The French
Sometimes I think of the French like this:
They are the only civilized grown-up people in the world. Even those who are ignorant or narrow have a mature attitude toward life, never a raw schoolboy attitude. They are logical in a world of insanity. For them not only do 2 plus 2 make 4, but 32 plus 32 make 64—not, as Blasco Ibañez said of the Russians, 4589. Their minds are orderly, swept and garnished, clear like their language, to hear which spoken by cultivated Frenchmen is an exquisite aesthetic pleasure, and to hear which falling precisely and crisply even from the lips of shopkeepers makes one sigh with relief at having come away from countries such as America or Italy, where common speech is a slovenly massacre, and where voices seem designed for the great open spaces.
Their prose is the marvel of the centuries. Its quality never stales. The mere flavour of the words on a page of Montaigne or of Anatole France is delicious. And no one who has learned that their poetry is not something to be compared with English poetry, but something of a different kind, will ever deem it thin. Racine thin? Alfred de Vigny thin?
Whatever thought they touch they clarify, and it is not true that they do not themselves originate and think creatively. It is only that to people who think muddily obscurity seems profound and simplicity superficial.
They have a fine respect for the individual. Nowhere else is the individual quite so free as in France—free within very broad limits as to behaviour, almost totally free as to thought. The French are infinitely less subject to the tyranny of majority opinion than, for example, the Americans or the Germans. Their minds are not standardized. ‘Equality’ and ‘Fraternity’ may have gone by the board, abandoned as impracticable ideals, but ‘Liberty’ still means something true in France: liberty for the individual.
They live soberly, disliking excess, spending less than they earn, saving for their children, whom they do not, like the Italians, treat as adorable playthings and cover with kisses and spoil, but educate sensibly as human beings.
For them marriage is not a reckless juvenile adventure in romance, but a partnership full of grave responsibilities, of which the woman must bear her part, as well as the man his; with the result that perhaps nowhere else does marriage work so well, so fairly, as in France.
And as with marriage, so with the whole of life. The French do not set for themselves Utopian ideals impossible of realization, the gulf between which and the actual facts of existence can but end in disillusioned despair, but reasonable ideals, difficult, indeed, of attainment, yet not beyond the conceivable reach of struggling mortals.
And yet, and yet... there is in the French a recurrent touch of madness that keeps all this from becoming grey and monotonous. The sense of drama is a clarion call to them. At almost any time they will sacrifice much that they hold dear for a ringing phrase, a beau geste; and they have more than once staked everything—their patient savings, their lives, their very national existence—on a noble idea, no whit less noble if later it proved to be false.
And then again I think of the French like this:
They are small and mean and petty. Those periods of exaltation are but rare raving moments; in all the long hours of their lives the French are hard and selfish.
Their love of money is a cold terrible passion; acquisition is not for them, as for Americans, a romance involving recklessness, imagination, and some other of the virtues to be found in higher adventures, but a cold, steady, ignoble thing rendering them capable of any baseness, any cruelty. The Americans gamble for high stakes boyishly, risk everything, and desire money for the power it brings; the French run no risks, play safe, and desire money from an ignominious fear of poverty. Their fixed universal longing is to become rentiers. No French government either dares or desires to tax income adequately. Nor are they generous with money, like the Americans or like the Italians, though they are rich and the Italians poor. A French girl may have every quality to fit her to become an exemplary wife and mother, but unless she has a dot she must die a spinster.
And as in their love of money, so in a multitude of other ways are the French small and sordid of spirit.
They are without generosity. They never give something for nothing. And therefore they are incapable of gratitude.
They will not concede superiority of whatsoever sort to another race, and when, as at the Olympic Games, this is demonstrated beyond question, they grow peevish and ill-mannered.
They are narrow. Once having made up their minds they never change them. Alone among the nations to-day, they will not admit that the Treaty of Versailles was other than righteous or that the Allies had any share of responsibility for the war.
They detest Americans because America is rich, Italians because the Italian race is strong and prolific, the English because England would leave Germany a nation, and all these and all the others because they are not French.
They are infinitely more insular than the English. All that they touch they Frenchify. Read any French romance of ancient Athens or Alexandria, and you feel yourself at once dishearteningly on the Boulevards. They know little, and care less, about contemporary life in any other country than their own. They are smug.
Their press is corrupt to—and beyond—the point of blackmail, and, by comparison with theirs, American politics are lily-white.
One Frenchman in every five is a government employee. Nowhere else does there exist so limp, obstructive and deadening a bureaucracy.
In the long run, I find something cheap in their love of thrilling phrase, of effect, of dramatic climax, because to it they sacrifice truth. There was something cheap in Victor Hugo, who could write of Napoleon: ‘This man had become too great. He inconvenienced God.’ There was something cheap in Napoleon himself. There is a strain of cheapness in Anatole France.
And, at all times, all of them, all Frenchmen, talk about France. Englishmen do not perpetually talk about England, nor Americans about America, but Frenchmen are for ever talking about France. ‘La France qui marche à la tête de la civilisation... la France qui a fait tant de sacrifices... la France! la France!’ It is unendurable.
I do not like to think in either of these two ways about the French; there is too much passion, too much prejudice, in both estimates. I would like to think of them as I have no difficulty in thinking of the English or the Italians... as individuals, good and bad, very mixed. But I cannot, no matter how many individual Frenchman I meet; for they will not let me. The truth, I say to myself, should lie somewhere about half-way between; but, instead, I swing helplessly from one of these two exasperating estimates to the other and back again, until, in a pet, I give up for a time thinking about the French at all.
Obnoxiously overdressed as nationality is to-day, one cannot simply dismiss it, deny its existence or even, I suppose, its importance. The things that men do and think and feel are the same everywhere, but in each of certain circles made up of language, climate and, in some slight degree, race, the angle of approach to these things is, roughly, unified and somewhat different from that in the other circles. That a man is a man is far more significant than that he is a Swede or an Englishman; still, in saying that he is a Swede or an Englishman you have said something significant about him, you have suggested certain probable variations (though even then you must be very careful; a Swedish poet is, in most ways, likely to resemble an English poet more closely than he resembles a Swedish butcher).
It is difficult and quite fruitless to determine whether in the past these differences of nationality have been more beneficial than harmful or vice versa. They have been the cause of infinite bloodshed and misery, but we are also the richer for inheriting, say, both Dutch painting and Spanish painting. Presumably they are still of some value. No great poet could write in Esperanto, and German music is composed in German idiom.
But it is, I think, fair to say that the value of nationality is at the origin, the bottom. Nationality is like the essential underground roots of a tree; the tree itself springs up into the universal air. Thus, in all countries national prejudices are strongest among the uneducated and the half-educated; whereas the more men become truly cultivated, the less marked in them become their national differences. There are no barriers between an intelligent educated American and an intelligent educated Englishman or Italian; merely subtle distinctions in point of view that add to the richness of their mutual relationship. Their nationality is behind them, not with them. Men of genuine cultivation grow impatient at all this flaunting of nationalism. They find themselves too similar to men of other countries to believe any longer in the grosser national generalizations. Indeed, they distrust generalizations of any sort, and grow more and more inclined to take everything, fact by fact, as they find it. Thus, as the mature man whose development has not halted feels an increasing desire to get away from himself, so, too, does he feel an increasing desire to get away from his nationality—not, like the petty Anglomaniac or Francophile, into some other, but into a broader human fellowship. Neither desire can ever be completely realized, but each is noble—a craving to shake off fetters of the mind. Perhaps the two desires are really one. When emancipated men of this sort witness the disagreeable act of some foreigner, it is to them simply a disagreeable act committed by an individual of faulty breeding. They do not say, with a shrug: ‘Characteristically Italian, that, eh?’ or, ‘A Boche is always a Boche.’
That, I fear, is precisely what, with fewer exceptions than among any other western people, a Frenchman would say—or, at any rate, feel. It appears, for some reason, extremely difficult for him to emerge from being a Frenchman into being a man. Perhaps the desire is not very strong. Far more than the Englishman, whose sense of racial superiority is currently supposed to be enormous (and is, of course, among the half-educated, but I am not considering them here), the Frenchman leans on his nationality for support, assumes its heritage of greatness as his own. So far as I am aware, no Frenchman has ever written anything similar to the famous song in Pinafore—‘For he himself has said it, and it’s greatly to his credit, that he is an Englishman, that he i-i-i-i-i-i-is an Eng-lish-man.’
Doubtless there is some measure of compensation for this willing narrowness of outlook, even though to-day one can hardly believe in Emerson’s neat pattern of balance, life appearing to us too confused and rich. Something of the French sureness, something of the French clarity, probably derives from the Frenchman’s persistent cultivation of his own garden and refusal to allow himself to be intrigued by the vast variety of exotic plants to be found elsewhere. He does know his own garden better than any of the rest of us know ours. And it is true that wide acquaintance with the varying minds of many different groups often leads to sterility, a poised inaction.
Often, but not always. Here it seems to me that the French sacrifice a possible rare greatness to a moderate average of success. One admires French achievement for being so French, and yet, even while admiring, is faintly dissatisfied that it is not something other than that, and greater. One wearies of so much perfection. It does not seem an adequate interpretation of a chaotic world. French art is noble; yet it has never produced a Tolstoy, a Wagner, a Shakespeare, or a Michelangelo. It is not universal enough; it is too French. At an earlier day, when it was still but half formed, it came perhaps closest to such heroic stature in Rabelais.
Probably more than any other one factor, it is their language that cuts the French off from other peoples and renders them so circumscribed. For it is, when spoken, very different from other languages. The whole system of voice production is different. A foreigner with no knowledge of any language save his own might mistake Spanish for Italian or Italian for Spanish, but he could not possibly mistake either for French. Its system of prosody is so different from that of other related languages that foreign poetry simply cannot be even approximately translated into French poetry. You can translate Shakespeare into German or into Italian and hear some echo of the original sonority—not into French. It is curious that the spoken language should have developed into this unique isolated instrument, since written French is extremely like any of the other Latin languages; but so it is.
There are no worse linguists in Europe than the French. But this may also be because they care so little about learning foreign languages, have so little esteem for them, since, while almost any cultivated Englishman can speak French correctly enough, if often with a pronounced accent, it is rare indeed to find a cultivated Frenchman who can speak English with even tolerable ungrammatical fluency. (Shopkeepers and hotel porters in France of course speak some English, because it is to their financial advantage to do so). Moreover, even a literary knowledge of other languages is rare among the French. When reputable English or Italian authors have occasion to insert a French sentence in a novel, the sentence is usually correct; a French author can seldom so much as quote a foreign phrase correctly. Paul Morand, who, I believe, has spent many years in the Diplomatic Service, and whose brilliant cosmopolitan short stories do reveal interest in the national characteristics of other people, is frequently guilty of solecisms in the foreign phrases he now and then employs. In Henri Béraud’s excellent historical novel, Le Vitriol-de-Lune, the principal character is an Italian who is called, throughout the book, ‘Guiseppe,’ though Giuseppe is one of the commonest Italian names. Alone among the contemporary French writers with whose work I am acquainted, André Maurois reveals a genuine knowledge of English. And it is significant that he, too, is practically alone in revealing a genuine sympathetic understanding of the English people. Les Silences du Colonel Bramble occasionally crosses the line into national caricature; but it is at least caricature based on knowledge, not wild unrelated caricature like Abel Hermant’s. As for Ariel, a work of far greater importance—well, written by an Italian, it would have been, if surprising, at least credible, since there are many Italians who love and understand Shelley; written by a Frenchman, it appears little short of miraculous. Nor is this solely a personal judgment of my own, employed for the sake of my thesis. English critics fairly gasped with amazement at Ariel. But I repeat that André Maurois stands alone. You would have to go back to Taine to find any similarly lonely figure.2
So, reluctantly, I end, as I began, with those two irreconcilable, but I think equally justified, estimates of the French—save that each has at the moment lost something of its intensity for me through the relief of putting it into written words.
It will not be the French who will overthrow the barriers between races, sacrifice their nationality to something broader and greater, or conduct the League of Nations to a position of supreme importance. True, there are those moments of national madness when it is as though the French were atoning for all their habitual narrowness. But one cannot say: ‘Come, let us now have a moment of madness.’ No, for the achievement of unselfish uncircumscribed ideals the world will have to depend on individuals who in their growth have gradually sloughed off all that is narrow, restrictive and myopic in their nationality. Such individuals have come in the past, and should come increasingly in the future, from many different peoples—hardly from the French.
On the other hand, even though we may feel that nationality is narrowing, and that at best it should be only a means to an end, we may nevertheless be actually grateful that the French have made it an end in itself. The similar devotion to it of the Poles arouses principally distaste; in the French we not only excuse but admire it. For there is about it in their case, and in their case alone, something akin to the results of intensive cultivation in agriculture, something that the best minds of other races must sacrifice (rightly, I think) to broader results—a perfection, an orderliness of thought, a fine neat thoroughness, incapable of achievement in any other way than through this persistent nurture of nationality, and to the contemplation of which we can always turn with pleasure.