French & English

It is a commonplace that the French and English of to-day are extremely unlike each other—wonderfully unlike each other, considering that they are such near neighbours, and the two principal representatives of western civilisation in Europe.

Has the unlikeness always been as marked as it is now, or has there been a time in the past history of the two nations when they resembled each other on some points now marked by trenchant differences?

The answer appears to be that the French and English have at certain periods of the past been much less unlike each other than they are now, but yet that the extreme of dissimilarity has been reached at a later period, and that, in the present day, the slow but sure action of causes that may be indicated is bringing about a diminution of that extreme dissimilarity, without, however, giving grounds for any belief or hope that the two nations can ever be very like each other in the future.

Recent historians, especially Mr. Freeman, have taught us to realise much more clearly than we did thirty years ago the truth that the kings of the House of Anjou were French kings, and that the governing classes in the England which they ruled were essentially a French noblesse. The Frenchifying influence of kings and nobles was resumed in another way by the Stuart dynasty, and might have gone on gradually approximating the entire English nation to French customs, had not a great mental revolution occurred in England and Scotland, which made the British thenceforward a peculiar people, strongly differing not only from the French but from all the other continental nations whatever. The result of that revolution, as it affects our own time, is that England resembles no nation in the world except her own colonies, including, of course, the great kindred nation in America.

That revolution was Puritanism, a far more important thing than the change from a monarchical to a republican form of government, because it really changed the mental habits of the nation, making English people more peculiar than they themselves know, and quite incomprehensible by the French; making English customs differ from continental customs more widely than they had ever differed before; changing even the fundamental character of the English mind by chastening and repressing the light-hearted gaiety of merry England and substituting for it a gravity often deepening into gloom; replacing the old morals by severer morals, establishing a strict censorship even over language, substituting for the old religion of Europe a faith less picturesque and less indulgent, consequently less in harmony with French feeling.

There is a temptation to exaggerate the importance of historical influences when once they have been perceived, but one can hardly exaggerate the importance of Puritanism in the history of the English people, especially in the history of the middle classes, where it is still predominant at the present day. Both the qualities and the defects that distinguish the British middle classes are for the most part directly traceable to the influence of Puritanism, and so are those feelings and opinions of which they themselves have forgotten the origin.

It may be thought that Puritanism ought to have been spoken of in the chapters on religion, but I am not sure that it ought to be classed as a special creed. It seems rather to be a reform of custom in the direction of severity and austerity which might be carried out under any creed that permitted rigorous moralists to obtain a great social power. The Wahhabees are the Puritans of Islam, with their particular prohibitions, their gravity of demeanour, their employment of pious forms in language, their severity of social espionage, and control by a vigilant public opinion. But although we may find Puritanism in the most unexpected places, it has never accomplished a work so extensive in its consequences, or likely to be so durable, as the transformation of British sentiment and custom. Only a dispassionate comparison with custom still alive on the continent, but extinct in England, can enable us to realise what that transformation is. A middle-class English family goes to Paris.[56] In due course of time a Sunday comes; or rather, not a Sunday, but a Dimanche. The English family has heard of a French Sunday before, but has hitherto been unable to realise it by mere force of imagination. On actually seeing it, the impression received is that the French are all intentional Sabbath-breakers—that the amusements which go forward on that day are a clear evidence of French wickedness. Some good English or Scotch people are so shocked by what they see that they recognise in the defeat of 1870 a just punishment for the national sin of Sabbath-breaking. They do not realise that what they see is not the French Sunday in particular, but the continental Sunday in general; still less do they remember that it is also the English Sunday of pre-Puritanic times—those times now so remote in memory, and yet historically still so near, when the English had not yet become a peculiar people, but lived like the other nations of western Europe. The English of Shakespeare’s time went to the theatre on Sunday,[57] and after morning service in the churches they enjoyed many active games and recreations, including dancing, archery, and leaping.[58] Now, as there is nothing more visible than external differences of custom, and as people are separated even more by visible differences than by those which are invisible, and as on one day out of seven those differences are now strikingly apparent between the English and French peoples, it is evident that on the day when they differ most they cannot but feel infinitely more estranged from each other than their ancestors would have felt on the same day.

The modern disapproval felt by British visitors for the behaviour of the French people on Sunday is due in great part to the cautious conduct of the Roman Catholic minority in England, who do not venture to show openly what kind of Sunday it is that their Church would hold to be innocently employed. To avoid scandal in a country where the influence of Puritanism is still powerful, they keep a Sunday that is outwardly almost a Sabbath, and are careful to avoid many recreations that the Church of Rome has always freely permitted. In fact, that Church permits all recreations on the first day of the week that she sanctions on any other, including the most active exercises. What she really forbids is lucrative professional labour. A lawyer should not study a case on Sunday, unless there is urgent necessity, but he is perfectly free to amuse himself, however noisily, in sawing and hammering. A professional artist may do better not to paint (although there is a kind of special toleration for artistic and intellectual pursuits, as being different from mere drudgery), but an amateur, working for recreation, may take his apparatus into the fields. Disinterested studies of all kinds are permitted by the Church on Sunday. It is not in a Roman Catholic country that geologists would be in danger of being stoned, as they have been in Scotland, for hammering at rocks on that day.[59]

Here is the way in which some very religious French people spent a Sunday in 1886, I being one of the party. They went to mass early in the morning, in the chapel of the nearest château; then they made preparations for receiving their friends. The friends came after déjeuner, two families, in addition to seven guests staying in the house. Some of them remained in the garden, sat about in camp chairs and talked; others went to the village fête, where, of course, there was a great deal of dancing and other amusements, which they looked upon quite benevolently. Now, it so happened that those who went to the fête were the most religious people of the whole party. On their return we had dinner, and the most pious were by no means the least merry. After dinner the young ladies gave us some music, and one of them played a waltz. This set the young people dancing, and so a dance was improvised which lasted till eleven o’clock, when the guests drove away in the moonlight.[60]

Perhaps the English and Scotch might have given up Sunday dancing more readily than if they had been by nature as saltatory as the French are, but the British have given up many things that they cared for passionately. They gave up salmon-fishing, for example, which was not readily put down in Scotland, and the new legislation attained in the end that supreme success of the legislator when he establishes a very durable custom that would survive the repeal of his law. The power of the dead Puritans is shown in nothing more wonderfully than in the abstinence of British sportsmen when the twelfth of August occurs on a Sunday, and every fowling-piece in the British Islands remains unloaded till Monday morning.

This history of the divergence from continental custom may be written in two sentences. Puritanism obtained power to legislate, and made recreation illegal on Sunday. By laws of great severity it established new customs which have now, by lapse of time, become rather old customs; and these have completely obliterated from the ordinary British mind all traces of any recollection that the still older British customs were like those of the continental nations.

Opinion has gone even beyond legislation itself, by a process of growth and development. Here is an example. An amateur violinist was staying in an English house for a few days, including the first day of the week. He took his violin out of its case and began to play a little in private. The lady of the house immediately entered the room and begged him to desist. “I am playing sacred music,” he answered; “this is a part of Handel’s Messiah.” “That does not signify,” was the rejoinder, “the music may be sacred, but the instrument is not.” Here is a new development in the distinction between sacred and profane instruments, and a very subtle distinction it is. The organ, the harmonium,—in default of these, even the commonplace piano,—these are sacred instruments, but not the voice-like violin. Yet the violin is but the lyre—“Jubal’s lyre”—made capable of far more perfect expression.[61]

When I lived in Scotland I had occasion to observe another very subtle distinction. It is forbidden to labour on the Sabbath-day, yet I found that the toilsome work of rowing was looked upon as innocent in comparison with sailing. This was because a white sail had rather a festive appearance. I was especially blamed for not removing the flag from my sailing-boat, for the same reason, though it might be argued that there can be nothing unholy in the crosses of St. Andrew and St. George. In France, sailing regattas are usually held on Sunday, with the full approval of the Church.

The establishment of Sabbatarian customs in Great Britain had an unforeseen effect on literature. It prepared the way for the success of theological books and periodicals by leaving the day, in the most pious families, without any other recreation than religious reading. The British read ten times as much about theology as the French, and therefore have a much more extensive knowledge of the subject. In France pious people read the Imitation, the mass-book, an abridgment of sacred history, and some printed sermons by the most celebrated ecclesiastical orators; but this is not to be compared with the range of English theological reading, both in the Bible itself and in all kinds of elaborate commentaries. As for French unbelievers, who are very numerous, they live outside of theology much more easily and completely than their English brethren, and often know so little about it that references to the Old Testament familiar to every Englishman would be unintelligible to them. The modern English political use of the cave of Adullam puzzled Frenchmen exceedingly, as they did not know anything about Adullam. One very curious and unexpected result of Sabbath strictness in Great Britain is that the British are much better prepared for German exegetic criticism than the French; so that the British often arrive at unbelief by laborious theological reading, whilst the French, as a general rule, come to it with much less trouble through Voltaire, and retain the Voltairean spirit. Of late years, however, certain scientific influences, especially that of Darwin, have been common to both countries, and the effect of theological studies counts for less, relatively, even in England.

The best example of a difference of custom that is simply chronological is that of duelling. The English, by a real progress, have passed out of this custom; the French have not yet passed out of it, though it is probable that they will do so ultimately. Like all fashions very recently discarded, it seems absurd to those who thought it a part of the order of nature a little time ago. And so completely do we forget the reasons for discarded customs that the English now look upon duelling as quite contrary to reason, having forgotten the ancient reason on which the single combat was founded. Yet it was a very good reason indeed, according to the ideas that our fathers held about the government of the universe.

The old belief, in France and England equally, was that the appeal to arms was an appeal to divine justice, and that God himself would interfere in the battle by protecting the combatant whose quarrel was rightful against the power and malice of his assailant. So long as this belief prevailed, a duel was incomparably more reasonable than is an action-at-law in the present day, for it appealed to infallible instead of to fallible justice, and in addition to being reasonable, it was distinctly a pious act, as the combatant proved his faith by staking his existence on his trust in the divine protection. “He will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine.” The faith of David was the faith of the Middle Ages.

The custom lasted longer than the belief, even in England, and in France it has long survived all faith in supernatural interference. The duel is utterly irrational when people do not believe that God will protect an inferior swordsman, with right on his side, against a better swordsman in the wrong, or that he will spare the innocent by deflecting the course of a bullet well aimed by a wicked adversary.

There has been, however, the intervention of a sort of secondary religion between the old one and modern unbelief. There has been the religion of honour. According to this, a man of honour was bound to expose his life on certain occasions to the rapier or pistol of a private enemy, and, if he fell, he fell a martyr to this religion of honour, leaving a name unsullied by the stain of cowardice, which was the equivalent of infidelity or apostasy.

This religion survived in England even so late as the first half of the present century, and it still survives in France. The old English sentiment,—I say the old sentiment because contemporary Englishmen have got so far past it, though it is very recent in mere date,—the old English sentiment was expressed by Thackeray in the challenge sent by Clive Newcome to his cousin Barnes, and in the gratification it afforded to Sir George Tufto and to the Colonel, both of them elderly men. Nevertheless, as Thackeray knew that the religion of duelling was already dead in England when he wrote, he took care to make the action of Clive acceptable by assigning to it filial affection as a motive. The French sentiment about honour was described with disapproval in the case of de Castillonnes and Lord Kew. “Castillonnes had no idea but that he was going to the field of honour; stood with an undaunted scowl before his enemy’s pistol; and discharged his own, and brought down his opponent, with a grim satisfaction and a comfortable conviction afterwards that he had acted en galant homme.” And so, no doubt, he had, not only according to modern French ideas, but according to old English ideas also.

General Tufto was of the old school when he said of Sir Barnes Newcome, after he had received Clive’s challenge, “At first I congratulated him, thinking your boy’s offer must please him, as it would have pleased any fellow in our time to have a shot.” And the Colonel himself, instead of reprimanding Clive for wishing to commit murder, “regarded his son with a look of beautiful, inexpressible affection. And he laid his hand on his son’s shoulder and smiled, and stroked Clive’s yellow moustache.

“‘And—and did Barnes send no answer to that letter you wrote him?’ he said slowly.

“Clive broke out into a laugh that was almost a sob. He took both his father’s hands. ‘My dear, dear old father, what an—old—trump you are!’ My eyes were so dim I could hardly see the two men as they embraced.”

All this is much more French (even down to the embracing and the tear-dimmed eyes of the spectator) than the opinions professed about duelling by the English newspapers of 1886. According to them, a man who sends a challenge is ridiculous, and no more. This marks the final extinction of the old sentiment.

Another indication of this change is the ridicule of duelling on the ground that it is not dangerous. French duelling is constantly represented in English newspapers as a very safe kind of ceremony, in which a slight scratch only is to be apprehended. As to this, perhaps I may be allowed to give an instance that was brought very near home.

I had been away for several days, and on my return journey dined at a railway station. The waiter had known me for years, and, according to his custom, enlivened my solitary dinner with a little talk. He asked if I had “heard about M. de St. Victor.” I had heard nothing. “Because, sir,” the waiter continued, “he was killed this morning in a duel in the wood at Fragny.” Now, it so happened that my wife and daughter were to have lunched and spent that afternoon with Madame de St. Victor; but as her husband’s dead body had been brought back to the château of Montjeu, where he lived, with a sword wound through it, Madame de St. Victor did not receive her friends that day.[62]

A single event of that kind, occurring in a family not altogether strange to you, does more to make you feel the grim reality of duelling than many newspaper paragraphs. In this particular case the incident arose from a correspondence between two proud and brave gentlemen about their game preserves. One of them had written in a manner that offended the other, and had refused to withdraw his letter. The code of honour then made a duel almost inevitable, and the correspondence being continued very soon led to it. An especially significant thing about this duel was that the conqueror was known as a remarkably expert swordsman, which the victim was not to the same degree. This demonstrates the real unfairness of duelling, as we see that the weaker or less expert antagonist goes down, whatever may be the righteousness of his cause.

The sense of this unfairness is gradually tending (in spite of appearances) to the abolition of the duel in France. There are two signs that the custom is growing weaker. The opinion that duels are contrary to reason is more frequently expressed in conversation, especially by women, than it used to be, and the duellists themselves are generally satisfied with the degree of deference to custom which goes as far as the first wound, and do not vindictively thirst for each other’s blood. The difficulty in abolishing the duel strikes an intelligent Frenchman in this way. “The duel,” he thinks, “is evidently a most irrational institution; but when there is a quarrel between two high-spirited men I cannot see how it is to come to an end otherwise.” Then he will say, “I know that the duel is obsolete in England, which is a happy thing for your country; but I cannot imagine how an English gentleman behaves when he is insulted.” To this difficulty I usually reply that public opinion in his country condemns the insolent man for his bad manners, and puts itself on the side of any gentleman who conducts himself with simple dignity, so that the latter is free to treat his enemy with silent contempt.

Changes of custom in one of the two nations, which have had the effect of separating it still further from the other, may be traced in several minor habits that are now considered especially and characteristically English. I can remember the time when the middle classes of England hardly knew the taste of French wine. Port and sherry were the wines of the middle class. The upper classes, in those days, offered French red wines at dessert under the general name of “claret,” without distinguishing between Bordeaux and Burgundy, and consequently without mentioning vineyards, unless the host happened to be, or pretended to be, a connoisseur. The taxes on French wines were afterwards reduced, and just before the reduction the kind of middle-class people who prided themselves on being especially national often declared that John Bull would never take to those light French wines, implying that he was a personage of more manly tastes, and writers in the press quoted a dignitary of the Anglican Church who had declared that “claret would be port, if it could,” which is like saying that port is anxious to become brandy. These good middle-class people, who made it a part of John Bull’s character to despise their French wines, seem to have been perfectly unaware that their ancestors, not less English than themselves, had for centuries been hearty appreciators of French wines, and that, in old times, casks of Bordeaux or Burgundy were to be found not only in the cellars of the rich, but in country hostelries. This may be a trifling matter, but to have the same taste in wines is not altogether unimportant as an aid to good-fellowship. A Frenchman looks upon an incapacity to appreciate the best wines—by which, of course, he always means the best French wines—as the sign of the outer barbarian. What he most likes in the Belgians is the just value they attach to the produce of “les meilleurs crûs” and their excellent, well-filled cellars.

Another great change of custom in England, separating her from France, is of quite modern introduction. There was a time when both countries were total abstainers from tea-drinking, and, so far, exactly alike; now England is a great tea-drinking country and France is not. Here is a new subject on which they are not in sympathy. It may seem a trifle; but has the reader ever observed Englishwomen in France deprived of tea or supplied with the beverage in a weaker condition than they like? At such times they have a very low opinion of Gallic civilisation. Far-seeing Englishwomen who are accustomed to the continent take their own teapots with their private supplies, and make the indispensable decoction themselves. When drinking it they feel like Christians in a pagan land. Is that nothing? Does it not produce a perceptible sense of estrangement from the French? Tea-drinking has now become one of those immensely important customs, like smoking and coffee in the East, that have connected themselves with the amenities of human intercourse, and to brew your cup in the solitude of a foreign hotel is to feel yourself an alien. Yet how long is it since the English began to drink tea? They began tasting it experimentally, as a few Englishmen now smoke hashish, about the middle of the seventeenth century. Compared with ale and wine, it is a novelty. The greatest of Englishwomen, Queen Elizabeth, who was of English blood by father and mother, and thoroughly national, never drank a cup of tea in her life, and did her work energetically without it.

The use of tea has produced a special meal in the English middle classes which is unknown in France as it was unknown in England two hundred years ago. The French way of living, under other names, bears a near resemblance to old English habits. The déjeuner à la fourchette is the early dinner, the dîner is the supper. The French first breakfast is modern, when café au lait is taken, but great numbers of French people take soup or a glass of white wine with a crust of bread, and many take nothing at all. Breakfast and tea are the peculiarly English meals, and they are modern. The one great English innovation which the French have never been able to accept is that of eating salty and greasy food, such as fried bacon, and drinking hot and sweet tea or coffee at the same time.

As an example of an old English fashion that is now looked upon as French, I may mention the way of treating the beard adopted by Napoleon III., and in imitation of him by many French soldiers and civilians. The moustache in combination with the barbiche was looked upon as a French fashion by the English, and very few contemporary Englishmen adopted it for that reason. They forgot that it was an old English fashion,—much older than the pair of whiskers with the shaven chin and upper lip which used to be looked upon as national in the highest degree. At the same time the English did not notice that the way of shaving the chin and upper lip which they believed to be so much the national mark of an Englishman was a rigorous contemporary French fashion for two classes, namely, magistrates (with barristers) and domestic servants. This is now somewhat relaxed, the tendency in both nations being towards complete liberty about the wearing of the beard.