French & English

It is most difficult to fix any common standard of luxury in two different nations. In a single nation the question whether an indulgence may be considered luxurious or not is settled by the national public opinion. There is no public opinion common to France and England.

Even the definition of the word “luxury” is not so easy as it seems. In practice, people define it for themselves according to their own characters. An austere person would condemn as luxury what another would call “comfort;” a very luxurious person would be proud of luxury as a proof of taste and cultivation.

Littré defined luxury (luxe) as “magnificence in dress, in the table, in furniture, an abundance of sumptuous things.” He made a curious distinction between luxury and sumptuousness. In his opinion sumptuousness expressed the costliness of things, whilst luxury was the taste for what is sumptuous. Lafaye, in his valuable dictionary of French synonyms, carried out the same idea further in the region of morals. He said that luxury might belong to all conditions of life, whereas magnificence and sumptuousness can only belong to lofty positions. In Lafaye’s opinion luxury is a fault or a vice which consists in the want of simplicity, or in offending against simplicity in one’s manner of living, or in his way of doing things, or of showing himself. Magnificence and splendour in great personages or in great cities are not vices, according to Lafaye, but the expression of generosity and grandeur.

In private life the idea of luxury is connected more nearly with expense than with enjoyment. Very cheap things are not considered luxuries, though they may be delightful. A shepherd on a hillside has access to a cool fountain, and in a hot summer he delights in drinking the water and in resting under the shade of the trees. These are clearly enjoyments of sense, and exquisite enjoyments, but they are not luxuries for the shepherd. Iced water and green shade are luxuries in the heart of Paris. In a good fruit year peaches, however delicious, are not luxuries in central France, neither was wine in the happy times before the phylloxera. The former abundance of wine has led to the free employment of it in French cookery. This always strikes English people as luxurious.

Independently of cheapness and abundance, the exigencies of custom often determine that an indulgence is to be considered necessary, and not a luxury, when in reality it is quite superfluous. Thus, carpets are a necessity in England, in and above the middle classes, and a luxury in France.

Luxury develops itself in different directions, even with reference to the same enjoyment. The rich English and French both spend freely on the pleasures of the table, but in England there is more pride in the luxury of the service, and in France in that of the cookery.

One difference in the luxury of the two countries is that the English are much more exotic in their indulgences than the French. Nearly all English luxuries come from abroad, whilst by far the greater part of French luxuries are procured at home. This may be connected with the broad, far-reaching, world-embracing character of the English intellect in its contrast with the narrower and more national French mind.

A religious theorist has maintained that Divine Providence gives to every nation, in the products of its own soil, whatever is best for the inhabitants. If that is so, the French carry out the intentions of Providence much more completely than the English, but they are more favourably situated for conformity. The English, however, have so completely adopted some foreign luxuries as almost to believe them indigenous. In this way tea has become an English beverage, and it used to be more English to drink port than claret, though port was equally foreign and came from a greater distance.

Supposing an Englishman and a Frenchman to be in the same rank of life, and in a rank requiring servants, the Englishman will have twice or three times as many domestics as the Frenchman, and their service will be more accurate and minute than that in the French establishment. The English domestics will be more showy in liveries, and there will be altogether more visible grandeur about the service. In France domestics are kept because they are useful; in England, because they are ornamental.

The key to the luxuries of the two nations may be found in two words, state and elegance. The desire of the English heart is for state, implying size in the house and numbers in the retainers. French ambition contents itself with a few small rooms and few servants; but it seeks distinction in elegance. French elegance, like that of antiquity, begins with the person, especially in women. In all kinds of feminine luxuries, particularly dress, France has kept the lead and gives the laws to England. The Church of Rome has settled that matter in her own authoritative and decided way by imposing simple and permanent uniforms on all women who belong to religious congregations; but her power, alas! is unequal to the far greater task of imposing a simple and rational dress upon all women whatsoever. The true French female mind, when left to its own devices, loves neither permanence nor simplicity in costume; it desires the utmost elaboration combined with incessant change. It employs thousands of couturières in cutting valuable materials into shreds to be worn for a few days or hours. This modern changefulness has one good effect, it is certainly on the side of cleanliness. The French luxury of to-day is far more closely associated with cleanliness than that of preceding ages. It is especially the luxury of renewal, first in dress, and also in furniture and habitation. The reconstruction of Paris has substituted clean streets, well lighted and well aired, for dirty and dark ones. The same process, in minor degrees, has been going on throughout France.

I cannot examine in this place the question concerning the association between luxury and the Fine Arts. It is most difficult to state the exact truth on so complicated a subject in a few words. Some of the French are artistic, and many of them are luxurious, so that art and luxury may be seen together in France; but they are not inseparably connected, and for my part I regret the accidental association. Nothing, in my opinion, can be nobler than the combination of artistic grandeur in the things which affect the mind with austere simplicity in those that touch the body. In the magnificent old French cathedrals you have the most sublime and the most costly architecture above you and around you, with a rush-bottomed chair to sit upon, like the chairs in the humblest cottage. In many an art gallery you have priceless treasures on the walls; but neither curtains for the windows nor carpets for the floor. The most precious engravings are often framed with a beading of plain oak. The masterpieces of sculpture keep their dignity best in rooms that are simple to severity. It is evident, therefore, that the fine arts are absolutely independent of luxury; but, on the other hand, it is also true that from the richness of the materials employed in some of the fine arts a luxurious people may be tempted to turn them to a lower use. Painting may be made luxurious by the charm of colour, and also by sensuous or sensual suggestions in the work itself. Besides these attractions, the modern spirit of luxury likes a picture as an excuse for decorating a room with a massive and glittering gilt frame.[65] The marble of a statue is also an agreeable thing to look upon, because it is smooth to the touch, and so soon as we descend to the minor arts we find great numbers of precious and pleasant materials which may be used as hangings or wrought into exquisite furniture. The love of beautiful objects, comprised in French under the convenient generic term bibelot, is strongly characteristic of the present stage of ultra-civilisation. The true sign of it is the search for the exquisite in all things. To live on dainties and be always surrounded with softness, to have plenty of amusing and expensive toys, is the end of the luxurious modern French development of the human faculties. How familiar, how commonplace, this life of luxury has become, and how many far higher and more estimable things are sacrificed to it! It is worse even than English comfort; because it takes a false appearance of superior refinement. Only after the first novelty has passed away do we discover that it is essentially vulgar and dull, and truly the vanity of vanities.