French & English

The tender feeling of patriotism, as distinguished from the proud, is more general in France than in England, and it has increased in France during the last twenty years, whilst it has diminished in England in the course of a generation, or during the transition from one generation to another.

This difference and these changes are due to causes that may easily be seen in operation. We may be able to fix upon some of them, and whilst we are so occupied the reader is especially requested to bear in mind that the tenderness of patriotism is not the whole of patriotism, and that the Englishman who has little tenderness may be as patriotic in other ways as the Frenchman who has more.

Tender patriotism in all cases attaches itself to the soil; it is an affection for the soil, and at first an affection for particular localities, generally with recognisable characteristics. One of the first effects of it is to produce a feeling of foreignness with regard to other parts of the same nation, so that by its particularism it may seem almost anti-patriotic.

“I will never leave Borva,” said the Princess of Thule, yet she did leave Borva, and sang her old island songs in the strange land and amongst the strange people “with her heart breaking with thoughts of the sea, and the hills, and the rude, and sweet, and simple ways of the old island life that she had left behind her.”

Here is an example of tender patriotism, so much localised that the lover of her own country, which is one of the Hebridean islands, feels herself a foreigner in London, and it might be argued that every British subject ought to feel at home in the capital of the nation. Well, we are coming to that, but the first patriotism is local and pathetic.[16] No English novelist understands the sentiment of patriotic tenderness better than does William Black, and he always represents it as strongest in poor and thinly-peopled places, such as are to be found in the Western Highlands, and in the bleak archipelago between the Scottish mainland and the open Atlantic.

Country life is highly favourable to the growth of a tender local patriotism, especially that kind of country life which remains stationary and attached to family possessions. Small estates are favourable to it, large estates less so, because they supply their owners with the means of living at a distance, and especially for passing a part of the year in the capital, and other months out of the country altogether.

Colonisation is unfavourable to a tender English patriotism, because it diverts the affection of families from the soil of the mother country by giving them a second country beyond the sea, and by encouraging the idea that the mother country is but a part of a vast confederation, in which the colonists may have a patriotic feeling for the confederation generally, and a specially affectionate patriotism for the State or province in which they were born.

When the State is very heterogeneous in composition, including several very different nationalities, there may be a tender sentiment in each nation for itself, but this is not likely to extend to the entire State. Thus, a Scotchman may have a tender feeling for Scotland, an Irishman for Ireland, but their tender affection is not likely to include England, still less Canada and Australia. They may be proud of belonging to so great an empire, but that is another feeling.

Every influence that increases the sensibility of the feelings is likely to increase the tenderness of patriotic sentiment. Religion and poetry are both strong influences in its favour, and a very powerful constant influence is that of a society in which feeling is habitually expressed as it is by the Irish and the French. A society in which the utterance of deep feeling of any kind is repressed by conventional good breeding, and by a kind of external stoicism, is repressive of tenderness in patriotic sentiment. This stoical tendency in the English is more favourable to pride than to love.

Habits of travel, habits of living abroad, cosmopolitan experiences on a large scale, diminish the intensity of local affection by affording opportunities for comparison, and so destroying illusions, especially about the grandeur of landscapes that have been dear to us in youth, and the appearance of houses and towns. After the Alps the English mountains are seen to be only hills, after Paris the northern towns look dismal.

Lastly, a sustained commercial and political prosperity is unfavourable to the tenderness of national sentiment, because a very prosperous nation does not appeal to the pathetic sympathies, does not call for commiseration. The sons of a powerful and rich mother do not feel themselves to be so necessary to her as if she were afflicted and sorrowful.

The reader will see at a glance how all these reasons against the tenderness of sentiment in patriotism tell in modern England.

England is not a country of small proprietors. Without committing the mistake, so common amongst foreigners, of believing that there are no small landowners in England, we know that they are not so numerous as in France, and therefore that the intense local affection of the peasant has fewer chances of developing itself. Again, the population of England is less and less a stationary population, it becomes constantly more urban and more migratory. The lower and middle classes change their place of residence with a facility unknown to the yeomanry of former times. It seems to be a matter of indifference to them whether they will live in one ugly and smoky street or in another ugly and smoky street, and why indeed should we expect their affections to take root in a “wilderness of bricks”? Nor do they limit themselves to the same town. They change towns almost as easily as streets on the slightest prospect of increased income, and often merely for the sake of the change itself, to break the monotony of a life destitute of local interests and local attachments. In its extreme development the facility in removing that characterises the modern Englishman of the unsettled class will include not merely the United Kingdom, but the most remote dependencies of the British Empire. The following is a case well known to me; it is given here as an extreme case, not as an average one, but it is thoroughly English, and most remote from the stay-at-home habits of the French.

A middle-class Englishman in a scientific profession began by going to Scotland in his youth, and there he married early. From Scotland he emigrated to New Zealand, and thence to Australia, where he prospered well, but in the midst of his prosperity he determined to return to Great Britain. He settled first in Glasgow, and afterwards migrated successively to Hull, Bristol, Cardiff, Southampton, Liverpool, and London. I pass over a temporary residence in the United States. When staying in one town it was his habit to change his residence frequently. During the thirty or forty years of his married life he made twice as many removals. Since his death his family have gone on in the same way: they are constantly changing their addresses, and are dispersed over the British possessions, including New Zealand, Canada, and British Columbia. A family of this kind is not cosmopolitan, because it confines itself to English-speaking countries, but its world is the vast area over which the English language is known. There was a condition of feeling in that family quite incompatible with old-fashioned local attachments. The members of it were ready at any time to leave England and each other and pitch their temporary camp in distant latitudes. This readiness was reflected in their conversation, which ranged easily over vast spaces of land and sea.

I began by saying that this was an extreme instance, and so it is, but there are thousands of others that show the English facility of removal in minor degrees. Nothing is more characteristic of the English, or more unlike the French, than the courage to go and settle in some place where they know nobody and with which they have no previous associations. French people do it when forced by necessity, but they do it with a sad heart; English people of their own free will have the courage to sever old ties and begin new experiments of life.

The extreme readiness of the modern English to change their residence is a recently-developed characteristic. It has grown with the modern facilities of communication. Sons and daughters disperse and settle anywhere. In wealthy families the eldest son retains possession of the paternal home, but seldom steadily settles down to live in it, whilst his brothers and sisters scatter themselves over the counties. The affectionate prejudices of local patriotism have given place to a broader national patriotism which, in its turn, is even now giving way to a still more comprehensive Imperial patriotism. It is a change by which the English have gained in grandeur of conception what they have lost in tenderness of feeling.

Amongst the nations under the British crown there is one that still retains that tenderness in perfection. The Irish people have it, and they even keep it in exile. The reason evidently is that Ireland is a small well-defined nation, separated from England by salient national characteristics, and a nation which for a long time has been poor, unhappy, and ill-used. Here are all the influences that increase the pathetic tenderness of patriotic feeling. If ever Ireland becomes rich and happy her patriotism may be quite as powerful, quite as genuine, but it will lose that intense pathos.[17] The pathetic element in Scottish patriotism was most intense when Scotland was poor, when the science and industry of her sons had not yet compensated for the barrenness of her soil.

Of all the English poets Wordsworth had the tender local affections in the greatest strength; and in his case not only did they attach themselves to a small district with a marked peculiarity of character, but they were almost invariably associated with poor and simple human lives, themselves rooted by hereditary affection in the miniature highland region that occupies the north-west corner of England. London, to Wordsworth, was “a crowded solitude.”

No race in Europe has so strong a tendency as the English race to form attachments for places outside of the native land. This tendency has increased with the habit of travel and with the spoiling of England by modern industrial works. The second love of Englishmen is Switzerland if they are mountaineers, and Italy if they care for poetry and art. France they seldom appreciate unless they are architectural students, when they cannot overlook “the most architectural country in Europe.” It is probable that no Englishman ever loved France as Robert Browning loves Italy, or would venture to express such a sentiment if he felt it.

cries the poet with a passionate longing—

The love of a foreign language is enough to give us a friendly interest in the country where it is spoken to perfection, and as Englishmen are better linguists than the French, foreign countries have this attraction for them. They are also better scholars, and therefore may be more drawn towards Greece.

Some Frenchmen have this second love, and when they feel nostalgia for any land out of France it is sure to be Algeria or Italy. Frenchmen never have any local affections in England. They may keep a grateful recollection of English houses where they have been kindly received, but have never any delight in England as a country. Their prejudices against its climate and about the absence of taste and art are ineradicable.

The love that the French have for France is associated with many innocent illusions. They believe it to be the only perfectly civilised country in the world, the home of all the arts, of all scientific and intellectual culture. Of late years France is to the republicans the one country where political and religious liberty is complete. It is, of course, the land where French people feel most at home, where they can most readily get the superfluities which are necessary to them—the elaborately-ordered and complete repasts, the abundant fruits, the varied drinks, the talk in the café, the lively and pointed newspaper articles that they can understand at a glance, the clever plays that they listen to with such rapt attention. Those Frenchmen who believe in a Providence think that it has specially favoured their own country. “Dieu protège la France.” Before the phylloxera came He gave his Frenchmen wine and refused it to the canting English, before the German invasion He gave them the intoxicating wine of victory. They have marvellous illusions about their climate; they think of it as a

They have a full and fair appreciation of the beauty of their own country, and the more cultivated take an intelligent interest in the still numerous architectural remnants of the past. They have not forgotten the old provincial names, nor suffered them to fall into disuse; the Burgundian is still a Burgundian, though not the less a Frenchman too. Even the towns have an adjective for their inhabitants which strengthens the local tie. The inhabitant of Sens is a Senonais, of Poitiers a Pictovien, of Gap a Gavot. In this way a Frenchman is the son of his native town, as an Oxonian of the University. The local feeling descends even to the villages—

This provincial feeling is not so strong in England. In the United Kingdom we have the four different nationalities, but in England only the counties, which answer to the French departments. England has no living tradition of historical provinces. We learn about ancient divisions in history, and that is all.

The words used in the two countries are in themselves an indication of the state of feeling. The word pays, as employed by journalists and politicians for the whole of France, is exactly equivalent to “the country” as employed by English politicians; but the word pays, as it is employed by a French peasant to mean locality to which he is bound by ties of birth and affection, has no equivalent in English, and it cannot be translated without a phrase. To get the force of it I must explain that it is a part of the country to which I and my family belong. But the greatest difference in language is the entire absence, in English, of any word having the peculiar emotional value, the sacredness, of patrie. The word patrie is reserved entirely for emotional use, it is never employed for common purposes. “Country” fails as an equivalent because it is used in various non-emotional senses, as when a minister appeals to the country by general elections, a huntsman rides across country, a gentleman’s residence is situated in a pretty country, a townsman goes to live in the country, a landowner is a country squire. Here the word stands for the everyday words pays and campagne, but patrie never stands for anything but the land that we should be ready to die for, and it is never used without visible or suppressed emotion.[18] The English are themselves fully aware of the power of a word, and of all that may be indicated by the possession of a word. They are proud, with just reason, of the word “home,” and think that the absence of it in the French language shows a want of tenderness of domestic sentiment in the French mind. The absence of any equivalent for patrie may indicate a like want of tenderness in the patriotic sentiment.

Happily the English have not for many centuries been educated by the kind of experience most favourable to tenderness in patriotism. Their country has not been invaded. No Englishman knows what it is to have foreign soldiers ruling irresistibly in his own village and in his own home. No Englishman has seen his corn trampled by an enemy’s cavalry, or his fruit-trees cut for fuel. In default of this experience no Englishman can imagine the sense of cruel wrong to their country that men feel when its sacred soil is violated.[19] The attempt to imagine it for the French only takes him from feeling to reason. He sees clearly that the French would have done as much on German soil had they been able to reach it, and from a reasonable point of view he perceives that no earthly soil is sacred. But the tender sentiment of patriotism, like other tender sentiments, is not amenable to reason.