FOOTNOTE:[A]Kitchin: "History of France," vol. I.
[A]Kitchin: "History of France," vol. I.
[A]Kitchin: "History of France," vol. I.
French taste? Why, of course—everybody knows all about that! It's the way the women put on their hats, and the upholsterers drape their curtains.
Certainly—why not?
The artistic integrity of the French has led them to feel from the beginning that there is no difference in kind between the curve of a woman's hat-brim and the curve of a Rodin marble, or between the droop of an upholsterer's curtain and that of the branches along a great avenue laid out by Le Nôtre.
It was the Puritan races—every one of them non-creative in the plastic arts—who decided that "Art" (that is, plastic art) was something apart from life, as dangerous to it asPlato thought Poets in a Republic, and to be tolerated only when it was so lofty, unapproachable and remote from any appeal to average humanity that it bored people to death, and they locked it up in Museums to get rid of it.
But this article is headed "Taste," and taste, whatever it may be, is not, after all, the same thing as art. No; it is not art—but it is the atmosphere in which art lives, and outside of which it cannot live. It is the regulating principle of all art, of the art of dress and of manners, and of living in general, as well as of sculpture or music. It is because the French have always been so innately sure of this, that, without burdening themselves with formulas, they have instinctively applied to living the same rules that they applied to artistic creation.
I remember being told when I was a young girl: "If you want to interest the person youare talking to, pitch your voice so that only that one person will hear you."
That small axiom, apart from its obvious application, contains nearly all there is to say about Taste.
That a thing should be in scale—should be proportioned to its purpose—is one of the first requirements of beauty, in whatever order. No shouting where an undertone will do; and no gigantic Statue of Liberty in butter for a World's Fair, when the little Wingless Victory, tying on her sandal on the Acropolis, holds the whole horizon in the curve of her slim arm.
The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.
Suitability—fitness—is, and always has been, the very foundation of French standards. Fitness is only a contraction of fittingness; and if any of our American soldiers inFrance should pause to look up at the narrow niches in the portal of a French cathedral, or at the group of holy figures in the triangle or half-circle above, they are likely to be struck first of all by the way in which the attitude of each figure or group is adapted to the space it fills.
If the figure is cramped and uncomfortable—if the saint or angel seems to be in a straitjacket or a padded cell—then the sculptor has failed, and taste is offended. It is essential that there should be perfect harmony between the natural attitude of the figure and the space it lives in—that a square saint should not be put in a round hole. Range through plastic art, from Chaldæa to France, and you will see how this principle of adaptation has always ruled composition.
It is the sense of its universal applicability that makes taste so living an influence in France. French people "have taste" asnaturally as they breathe: it is not regarded as an accomplishment, like playing the flute.
The universal existence of taste, and of the standard it creates—it insists on—explains many of the things that strike Americans on first arriving in France.
It is the reason, for instance, why the French have beautiful stone quays along the great rivers on which their cities are built, and why noble monuments of architecture, and gardens and terraces, have been built along these quays. The French have always felt and reverenced the beauty of their rivers, and known the value, artistic and hygienic, of a beautiful and well-kept river-front in the heart of a crowded city.
When industrialism began its work of disfigurement in the great cities of the world, long reaches of the Thames were seized upon by the factory-builder, and London has only by a recent effort saved a short stretch of her river front; even so, from the Embankment,whether at Westminster or Chelsea, one looks across at ugliness, untidiness and squalor.
When industrialism came to the wise old Latin cities—Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, Florence—their river banks were already firmly and beautifully built up, and the factory chimneys had to find a footing in the outskirts. Any American with eyes to see, who compares the architectural use to which Paris has put the Seine with the wasteful degradation of the unrivalled twin river-fronts of New York, may draw his own conclusions as to the sheer material advantage of taste in the creation of a great city.
Perhaps the most curious instance of taste-blindness in dealing with such an opportunity is to be found in Boston, where Beacon Street calmly turned its wealthy back to the bay, and fringed with clothes-lines the shores that might have made of Boston one of the most beautifully situated cities in the world. In this case, industry did not encroach or slums degrade. The Boston aristocracyappropriated the shore of the bay for its own residential uses, but apparently failed to notice that the bay was there.
Taste, also—the recognition of a standard—explains the existence of such really national institutions as the French Academy, and the French national theatre, the Théâtre Français. The history of the former, in particular, throws a light on much that is most distinctively French in the French character.
It would be difficult for any one walking along the Quai Malaquais, and not totally blind to architectural beauty, not to be charmed by the harmony of proportion and beauty of composition of a certain building with curved wings and a small central dome that looks across the Seine at the gardens of the Louvre and the spires of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois.
That building, all elegance, measure and balance, from its graceful cupola to the stately stone vases surmounting the lateral colonnades—that building is the old "Collège des QuatreNations," the Institute of France, and the home of the French Academy.
In 1635, at a time when France was still struggling with the heavy inheritance of feudalism, a bad man and great statesman, the mighty Cardinal Richelieu, paused in his long fight with the rebellious vassals of the crown to create a standard of French speech: "To establish the rules of the language, and make French not only elegant, but capable of dealing with the arts and sciences."
Think of the significance of such an act at such a moment! France was a welter of political and religious dissension; everything in the monarchy, and the monarchy itself, was in a state of instability. Austria and Spain menaced it from without, the great vassals tore it asunder from within. During the Great Assizes of Auvergne some of the most powerful of these nobles were tried, punished and stripped of their monstrous privileges; and the record of their misdeeds reads like atale of Sicilian brigandage and Corsican vendetta.
Gradually the iron hand of Richelieu drew order—a grim pitiless order—out of this uninhabitable chaos. But it was in the very thick of the conflict that he seemed to feel the need of creating, then and there, some fixed principle of civilised life, some kind of ark in which thought and taste and "civility" could take shelter. It was as if, in the general upheaval, he wished to give stability to the things which humanise and unite society. And he chose "taste"—taste in speech, in culture, in manners,—as the fusing principle of his new Academy.
The traditional point of view of its founder has been faithfully observed for nearly three hundred years by the so-called "Forty Immortals," the Academicians who throne under the famous cupola. The Academy has never shrunk into a mere retreat for lettered pedantry: as M. Saillens says in his admirable little book, "Facts about France": "The greatobject of Richelieu was national unity," and "The Forty do not believe that they can keep the language under discipline by merely publishing a Dictionary now and then (the first edition came out in 1694). They believe that a standard must be set, and that it is for them to set it. Therefore the Academy does not simply call to its ranks famous or careful writers, but soldiers as well, bishops, scientists, men of the world, men of social rank, so as to maintain from generation to generation a national conservatory of good manners and good speech."
For this reason, though Frenchmen have always laughed at their Academy, they have always respected it, and aspired to the distinction of membership. Even the rebellious spirits who satirise it in their youth usually become, in maturity, almost too eager for its recognition; and, though the fact of being an Academician gives social importance, it would be absurd to pretend that such men as Pasteur, Henri Poincaré, Marshal Joffre,sought the distinction for that reason, or that France would have thought it worthy of their seeking if the institution had not preserved its original significance.
That significance was simply the safeguarding of what the French callles choses de l'esprit; which cannot quite be translated "things of the spirit," and yet means more nearly that than anything else. And Richelieu and the original members of the Academy had recognised from the first day that language was the chosen vessel in which the finer life of a nation must be preserved.
It is not uncommon nowadays, especially in America, to sneer at any deliberate attempts to stabilise language. To test such criticisms it is useful to reduce them to their last consequence—which is almost always absurdity. It is not difficult to discover what becomes of a language left to itself, without accepted standards or restrictions; instances may be found among any savage tribes without fixed standards of speech. Their language speedilyceases to be one, and deteriorates into a muddle of unstable dialects. Or, if an instance nearer home is needed, the lover of English need only note what that rich language has shrunk to on the lips, and in the literature, of the heterogeneous hundred millions of American citizens who, without uniformity of tradition or recognised guidance, are being suffered to work their many wills upon it.
But at this point it may be objected that, after all, England herself has never had an Academy, nor could ever conceivably have had one, and that whatever the English of America has become, the English of England is still the language of her great tradition, with perfectly defined standards of taste and propriety.
England is England, as France is France: the one feels the need of defining what the other finds it simpler to take for granted. England has never had a written Constitution; yet her constitutional government has long been the model of free nations.England's standards are all implicit. She does not feel the French need of formulating and tabulating. Her Academy is not built with hands, but it is just as powerful, and just as visible to those who have eyes to see; and the name of the English Academy is Usage.
I said just now: "If any of our American soldiers look up at the niches in the portal of a French cathedral they are likely to be struck first of all by" such and such things.
In our new Army all the arts and professions are represented, and if the soldier in question happens to be a sculptor, an architect, or an art critic, he will certainly note what I have pointed out; but if he is not a trained observer, the chances are that he will not even look up.
The difference is that in France almost every one has the seeing eye, just as almost every one has the hearing ear. It is not a platitude, though it may be a truism, to say that theFrench are a race of artists: it is the key that unlocks every door of their complex psychology, and consequently the key that must be oftenest in the explorer's hand.
The gift of the seeing eye is, obviously, a first requisite where taste is to prevail. And the question is, how is the seeing eye to be obtained? What is the operation for taste-blindness? Or is there any; and are not some races—the artistically non-creative—born as irremediably blind as Kentucky cave-fishes?
The answer might beyes, in the case of the wholly non-creative races. But the men of English blood are creative artists too: theirs is the incomparable gift of poetic expression. And any race gifted with one form of artistic originality is always acutely appreciative of other cognate forms of expression. There has never been a race more capable than the English of appreciating the great plastic creators, Greece, Italy and France. This gift of the critical sense in those arts wherein the race does not excel in originalexpression seems an inevitable by-product of its own special endowment. In such races taste-blindness is purely accidental, and the operation that cures it is the long slow old-fashioned one of education. There is no other.
The artist races are naturally less dependent on education: to a certain degree their instinct takes the place of acquired discrimination. But they set a greater store on it than any other races because they appreciate more than the others all that, even to themselves, education reveals and develops.
It is just because the French are naturally endowed with taste that they attach such importance to cultivation, and that French standards of education are so infinitely higher and more severe than those existing in Anglo-Saxon countries. We are too much inclined to think that we have disposed of the matter when we say that, in our conception of life, education should be formative and not instructive. The point is, the French might return, what are we to be formed for? And, inany case, they would not recognise the antithesis, since they believe that, to form, one must instruct: instruct the eye, the ear, the brain, every one of those marvellous organs of sense so often left dormant by our Anglo-Saxon training.
It used to be thought that if savages appeared unimpressed by the wonders of occidental art or industry it was because their naturalhauteurwould not let them betray surprise to the intruder. That romantic illusion has been dispelled by modern investigation, and the traveller now knows that the savage is unimpressed becausehe does not seethe new things presented to him. It takes the most complex assemblage of associations, visual and mental, to enable us to discover what a picture represents: the savage placed before such familiar examples of the graphic art as "The Infant Samuel" or "His Master's Voice" would notseethe infant or the fox-terrier, much less guess what they were supposed to be doing.
As long as America believes in short-cuts to knowledge, in any possibility of buying taste in tabloids, she will never come into her real inheritance of English culture. A gentleman travelling in the Middle West met a charming girl who was a "college graduate." He asked her what line of study she had selected, and she replied that she had learnt music one year, and languages the next, and that last year she had "learnt art."
It is the pernicious habit of regarding the arts as something that can be bottled, pickled and absorbed in twelve months (thanks to "courses," summaries and abridgments) that prevents the development of a real artistic sensibility in our eager and richly endowed race. Patience, deliberateness, reverence: these are the fundamental elements of taste. The French have always cultivated them, and it is as much to them as to the eagle-flights of genius that France owes her long artistic supremacy.
From the Middle Ages to the Revolutionall the French trade-guilds had their travelling members, the "Compagnons du Tour de France." Not for greed of gold, but simply from the ambition to excel in their own craft, these "companions," their trade once learned, took their staves in hand, and wandered on foot over France, going from one to another of the cities where the best teachers of their special trades were to be found, and serving an apprenticeship in each till they learned enough to surpass their masters. The "tour de France" was France's old way of acquiring "Efficiency"; and even now she does not believe it can be found in newspaper nostrums.
Most people, in their infancy, have made bogeys out of sofa-pillows and overcoats, and the imaginative child always comes to believe in the reality of the bogey he has manufactured, and toward twilight grows actually afraid of it.
When I was a little girl the name of Horace Greeley was potent in American politics, and some irreverent tradesman had manufactured a pink cardboard fan (on the "palmetto" model) which represented the countenance of the venerable demagogue, and was surrounded with a white silk fringe in imitation of his hoary hair and "chin-beard." A Horace Greeley fan had long been knocking about our country-house, and was a familiar object to me and to my little cousins, whenone day it occurred to us to make a bogey with my father's overcoat, put Mr. Greeley's head on top, and seat him on the verandah near the front door.
When we were tired of playing we started to go in; but there on the threshold in the dusk sat Mr. Greeley, suddenly transformed into an animate and unknown creature, and dumb terror rooted us to the spot. Not one of us had the courage to demolish that supernatural and malevolent old man, or to dash past him into the house—and oh, the relief it was when a big brother came along and reduced him into his constituent parts!
Such inhibitions take the imagination far back to the childhood of the human race, when terrors and taboos lurked in every bush; and wherever the fear of the thing it has created survives in the mind of any society, that society is still in its childhood. Intellectual honesty, the courage to look at things as they are, is the first test of mental maturity. Till a society ceases to be afraid of the truth inthe domain of ideas it is in leading-strings, morally and mentally.
The singular superiority of the French has always lain in their intellectual courage. Other races and nations have been equally distinguished for moral courage, but too often it has been placed at the service of ideas they were afraid to analyse. The French always want to find out first just what the conceptions they are fighting for are worth. They will not be downed by their own bogeys, much less by anybody else's. The young Oedipus of Ingres, calmly questioning the Sphinx, is the very symbol of the French intelligence; and it is because of her dauntless curiosity that France is of all countries the mostgrown up.
To persons unfamiliar with the real French character, this dauntless curiosity is supposed to apply itself chiefly to spying out and discussing acts and emotions which the Anglo-Saxon veils from publicity. The French view of what are euphemistically called "the facts of life" (as the Greeks called the Furies the"Amiable Ones") is often spoken of as though it were inconsistent with those necessary elements of any ordered society that we call purity and morality. Because the French talk and write freely about subjects and situations that Anglo-Saxons, for the last hundred years (not before), have agreed not to mention, it is assumed that the French gloat over such subjects and situations. As a matter of fact, they simply take them for granted, as part of the great parti-coloured business of life, and no more gloat over them (in the morbid introspective sense) than they do over their morning coffee.
To be sure, they do "gloat" over their coffee in a sense unknown to consumers of liquid chicory and health-beverages: they "gloat," in fact, over everything that tastes good, looks beautiful, or appeals to any one of their acute and highly-trained five senses. But they do this with no sense of greediness or shame or immodesty, and consequently without morbidness or waste of time. They take the normalpleasures, physical and æsthetic, "in their stride," so to speak, as wholesome, nourishing, and necessary for the background of a laborious life of business or study, and not as subjects for nasty prying or morbid self-examination.
It is necessary for any one who would judge France fairly to get this fundamental difference fixed in his mind before forming an opinion of the illustrated "funny papers," of the fiction, the theatres, the whole trend of French humour, irony and sentiment. Well-meaning people waste much time in seeking to prove that Gallic and Anglo-Saxon minds take the same view of such matters, and that theVie Parisienne, the "little theatres" and the light fiction of France do not represent the average French temperament, but are a vile attempt (by foreign agents) to cater to foreign pornography.
The French have always been a gay and free and Rabelaisian people. They attach a great deal of importance to love-making, butthey consider it more simply and less solemnly than we. They are cool, resourceful and merry, crack jokes about the relations between the sexes, and are used to the frank discussion of what some one tactfully called "the operations of Nature." They are puzzled by our queer fear of our own bodies, and accustomed to relate openly and unapologetically the anecdotes that Anglo-Saxons snicker over privately and with apologies. They define pornography as a taste for the nasty, and not as an interest in the natural. But nothing would be more mistaken than to take this as proving that family feeling is less deep and tender in France than elsewhere, or the conception of the social virtues different. It means merely that the French are not frightened by the names of things; that they dislike what we call coarseness much less than what they call pruriency; and that they have too great a faith in the fundamental life-forces, and too much tenderness for the young mother suckling her baby, for Daphnis and Chloe in the orchardat dawn, and Philemon and Baucis on their threshold at sunset, not to wonder at our being ashamed of any of the processes of nature.
It is convenient to put the relations between the sexes first on the list of subjects about which the French and Anglo-Saxon races think and behave differently, because it is the difference which strikes the superficial observer first, and which has been most used in the attempt to prove the superior purity of Anglo-Saxon morals. But French outspokenness would not be interesting if it applied only to sex-questions, for savages are outspoken about those, too. The French attitude in that respect is interesting only as typical of the general intellectual fearlessness of France. She is not afraid of anything that concerns mankind, neither of pleasure and mirth nor of exultations and agonies.
The French are intrinsically a tough race: they are careless of pain, unafraid of risks, contemptuous of precautions. They have no idea that life can be evaded, and if it could bethey would not try to evade it. They regard it as a gift so magnificent that they are ready to take the bad weather with the fine rather than miss a day of the golden year.
It is this innate intellectual honesty, the specific distinction of the race, which has made it the torch-bearer of the world. Bishop Butler's celebrated: "Things are as they are and will be as they will be" might have been the motto of the French intellect. It is an axiom that makes dull minds droop, but exalts the brain imaginative enough to be amazed before the marvel of things as they are.
Mr. Howells, I feel sure, will forgive me if I quote here a comment I once heard him make on theatrical taste in America. We had been talking of that strange exigency of the American public which compels the dramatist (if he wishes to be played) to wind up his play, whatever its point of departure, with the "happy-ever-after" of the fairy-tales; and Ihad remarked that this did not imply a preference for comedy, but that, on the contrary, our audiences want to be harrowed (and even slightly shocked) from eight till ten-thirty, and then consoled and reassured before eleven.
"Yes," said Mr. Howells; "what the American public wants isa tragedy with a happy ending."
What Mr. Howells said of the American theatre is true of the whole American attitude toward life.
"A tragedy with a happy ending" is exactly what the child wants before he goes to sleep: the reassurance that "all's well with the world" as he lies in his cosy nursery. It is a good thing that the child should receive this reassurance; but as long as he needs it he remains a child, and the world he lives in is a nursery-world. Things are not always and everywhere well with the world, and each man has to find it out as he grows up. It is the finding out that makes him grow, and until hehas faced the fact and digested the lesson he is not grown up—he is still in the nursery.
The same thing is true of countries and peoples. The "sheltered life," whether of the individual or of the nation, must either have a violent and tragic awakening—or never wake up at all. The keen French intelligence perceived this centuries ago, and has always preferred to be awake and alive, at whatever cost. The cost has been heavy, but the results have been worth it, for France leads the world intellectually just because she is the most grown up of the nations.
In each of the great nations there is a small minority which is at about the same level of intellectual culture; but it is not between these minorities (though even here the level is perhaps higher in France) that comparisons may profitably be made. A cross-section of average life must be taken, and compared with the same average in a country like ours, to understand why France leads in the world of ideas.
The theatre has an importance in Francewhich was matched only in the most glorious days of Greece. The dramatic sense of the French, their faculty of perceiving and enjoying the vivid contrasts and ironies of daily life, and their ability to express emotion where Anglo-Saxons can only choke with it, this innate dramatic gift, which is a part of their general artistic endowment, leads them to attach an importance to the theatre incomprehensible to our blunter races.
Americans new to France, and seeing it first in war-time, will be continually led to overlook the differences and see the resemblances between the two countries. They will notice, for instance, that the same kind of people who pack the music-halls and "movie-shows" at home also pack them in France. But if they will take a seat at the one of the French national theatres (theThéâtre Françaisor theOdéon) they will see people of the same level of education as those of the cinema-halls enjoying with keen discrimination a tragedy by Racine or a drama of Victor Hugo's. InAmerica the "movie" and music-hall audiences require no higher form of nourishment. In France they do, and the Thursday matinées in theatres which give the classic drama are as packed as the house where "The Mysteries of New York" are unrolled, while on the occasion of the free performances given on national holidays in these theatres a line composed of working-people, poor students and all kinds of modest wage-earners forms at the door hours before the performance begins.
The people who assist at these great tragic performances have a strong enough sense of reality to understand the part that grief and calamity play in life and in art: they feel instinctively that no real art can be based on a humbugging attitude toward life, and it is their intellectual honesty which makes them exact and enjoy its fearless representation.
It is also their higher average of education, of "culture" it would be truer to say, if the word, with us, had not come to stand for thepretence rather than the reality. Education in its elementary sense is much more general in America than in France. There are more people who can read in the United States; but what do they read? The whole point, as far as any real standard goes, is there. If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets in hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.
The very significance—the note of ridicule and slight contempt—which attaches to the word "culture" in America, would be quite unintelligible to the French of any class. It is inconceivable to them that any one should consider it superfluous, and even slightly comic, to know a great deal, to know the bestin every line, to know, in fact, as much as possible.
There are ignorant and vulgar-minded people in France, as in other countries; but instead of dragging the popular standard of culture down to their own level, and ridiculing knowledge as the affectation of a self-conscious clique, they are obliged to esteem it, to pretend to have it, and to try and talk its language—which is not a bad way of beginning to acquire it.
The odd Anglo-Saxon view that a love of beauty and an interest in ideas imply effeminacy is quite unintelligible to the French; as unintelligible as, for instance, the other notion that athletics make men manly.
The French would say that athletics make men muscular, that education makes them efficient, and that what makes them manly is their general view of life, or, in other words, the completeness of their intellectual honesty. And the conduct of Frenchmen during the last four and a half years looks as though therewere something to be said in favour of this opinion.
The French are persuaded that the enjoyment of beauty and the exercise of the critical intelligence are two of the things best worth living for; and the notion that art and knowledge could ever, in a civilised state, be regarded as negligible, or subordinated to merely material interests, would never occur to them. It does not follow that everything they create is beautiful, or that their ideas are always valuable or interesting; what matters is the esteem in whichthe whole raceholds ideas and their noble expression.
Theoretically, America holds art and ideas in esteem also; but she does not, as a people, seek or desire them. This indifference is partly due to awe: America has not lived long at her ease with beauty, like the old European races whose art reaches back through an unbroken inheritance of thousands of years of luxury and culture.
It would have been unreasonable to expecta new country, plunged in the struggle with material necessities, to create an art of her own, or to have acquired familiarity enough with the great arts of the past to feel the need of them as promoters of enjoyment, or to understand their value as refining and civilising influences. But America is now ripe to take her share in the long inheritance of the races she descends from; and it is a pity that just at this time the inclination of the immense majority of Americans is setting away from all real education and real culture.
Intellectual honesty was never so little in respect in the United States as in the years before the war. Every sham and substitute for education and literature and art had steadily crowded out the real thing. "Get-rich-quick" is a much less dangerous device than "get-educated-quick," but the popularity of the first has led to the attempt to realise the second. It is possible to get rich quickly in a country full of money-earning chances; but there is no short-cut to education.
Perhaps it has been an advantage to the French to have had none of our chances of sudden enrichment. Perhaps the need of accumulating money slowly leads people to be content with less, and consequently gives them more leisure to care for other things. There could be no greater error—as all Americans know—than to think that America's ability to make money quickly has made her heedless of other values; but it has set the pace for the pursuit of those other values, a pursuit that leads to their being trampled underfoot in the general rush for them.
The French, at any rate, living more slowly, have learned the advantage of living more deeply. In science, in art, in technical and industrial training, they know the need of taking time, and the wastefulness of superficiality. French university education is a long and stern process, but it produces minds capable of more sustained effort and a larger range of thought than our quick doses of learning. And this strengthening discipline of themind has preserved the passion for intellectual honesty. No race is so little addicted to fads, for fads are generally untested propositions. The French tendency is to test every new theory, religious, artistic or scientific, in the light of wide knowledge and experience, and to adopt it only if it stands this scrutiny. It is for this reason that France has so few religions, so few philosophies, and so few quick cures for mental or physical woes. And it is for this reason also that there are so few advertisements in French newspapers.
Nine-tenths of English and American advertising is based on the hope that some one has found a way of doing something, or curing some disease, or overcoming some infirmity, more quickly than by the accepted methods. The French are too incredulous of short-cuts and nostrums to turn to such promises with much hope. Their unshakeable intellectual honesty and their sound intellectual training lead them to distrust any way but the strait and narrow one when a difficulty is to bemastered or an art acquired. They are above all democratic in their steady conviction that there is no "royal road" to the worth-while things, and that every yard of the Way to Wisdom has to be travelled on foot, and not spun over in a joy-ride.
Have you ever watched the attempt of any one who does not know how to draw to put down on paper the roughest kind of representation of a house or a horse or a human being?
The difficulty and perplexity (to any one not born with the drawing instinct) caused by the effort of reproducing an object one can walk around are extraordinary and unexpected. The thing is there, facing the draughtsman, the familiar everyday thing—and a few strokes on paper ought to give at least a recognisable suggestion of it.
But what kind of strokes? And what curves or angles ought they to follow? Try and see for yourself, if you have never been taughtto draw, and if no instinct tells you how. Evidently there is some trick about it which must be learned.
It takes a great deal of training and observation to learn the trick and represent recognisably the simplest three-dimensional thing, much less an animal or a human being in movement. And it takes a tradition too: it presupposes the existence of some one capable of handing on the trick, which has already been handed on to him.
Thirty thousand years ago—or perhaps more—there were men in France so advanced in observation and training of eye and hand that they could represent fishes swimming in a river, stags grazing or fighting, bison charging with lowered heads or lying down and licking their own shoulders—could even represent women dancing in a round, and long lines of reindeer in perspective, with horns gradually diminishing in size.
It is only twenty years ago that the first cavern decorated with prehistoric paintingswas discovered at Altamira, in north-western Spain. Its discoverer was regarded with suspicion and contempt by the archæologists of the period: they let him see that they thought him an impostor and he died without having been able to convince the learned world that he had not had a hand in decorating the roof of the cave of Altamira with its wonderful troops of inter-glacial animals. But ten or twelve years later the discovery of similar painted caves in all directions north and south of the Pyrenees at last vindicated Señor Sautola's sincerity, and set the students of civilisation hastily revising their chronologies; and since then proofs of the consummate skill of these men of the dawn have been found on the walls of caves and grottoes all over central and southern France, throughout the very region where our American soldiers have been camping, and where our convalescents are now basking in the warm Mediterranean sun.
The study of prehistoric art is just beginning, but already it has been found thatdrawing, painting and even sculpture of a highly developed kind were practised in France long before Babylon rose in its glory, or the foundations of the undermost Troy were laid. In fact, all that is known of the earliest historic civilisations is recent in date compared with the wonderful fore-shortened drawings and clay statues of the French Stone Age.
The traces of a very ancient culture discovered in the United States and in Central America prove the far-off existence of an artistic and civic development unknown to the races found by the first European explorers. But the origin and date of these vanished societies are as yet unguessed at, and even were it otherwise they would not count in our artistic and social inheritance, since the English and Dutch colonists found only a wilderness peopled by savages, who had kept no link of memory with those vanished societies. There had been a complete break of continuity.
In France it was otherwise.
Any one who really wants to understand France must bear in mind that French culture is the most homogeneous and uninterrupted culture the world has known. It is true that waves of invasion, just guessed at on the verge of the historic period, must have swept away the astounding race who adorned the caves of central and south-western France with drawings matching those of the Japanese in suppleness and audacity; for after that far-off flowering time the prehistorian comes on a period of retrogression when sculptor and draughtsman fumbled clumsily with their implements. The golden age of prehistory was over. Waves of cold, invasions of savage hordes, all the violent convulsions of a world in the making, swept over the earliest France and almost swept her away: almost, but not quite. Soon, Phœnicia and Greece were to reach her from the south, soon after that Rome was to stamp her once for all with the stampof Roman citizenship; and in the intervals between these events the old, almost vanished culture doubtless lingered in the caves and river-beds, handed on something of its great tradition, kept alive, in the hidden nooks which cold and savages spared, little hearths of artistic vitality.
It would appear that all the while people went on obscurely modelling clay, carving horn and scratching drawings on the walls of just such river-cliff houses as the peasants of Burgundy live in to this day, thus nursing the faint embers of tradition that were to leap into beauty at the touch of Greece and Rome. And even if it seems fanciful to believe that the actual descendants of the cave-painters survived there can be little doubt that their art, or its memory, was transmitted. If even this link with the past seems too slight to be worth counting, the straight descent of French civilisation from the ancient Mediterranean culture which penetrated her by the Rhone and Spain and the Alps would explain theripeness and the continuity of her social life. By her geographic position she seemed destined to centralise and cherish the scattered fires of these old societies.
What is true of plastic art must of course be true of the general culture it implies. The people of France went on living in France, surviving cataclysms, perpetuating traditions, handing down and down and down certain ways of ploughing and sowing and vine-dressing and dyeing and tanning and working and hoarding, in the same valleys and on the same river-banks as their immemorially remote predecessors.
Could anything be in greater contrast to the sudden uprooting of our American ancestors and their violent cutting off from all their past, when they set out to create a new state in a new hemisphere, in a new climate, and out of new materials?
How little the old peasant-tradition of rural England lingered among the uprooted colonists, who had to change so abruptly all theiragricultural and domestic habits, is shown in the prompt disappearance from our impoverished American vocabulary of nearly all the old English words relating to fields and woods. What has become, in America, of the copse, the spinney, the hedgerow, the dale, the vale, the weald? We have reduced all timber to "woods," and, even that plural appearing excessive, one hears Americans who ought to know better speak of "awoods," as though the familiar word has lost part of its meaning to them.
This instance from our own past—to which might be added so many more illustrating the deplorable loss of shades of difference in our blunted speech—will help to show the contrast between a race that has had a long continuance and a race that has had a recent beginning.
The English and Dutch settlers of North America no doubt carried many things with them, such vital but imponderable things as prejudices, principles, laws and beliefs. Buteven these were strangely transformed when at length the colonists emerged again from the backwoods and the bloody Indian warfare. The stern experience of the pioneer, the necessity of rapid adaptation and of constantly improvised expedients, formed a far different preparation from that dogged resistance to invasion, that clinging to the same valley and the same river-cliff, that have made the French, literally as well as figuratively, the most conservative of western races. They also had passionate convictions and fierce wants, like other peoples trying to organise themselves; but the idea of leaving France in order to safeguard their convictions and satisfy their wants would never have occurred to the French Huguenots if the religious wars of the sixteenth century and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had not made France literally uninhabitable. The English Puritans left England only to gain greater liberty for the independent development of their peculiar political and religious ideas; they were notdriven out with fire and sword as the Huguenots were driven from France.
Why, then, one wonders, did the French people cling to France with such tenacity—since none are more passionate in their convictions and prejudices where anything short of emigration is concerned? They clung to France because they loved it, and for such sentimental fidelity some old underlying economic reason usually exists. The map of France, and the climate of France, show what the reason was. France, as her historians have long delighted to point out, is a country singularly privileged in her formation, and in the latitude she occupies. She is magnificently fed with great rivers, which flow where it is useful for commerce and agriculture that they should flow. The lines of her mountain-ranges formed natural ramparts in the past, and in the south and south-west, serve as great wind-screens and sun-reflectors, creating almost tropic corners under a temperate latitude. Her indented coast opens into manycapacious and sheltered harbours, and the course of the Gulf Stream bends in to soften the rainy climate of her great western peninsula, making Brittany almost as warm as the sunnier south.
Above all, the rich soil of France, so precious for wheat and corn-growing, is the best soil in the world for the vine; and a people can possess few more civilising assets than the ability to produce good wine at home. It is the best safeguard against alcoholism, the best incentive to temperance in the manly and grown-up sense of the word, which means voluntary sobriety and not legally enforced abstinence.
All these gifts France had and the French intelligently cherished. Between the Swiss snows and the icy winter fogs of Germany on the one side, and the mists and rain and perpetual dampness of England on the other, her cool mild sky shot with veiled sunlight overhung a land of temperate beauty and temperate wealth. Farther north, man might growaustere or gross, farther south idle and improvident: France offered the happy mean which the poets are forever celebrating, and the French were early aware that the poets were right.
Satisfaction with a happy mean implies the power to choose, the courage to renounce.
The French had chosen: they chose France. They had to renounce; and they renounced Adventure.
Staying in France was not likely to make any man inordinately rich in his life-time; forsaking France to acquire sudden wealth was unthinkable. The Frenchman did not desire inordinate wealth for himself, but he wanted, and was bound to have, material security for his children. Therefore the price to be paid for staying at home, and keeping one's children with one (an absolute necessity to the passionately tender French parent), was perpetual, sleepless, relentless thrift. The moneynecessary to security had to be accumulated slowly and painfully, so the Frenchman learned to be industrious, and to train his children to industry; and that money had to be kept fast hold of, since any profitable investment meant Risk.
Risk and Adventure were the two dreaded enemies that might, at a stroke, deprive one of the bliss of living in France, or of the modicum of well-being necessary to live there in comfort, as the unluxurious French understand it. Against Risk and Adventure, therefore, it is the French parent's duty to warn and protect his children. Brought up in this atmosphere of timidity and distrust of the unknown, generation after generation of young Frenchmen became saturated with the same fears; and those among them who tried to break through the strong network of tradition, and venture their inheritance or their lives in quest of new things, were restrained by the fierce conservatism of the women and the insinuating tyranny of French family life.
It is useless to deny that, to Anglo-Saxon eyes, the niggardliness of the French is their most incomprehensible trait. The reluctance to give, the general lack of spontaneous and impulsive generosity, even in times of such tragic appeal as the war has created, have too often astonished and pained those who most admire the French character to be passed over in any frank attempt to understand it.
During the most cataclysmic moments of the war, when it seemed that a few days or weeks might bring the world crashing down in ruins, and sweep away all that made life tolerable and material ease a thing worth considering—even then (though one could of course cite individual cases of the noblest generosity), the sense of the imprudence of uncalculated generosity still prevailed, and in France money never poured forth for the relief of suffering as it did in England.
The same clinging to tradition and fear of risk which make prudence almost a vice in the French are not applied only tomoney-saving. The French too often economise manners as they do francs. The discovery is disillusionising until one goes back to its cause, and learns to understand that, in a society based on caution, and built about an old and ineradicable bureaucracy, obsequiousness on the one side is sure to breed discourtesy on the other.
No one knows more than the French about good manners: manners are codified in France, and there is the possibility of an insult in the least deviation from established procedure, such as using the wrong turn in signing a note, as, for example, putting "Agréez, Monsieur" where "Veuillez agréer, Monsieur" is in order, or substituting "sentiments distingués" for "haute considération." Unfortunately, in the process, the forms of courtesy have turned into the sharp-edged metallic counters of a game, instead of being a spontaneous emission of human kindliness.
The French are kind in the sense of not being cruel, but they are not kindly, in the senseof diffused benevolence which the word implies to Anglo-Saxons. They are passionate and yet calculating, and simple uncalculated kindliness—the vague effusion of good-will toward unknown fellow-beings—does not enter into a plan of life which is as settled, ruled off and barricaded as their carefully-measured and bounded acres. It savours too much of Adventure, and might lead one into the outer darknesses of Risk.
If one makes such a criticism to a French friend, in any candid discussion of race-differences, the answer is always: "Of course you Anglo-Saxons are more generous, because you are so much richer."
But this explanation, though doubtless sincere, is not exact. We are more generous not because we are richer, but because we are so much less afraid of being poor; and if we are less afraid of being poor it is due to the fact that our ancestors found it much easier to make money, not only because they were morewilling to take risks, but because more opportunities came in their way.
Once these arguments are balanced, it becomes easier to allow for French caution, and to overlook it in favour of those other qualities which their way of life has enabled the French to develop.
First among these qualities is the power of sustained effort, and the sense of its need in any worth-while achievement.
The French, it has already been pointed out, have no faith in short-cuts, nostrums or dodges of any sort to get around a difficulty. This makes them appear backward in the practical administration of their affairs; but they make no claim to teach the world practical efficiency. What they have to teach is something infinitely higher, more valuable, more civilising: that in the world of ideas, as in the world of art, steady and disinterested effort alone can accomplish great things.
It may seem, from what has been said in an earlier part of this chapter, as though the French were of all people the most interested, since questions of money so constantly preoccupy them. But their thoughts are not occupied with money-making in itself, as an end worth living for, but only with the idea of having money enough to be sure of not losing their situation in life, for themselves or their children; since, little as they care to rise in the world, they have an unspeakable terror of falling, based partly, no doubt, on the pitiful fate, in France, of those whodofall. This point assured, they want only enough leisure and freedom from material anxiety to enjoy what life and the arts of life offer. This absence of financial ambition should never be lost sight of: it is not only the best clue to the French character, but the most useful lesson our own people can learn from contact with France.
The requirements of the average Frenchman in any class are surprisingly few, and theambition to "better" himself socially plays a very small part in his plans. What he wants is leisure to enjoy the fleeting good things of life, from which no one knows better how to extract a temperate delight, and full liberty of mind to discuss general ideas while pursuing whatever trade or art he is engaged in. It may seem an exaggeration to ascribe such aspirations to the average man of any race; but compared with other peoples the distinguishing mark of the Frenchman of all classes is the determination to defend his own leisure, the taste for the free play of ideas, and the power to express and exchange views on questions of general interest.
Great shrewdness and maturity of judgment result from this tendency to formulate ideas: it is unusual to hear a French peasant or working man express an opinion on life that is not sagacious. Human nature is a subject of absorbing interest to the French, and they have, to use their own phrase, "made the tour of it," and amply allowed for it in all theirappreciations of life. The artless astonishment of the northern races in the face of the oldest of human phenomena is quite incomprehensible to them.
This serenity and maturity of view is the result of an immensely old inheritance of culture; and the first lesson it teaches is that Rome was not built in a day.
Only children think that one can make a garden with flowers broken from the plant; only inexperience imagines that novelty is always synonymous with improvement. To go on behaving as if one believed these things, and to foster their belief in others, is to encourage the intellectual laziness which rapid material prosperity is too apt to develop. It is to imprison one's self in a perpetual immaturity. The French express, perhaps unconsciously, their sense of the weight of their own long moral experience by their universal comment on the American fellows-in-arms whose fine qualities they so fully recognise. "Ce sont des enfants—they are mere children!" is whatthey always say of the young Americans: say it tenderly, almost anxiously, like people passionately attached to youth and to the young, but also with a little surprise at the narrow surface of perception which most of these young minds offer to the varied spectacle of the universe.
A new race, working out its own destiny in new conditions, cannot hope for the moral and intellectual maturity of a race seated at the cross-roads of the old civilisations. But America has, in part at least, a claim on the great general inheritance of Western culture. She inherits France through England, and Rome and the Mediterranean culture, through France. These are indirect and remote sources of enrichment; but she has directly, in her possession and in her keeping, the magnificent, the matchless inheritance of English speech and English letters.
Had she had a more mature sense of the value of tradition and the strength of continuity she would have kept a more reverenthold upon this treasure, and the culture won from it would have been an hundredfold greater. She would have preserved the language instead of debasing and impoverishing it; she would have learned the historic meaning of its words instead of wasting her time inventing short-cuts in spelling them; she would jealously have upheld the standards of its literature instead of lowering them to meet an increased "circulation."
In all this, France has a lesson to teach and a warning to give. It was our English forbears who taught us to flout tradition and break away from their own great inheritance; France may teach us that, side by side with the qualities of enterprise and innovation that English blood has put in us, we should cultivate the sense of continuity, that "sense of the past" which enriches the present and binds us up with the world's great stabilising traditions of art and poetry and knowledge.
There is no new Frenchwoman; but the real Frenchwoman is new to America, and it may be of interest to American women to learn something of what she is really like.
In saying that the real Frenchwoman is new to America I do not intend to draw the old familiar contrast between the so-called "real Frenchwoman" and the Frenchwoman of fiction and the stage. Americans have been told a good many thousand times in the last four years that the real Frenchwoman is totally different from the person depicted under that name by French novelists and dramatists; but in truth every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written—and none more so than French literature, the freest and frankest of all.
The statement that the real Frenchwoman is new to America simply means that America has never before taken the trouble to look at her and try to understand her. She has always been there, waiting to be understood, and a little tired, perhaps, of being either caricatured or idealised. It would be easy enough to palm her off as a "new" Frenchwoman because the war has caused her to live a new life and do unfamiliar jobs; but one need only look at the illustrated papers to see what she looks like as a tram-conductor, a taxi-driver or a munition-maker. It is certain, even now, that all these new experiences are going to modify her character, and to enlarge her view of life; but that is not the point with which these papers are concerned. The first thing for the American woman to do is to learn to knowthe Frenchwomanas she has always been; to try to find out what she is, and why she is what she is. After that it will be easy tosee why the war has developed in her certain qualities rather than others, and what its after-effects on her are likely to be.
First of all, she is, in nearly all respects, as different as possible from the average American woman. That proposition is fairly evident, though not always easy to explain. Is it because she dresses better, or knows more about cooking, or is more "coquettish," or more "feminine," or more excitable, or more emotional, or more immoral? All these reasons have been often suggested, but none of them seems to furnish a complete answer. Millions of American women are, to the best of their ability (which is not small), coquettish, feminine, emotional, and all the rest of it; a good many dress as well as Frenchwomen; some even know a little about cooking—and the real reason is quite different, and not nearly as flattering to our national vanity. It is simply that, like the men of her race, the Frenchwoman isgrown up.
Compared with the women of France theaverage American woman is still in the kindergarten. The world she lives in is exactly like the most improved and advanced and scientifically equipped Montessori-method baby-school. At first sight it may seem preposterous to compare the American woman's independent and resonant activities—her "boards" and clubs and sororities, her public investigation of everything under the heavens from "the social evil" to baking-powder, and from "physical culture" to the newest esoteric religion—to compare such free and busy and seemingly influential lives with the artless exercises of an infant class. But what is the fundamental principle of the Montessori system? It is the development of the child's individuality, unrestricted by the traditional nursery discipline: a Montessori school is a baby world where, shut up together in the most improved hygienic surroundings, a number of infants noisily develop their individuality.
The reason why American women are not really "grown up" in comparison with thewomen of the most highly civilised countries—such as France—is that all their semblance of freedom, activity and authority bears not much more likeness to real living than the exercises of the Montessori infant. Real living, in any but the most elementary sense of the word, is a deep and complex and slowly-developed thing, the outcome of an old and rich social experience. It cannot be "got up" like gymnastics, or a proficiency in foreign languages; it has its roots in the fundamental things, and above all in close and constant and interesting and important relations between men and women.
It is because American women are each other's only audience, and to a great extent each other's only companions, that they seem, compared to women who play an intellectual and social part in the lives of men, like children in a baby-school. They are "developing their individuality," but developing it in the void, without the checks, the stimulus, and the discipline that comes of contact with the strongermasculine individuality. And it is not only because the man is the stronger and the closer to reality that his influence is necessary to develop woman to real womanhood; it is because the two sexes complete each other mentally as well as physiologically that no modern civilisation has been really rich or deep, or stimulating to other civilisations, which has not been based on the recognised interaction of influences between men and women.
There are several ways in which the Frenchwoman's relations with men may be called more important than those of her American sister. In the first place, in the commercial class, the Frenchwoman is always her husband's business partner. The lives of the French bourgeois couple are based on the primary necessity of getting enough money to live on, and of giving their children educational and material advantages. In small businesses the woman is always her husband's book-keeper or clerk, or both; above all, she is his business adviser. France, as you know, is heldup to all other countries as a model of thrift, of wise and prudent saving and spending. No other country in the world has such immense financial vitality, such powers of recuperation from national calamity. After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when France, beaten to earth, her armies lost, half her territory occupied, and with all Europe holding aloof, and not a single ally to defend her interests—when France was called on by her conquerors to pay an indemnity of five thousand million francs in order to free her territory of the enemy, she raised the sum, and paid it off,eighteen months sooner than the date agreed upon: to the rage and disappointment of Germany, and the amazement and admiration of the rest of the world.
Every economist knows that if France was able to make that incredible effort it was because, all over the country, millions of Frenchwomen, labourers' wives, farmers' wives, small shopkeepers' wives, wives of big manufacturers and commission-merchants and bankers,were to all intents and purposes their husbands' business-partners, and had had a direct interest in saving and investing the millions and millions piled up to pay France's ransom in her day of need. At every stage in French history, in war, in politics, in literature, in art and in religion, women have played a splendid and a decisive part; but none more splendid or more decisive than the obscure part played by the millions of wives and mothers whose thrift and prudence silently built up her salvation in 1872.
When it is said that the Frenchwoman of the middle class is her husband's business partner the statement must not be taken in too literal a sense. The French wife has less legal independence than the American or English wife, and is subject to a good many legal disqualifications from which women have freed themselves in other countries. That is the technical situation; but what is the practical fact? That the Frenchwoman has gone straight through these theoretical restrictionsto the heart of reality, and become her husband's associate, because, for her children's sake if not for her own, her heart is in his job, and because he has long since learned that the best business partner a man can have is one who has the same interests at stake as himself.
It is not only because she saves him a salesman's salary, or a book-keeper' salary, or both, that the French tradesman associates his wife with his business; it is because he has the sense to see that no hired assistant will have so keen a perception of his interests, that none will receive his customers so pleasantly, and that none will so patiently and willingly work over hours when it is necessary to do so. There is no drudgery in this kind of partnership, because it is voluntary, and because each partner is stimulated by exactly the same aspirations. And it is this practical, personal and daily participation in her husband's job that makes the Frenchwoman more grown up than others. She has a more interesting and moreliving life, and therefore she develops more quickly.
It may be objected that money-making is not the most interesting thing in life, and that the "higher ideals" seem to have little place in this conception of feminine efficiency. The answer to such a criticism is to be found by considering once more the difference between the French and the American views as to the main object of money-making—a point to which any study of the two races inevitably leads one back.
Americans are too prone to consider money-making as interesting in itself: they regard the fact that a man has made money as something intrinsically meritorious. But money-making is interesting only in proportion as its object is interesting. If a man piles up millions in order to pile them up, having already all he needs to live humanly and decently, his occupation is neither interesting in itself, nor conducive to any sort of real social development in the money-maker or in those abouthim. No life is more sterile than one into which nothing enters to balance such an output of energy. To see how different is the French view of the object of money-making one must put one's self in the place of the average French household. For the immense majority of the French it is a far more modest ambition, and consists simply in the effort to earn one's living and put by enough for sickness, old age, and a good start in life for the children.
This conception of "business" may seem a tame one to Americans; but its advantages are worth considering. In the first place, it has the immense superiority of leaving time for living, time for men and women both. The average French business man at the end of his life may not have made as much money as the American; but meanwhile he has had, every day, something the American has not had: Time. Time, in the middle of the day, to sit down to an excellent luncheon, to eat it quietly with his family, and to read his paperafterward; time to go off on Sundays and holidays on long pleasant country rambles; time, almost any day, to feel fresh and free enough for an evening at the theatre, after a dinner as good and leisurely as his luncheon. And there is one thing certain: the great mass of men and women grow up and reach real maturity only through their contact with the material realities of living, with business, with industry, with all the great bread-winning activities; but the growth and the maturing take placein the intervals between these activities: and in lives where there are no such intervals there will be no real growth.