French & English

Entering London one day with a friend in the railway train, I asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the impressions of an ancient Roman if he could have accompanied us. What would an inhabitant of Augustan Rome think of English civilisation in Victorian London?

My friend at once answered, “He would think we were a very dirty race, and this impression would be so strong and so unfavourable that he would be slow to perceive our superiority in other respects.”

This is not the general English opinion. The English believe themselves to be a clean people. Foreigners are dirty, Englishmen are clean; that is one of the most obvious distinctions between them.

The English upper classes are clean, but cleanliness of any high degree is a very modern virtue amongst them. It is an invention of the nineteenth century. I am just old enough to remember the time when the use of the morning sponge-bath became general amongst boys and young men of my own generation. Men and women born at the close of the eighteenth century did as French people do to-day; they took a warm bath occasionally for cleanliness,[54] and they took shower-baths when they were prescribed by the physician for health, and they bathed in summer seas for pleasure, but they did not wash themselves all over every morning. I remember an old gentleman, of good family and estate, arguing against this strange, newfangled custom, and maintaining that it was quite unnecessary to wash the skin in modern times, as the impurities were removed by linen. However, the new custom took deep root in England, because it became one of the signs of class. It was adopted as one of the habits of a gentleman, and afterwards spread rather lower, though it is not yet by any means universal. It is chiefly upon this habit that the present English claim to superior cleanliness is founded. In former times the English were proud of using more water than the French for ordinary ablutions, and they pretended to believe that the French were unacquainted with the use of soap, because they did not provide public pieces of soap in the bedchambers of their hotels.

The cold sponge-bath is perhaps used in England more for health than for cleanliness, as a prolonged stay in a warm bath cleans much better, and the treatment by perspiration according to old Roman or modern oriental usage is incomparably the most effectual cleanser of all. It is characteristic of the English to have set hardihood above the ideal perfection of cleanliness, and to have avoided the luxurious and enervating bath in which the ancients took delight.

Englishmen are proud of being able to sponge themselves with cold water all through the winter. I have known one who used to lie down in ice-cold water every morning; others boast of a morning plunge in sea or river at Christmas time, and they continue the habit as long as their constitutions will hold out.

English physicians are severe on the concealed dirtiness of many people in the middle classes, who seem clean with their false collars and cuffs and their washed faces and hands. One does not expect much cleanliness amongst the labouring population of any modern country, but the working classes in England deserve great credit for every effort they make in the direction of cleanliness, because they have not the facilities of the rich. I myself have often seen colliers in Lancashire naked to the waist and giving themselves a thorough wash in plentiful hot water with soap, and when greater facilities are given in the shape of public baths they make use of them. It would be easy for manufacturers to encourage cleanliness by having baths at their factories. Some have actually done this.

The state of England with regard to personal cleanliness may be considered as partially satisfactory, and it is improving. As to the French, their strong point is their excellent institution of warm baths, which are to be found even in the smallest towns with a complete service. A tired Frenchman, arriving at anything like a town, looks to his hot bath as the best restorative. If these baths are a pleasure to a man he will be clean; if he does not like them he will not be so clean as the Englishman who sponges himself by way of discipline, whether he likes it or not. However, English example has had a wonderful effect in improving the apparatus of cleanliness in French private houses. English baths, ewers, basins, and other complicated toilet arrangements are copied extensively in France. If you visit a pot-shop in a small provincial town, quite remote from the Channel, you will find English washstand services of full size, or good French copies of them; and if you go to the ironmonger’s you will find all kinds of baths for domestic use, including English “tubs.” In French houses, where the old small ewers and basins are retained, they are now almost invariably supplemented by a capacious tin water-jug on the floor. In fact, the French are becoming a cleaner people, thanks to the example of their neighbours, who are about forty years in advance.

A French crowd (I am not the first to notice this) always appears cleaner than an English crowd. This is due to the self-respecting habits of the French lower classes. In England the poor people in towns will wear old and dirty things that have belonged to middle-class people; in France they wear cheap things of their own and take care to have them clean, especially on Sunday or a fête-day. Peasants’ and workmen’s wives look as clean as ladies; in fact, their washed caps, prettily ironed, have a fresher appearance than ladies’ bonnets. The men, too, in their new blouses, appear cleaner than a bourgeois in a black coat. In summer, all the young peasants look as if they put on a new straw hat every Sunday.

Much of this external cleanliness is due merely to the absence of coal-smoke. In London and Manchester it is difficult and expensive to be clean. The cheery and bright external appearance of French houses is due to the same cause, and now the common use of coal is spoiling it in some places. As for English houses in large and smoky towns, the melancholy dinginess of the outer walls is accepted as a matter of course, but cleanliness has its revenge in the interior and even on the whitened doorstep. There is one point as to which the English are greatly superior to the French, especially to middle-class provincial families,—they renew paper and paint. The good old-fashioned French way was to neglect papering and painting till further neglect could make it no worse, and then to think no more of the matter. There is a strong conventionalism about these subjects everywhere. In the inside of a room English people are more particular about the walls and ceiling, French people about the floor. There is many a middle-class French dining-room where the only beauty is the extreme cleanliness of the bare boards. The English like carpets, which are more favourable to comfort than to cleanliness, the French prefer the healthy waxed oak parquet, and often content themselves with a deal plancher or red tiles.

The humbler classes in England have a great superiority in their love of whitewash. The passion for whitewash which has been so disastrous in churches is excellent in farm-houses, and I have known many a farm-house in Lancashire that was kept fresh and pleasant by the use of it. In French farm-houses it seems to be perfectly unknown; and although their interiors are admirably adapted for pictorial treatment, and have been charmingly painted by Edouard Frère and others, the rich browns of the coarsely-plastered walls are really nothing but dirt, though delightful in colour and texture from an artist’s point of view.[55]

The French are very careful about the cleanliness of their bedding. I have often in my travels slept in very poor country inns, but was always sure of clean, if coarse, sheets, as well as a clean table-cloth and napkin.

The English are incomparably superior to the French in their care and cleanliness about water-closets and everything of that kind. French incompetence, stupidity, and neglect of this matter are indefensible. The only possible explanation is that when people have once got into the habit of neglecting any particular thing the habit of neglect becomes fixed, even when it is attended by great inconvenience. To borrow an illustration from a pleasanter subject, I may observe that many French farmers, and, I believe, more Irish, have a fixed habit of neglecting the repair of harness except with bits of string. Certainly, in the better class of French houses, an attempt is made to keep the water-closet in order; but as it has always been badly organised at the beginning this is very difficult. The French might learn all about these inventions from the English, who thoroughly understand them.

In conclusion, France and England may be ranked amongst the tolerably clean nations, England taking the lead; but real cleanliness is not general in either. What there is of it is confined to limited classes, and anything like an ideal perfection of cleanliness is the peculiarity of individuals who have a natural genius for it and find a pleasure in it. The majority prefer a moderate degree of dirtiness as being more conducive to their true comfort. A certain English poet used to wear a dirty shirt for comfort, and a clean one over it for show. That exactly represents the feelings of ordinary mankind, who have no objection to a little cleanliness in deference to custom, provided that it is only external, and that they may have the satisfactions of dirt beneath, like a cherished secret sin under a mantle of piety. As for the really poor, who are miserably clad, it has been pointed out by Mr. Galton that dirt is a necessity for them in cold weather; it is the poor man’s under-shirt.