and
disposition. I remember listening for two hours to
one of your cleverest women lecturing on Joan of
228 FRENCH TRAITS

Arc, and the thesis of her lecture was that there
was no mystery at all about the Maid and her ac-
complishments, except the eternal mystery of tran-
scendent military genius, that she was in fact a fe-
male Napoleon and that it was the ‘ accident of sex’
simply that had prevented her from being so es-
teemed by the purblind masculine prejudice which
had theretofore dominated people’s minds. Think-
ing of what Jeanne d’Are stands for to us French-
men, of her place in our imaginations, of the way in
which she illustrates for us the puisssance of the
essentially feminine element in humanity, I said to
myself ‘No, the Americans and we will never agree
about women.’ ”

The Frenchman is apt to become eloquent in al-
lusions to Joan of Are, and French eloquence, like
any other, is sometimes misleading. One may be
permitted to object to our French friend’s implica-
tion here, that the resemblance between Joan of Are
however conceived and the average Parisienne is at
least not a superficial one. At the same time, mak-
ing every allowance for the difference between things
‘as they really are” and as they seem to the per-
sons irreparably committed to support of them, it

(is undoubtedly true that if not love at least interest
, in the other sex plays a considerably larger part in
. the life of the French than in that of the American
woman. It is certain that she never, as so frequently
happens with us, considers herself independently,
WOMEN 229

that she has no occupations or projects from which
men are excluded, that she never contemplates a
single life, for example, except as a fate hardly to be
borne with philosophy and likely to prove too
much for her sagesse. Society makes no provision
for the vieille fille, in the first place ; in the second,
society occupies almost the whole of life, absorbs
almost every effort—two enormous differences from
ourselves. The attractiveness of the spinster with
us and the position she occupies in our society are
well-known. Of how many “homes” is she not the
delight, of how many “ firesides” is she not the de-
corously decorative adornment! She may or may
not have had her romance ; she may, that is to say,
have courted or have drifted into her position of
dignified singleness ; it is in either case equally sure
that she has not considered her estate so “‘incom-
plete ” in itself, or so disengaged from the structure
of society, as to furnish in itself reason and motive
of exchange for another distinguished quite as much
by another kind of duties as by another order of
opportunities, And not only is the Frenchwoman
prevented from taking such a view’ as this by the
society which surrounds her and of which it is a
prime necessity of her nature that she should form
an integral part, but she is constitutionally incapable
of contentedly fulfilling such a destiny. All her
instincts of expansion—and she possesses these in
greater intensity than we are apt to fancy is natural
to women—are hostile to it. The genius for renun-
230 FRENCH TRAITS

ciatioh so Conspicuous in many of our New England
women is, in her composition, quite lacking. Such
concentration as she possesses is, to speak paradox-
ically, expended: upon the exploitation of her expan-
siveness. If by chance she becomes vieille fille she
has a clear sense of failure. This certainly happens,
comparatively rare as it seems to us. And the
French spinster is apt to be an enjoyable person—
as. for that matter who in France is not? But it
cannot have failed to strike any Anglo-Saxon ob-
server that she is a wholly different kind of a person
from her Anglo-Saxon analogue. Almost invariably
she is either dévote or gauloise. Most people’s ex-
perience probably is that she is generally gauloise,
and one may. even be permitted to note that in that
event she is apt to be exaggeratedly gauloise. Pru-
dishness is hardly ever exhibited by her except in
conjunction with religious devotion. The dévotes
apart, almost every vieille fille after a certain age is
reached—the age when marriage is no longer to
be contemplated—feeling the formal eccentrigity of
her position in society, makes a distinct break with
her réle of jeune jille, and tacitly suffers her already
cynically disposed milieu to infer that she does not
really merit the ridicule she would inevitably re-
ceive upon the supposition of her total unfamiliar-
ity, even by reputation, with the fruit of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil.

Single women, however, are, after all, exceptions
in France, and it is only the great contrast which
WOMEN 231

France presents in this respect to those portions of
America which are socially most highly developed
that makes a consideration of the character and po-
sition of the vietlle fille interesting or significant.
Its significance really consists in what it suggests
and implies as to the fundamental differences which
separate French and Anglo-Saxon societies. Mar-
ried women, of course, constitute the great bulk of
the feminine portion of French society. But when
it is remembered that the interest in the other sex
just referred to is as characteristic of them as of
their unmarried sisters, it will be immediately per-
ceived that French society contrasts positively as
well as negatively with our own. With us, it is
well known, feminine interest in the other sex
ceases at marriage. It is frequently active enough
before that event, but its cessation with the wedding
ceremony is nearly universal. To many men this
change comes with a suddenness that is appalling.
Each season witnesses shoals of our society beaux
left stranded by it. They seem never to be able to
prepare for it in advance, inevitable as they must
‘know it to be; to them the disappearance from the
social circle (the arena, it might be called) of a
young girl who seems to have made her selection
and thenceforward to forget that there was ever
any competition, comes always with the force of a
shock. Furthermore with us feminine interest in
men ceases at marriage as absolutely, with as com-
plete remorselessness, when the marriage is of the
232 FRENCH TRAITS

former beau as when it is of the former belle. To
this our young men will probably never be able to
habituate themselves with philosophy. However it
may be with American women, American men are
very much like other men, like Frenchmen even in
some respects, and the average ‘society man’s”
sense of sudden loss, of a support withdrawn, an
activity paralyzed, immediately consequent upon his
marriage must be of a nature calculated to effect,
in the long run, substantial changes in the existing
social constitution. To many young men with us
marriage involves not perhaps a loss of caste, but
indubitably a loss of that constant consideration,
direct and indirect, which makes the possession of
caste desirable ; and this circumstance is perhaps
the most serious menace by which the view of so-
ciety as a device for bringing marriageable young
people together is at present threatened. Our
young men have nothing approaching the genius
for renunciation of our young women, and though
they may long tolerate the retirement at marriage
of women from society—being largely reconciled
thereto by the thought of thus attaining superior
domesticity in their own wives—to continue to sub-
mit throughout the course of our social evolution
‘to instant personal effacement at marriage, to drop
at once in universal feminine consideration from
the position of Adonis to that of Vulcan, would un-
doubtedly be too much to expect of them.

In neither of these ways, it need hardly be said,
WOMEN 233

does marriage affect French society. Marriage is, |
on the contrary, the cardinal condition of society in
France. It might almost be called the young girl’s
“coming-out party.” It is, if anything, to a woman’s
sense an added attraction in a man; he is rangé cer-
tainly, but certainly none the less a man, association
with whom is, ceteris paribus, as much more agree-
able than association with a woman as the elective
affinity of nature has contrived it. Women’s gen
eral interest in men, that is to say, is so far a
being repressed or even restricted by marriage that
it is quickened by it, and thus society in general re-:
ceives the stimulus of a powerful force which with
us is well known to be almost altogether lacking.
The entire French conception of marriage differs so
fundamentally from our own that it is really difficult
for us to appreciate it. Probably most Americans
who have been attracted toward the French have,
at some period of their study of French manners,
said to themselves: ‘There must be some error in
our understanding of French marriages. According
to all accounts they are invariably and exclusively
de convenance. They must therefore be loveless
marriages. No healthful social life such as must
exist in France can be based upon strict conformity
to such a system. It must be, therefore, that the
accounts exaggerate. In this detail, as in others,
we must have been misled by English prejudices.”
But the fact is literally as it is understood to be.
Exceptions to the rule of mariages de convenance are

 

 
234 FRENCH TRAITS

so rare as really not to count at all. To campre-
hend, however, that this does not inevitably lead to
social stoppage and disaster, it is necessary to per:
ceive that the same thing which might result very
badly for us does not necessarily result badly for
people who are so very different from us as the
French are. And this is an extremely difficult mat-
ter; it is always difficult to realize that maxims
which we have conquered for ourselves have not a
universal validity. The conception of mariage de
convenance by no means excludes the idea of love.
Neither does the practice. No young girl in France
looks forward to not loving her husband. She sim-
ply expects to learn to love him after marriage as
our young girls are expected to do before as well.
As a matter of fact, in the vast majority of cases this
expectation is justified. Parents and society see to
it that it shall be justifiable, and the result—always
of course a lottery—is made dependent on old heads
instead of on young hearts. To our criticism of the
working of their system, the French retort in kind
with unconvinced obstinacy, They assert that cer-
tain lamentable and undeniable phenomena are di-
rect results of our system and observe, truly enough,
that from these at least theirs is free. To our re-
joinder that this may be so, but that their concep-
tion of marriage, however salutary, is terribly unro-
mantic, their answer would undoubtedly be that we
are altogether too romantic. And this is really our
difference from the French in this matter—that we
WOMEN 235

conceiye marriage sentimentally, namely, and they |
as an affair of reason ; and from reason to conve-
nance is always an incredibly short step in France.
Individualism is a force so nearly unknown in
France, collective and corporate authority is such a
constant and intimate one, the entire social struc-
ture is so elaborately organized for the genergl
rather than the particular good, that to leave even
particular a matter as marriage wholly to the whit
of the persons directly interested would be forei
to the national proclivities. No sentiment is too s
cred, no feeling too intimate, to be thus centrally ad
ministered, as it were, by society. If they are sacred
and intimate enough and for any reason—often for a
reason which might to us appear frivolous—intensely
enough recalcitrant to the code, their violation of it
‘will be tolerated and even applauded. But the no-
tion that the code should not deal with the subject at
all would be esteemed as absurd as we should esteem
it to disparage marriage though permitting divorce.
The French marriage being thus distinctly not
the affair of sentiment which it is with us, the ideal
formed for a woman’s deportment within its bonds
differs proportionally from that to which we hold
our married women. Of the strictness of the latter
one hardly needs to be reminded. The husband
himself insists upon it with virtuous sufficiency.
The wife herself admires this attitude in him. He
becomes in a way her spiritual director, and she in
some sense his penitent. Following his idea of
236 FRENCIL TRAITS

making a companion of her, he arranges her read-
ing, counsels the disposition of her leisure, modifies
the list of her acquaintance, in proportion as he at-
taches value to these things. If her family have
been of a different political or religious faith from
his own, he devotes no small labor to the subtle un-
dermining of her prejudices. She is his wife, pre-
siding over his household, entertaining Ais friends.
She sees the world through his spectacles—such of
it as he permits. Her amusements are such as he
approves, her study such as he directs. Her destiny
and glory are to be the mother of his children, the
ornament of his fireside, his help-meet. This at
least the Teutonism underlying our American chiv-
‘alry makes our ideal in many instances, and in
these instances it is realized by our women with a
-grace and dignity which ought, perhaps, to do more’
than they do to keep our men up to the mark of
realizing its counterpart. There are with us of
course very few average men who do not expect
their wives to take them at their own valuation—
very few average women who do not thus take their
husbands, at least until they become grandmothers.
Indeed the mental acuteness and moral independ-
ence of our women are in many cases pitched toa
considerably lower key than even this ; they are ex-
pected to and do take their husbands not merely at
the self-valuation of these latter, but at the valua-
tion fixed by marital diplomacy as well as by mari-
tal conceit. There is indeed to some extent with us
WOMEN 237

an unconfessed but perfectly recognized freema-
sonry of husbands, having for its object the pres-
ervation in the fairer sex of illusions as to the
sterner. Treachery to this is extremely uncommon,
and is regarded as almost base, by the occasional
traitor himself. It is painful to the American hus-
band to witness the absence of similar illusions in
the Frenchwoman. ‘The discovery of her opinion of
the opposite sex and her complacent acquiescence
therein comes to him with a certain shock ; it is
some time before he recovers from it and again per-
mits himself to be attracted by what to him seems
the uncomfortable paradox of blasée femininity. It.
is important to distinguish, however, that the ab-
sence of illusions in the Frenchwoman as to mascu-
line qualities by no means implies, as a similar ab-
sence might be taken to imply with us, a more or less
brutal disillusionizing process as having taken place
and left its scar and stain upon feminine freshness.
The Frenchwoman is simply almost never naive, in
great things any more than in small. The French
ideal excludes naiveté, and from a French point of
view she is never more femme than when she is least
naive ; to be naif is the next thing to being insig-
nificant, and to be insignificant is ignominy. i
One effect of this attitude is to make the French-
woman much. more serious in an intellectual sense
than is possible to women whose cherishing of illu-
sions is systematic. They are far more nearly at
the centre of the situation ; their comprehension of
238 FRENCH TRAITS

motives is far wider, their acquaintance with socio-
logical data and causes far more intimate. They
are far less dependent upon their emotions in the
exercise of their judgment ; and thus a perfect ac-
quaintance with the facts and their bearings in any
given case, and with the great mass of material to
which secondarily and indirectly any given case is
to be referred, and by which in large measure it is
to be judged, relieves them of this one great re-
proach which among us is constantly addressed to
women who make any attempt to discuss serious top-
ics. They are in no wise driven to the makeshift of
making up by the intensity of emotion for imperfect
comprehension. In fine, whereas we seek the artifi-

. ¢ial stimulus for certain virtues in what may be fan-
. eifully called a “protective policy” as applied to

women, the French are believers in social free trade,
with individual competition and survival of the soci-
ally fittest the only winnowing principle recognized.

And the characteristic effect of each theory is by
no means confined to women alone, or to women and
what passes for society in general. It is very mark-
ed upon the men considered apart—as with us they
have to be considered in so many relations. It is of
course impossible to make of an entire sex a class
by itself which, unconsidered in any but the domes-
tie and decorative functions of life, shall have no in-
fluence upon the habits of thought and the courses
of conduct of the other sex in even those matters
with which the latter exclusively charges itself. In
WOMEN 239

a general and vague way we are so far from denying
this that we make a merit of sustaining the con-
trary. It is indeed because we value so much what
is called ‘‘the purifying influence of woman ” that
we like to keep her so far removed from the dust
and stain of street or forum discussion. But now
and then this remoteness not only acts upon them-
selves in the way just indicated—throws them back
upon pure feeling in matters of pure judgment, that
is to say; it gives a decided twist, a divergence of
marked eccentricity to the movement of exclusively
masculine thought and discussion. Men who are
very much with women and very little in the world
betray this influence upon their philosophy quite as
much, often, as they illustrate in their conduct the
general “ purifying influence.” Instances are within
the recalling of every reflecting observer. They il-
lustrate a state of mind and temper analogous to
that of the dweller in the country, as compared
with the metropolitan, or if one chooses, the “cock-
ney” temper and mind ; or that of the Middle Ages
philosopher compared with the modern sociologist.
D’Alembert, says Mr. John Morley, adopted jnstead
of the old monastic vow of poverty, chastity, obedi-
ence, “ the manlier substitute of poverty, truth, lib-
erty.” The substitute may be more manly; un-
doubtedly the modern world, breaking more and
more completely with Middle Age ideals, tends more
and more so to believe. But it is certainly not more
womanly, as we understand the term, and in our so-
240 FRENCH TRAITS

ciety, owing to the influence aforesaid, many men
feel that there is something radically defective in
any social philosophy to which women—and women
as we make them—do not subscribe.

Very slight analogy of this influence is to be en-
countered in France. And the reason, many per-
sons will say, is because women as such have no in-
fluence in France, because France is socially organ-
ized entirely with a view to the interest and pleasure
of men. One hears that constantly from Americans
in Paris. Women are not admitted to the orchestra
chairs of some of the theatres. In omnibuses and
tramways place aux dames is a satirical phrase de-
noting a civility far from the heart of the ordinary
French male. The cabs charge upon both sexes
alike. The divorce law, so long withheld in the in-
terest of men, with its proposition odiously unjust
to women so nearly adopted, the arguments on
either side during the debate were excellent illus-
trations of the general feeling. The vice most in-
imical to women is licensed and regulated for the
benefit of men. Women’s fate in the highest as
well ag in the lowest social circle is to be pursued
by man—pursued, too, brutally and prosaically. In
marriage it is the men who are mercenary. What
American in France, I say, has not heard a great
deal of this from his travelling countrywomen?
The Frenchman’s answer to it all is that it is super-
ficial and unintelligent, and he attributes such criti-
cism to what he deems our habit of separating the
WOMEN 241

sexes in thought and in fact, which in its turn he
thinks attributable to our not having fully emerged
from the pioneer stage of civilization wherein men
and women have markedly distinct functions to per-
form and demand markedly distinct treatment and
consideration. In an old society such careful and
conscious distinctions are not needed; like the
marching of regulars the adjustment takes. care of
itself. At all events what we refer to as women’s in-
fluence upon man is in such a society less formal,
less immediately recognizable. Co-operation be-
tween the sexes is so complete in France that their
reciprocal influences are, so far as they are obviously
traceable, mere matters of detail. The position of
woman in France at the present time is certainly
one of the results of modern civilization working
upon, socially speaking, the most highly developed
people of a race which “invented the muses and
chivalry and the Madonna ”—and of that race the
people which has produced by far the greatest num-
ber of eminent women. And if it seem to us and
especially to our travelling countrywomen an un-
worthy position, and inferior to that which women
hold with us, the reason is not to be sought in the
absence of a marked and rigid distinction between
the sexes, in which we ourselves would have to yield
the palm to the Semitic and polygamous peoples,
who have carried the idea to a perfection of logical
development undreamed of by us.

However, the real answer to this is that French-

16
242 FRENCH TRAITS

women themselves are perfectly satisfied with this
position. They do not find it humiliating, as it is
hardly likely they would fail to do, being tolerably
susceptible, if there were not some error about its
being really humiliating. Their influence upon men
is perhaps not the less real for being less marked. If
it is not what we mean by “purifying ” it is assuredly
refining. It is as hostile to grossness as women’s in-
fluence with us isto immorality. Indeed itis to this
influence that is to be distinctly ascribed the los-
ing by vice of half its evil, to recall Burke’s phrase.
“ His wife, I find, is acquainted with the whole affair.
This is the woman’s country !” exclaims Gouverneur
Morris in his Paris diary in 1789; and it is only a
Frenchman, I fancy, .who would agree with M. Jules
Lemattre, who said the other day that if he could be
just what he chose he would be first of all a beauti-
, ful woman. The conditions of the active operation
‘ of feminine influence in France are nearly the oppo-
site of those with us. They consist in the co-opera-
| tion between the sexes before alluded to, in the pos-
session of the same social philosophy by men and
women, the same opportunities, the same knowledge
of natives and data, of facts and general principles.
Just as with us these conditions consist in a separa-
tion and exaltation of woman’s sphere far above con-
tact with the rude strife of natural passions and
, complex interests, the intricate and absorbing con-
| flict of business, politics, amusement, and ennut of
( which the real drama of human life is composed.
VII
THE ART INSTINCT.
THE ART INSTINCT

“Tw art,” exclaims a French critic, M. Jacques de
Biez, ‘‘we care more for the true than even for the
beautiful "—ce qu'il nous faut, c'est le vrai dans Uart
plus encore que le beau. Nothing could be more just.
It is precisely for this reason that sentimental and
poetical peoples have hitherto wholly surpassed the
French in art, where the beautiful is of even more
importance than the true; Italy in plastic art, for
example, the Germans in music, the English in po-
etry. In vain does Victor Hugo, running down the
list of great: poets, associate Voltaire with Dante and
Shakespeare; in vain does every French writer on
art, having occasion, in any general way, to mention
Raphael, habitually add the name of Poussin : none
but Frenchmen are deceived. Corneille, Racine,
Jouvenet, Le Sueur, Lebrun, Watteau, Puget, Jean
Goujon, Mignard, Houdon are glorious names, but
they are not to be imposed as names of the first class,
ranking with Velasquez, with Rembrandt, with Mil-
ton, Donatello, Leonardo, Goethe, when it is “the art
of art” that is in question. What foreigner has not
been struck by the struggle which the French can-
vases in the Salon carré of the Louvre make to justify
246 FRENCH TRAITS

their places in the serene and lofty company of the
great Flemish, Dutch, Venetian masterpieces? One
looks at Jouvenet’s fine “ Descent from the Cross,”
and thinks of Rubens’s at Antwerp, of Daniele da
Volterra’s at Rome, of Sodoma’s at Sienna, of Rem-
brandt’s at Munich. A glance from Le Sueur’s soft
‘Saint Scholastica” to the gorgeous Rubens above
it, from Poussin’s portrait of himself to Rembrandt’s
“Saskia,” from Rigaud’s “Bossuet” to Holbein’s
“Erasmus,” from Gaspar Poussin’s rural idyl to
Giorgione’s, brings one into a wholly different es-
thetic atmosphere ; justas turning from “ Hernani,”
or “Le roi s’amuse,” to Wordsworth or Keats, or
from “Fra Diavolo ” to “ Oberon,” does in other de-
partments of fine art. It is the change from the at-
mosphere of the intelligence to that of poetry, from
an atmosphere in which the true is insisted on to

_ the region where the sense of discovery, the imagi-

nation, genius with its unexpectedness and its aspi-

' rations, are overmasteringly occupied with beauty.

Metaphysical critics will deny the distinction, per-’
haps, and remind us of Plato’s definition’of beauty
as merely “the splendor of truth,” but plain-think-
ing minds will readily perceive the practical differ-
ence arising between the art of a nation which de-
votes itself to the splendor, and that of one concerned

chiefly about the constitution, of truth. When the

latter attitude of mind, indeed, becomes excessive,
as it has become in France, the very intelligence
which is the object of such direct and concentrated
THE ART INSTINCT 247

cultivation suffers obscuration, and the faculty itself
of appreciation loses the keenness of its edge. Thus
Stendhal, who passed his life among the master-
pieces of Italian art, and who had a passion for the
beautiful which made him the bitterest of the critics
of pure rhetoric—Stendhal is perpetually finding
the sum of all pictorial qualities in Guido. And
Fromentin, an esprit délicat, if ever there was one,
discovers with every mark of surprise, and proclaims
with every sign of conscious temerity, that Rem-
brandt was an idealist in disguise. Why in dis-
guise? asks every reader but the Frenchman, the
devotee of order and measure, who finds it astonish-
ing that poetry should be extracted from ordinarily
prosaic material. Down to Delacroix, French paint-
ing is mainly a continuation of the Bolognese school,

It is precisely for the same reason that the French
art of the present day, while it interests everyone
extremely, moves and touches so little anyone but
the French themselves. It is true that French
painting and sculpture stand at the head of contem-
porary plastic art. It is true that such sculptors as
M. Rodin and M. Dalou recall the best days of the
Italian Renaissance ; and that from Delacroix to
Degas is a line of painters whose works are as sure
of the admiration of posterity as of their present
fame. And nowhere else is there anything in con-
temporary art to be seriously compared with the
productions of these men. There is a fine landscape
school at The Hague. Mr. Alma Tadema is an ex-
248 FRENCH TRAITS

tremely clever painter, and Mr. Poynter and Mr.
Burne-Jones are men indisputably provided with
what the French call a “temperament.” There are
Mr. Whistler and Mr. La Farge, who are unclassifia-
ble, and so entirely individual that to argue from
them to their respective milieus would be unwarrant-
able. There are Signor Nono in Venice, and Signor
Segantini in Milan, truly poetic artists as well as
thoroughly equipped painters, who are sure one day
of a fame of wider than Italian extent. But putting
all these together (and adding even, if any reader
chooses, the painting professors of Germany), it is
evident that they make but an insignificant showing
beside the names first mentioned and those with
which these are associated—Carpeaux, Rude, Barye,
Corot, Courbet, Rousseau, Troyon, and Millet.
These men, however, are wholly exceptional, not
only in the possession of conspicuous genius, but in
the quality of their genius. It cannot be said that
this is not French—it is certainly nothing else ; but
it is the kind of genius that is the rare exception
in France, and that makes its way there, not amid
the favoring and forwarding influences of popular
sympathy, but against the current of opinion and
the whole drift of feeling. Make their way, too,
these men have all done. The Institute might frown
on Barye, and the Salon juries reject Millet; but it
is idle to argue from this hostility, as ignorance so
frequently does, that France has often failed to ap-
preciate her most admirable artists, her most poetic
THE ART INSTINCT 249

and truly exalted talent. Invariably they “ arrive,”
as the phrase is; and they arrive first in Paris,
where they have indeed, from the first, never failed
of supporters. M. Rodin’s most pronounced and
most uncompromising work is now in the Luxem-
bourg ; we may one day expect to see a work by
Manet in the Louvre. The French mind is elastic,
and French public opinion tolerant to a degree
which shames the prejudice of other peoples.

All these considerations, however, do not at all
obscure the fact that it is not M. Puvis de Cha-
vannes that Paris really admires, but—let us not
say M. Bouguereau, for that would be unfair, or M.
Cabanel, or even M. Géréme, though each of these
painters is honored in his own country in a way
which it is difficult for a foreigner to understand.
Let us say M. Meissonier. M. Meissonier presides
without a rival in French estimation generally; his
qualities are precisely those which appeal to French
admiration —sanity, flawless workmanship, thorough-
ly adequate expression of a wholly clear and digni-
fied pictorial motive. Or, if his defective sense for
what is poetic be pointed out, the Parisian will in
turn point to M. Henner, with whose art he has in
general less sympathy, but whose poetic sense he
feels must be striking enough for anyone’s taste.
And it is undeniable that the Salon, or even the
greater part of the Luxembourg, seems, to the sen-
sitive foreigner the zsthetic side of whose nature
is developed in any considerable degree, particu-
250 FRENCH TRAITS

larly lacking in those elements which place the
plastic arts in the same category with music and
poetry. The trail of the conventional is apparent
on every hand. Original inspiration, of whatever
character, is infrequent. The faculties are, in the
vast majority of instances, mainly occupied and oc-
casionally exhausted in technical expression. With
the idea, the sentiment, the theme, the artist does
not concern himself in anything like the same de-
gree. As to this, he selects rather than invents,
and his material is inexhaustible. France is the
only country which has kept alive the Renaissance
tradition, and consequently education in France
means familiarity with a far greater number of ar-
tistic generalizations, of precedents, and authorities,
than exist elsewhere. Speaking loosely, it may be
said that, of every problem which the French artist
attacks, he knows in advance various authoritative
and accepted solutions. Inrresistibly he is impelled
to take advantage of these. He could not, if he
would, go over the whole ground for himself as if
it were virgin soil. Inevitably his zest for discovery
‘is less vivacious, and the edge of his impulse dulled.
_ He counts the less personally for his acquisitions ;
his equipment saps his original force ; he cares less
about subject and more about treatment. Incom-
petence is what he most dreads in the general com-
petition. To avoid appearing ridiculous is as much
an anxiety of the artist as of any other Frenchman.
He holds himself, therefore, well in hand, and pro-
THE ART INSTINCT 251

ceeds systematically. He surrenders himself to no
afflatus but that of science. In every department
of artistic effort, then, where training is salutary
and education possible—that is to say, not merely
in method but in general attitude—the French art-
ist excels. Freak, fantasticality, emotional exube-
rance are nearly unknown. Les incohérents are
mainly practical jokers, and the rest gain no accept-
ance. In this way, as the epoch changes in taste,
seriousness, ideas, objects of interests, Lebrun,
Boucher, David, M. Meissonier, are successively de-
veloped. And to-day the French appreciation of
M. Meissonier—the French feeling that he is the
fine flower of what in France is most confidently
believed in—has become in fact a cult. It would
scarcely be fanciful to find something religious in
the intelligent idolatry of the daily crowd at M.
Meissonier’s exhibition of his works a few years
ago. The Galerie Petit was a temple. M. Meis-
sonier himself conceives his mission in eminently
hierarchical fashion.

In fine, the lack of personal quality born of the;

social instinct, and illustrated in French manners, |
shows itself in French art as well, and has done so ;

from the time of Francis I., when classism was born
in full panoply instead of, like its Italian foster-
mother, attaining classic stature through natural
stages of growth. The arts of comedy and conver-
sation aside, in which personality is almost obliter-
ated and the social, appreciative, and purely intel-
252 FRENCH .TRAITS

lectual faculties are most actively engaged, French
{art does not in general contain enough personal
‘flavor to escape conventionality. To thus escape it
depends on its geniuses, its wholly exceptional
names. Certainly strenuous personality is sure to
perger —to come to the surface—and its ability to
issue from the mass to which culture gives a con-
ventional uniformity is excellent test and witness
of its quality. A triumph over the Institute affirms
an artist’s force and fortifies his vitality as nothing:
else can. And it is equally true that where art is
classic and its following popular, more individuals
practise it, and the chances of thus developing an
exceptional personality are proportionally increased.
But these considerations, however obvious, are more
or less speculative, and the fact remains that not
only the mass of French art, but the portion of it
which is at once most characteristic and most cor-
dially appreciated by the French public, is alto-
gether too impersonal to be poetic.

Personality, I take it, is of the essence of poetry.
| Wherever the note of culture predominates and the
individual is subordinated, poetry suffers. The per-
sonality may be illusory, and ‘“ barbaric yawps” as
| unaccompanied by poetry as by culture. But there

is no poetry without sentiment and feeling, and sen-
‘timent and feeling mean individuality accentuated
in proportion to their intensity. The intellect is in
jcomparison impersonality itself. ‘Less personal, less
‘concentrated, and less sentimental than any other
THE ART INSTINCT 258

people’s, French expression in every department of i
art is less poetic also. Wordsworth’s objection to
Goethe's poetry, that it was not “inevitable enough”
is applicable to all French art. ‘‘ Possession ” im-
plies not less, but more personality, since it means
an intensification of the sentimental, incommuni-
cable, individual side of the poet’s nature, and its
proportionate emancipation from control by the
definite and rational standards which mankind en-
joy in common. “Superiority of intellect,” Carlyle
notes as Shakespeare's distinguishing characteris-
tic, but his Protean personality is rather what sep-
arates Shakespeare from other giants of intellect,
and this indeed is what we really mean by calling
his art “objective.” Just asin the instance of the
“ objective ” Goethe, the “Gedichte” and “Faust”
are called immortal works by Goethe’s most incis-
ive critic, who says that here only is Goethe “truly
original and thoroughly superior,” because “they
issue from a personal feeling and the spirit of sys-
tem has not petrified them.” Perfectly ea

jontia —ee
ene a

art is infallibly marked by convention, and conven-

tion is the implacable foe of poetry everywhere. It |
is, on the other hand, a friend and ally of prose, of

what is communicable and rational.

Frenchmen resent being told that their genius for \-
prose is a possession which involves an inepact
for poetry, an insensitiveness to what is intimately '
poetic. But they must pay in this way for their
highly-developed social and rational side. “As
——

254 FRENCH TRAITS’

civilization advances poetry almost necessarily de=
clines,” says Macaulay ; which is perhaps too gen-
eral a statement, considering the coincidence of civ-
ilization and poetry of the very highest order at one
moment, at least, in the race’s history. But M.
Scherer is undoubtedly right, speaking for France
alone, in doubting whether “our modern society
will continue to have a poetry at all.” M. Francis-
que Sarcey, who is in general good nature itself, be-
comes almost irritated at an English judgment of
Victor Hugo maintaining that Hugo is a great ro-
mancer rather than a true poet. Yet in his charm-
ing “Souvenirs de Jeunesse,” having to confess that
he has made verses, he exclaims: ‘‘ Where is the
man who can flatter himself that he knows the lan-
guage of prose, if he has not assiduously practised
that of poetry?” And he adds, “One learns the
happy choice of words, the number of the phrase,
and the grace of felicitous expression only in forg-
ing his style on the hard anvil of the Alexandrine.”
La pénible enclume de Valerandrin! Fancy an Eng-
lish or American writer of M. Sarcey’s eminence
speaking in that way of what a French critic calls
“the majestic English iambic.” “On n'est trahi
que par les siens,” according to the French pro-
verb. This statement of M. Sarcey’s hits the nail
exactly on the head. Poetry is in France an exer-
tise, not an expression. Itis to real French expres-
sion, to prose, what gymnastics and hygiene are to
health. And not only is this true of the verses of
THE ART INSTINCT 955

the littérateur forging his prose on the anvil of the
ten-syllable couplet, the littérateur of whom M.
Sarcey may be taken as the type, but of the poets
themselves it is true that poetry is conceived and:
handled by them as something external rather thant
native, something whose qualities they are felici-
tously to illustrate rather than to employ sympathet-
ically and spontaneously for illustration of the idea
or emotion seeking expression. Conceived in this
way, it is easy to see how the form became tyran-
nical, how the despotism of the Alexandrine arose.
And we may certainly say that conceived in this Way
it never would have been but for the national genius
for highly-developed regularity and symmetry of
form, for clearness, compactness, measure, and bal-
ance, for forging its fine prose, in a word, on the
anvil of the Alexandrine.

But for form the French have an unrivalled sense ,
—a sense which unites them closely to the antique {
and to the Italian Renaissance. If they have not the
highest substance, they have the severest expression
of any modern people ; if they are the least red
they are certainly the most artistic. I know that
‘nowadays the latter epithet is frequently used in
a rigidly esoteric sense. But such terms- havea
literary as well as a professional and pedantie value,
and no one will fail to seize the distinction here
hinted at, however he may himself identify artistic.
with poetic. The one means keeping one’s self.
well in hand, and the other abandon and exal-;
256 FRENCH TRAITS

i tation ; one is constructive, the other inventive ; one
{manipulates, the other discovers. In this sense,.
then, “artistic” may be used to describe the French-
man’s: universal attitude. He is disinclined to ac-
cept nature in any of her phases or aspects. His
passion is to arrange, to modify, to combine. He
isineradicably synthetic. His gardens, parks, farms,
the entire surface of France, in fact, are landscape
compositions. At Hampton Court you are in the
presence of the natural forces; at Versailles or St.
Cloud, of artistic ones. That alliance with nature.
through the inspiration of sentiment, which gives
such repose and delight to every other nationality,
the- Frenchman takes no satisfaction in. It does
not call for that active exercise. of his intellectual
faculties which is necessary to his enjoyment. And
it seems to him rudimentary and formless. He is
as intensely human as he is impersonal, and nature
outside of man and unmoulded by man’s influence
interests him only scientifically. She is emphatic-
ally not something to be enjoyed in itself, but ar-
tistic material rather, lying more or less ready to
the artist’s hand, but demanding co-ordination and
organizing before becoming truly worthy of contem-
plation. The hap-hazard, the fortuitous, what we °
call the picturesque, either jar on the French sense
or strike it as insufficient and elementary. Naples,
Andalusia, London are picturesque. They are form-
less, full of the unexpected, full of color, physical
and moral. They are in these respects in complete
ee
THE ART INSTINCT 257

contrast to Paris and the provinces, where every

aspect is ordered and the coup-d’wil on every hand

artistically organic. Here nothing is left to itself
in any department of possible human activity.
“The trouble with the French,” said an Italian fel-

low-traveller to me once, “is that they can leave

nothing alone. They charge you more for potatoes

au naturel than for potatoes served in any other

way.”

French art is thus naturally characterized more \
by style than substance. It insists upon what Buf-
fon calls “order and movement” more than upon
motive. It addresses itself to the intellect mainly
rather than to the sense or the susceptibility. ;
French painting occupies itself more than any art j
except that of the Dutch masters with subtle values, |
which give a refined intellectual pleasure. The -
magic of color or composition which moves and the
sensuousness which charms are quite lacking. It is
in line and mass, and light and shade, and delicate
adjustments of harmonious tones that French paint-
ing excels. Baudry passes for grandiose, and Bou-
guereau for subtile, spite of the eclecticism of the
one and the emptiness of the other, fundamentally
considered, because, abstractedly and impersonally
considered, mass and line respectively are thus
handled by them. The excess of a devotion to
form is precisely this traditionalism and inanity.
The excess of a devotion to color is violence. Vio-
lence of any kind is instinctively repugnant to the

17
258 FRENCII TRAITS

French sense. It is Ingres, and not Delacroix, that
permanently attaches and really interests his coun-
trymen. Delacroix seems to them not merely ro-
mantic ; he seems violent. Théophile Gautier, him-
self a thorough romanticist, calls Tintoretto le roi des
fougueux—quite missing the ineffable sweetness and
distinction of Tintoretto’s hues and poetic poses.
There is very little color at the Salon; although
there is an immense amount of quality, and of qual-
ity very sapiently understood, so that nature’s color
filtered through the plein air process is satisfactorily
reproduced. Yet passed through the alembic of the
painter’s personality, specially observed, insisted on,
developed, it rarely is. “Gray,” says M. de Biez
again, “which is the color of the sky in France, is
also the color of truth itself, of that truth which
tempers the impetuosity of enthusiasm and restrains
the spirit within the middle spheres of precise rea-.
son.” Nothing could more accurately attest the
French feeling in regard to color—the French dis-
trust of its riotous potentialities. And, as when one
looks constantly at one side of any thing its other
side escapes him, the Salon is not only lacking in
color, but it frequently illustrates how a constant
pre-occupation with its value leads to toleration of
very disagreeable character in color. The light and
dark harmony is now and then perfect, while at the
same time charm, perfume, purely sensuous quality
is quite lacking. os
Keats speaks somewhere of ‘ Lord Byron’s last
THE ART INSTINCT 259

flash poem.” Following the lead of the English
enervated school which one of its admirers recently
described as trying to do for painting what Keats
did for poetry, one very frequent notion of an im-
portant side of French art is exactly expressed by
this epithet. I mean the decorative side—every-
thing in fact in which severity does not noticeably
preside. The decorative art of the French does in-
deed oftener than not lend itself to the rococo,
though baroque it has rarely been. The extrava-
gances of the late Italian, Spanish, and German
Renaissance were but imperfectly emulated in
France, where, with an occasional exception, such
as the sculpture of Puget’s school, the keynote of
all the second-rate art since the days of Goujon’s
and Delorme’s imitators has been the academic
quality. Vulgarly sensational, whimsical, eccen-
tric, that is to say “ flash,” it has never been except
in that comparatively inconsiderable part which has
always obtained infinitely less consideration than
frivolity of the kind does elsewhere. Education and
the subordination of idiosyncrasy make it rare and
disesteemed. There is nothing in France like the
cemetery at Genoa. There is nothing like the in-
terior of the House of Lords, which a recent French
writer compares to a “thirty-cent Bohemian glass
bazar.” Nor like the spectacle in the same hall dur-
ing an important sitting, “‘when the Peeresses’ Gal-
lery is adorned with women in blue dresses, yellow
flowers, red fans, and apple-green feathers,” and

 
260. FRENCH TRAITS

when, consequently, he adds, “the Bohemian glass
shop seems to have been invaded by an assortment
of Brazilian parrots.” And we may affirm that, even
to M. Charles Garnier himself, who has loaded the
Nouvel Opéra at Paris with every mark of luxurious
elegance conceivable or collectable by him, the deco-
ration of most American theatres and public build-
ings which antedate the present era of fastidious
and forceless eclecticism would seem “flash” to
the last degree. What we call ‘Salon nudities”
are not the catch-penny things similar canvases
would be with us. Nudity is in no Latin country
the sensational thing it is in the world inhabited by
the British matron and the American young person,
whose cheek it is traditionally so difficult to keep
from blushing. In the second place, the Salon
nudities are studies in the most difficult depart-
ment of pictorial art, namely, in the painting of
flesh; and the appeal of the painter concerns his
success in this, and is directed to a trained jury and
not at all to people to whom for climatic reasons
nudity is a sensational thing. It is indeed doubtful
if the Anglo-Saxon notion of his motive and of his
accomplishment could be clearly conveyed to a
French painter—all that we are apt to regard as
“ flash ” is to him so thoroughly convention.

In fine, so far in general are French painting and
sculpture from the extravagant or the wilfully
meretricious, that painting and sculpture may be
defined as, for the French, the representation of
THE ART INSTINCT 261

ideas in form. Sometimes the form becomes a
mere symbol. Variations of it are esteemed vio-
lences. But even when it does not reach this state
of petrifaction through system, it is employed
mainly to embody ideas rather than images, and
though never morally didactic, now and then seems
to a true child of nature not a little notional and
narrow. ‘At the Institute,” says M. Rodin, con-
temptuously, “they have recipes for sentiments.”
As for character, style shrinks a little from repre-
senting anything so little systematized, so little
brought into harmony with itself, so complex, so
vague in outline and condensed in essence, so dis-
cordant, so tumultuous. Geniuses like Michael An-
gelo and Tintoretto, who have a special faculty for
fusing style and character, form and color, are rare.
Generally the artist leans toward one or the other—
toward Raphael or Rubens, toward Leonardo or
Velasquez. The “School of Athens” is the exem-
plar of French effort, minus its spirituality, which is
as foreign to the French genius, perhaps, as it is
sealed to Mr. Ruskin. Where we find the artist
preoccupied with character it is apt to be a little
factitious, as if he had wandered from, for him, the
true path and were engaged in an effort for which
he was distinctly not born, a work whose conditions
are quite foreign to his capacities. Spontaneity
thus is rather stified than stimulated. All formative
influences induce restraint, measure, order, and op-
pose invention and experiment. Even in conversa-
262 FRENCIL TRAITS

tion you hear the same expression, the same joke,
indefinitely repeated. No one seeks to vary them
because they have become classic, because their
form is not to be improved upon, and any attempt
in this direction is foredoomed to failure. Because,
too, there is such an infinite variety of them. Ex-
cellence in this department of activity depends upon
eclectic taste and cultivation ; not at all upon per-
sonal inventiveness. An American gets tired of “Je
vous le donne en mille,” “Tl n’y a plus de Pyrénées,”
and the infinitude of such classic combinations and
tradition-enshrouded expressions. The Frenchman
thinks no more of them than we do of “yes” and
“no” and the ordinary parts of speech taken separ-
ately. He is interested in further combinations,
and enjoys dealing with the classic ones as simple
elements, so that his result is always far more re-
fined and developed. But it is, after all, wholly im-
personal and artistic; his originality has nowhere
the chance of penetrating the substance, but exhausts
itself in modifying the form. The same thing is
true, not only of plastic art and of poetry, but even
of music. French music is as scientific as Palladian
architecture. Distinctly it lacks melody. It is full
of ideas, and its form is full of interest; but com-
pare not the sentiment of Saint-Saens to that of
Schubert, but the counterpoint of Berlioz to that of
Bach.

On the other hand, the predominance of the ele-
ment of style rarely results in the insipidity which
THE ART INSTINCT 263

elsewhere seems the inevitable fate of the refugee
from the rococo. The devotion to form is some-\
times tiresome, as in superficial articles and prosy/
books, where a completeness, not logical and philo-'
sophical like the completeness of the Germans, but:
purely of literary form, is sought. Subject, which /
is in general made so little of, is occasionally
valued in proportion to its hackneyed and lifeless
dignity. But insipidity is usually escaped be-
cause the artist’s work is always positive, and, how-
ever conventional, almost never perfunctory. Even
if it can be called insipid on occasion, its insipidity
is never stupid. The special training of the artist
gives at least the interest of competence in execu-
tion, and his general culture, the demands of the
environment, his familiarity with the best models,
ensure that its substance shall not be contemptible.
-There is nowhere the flatness, the lack of accent, the
pallor, the wan, chill, meagre aspect which charac-
terizes much of our Protestant and polemic reaction
from the earlier tropicality. Weare no longer brutal
or boisterous, but candor must compel us to acknow-
ledge that our artistic Puritanism isa trifle bleak.
It is possible to avoid the commonplace and still be
uninteresting. Round door-knobs and legible in-
scriptions may make an insufficient appeal to the
sensitiveness which demands the soothing stimulus
of pleasurable aspect everywhere, but merely to de-
stroy the roundness and the legibility results in
nothing positive enough to escape insipidity. Dis-
264 FRENCH TRAITS

gust with the painting of panoramas and the sculp-
ture of ideal inanity does little to justify itself by
resorting to equally empty possibilities and reali-
‘|. ties. French culture and artificiality save art from
that spontaneity which ends in sterility. M. Ben-
jamin Constant’s “seraglio” painting is not truly
rococo, nor is M. Jean Béraud’s realism insipid. The
sense for form indeed is equally a safeguard in
either instance.

In every artistic effort, where the poetic note is
not so imperatively needed that its absence is a pos-
itive flaw, it would be difficult to attach too much
value to form. Earm is the safeguard and quick-
ener of all elevated prose. If it be not itself the
highest of qualities, if free and forceful as it shows
itself in Greek sculpture it is even there subordi-
nate to sentiment and color, it is everywhere and
always the inexorable condition of the highest qual-
ities ; they are useful to it—it is necessary to them.
And how admirable and elevating is the prose
which in‘every department of art the French sense
for form produces! To talk of French painting as
many of our amateurs and artists do, and as they
would of French sculpture were they familiar
enough with it to perceive that most of it has the
same characteristics, is merely to exhibit blindness
for a number of excellent qualities which whatever
they fail in, at least save French art from the pure
caprices which many of our artists and amateurs
execute and admire. As the national turn for in-
THE ART INSTINCT 265

telligence prevents life in France from being taken
en amateur, so the national sense for form prevents
amateurishness in French art. Our art students go
to Paris for instruction in technic, but it isa pity
that they so universally content themselves with
that, and so rarely acquire there the general artistic
cultivation which is there as much a mark of pro-
fessional excellence as is excellence of technic. Very
seldom is a painter like Mr. Bridgman, let us say,
a painter who understands his capacities as well as
his tastes—a thoroughly professional painter, in a
word—returned to us by Paris itself out of the va-
ried and abundant material we send her. In the
vast majority of cases she sends us back amateurs—
the same amateurs who sought her schools, im-
mensely better equipped in technic, but, in pretty
exact proportion to their individuality, preserving
still the notions, whims, and ambitions with which
they set out—the visions, that is to say, of the in-
curable amateur. Hence our art, spite of the very
great improvement in technic within the past dozen
years, still remains essentially the experimentation
which it has been from the first. Our artists are as
anxious as, ever to reconstruct the basis of art, to
give it in their practice a national and personal fla-
vor, to be racial and individual, to display original-
ity, and to do all this fundamentally and radically
quite without regard to the immutable decorum of |
evolution, and in defiance rather than through the
aid of culture. Europe has constantly been saying
266 FRENOH TRAITS

to us at every international exhibition, ‘‘Be less im-
itative. Give us something new, some ‘new birth
of your new soil.’” And quite unconscious that
European interest in our art is one mainly of curi-
osity, and forgetful of the fact that our new soil,
whatever its capacities for producing great natural
triumphs from human character to railroads, from
the very fact that it is new demands careful culture
to produce anything so artificial as fine art, we
ave gone about being racial and individual by
pointedly neglecting culture and by breaking defini-
tively with tradition.

Culture has been acutely defined as “the power
of doing easily what you don’t like to do.” Of cul-
ture in this sense our artists, in general, have not,
I think, a sympathetic comprehension. Doing
painfully what they nevertheless like exceedingly
to do, describes rather their practice. What they
like to do, at any rate, not at all what they are
fitted to do, is the rule of their effort. And it
is the unfailing trait of the amateur. No amount
of cleverness can prevent the result from insecu-
rity, from essential triviality, from having that
ephemeral quality characteristic of pure experimen-
tation. Like the cleverness of Walt Whitman’s
defiance of culture, only for a time can it conceal
the essential elementariness, the really rudimentary
attitude of mind which conceit leads naiveté to mis-
take for finesse. Curious conception of the relations
of means to ends our amateur artists and their
THE ART INSTINCT 267

amateur admirers must, entertain, in conceiving our
formlessness of sufficient substance to revolutionize
the judgment of the ages as to form and fitness.
Interested as Europe may be in seeing us more
original,” we may be sure we shall never compel
her obeisance to amateur originality, to “ origi-
nality” painfully retesting the exclusions which
mark the progress of culture and imagining itself
inventive. The inexpressible flatness which coexists
with our lack of sobriety, of measure, of form is
grotesque. We can all nowadays recognize this
quality in our yesterday’s art—in the architecture
which aimed at effects in “frozen music” that would
have been the despair of the flamboyant Gothic
epoch; in the sculpture which attempted to unite
repose and action, the “ far off” and the familiar, in
a way which Phidias and Donatello were too pru-
dent to essay ; in the painting which, despising Na-
ture considered as merely artistic material, surprised
her in her own pictorial moods and endeavored to
surpass her in intensifications of autumn color, ex-
aggerations of sierras, volcanoes, and cataracts,
arrangements of woodland cascades, romantic pools,
“coming storms,” and sentimental genre situations,
—endeavored, in fine, to “paint the lily” with an
impasto touch, the mere notion of which would have
startled Claude and dismayed Rembrandt. But we
are quite blind to the same quality in our current
art, which displays in its own way the same mental
preoccupation with the search for the philosopher's

.
268 FRENCH TRAITS

stone and perpetual motion, in complete neglect of
{ the cautious dictates of scientific discovery.
“The amateur view of art, of its functions and
character, pervades the public as well as the profes-
sion, which is thus at once measurably excused for
and encouraged in its superficiality. Mr. Howells
draws up a list of short story writers, embroidered
with laudatory comment calculated to make several
dozen people imagine themselves the equals of
Mérimée and Maupassant. It is followed promptly
by a catalogue of poets from an equally friendly
hand, which pleads for a more attentive audience
for as many as forty-one “poets,” few of whom
have ever suffered for the want of a meal, a new
suit of clothes, or a theatre-ticket, have ever com-
mitted a serious moral indiscretion, know either
pain, ecstasy, or remorse, have ever experienced
any deep emotional perturbation, or enjoyed any
unusual spiritual excitement, and whose culture
is shown by their product to correspond to their
experience. The popular and good-natured eriti-
cism which thus rescues our littérateurs and poets
from any peril of self-depreciation, and keeps them
a little dazed as to the exactness of their equivalence
to Boccaccio and Keats, has a similar effect in plastic
art, where, as in the matter of prose and poetry, it
merely formulates the feeling of the entire public
which occupies itself with such subjects. The
American attitude in the presence of novelty of any
kind has been described as speculation as to ‘how
THE ART INSTINCT 269

to make something just as good for less money.”
In art, at all events, this accurately characterizes the
demand of the public upon the artist, who is there-
fore stimulated to “supply long felt wants” rather
than permitted to produce naturally. Of an artist
of great taste and refined appreciation, for instance,
we excuse, if we do not exact, parodies of the gran-
diose effects of Rome and of the large picturesque-
ness of Flanders. Of a painter born and trained
evidently for high class periodical illustration, we
greet with effusion naif experimentation in the
sphere of Christs, Venuses, Last Suppers, the acme
of classic subject. Of a sculptor who has a decora-
tive sense, we persist in calling for the heroic and
statuesque. And while we thus pervert mere
stinct and talent, we afford little scope to the fre
and natural exercise of its energy by the conspicu-
ous genius we may legitimately boast. If in the in-
formal organization some semblance of which in
every civilized country all professions tend inevi-
tably to acquire, our artists did not resemble less an
army than a mob; if in the exercise of their func-
tions normal conditions were not so sourly disturbed
that “time is lost and no proportion kept ;” does
anyone suppose that Mr. Hidlitz would build an
ecclesiastical savings-bank, Mr. La Farge set a
Theocritan idyl in a church casement, or Mr. Eakins
choose the Crucifixion for his masterpiece ?

Of course, in all these respects artistic France
presents the completest possible contrast to our-
270 FRENCH TRAITS

selves. The’ French art public does not demand
medizval cathedrals and Titians, early Renaissance
low relief and pre-Raphaelite intensity, the Floren-
tine line and the Venetian palette. It demands in-
stead M. Gérdme. M. Géréme is by no means a
favorite of mine. His work, largely considered,
lacks just that element of reality which apparently
its author and his public conceive to be its raison
@étre. But the evolution of such a painter and his
popularity witness strikingly the culture of the en-
vironment, where all serious effort is soberly and
sanely made, where every artist seems occupied with
what he was born to do, and where that crying dis-
proportion between ambition and accomplishment
characteristic of the amateur stage of progress is re-
duced toa minimum. M. Géréme’s work is in this
sense admirably professional, and the almost uni-
versal honor in which itis held is admirable recogni-
tion of this aspect of it—its excellence, that is to say,
in form, in restraint, in a certain felicity of style,
often, which raises it far above almost any gontem-
porary work of the kind, and occasionally (as in the
« Ave, Cesar! Morituri te salutant”) achieves for it
a dramatic distinction bordering on grandeur. Com-
pare it for these qualities with any work produced
among us by fellow-craftsmen who find Géréme
terribly deficient in charm, who have the true in-
terests of art so much at heart as to fear compromis-
ing them should they admit the value of education,
even in the absence of afflatus. And observe the
THE ART INSTINCT 271

prodigious difference between the milieu whose
admiration fosters these qualities and our own, which
expiates its ignorance of their importance by attach-
ing itself to the experimental and the ephemeral,
and which by its ingenuous exaction of stimulating
and contempt for sustaining viands is condemned
oftenest to a Barmecide banquet in the halls of art.
Compare, on the other hand, such a work as the
« Ave, Cesar!” with the historical painting of Piloty,
or Wagner, or Kaulbach, or even Hans Makart.
How wide is the interval by which it escapes their
touch of commonness—that element which in art as
in life we know best as the exact opposite of distinc-
tion, the Gemeinhett which Goethe was always repre-
hending, and before which Heine fled into exile.
Géréme, Meissonier, Boulanger, Baudry, Laurens,
Dubufe, Henner, Detaille, Mercié, Dubois, Lefebvre,
Batrias, Luminais, Cabanel, Bouguereau, Chaplin,
and a score of others placed in the front rank by their
compatriots’ esteem, testify, in a word, to the success
of the national sense for form in developing the fine
qualities of distinction and elegance, as well as the
solid ones of special competence and general culture.
Distinction is a trait as proper to prose as to poetry.
It is perhaps even more necessary to prose, and
hence apt to be therein more generally developed..
It is at any rate a native and penetrating quality,
which shows itself in every effort of the artist who
possesses if. It implies that his point of view is
always special and fastidious, that he does not look
272 FRENCH TRAITS

at things in a preoccupied and matter-of-course way,
permitting their grosser traits to impress him, and
inertly accepting the actual impression on the retina
as equalling the artistic suggestion of the object.
Such a painter as M. Alfred Stevens, for example,
and such a sculptor as M. Moreau-Vautier, evince in
the highest degree the French feeling for distinction,
for what is fastidious in its correctness, for refine-
ment, polish, artistic decorum. The patrician ele-
ment is as characteristic in plastic art as in character
or manners, and the French have an instinctive
affinity for it. M. Moreau-Vautier stoops to trifles
and M. Stevens sometimes suffers his art to exhale
in mere millinery; but in each instance, and in a
host of others of which these are simply typical,
there is a highbred, cultivated dignity which confers
on the most frivolous work a certain amount of un-
mistakable distinction.

We come finally, thus, to recognize elegance as
the characteristic quality of French art in its wid-
est scope, and to perceive that the divinity which
presides over every esthetic shrine is Taste. In
everything plastic, taste is universally the French
test of excellence. Offences against taste are the
sins most shocking to the French sense; obedi-
ence to its dictates is the attitude most cordially
approved by the French mind. One can see how
distinctly national the trait is by observing, not
merely how quickly elegance became the dominant
note in all artistic importation at the Renaissance
THE ART INSTINCT 273

epoch—how even Primaticcio at Fontainebleau, for
exaniple, shows the effect of the new environment
upon the Italian inspiration—but also how it strug-
gles with the grandiose severity of Gothic at Rouen
and Beauvais ; as indeed, centuries before, the in-
stinctive feeling for it developed Gothic line and
movement out of the sombre massiveness of Roman-
esque. The quality is as noticeable in every de-
partment of effort agin formal art. From landscape
gardening to needlework, from bookbindings to
placards, from the carefully-considered proportions
of a Neo-grec palace to the mouldings on a block
of builder’s buildings, from the decoration of a
theatre to the arrangement of a kitchen-garden,
in dress, in amusements, in household furnish-
ings, in carriages, chandeliers, clocks, mirrors, table
services—in fine, in every object produced by the
hand of man—is visible the working of the art in-
stinct under the direction of taste to the end of
elegance. In Paris every vista is an artistic spec-
tacle. From the point of view of art nothing in the
world equals the picture one sees in looking toward
the Louvre from the Arc de )’Etoile—unless it be
the line of the boulevards, where the buildings, the
terraces, the shop-windows, the people combine in
the production of-a scene from which every nat-
ural element except the sky above it has been elimi-
nated, and which would therefore be dazing and de-
pressing if its harmony, its taste, its elegance did
not render it beyond all expression stimulating and
18
274 FRENCH TRAITS °

delightful. The entire city is a composition, the
principle of fitness in whose lines and masses, tones,
and local tints secures elegance in the ensemble.
Elegance is embodied by Paris as perfectly as, ac-
cording to Victor Hugo, majesty is by Rome, beauty
by Venice, grace by Naples, and wealth by London.
; Naturally the rule of taste results in the tyranny
\ of the mode. Nowhere, perhaps, is fashion so
exacting, not only in dress and demeanor, but in
plastic art itself. Hence the development of schools,
the erection of methods into systems, the succes-
sion of romanticists to classicists and of realists to
both,the sequence of academic, pre-Raphaelite, plein
air, impressionist notions. So that if the mass of
French art is too conventional, too little spiritual,
‘too far separated from nature, too material in a
Doral to be constantly renewed by fresh impulses
operating in the work of original geniuses contin-
ually springing up, it nevertheless always makes the
most of a novel view, a fresh position by developing,
systematizing, and finally imposing it as the mode.
And however extraordinary the germ of the mode,
so severe is French taste and so acute is the French
sense for harmony, that in its full flower any fash-
ion is sure to be distinguished more by unity and
measure than by caprice. Women’s bonnets and
dress, and certain accompanying accoutrements, for
example, of a most bizarre character in themselves,
are wholly transmuted in the laboratory of the
French modiste and couturiére. In this way the in-
THE ART INSTINCT 275

ventions of English eccentricity actually acquire,
when transplanted to France, the quality of elegance
in which they are most conspicuously lacking, and
French taste and constructive art have done for the
ulster and the Gainsborough hat what the Fontaine-
bleau landscape school did for the germ transmitted
to it by Constable. . Taste, too, is endued with that
sanative property which purges French art of the
dross of positively ridiculous and extravagant fash-
ions. A fashion is not in France the mere “ fad” it is
in England and with us. The mode is tyrannical, but
it is intelligent as well. There was a method and a
measure in the costume of the Incroyables of the
Revolution and the Greek and Roman fantasies of
the Empire, which give them dignity in retrospect
and must have saved them from that contemporary
ridicule of which every Frenchman stands in terror.
Good or bad, they were styles. They were not the
ridiculous results of personal feeling, of whim and
freak, intruding themselves in Maudle and Postle-
thwaite fashion into a realm where reason and con-~
vention legitimately reign.

Taste, moreover, is universal in France. It per-,
vades allranks. It dictates the blouse of the ouvrier,
the blue and white composure of the blanchisseuse,
the furnishing of a concierge’s lodge as explicitly as
it does theapparel of the ééganie or the etiquette
of asalon. It banishes everywhere raggedness, dirt,
slovenliness, disorder. Having classified people, so
far as possible it uniforms them; and by uniform-
276 FRENCH TRAITS

ing the classes it unifies the whole which the classes

) compose. Thus everyone is a critic, everyone instinct-
ively feels, as to any specific thing, whether or no
it comes up to the general standard. The first-comer
is a judge of art, as in Italy he is of beauty. Every-
one’s instinct is trained under the influence of taste
all the time ; whichever way ong turns he receives
some imperceptible education. Nature, wilfulness,
untrammelled self-expression, and spontaneity are
lacking. An English friend of mine complained in
disgust of the placidity and tenue of the immense
crowd at Gambetta’s frmeral, and of its blue, white,
gray, and black monotone of color. An Italian
prince or pauper, raffiné or rustic, throws the con-
centrated charm of an absolute unconsciousness in-
to a look, a gesture, an attitude, which the happiest
art can never hope torival. Perhaps we may main-
tain that there is a subtile order and harmony in the
fortuitous, the accidental, which escapes the ordi-
nary eye, and which the ordinary artist does not
catch. But whereas this kind of harmony is some-
what insubstantial, and one’s feeling for it specu-
lative and fanciful, France presents the stimulating
spectacle of an entire people convinced with Sénan-
cour that the tendeney to order should form “an
essential part of our inclinations, of our instinct,
like the tendency to self-preservation and to re-
production,” and illustrating its conviction con-
sciously and unremittently in every sphere of life
and art—making indeed an art of life itself.
THE ART INSTINCT 277

With this feeling impregnating the moral atmos-
phere, with the architectonic spirit informing all
activities, the trifling as well as the serious, it is no
wonder that Paris is the world’s art clearing-house
whither every one goes to perfect, or at least to
“ consecrate” his talent, and the centre of artistic
production whence art objects as well as art ideas
are disseminated throughout civilization. Nor is it
surprising that even in music—for which the French
have certainly no special gift, owing to their lack of
sentiment, to the absence of rhythm and the predom-
inance of the saccadé note in the French language and
character—Paris should have reached its indisput-
able eminence. What is curious, however, and what
constitutes a singular criticism of our century as the
‘heir of all the ages,” is that the least poetic should
be the most artistic of modern peoples ; that France,
in fact, which “in art cares more for the true than
even for the beautiful,” should be the only country
comparable with the Italy of the Renaissance and
the Greece of antiquity, not only for the prodigious
amount, but for the general excellence of her artis-
tic activity.
VUl
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT

As the French social instinct culminates in the
French religion of patriotism, French individual
vanity becomes conceit whenever the Frenchman
contemplates France or the foreigner. The egotism
which he personally lacks is conspicuously charac-
teristic of himself and his fellows considered as a
nation. Nationally considered, the people com-
posed of the most cosmopolitan and conformable
individuals in the world distinctly displays the pro-
vincial spirit. Other peoples have their doubts,
their misgivings. They take refuge in vagueness,
in emotional exaggeration, in commonplaces, in pure
brag. We have, ourselves, a certain invincibility of
expectation that transfigures our present and recon-
ciles us to our lack of a past. Or, when we are con-
fronted with evidence of specific inferiority, we ad-
duce counterbalancing considerations, of which it
need not be said we enjoy a greater abundance even
than most of us are prepared on the instant to recall
—* comfort and oysters” were all a certain compa-
triot could think of in one emergency, according to
a recent anecdote. But France is to the mind,
rather than exclusively to the feeling, of every
282 FRENCH TRAITS

Frenchman as distinctly Ja grande nation to-day as
she was in the reign of le grand monarque, when
she had fewer rivals. The rise of these has made
little impression on her. M. Victor Duruy begins
his history by citing from “some great foreign |
poet,” of whose name he is characteristically igno-
rant, the statement that France is “the Soldier of
God.” Every Frenchman echoes the words of
Stendhal, who, nevertheless, in general strikingly
illustrates what Mr. Spencer calls the “bias of anti-
patriotism :” ‘ We, the greatest people that has
ever existed—yes, even after 1815!” The “ mis-
sion” of France is in every Frenchman’s mind.
Her many Cassandras spring from the universal
consciousness of it, and are, besides, more articulate
than convinced. Antiquity itself, to which it is a
tendency of much modern culture to revert for
many of its ideals, seems in a way rudimentary to
the French, who, even during the First Empire,
deemed themselves engaged in developing rather
than copying, classic models, from administration
to attire. More than any other people with whom
comparison could fitly be made, they seem ignorant
of what is thought and done outside the borders of
‘their own territory. It is probable that not only
the Germans, a large class of whom know every-
thing and whose rapacity of acquisition nothing es-
‘capes, and the English and ourselves, who are great
travellers, but persons of almost any nationality to
be encountered anywhere abroad, are far more fa-
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 29838

miliar with French books, French history, French
topography, French ways, than the average intelli-
gent Frenchman is with those of any country but
his own. ‘

The French travel less than any other people. |
Less than any people do they savor what is dis-
tinctly national abroad. Not only do they emigrate
less; France is so agreeable to Frenchmen, and to
Frenchmen of every station, that it is small wonder
they are such pilgrims and strangers abroad, and
tarry there so short a time unless necessity compel
them. But, as one travels to become civilized, and
as in French eyes civilization reaches perfection
only in France, the chief motive for travel is lacking
to them. “We need to study, not to travel, A
travelled Frenchman is no more civilized than his
stay-at-home compatriots—which is not the case
‘elsewhere. Besides, nowadays, you know, we have
photographs ”—naiveéé like this it is not uncommon
to hear in Paris. “Le Temps,” probably on the
whole the best journal in the world, rarely has oc-
casion to refer to the United States without falling
into some error of fact, such as its American an-
analogue would be incapable of making in regard to
France, though the latter shows considerably less
sympathetic disposition to appreciate French cur-
rents of feeling and thought than “Le Temps” does
in the converse case. Every American traveller has
encountered the Frenchman who believed that the
Civil War was a contest between North and South
284 FRENCH TRAITS

America, and has been astonished by his general in-
telligence, which is wholly superior to that of our
people of an analogous ignorance. The entire
French attitude toward foreigners strikes us as cu-
viously conscious and sensitive. In Paris, certainly,
the foreigner, hospitably as he is invariably treated,
is invariably treated as the foreigner that he is.
His observations about French politics, manners,
art, are received with what slight impatience civility
permits ; and often, indeed, they are of an exasper-
ating absurdity. He is made to perceive that all
these things are distinctly matters of French con-
cern. The Frenchman feels too acutely the privi-
lege of being a Frenchman to extend the favor, even
by courtesy, to the stranger within his gates. He
has laws which authorize him to expel from French
territory foreigners who displease him. When
the little American daily, ‘“‘The Morning News,”
treated the Parisians to some American “ journalis-
tic enterprise” about the healthfulness of Nice,
some years ago, there was an amusing outcry for
its immediate exile as a foreign publication. When
the late King Alfonso passed through Paris after
accepting in Germany a colonelcy of Uhlans, Presi-
dent Grévy was obliged to apologize for the conduct
of the Paris mob, which hissed and hooted him as
if there were no such thing as French civility,
which, nevertheless, is proof against everything but
chauvinism. Accurately estimated as Wagner is by
the leading French musicians, and avid as are the
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 285

Parisians of whatever is new in art, Paris is so
distinctly an entity and as such takes itself so se-
riously, that it would not-listen to “Lohengrin”
because the author of “Lohengrin” had, nearly
twenty years before, insulted it after a manner
which, one would say, Paris would be glad to con-
done as natural to German grossierde, and therefore
as unworthy of remembrance. The artists of the
Salon lose a similar opportunity of showing them-
selves superior to provincialism of a particularly
gross kind, in visiting the zsthetic primitiveness of
our Congressmen on the individual American paint+
er, who is already only too impotently ashamed of
it.

The provincial spirit born of an exaggerated sense
of nationality has nowhere else proved so fatal to
France, perhaps, as in closing her perceptions |
one of the very greatest forces of the century. The
modern spirit is illustrated in many ways more sig-
nally and splendidly by the French than by any
dustrial side. Industrialism may almost be said to
play the chief part in the modern world, to be one
of those influences which contribute the most to na-
tional grandeur and individual importance. Beside
its triumphs, those of the military spirit are surely
beginning to seem fleeting and ineffective. Stand-
ing armies were never so colossal and never cost so
much, but, despite the fact that no one can foresee
the manner of their decline, it is already plain that
286 FRENCH TRAITS

the system which they support must ally itself with
industrialism, or perish before it; which is only an
extended way of putting Napoleon’s remark that
“an army travels on its belly.” Democracy may
_ have as much use for force as feudalism had, but it
‘is only the more clear for this that the heaviest bat-
‘talions are to be on the side of the particular democ-
racy which best apprehends and applies the princi-
/ples of peaceful industry in their widest scope and
exactest precision. If there be anything in these
inconsistent with eminence in literature, art, natural
science, diplomacy, philosophy, with the ideal, in
short, so much the worse for the ideal. It is the
Jittest to survive that does survive. But it is far more
probable that what is generally called materialism is
often only so called because the science of it has not
yet been discovered. The future will certainly ac-
- count nationality a puissant and beneficent force
measurably in proportion as the nationality of the
future imbues itself with the spirit of industrialism,
which at the present time appears, superficially at
least, so unnational, so cosmopolitan. Witness al-
ready not only the wealth of Anglo-Saxondom, but
the way in which this wealth serves to promulgate
the Anglo Saxon ideals, imperfect as these are.
Now, at a time when the foundations of modern
society were being laid, France was neglecting the
practice, if not the philosophy, of industrialism.
Only in a philosophical and speculative way—and,
indeed, one may add an amateur way—did she con-
THK PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 287

cern herself with it. She was wholly given over to
the things of the mind, of the heart, of the soul, ex-
amining the sanctions of every creed, every concep-
tion, every virtue even, and so preoccupied with en-
cyclopedism that she forgot colonization entirely.
She threw away Canada, which she had administered
with a sagacity wholly surpassing that of the Eng-
lish administration of the then loyal America. She
allowed herself to be driven from India. She made
only a desultory effort to develop her possessions in
South America. While Turgot was studying his re-
forms, writing political economy, discovering that
needless wages were in reality but alms, meditating
and administering with a brilliance and power that
place him at the very head of French statesmanship,
the English Turgot was plundering India. While
the French were pondering and discussing the Con-
trat Social, the English were putting money in their
purse, with which to fight the Napoleonic wars and
restore the ancient régime at the Congress of
Vienna. By force of intelligence, of impatience
with sophisms, of passion for pure reason, by detes-
tation of privilege and love for humanity, feudality
in France was being undermined ; while by force of
energy, of strenuous, steadfast, and heroic determi-
nation, Hastings was enabling England, by condon-
ing infamy, to substitute wealth for institutional re-
form.

The result is very visible at the present day, and
complicates the French’outlook nota little. French
288 : FRENCH TRAITS

credit is still high, but French finances give the
wisest French economists melancholy forebodings.
France’s commerce and manufactures are very con-
siderable, but, unlike her agriculture, they are so in
spite of, rather than because of, French institutions,
The settlement of the land question followed natur-
ally upon the adoption of the Rights of Man, whereas
the Revolution left the questions of trade and finance
untouched in their provincial seventeenth-century
status. Immigration and geographical situation go
far to atone for the un-American stupidity of our
tariff, but the same provincial spirit works much
greater provincial results in France, where no good
luck in the industrial field counterbalances the effects
of subsidies and protection. The nation is at once
the most. industrious and the least industrial of the
great nations. Notable exceptions there are ; but
not only do these thrive at the expense of the mass,
but, these included, the business of the nation
seems, by comparison with that of England and our- -
selves, exaggeratedly retail, where indeed traces of
its activity are not altogether lacking. An English-
man notes at once the tremendous depleting cost of
consuming only native manufactures. An American
remarks a surprising absence of business of all kinds,
except in the luxuries and decorations of life. The
smallness of the scale, the universal two prices for
everything, the restriction of speculation to a small
army of professed speculators, the way in which the
trade in articles de Paris and nowveautés dominates
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 289

in importance that in grain, cotton, groceries, and
provisions, the outnumbering of drays and trucks
by handcarts and cabs, the immense preponderance
of little shops over what we are really etymological
in calling “stores”—these things seem provincial
not to our philistinism so much as to our ideality.

It is very well to be at the head of civilization, to
represent most perfectly of all nations “ the human- |
ization of man in society,” but you must manage,to |
live, to endure; and to endure you must take note
of the forces at work around you, you must see the |
way the world is going. You must not at the pres- ;
ent day be so exclusively devoted to Geist, however {
justifiably Mr. Arnold might sing its praises to his |
own countrymen, as to let your commercial instincts |
atrophy. Such costly fiascos as the Tonquin expe-
dition are the price paid by France for that uncom-
mercial character betrayed in the use of the term
‘article dexport” tor whatever is cheap and poor.
At a time when every European nation is colonizing
in search of markets, success is not to be won by
exporting brummagem. Curiously enough, even in
the domain of art, where the French are, one would
say, thoroughly commercial (as well as, of course, ad-
mirable executants), a critic in “L’Art” rebukes the
provincial French disregard of foreign art, by beg-
ging his countrymen to be at least lenient enough
to examine before disapproving, and asking them
how they would like to be judged solely on the art

products they themselves send abroad. The French
19
290 FRENCH TRAITS

belief that foreigners can be made to buy an article
in art or industry that Frenchmen would reject is,
indeed, directly associated with their conviction that
in all activities you can only be amusing to them,
never instructive. Although they welcome the mere
strangeness which other peoples resent and which
_ they find curious and intellectually interesting, prac-
tically they find no more utility in exchanging ideas
i thgn dry goods with you. And not only do they lose
in national consideration in this way, but, to note a
by no means unimportant detail, they miss the de-
velopment of character that a national genius for in-
dustrialism in its large aspects stimulates in individ-
ual citizens. The amassing of money is apt to make
misers of Frenchmen. There is little amassing on a
large scale that is not known and described as ava-
rice. There are no Vanderbilts. Their laws secur-
ing the distribution of wealth stimulate sordidness
instead of speculation. For speculation the mass
of the people substitute the lottery, which is cer-
tainly a provincial form of business risk. Holders
of successful tickets almost never dissipate their
winnings, but employ them sensibly and econom-
ically. Petty gambling is nearly universal, but its
scale is usually parochial. The gambling at the
Paris Bourse is, of course, colossal in amount, but
in its area of influence it is restricted. There are
comparatively few “lambs shorn” there, and the
temptation to take a “flyer” in the market does not
assail the average citizen.
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 291

Moreover, the necessity for an immense army
keeps the military spirit in fashion. Every citizen
passes through the caserne, and retains something of
its feeling. Duels, fine uniforms, contempt of civil-
ians, superciliousness toward “ trades-people” sur-
vive from the middle-age predominance of the no-.
blesse, through this necessity, with a persistence that
strikes our industrialized sense as puerile. Demo-:
cratic as France is, she is still as feudal, as provincial!
in these respects, as oligarchical or despotic societies
are in others, Material as the community is in many
ways, in these it is still steeped in the antiquated
ideal of that age of chivalry whose very existence
we have arrived at doubting. The truculence of
Richelieu’s time has been softened, but a states-
man is still at the mercy of a spadassin, if the lat-
ter conceives his “ honor” wounded in the course
of parliamentary polemics. The sentiment which
sustains the soldier against the avocat is wide-
spread, and does not differ greatly, except in refine-
ment, from the similar provincialism of our Southern
fire-eaters.

French provincialism, however, is exhibited rather
in a restricted field of knowledge than in a narrow
attitude of mind. It proceeds from ignorance rath-
er than prejudice. Unlike the provincialism of any
other people, itis thoroughly open-minded. It is
traditional rather than perverse. It is not arrogant
but limited—not so much sceptical of foreign merit
as conscious of its own. Its development has taken
292 FRENCH TRAITS

place amid competitive, rather than isolated, con-
ditions, and it shows the mark of the continental
struggle instead of insular evolution ; its conceit is
derived from a too exclusive contemplation of French
accomplishments, not from that vague and senti-
mental exaggeration with which unchecked emotion
accentuates self-respect. Its view of the universe is
conspicuously incomplete, but so far as it goes its
vision is admirably undistorted. In a word, even
French provincialism is remarkably candid and ra-
tional. It seems for this reason particularly crass
to us, because its exhibition is marked by so much
sense and so little sentiment, because a Jack of emo-
tional delicacy leads to bald and, so to speak, scien-
tific statement of French merits and attainments.
We could sympathize much more readily with pure
brag. The absence of buncombe is distinctly dis-
agreeable to us. The palpable sincerity of its air
of placid exactitude we find difficult to support.
We could forgive it anything more readily than its
frank composure. The story of the London cock-
ney who found the French a singular people because
they called “bread” pain, and replied to a comrade,
who observed that calling pain ‘‘ bread” was just as
singular, ‘Oh, well, you know it is bread,” illus-
trates rather the French than the Anglo-Saxon order
of provincialism. The Englishman would be pre-
occupied with the contemptible character of the
bread itself. The reason why the Germans are such
good linguists, says the French Calino, is because
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 293

“they already know one foreign language.” His
English correlative esteems foreign languages “ lin-
go.” A young and observant Methodist clergyman
-whom I once saw in Rome, whither he had been
sent by his Connecticut congregation in search of
health and recreation, was evidently getting none
of either because,in the presence of Raphael and
Michael Angelo, he was perpetually and painfully
reminding himself, as well as others, that “a fine
action is finer than a fine picture,” and that the
Italians were so contemptible a people as to make it
natural to infer from their distinction in them some-
thing particularly debasing in the influence of the
fine arts. It would be hard to find a French priest
in our day thus perplexed and tormented by the
fascination of pure oppugnation, and well-nigh im-
possible to encounter a Frenchman of any kind so
persuaded that to differ morally from himself was
ipso facto witness of degradation.

The travelling Frenchman rarely exhibits this pe-
dantic order of contempt for the foreign phenomena
with which he comes in contact. He often miscon-
ceives and misinterprets them most absurdly, and
the serenity of his superiority on such occasions has,
first and last, afforded a good deal of amusement.
The newspaper letters of the French correspondents
are sometimes as good reading on account of the
picturesqueness of their blunders as for any other
reason. The conceit is colossal. But it arises from
ignorance and misconception, from a certain help-
294 FRENCH TRAITS

lessness in the presence of what is unfamiliar that
fairly paralyzes even Gallic curiosity, and throws
the victim back on his own nation’s eminence, with
whose justification he is much more at home. It is
never combined with feeling, and generally contents
itself with such comparisons as observation suggests,
Our pedants, on the other hand, are constantly oc-
cupied with inferences of the most fundamental na-
ture drawn from the most trivial circumstances.
In the case of the travelling Briton, the view of
novel objects seems actually to distil dislike. En-
countering abroad, for example, a strange costume,
the Frenchman finds it in bad taste, the Euglish-
man conceives a contempt for the wearer. Both
positions are equally unwarrantable, very likely, but
it is clear that the provincialism of the latter only is
pedantic. We are all familiar with the budget of
opinions about foreigners with which our kindest
and gentlest travellers return from Europe: the
filth of Italy, the stupidity of the Germans, the in-
sincerity of the French, the ridiculousness of the
English, the atrocity of the Spanish cuisine, their ul-
tra-radical conviction of American superiority in all
these instances being based on the simple fact of
difference. No French traveller looks at foreign
phenomena in. this way, and though his conviction
‘ of French superiority may be as unsound at bot-
' tom, yet, so far as he is concerned, it is more intelli-
gent, less exclusively sentimental, as well as less un-
' charitable—one is tempted to add, less unchristian.
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 295

The explanation is that the French provincial
spirit, like other French traits, is thoroughly im-:
personal, The individual, everywhere subordinated ;
to the state and the community, appears himself
curiously unrelated to the very object of his char-
acteristic adoration. Personally speaking, his pro-
vincialism is impartial. He does not admire France
because she is his country. His complacence with
himself proceeds from the circumstance that he is a}
Frenchman ; which is distinctly what he is first, be-
ingaman afterward. And his pride in France by no
means proceeds from her production of such men as
he and his fellows, but from what France, com-
posed of his fellows and himself, accomplishes and
represents. One never hears the Frenchman boast
of the character and quality of his compatriots, as
Englishmen and ourselves do. He is thinking about
France, about her different gloires, about her posi-
tion at the head of civilization. His country is to
him an entity, a concrete and organic force, with
whose work in the world he is extremely proud to
be natively associated, without at the same time be-
ing very acutely conscious of contributing thereto
or sharing the responsibility therefor. He is, ac-
cordingly, 2 marvel of candor in discussions relating
to France, of which in detail he is an unsparing
and acute critic. One wonders often at his ad-
missions, which seem drastic, not to say fundament-
al. We forget that he always has France in reserve
—that organic conception which every Frencliman
296 FRENCH TRAITS

holds so firmly, owing to the closeness of texture in
the national life since the nation’s birth. _ In discus-
sions of this kind his attitude is very well expressed
by a fine mot of the Duc d’Aumale, who, during the
“Bazaine trial, when the inculpated marshal exclaim-
‘ed, in justification of his treason, that there was no
longer any government left, any order, any author-
ity to obey, said, ‘12 y avait encore la France, mon-
sicur/” The national life of England has been
nearly as long and no doubt as glorious as that of
France ; but, owing to its looseness of texture, to
the incomplete way in which it has absorbed the in-
dividual, the individual himself seems to make its
dignity and eminence subjects of constant concern.
And so much personal emotion is in his case associ-
ated with this preoccupation, that nowhere more
conspicuously than in his chauvinism does he illus-
trate the disposition of Dr. Johnson, “who,” says
Emerson, “ a doctor in the schools, would jump out
of his syllogism the instant his major proposition
was in danger, to save that at all hazards.” Simi-
larly with ourselves. :

In national criticism the Frenchman, on the other
hand, never thinks his major proposition in the
least danger. This perhaps argucs an intenser na-
tional conceit, a more explicit provincialism, but it
permits a certain syllogistic freedom which an
Anglo-Saxon can only envy. Mr. Arnold notes this
characteristic as common to the continentals gener-
ally in his inimitable essay entitled “My Country-
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 297

”

men.” ‘It makes me blush,” he says, “to think’
how I winced under what the foreigners said of
England ; how I longed to be able to answer it;
how I rejoiced at hearing from the English press
that there was nothing at all in it, when I see the
noble frankness with which these foreigners judge
themselves.” But I think this frankness is espec-
ially characteristic of the French, and it is, from our
point of view, not a little singular that it should be
accompanied by the most intense chauvinism.
* Modesty is doubt,” says Balzac, and the French
thus judge themselves so frankly, very likely, be-
cause they are lacking in that modesty which the
screaming of our eagle and the roar of the British
lion attest as an Anglo-Saxon trait. At all events,
the French, with their excessively rational way of
looking at things, esteem modesty a defect rather
than a quality, both in nations and individuals, and
rarely use the word except in the enumeration of
feminine charms, or in the extended sense of “un-
pretentiousness”—as, for example, a modest savant.
And it is to be remarked that the French have a
particular justification for their ignorance of foreign
national worth and accomplishment which people of
other countries are without. On principles which
they comprehend, that is to say, such principles as
state action, organic development, scientific study
of special problems, co-operation, and centralization
—every principle, in fact, in accordance with which
the common activities of an entire nation are to be
298 FRENCH TRAITS

directed—France presents as a nation a far more
definite and concrete figure than any other. Eng-
lishmen, Italians, Americans may excel in a hun-
dred ways, but they are not excellences to which
England, Italy, America concretely contribute as
nations. In the way of direct national accomplish-
ment, the work of France is certainly more palpa-
ble than that of other nations. We build for ex-
ample, an astonishing number of miles of railway
every year, but what we mean by “ America” is no
more associated with it than it is with the levying of a
thirty per cent. duty on foreign art. M. de Lesseps’s
success or failure is, on the other hand, intimately
and directly French. It is by no means altogether
because French national accomplishment is almost
always a government affair, whereas we make “ pri-
vate enterprise” the great protagonist of our na-
tional drama. It is because in France the govern-
ment is in all matters of this kind so thoroughly
representative, so wholly a popular agent. The re-
sult is that ‘ France” is far more real to a F'rench-
man’s intelligence than ‘‘ America ” is to ours, how-
ever much our subjective sentiment may atone for
the lack of national palpability. Of “private en-
terprise,” of the attainment of magnificent results
through pure sentiment, through a loose social
organization, through a consistent inconsistency,
the Frenchman has no notion. These are principles
of which he does not comprehend the workings.
But, as I say, the results of those principles whose
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 299

workings he does comprehend are far more consider-
able in France than elsewhere. In the line of social .
and political problems whose solution depends upon .
the conscious and precise regulation, ordering, and:
development of an entire society, French experimen-'
tation has, in variety, scope, and thorough-going|
audacity, been so far in excess of that of other mod-!
ern peoples that it seems to him idle to examine the!
history of the latter. Since the Revolution and the!
adoption of the Code Napoléon, for instance, the
phenomena marking the gradual rise of the English
democracy naturally seem to him interesting mainly
from a humanitarian point of view, and only indi-
rectly instructive. And as for studying the details
of our social system, to take another popular ex-
ample, whereby American relations between men
and women are secured, he necessarily feels that
this would be rather curious than profitable to him,
because of his conviction that these relations, if they
are what our admirers maintain, are owing more to
the favor of Heaven than to that human ordering
upon which his own society must inevitably and ex-
clusively continue to depend.

This justification for French provincialism appears
especially clear in the matter of French ignorance
of foreign languages. Such ignorance is nearly uni-
versal in France, and the French have greatly suf-
fered from it both in peace and war. They are now
making a heroic, but probably not very systematic
or successful effort, to remedy the evil. It is one of
800 FRENCH TRAITS

the “lessons” of the late conflict with Prussia, like
the lesson of mobilization and full rosters. But cer-
tainly one reason of their linguistic limitedness is
the circumstance that for them the acquisition of
foreign languages is in the nature of a pure accom-
plishment ; and for accomplishments as such the
French care very little. In this respect their atti-
tude is far less provincial than our polyglot pas-
sion’ for, in Mr. Arnold’s happy phrase, “fighting
the battle of life with the waiters in foreign hotels.”
They view language as a distinct expression of defi-
nite thought and for this, rightly or wrongly, they
think French suffices—chronicles what of that has
been expressed. Had they the sentimental, the
poetic, the religious temperament, they would be
drawn toward an effort to appreciate English po-
etry, which is of course absolutely untranslatable.
But not to possess the poetic temperament is not of
itself to be provincial ; and, lacking it, an acquain-
tance with English would teach the French less than
we are apt—provincially—to imagine that would be
new to them. Even of English poetry, there has
been no happier general eulogy than that of Vol-
taire, and despite the provinciality of the recent
French rendering of “Hamlet” (where, beside the
distortion of ideas, M. Dumas’s authority lends itself
to such ludicrous errors as the confusion of “canon”
and “cannon”) no one has characterized Shakespeare
more discriminatingly than M. Henry Cochin, whose
commentary is worth a volume of Ulrician profun-
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 301

dity. But, poetry aside, all those problémes de la vie,
which are so much more definitely treated in prose,
are treated in French so copiously as in a measure to
justify French preoccupation with French literature,
which, indeed, is familiar to and studied by French-
men as English rarely isamong ourselves. It is im-
possible to conceive of even Goethe, the incarnation
of the cosmopolitan spirit, except as in part the pro-
duct of French influences; and the fact that the
French can show no one who used German as Heine
used French, is not so much witness of their pro-
vincial attitude, as of the unprovincial spirit of the
French language. French has more concrete and
crystallized things to tell us than any other modern |
tongue and the majority of people can get only dis-,
tinct things from a language that is not their own. |
That is why to our average man French is more
profitable than English is to the majority of French-
men. Only subtle and delicate minds, such as are
in any country the rare exceptions, catch the charac-
teristic aroma, the peculiar perfume, the racial point
of view of a foreign literature. No one has more
discriminatingly expressed the value of studying
foreign literatures than Doudan in calling it a means
of awakening one’s own national genius; “‘it. is”
says he, ‘“‘like the sound of the trumpet which gave
Saunderson the notion of scarlet.” For the cosmo-
politanism evinced in studying Ollendorf, Doudan
would certainly entertain a very slight esteem.

In fine, the peculiarity of the French provincial
302 FRENCH TRAITS

spirit is that, for the most part, its manifestations
are national and not individual. Toward other na-
tions abstractly, and toward the people of other na-
tions in the concrete, it is exhibited in very nearly
the proportion in which it is aroused by the exclu-
sive contemplation and knowledge of France itself,
But its reaction upon the individual in his own en-
vironment is scarcely apparent. Where neither
France nor the foreigner is directly in question, un-
provincial is precisely the epithet for the French-
man’s mental attitude and processes. The French-
man makes so much of his position as a member of
a society whose texture is extremely close, he em-
ploys his relations to his surroundings in such con-
stant and salutary fashion, that personally he avoids
nearly every mark of the provincial spirit. He has
little of its narrowness, its self-concentration, its un-
remittent experimentation, its confusion of relative
with absolute values. It is, for example, especially
a mark of the provincial spirit to take one’s self too
seriously. To take one’s self too seriously is the
distinguishing trait at once of the pedant and the
amateur—the person who attaches an excessive impor-
tance to trifles, and the person who attacks lightly
matters of great dignity and difficulty ; two arche-
types, one may say, of the provincialism illustrated
by Anglo-Saxons. At home, certainly, however he
may appear abroad, the Frenchman takes himself
far less seriously than the Englishman or the Ameri-
can is apt to do under sufficient provocation, unre-
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 303

strained as both are by either the dread or the dan-
ger of that ridicule which operates with such salutary
universality in France. Beside the pedant and the
amateur, the fat is conspicuously a cosmopolitan, or,
at least, a cockney product. The badaud himself is
a very catholic-minded character ; he sinks himself
in his surroundings. Note the essential difference,
from the point of view*of provincialism, between
him and the prig—especially that latest and least
attractive variety of the species by which at present
our own society is infested, and from which France
is free—the prig bent on self-improvement. An
environment whose cosmopolitanism is a pervasive
force, instead of mainly a mere lack of positive na-
tionality, cannot develop a being of whom it is the
cardinal characteristic that his constant discipline
and effort are exercised uniformly at the expense of
others. So perfectly are the amateur and the
pedant fused in him that the most trivial conversa-
tion is in his eyes an opportunity ; he takes notes
for self-education on the most sacred and solemn
occasions; at dinner-parties he is studying eti-
quette, at the whist-table he is improving his game,
at church he is exercising his memory, in a neigh-
bor’s house or a picture gallery, his taste; he has
no intimacy too great for him to employ in practis-
ing his voice, his gestures, his carriage, his de-
meanor—his whole environment, in fact, animate
and inanimate, friend and foe, he remorselessly
sacrifices to his implacable purpose of educating
804 FRENCH TRAITS

himself, whatever may happen. And that he may
advance in virtue as in wisdom he lets slip no oppor-
tunity of educating others. No description, indeed,
of a society which lacks him can be more vivid and
positive to a society which possesses him than the
mention of his absence. One infers at once in such
a society a free and effortless play of the faculties,
a large, humorous, and tolerant view of one’s self
and others, leisure, calm, healthful and rational vi-
vacity, a tranquil confidence in one’s own perceptions
and in the intelligence of one’s neighbors—charac-
teristics which, very likely, have in turn their weak
side, but which indicate the urban, the metropoli-
tan, the mundane attitude of a community wherein
men rub against and polish each other, and exclude
the village or conventual ideal of laborious effort,
careless of the present, forgetful of the past, its ar-
dent gaze fixed on a vague recompense in an indef-
inite future to the successful contestant in a rigorous
competitive examination. °

Religion, too, has contributed as largely in France
to the absence of the provincial spirit as it has fur-
thered the social instinct by tending to so¢ial con-
cert and social expansion. Not only, that is to say,
has religion in France exercised the influence pecu-
liar to Catholicism, but Catholicism has there been
without a rival. Protestantism exists. The Re-
formed Church is indeed supported by the state on
a perfectly proportionate equality with Catholicism,
but the blood of the martyrs has not been its seed,
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 305

and it does not really count. The leading Paris
newspaper is Protestant ; many of the leading men
are of Huguenot descent and cherish Protestant tra-
ditions. But these themselves discuss every ques-
tion from a Catholic stand-point, and it never occurs
to them that society is not homogeneously Catholic.
Catharine de’ Medici is in this respect as much the
creator of modern France as Henry VIII. is of mod-
ern England or Philip IL. of modern Spain. It is so
far from easy to be content with her work that the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew seems to me the great-
est misfortune that has ever befallen France. Com-
pared with it the Prussian invasion of 1870 and the
loss of Alsace-Lorraine seem insignificant ; when
we think of the France of Coligny’s time and its po-
tentialities, the France of to-day, even post-revolu-
tionary France, is, in certain directions, a disap-
pointment. But it is not to be denied that to the
* Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes are attributable the religious
homogeneousness of French society, and, conse-
quently, its composure, its serenity, its absence of
the provincial spirit in one of the profoundest, and
most sacred, and most influential of human concerns.
The humanizing effect of unity in religion is one |
of those phenomena which have only to be mention-
ed to be immediately appreciated. The attitude of
superstition itself is really far less provincial than
the attitude of scepticism. The one is traditional
and social in its nature, the other of necessity soli-
20
306 FRENCH TRAITS 4

tary and personal. Even superstition implies a
placid and serene sympathy between its victim and
his environment. Sophocles, Virgil, Raphael, Shakes-
peare, Erasmus, Goethe—how distinct is the urban-
ity, the felicity of rounded and complete harmony
which the mere mention of these names reminds us
they illustrate in common! How different it is
from the notion called up by the mention of Luther,
Calvin, Bunyan, Knox, Byron, Carlyle! Apollo is
one type and Achilles is quite another. To fight it
out for one’s self in the sphere of religion; to
forge one’s own credo out of materials painfully se-
lected from the workshops of the ages; not to feel
one’s self sustained and supported by human sym-
pathy in the supreme human concern ; to assume
the objector’s attitude, to place one’s self at the
sceptic’s view-point, to particularize laboriously and
sift evidence with scrupulous care in a matter so
positive, so attractive, and so universal—how can
this fail to stimulate in one the provincial temper,
the provincial spirit? The social instinct recoils
in the face of such a prospect.

The tendency of unity is to magnify the worship,
of diversity to magnify the philosophy, of religion.
How many scores of conscientious and piously-dis-
posed young men at the moment when “choice is
brief and yet endless” cut themselves off entirely
from the former because they cannot make up their
minds clearly as to the latter! Everyone’s experi-
ence has acquainted him with the phenomenon of
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 307

“ truly religious souls” debarred from the commun-
ion of saints, not to say impelled toward the com-
munion of sinners, by what Renan calls “the narrow
judgments of the frivolous man.” The kindred phe-
nomenon resulting from the narrow and frivolous
judgments of the truly religious soul itself, is scarce-
ly less frequent. In New England, at any rate,
where the old Arian heresy redivivus has produced
such luxuriant intellectual fruit, it is not an infre-
quent occurrence to find the anxious seat filled with
candidates carefully conning the different “ confes-
sions,” the mind concentrated on the importance of
an intelligent and impartial selection, preliminary to
the satisfaction of the soul’s highest need. “The
experience of many opinions gives to the mind great
flexibility and fortifies it in those it believes the
best,” says Joubert. Nothing can be truer and
nothing more just than the high praise that has
been given to this remark. Butit is surely applic-
able to philosophy rather than to religion, and if ap-
plied to religious philosophy it should be read in
conjunction with that other and profoundly spiritual
saying of Joubert: “It is not hard to know God,
provided one will not force one’s self to define him ;”
or this: “Make truth lovely, and do not try to
arm her.”

The great word of religion is peace, and controversy
here, however practical it may be, is indisputably
provincial. Controversy has become so character-
istic of our sectarianism, itis believed in so sincerely,
308 FRENCH TRAITS

it is, in effect, so necessary as a protection against
the insidiousness of superstition, that one distrusts
its universal efficacy at his peril. No one, failing to
see how this must be so, can fail to observe that it
is in fact so when he contemplates many of the
manifestations of the controversial spirit in which
our society abounds. A not infrequent spiritual ex-
perience, for example, is this: a person of inbred
piety, infinitely attracted by the beauty of holiness,
comes in contact with the scientific and scrutinizing
spirit of the age. The unity of nature, the univer-
sal identity of her undertakings, which, as Thoreau
says, are “sure and never fail,” make a profound
impression on him. He is unable to credit or con-
ceive of their overruling to the end that spiritual
truth may be attested by thaumaturgy. He pays
dearly for his inability. It excludes him from fel-
lowship with spirits a thousand times more akin to
his own than he can find outside the doors guarded
by the flaming sword of an inflexible credo. He be-
gins, nevertheless, to adjust himself to his position.
Soon he proceeds to vaunt it, out of sheer self-re-
spect. His heart becomes hardened ; his intellect
freezes ; finally he finds a haven in a society for
ethical culture, whose cardinal tenet it is that the
Sermon on the Mount is too simple for application
to the immensely diversified needs of our complex
modern society. He may not have lost his own soul,
but he has certainly not gained the whole world,
nor any considerable part of it. The world stamps
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 309

him and his society as essentially provincial, and
turns with relief to the fellowship of quarters where-
in the beautiful and the good stand in no terror of
the tyranny of truth. From this variety of provin-
cialism, at least, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew
and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes have
done much to spare France, both in her religion and
her irreligion.

It would, indeed, be very difficult to persuade a
Frenchman visiting America of our good faith in
charging him with provincialism in any regard.
Every contrast with things French which meets his
eye must enforce his sense of our rudimentary and
undeveloped condition. He could not fail to find
our theatres, some of our churches, our conception
of his interest in cemeteries and penal institutions,
the transparent dresses of our women on undress,
and their high-necked “ gowns” on dress, occasions,
our diversified tastes in the matter of feminine bon-
nets and masculine beards, our bathing costumes
and manners, our lack of police efficiency, our cut-
sine, the attire and conduct of that immense class
among us in whom gentility is uneasily nascent, and
our categorical and serious defence of these and
scores of other peculiarities, exactly to be character-
ized by the epithet provincial. He would probably
be unabashed even by our “men of general informa-
tion”’—a product in which, perhaps, we may defy
competition. He would certainly maintain that in
France there are more people who have an academic
310 FRENCH TRAITS

and critical knowledge of “life” and character,
people whose judgments of the innumerable and
immensely varied phenomena of life and character,
of art and science, are independent without being
capricious. ‘The range within which these judg-
ments are restricted seems limited to you,” he would
assert, “mainly, perhaps, because yours is extended
into the region of triviality. Prices of every sort
from pictures to mess pork, railway time-tables,
tinkering, horse and dog lore, stitches, sports, the
mysteries of plumbing, old furniture, pottery marks,
in fact, all that desultory and fragmentary ‘ informa-
tion’ with which your as yet unsystematized strug-
gle with nature seems to encrust so many among
you, is what, on the contrary, we regard as really
limited and limiting. And, in general, a crystal-
lized and highly developed community seems pro-
vincial to the nomad and the adventurer, whether
he be a Bedouin or a Wall Street broker, because it
has traditions, local pride, public spirit, and organic
relations ; because, great or small, it is and stands
for something at once definite and complex, and is
not merely a part of the amorphous universe where
nothing is settled, where there is no code to sys-
tematize the general scramble, and where industry
and enterprise thrive at a tremendous cost to the
ensemble, and substitute a startling social chiaro-
oscuro for the just pictorial values of civilization.
Paris is ‘ provincial’ in the same way as your oldest
and maturest city is. Like Boston, it seems ‘pro-
THE PROVINCIAL SPIRIT 311

vincial’ to the New Yorker and the Chicagoan be-
cause it is so completely organic, because it is so
distinctly a community instead of being merely a
piece broken off the wide, wide world. The desert
of Sahara is not ‘ provincial ;’ as Balzac said, ‘It is
nothing and yet everything, for God is there and
man is not!’ You Americans strike us as unpro-
vincial, I may observe, mainly in this Sahara sense.”

At the same time—we may, I think, legitimately
rejoin—the catholic and cosmopolitan spirit which
leads Emerson to find not provincialism but “ char-
acteristic nationality” in Madame de Staél’s per-
emptory ‘‘Conversation, like talent, exists only in
France,” is probably rarer in France than in an en-
vironment where there is, if not more of God, at any
rate less of man.
IX
DEMOCRACY
DEMOCRACY

* Horace tells us,” says Gouverneur Morris, in a
letter from Paris to the Comte de Moustier, French
Ambassador to the United States, “that in grossing
the seas we change our climate, not our souls. But
Ican say what he could not, that I find on this side
of the Atlantic a strong resemblance to what I left
on the other—a nation which exists in hopes, pros- |
pects, and expectations.” This was in 1789, and
though of course each country has to-day fewer ex-
pectations to realize than it had then, an American
in France must still be impressed by the same cor-
respondence of national attitude—by the vivacious
and confident way of looking forward to the future
which the French people, and, perhaps, the French:
people alone, share with ourselves. Our own anima-|
tion is partly due, no doubt, to the fact which Carlyle
pointed out, namely, that we have “a great deal of
land for a very few people.” It is due also to our
belief in the American character. But it resembles
the analogous French elation in being also based
on confidence in democratic institutions. Demo- }
cratic institutions, however, may differ widely, and
it is undoubtedly the very considerable ,difference
316 FRENCH TRAITS

between our democracy and that of the French that
is responsible for our very popular error, which as-
sumes that their institutions are not really, and in so
far as they work easily and with promise of perma-
nence, democratic.institutions at all. That this error
is a little ridiculous does not, of course, prevent it
from being very widespread and very deeply rooted.
There is probably no country in which the French
Revolution is less understood than it is in America,

Its ideality first of all, I think, distinguishes
French tlemocracy from our own. Democracy is a
i creed, that is to say, with the French—a positive
cult rather than a working principle, a standard,
general test of particular measures. It is held
consciously and with conviction. It provokes en-
thusiasm. Its devotees have had to die for it. It
is not merely accepted as a matter of course, due
originally to the triumph of circumstances over. na-
tional characteristics, as was measurably the case
with us. Our government, it is true, was, as General
Collins aptly says, “the child of revolution nurtured
on philosophy.” But it is perfectly certain that, but
for Jefferson’s French philosophy, called then as
now, demagogic Quixotism, we should have had as
short-lived a democratic republic as Hamilton proph-
esied and endeavored to compass. Our next epoch
made a nation of us, and crystallized the spirit of
nationality in democratic form. But nothing is
more significant of the discredit into which democ-
| racy, as an ideal, has fallen among us than the way
DEMOCRACY 817

in which this formative period of the nation’s
growth has been obscured by the struggle with
slavery which immediately followed it, and during
which democracy, as an ideal, almost wholly disap-
appeared. Their interest in the preservation of
the rights of States allied the slaveholding aristoc-
racy with democratic philosophy, and the alliance
was disastrous. Democratic philosophy nearly per-
ished. It ceased to be propagated among “the
best people,” as they are called. It lost its hold on
the mass of intelligence, on the newspapers, on the
college graduates, on all those who had not an espe-
cial capacity for keeping their heads in the midst of
the excitement of a great national crisis, the right set-
tlement of which was infinitely more important than
the keeping of one’s head. Inter arma silent political
principles as well as laws. And though the laws may
resume their sway and supreme courts reverse their
decisions after the clash of arms has definitely died
away, political principles that have once lost cur-
rency have irretrievably lost credit also. Great men
may restore to them their popular validity. Had
Abraham Lincoln lived, perhaps the entire political
feeling of the country might have been different.
But erises only produce great men, and now-a-days
Lincoln’s lofty maxim has really become transformed
into “government of the people, for the people, by
‘the best people,’” as the political ideal of many of
our purest patriots; though it may be questioned if
in this form it will “‘make the tour of the world.”
318 FRENCH TRAITS

We have in large measure forgotten our heroic phi-
losophical genealogy. Our English character has
come to the surface again, and necessarily philoso-
phy gives place to casuistry.

Our democracy, indeed, was not, to begin with,
anything like ‘‘the child of revolution nurtured by
philosophy,” which the French democracy is. We
only suffered from political tyranny.. We did not

. rise also from social subjection. Mainly we had at
the outset merely the independent spirit, the native
Anglo-Saxon instinct for freedom—not the senti-
ment of equality and a philosophical belief in the

‘essential worthiness of man as man. Gouverneur
Morris, in 1790, prefers the English constitution to
the French, and one has only to think what the
English constitution, in 1790, was, to perceive the
significance of such a preference. And Morris was
by no means an unrepresentative American. And
the French constitution of 1790 was made by the
upper classes. It was through self-assertion that
we triumphed, whereas the French won their auton-
omy through the universal appeal of principle. And
they came thus to love the abstraction through
which they conquered—at first fanatically, and now
for a long time rationally ; whereas the democratic

| ereed never had the universal validity of an abstrac-

, tion to us, except to our philosophic minds, like Jef-

ferson, for example, and through them to our Dem-

‘ocratic party. Neither Federalist nor Whig ever

‘ thought of it as universal at all.
DEMOCRACY 319

Nor have their successors since. The great mass
of our people undoubtedly believe in democratic in--
stitutions for Americans, though undoubtedly an
important portion of our “ wealth and intelligence”
thinks our own altogether too democratic. But
many even of those whose politics are not merely
traditionary, would probably echo the general Anglo-
Saxon conviction, that institutions in themselves,
democratic or other, are unimportant, compared
with national character; that there is no abstractly
good kind of government, and that every people
should have the kind its own racial constitution and
its degree of development call for. We did, to be
sure, make one of the very boldest democratic ex-
periments that any society ever made during the Re-
construction period, but it hardly proceeded from
our faith in universal suffrage as a civilizing agent ; '
it was due rather, to use an extenuating epithet, to
political diplomacy, and it was really undemocrati- ;
cally imposed on an unwilling section by an impe- |
rious one. Probably the most popular cry now au-.
dible in strictly American political circles, is for the
regulation of immigration and naturalization, in or-
der that “ignorance and poverty ” may be fitted for
the suffrage, to the end that property may be more ,
secure, and “hidden and forbidden forces” less
powerful. Sound as this may be, it is a long way
from the democratic ideal as held and illustrated by
France. It is not consistent with an enthusiastic ,
subscription to the gospel of Liberty, Equality, Fra-
320° FRENCH TRAITS

ternity. Its tendency is rather in the direction of
such a democracy as that of slaveholding Athens (so
far as a parallel may be drawn between a nation of
'\” sixty millions of people and a community “at most
a subprefecture”), in which the democratic ideal
found expression mainly in an equality of the élite.
In fine, it must be evident to all close observers
that the ideal of government by “the best people”
is growing with us. It is by no means yet
triumphant, and in many instances it is so closely
associated with a pharisaical habit of mind, that
very likely our many publicans and sinners, who be-
lieve in democratic institutions at least for them-
selves, and as satisfying their individual instincts
of independence, will contrive to keep it perma-
nently under. The “masses” are solidifying, per-
haps, as fast as the “classes” crystallize, and
whereas it used to be our boast that our cities had
no “ populace,” and our country districts no “ peas-
antry,” we shall possibly have enough of both to
prevent the establishment of the ideal of govern-
ment by “the best people ””—by the people, that is
to say, who are doing their reckless utmost toward
the production of the American proletariat they so
abjectly dread. Of course in America, by “ the best
people,” we do not yet mean the richest ; we mean
very generally the most intelligent. Mr. Lowell,
for example, who courageously patronizes democracy
in England, and with equal courage castigates it at
home, affirms that “the duty of the more intelligent
DEMOCRACY 321

is to govern the less intelligent.” It is a matter)
mainly of color, perhaps, but I own to a feeling that
when Mr. Lowell, and indeed most of our publicists
who have cut themselves adrift from the aristocratic
party on questions of morals and taste rather than '
of political principles, praise the democratic creed,
what they are really thinking of is not ‘“ Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity,” but the New England town-
meeting of earlier and better days. The moment the
milieu becomes heterogeneous and uncolonial, their
democracy seems really to vanish in distrust of that
average man, respect for whom is the corner-stone
of the French democracy. Whenever, as in large
cities, elaborate political machinery with its atten-
dant evils becomes necessary, it is significant how
instinctively their minds turn to disfranchisement
asaremedy. No one has eulogized Lincoln more
sympathetically than Mr. Lowell, exercising his no-
ble poetic faculty. But it is difficult to fancy the
man who said “the Lord must love the common
people, he made so many of them,” laying much
stress upon the “duty of the intelligent to govern
the unintelligent.” And undoubtedly Mr. Lowell’s
crisp prose just now appeals to “the intelligent”
among us far more cogently than the looser demo-
cratic feeling of Lincoln. How many of our writers,
whose philosophic utterances have any credit, would
echo La Bruyére’s famous “ Faut-il opter? Je veux
étre peuple.” ,
Our democracy indeed shows its unideal quality }
21

 
322 ' FRENCH TRAITS

in no wise more clearly than in the exaltation thus
implied of character, national as well as individ-
jual, over institutions. We like our institutions,
‘in cases where we do not accept them with amused
resignation, because they suit us, because they give
us personal independence, because we can—some
of us—grow rich under them; and not at all be-
/eause per se we admire institutions, are attracted
by them, and believe in their universality. On the
other hand, it is the French notion that civilization
means the improving of character by institutions.
Mankind tends naturally to inequality. Inequal-
jity tends naturally to establish itself. Inequality
jis undemocratic and uncivilized. The only bulwark
jagainst it in the long run is the careful, systematic,
and minute formulation of political principles in the
light of reason, aided by experience, and their uni-
versal application as institutions to the society sub-
ject to their sway. To use a fanciful, but exact,
figure, whereas, thus, we regard institutions as anti-
septic, the French consider them as therapeutic.
Our democracy is a working hypothesis, establishing
the lines through which national and individual
‘character may work out their salvation. French
democracy is a positive and highly differentiated
system, designed for direct and active agency in the
securing of social well-being and political progress.
Each has, of course, its peculiar peril. For the lack
of institutions tending to secure equality—as di-
rectly as excise laws tend to promote temperance,
DEMOCRACY 323

anti-lottery laws to prevent gambling, anti-usury
laws to prevent extortion, and strict divorce laws to
promote chastity—our democracy is constantly
menaced by the growing heterogeneity of our
society, the geometrically increasing power of wealth,
culture, position. For the lack of the free play of
individual expansiveness and independence inherent
in systematic and effective organization, the French |
social democracy is in constant danger of losing its
political freedom. And the effect of the loss of \
political freedom on social democracy is one of
constant and subtle attrition.

I must say, however, I think the French are more
conscious of their danger than we are of ours, In-
deed, this particular one I have mentioned is the
only political peril concerning which we seem just
now to be displaying no anxiety whatever. Our
pessimists are optimistic on this point. But the
experience of France, in the difficulties of securing
and sustaining democracy, has been considerably
greater than our own. And this circumstance has
doubtless done much to strengthen, as well as to
sober, the ideality with which its mainly philosophic,
instead of mainly practical origin, endued it at the
outset, And the particular practical form which
this ideality takes on distinguishes French de-
mocracy from ours, in even greater measure than
does the positive spirit from which it proceeds. Its
great practical distinction, in a word, is that it is at
once popular and authoritative. We are accustomed
824 FRENCH TRAITS

to believe the two qualities incompatible. Author-
itative government is inseparable in our minds from
what is called paternal government, and we feel
that if government with us should show any par-
ticular authoritativeness, even in the way of greater
efficiency of administration, it would infallibly, to
just that extent, lose its popular character. But
when the popular character of a government is
secured, not by the cordial initiative of independent
individuals iispired by intelligently understood in-
‘terest, but by a natural enthusiasm for the demo-
cratic ideal, rationally interpreted and vigorously im-
posed, it is easy to see that it may be asauthoritative,
or even as intolerant, as it finds it effective to be,
without really sacrificing anything of its essentially
popular nature. No one can have lived in France,
at all events, since the establishment of the present
Republic, without observing how popular the govern-
ment is. Everyone talks politics. People every-
where are politically alive, however remiss they
may be about voting. One perceives a general in-
terest in active self-government. The difference be-
tween the political atmosphere in this respect and
that of England, for example, is very noticeable to
an American sense, and, so far as its influence
operates, makes an American feel far more at home
than in English society, where the political talk is
almost exclusively sentimental and apt to be con-
fined to the personal character of Mr. Gladstone,
and the national traits of the Irish. The press is as
DEMOCRACY 325

fundamentally democratic as the English press is
fundamentally contemptuous of popular ideas. It
is, moreover, quite as free. Personal privacy is the
only ground it may not invade. One notes that,
whereas English liberty, up to the Reform bills at
any rate, was individual rather than popular, the
individual left to do as he liked, even to the point
of “going to the devil hisown way,” with no voice
in the control of the society of which, indeed, it
was not recognized that he formed a part in the ab-
sence of substantial titles to recognition ; and,
whereas, even now, the voice many individuals have
is practically a ludicrously feeble one, and, to their
own stolid perceptions, often scarce worth the pains
of uttering at all, except for the purpose of “saying
ditto” to their respective Mr. Burkes, French ene
as it exists at present, works in entire and efficient
harmony with the social instinct. ,
The French canaiile itself enjoys much more con-
sideration than does ours, and the fact contributes
powerfully to the democratic homogeneity of society.
It is significant that, when such a born aristocrat as
M. Jules Simon has occasion to make a contemptu-
ous allusion to the canaille, he feels compelled in-
stantly to add: “Don’t be alarmed, I mean Ja
sainte canaille.” Certainly it would occur to no
English, and I doubt if to any American, publicist
of M. Jules Simon’s temperament and convictions,
to apologize sarcastically for calling the canaille the
canaille. And the reason is that in France the
326 FRENCH TRAITS

canaille has, in common with every other class of
society, received the advantages of long evolutionary
differentiation, so that it has of necessity developed
the qualities which create companionability. Its
coarseness and grossness are accordingly not shock-
ing, whereas, with us, the grossness and coarseness
are so great as to mislead us into a most unchristian
‘contempt for those who show them, and cause us to
‘imagine that what is really ignorance of the essential
‘moral and spiritual similarity of people, is a witness
\of a refined nervous organization. The French-
man’s nerves not being thus exasperated, do not
thus lead him to mistake snobbishness for sensitive-
ness. And being in this way, and for this reason,
less contemned, even the canaille in France becomes
inevitably less contemptible than the canaille- else-
where. Being—for cause—better liked, it becomes
in turn more likable. It is intelligent and con-
scious, and alive to its own interests. It has to
be reckoned with politically. It counts as a force.
It is not merely intractable and turbulent. It at-
tempts, at least, to. give its rioting an air of revolu-
tionary intention. It has even then a distinctly
political motive, and the idea of expending its force
in mere wanton marauding, after the Trafalgar Square
order, would seem absurd to it. Its demonstrations
at their worst are directed against what it believes
a tyrannical government; those who take part in
them talk about capturing the Hétel de Ville, or
marching on the Palais Bourbon; they do uot
DEMOCRACY 827

smash club windows, and attack casual pedestrians,
and loot shops. In brief, the canaille is serious,
It is very likely more dangerous for this reason to
the established order, but it certainly is a more.
healthful social element, from the democratic point
of view, than is either the supine and submissive
understratum of German, or the “ brutalized lower
class ” of English, civilization.

The attitude toward it, therefore, of that part of
the community whose property and position give it
contrary interests, is correspondingly different from
the attitude of the upper classes elsewhere. Else-
where the upper classes’ endeavor is to keep it down.
In France the analogous endeavor is better de-
scribed, in vulgar phrase, as an attempt to keep it
off. In France property and position are simply
engaged in the attempt to hold their own amid the
social warfare of clashing interests, according to,
the laws of the struggle for existence. They are,
not seeking to impose themselves on the less for-'
tunate and less powerful. They merely sustain |
their cause, their side, in the general democratic
parliament. Permanent domination is a dream
they certainly have not cherished since the abdi-
cation of Charles X. But what is still more impor- |

tant. to. note is that these extremes apart—the in-
lteritors of the old aristocratic tradition on the one
hand, and the canaille, so called, on the other—the
rest of the nation explicitly objects to a warfare of |
opposing interests, and cherishes the ideal of serving |
328 FRENCH TRAITS

\\the interests of the entire people as a people. ‘Le
Temps,” for example, is never tired of preaching this
doctrine. The burden of its daily message is that
it is unpatriotic to legislate in favor of any class,
even of the least privileged ; that to be a truly popu-
lar government the Republic should avoid espousing
the cause of the poor against the rich as strictly as
that of the rich against the poor ; that every class of
the community has its right to equal consideration,
and that the rule of the masses for the masses is as
illogical republicanism as that of the classes for the
classes would be. This is a lesson which ‘“ Le
Soleil” on the one hand, and “ L’Intransigeant” on
the other, no doubt find it hard to learn ; but save in
America, certainly nowhere else is it preached with
the same general acceptance, and nowhere else is its
practice so well secured by thoroughly positive as
well as thoroughly popular institutions. We have
an immense advantage from the democratic stand-
point in having no classes in the Kuropean sense, and
of a constant and easy passing from one into the

Vother of the two we do have. So far as classes,
therefore, are concerned we are more homogefeous,
taken in the mass, and politically considered, than
any other people in the world ; it is as individuals
that we illustrate such prodigious differences. With,
therefore, a comparative identity of interest, it is
comparatively easy for everyone to mean by “the
people” the whole people, rather than the peasant,
the ouvrier or the Tiers Etat even. How long this
DEMOCRACY 329

will last with us is, of course, problematical. The
wise words of Mr. Lincoln’s first annual message :
“There is no such relation between capital and la-
bor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a
free man being fixed for life in the condition of a
hired laborer. . . . The prudent, penniless be-
ginner in the world labors for wages for a while, saves
a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself,
then labors on his own account another while, and
at length hires another new beginner to help him ”
—these words are or were applicable to us, and are
little applicable anywhere else. To be exact, they
should have read “the prudent, penniless beginner
in America,” not “in the world.” In the world in
general the relation between labor and capital is
much more fixed. And, as I have already observed,
social differences among us are erystallizing and in:
creasing, and social differences mean very quickly
changed political atmosphere. But should our plu
tocracy establish itself, and the lines between such
classes as we have become in consequence more
closely drawn and less passable, we should ‘be very
fortunate, so far as the preservation of the democratic
spirit is concerned, if our well-to-do and our poor;
our educated and our ignorant, classes had the coe
mutual respect and tolerance which exist in France|
between the upper, middle, and lower classes. For
in France, these classes are cemented by the social
instinct and the democratic spirit into a whole,
which, if not possessed of identical interests, is, at
330 FRENCH TRAITS

least, composed of harmoniously balanced and equal-
ly recognized constituent elements. There is a cer-
tain advantage, indeed, in the comparative perma-
nence of the class situation in France. The ouvrier
who is always to be an ouvrier, the bourgeois or the
peasant who is always to remain such, as his fathers
did before and as his son will after him, is the more
interested in maintaining his dignity and asserting
his importance as ouvrier, bourgeois, or peasant ;
whence a manifest equilibrium in the regulation of
a society composed of necessarily unequal classes,
by the elastic compensating force of democratic
feeling. Personally the ouvrier is likely to count
less, of course, than where, as still with us, he may
hope to become a patron. But as a class he counts

; more ; and as a class our ouvriers are, as I said, rap-
idly tending to become “a class dangerously with-
out class self-respect—a class composed rather of
envious individuals soured by the loss of that op-
portunity which in a simpler situation their sires pos-

sessed. We shall then have Mr. Gladstone’s dem-
ocracy with its cry of ‘the classes vs. the masses ”—a
motto subscribed to at present neither by the French
nor ourselves. Class, in France no more than in
America, implies caste. ;

One hears a good deal about the French govern-
ment not being really a republic, about its being as
autocratic and as fond of tyrannical traditions as a
monarchy could be. But it must be admitted that
the reasons assigned for this conviction seem a
DEMOCRACY 881

little literal. Of course, if to have a large party.
within your borders which is opposed to a republi-
can form of government is, ipso facto, to be “a re-
public only in name,” the French Republic is open
to that reproach. But this very circumstance is a
sufficient justification for a good deal of the so-called
arbitrariness of the Republic’s action of recent years.
Only a pedant would be embarrassed by the logic
of the late Louis Veuillot, who remarked in defence
of ultramontanism, ‘“‘ When you are in power we de-
mand tolerance, because it is your principle ; when
we are in power we refuse it, because it is not ours.”
It is no party’s principle to the extent of tolerating
what would, if tolerated, do its utmost to come
the destruction of tolerance. The republican creed,
however superficially inconsistent it may seem, must
in its first article require subscription to the repub-
lican form as the necessary basis of toleration, of lib-
erty. A great deal of criticism of the Republic’s
action in removing the Orleanist princes from their
positions in the army, and in expelling pretenders,
found its way at the time into the American and
English press. But no country in the world would
for a moment tolerate an analogous formal and
avowed conspiracy within its borders. Does any-
one suppose that if Lord Wolseley should declare
his preference for a republic, and should devote him-
self to a propagandism in the British, equivalent to
that of the Orleans princes some years ago in the
French, army, he would remain a day in the royal
332 FRENCH TRAITS

service? Why, because a republic is professedly
more tolerant than any other form of government,
it should therefore be the less, rather than the more,
entitled to regard self-preservation as its first law,
isa mystery. It is, moreover, a mystery we should
find it more difficult to explain now than we might
have done before the trials of the German, Polish,
and English anarchists in Chicago, and of their
truculent and ridiculous spokesman, Most, in New
‘York. But, it is said, we are distinguished for our
wise and sober capacity to wait for the ‘“ overt act,”
before we punish its incitement. This is no longer
quite true; but, aside from the ridiculousness of
such delay when the “overt act” has been shown
by experience to be certain to follow its incitement,
it really behooves us to acknowledge that recent
events have shown our disposition to go quite as far
in the way of repression as the French Republic
does, if we had the same temptation, rather than to
dwell complacently on our superior republican con-
sistency. Teally, the difference between ourselves
and the French here is only that which proceeds
from the excess of their state action over ours. And
what is really extraordinary in the case of the pres- ”
ent Republic is, that the logic of republican tol-
erance has so completely counteracted the tenden-
cy to tyranny springing naturally from excessive
state action. The tyranny of the government has
in no instance, I imagine, exceeded, if indeed it
has equalled, the party tyranny which our present
DEMOCRACY B30

tariff and our theory of a civil service produce
among us.

The danger of democracy is always despotism, it
is true ; but it should always be borne in mind that
this despotism means popular, not at all oriental
despotism, as pessimists presume. Universal suf-
frage gets impatient with parliamentarism whenever
any political shoe really pinches, and wishes to as-
sert itself directly. We have ourselves passed
through at least one such peril, since Hamilton’s
hope of a limited monarchy to succeed our initial
republican institutions perished at the hands of
practical pioneer good sense. I mean, of course,
the third term movement in favor of that one of our
presidents who was most conspicuously a civic fail-
ure. Democracy has precisely this practical peril.
Publicists who are especially terrified at it do well
not to be democrats. And France has seemed often
to “need a strong hand to govern her,” as political
sciolists are so fond of saying, only because she has,
since the Revolution, at all events, been so deter-
minedly and persistently democratic. The demo-
cratic instinct is in France too imperative and too
irreflective to consider consequences when any un-
popular régime is in power—to consider the re-
sults of confounding nominal distinctions, such as
Democratic Republic, Constitutional Monarchy,
Party Government, ete.

When Morris and others, during the Revolu-
tion, prophesied that the first Republic would end in
334 FRENCH TRAITS

a despotism, they were arguing from historical pre-
cedent, and prophesying an altogether different kind
of despotism from that of Napoleon. It is amusing
to note the complacency with which these prophets
speak afterward of the fulfilment of their predictions
in this regard. What they really predicted was the
rise of an autocrat like the Russian Czar, or the Ro-
man Emperors—of such a tyrant as Napoleon was
contemporarily believed to be in England, where
nurses used his name to frighten children with ;
whereas, of course, instead of being essentially reac-
tionary, Napoleon was in many ways what he called
himself, and what the national temper compelled him
to be, “the incarnation of the Revolution,” and Em-
erson’s representative democrat. The despot Morris
foretold would hardly have denounced England as an
oligarchy. Nor, in spite of his Corsican vulgarity,
which made him do so much grosso modo, did he at-
tempt the rédle of Augustus—who passes with many
of our political philosophers now-a-days for a kind
of excellent and worthy constitutional monarch—
and endeavor to realize in any completeness the
panem et circenses ideal of government. And when
we wonder at the resignation with which France ac-
cepted the coup @état of 1851, we forget that it
was in some sense a popular move ; that it appealed
to the people for its justification, and that at all
events it was the overthrow of the reactionary,
which had succeeded a visionary, Chamber. More-
over, the plébiscites of the latter part of Napoleon
DEMOCRACY 335

IIL’s reign were so one-sided not so much because
the voters were terrorized and corrupted as because,
in the first place, the régime was extremely demo-
cratic in almost every respect except that of admin-
istrative centralization, and because, in the second
place (and this is too often lost sight of), there was
nothing positive and definite for those who did not
wish to vote “yes ” to vote for ; voting “no,” under
the circumstances, was like voting in the air. In
other words, the régime was less tyrannical, and
France less inert and ductile, than is usually as-
sumed to have been the case.

One of the commonest of errors is to confuse
state action with centralization. The two are suffi-
ciently distinct, however practically they may be
related and reciprocally imply each other. It isa
commonplace that state action—which is another
name for authoritative government—is, as a social
principle, a question of degree. Matthew Arnold
—whose political-and social observations will cer-
tainly some day obtain the recognition hitherto de-
-nied them by our Anglo-Saxon inability to conceive
of sound social and political criticism as emanating
from the Nazareth of mere culture—has very well
expressed the gist of the matter in his remark:
“ Some things the state had better leave alone, others
it had better not.” ven in America we acknowledge
the efficacy of police. And we are beginning to
speculate as to whether railroads and telegraph lines
would not be better managed on the principle
336 FRENCH TRAITS

which governs postal arrangements than if left in
their present oppressive anarchy. We are, in fact,
approaching a stage of development which makes it
possible for us to recognize that the principle of
state action has something to say for itself. The
late Mr. Washburne, Minister to France in 1870-71,
mentions in his “ Recollections” that Napoleon IIL.
expressed to him—and one can easily fancy the
solemnity with which that potentate made the con-
fession—“ his regret that the French people were
not better fitted for more liberal institutions, and
for the concessions he desired to make to them.
The great trouble with the French, he said, was
that they always looked to the government for
everything, instead of depending upon themselves.”
Our philanthropists who are anxious to reduce the
Treasury surplus by preventing the people of the
Southern States from depending upon themselves
for popular education, would doubtless object to
the Emperor's implication here; but most Ameri-
cans, probably, would be only too ready to admit
the demoralizing effects of state action on the initi-
ative and self-respect of a democracy. And we may
be very right in the main and still, so far as purely
independent criticism is concerned, err in looking
too exclusively at one side of the shield of state ac-
tion, especially as regards its working in France.
Napoleon III. was certainly very right, as well as
very courteous, in uttering his commonplace ;. but
at the same time it might have been replied to him,
DEMOCRACY 337

in the first place, that one reason for the French
being “‘ unfitted for more liberal institutions” was
their necessity for an army, and the use to which an
army could be put by unscrupulous usurpers in de-
priving them of such liberal institutions as they
were fitted for ; and, secondly, that there is no real
contradiction between fitness for liberal institutions
and the habit of “looking to the government” for
many things which “the government” can best
compass and supply.

The fact is that we are as likely to underestimate
the salutary efficiency of official action as the French
are that of private enterprise ; government, of course,
is a constant quantity and, as has often been sug-
gested, there is as much of it, on the hither side of
anarchy, when it is hap-hazard and irresponsible as
when it is organized. From the democratic point
of view, one of the best effects of state action in a
society hampered, like that of France, by the re-
mains of feudalism, is the abolition of privilege by
law. The relations between absence of state action
and privilege are closer and more direct than we'
imagine. In England, for example, where the privi-
leges of the privileged classes form a part of that
Constitution so greatly extolled as a growth and
not a device, minute state regulations, codes, etc.,
are easily dispensed with, because the strong can/
readily get along without them, and because only
the strong are accounted worthy—and by a nat-
ural consequence alone are so in reality, perhaps.

22
338 FRENCH TRAITS

With us opportunity has hitherto rendered privi-
lege less important than it is anywhere else ; but
where competition is at all close, privilege—which
is no more an artificial product than original sin—
flourishes with a Iusuriance as natural and logical
as it is excessive. In France, where such opportu-
nity.as ours is necessarily lacking, the democratic
instinet requires that its absence be supplied in a
thousand ways and details by law, by regulations,
by a minute explicitness of administration. The
fact that in France it costs a tenant three cents to
drive a defacing nail into a landlord’s wood-work is,
it, is easy to see,.a democratic provision in a highly
organized society where nail-driving is important.
What is liberty, exclaims M. Scherer, but a regula-
tion and adjustment of warring interests. Tenny-
son would reply that it is a result arrived at merely
by permitting a man to “speak the thing he will.”
But this is, if not fustian, clearly elementary ; and so
we statements of ours like: “The measure of every
man’s rights is another’s wrongs.” What is gained
from the social and democratic point of view if, in the
former case, social tyranny (which is really a polit-
ical result) is so exaggerated as to make politieal lib-
arty (which is really a political agent) futile ; and if,
in the latter, a man’s rights receive a merely nega-
sive authorization for exercise in vacuo, so to speak,
or else another’s wrongs are measured by tradition-
wy standards which fail to note the degree of wrong
upparent to the instinctive sense of reason and jus-
DEMOCRACY °- 339

tice? In spite of these commonplaces, we are
obliged to acknowledge that, however good political
economy the principle of Iaisser faire may be, in the
matter of political and social organization it is a
principle very speedily transformed into the princi-
ple of laisser aller. And in a democracy like that
of France which is not rendered elastic by opportu-
nity this means anarchy. Where an active and in-
telligent proletariat is comparatively permanent on
the one hand, and takes the place of a “ brutalized
lower class” on the other, the feeling that society
needs _ protection against the individual rather than
the converse is quickly developed. The proletariat
comes quickly to share it, and tends in consequence
to socialism. The feeling is carried so far in France
that it sometimes seems, for example, as if French
jurisprudence.itself contemplated the punishment of
the innocent with more resignation than the escape
of the guilty. And even in this excess it is not an
autocratic, but a democratic, feeling. The sense
that you are protected is much greater in France
than either in England or among ourselves.
Centralization is so much another thing that one
may indeed ascribe to it, rather than to authorita-
tive and elaborate state action, the lack of individual
initiative and dependence on one’s self which so
deeply distressed Napoleon IM. in the French.
When elaborate state action is democratic rather
than paternal, when it means simply systematic at-
tention to social administrative needs; when, that
340 FRENCH TRAITS

is to say, it is not Prussian, but French, it tends, per-
haps we may say, to develop rather than counteract
individual activities of a high, by preventing the ne-
cessity for those of a low, order. For example, a
man who is restrained by “ officialism ” from jump-
ing for ferry-boats, or crossing railway-tracks in
front of coming trains, can release for more positive.
uses some of the alertness he would otherwise be
forced to keep under tension to the mere end of
continued existence. However, the privilege of
looking out for one’s self in all such instances—and
they are more numerous and varied than we are apt
to remember—forms so precious a part of an Amer-
ican’s personal liberty, that it would very likely be
unwise to insist on this point. As to the effect of
centralization on individual initiative, there can, I
think, at any rate, be no doubt. Its warmest advo-
sates agree in this with its severest critics. Even
under democratic auspices, and when it is of the
most loyally representative character, it means in-
avitably government “ for” but not “by” the people,
and its liability to abuse is self-evident. It is advo-
sated by French democrats mainly because “it is a
sondition and not a theory” that confronts them, to
quote the admirable expression of President Cleve-
and, The cardinal necessity for France, in view of
shis condition, is to be strong. It is as true now as
t was during the Revolution—not as true material-
y, but as true morally—that, as Gouverneur Morris
said, “‘ France has an enemy in every prince.” It is
DEMOCRACY 341

this enmity—betrayed every week in the Liberal
London “ Spectator,” even, which long ago wrote a
famous article entitled “The Fall of the French Re-
public “that makes it necessary for France, so far
as her attitude toward Europe is concerned, to be a
unit and a powerful one. This was the reason why
Gambetta permitted the first serious breach in the
Republican ranks, and suffered the schism of the Clé-
menceau Radicals. He contested M. Clémenceau’s
statesman-like contention that the time had come to
consider internal politics, and that decentralization
within certain limits would immensely stimulate in
modern France the moral qualities which built the
cathedrals and made the communes of the Middle
Ages what they were. He believed that centraliza-
tion alone could so weld together politically the var-
ious peoples that compose the French nation—the
Norman with the Gascon, the Breton with the Tour-
angeau, the Provencal with the Lorrain—as to keep
the traditional French position in Europe, menaced
as this was by the anti-democratic European forces
marshalled against it, from the reactionary hostility
of united Germany to the traditional Tory distrust
of Great Britain. We may be pleased that his resi-
dence in the United States, perhaps, confirmed M.
‘Clémenceau in his radical belief in the panacea of
local self-government, without presuming to decide
between two such political philosophers and prac-
tical statesmen as Gambetta and himself. And we
may wish that the condition of Europe—aggravated
342 FRENCH TRAITS

by the barbarous seton which Prince Bismarck, in
taking from France her eastern frontier, inserted in
the European flank—did not so terribly complicate
the problem of French internal progress, without
failing to recognize that if centralization has marred
the welfare, it has largely achieved the greatness, of
that France which finds it impossible to conceive of
welfare apart from greatness. But we may be sure, at
all events, that decentralization would not mean aban-
dJonment of state action in France, and that local,
would not imply individual, self-government there.

In a very noteworthy passage of what are curiously
ralled his theological writings, Matthew Arnold char-
icterizes France as a brilliant and attractive Ishmael,
und exclaims in his happiest scriptural vein : “How
often for France has gone up the cry, ‘ Oh that Ish-
nael might live before the Lord,’” maintaining that
ust at the moment when the French Ishmael seems
succeeding he breaks down notably, and the homely
[saac gets the succession. I dare say this is so, with
xertain reservations, But what must strike one most
n the history of this brilliant Ishmael is his prodig-
ous success, and not his breakings down at all,
Kven his occasional utter collapses such as I sup-
yose Mr. Arnold considered the disasters of Louis
XIV.’s later days, of 1815, of L’année terrible, fail,
{ think, to impress the imagination as vividly as
tis astonishing recuperative power; and, indeed,
the most terrible of his “disasters” seems hardly
DEMOCRACY 343

to outweigh the corresponding benefit accompany-
ing or soon succeeding it. So that. the average of
success resulting from Ishmael’s amazing activity
seems still high. What experiences he has of sick-
ness and health, of heroic treatment for obstinate
ills, of long periods of vigorous activity, of extremes
of all sorts, of sensations of all kinds! Beside his
varied and full existence, the peaceful and placid
hibernation of “the homely Isaac ” across the Chan-
nel, dreaming of the victory of the hedgehog over
the hare, presents certainly a less striking object
to the imagination. But Ishmael’s admitted suc-
cess so far predominates over his failures and his
“breakings down!” Iam perfectly willing to agree
with Mr. Arnold that “a little more Biblism would
do him no harm.” But how he triumphs over this
lack, I say, is the striking thing about him, and the
explanation of his doing so is one of the most inter-
esting facts in connection with him. If, in spite of,
his lack of Biblism, he is so successful, it must bei
either that we overestimate the importance of Bib- .
lism, or else that his institutions are particularly |
adapted to bring him success, Either character |
counts less than ordinarily we think it does, or in-
stitutions count more.

And if we examine into the matter closely we
shall find that just in so far as institutions affect a
people, the French are eminently successful, and :
that just in those qualities which no institutions:
can touch in people to affect them in any way, the!
344 FRENCH TRAITS

French fail. Institutions may be taken by exten-
sion to mean all the formulated instincts which the
people of a nation possess in common. They have
a great, a prodigious, direct effect in determining the
national expression, the national character. They
have only an indirect association with individual
character and expression. Hence we find the French
nationally very strong, very conspicuously successful.
In individual character the homely Isaac may have
charms for us of an enduring attractiveness, to which
no Ishmaelite brilliancy and vivacity can pretend.
But to anyone who has really seen their working, any.
doubt of. the essential wisdom of French institutions,
or any query as to whether the national expression
which they embody is not far in advance of any na-
tional expression elsewhere illustrated in Europe, is
impossible. From nearly every point of view, cer-
tainly, France strikes an American sense as success-
ful. There is by general admission more happiness
enjoyed by more people in France than in any other
European country. Well-being is more evenly dis-
tributed there. Henry IV.’s measure of national
success, namely, a fowl in every man’s pot, is more
nearly attained there than anywhere else. In France °
there is nothing analogous to the famous East End
of London ; even Paris has no “slums.” The people,
from top to bottom, is far more perfectly humanized
than elsewhere. Equality has been such a practical
educator for them that even the ignorant have at-
tained that intelligence which is the end of formal
DEMOCRACY 345

education in greater measure than the correspond-
ing classes of the most highly educated portions
of Prussia itself. Fewer emigrants leave the most
overcrowded regions, and ‘these almost never with-

out hope of return. The attraction France has for

Frenchmen is something of which we can form no

adequate notion. Everything French suits szacily)
every Frenchman. Life is a larger thing, or, at any:
rate, people in general are more alive—not nervously
and feverishly, as we are apt tc to fancy from the nov-
els, but freely and expansively. As to French liter-
ature, art, and science, the elegant side of social life,

the characteristics which go to make a nation ad-
mired and envied abroad, there is clearly no need to
insist on this element of the contemporary success
of France. She is no longer la grande nation to any

but her own citizens, but that is not because she has

diminished, as one is constantly hearing from super-

ficial foreign critics as well as from French fatuity

itself, but because her preponderance has disap-

peared with the rise in the modern world of other
nations. She has herself contributed so much to
this result that she can hardly realize that it has act-
ually taken place. But because there are now a
united Germany, and a united Italy, and the United
States of America in the world, and a Radical party
in England, and so on, it is only a frivolous notion
to suppose that France has stood still any more than
ever these last fifteen years in national development,
or has become internationally a figure of any less
346 FRENCH TRAITS

real and serious attractiveness and importance. She
is no longer the arbiter of Europe, but that was a fuc-
titious success which was in many ways a drawback
to her real hold on foreign minds; she is much
more attractive to serious strangers when bearing
Victor Hugo from the Are de Triomphe to the Pan-
théon than when confiscating his books atthe Belgian
frontier. Her internal. development since the Re-
public has been far greater than most persons who
are strangers to any close study of contemporary
politics are apt to suppose; we all know about M.
Ferry’s Tonquin failure, for example, but very few
of us know anything of his work for popular educa-
tion.

French democracy does not practically date from
the Revolution. The Revolution awakened it into
consciousness, imbued it with ideality, saturated it
with sentiment, and endued it with efficient force.
But democracy, in the form of the social instinet in-
directly but powerfully shaping political action, is

‘in France nearly as old as the nation itself. But

for it the despotism of Louis XIV. never would have
been prepared by Richelieu and Mazarin ; but for
it indeed, Louis XI. would never have checkmated
his vassals. The democratic spirit sapped the
strength of the Fronde as surely as the autocratic
turbulence of the English barons won Magna Charta
from King John, who was a tyrant of the Byzantine
rather than the Greek order and had no representa-
tive character whatever. In estimating the natural
DEMOCRACY 3847

independence of spirit as regards government ex-
hibited by different peoples, persistency in the face
of discouragement affords as good a measure of in-
tensity, indeed, as the actual gain in specific liber-
ties, which is more generally taken as the standard.
In fact, it may be a better measure of the natural
tendency toward independence, for success in
achieving liberty increases the love of it, and so the
original force which secures it is increased by its
attainment in a way almost to be described as me-
chanical. Now, the French in their communal revolts
of the twelfth century demanded for their separate
cities very much the reforms which in the Revolu-
tion they demanded for the whole of France.
Against full success then the nobles were arrayed ;
against the retention of what gains were accorded
by the crown stood the lack of unity of law and of a
jurisdiction to which all should be alike subject, as
had been the more favorable condition of England
from the time of the Conquest, when the Conqueror
brought the Norman talent for administration to
bear on Saxon anarchy. Astill more hostile element
was the very sense of solidarity in the people, a
sense greatly quickened by the influence of the
crown and the church in conjunction—the crown
working to combat the disintegrating and German
spirit of separatism and the independence of the
nobles, the church contending against the tendency
to relapse into barbarism and the decay of faith.
This joint effort of church and crown indeed is def-
348 FRENCH TRAITS

initely traceable from the time of Charlemagne, and
in germ even from the invasion of the barbarians;
and it found its culmination under Louis XTV., when
the-nobles were definitively conquered by the crown
and the Reformation by the church. Meantime the
French people, in helping to overcome the nation-
ally disintegrating movement which the Reformation
in effect was, erected the church into a tyrant such
as it had never been before, and lost their civil
liberties to the crown before the tyrannizing nobles,
against whom the crown was fighting their fight,
were entirely subdued. The attachment to liberty
of a people thus cheated of it by circumstances of a
fatal perversity—circumstances which but for the
Conqueror’s earlier and consequently less rigorous
centralization, might have triumphed over English
energy as well—naturally became fanatical in its
intensity when the burden of despotism became at
once intolerable and absurd. Nothing so well as
its evolution explains the very extravagances of the
Revolution—the utopia of ’89, the Terror of ’93.
Only by forgetting their history is it possible to talk
glibly of the French as unfitted by nature for self-
government, And, indeed, one would think someé-
times that the works of Augustin Thierry, instead
of being as accessible in English as in French, had
never been written at all.

Nus sumes homes cum il sunt ;
Tex membres avum cum il unt,
DEMOCRACY 349

Et altresi granz cors avum,
Et altretant sofrir poiim ;
Ne nus faut fors cuer sulement,

sings the Roman de Rou in the twelfth century.
When the Déclaration des Droits de ’Homme, which
has the same inspiration, was written, the ‘‘cuer’””
was supplied.

It is, moreover, important to remember that when
we speak of self-government and democracy as
identical, and of self-government as a peculiarly
Anglo-Saxon institution, we lose an essential dis-
tinction in vagueness. The only sense in which
self-government is exclusively Anglo-Saxon, in the
view of continental critics—both those who extol
and those who distrust it—is the sense of private
rather than official government. Its maxims are
“the state had better leave things alone,” and “the
best government is that which governs least.” But
manifestly, when we think of self-government as
government by trusts, corporations, and newspapers,
or by what Professor Huxley calls a ‘‘ beadleocracy,”
the term appears euphemistic. What we really |
mean by self-government, when we praise it intelli- |
gently, is either representative government or else!
local self-government — “‘home-rule,” as we say.
Local self-government is, as every American must’
believe, an admirable institution as it works with
us; but clearly it has not the universality of a prin-
ciple, and if, when we say that self-government is a
lofty ideal, we really mean that it is a good thing
Fa a aad

350. FRENCH TRAITS

for a village community to elect its own selectmen,
or for a city to be independent of a State legislature,

, we shall certainly say it with less emotion. Repre-

sentative government is also a splendid piece of po-
litical machinery, but in itself it is machinery. Nor
is it by any means necessarily democratic. Every-
thing depends on the degree and character of rep-
resentation,

Of recent years especially, ‘representative gov-
ernment” has become one of the hardest worked
elements of our inveterate Anglo-Saxon self-laud-
ation. Glimmerings of it are discovered in the
twilight of the Teutonic genesis, with an assiduity
curiously oblivious of the fact that it gains its
practical significance only from its application
to a Third Estate then in the womb of time and
since developed by the rise and decay of feudalism
with its result of social differentiation. And yet
if the East End of London could read, it would
no doubt be as proud of the pre-Norman Witenage-
mote as Mr. Freeman. But here again history

' shows how easy it is to mistake names for things.

History shows that representative government
properly so-called has been no more the ally of
democracy than it has been of national unity. It
was really born in Europe in the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries in consequence of the great popu-
lar movement of the communes. The circumstance
that the Third Estate was first represented (for
special reasons and through special causes) in Ara-
DEMOCRACY 351

gon, next in France, and last of all in England and
Germany—the matter of precedence, that is to say
--is comparatively trivial, though the small amount
of disturbance it created in France indicates how
slight was the change there which it involved, and
therefore how thoroughly in accord with the spirit
of the whole nation was the movement it stands
for.. The important consideration is that the move-
ment was general, European, and popular. It de-
clined in France and Spain and increased in Eng-
land, so that it died under Philip IV. and Louis
XII, just as it reached a splendid climax in the Eng-
lish struggle against the Stuarts. But it declined
in France because the foe which destiny, in the way
I have already recalled, raised up to the noblesse
was despotism—because the king made himself
the leader of the popular party and the personifica-
tion of national unity, just as the tyrants of the
Greek cities did in the contest between the people
and their oligarchies. No despot was ever more
* representative ” than Louis XIV. declared himself
in the famous phrase, “L’Etat, c’est moi.” It re-
sumed its sway, sanctioned, secured, and modified
by the Revolution, after the monarchy ceased to
represent its cause under Louis XV., and the
“deluge ” issued in constitutional government of a
real, that is to say, a written kind fortified and
guaranteed by a code. In England, on the other
hand, owing its popularity to its sympathy with the
feudal caste notion of contract, it developed because
352 FRENCH TRAITS

the Third Estate, never concerned about associating
political power to political freedom, passed into the
control of a powerful set of allied nobles ; and the
politics of the country speedily became a contest
between a Tory and a Whig aristocracy—repre-
sentative government being the weapon of each,
and used as the instrument of popular oppression
to this day, when it gives Lord Lonsdale forty liv-
ings and the Duke of Westminster half the West
End of London.

In a word, history shows that representative gov-
ernment is, in the first place, not in itself a talis-
man, and, in the second, that though it tends in
great measure to promote liberty, it easily may be,
and in England has been, used to subvert equality
and fraternity. Hence the wisest eulogists of Eng-
land refrain from extolling it as a talisman, affect
to disregard “institutions” of all kinds as anything
other than the outward signs of progress really ac-
complished through force of character, preferring
1640 to 1688, for example, and rightly attributing
every English political step ahead to moral causes.
But this is not at all the case with the French,
whose turn for ideas and intelligence naturally leads’
them to invent civilizing agencies instead of relying
on the hap-hazard in this field. An important ele-

! ment in the French character, indeed, is precisely
' this confidence in the virtue of philosophic organi-
zation—in what we are apt to stigmatize as “ paper
constitutions,” scientific pedantry, and “revolution-
DEMOCRACY 353

ary methods” generally. It is just as paradoxical
to accuse the French of leaving out of the account
the complexity and perversity of human nature in
their mathematical and rule and compass political
philosophy, as it is superficial to assert that their
national character unfits them for self-government—
for the democratic institutions which history proves
they have won in the face of difficulties that would
infallibly have discouraged a-less determined and
inveterate “democratic national instinct. It is all |
very well to talk about the advantages of perso- }
nal liberty sanctioned by character and the capac- |
ity for self-government (meaning by self-govern- :
ment either the absence of institutions or what we
call “home-rule ”), but how irrational is it to re-
proach a people whose character is such that they |
are disinclined to dispense with institutions and -
centralization, whose society is so highly developed, \
so organic and solidaire that the limitation of one
man’s rights by another man’s wrongs occurs far
more quickly than elsewhere—how irrational is it, |
I say, to reproach such a people with failing to con-
sider ‘“‘man’s nature as modified by his habits,”
when their habits have no special sanction for them
and, so far as they are inveterate, are in harmony
with nature—whose habit it is, in a word, to con-
sider reason rather than habit! If it is the French
nature to believe in theories, theories rather than the
anomalies and systems of checks in which they do
not believe should predominate in their institutions."
23
354 FRENCH TRAITS

How idle is it to commiserate them for their insta-
bility, when not stability but flux is their ideal!
With us instability would doubtless be very dis-
astrous (though we can easily see how a little of it
would benefit our English kin), because we ourselves
look upon it as a destructive and disintegrating
agent, not as a condition of progress—quite aside
from the additional reason arising from the fact that
we were born in the butterfly state, so to speak,
whereas the French still are, to a degree, enmeshed
in the filaments of their ecclesiastical and civil chrys-
alis of feudality.

This is why we quite misconceive the revolution-
ary spirit, as exemplified in French history. The
revolutionary spirit, as thus exemplified, is as differ-
ent from the rebellious and turbulent spirit as it is
\from the spirit of submission and servility. It is
‘the reforming and revising instinct. It delights in
making over everything, in carrying out new ideas,
in taking a new point of view. It has invariably a
programme. It disbelieves in the sanctity of the
status quo because its instinct is to press forward.
It believes, for the same reason, in experiment, in
essay, effort, intention. It is restlessly constructive.
It is scientific rather than sentimental. It aims at
administering rather than governing. When in
reply to Louis XVIth’s “C’est done une révolte?”
the Duc de Liancourt answered: “Non, Sire, c’est
une révolution,” he meant something very different
from a revolt on a very large scale, and likely for
DEMOCRACY 355

that reason to be successful. He was prophesying
an organic change, the disappearance of the old
order before the rise of the new. Revolution, in
fine, with the French, means largely change of ad-
ministration, not the subversion of order which we:
fancy it to mean with them, and which it would’
mean with any people who regard not social (or.
civil) but political law as the basis of the established -
order and the condition of civilization. The two.
points of view are very different, and spring respect-|
ively from the individual spirit anxious for freedom
from constraint, and the social instinct concerned
about effective organization, and therefore bent on
changing the organic, rather than disobeying the
statutory, law. The state being regarded as the
most important instrument of civilization, a truly
democratic people like the French is naturally pre-
disposed to revolutions whereby it may get posses-
sion of an administration which it believes either
tyrannical or ineffective—which is, for any reason,
unpopular; whereas, trusting solely to individual in-
itiative for civilizing agencies, it is far easier for
Anglo-Saxondom quietly to await a revolution of
the Duke of Wellington’s kind—that is to say, a
revolution which is no revolution at all, and which
involves a delay that has undoubtedly caused untold
misery to the people of England, however serenely
Tennyson may celebrate the slow broadening down
from precedent to precedent, and however com-
fortably “The Saturday Review” may sneer at the

 
356 FRENCH TRAITS

searching and lofty criticism of such works as Mr.
Whiteine’s “The Island.” To “hold a fretful
realm in awe” is not, in a word, considered in
France the only or the main function of “the com-
mon sense of most.”

Nor does the French revolutionary spirit conflict
with what we ordinarily mean by respect for law,
and it is quite erroneous to imagine, from their po-
litical tumultuousness, that in general the French
have less of this than ourselves. On the contrary,
they have considerably more of it, as, inconsistently,
we frequently attest when we have an opportunity to
accuse them of being “‘slavish” in this regard. The
deference for authority shown in conduct is as great
as that witnessed for public opinion in the matter
of individual ideals of all sorts. Demeanor which
we describe as outrageous is with the French not
permis. There is nothing corresponding to the lynch
law established en permanence in some of our com-
munities that are by no means to be called
“pioneer sections.” Purely social disturbances
never reach the degree of violence indicated in the
existence of White Caps and similar organizations.
No one carries a revolver. No individual—no cor-
poration even—ever “defies the law.” Such riots
as the Cincinnati outburst some years ago over
the continued miscarriage of justice, do not occur.
Labor troubles, however marked by turbulence and
even bloodshed on occasion, do not result in such
subversion of order as the Pittsburgh riots of 1877.
DEMOCRACY 857

The confidence one feels in freedom from the perils
of darkness and unsavory neighborhoods, from
molestation or annoyance, is quite sensible to the
American in Paris, and is certainly attributable
rather to the ingrained law-abidingness of the peo-
ple than to the perfection of the Paris police sys-
tem. It need hardly be added that this respect and
regard spring rather from the sense of conformity
than that of subjection. During the Commune of
1871, which we always think of as a “Saturnalian ”
riot, private property, if it was not perfectly safe,
went at all events extraordinarily unmolested. The
very cry that “the people” should be permitted to
be their own police was as ideal as it was absurd.
The license that reigned in many respects was by no
means brigandish and disorderly. It was the in-
evitable concomitant of attempting to execute the
wild notion that order could be preserved by good
will as well as by organization. The “government”
still administered and directed the Théatre Frangais,
for example. And in fine, theoretically speaking
and except for the inevitable laxity accompanying
the overturning of the established order, respect for
law was essentially undiminished. The burning of
the Tuileries was the work of despair and an in-
cident of the Commune’s death agony ; but the over-
throw of the Vendéme column was a very decorous
and solemn—solemn in the sense of solennel—
proceeding.

A good deal of the turbulence of the Revolution
358 FRENCH TRAITS

we misunderstand in the same way, from mistaking
the proper point of- view. Hven as hostile a critic
of the Revolution as Gouverneur Morris, totally
out of sympathy with every effort for reform that
did not imply the adoption of English institutions,
whose “Diary” hardly mentions any of the great
popular leaders except Mirabeau, and testifies to a
curious unconsciousness of the great movement go-
ing on about him outside of boudoirs and salons, is
less impressed by the popular violence than we are
apt to be, because he was inevitably better oriented.
He enjoyed the truth of impressionism, and wasat all
events not misled by a factitious perspective. “Free-
dom and tranquillity are seldom companions,” he
‘observes with characteristic sententiousness, and he
considers the capture of the Bastille “an instance of
great intrepidity ”—which is valuable testimony to
contemporary feeling. Much of the violence of the
Revolution was animated by a certain loftiness of
political purpose, even when exasperated by a situa-
tion typified in the spectacular contrast of starving
Paris and feasting Versailles. Excess loses a cer-
tain element of its viciousness when it is indulged
in by temperaments ordinarily responsive only to —
the intelligence. The intelligence guided only by
what metaphysicians call ‘the logical understand-
ing,” and unaffected by the sentiment surround-
ing the status quo, inevitably leads to uncompro-
mising conduct, which to instinctive dependence
on precedent seems more like excess than it really
DEMOCRACY 359

is. In other words, excess is wholesomely and
essentially modified when those who are guilty of
it do not regard it as excess at all. During all the
tumult of the Revolution society subsisted with a
completeness we should find it difficult to imagine,
and such as certainly could not exist during an
anarchy as absolute as that which we fancy existed
during the Terror. Not only was the amount of
beneficent legislation accomplished prodigious, as
Mr. John Morley points out, but art, letters, society
flourished as gaily as they had done under the
ancien régime. The galleries of the Louvre were
opened with éclat October 10, 1793. The Revolu-
tion in fact produced a school of painting of its
own. Every sign of civilization subsisted; the po-
litical turmoil was, in fact, universally accepted by its
authors as in the interest of civilization.

It is easy indeed to look at even the cruelty and
savagery of the Terror, often instanced as an evi-
dence of racial bloodthirstiness, from a more impar-
tial point of view than we usually take, without in
any sense assuming an apologetic attitude. It was
not at all the cruelty and savagery of the last Valois
days, any more than it partook of the bouffe character
so significantly pointed out by Voltaire in the con-
duct of the Fronde tumults. The cruelty of the
Revolution proceeded from individual rather than
national character. The Catholic Church and admin-
istrative centralization had modified individual char-
acter greatly in the direction of greatly lessening the
3860 FRENCH TRAITS

individual sense of responsibility—to the point indi-
cated by Michelet in calling France ‘‘a nation of sav-
ages civilized by the conscription.” By this extray-
agant remark Michelet did not at all mean that
before the conscription Frenchmen were brutal, but
simply that they were uncivilized ; that individually
they needed self-control, and as a nation social or-
ganization. But the sense of the dignity of human
nature is an even more civilized feeling than the
sense of the sanctity of human life, and many of the
atrocities, even, of the Revolution were committed in
ostensible vindication of the former principle. One
-is the maxim of a live-and-let-live individualism, the
other that of a society penetrated by the feeling that
‘life is not worth considering, except in accordance
with principles which make it -worth living. Com-
pare, for example, the “blood-thirsty clinging to
life” of Matthew Arnold’s famous portly Cheapside
jeweller, with the sentiment animating the proscribed
Condorcet writing a eulogy of the Revolution at the
moment its excesses were forcing him to suicide—an,
event which he regarded asa passing and compara-
tively trifling incident, A certain recklessness of
one’s own life and the contempt for that of others
go together. Condorcet’s heroic indifference to
death was not at the time extraordinary. Many of
the important victims of the guillotine may almost
be said to have “yielded gracefully.” Respect for
human life is undoubtedly, as we are never tired of
preaching to some of our own communities, the first
DEMOCRACY 361

condition of civilization, but only under ordinary
circumstances. In crises of great moment the
maxim has a routine and perfunctory ring. In such
crises it is only a firmament of brass that echoes
harmoniously Wellington’s great principle of revo-
lution by due course of law. Given an enthusiasm
for ideas which excludes a care for personality, an
unqualified belief in reason unmodified by any sen-'
timental conservatism whatever, and a subordination \
of the sense of individuality and individual dignity
and responsibility, and it is easy to see how the
cruelty and savagery of the Revolution is to be ex-
plained.

Nationally and ideally, even during the Revolu-
tion, France was eminently humane. She eman-
cipated her slaves and those of everybody else
whom she could control. Whatever the individual
failures of her citizens, nationally she essayed the
beau réle then, as since. In the recent Tonquin war
the French soldiers treated the Annamese “ black
flags” with great cruelty, according to accepted ac-
counts ; but officially the French authorities never
blew Sepoys from the mouths of cannon. It was
perhaps the Quixotism, but it was at any rate the
generous humanity of M. Clémenceau and his fellow-
Radicals, which prevented France from joining Eng-
land in Egyptian interference in the interest of
bondholders ; and what the sacrifice was, the en-
vious chafing of France under the English Egyptian
occupation abundantly witnesses. Nice and Savoy

 

 
362 FRENCH TRAITS

were perhaps a sufficient reward for French aid to
Victor Emmanuel in 1859, but what fought Solferino
and Magenta was French national enthusiasm for
the unification of Italy. The Mexico scheme had
nothing of the same backing, and would have failed
in consequence, perhaps, without our own deter-
mined hostility and admirable attitude. One re-
calls also the French interest in Greece, and the
French indisposition to join all other powers in
“coercing” her in 1886. The magsacre of Jaffa,
again, was savagely inhuman, but the army which
committed it would not have destroyed the canal
of Bruges. Nor is it any more possible to fancy the
contemporary Irish evictions taking place under
French auspices, than it is to imagine the noy-
ades of Nantes conducted by Englishmen, unless
the noyés had been proved guilty of some offence
_against positive legality. As to the Revolution, it is
‘possible, no doubt, to say much in excuse of its vio-
lence, its inhumanity, and its aggression. Mr. John
Morley has pointed out, in reply to M. Taine, what
especial justification the French Tiers Etat had for
its vengeance on the noblesse and the clergy. To
the last the king and his party were conspirators ;
there was no opportunity for a revolution like that
of 1688 in England, accomplished only through a
change of dynasties. And in 1649 it was no harder
to dispose of Charles than in 1793 it was of Louis.
Had Charles had a court, .had the English crown re-
duced its feudal chiefs to courtiers, had England
DEMOCRACY 363

aimed at the transformation instead of the mitiga-
tion of feudalism, had London been Paris in a
word, the taking off of Charles would have been less
decorous and less solitary, though it could not have
been more cynical and brutal. As for aggression,
when it is observed that France, even before Napo-
leon, had the dream of succeeding the Roman Em-
pire in “assuring to herself the empire of the world,”
as Mr. Arnold asserts, the fact is lost sight of that
the very existence of the French Republic compelled
aggression. Had the wars been carefully defensive,
the great cause would have been lost and the Bour-}
bons restored. The Republic was engaged in a life |
and death struggle, and if it had not been defiant it |
would have been destroyed.
After all, both historically and essentially, the
French revolutionary spirit means devotion to rea-/
son. Of the two great maxims of the modern
creed: no class can legislate for another, and legis-
lation should conform to reason and not to habit,
which is born of unreasoning adjustments, the
French excel us perhaps in believing in the second
as firmly as they do in the first. We may fairly
say in explanation that our conservatism is really |,
the clinging to a custom and habit essentially radi-.
cal. Our status quo is the Radical hope of Europe.’
We have no need of the revolutionary spirit, since
reason rather than tradition presided in the coun-
sels crystallized in our Constitution itself. Content
aud unrest mean very different things here and

 
364 FRENCH TRAITS

abroad. Our party of change—called during the
war period “Radical” in the etymological sense alone
—has really thus far been the one which corre-
sponds to the European Right. Like the European
Right it stands for strong government, government
| by “the best people,” centralization, subsidies, state
' control of education, limitation of the suffrage, op-
position te immigration. Should the popular party
become largely proletarian, the case may alter ; but
at present our popular party is our conservative one,
and the fact makes it impossible to institute a par-
allel between our party relations and development
and those of Europe. But this very fact leads us to
misconceive the European revolutionary spirit still
endeavoring to plant the standard of reason in the
citadel held by custom—a citadel we fortified ration-
ally a century ago. It leads us to conceive of it as
merely turbulent, lawless, unpractical.

Nevertheless, we are prone to reflect, the revolu-
tionary spirit, whatever its attendant advantages,
has inevitably the effect of establishing a crisis en
permanence. It is a force, we insist, that may be
either rigorously repressed or blindly followed, but
cannot profitably be utilized. To the conservative
Anglo-Saxon political temperament, it seems to
mean a degree of instability inconsistent with sound
political growth. We cannot help, in consequence,
always considering the political situation in France
ag a spectacle rather than a study. What interests
DEMOCRACY 865

us in it at present, for example, is solely the pros-
pect for continuance of the present parliamentary
régime. But, though it would be idle to hazard pre-
dictions in the case of a people which has no regard
for precedent, it is, I think, clear that whatever
changes the French organic law is destined to under-
go, they will not be essentially undemocratic, French
democracy is, as I began by saying, held consciously
as an ideal, and for that reason alone its puissance}
has the promise of permanence. ‘‘It was never any:
part of our creed,” says Matthew Arnold, with admir-
able candor, “that the great right and blessedness of
an Irishman, or indeed of anybody but an English-
man, is to do as he likes, and we have no scruple at all
about abridging if necessary a non-Englishman’s as-
sertion of personal liberty.” Compare with this a
dozen sentences to be found in the same writer’s
“Friendship’s Garland ;” such as: “They [the
French] were unripe for the task they, in ’89, set
themselves todo; and yet. . . they left their trace
in half the beneficial reforms through Europe ; and if
you ask how, at Naples, a convent became a school, or
in Ticino an intolerable oligarchy ceased to govern,
or in Prussia Stein was able to carry his land-reforms,
you get one answer: The French! Till modern so-
.ciety is finally formed, French democracy will still be
a power in Europe.” Besides such pertinence as this,
much of Mr. Lowell’s famous Birmingham address
has something of a post-prandial flavor, as of enun-
ciations essentially detached and undirected ;—“ the
366 FRENCH TRAITS

French fallacy that a new system of government
could be ordered like a new suit of clothes,” “no
dithyrambic affirmations or wire-drawn analyses of
the Rights of Man would serve,” “the British
Constitution. . . is essentially democratic,” “Eng-
land, indeed, may be called a monarchy with demo-
cratic tendencies,” the citation from Lord Sher-
brooke, the inevitable allusion to M. Zola, the
eloquent conclusion that ‘‘ our healing is not in the
storm or in the whirlwind, it is notin monarchies, or
aristocracies, or democracies, but rather in the still
small voice that speaks to the conscience and the
j heart!” This last is doubtless very true, but for an
' address on “ Democracy ” it does not, I think, betray
that enthusiasm for the democratic ideal which a
French orator of anything like Mr. Lowell’s eminence
would display. It has a very different note, a very
different tone and color from M. Goblet, for example,
addressing the students of the Sorbonne on the same
subject. And democracy such as M. Goblet’s is
neither extreme nor exceptional in France at the
present time, it is, in fact, so general as largely to
account for the presence at the head of affairs of
men of convictions and competent capacity—men
like M. Goblet, that is to say—instead of those
saviours of society, those “ great men ” whose absence
in the political life of both France and America Mr.
Lowell so deeply regrets.
But these men are greatly divided among them-
selves, they have not that commanding personal
DEMOCRACY 367

popularity which insures their remaining in power,
they are surrounded with difficulties. The Catholic
chureh, which is in its nature hostile to political
democracy, is astanding menace. So is its ally the
monarchic Right. On the other hand there are the
Radical extremists, with their tendency to entrust”
their fortunes to an individual representative, whose
representative character may easily cease when he
ceases to need it. Behind all is the constant neces-
sity of being ready for a European war of proportions
which the imagination only can prefigure. Mean-
time internal democratic development indubitably
goes on, and itis a mistake to fancy that it would
show political wisdom to postpone what we call
“changes in the organic law” till the more con-
venient season which would doubtless have its own
difficulties. The present Constitution has never been
submitted to the popular judgment, the drift of feel-
ing has distinctly been in favor of its revision for
years. The questions of the Concordat and of com-
munal decentralization, for example, are pressing
ones, and because they are from the nature of the
case “organic” questions, to assume that discussion
of them indicates instability is rather superficial.
Should the present Constitution be revised in these
respects, we should of course hear a good. deal of
French political fickleness in our own press, and the
“Spectator” would have another article on “The
Fall of the French Republic.” All the same, French-
men would still reply just as they do now, that
368 FRENCH TRAITS

the instability of their documentary constitutions
doesn’t imply the variation in “the fundamental
law” we take it to mean, and that our solemnity in
the matter is a little pedantic; that the Code Napo-
léon would still subsist; that if they are not as
much attached to Republican nomenclature as we
are, their democracy is at least as deeply rooted ; that
in France political stability, with its accompanying
danger of political stagnation, is by no means the
basis of social order and progress ; that the state not
being a medium but an agent, to change its expres-
sion when you wish becomes merely rational ; that
even a dictatorship would with them be more truly
popular than are English institutions; that their
very attitude toward “organic” change implies the
formulation of grievances and definite propositions
for their redress, whereas under an unwritten con-
stitution progress is not only slow, but accom-
panied by the immense cost involved in drifting at
the mercy of now one and now the other of two
opposite political temperaments, whose preferences
are never formulated with anything like precision ;
and that the formulation of ideas is one of the great-
est safeguards of popular government. i

With our comparatively simple national politics,
due in great measure to the autonomy of our States,
it is difficult for us to appreciate the great complex-
ity of French politics, and the number and variety
of French political questions. Speculation con-
cerning them, abundant as it is among us—for
DEMOCRACY 369

France is a perpetually attractive spectacle to even
our sciolists—is for this reason, if for no others,
somewhat barren. But there is one clarifying and
illuminating consideration which it is especially per-
tinent to bear in mind. French differences of opin-
ion in regard to French political questions are in
the highest degree practical, rather than, as we
imagine, irreconcilable antagonisms of sentiment,
tradition, temperament, passion. “The internal
quarrels which seem so profoundly to disturb and
distract us are'not, as Europe may assume, the re-
sult of an anemic fever,” said M. Floquet at Mar-
seilles recently, “but on the contrary, a proof of
superabundant vitality, and, so to say, a passing
convulsion of political growth.” On whata high key
of statesmanlike color, of patriotic courage, that is
said! The division of French Republicans into not
only radicals and conservatives, but into subsidiary
groups, is commonly misinterpreted by us in two
ways. It is supposed in the first place to indicate
an inaptitude for, and restiveness under, democratic
institutions—a native, constitutional repugnance to
self-government. On the contrary, it attests the
French disposition toward democracy, the French
belief in it, and fearlessness about its perils. The
absence in France of any hearty and instinctive sub-|
scription to the ethics of what Anglo-Saxons know:
and worship as party government, witnesses, if not |
a remarkable individual independence, at any rate a‘

far livelier interest in, a far greater and more intelli- |
370 FRENCH TRAITS

gent devotion to principles of political philosophy,
than are illustrated by party sheep following some
‘masterful personality as a bell-wether, which has
| generally been the case in England, or by the
tyranny of the caucus with us. In England, the
rare political independent is apt to be grotesque.
With us the tradition of party fealty has notoriously
been carried by that party which has no political
principles, and is based on interests and sentiment,
to the ridiculous length of assuming the independ-
ent to be a negative instead of a positive force, a
passive and temperamental, rather than an active
and philosophic, person. The far larger number of
French independents, their variety, their activity,
their eminence and influence, certainly indicate a
democracy not only ingrained but very highly de-
veloped. And indeed, since the Revolution, it has
been developing very constantly, though not always
visibly, until it has now reached a stage of differ-
entiation which makes strict party government seem
very oligarchical in contrast.

In the second place, we misinterpret the existence
of “ groups” in the French Chamber as evidence of
a French “lack of political sense.” That is a phrase
constantly recurring in those of our journals par-
tially au courant with French affairs, that is to say,
our only journals thus au courant at all. Whenever
anything happens distinctly traceable to the excess,
or even the exercise, of the democratic instinct, this
phrase appears as if issuing from the lumber-room

.
DEMOCRACY 371

of perfunctory political Toryism. French political
independence has undoubtedly its weak side. It
was certainly one of Gambetta’s distinctions that he
perceived this so clearly and labored so strenuously
to the end of party unity. In crises, manifestly, dis-
union is, if not fatal, highly dangerous; and though
French Republican independence does not contem-
plate showing itself recalcitrant in crises, it is cer-
tainly true that the habits formed and the passions
excited by internal dissension in ordinary times of
routine legislation, so to speak, have a powerful dis-
integrating effect, that might easily go so far as to
rob a crisis of that crystallizing power which French
Republicans ascribe to it, and on which they so con-
fidently rely. It is also true that Republican inde-
pendence has done something to keep alive that
standing menace to the Republic, the conservative
and clerical Right. Had radicalism exhibited a dis-
cretion such as in no country in the world it has
ever shown, the conservative ranks might have be-
come permanently thinned, owing to the disappear-
ance of traditional distrust before the continued ab-
sence of any visible reason for its existence. Had
M. Clémenceau, for example, not seceded from the
Gambettist ranks upon the question of centraliza-
tion, very likely the French Left would have been
better able to-day than it is to give satisfactory
guarantees for the continuance of the salutary re-
publican form as well as of democratic substance in
the Government of the nation. The monarchists
372 FRENCH TRAITS

might have been less able to nourish their organiza-
tion upon the vague hopes derived from the specta-
cle of Republican differences. ‘They might possibly
have become discouraged. But this is surely spec-
ulative and, manifestly, for a great party with a large
majority to resign itself to purely defensive tactics
until Bourbons are driven into learning or forget-
ting something, contenting itself meanwhile with
what many of its members believed to be the shadow
without the substance of a Republic; to delay
needed and urgent reforms out of a timorous regard
for the tactics of parliamentary strategy ; to look at
every question from an indirect and party, instead
of a directly patriotic, point of view—to do this
would clearly be to paralyze every beneficent activ-
ity belonging to government by discussion. It
might be diplomatic, but it would be as little a de-
monstration of “ political sense” as it would be
democratic.

But whatever character the further evolution of
the French nation may assume, whatever fate may
have in store for the most sentient, the most organ-
ic, the most civilized, the most socially developed
people of the modern world, it is certain that, for a
long time to come, “ the country of Europe in which
the people is most alive”—according to Matthew Ar-
nold’s acute synthesis of the results of the Revolu-
tion—the country of Europe to which we owe it
that the Declaration is the definition rather than the
source of our national and individual rights, will re-
DEMOCRACY 373 -

main for Americans, if not the most exemplary, at
least the most animating figure among the European
states. And however tradition, prejudice, ignorance,
and a different language may obscure our vision,
we shall never fail to find politically instructive, in
proportion to our intelligence and the preservation
of our own democratic instincts, that one of the
European powers the vast majority of whose citizens
—not being “subjects” in either a real or a nominal
sense—instinctively echo La Bruyére’s sentiment
which I have already cited: “ Faut-il opter? Je
veux étre peuple !”
xX
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS

No American, not a commercial or otherwise har-
dened traveller, can have a soul so dead as to be in-
capable of emotion when, on his return from a long
trip abroad, he catches sight of the low-lying and in-
significant Long Island coast. One’s excitement be-
gins, indeed, with the pilot-boat. The pilot-boat is
the first concrete symbol of those native and nor-
mal relations with one’s fellow-men, which one has
so long observed in infinitely varied manifestation
abroad, but always as a spectator and a stranger, and
which one is now on the eve of sharing himself. As
she comes up swiftly, white and graceful, drops her
pilot, crosses the steamer’s bows, tacks, and picks up
her boat in the foaming wake, she presents a spec-
tacle beside which the most picturesque Mediter-
ranean craft, with colored sails and lazy evolutions,
appear mistily in the memory as elements of a fee-
ble and conventional ideal. The ununiformed pilot
clambers on board, makes his way to the bridge,
and takes command with an equal lack of French
manuer andof English affectation distinctly palpable
to the sense, sharpened by long absence into observ-
ing native characteristics as closely as foreign ones.
378 FRENCH TRAITS

If the season be right the afternoon is bright, the
range of vision apparently limitless, the sky nearly
cloudless and, by contrast with the European firma-
ment, almost colorless, the July sun such as no Pari-
sian or Londoner ever saw. The French reproach
us for having no word for “patrie” as distinct
from “pays;” we have the thing at all events, and
cherish it, and it needs only the proximity of the
foreigner, from whom in general we are so widely
separated, to give our patriotism a tinge of the
veriest chauvinism that exists in France itself.

We fancy the feeling old-fashioned, and imagine
ours to be the most cosmopolitan, the least preju-
diced temperament in the world. It is reasonable
that it should be. The extreme sensitiveness no-
ticed in us by all foreign observers during the ante-
bellum epoch, and ascribed by Tocqueville to our
self-distrust, is naturally inconsistent with our posi-
tion and circumstances to-day. A population greater
than that of any of the great nations, isolated by the
most enviable geographical felicity in the world
from the narrowing influences of international
jealousy apparent to every American who travels in
Europe, is increasingly less concerned at criticism
than a struggling provincial republic of half its size.
And along with our self confidence and our careless-
ness of “abroad,” it is only with the grosser element
among us that national conceit has deepened ; in
general, we are apt to fancy we have become cos-
mopolitan in proportion as we have lost our provin-
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 379

cialism. With us surely the individual has not
withered, and if the world has become more and
more to him, it is because it is the world at large
and not the pent-up confines of his own country’s his-
tory and extent. ‘La patrie” in danger would be
quickly enough rescued—there is no need to prove
that over again, even to our own satisfaction ; but in
general “la patrie” not being in any danger, being
on the contrary apparently on the very crest of the
wave of the world, it is felt not toneed much of one’s
active consideration, and passively indeed is viewed
by many people, probably, as a comfortable and gi-
gantic contrivance for securing a free field in which
the individual may expand and develop. ‘ Amer-
ica,” says Emerson, ‘America is Opportunity.”
After all, the average American of the present day
says, a country stands or falls by the number of
properly expanded and developed individuals it pos-
sesses. But the happening of any one of a dozen
things unexpectedly betrays that all this cosmopoli-
tanism is in great measure, and so far as sentiment
is concerned, a veneer and a disguise. Such a hap-
pening is the very change from blue water to gray
that announces to the returning American the near-
ness of that country which he sometimes thinks he
‘prizes more for what it stands for than for itself.
It is not, he then feels with a sudden flood of emo-
tion, that America is home, but that home is Amer-
ica. America comes suddenly to mean what it never
meant before.
380 FRENCH TRAITS

Unhappily for this exaltation, ordinary life is not
composed of emotional crises. It is ordinary life
with a vengeance which one encounters in issuing
from the steamer dock and facing again his native
city. Paris never looked so lovely, so exquisite to
the sense as it now appears in the memory. All
that Parisian regularity, order, decorum, and beauty
into which, although a stranger, your own activities
fitted so perfectly that you were only half-conscious
of its existence, was not, then, merely normal,
wholly a matter of course. Emerging into West
Street, amid the solicitations of hackmen, the tink-
ling jog-trot of the mostignoble horse-cars you have
seen since leaving home, the dry dust blowing into
your eyes, the gaping black holes of broken pave-
ments, the unspeakable filth, the line of red brick
buildings prematurely decrepit, the sagging multi-
tude of telegraph wires, the clumsy electric lights
depending before the beer saloon and the groggery,
the curious confusion of spruceness and squalor in
the aspect of these latter, which alsa seem legion—
confronting all this for the first time in three years,
say, you think with wonder of your disappointment
at not finding the Tuileries Gardens a mass of flow-
ers, and with a blush of the times you have told
Frenchmen that New York was very much like
Paris. New York is at this moment the most foreign-
looking city you have ever seen; in going abroad
the American discounts the unexpected ; returning
after the insensible orientation of Europe, the con-
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 381

trast with things recently familiar is prodigious, be-
cause one is so entirely unprepared for it. One
thinks to be at home, and finds himself at the spec-
tacle. New York is less like any European city than
any European city is like any other. It is distin- |
guished from them all—even from London—by the
ignoble character of the res publice, and the refuge }
‘of taste, care, wealth, pride, self-respect even, in
private and personal regions. A splendid carriage,
liveried servants without and Paris dresses within,
rattling over the scandalous paving, splashed by the
neglected mud, catching the rusty drippings of the
hideous elevated railway, wrenching its axle in the
‘tram-track in avoiding a mountainous wagon load of
commerce on this hand and a garbage cart on that,
‘caught in a jam of horse-cars and a blockade of
trucks, finally depositing its dainty freight to pick
its way across a sidewalk eloquent of official neglect
and private contumely to a shop door or a residence
stoop—such a contrast as this sets us off from Eu-
rope very definitely and in a very marked degtee.
There is no_palpable New_York in the sense in
which there is a Paris, a Vienna, a Milan. You
can touch it at no point. Itisnot even ocular. There
is instead a Fifth Avenue, a Broadway, a Central
Park, a Chatham Square. How they have dwindled,
by the way. Fifth Avenue might be any one ofa
dozen London streets in the first impression it makes
on the retina and leaves on the mind. The opposite
side of Madison Square is but a step away. The
382 FRENCH TRAITS

‘spacious hall of the Fifth Avenue Hotel has shrunk
to stifling proportions. Thirty-fourth Street is a
lane; the City Hall a band-box; the Central Park
a narrow strip of elegant landscape whose lateral
limitations are constantly forced upon the sense by
the Lenox Library on one side and a monster apart-
, ment house on the other. The American fondness
for size—for pure bigness—needs explanation, it ap-
pears ; we care for size, but inartistically ; we care
nothing for proportion, which is what makes size
count. Everything is on the same scale; there is
no play, no movement. An exception should be
made in favor of the big business building and the
apartment house which have arisen within a few
years, and which have greatly accentuated the gro-
tesqueness of the city’s sky-line as seen from either
the New Jersey or the Long Island shore. They
are perhaps rather high than big ; many of them were
built before the authorities noticed them and fol-
lowed unequally in the steps of other civilized muni-
cipal governments, from that of ancient Rome down,
in prohibiting the passing of a fixed limit. But big-
ness has also evidently been one of their architectonic
motives, and it is to be remarked that they are so
far out of scale with the surrounding buildings as to
avoid the usual commonplace, only by creating a
positively disagreeable effect. The aspect of Fifty-
seventh Street between Broadway and Seventh
Avenue, for example, is certainly that of the world
upside down: a Gothic church utterly concealed, not
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 383

to say crushed, by contiguous flats, and confronted
by the overwhelming “Osborne,” which towers
above anything in the neighborhood, and perhaps
makes the most powerful impression that the re-
turned traveller receives during his first week or two
of strange sensations. Yet the ‘‘Osborne’s ” dimen-
sions are not very different from those of the Are
de V'Etoile. It is true it does not face an avenue of
majestic buildings a mile and a half long and two
hundred and thirty feet wide, but the association
of these two structures, one a private enterprise and
the other a public monument, together with the ob-
vious suggestions of each, furnish a not misleading
illustration of both the spectacular and the moral
contrast between New York and Paris, as it appears
unduly magnified no doubt to the sense surprised
to notice it at all.

Still another reason for the foreign aspect of the
New Yorker’s native city is the gradual withdrawing
of the American element into certain quarters, its
transformation or essential modification in others,
and in the rest the presence of the lees of Europe.
At every step you are forced to realize that New
York is the second Irish and the third or fourth
German city in the world. However great our suc-
cess in drilling this foreign contingent of our social
army into order and reason and self-respect—and it
is not to be doubted that this success gives usa dis-
tinction wholly new in history—nevertheless our ef-
fect upon its members has been in the direction of
—e

3884 FRENCH TRAITS

development rather than of assimilation. We have
given them our opportunity, permitted them the ex-
pansion denied them in their own several feudalities,
made men of serfs, demonstrated the utility of self
government under the most trying conditions, proved
the efficacy of our elastic institutions on a scale truly
grandiose ; but evidently, so far as New York is con-
cerned, we have done this at the sacrifice of a dis-
tinct and obvious nationality. To an observant
sense New York is nearly as little national as Port
Said. It contrasts absolutely in this respect with
Paris, whose assimilating power is prodigious ; every
foreigner in Paris eagerly seeks Parisianization.
Ocularly, therefore, the “ note” of New York seems
that of characterless individualism. The monotony
of the chaotic composition and movement is, para-
doxically, its most abiding impression, And as the
whole is destitute of definiteness, of distinction, the
parts are, correspondingly, individually insignificant.
Where in the world are all the types? one asks one’s
self in renewing his old walks and desultory wander-
ings. Where is the New York counterpart of that
astonishing variety of types which makes Paris what
it is morally and pictorially, the Paris of Balzac as
well as the Paris of M. Jean Béraud. Of a sudden
the Jack of nationality in our familiar literature and
art becomes luminously explicable. One perceives
why Mr. Howells is so successful in confining him-
self to the simplest, broadest, most representative
representatives, why Mr. James goes abroad invari-
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 385

ably for his mise-en-scéne, and often for his charac-
ters, why Mr. Reinhart lives in Paris, and Mr. Abbey
in London. New York is this and that, it is incon-
testably unlike any other great city, but compared
with Paris, its most impressive trait is its lack of that
organic guality which results from variet, of types.
Thus compared, it seems to have only the variety of
individuals which results in monotony. It is the
difference between noise and music. Pictorially, the
general aspect of New York is such that the mind
speedily takes refuge in insensitiveness. Its expan-
siveness seeks exercise in other directions—business,
dissipation, study, zstheticism, politics. The life of
the senses is no longer possible. This is why one’s
sense for art is so stimulated by going abroad, and
one’s sense for art in its freest, frankest, most uni-
versal and least special, intense and enervated de-
velopment is especially exhilarated by going to Paris.
Itis why, too, on one’s return one can note the grad-
ual decline of his sensitiveness, his severity—the
progressive atrophy of a sense no longer called into
exercise. “I had no conception before,” said a
Chicago broker to me one day in Paris, with intelli-
gent eloquence, “of a finished city!” Chicago un-
doubtedly presents a greater contrast to Paris than
does New York, and &0, perhaps, better prepares
one to appreciate the Parisian quality, but the re-
turned New Yorker cannot fail to be deeply im-
pressed with the finish, the organic perfection, the
elegance, and reserve of the Paris mirrored in his
20
386 FRENCH TRAITS

memory. Is it possible that the uniformity, the
monotony of Paris architecture, the prose note in
Parisian taste, should once have weighed upon his
spirit? Riding once on the top of a Paris tramway,
betraying an understanding of English by reading
an American newspaper, that sub-consciousness of
moral isolation which the foreigner feels in Paris as
elsewhere, was suddenly and completely destroyed by
my next neighbor, who remarked with contemptuous
conviction and a Manhattan accent: ‘‘ When you've
seen one block of this infernal town you've seen it
all!” He felt sure of sympathy in advance. Prob-
ably few New Yorkers would have differed with him.
The universal light stone and brown paint, the wide
sidewalks, the asphalt pavement, the indefinitely:
multiplied kiosks, the prevalence of a few marked
kinds of vehicles, the uniformed workmen and work-
women, the infinite reduplication, in a word, of
easily recognized types, is at first mistaken by the
New Yorker for that dead level of uniformity which
is, of all things in the world, the most tiresome to
him in his own city. After a time, however, he be-
gins to realize three important facts: In the first
place these phenomena, which so vividly force theri-
selves on his notice that their reduplication strikes
him more than their qualities, are nevertheless of a
quality altogether unexampled in his experience for
fitness and agreeableness ; in the second place they
are details of a whole, members of an organism, and
not they, but the city which they compose, the “ fin-
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 387

ished city ” of the acute Chicagoan, is the spectacle ;
in the third place they serve as a background for
the finest group of monuments in the world. On
his return he perceives these things with a melan-
choly a non lucendoluminousness. The dead level of
Murray Hill uniformity he finds the most agreeable
aspect in the city.

And the reason is that Paris has habituated him to
the exquisite, the rational, pleasure to be derived
from that organic spectacle a “finished city,” far
more than that Murray Hill is respectable and
appropriate, and that almost any other prospect, ex-
cept in spots of very limited area which emphasize
the surrounding ugliness, is acutely displeasing.
This latter is certainly very true. We have long
frankly reproached ourselves with having no art com-
mensurate with our distinction in other activities,
resignedly attributing the lack to our hitherto ne-
cessary material preoccupation. But what we are
really accounting for in this way is our lack of
Titians and Bramantes. We are for the most part
quite unconscious of the character of the American
zsthetic substratum, sotospeak. Asa matter of fact,
we do far better in the production of striking artis-
tic personalities than we do in the general medium
of taste and culture. We figure well invariably at
the Salon. At home the artist is simply either
driven in upon himself, or else awarded by a naive
clientéle, an eminence so far out of perspective as to
result unfortunately both for him and for the com-

 
388 FRENCH TRAITS

munity. He pleases himself, follows his own bent,
and prefers salience to conformability for his work,
because his chief aim is to make an effect. This is
especially true of those of our architects who have
ideas. But these are the exceptions, of course, and
the general aspect of the city is characterized by
something far less agreeable than mere lack of
symmetry ; it is characterized mainly by an all-per-
vading bad taste in every detail into which the ele-
ment of art enters or should enter—that is to say,
nearly everything that meets the eye.

However, on the other hand, Parisian uniformity
may depress exuberance, it is the condition and often
the cause of the omnipresent good taste. Not only
is it true that, as Mr. Hamerton remarks, “in the
better quarters of the city a building hardly ever
rises from the ground unless it has been designed
by some architect who knows what art is, and endeav-
ors to apply it to little things as well as great ;” but
it is equally true that the national sense of form ex-
presses itself in every appurtenance of life as well as
in the masses and details of architecture. In New
York our noisy diversity not only prevents any effect
of ensemble and makes, as I say, the old common-
place brown stone regions the most reposeful and
rational prospects of the city, but it. precludes also,
in a thousand activities and aspects, the operation of

jthat salutary constraint and conformity without
which the most acutely sensitive individuality in-
evitably declines to a lower level of form and taste.
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 389

La mode, for example, seems scarcely to exist at all;
or at any rate to have taken refuge in the chimney-
pot hat and the tournure. The dude, it is true, has
been developed within a few years, but his distin-
guishing trait of personal extinction has had much
less success and is destined to a much shorter life
than his appellation, which has wholly lost its orig-
inal significance in gaining its present popularity.
Every woman one meets in the street has a different
bonnet. Tvery street car contains a millinery mu-
seum. And the mass of them may be judged after
the circumstance that one of the most fashionable
Fifth Avenue modistes flaunts a sign of enduring
brass announcing “ English Round Hats and Bon-
nets.” The enormous establishments of ready-made
men’s clothing seem not yet to have made their
destined impression in the direction of uniform-
ity. The contrast in dress of the working classes
with those of Paris is as conspicuously unfortunate
esthetically, as politically and socially it may be
significant ; ocularly, it is a substitution of a cheap,
faded, and ragged imitation of bourgeois costume
for the marvel of neatness and propriefy which com-
poses the uniform of the Parisian ouvrier and ou-
vriére. Broadway below Tenth Street is a forest of
signs which obscure the thoroughfare, conceal the
buildings, overhang the sidewalks, and exhibit sev-
erally and collectively a taste in harmony with: the
Teutonic and Semitic enterprise which, almost exelu-
sively, they attest. The shop-windows’ show, which is
390 FRENCH TRAITS

one of the great spectacles of Paris, is niggard and
shabby ; that of Philadelphia has considerably more
interest, that of London nearly as much. Ourclumsy
coinage and couutrified currency; our eccentric
book-bindings ; that class of our furniture and inte-
rior decoration which may be described as American
rococo ; that multifariously horrible machinery de-
vised for excluding flies from houses and preventing
them from alighting on dishes, for substituting a
draught of air for stifling heat, for relieving an entire
population from that surplusage of old-fashioned
breeding involved in shutting doors, for rolling and
rattling change in shops, for enabling you to “ put
only the exact fare in the box ;” the racket of pneu-
matic tubes, of telephones, of aérial trains; the prac-
tice of reticulating pretentious fagades with fire-
escapes in lieu of fire-proof construction ; the vast
mass of our nickel-plated paraphernalia; our zine
cemetery monuments; our comic valentines and
serious Christmas cards, and grocery labels, and
“ fancy ” job-printing and theatre posters ; our con-
spicuous cuspadores and our conspicuous need of
more of them; the “tone” of many articles in our
most popular journals, their references to each other,
their illustrations ; the Sunday panorama of shirt-
Sleeved ease and the week-day fatigue costume of
curl papers and ‘“ Mother Hubbards” general in
some quarters; our sumptuous new bar-rooms, deco-
rated perhaps on the principle that le mauvais goat
méne aucrime—all these phenomena, the list of which
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 391

might be indefinitely extended, are so many wit-
nesses of a general taste, public and private, which
differs cardinally from that prevalent in Paris.

In fine, the material spectacle of New York is such
that at last, with some anxiety, one turns from the ex-
ternal vileness of every prospect to seek solace in the
pleasure that man affords. But even after the whole-
some American reaction has set in, and your appetite
for the life of the senses is starved into indifference
for what begins to seem to you an unworthy ideal ;
after you are patriotically readjusted and feel: once
more the elation of living in the future owing to the
dearth of sustenance in the present—you are still at
the mercy of perceptions too keenly sharpened by
your Paris sojourn to permit blindness to the fact
that Paris and New York contrast as strongly in
moral atmosphere as in material aspect. You be-
come contemplative, and speculate peusively as to
the character and quality of those native and normal
conditions, those Relations, which finally you have
definitely resumed. What is it—that vague and
pervasive moral contrast’ which the American feels
so potently on his return from abroad? How can
we define that apparently undefinable difference
which’ is only the more sensible for being so elu-
sive? Book after book has been written about Eu-
rope from the American standpoint—ahout America
from the European standpoint. None of them has
specified what everyone has experienced. The spec-
tacular and the material contrasts are easily enough
392 FRENCII TRAITS

characterized, and it is only the unreflecting or the
superficial who exaggerate the importance of them.
We are by no means at the mercy of our apprecia-
tion of Parisian spectacle, of the French machinery
of life. Wemiss or we do not miss the Salon Carré,
the view of the south transept of Notre Dame as
one descends the rue St. Jacques, the Théatre Fran-
cais, the concerts, the Luxembourg Gardens, the
excursions to the score of charming suburban
places, the library at the corner, the convenient
cheap cab, the manners of the people, the quiet, the
climate, the constant entertainment of the senses.
We have in general too much work to do to waste
much time in regretting these things. In general,
work is by natural selection so invariable a concom-
itant of our unrivalled opportunity to work profit-
ably, thatit absorbs our energies so far as this pal-
pable sphere is concerned. But what is it that
throughout the hours of busiest work and closest
application, as well as in the preceding and following
moments.of leisure and the occasional intervals of
relaxation, makes everyone vaguely perceive the vast
moral difference between life here at home and life
abroad —notably life in France? What is the subtle
ce pervading the moral atmosphere in New
York, \which so markedly distinguishes what we
call life here from life in Paris or even in Penne-
depie?
Itis, Ithink, distinctly traceable to the intense in-
diyiduglism which prevails among us. Magnificent

 
 
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 393

results have followed our devotion to this force ; in-
contestably, we have spared ourselves both the acute
and the chronic misery for which the tyranny of so-
ciety over its constituent parts is directly responsible.
We have, moreover, in this way not only freed our-
selves from the tyranny of despotism, such for ex-
ample as is exerted socially in England and politi-
cally in Russia, but we have undoubtedly developed
a larger number of self-reliant and potentially ca-
pable social units than even a democratic system like
that of France, which sacrifices the unit to the or-
ganism, succeeds in producing. We may truly say
that, material as we are accused of being, we tr
out more men than any other nationality. And if
some Frenchman points out that we attach an eso-
toric sense to the term “ man,” and that at any rate
our men are not better adapted than some others to
a civilized environment which demands other quali-
ties than honesty, energy, and intelligence, we may
-be quite content to leave him his objection, and to
prefer what seems'to us manliness to civilization it-
self. At the same time we cannot pretend that in-
dividualism has done everything for us that could
-be desired. In giving us the man it has robbed us
of the milieu. Morally speaking, the milieu with us \
searcely exists. Our difference from Europe does
not consist in the difference between the European
milieu and ours; it consists in the fact that, com-
paratively speaking of course, we have no milieu.
If we are individually developed, we are also indi-
394 FRENCH TRAITS

) vidualiy isolated to a degree elsewhere unknown.
Politically we have parties who, in Cicero’s phrase,
“think the same things concerning the republic,”
but concerning very little else are we agreed in any
mass of any moment. The number of our sauces is
growing, but there is no corresponding diminution
inthe number of our religions. We have no com-
munities. Our villages even are apt, rather, to be
aggregations. Politics aside, there is hardly an
American view of any phenomenon or class of phe-
nomena. Everyone of us likes, reads, sees, does
what he chooses. Often dissimilarity is affected as
adding piquancy of paradox. The judgment of the
ages, the consensus of mankind, exercise no tyranny
over the individual will. Do you believe in this or
that, do you like this or that, are questions which,
concerning the most fundamental matters, neverthe-
less form the staple of conversation in many circles.
We live all of us apparently in a divine state of flux.
The question asked at dinner by a lady in a neigh-
boring city of a literary stranger, ‘“‘ What do you think
of Shakespeare ?” is not exaggeratedly peculiar. We
all think differently of Shakespeare, of Cromwell, of
Titian, of Browning, of George Washington. Con-
cerning matters as to which we must be fundament-
ally disinterested, we permit ourselves not only preju-
dice but passion. At the most we have here and
there groups of personal acquaintance only, whose
members are in‘accord in regard to some one thing,
and quickly crystallize-and precipitate at the men-
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 395

tion of something that is really a corollary of the
force which unitesthem. The effortsthat have been
made in New York, within the past twenty years, to
establish various special midlieus, so to speak, have
been pathetic in their number and resultlessness.
Efforts of this sort are of course doomed to failure,
because the essential trait of the milieu is sponta-
neous existence, but their failure discloses the mu-
tual repulsion which keeps the molecules of our so-
ciety from uniting. How can it be otherwise when
life is so speculative, so experimental, so wholly de-
pendent on the personal force and idiosyncrasies of
the individual? How shall we accept any general
verdict pronounced by persons of no more authority
‘than ourselves, and arrived at by processes in which
we are equally expert? We have so little consensus
as to anything, because we dread the loss of person-
ality involved in submitting to conventions, and be-
cause personality operates centrifugally alone. We
make exceptions in favor of such matters as the Co-
pernican system and the greatness of our own future.
There are things which we take on the credit of the
consensus of authorities, for which we may not have
all the proofs at hand. But as to conventions of all
sorts, our attitude is apt to be one of suspicion and
uncertainty. Mark Twain, for example, first won
his way to the popular American heart by exposing
the humbugs of the Cinque-cento. Specifically the
most teachable of people, nervously eager for infor-
mation, Americans are nevertheless wholly distrust-
396 FRENCH TRAITS

ful of generalizations made by anyone else, and little
disposed to receive blindly formularies and classifi-
cations of phenomena as to which they have had no
experience. And of experience we have necessarily
had, except politically, less than any civilized people
in the world.
"We are infinitely more at home amid universal
Inobility. We want to act, to exert ourselves, to
be, as we imagine, nearer to nature. We have our
tastes in painting as in confectionery. Some of us
prefer Tintoretto to Rembrandt, as we do chocolate
to cocoanut. In respect of taste it would be impos-
sible for the gloomiest sceptic to deny that this is
an exceedingly free country. ‘I don’t know any-
thing about the subject (whatever the subject may
be), but I know what I like,” is a remark which is
heard on every hand, and which witnesses the sturdi-
ness of our strugele against the tyranny of conven-
tions and the indomitable nature of our independ-
ent spirit. In criticism the individual spirit fairly
runs a-muck; it takes its lack of concurrence as
credentials of impartiality often. In constructive
art everyone is occupied less with nature than with
the point of view. Mr. Howells himself displays
more delight in his naturalistic attitude than zest
in his execution, which, compared with that of the
French naturalists, is in general faint-hearted
enough, Everyone writes, paints, models, exclu-
et the point of view. Fidelity in following out
nature’s suggestions, in depicting the emotions nat-
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 397

ure arouses, a sympathetic submission to nature’s
sentiment, absorption into nature’s moods and sub-
tle enfoldings, are extremely rare. The artist’s eye
is fixed on the treatment. He is “creative” by main’
strength. He is penetrated with a desire to get
away from “the same old thing,” to “take it” ina
new way, to draw attention to himself, to shine.
One would say that every American nowadays who
handles a brush or designs a building was stimu-
lated by the secret ambition of founding a school.
We have in art thus, with a vengeance, that per-
sonal element which is indeed its savor, but which
it is fatal to make its substance. We have it still
more conspicuously in life. What do you think of
him, or her? is the first question asked after every
introduction. Of every new individual we meet w

form instantly some personal impression. The criti-
cism of character is nearly the one disinterested
activity in which we have become expert. We have
for this a peculiar gift, apparently, which we share
with gypsies and money-lenders, and other people
in whom the social instinct is chiefly latent. Our
gossip takes on the character of personal judgments
rather than of tittle-tattle. It concerns not what
So-and-So has done, but what kind of a person So-
.and-So is. It would hardly be too much to say that
So-and-So never leaves a group of which he is not
an intimate without being immediately, impartially
| but fundamentally, discussed. Toa degree not at all
suspected by the author of the phrase, he “leaves
398 FRENCH TRAITS

his character” with them on quitting any assem-
blage of his acquaintance.

The great difficulty with our individuality and
independence is that differentiation begins so soon
and stops so far short of real importance. In no
department of life has the law of the survival of the
fittest, that principle in yirtue of whose operation
societies become distinguished and admirable, had
time to work. Our social characteristics are in-
ventions, discoveries, not survival. Nothing with
us has passed into the stage of instinct. And for
this reason some of our “ best people,” some of the
most “thoughtful” among us, have less of that
quality best characterized as social maturity than a
_ Parisian washerwoman or concierge. Centuries of
sifting, ages of gravitation toward harmony and
homogeneity, have resulted for the French in a
delightful immunity from the necessity of “proving
all things” remorselessly laid on every individual
of our society. Very many ‘matters, at any rate,
which to the French are matters of course, our self-
respect pledges us to a personal examination of.
The idea of sparing ourselves trouble in thinking
occurs to us far more rarely than to other peoples,
We have certainly an insufficient notion of the su-
perior results reached by economy and system in
this respect.

In one of Mr. Henry James's cleverest sketches,
“Lady Barberina,” the English heroine marries an
American and comes to live in New York. She finds
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 399

it dull. She is homesick without quite knowing
why. Mr. James is at his best in exhibiting at once
the intensity of her disgust and the intangibility of
its provocation. We are not all like ‘‘ Lady Barb.”
We do not all like London, whose materialism is
only more splendid, not less uncompromising than
our own ; but we cannot help perceiving that what
that unfortunate lady missed in New York was the
milieu—an environment sufficiently developed to
permit spontaneity and free play of thought and
feeling, and a certain domination of shifting merit
by fixed relations which keeps one’s mind off that
disagreeable subject of contemplation, one’s self.
Everyone seems acutely self-conscious ; and the self-|
consciousness of the unit is fatal, of course, to the
composure of the ensemble. The number of people
intently minding their P’s and Q's, reforming their
orthoepy, practising new discoveries in etiquette,
making over their names, and in general exhibiting
that activity of the amateur known as “ going
through the motions ” to the end of bringing them-
selves up, as it were, is very noticeable in contrast
with French oblivion to this kind of personal exer-
tion. Even our simplicity is apt to be simplesse.
And the conscientiousness in educating others dis-
played by those who are so fortunate as to have
reached perfection nearly enough to permit relaxa-
tion in self-improvement, is only equalled by the
avidity in acquisitiveness displayed by the learners
themselves. Meantime the composure born of equal-|
400 FRENCH TRAITS

ity, as well as that springing from unconsciousness,
suffers. Our society is a kind of Jacob’s ladder,
to maintain equilibrium upon which requires an
amount of effort on the part of the personally es-
timable gymnasts perpetually ascending aud de-
scending, in the highest degree hostile to spontane-
ity, to serenity, and stability.

Naturally, thus, everyone is personally preoccu-
pied to a degree unknown in France. And it is
not necessary that this preoccupation should con-
cern any side of that multifarious monster we know
as “business.” It may relate strictly to the para-
dox of seeking employment for leisure. Even the
latter is a terribly conscious proceeding. We go
about it with a mental deliberateness singularly in
contrast with our physical precipitancy. But it
is mainly “business,” perhaps, that accentuates
our individualism. The condition of désceuvre-
ment is positively disreputable. It arouses the sus-
picion of acquaintance and the anxiety of friends.
Occupation to the end of money-getting is our nor-
imal condition, any variation from which demands
explanation, as little likely to be entirely honor-
able. Such occupation is, as I said, the inevitable
sequence of the opportunity for it, and is the wiser
and more dignified because of its necessity to the
end of securing independence. What the French-
man can secure merely by the exercise of economy
is with us only the reward of energy and enterprise
in acquisition—so comparatively speculative and
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 401

hazardous is the condition of our business. And

whereas with us money is far harder to keep, and is

moreover something which it is far harder to be

without than is the case in France, the ends of

self-respect, freedom from mortification, and getting

the most out of life, demand that we should take

constant advantage of the fact that it is easier to

get. Consequently everyone who is, as we say,

worth anything, is with us adjusted to the prodigi-

ous dynamic condition which characterizes our ex-

istence. And such occupation is tremendously ab-

sorbing. Our opportunity is fatally handicapped

by this remorseless necessity of embracing it, It

yields us fruit after its kind, but it rigorously ex-

cludes us from tasting any other. Everyone is en- |
gaged in preparing the working drawings of his own
fortune. There is no co-operation possible, because
‘competition is the life of enterprise.

In the resultant manners the city illustrates Car-
lyle’s “anarchy plus the constable.” Never was the
struggle for existence more palpable, more nake
and more unpictorial. ‘It is the art of mankind t
polish the world,” says Thoreau somewhere, “and
everyone who works is scrubbing in some part.”
Everyone certainly is here at work, yet was there ever
such scrubbing with so little resultant polish? The
disproportion would be tragic if it were not gro-
tesque. Amid all ‘the hurry and rush of life along
the sidewalks,” as the newspapers say, one might
surely expect to find the unexpected, The spec-

26
pth Seesaw

402 FRENCH TRAITS

tacle ought certainly to have the interest of pic-
turesqueness which is inherent im the fortuitous.
Unhappily, though there is hurry and rush enough,
it is the bustle of business, not the dynamics of
what is properly to be called life. The elements of
the picture lack dignity—so completely as to leave ;
the ensemble quite without aceent. More incidents
in the drama of real life will happen before midnight
to the individuals who compose the orderly Boule-
vard procession in Paris than those of its chaotic
Broadway counterpart will experience in a month.
The latter are not really more impressive because
they are apparently alk running errands and include
no fidneurs. The fldneur would fare ill should any-
thing draw him into the stream. Everything being
adjusted to the motive of looking out for one’s self,
any of the sidewalk civility and mutual interest which
obtain in Paris would throw the entire machine out
of gear. Whoever is not ina hurry is in the way.
A man running after an omnibus at the Madeleine
would come into collision with fewer people and
cause less disturbance than one who should stop on
Fourteenth Street to apologize for an inadvertent
jostle, or to give a lady any surplusage of passing
room. He would be less ridiculous. A friend re-
cently returned from Paris told me that, on several
street occasions, his involuntary ‘Excuse me!” had
been mistaken for a salutation and answered by a
“How do you do?” and a stare of speculation.
Apologies of this class sound to us, perhaps, like a
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 403

subtle and deprecatory impeachment of our large
tolerance and universal good nature.

In this way our undoubted self-respect. undoubt-
edly loses something of its bloom. We may prefer
being jammed into street-cars and pressed against
the platform rails of the elevated road to the tedious
waiting at Paris ‘bus stations—to mention one of the
perennial and principal points of contrast which mo-
nopolize the thoughts of the average American so-
journer in the French capital. But it is terribly
vulgarizing. ‘The contact and pressure are abomin-
able. Toa Parisian the daily experience in this re-
spect of those of our women who have no carriages
of their own, would seem as singular as the latter
would find the Oriental habit of regarding the face
as more important than other portions of the fe-
male person to keep concealed. But neither men
nor women can persist in blushing at the inti-
macy of rudeness to which our crowding subjects
them in common, The only resource is in blunted
sensibility. And the manners thus negatively pro-
duced we do not quite appreciate in their enormity
because the edge of our appreciation is thus neces-
sarily dulled. The conductor scarcely ceases whist-
ling to poke you for your fare. Other whistlers
apparently go on forever. Loud talking follows
naturally from the impossibility of personal se-
clusion in the presence of others. Our Sundays
have lost secular decorum very much in proportion
as they have lost Puritan observance. If we have
404 FRENCH TRAITS

nothing quite comparable with a London bank holi-
day, or with the.conduct of the popular cohorts of
the Epsom army; if only in “political picnics”
and the excursions of “ gangs” of “toughs we il-
lustrate absolute barbarism, it is nevertheless true
that, from Central Park to Coney Island, our peo- ,
ple exhibit a conception of the fitting employment of
periodical leisure which would seem indecorous to a
crowd of Belleville ouvriers. If we have not the cad,
we certainly possess in abundance the species “‘ hood-
lum,” which, though morally far more refreshing,
is yet esthetically intolerable ; and the hoodlum is
nearly as rare in Paris as the cad. Owing to his
presence and to the atmosphere in which he thrives,
we find ourselves, in spite of the most determined
democratic convictions, shunning crowds whenever
it is possible to shun them. The most robust of us
easily get into the frame of mind of a Boston young
woman, to whom the Champs-Elysées looked like a
railway station, and who wished the people would get
up from the benches and go home. . Our life becomes
a life of the interior ; wherefore, in spite of a.climate
that permits walks abroad, we confine out-door exist-
ence to Newport lawns and camps in the Adiron-
dacks ; and whence proceeds that carelessness of the
exterior which subordinates architecture to ‘ house-
hold art,” and makes of our streets such mere thor=
oughfares lined with “homes.”

The manners one encounters in street and shop
in Paris are, it is well known, very different from
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 405

our own. But no praise of them ever quite prepares
an American for their agreeableness and simplicity.
We are always agreeably surprised at the absence of
elaborate manner which eulogists of French manners
in general omit to note; and indeed it is an ex-
tremely elusive quality. Nothing is further removed
from that intrusion of the national gemtithlichkett into
so impersonal a matter as affairs, large or small,
which to an occasional sense makes the occasional
German manner enjoyable. Nothing is further from
the obsequiousness of the London shopman, which
rather dazes the American than pleases him. Noth-
ing, on the other hand, is further from our own bald
despatch. With us every shopper expects, or at
any rate is prepared for, obstruction rather than fa-
cilitation on the seller’s side. The drygoods coun-
ter, especially when the attendant is of the gentler
sex, is a kind of chevaux-de-frise. The retail atmo-
sphere is charged with an affectation of unconscious-
ness ; not only is every transaction impersonal, it is
mechanical ; ere long it must become automatic. In
many cases there is to be encountered a certain de-
fiant attitude to the last degree unhappy in its ef-
fects on the manners involved—a certain self-asser-
tion which begs the question, else unmooted, of |
cial equality, with the result for the time being of
the most unsocial relation probably existing among
men. Perfect personal equality for the time being
invariably exists between customer and tradesman
in France ; the man or woman who serves you is first
406 FRENCH TRAITS

of all a fellow-creature ; a shop, to be sure, is not a

conversazione, but if you are in a loquacious or in-

quisitive mood you will be deemed neither frivolous

nor familiar—nor yet an inanimate obstacle to the

flow of the most important as well as the most im-
etuous of the currents of life.

Certainly, in New York, we are too vain of our bus-
tle to realize how mannerless and motiveless it is.
The essence of life is movement, but so is the essence
of epilepsy. Moreover the life of the New Yorker
who chases street-cars, eats at a lunch counter,
drinks what will “take hold” quickly at a bar he
can quit instantly, reads only the head-lines of his
newspaper, keeps abreast of the intellectual move-
ment by inspecting the display of the Elevated Rail-
way news-stands while he fumes at having to wait
two minutes for his train, hastily buys his tardy
ticket of sidewalk speculators, and leaves the theatre
as if ib were on fire—the life of such a man is, not-
withstanding all its futile activity, varied by long
spaces of absolute mental stagnation, of moral coma.
Not only is our hurry not decorous, not decent ; it
is not real activity, it is as little as possible like the
animated existence of Paris, where the moral nature
is kept in constant operation, intense or not as the
case may be, in spite of the external and material
tranquillity. Owing to this lack of a real, a rational
activity, our individual civilization, which seems when
successful ascramble, and when unlucky a sauve qui
peut, is, morally as well as spectacularly, not ill de-.
NEW: YORK AFTER PARIS 407

scribed in so far as its external aspect is concerned
by the epithet flat. Enervation seems to menace
those whom hypereesthesia spares. wf

“We go to Europe to become Americanized,”
says Emerson, but France Americanizes us less in
this sense than any other country of Europe, and
perhaps Emerson was not thinking so much of her
democratic development into social order and effi-
ciency as of the less American and more feudal
European influences, which do indeed, while we are
subject to them, intensify our affection for our own
institutions, our confidence in our own outlook. One
must admit that in France, which nowadays follows
our ideal of liberty perhaps as closely as we do hers
of equality and fraternity, and where consequently
our political notions receive few shocks, not only is
the life of the senses more agreeable than it is with
us, but the mutual relations of men are more feliui-
tous also. Andalas! Americans who have savored
these sweets cannot avail themselves of the implica-
tion contained in Emerson’s further words—words
which approach nearer to petulance than anything
in his urbane and placid utterances—‘ those who
prefer London or Paris.to America may be spared
to return to those capitals.” “Tl faut vivre, com-
battre, et finir avec les siens,” says Doudan, and no
law is more inexorable. The fruits of foreign gar-
dens are, however delectable, enchanted for us;
we may not touch them ; and to pass our lives in
408 FBENCH TRAITS

covetous inspection of them is as barren a perform-
ance as may beimagined. For this reason the ques-
tion “Would you like better to live here or abroad ?”
is as little practical as it is frequent. The empty
life of the “ foreign colonies” in Paris is its sufficient
answer. Not only do most of us have to stay at
home, but for everyone except the inconsiderable
few who can better do abroad the work they have to
do, and except those essentially un-American waifs
who can contrive no work for themselves, life abroad
is not only less profitable but less pleasant. The
American endeavoring to acclimatize himself in Paris
hardly needs to have cited to him the words of
Epictetus : ‘‘ Man, thou hast forgotten thine object ;
thy journey was not ¢o this, but through this ”—he is
sure before long to come dismally persuaded of
theirtruth. More speedily than elsewhere perhaps,
he finds out in Paris the truth of Carlyle’s assur-
ance: “Itis, after all, the one unhappiness ofa man.
That he cannot work ; that he cannot get his destiny
as a man fulfilled.” For the work which insures the
felicity of the French life of the senses and of
French human relations he cannot share ; and, thus,
the question of the relative attractiveness of French.
and American life—of Paris and New York—be-
comes the idle and purely speculative question as
to whether one would like to change his personal
and national identity.

And this an American may permit himself the
chauvinism of believing a lese rational contradiction
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 409

of instinct in himself than it would be in the case of
anyone else. And for this reason : that in those ele-
ments of life which tend to the development and
perfection of the individual soul in the work of ful-
filling its mysterious destiny, American character and
American conditions are especially rich. Bunyan’s
genius exhibits its characteristic felicity in giving
the name of Hopeful to the successor of that Faith-
ful who perished in the town of Vanity.. It would
be a mark of that loose complacency in which we
are too often offenders, to associate the scene of Faith-
ful’s martyrdom with the Europe from which defin-
itively we set out afresh a century ago; but it is
impossible not to recognize that on our forward
journey to the celestial country of national and
individual success, our conspicuous inspiration and
constant comforter is that hope whose cheering
ministrations the “‘ weary Titans” of Kurope enjoy
in far narrower measure. Living in the future has
an indisputably tonic effect upon the moral sinews,
and contributes an exhilaration to the spirit which
no sense of attainment and achieved success can give.!
We are after all the true idealists of the world,
Material as are the details of our preoccupation, ou

sub-consciousness is sustained by a general aspira

tion that is none the less heroic for being, perhaps
somewhat naif as well. The times and moods whe

one’s energy is excited, when something oceurs in
the continuous drama of life to bring sharply into
relief its vivid interest and one’s own intimate share
410 FRENCH TRAITS

therein, when nature seems infinitely more real than
the societies she includes, when the missionary,
the pioneer, the constructive spirit is aroused, are
far more frequent with us than with other peoples.
Our intense individualism happily modified by our
equality, our constant, active, multiform struggle
with the environment, do at least, as I said, pro-
| duce men; and if we use the term in an esoteric
' sense we at least know its significance. Of our
‘riches in this respect New York alone certainly
gives no exaggerated idea—however it may other-
wise epitomize and typify our national traits. A
walk on Pennsylvania Avenue ; a drive among the
“homes” of Buffalo or Detroit—or a dozen other
true centres of communal life which have a concrete
impressiveness that for the most part only great capi-
tals in Europe possess ; a tour of college commence-
ments in scores of spots consecrated to the exalta-
tion of the permanent over the evanescent ; contact
in any wise with the prodigious amount of right
feeling manifested in a hundred ways throughout a
country whose prosperity stimulates generous im-
' pulse, or with the number of “ good fellows” of large,
| shrewd, humorous views of life, critical perhaps
grates than constructive, but at all events untouched
by cynicism, perfectly competent and admirably con-
fident, with a livelier interest in everything within
| their range of vision than can be felt by anyone
‘mainly occupied with sensuous satisfaction, saved
" from boredom by a robust imperviousness, ready to
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 411

begin life over again after every reverse with unen-
feebled spirit, and finding, in the working out of
their own personal salvation according to the gospel |
of necessity and opportunity, that joy which the|
pursuit of pleasure misses—experiences of every
kind, in fine, that familiarize us with what is espec-
ially American in our civilization, are agreeable as,
no foreign experiences can be, because they are
above all others animating and sustaining. Life in:
America has for everyone, in proportion to his seri-
ousness, the zest that accompanies the “advance on
Chaos and the Dark.” Meantime, one’s last word
about the America emphasized by contrast with the
organic and solidaire society of France, is that, for
insuring order and efficiency to the lines of this
advance, it would be difficult to conceive too gravely
the utility of observing attentively the work in the
modern world of the only other great nation that
follows the democratic standard, and is perennially
prepared to make sacrifices for ideas. .