French & English

Codes of manners have a very restricted rule. They are national, and in the nation each class has its own code. If, therefore, one nation judges another by its own standard, it is evident that abstract justice must be impossible; yet it is difficult to find any other criterion.

The reader may try to discover some criterion outside of national peculiarities, but he will certainly meet with this difficulty, that although people of different nations might be induced to agree about some virtue that manners ought to have, they are not likely to agree about its practical application and expression.

For example, let us take the virtue of courtesy. Are people to be courteous or discourteous? We should find an almost universal agreement on the general principle that courtesy is a part of good manners; but we should disagree on the application of it. As a rule, the Frenchman would be likely to think the Englishman’s courtesy too restricted and reserved. Much of it, and that the best, would even escape his notice, whilst the Englishman would consider French politeness overdone.

The great difficulty in judging such a question as this is that we require to have been long accustomed to manners of a peculiar kind before we can estimate them at their precise significance. If they are new to us we do not understand them, we are not able to read the thoughts and intentions which express themselves in forms as in a sort of language.

The words used in epistolary forms are the most familiar example of the second meaning, the only true meaning that there is in forms of any kind. If a superior in rank subscribes himself my obedient servant, I know that his meaning is as remote as possible from the dictionary sense of the words. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to suppose that the words, as he uses them, are meaningless. Such a form, in English, is intended to convey the idea of distance without contempt. It is as much as to say, in familiar English, “I don’t know you, and don’t care to know you; but I have no desire to be rude to you.” The form Dear Sir, in English, has nothing to do with affection. It means, “I know very little of you; but wish to avoid the coldness of Sir by itself.” My dear Sir means something of this kind, “I remember meeting you in society.”

A literal translation of these forms into French would entirely fail to convey their significance. You must be on the most intimate terms with a Frenchman before he will venture to address you as Cher Monsieur. There is absolutely no form of address in French that translates the meanings of Dear Sir and My dear Sir. They can only be translated by Monsieur, which fails to differentiate them from Sir.

The French forms used in writing to ladies are still more severe. “How would you begin a letter to Madame L——?” I asked a French gentleman who is a model of accuracy in etiquette:—

“Well, in the first place, I should never presume to write to Madame L—— at all.”

“But if circumstances made it imperative that you should write to her?”

“In that case I should address her as Madame, simply, and at the close of the letter beg her to accept mes hommages respectueux.”

Perhaps the reader imagines that the lady was a distant acquaintance; no, she was the wife of a most intimate friend, and the two families met very frequently. In this case the point of interest is that the lady would have been addressed as a stranger from a want of flexibility in the French forms.

There is a Frenchman who receives me with the utmost kindness and cordiality whenever I visit his neighbourhood. We correspond occasionally, and his letters begin “Monsieur” just as if he had never seen me, ending with the expression of his “sentiments respectueux.”

A very intimate friend in France will begin a letter with Mon cher Ami. I have only known three Frenchmen who used that form of address to myself. Two or three others would begin Cher Monsieur et Ami, mingling the formal with the affectionate. Englishmen hardly ever write My dear Friend; that is now an American form.

The French tendency to be ceremonious is not confined to letter-writing. It comes upon French people in personal intercourse in a curiously occasional way. I remember a physician, now dead, who had excellent French manners of the old school. He talked with great ease and without the least affectation, but on all those little occasions when a Frenchman feels bound to be ceremonious he was so in the supreme degree. After talking quite easily and intimately with some lady whom he had known for many years, he would rise to take leave with graceful old-fashioned attitudes and phrases, as if she were far his superior in rank and he had spoken to her for the first time.

It has happened to me to know rather intimately six or eight old French gentlemen who retained the manners which had come down from the eighteenth century. They evidently took a pleasure, perhaps also some pride, in being able to go through forms of politeness gracefully, and without error. An Englishman would find it difficult to do that in equal perfection, his northern nature would not take quite so fine a polish. Even amongst French people, as manners become more democratic, these old forms are continually reduced. They are no longer considered indispensable, and the younger men, who have not continually practised them, are not sufficiently skilful actors to play ceremonious parts with ease.[66]

It is very difficult for a non-ceremonious people to understand the precise value of old ceremonial forms. Even the poor and meagre survivals of them seem devoid of meaning to those who do not practise them at all, yet assuredly they had a meaning which was not exactly that of the words employed. After much reflection and much studying of the matter, as a barbarian, from the outside, I have come to the conclusion that a great repertory of formal phrases would be valued as a means of decently concealing the emptiness of genteel intercourse. To us they are embarrassing because we have not learned our lesson well, but the French upper classes of the eighteenth century knew them all by heart, and could repeat them without thinking. When people take any serious interest in a subject worth talking about, polite phrases are forgotten, the only instance to the contrary that I remember being the pretty one of a French professor lecturing in the royal presence, when he announced that two gases would “have the honour of combining before His Majesty.”

The real embarrassments of social intercourse are awkward silence, stiffness, ignorance of conventional usages. As for the degree of affectation or falsity that there may be in the expression of so many amiable or deferential sentiments that one does not exactly feel, everybody knows that they have only a secondary signification.

In any attempt to judge of manners, especially in a foreign nation, we are liable to two mistakes. We are likely to think that a degree of polish inferior to our own is rudeness, whilst the refinement that surpasses ours is affectation, we ourselves having exactly that perfection of good breeding which is neither one nor the other. An Englishman is particularly liable to think in this way, because the present English ideal of good manners is a studied simplicity. We come to think that a simple manner is unaffected, whilst high polish must have been learned from the etiquette-book. However, in a perfectly bred French gentleman, a somewhat ceremonious manner with a vigilant politeness is so habitual as to be second nature. It remains constantly the same; if it were only assumed, it would be involuntarily forgotten in privacy or in moments of fatigue or vexation.

The history of the relation between English and French manners may be conveniently divided into three periods.

In the eighteenth century manners were ceremonious in both countries. English people used “Sir” and “Madam,” they bowed and were punctilious, they went through complicated little performances of graceful attitudes and expressions. In the first half of the nineteenth century the English laid these old fashions aside and became simple in their manners. The French kept to the ancient ways, and so there was a great contrast. In the second half of the nineteenth century the French tendency is towards English simplicity, so that the two nations may ultimately be as near each other in simplicity as they were once in ceremony.

Another point of resemblance may deserve notice. When the English were very ceremonious and polite the ordinary manners of the nation were rude, with occasional explosions of coarse anger between gentlemen.[67] So the French have been, and still are, at once a very polite and a very rude nation. Their politeness and their rudeness are now decreasing together, which leads to the conclusion that ceremonious politeness is a defence against surrounding barbarism, and therefore the mark of an imperfect state of general civilisation. There may come, in the future, in both countries, a uniform mediocrity, when everybody will have tolerable manners, when a sort of informal serviceableness will be the universal rule, and all graces, delicacies, and refinements will be forgotten.

The reader may remember a passage in John Mill’s autobiography, where he makes a contrast between English and French manners in connection with his early residence in France at Sir Samuel Bentham’s house near Montpellier. “I even then felt,” he says, “though without stating it clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few or no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true, the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in ordinary intercourse, than in England; but the general habit of the people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper or middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.”

This judgment is at the same time bold and true. The English do not care about any reputation for politeness, but do greatly care about their dignity, and are extremely afraid of compromising it by being incautiously amiable. When, however, an Englishman knows you, and has come to the conclusion that he can be amiable with safety, that you are not the pushing person he dreads and detests, then his undemonstrative politeness will go much further than that of the Frenchman. You may know Frenchmen for twenty years without getting beyond that first stage of Gallic sociability that gives such a charm to the beginning of intercourse with them. One cause of this difference is that the English are an extremely hospitable people, and the French just the reverse. Acquaintance with French people is therefore very frequently limited to short formal calls, in which everybody acts a part in repeating polite commonplaces, leaving any mutual knowledge of minds and hearts exactly where it was before.

Here is another point of contrast that may be worth mentioning. French gentlemen in their intercourse with the middle classes often use an excessive politeness as a defence against intimacy, and this is perfectly understood. English habits would make excessive politeness unnatural, so the Englishman defends himself by a chilling reserve. The purpose is the same in both cases.

Manners always represent an ideal of some kind. The English way of behaviour seems to stand for dignity, the French for grace. Manners in both countries are more the representation of self in outward forms than any evidence of real consideration for the person to whom they are addressed. The Englishman wishes to convey the idea that he himself has dignity, that he is a gentleman; the Frenchman is anxious to show that he is a witty and accomplished man of the world. In England dignity is maintained by coldness, by repose, by the absence of effort, including low-toned, indolent enunciation; in France the notion of polish requires, above all things, brilliance. The English criticism on a Frenchman’s manners is that he lays himself out too much for admiration, and seems to beg for sympathy too much. French criticism on an Englishman’s manners is simply that he is destitute of manners. It is almost idle to compare two styles of behaviour that are founded on different principles. Without pretending to pronounce upon the merits of either, I should say that the virtues of English behaviour are chiefly of a negative kind, and those of French behaviour positive. An Englishman is pleasant because he is not noisy, not troublesome, not obtrusive, not contradictory, and because he has the tact to avoid conversational pitfalls and precipices. The Frenchman is agreeable because he is lively, is amusing, is amiable, is successful in the battle against dulness, and will take trouble to make conversation interesting.

Bad manners in England are simply boorish; in France they are noisy, insolent, and full of contradiction. A thoroughly vulgar Frenchman is overbearing and menacing in his tone, he is loud and positive, and if you attempt to speak he will interrupt you. In his presence one has no resource but silence. Even his own more civilised countrymen consider him unendurable.

Manners change greatly with localities in Great Britain and France, and it is remarkable that they are often worst in the most industrious and advanced parts of the country. In the Highlands of Scotland, where industrial civilisation is almost unknown, popular manners are excellent; in some parts of the Lowlands they are rude, repellent, and unsympathetic. The best popular English manners are to be found in certain rural districts, the worst in thriving and energetic Lancashire. Too much energy seems unfavourable to the best behaviour, which grows to perfection amongst idlers, or in agricultural and pastoral communities, where folks work in a leisurely fashion and have many spare moments on their hands.

In the course of this chapter I have avoided exceptions for the sake of clearness, which makes it necessary to add that there are people in both nations whose manners are not national. It is not an English characteristic to be a lively and brilliant causeur, yet there are Englishmen who have that quality and that art. The manners of George Henry Lewes were more French than English; he had the openness and ease of a Frenchman, his frank welcome, his gay cordiality, his abundant flow of words, his natural delight in conversation, his unhesitating self-confidence. There is also a small class of Frenchmen who have those qualities in manners which are believed to be exclusively English. They are quiet and reserved, they listen well, they never interrupt, they do not attempt to shine. When they talk, they talk deliberately, and in the purest language, never condescending to use the slang which is now rapidly corrupting the French tongue, and they employ terms accurately without French exaggeration. They are polite, but with an intelligent moderation, and they make no show of politeness.

These are exceptions on the favourable side. There are also innumerable exceptions which are nothing but a variety of individual failures to approach the national ideal. It is useless to attempt the description of these. All comic and satirical literature takes them for its own.