"Forty Immortals", the Academicians who throne under the 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 great object of Richelieu was national unity," and "The Forty do not believe, etc." (see M. Saillous, Biographie des Forty).

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 satirize 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 seeing if the institution had not preserved its original significance.

That significance was simply the safe-guarding of what the French call "les 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 that recognized from the first day—the national 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 stabilize 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 standards or restrictions; instances may be found among any savage tribes without fixed standards of speech. Their language speedily ceases 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

30.

"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 great object 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 satirize it in their youth usually become, in maturity, almost too eager for 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 safe-guarding of what the French call "les 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 recognized from the first day that the language was the chosen vessel in which the finer life of a nation must be preserved.

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 speedily ceases to be one, and deteriorates into a muddle of unstable dialects. Of, if an instance nearer home is needed, the lover of English need only note

what that

ING.

V.

Continuity.

I.

the attempt of

Have you ever watched anyone 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 recognizable 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 taught to draw, and if no instinct tells you how. Evidently there is something about it which must be learned.

great deal

It takes a great deal of training and observation to learn the trick and represent recognizably 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 diminish-
ing in size.

It is only twenty years ago that the first cavern decorated
with prehistoric paintings was discovered at Altamira, in north-western
Spain. Its discoverer was regarded with suspicion and contempt by
the archaeologist 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 conderful 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
Senor Sautela's sincerity, and set the students of civilization
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 that drawing, 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 civilizations 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 colonist

found only a wilderness peopled by savages, ~~who had kept no link of memory~~
~~with those societies vanished~~. There had been a complete break of
continuity.

## II.

In France it was otherwise. It must be borne in mind by any one who really wants to understand France, 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 southwestern 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, the 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, Phenicia and Greece were to reach her from the south, soon after that Rome was to stamp her once for all the stamp of Roman citizenship; and in the intervals between these events, the old, almost vanished culture, 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.

P 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

4.

even this link with the past seems too slight to be worth counting, the
straight descent of French civilization from the ancient Mediterranean
culture which penetrated her by the Rhone and Spain and the Alps would
explain the ripeness and the continuity of her social life. By her
geographic position she seemed destined to centralize 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 sewing 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, 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 their
agricultural and domestic habits, is shown in the prompt disappearance
from our empoverished 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 barrow? We
have reduced all timber to "woods", and, even that plural <u>wildwood</u>
appearing
excessive, one hears Americans who ought to know better speak of "a wood,
the familiar <u>part of</u>
as though <u>part</u> of that simple word had lost 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 had had a long continuance and a race that has had a recent
beginning.

The English and Dutch settlers of North America no doubt carried

5.

many things with them, such vital but imponderable things as prejudices, principles, laws and beliefs. But even 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 racers. They also had passionate convictions and fierce wants, like other peoples trying to organize themselves; but the idea of leaving France in order to safeguard their convictions and satisfy their wants would never have occurred to them, unless, as happened in the religious wars of the fifteenth century, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had not made France been made literally uninhabitable to them. The English Puritans, it should be remembered, left England only to gain greater liberty for the development of their peculiar political and religious ideas; they were not driven out with fire and sword as the French 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, will show what the reason was. France, as her historians have long delighted to point out, is a singularly privileged country 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 ranges follow lines that formed natural ramparts in the past, and serve as in the South and south-west, great wind-screens and sun-reflectors, creating almost tropic corners under a temperate latitude. Her indented

6.

coast opens into many capacious 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 civilizing 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 over-
hung a land of temperate beauty and temperate wealth. Farther north,
man might grow autere 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.

### III.

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 money
necessary to security had to be accumulated slowly and painfully, so

7.

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 un-
luxurious French understand it. Against Risk and Adventure, there-
fore, 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 conserva-
tism of the women and the insinuating tyranny of French family life.

It is useless to deny that, to Anglo-Saxon eyes, the niggard-
liness 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 to money-
saving. The French too often economize manners as they do frances.
The discovery is disillusionizing until one goes back to its cause,

8.

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 changed, turned into the sharp-edged metallic counters of a game, instead of being a spontaneous emission of human kindliness.

The French are kind, but they are not kindly, in the sense of diffused benevolence which the word implies to Anglo-Saxons. They are passionate and yet calculating, and the simple uncalculated kindliness — the vague effusion of good-will toward unknown fellow beings — does not enter into a plan of life 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 frank discussion of race-differences, the answer is always: "Of course you Anglo-Saxons are more generous, because you are so much richer."

candid

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 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.

9.

IV.

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 civilizing: 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 the earlier part of this article, 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 abstract end, but only with the idea of having money enough to be sure of not losing their situation in life, for themselves or their children; while, 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 who do fall. 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 the ambition 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

10.

exaggeration 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 allowed for it in all their appreciations of life. The artless astonishment of the northern races in the face of the oldest of human phenomena are 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 one 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 recognize.

"Ce sont des enfants — they are mere children!" is what they 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.

II.

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 civilizations. 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 reverent hold 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 an 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 stabilizing traditions of art and poetry and knowledge.

The World.

46.

# IN CONCLUSION.

## I.

One of the best ways of finding out why a race is what it is, is to pick out the words that preponderate in its speech and its literature, and then try to define the special meaning it gives them.

The French people are one of the most ascetic and the most laborious in Europe; yet the four words that preponderate in French speech and literature are: Glory, love, voluptuousness, and pleasure. Before the Puritan reflex causes the reader to fling aside the page polluted by this statement, it will be worth his while to translate these four words into *la gloire*, *l'amour*, *la volupté*, *le plaisir*, and then (if he knows French and the French *enough*) consider what they mean in the language of Corneille and Pascal. For it must be understood that they have no equivalents in the English consciousness, and that, if it were sought to explain the fundamental difference between the exiles of the *Mayflower* and the conquerors of Valmy and Jéna, it would probably best be illustrated by the totally different significance of "love and glory" and "amour et gloire".

To begin with "la gloire"; we must resign ourselves to the fact that we do not *really know* what the French mean when they say it — what, for instance, Montesquieu had in mind when he wrote of Sparta: "The only object of the Lacedaemonians was liberty, the only advantage it gave them was *glory*". At best, if we are intelligent and sympathetic enough to have entered a little way into the French psychology, we know that they mean something infinitely larger, deeper, and subtler than we mean by "glory". The proof is that the Anglo-Saxon is taught *not* to do great deeds for "glory", while the French, unsurpassed in great deeds, have always avowedly done them for "la gloire".

It is obvious that the sense of duty has a large part in the French conception of *glory*; perhaps one might risk defining it as duty with a *panache*. But that only brings one to another untranslatable word. To put a *panache* — a plume, an ornament — on a prosaic deed is an act so eminently French that one seeks in vain for its English equivalent; it would verge on the grotesque to define "la gloire" as duty wearing an aigrette! The whole conception of "la gloire" is linked with the *panache* profoundly French conviction that the lily *should* be gilded; that, however lofty and beautiful a man's act or his purpose, it gains by being performed with what the French (in a word which for them has no implication of effeminacy) call "elegance". Indeed, the higher, the more beautiful, the gesture or the act, the more it seems to them to call for adornment, the

5.

more it gains by being given relief. And thus, by the very appositeness
of the word relief, one is led to perceive that "la gloire" as an
incentive to high action is essentially the conception of a people in
whom the plastic sense has always prevailed. The idea of "dying in beauty
certainly originated with the Latin race, though a Scandinavian play-
wright was left, incongruously enough, to find a phrase for it.

The case is the same with "love" and "amour"; but here the
difference is more visible, and the meaning of "amour" easier to arrive
at. Again, as with "gloire", the content is greater than that of our
"love". "Amour", to the French, means the undivided total of the complex
sensations and emotions that a man and a woman may inspire in each other;
whereas "love", since the days of the Elizabethans, has never, to Anglo-
Saxons, been more than two halves of a word — one half all purity and
poetry, the other all prurieny and prose. And gradually the latter half
has been discarded, as too unworthy of association with the loftier
meanings of the word, and "love" remains — at least in the press and
in the household — a relation as innocuous, and as undisturbing to
social conventions and business routine, as the tamest ties of consanguinity.

Is it not possible that the determination to keep these two
halves apart has diminished the one and degraded the other, to the loss
of human nature in the round? The Anglo-Saxon answer is, of course, that
love is not license; but first let us see what meaning is left to "love"
in a society where it is supposed to determine marriage, and yet to ignore
the transiency of sexual attraction. At best, it seems to designate a
boy-and-girl fancy not much more mature than a taste for dolls or marbles.
In the light of that definition, has not license kept the better part?

It may be argued that human nature is everywhere fundamentally
the same, and that, though one race lies about its deepest impulses, while
another speaks the truth about them, the result in conduct is not very
different. Is either of these affirmations exact? If human nature, at

6.

bottom, is everywhere the same, such deep layers of different habits, prejudices, and beliefs have been formed above its foundation that it is rather misleading to test resemblances by what one digs up at the roots. Secondary motives of conduct are widely divergent in different countries, and they are the motives that control civilized societies except when some catastrophe throws them back to the state of naked man.

To understand the difference between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon idea of love one must first of all understand the difference between the Latin and Anglo-Saxon conceptions of marriage. In a society where marriage is supposed to be determined solely by reciprocal inclination, and to bind the contracting parties not only to a social but to a physical lifelong loyalty, love, which never has accepted, and never will accept, such bonds, immediately becomes a pariah and a sinner. This is the Anglo-Saxon point of view. How many critics of the French conception of love have taken the trouble to consider first their idea of marriage?

Marriage, in France, is regarded as founded for the family and not for the husband and wife. It is designed not to make two people individually happy for a longer or shorter time, but to secure their permanent well-being as associates in the foundation of a home and the procreation of a family. Such an arrangement must needs be based on what is most permanent in human states of feeling, and least dependent on the accidents of beauty, youth, and novelty. Community of tradition, of education, and, above all, of the parental feeling, are judged to be the sentiments most likely to form a lasting tie between the average man and woman; and the French marriage is built in parenthood, not on passion.

An illustration of the radical contradiction between such a view of marriage and that of the English races is found in the following extract from a notice of a play lately produced (with success) in London:

"After two months of marriage a young girl discovers that her husband married her because he wanted a son. That is enough. She will

7.

have no more to do with him. So he goes off to fulfil a mining engagement in Peru, and she hides herself in the country...."

It would be impossible to exaggerate the bewilderment and disgust with which any wife or husband in France, whether young or middle-aged, would read the cryptic sentences I have italicized. "What! they would ask, " did the girl suppose he had married her for? And what did she want to be married for? And what is marriage for, if not for that?"

The French bride is no longer taken from a convent at sixteen to be flung into the arms of an unknown bridegroom. As emancipation has progressed, the young girl has been allowed a voice in choosing her husband; but what is the result? That in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred her choice is governed by the same considerations. The notion of marriage as a kind of superior business association, based on community of class, of political and religious opinion, and on a fair exchange of advantages (where one, for instance, brings money and the other position), is so ingrained in the French social organization that the modern girl accepts it intelligently, just as her puppet grandmother bowed to it passively.

From this important act of life the notion of love is tacitly excluded; not because love is thought unimportant, but on account of its very importance, and of the fact that it is not conceivably to be fitted into any stable association between man and woman. It is because the French have refused to cut love in two that they have not attempted to subordinate it to the organization of the family. They have left it out because there was no room for it, and also because it moves to a different rhythm, and keeps different seasons. It is because they refuse to regard it either as merely an exchange of ethereal vows or as a sensual gratification; because, on the contrary, they believe, with

8.

Coleridge, that

" All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame,"
that they frankly recognize its right to its own place in life.

What, then, is the place they give to the disturbing element? They treat it — the answer might be — as the poetry of life. For the French, simply because they are the most realistic people in the world, are also the most romantic. They have judged that the family and the state cannot be built up on poetry, but they have not felt that for that reason was to be banished from their republic. They have decided that love is too grave a matter for boys and girls, and not grave enough to form the basis of marriage; but in the relations between grown people, apart from their permanent ties (and in the deepest consciousness of the French, marriage still remains indissoluble), they allow it, frankly and amply, the part it furtively and shabbily, but no less ubiquitously, plays in Puritan societies.

It is not intended here to weigh the relative advantages of this view of life and the other; what has been sought is to state fairly the reasons why marriage, being taken more seriously and less vaguely by the French, there remains an allotted place for love in their more precisely ordered social economy. Nevertheless, it is fairly obvious that, except in a world where the claims of the body social are very perfectly balanced against those of the body individual, to give such a place to passion is to risk being submerged by it. A society which puts love beyond the law, and then pays it such heavy toll, subjects itself to the most terrible of Camorras.

IV.

The French are one of the most ascetic races in the world; and

9.

that is perhaps the reason why the meaning they give to the word "volupté" is free from the vulgarity of our "voluptuousness". The latter suggests to most people a crosslegged sultan in a fat seraglio; "volupté" means the intangible charm that imagination extracts from things tangible. "Volupté" means the "Ode to the Nightingale" and the "Ode to a Grecian Urn"; it means Romeo and Juliet as well as Antony and Cleopatra. But if we have the thing, one may ask, what does the word matter? Every language is always losing word-values, even where the sense of the word survives.

The answer is that the French sense of "volupté" is found only exceptionally in the Anglo-Saxon imagination, whereas it is part of the imaginative make-up of the whole French race. One turns to Shakespeare or Keats to find it formulated in our speech; in France it underlies the whole view of life. And this brings one, of course, to the inevitable conclusion that the French are a race of creative artists, and that artistic creativeness requires first a free play of the mind on all the facts of life, and secondly the sensuous sensibility that sees beyond tangible beauty to the aura surrounding it.

The French possess the quality and have always claimed the privilege. And from their freedom of view combined with their sensuous sensibility they have extracted the sensation they call "le plaisir", which is something so much more definite and more evocative than what we mean when we speak of pleasure. "Le plaisir" stands for the frankly permitted, the freely taken, delight of the senses, the direct enjoyment of the fruit of the tree called golden. No suggestions of furtive vice degrade or coarsen it, because it has, like love, its open place in speech and practice. It has found its expression in English also, but only on the lips of genius: for instance, in the "bursting of joy's grape" in the "Ode to Melancholy"(it is always in Keats that one seeks such utterances); whereas to the French it is part of the general fearless and joyful contact with life. And that is why it has kept its

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finer meaning, instead of being debased by incomprehension.

V.

The French are passionate and pleasure-loving; but they are above all ascetic and laborious. And it is only out of a union of these supposedly contradictory qualities that so fine a thing as the French temperament could have come.

The industry of the French is universally celebrated; but many — even among their own race — might ask what justifies the statement that they are ascetic. The fact is, the word, which in reality indicates merely a natural indifference to material well-being, has come, in modern speech, to have a narrower and a penitential meaning. It is supposed to imply a moral judgment, whereas it refers only to the attitude taken toward the creature comforts. A man, or a nation, may wear homespun and live on locusts, and yet be immoderately addicted to the lusts of the eye and of the flesh. Asceticism means the serene ability to get on without comfort, and comfort is an Anglo-Saxon invention which the Latins have never really understood or felt the want of. What they need (and there is no relation between the needs) is splendor on occasion, and beauty and fulness of experience always. They do not care for the raw material of sensation: food must be exquisitely cooked, emotion eloquently expressed, desire emotionally heightened, every experience must be transmuted into terms of beauty before it touches their imagination.

This fastidiousness, this tendency always to select and eliminate, and refine their sensations, is united to that stoic indifference to dirt, discomfort, bad air, damp, cold, and whatever Anglo-Saxons describe as "inconvenience" in the general organization of

II.

life, from the bathroom to the banking system, which gives the French
leisure of spirit for enjoyment, and strength of heart for war. It en-
ables, and has always enabled, a people addicted to pleasure and
unused to the discipline of sport, to turn at a moment's notice into
the greatest fighters that history has known. All the French need to
effect this transformation is a "great argument"; once the spring of
imagination touched, the body obeys it with a dash and an endurance
that no discipline, whether Spartan or Prussian, ever succeeded in
outdoing.

This fearless and joyful people, so ardently individual and so
frankly realistic, have another safeguard against excess in their
almost Chinese reverence for the ritual of manners. It is fortunate
that they have preserved, through every political revolution, this sense
of the importance of ceremony, for they are without the compensating
respect for the rights of others which eases intercourse in Anglo-Saxon
countries. Any view of the French that considers them as possessing the
instinct of liberty is misleading; what they have always understood is
equality — a different matter — and even that, as one of the most
acute among their recent political writers has said, "on condition that
each man commands". Their past history, and above all the geographical
situation which has conditioned it, must be kept in view to understand
the French indifference to the rights of others, and the corrective for
that indifference which their exquisite sense of sociability provides.

For over a thousand years France has had to maintain herself in
the teeth of an aggressive Europe, and to do so she has required a
strong central government and a sense of social discipline. Her great
kings were forever strengthening her by their resistance to the scatter-
ed feudal opposition. Richelieu and Louis XIV finally broke this
opposition, and left France united against Europe, but deprived of the
sense of individual freedom, and needing to feel the pressure of an
"administration" on her neck. Imagination, intellectual energy, and

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every form of artistic activity, found their outlet in social inter-
course, and France created polite society — one more work of art in
the long list of her creations.

The French conception of society is hierarchical and
administrative, as her government (under whatever name) has so long
been, Every social situation has its appropriate gestures and its
almost fixed vocabulary, and nothing, for example, is more puzzling to
the French than the fact that the English, a race whose civilization
they regard as in some respects superior to their own, have only two
or three ways of beginning and ending their letters.

This ritual view of politeness makes it difficult of application
in undetermined cases, and therefore it often gets left out in
emergencies. The complaint of Anglo-Saxons that, in travelling in
France, they see little of the much-vaunted French courtesy, is not
unjustified. The French are not courteous from any vague sense of good-
will toward mankind; they regard politeness as a coin with which
certain things are obtainable, and being notably thrifty they are
cautious about spending it on strangers. But the disillusion of the
traveller often arises in part from his own ignorance of the most
elementary French forms: of the "Bonjour, Madame", on entering and
leaving a shop, of the fact that a visitor should always, on taking
leave, be conducted to the outer door, and a gentleman (of the old
school) bitten not to remain uncovered when he stops to speak to a lady
in the street; of the "Merci" that should follow every service, however
slight, the "Après vous" which makes way, with ceremonious insistence,
for the person who happens to be entering a door with one. In these re-
spects, Anglo-Saxons, by their lack of "form" (and their lack of
perception), are perpetually giving unintentional offense. But small
social fashions are oddly different in different countries and vary ab-
surdly in succeeding generations. The French gentleman does not uncover
in a lift or in a museum, because he considers these places as public

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as the street; he does not, after the manner of the newest-of-all
American, jump up like a Jack-in-the-box (and remain standing at
attention) every time the woman he is calling on rises from her seat,
because he considers such gymnastics fatal to social ease; but he is
shocked by the way in which Americans loll and sprawl when they _are_
seated, and equally bewildered by their excess of ceremony on some
occasions, and their _startling_ familiarity on others.

Such misunderstandings are inevitable between people of
different speech and traditions. If French and Americans are both
(as their newspapers assure us) "democratic", it gives a notion of
how much the term covers! At any rate, in the older race there is
a tradition of trained/cultivated politeness that flowers, at its
best, into a simplicity democratic in the finest sense. Compared to
it, our politeness is apt to be rather stagy, as our ease is at times
a little boorish.

VI.

It will be remembered that Paolo and Francesca are met by
Dante just beyond the fatal gateway, in what might be called the
temperate zone of the infernal regions. In the society of dangerously
agreeable fellow-sinners they "go forever on the accursed air",
telling their beautiful tale to sympathizing visitors from above; and
as, unlike the majority of mortal lovers, they seem not to dread an
eternity together, and as they feel no exaggerated _remorse_ for their
sin, their punishment is the mildest in the poet's list of expiations.
There is all the width of hell between the "Divine Comedy" and the
"Scarlet Letter"!

Far different is the lot of the dishonest man of business
and of the traitor to the state. For these two offenders against the
political and social order the ultimate horrors of the pit are reserved,

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The difference between their fate and that of the lovers is like that between the lot of an aviator in an eternally invulnerable aero-plane and of a stoker in the burning hold of an eternally torpedoed ship. On this distinction between the two classes of offenses — the antilegal and the antisocial — the whole fabric of Latin morality is based.

The moralists and theologians of the Middle Ages, agitated as no other age has been by problem of death and the life after death, worked out the great scheme of moral retribution on which the "Divine Comedy" is based. This system of punishment is the result of a purely Latin and social conception of order. In it individualism has no place. It is based on the interests of the family, and of that larger family formed by the commune or the state; and it distinguishes, implicitly if not outspokenly, between the wrong that has far-reaching social consequences and that which injures only one or two persons, or perhaps only the moral sense of the offender.

The French have continued to accept this classification of offenses. They continue to think the sin against the public conscience far graver than that against any private person. If in France there is a distinction between private and business morality it is exactly the reverse of that prevailing in America, and the French conscience rejects with abhorrence the business complaisances which the rigidly virtuous American too often regards as not immoral because not indictable. "Business" tends everywhere to subdue its victims to what they work in, and it is not meant to suggest that every French financier is irreproachable, or that France has not had more than her share of glaring financial scandals, but that among the real French, uncontaminated by cosmopolitan influences, and especially in the class of small shopkeepers and in the upper bourgeoisie, business probity is higher, and above all more sensitive, than in America. It is not only, or always, through indolence that France has remained backward in

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certain forms of efficiency.

It would be misleading to conclude that this sensitiveness
is based on a respect for the rights of others. The French, it must
be repeated, are as a race indifferent to the rights of others. In the
people and the lower middle class (and how much higher up!) the
traditional attitude is: "Why should I do my neighbor a good turn when
he may be getting the better of me in some way I haven't found out?"
The French are not generous, and they are not trustful. They do not
willingly credit their neighbors with sentiments as disinterested as
their own. But deep in their very bones is something that was called
"the point of honour" when there was an aristocracy to lay exclusive
claim to it, but that has, in reality, always permeated the whole
fabric of the race. It is just as untranslatable as the "panache" into
which it has flowered on so many immortal battle-fields; and it
regulates the conscience of one of the most avaricious and least
compassionate of peoples in their business relations, as it regulated
the conduct in the field of the knights of chivalry and of the <u>parvenu</u>
heroes of Napoleon.

It all comes back, perhaps, to the extraordinarily true
French sense of values. As a people, the French have moral taste, and
an ear for the "still small voice"; they know what is worth while, and
they despise most of the benefits that accrue from a clever disregard
of their own standards. It has been the fashion among certain of their
own critics to inveigh against French "taste" and French "measure",
and to celebrate the supposed lack of these qualities in the Anglo-
Saxon races as <u>giving</u> a freer play to genius and a larger scope to
all kinds of audacious enterprise. It is evident that if a new <u>continuing</u>
continent is to be made habitable, or a new prosody to be created, the
business "point of honour" in the one case, and the French Academy in
the other, may seriously hamper the task; but in the minor transactions
of commerce and culture perhaps such restrictive influences are worth

I6.

more to civilization than a mediocre licence.

VII.

Many years ago, during a voyage in the Mediterranean, the yacht on which I was cruising was driven by bad weather to take shelter in a small harbor on the Mainote coast. The country, at the time, was not considered particularly safe, and before landing we consulted the guidebook to see what reception we were likely to meet with.

This is the answer we found: "The inhabitants are brave, hospitable, and generous, but fierce, treacherous, vindictive, and given to acts of piracy, robbery, and wreckage".

Perhaps the foregoing attempt to define some attributes of the French character may seem as incoherent as this summary. At any rate, the endeavor to strike a balance between seemingly contradictory traits disposes one to indulgence toward the anonymous student of the Mainotes.

No civilized race has gone as unerringly as the French toward the natural sources of enjoyment; none has been so unashamed of instinct. Yet none has been more enslaved by social conventions, small complicated observances based on long-past conditions of life. No race has shown more collective magnanimity on great occasions, more pettiness and hardness in small dealings between individuals. Of no great people would it be truer to say that, like the Mainote tribesmen, they are generous and brave, yet fierce and vindictive. No people are more capable of improvising greatness, yet more afraid of the least initiative in ordinary matters. No people are more sceptical and more religious, more realistic and more romantic, more irritable and nervous yet more capable of a long patience and a dauntless calm.

Such are the conclusions to which the foreign observer is

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perplexedly led. It would probably take kinship of blood to resolve them into a harmonious interpretation of the French character.

All that the looker-on may venture is to say: Some of the characteristics I have noted seem unamiable, others dangerously disintegrating, others provokingly unprogressive. But when you have summed up the whole you will be forced to conclude that as long as enriching life is more than preserving it, as long as culture is superior to business efficiency, as long as poetry and imagination and reverence are higher and more precious elements of civilization than telephones or plumbing, as long as truth is more bracing than hypocrisy and wit more wholesome than dulness, so long will France remain greater than any nation that has not her ideals.

The best answer to every criticism of French weakness or French shortcomings is the conclusive one: Look at the results! Read her history, study her art, follow up the current of her ideas; then look about you, and you will see that the whole world is full of her spilt glory.

The End.