French & English

The French laugh at the English for their “décorum anglais,” as if the English were alone in having a strict rule about what is becoming. The French themselves are equally strict, but in other ways, nor is this strictness confined to the upper classes, for the French peasantry have it in a marked degree.[68]

The maintenance of decorum as a principle and a rule is compatible with astonishing oversights and omissions which strike a foreigner so forcibly that he thinks there no decorum at all. In these cases, the foreigner’s mistake is usually to be unaware of some powerful conventionalism by which decorum is theoretically maintained whilst it is practically violated. Travellers in Japan are astonished by the old Japanese system of bathing. One asks for a bath in a Japanese inn, and it is prepared, perhaps, in the common room or the kitchen, in the midst of the usual movement of men and women. Here, if anywhere, is surely a gross violation of decorum. No; it appears that by a convenient fiction a bather is not seen, and the same fiction allows the Japanese themselves to bathe together without any separation of sexes. When I was a boy there existed a certain conventionalism of the same kind in England. In those days bathing-dresses were only used by women, men always bathed in a state of complete nudity, and they were frequently close to the sea-shore whilst ladies were walking about and looking on. A French author gave, at that time or a little later, an account of his embarrassment when bathing in a lonely place on the shores of England. He had left his clothes on the beach, when some ladies came and pitched their camp-stools on the spot. He splashed to attract their attention, but they sat on, impassible. At length he quitted the water and made a bold advance, but with no effect. Finally he marched past, like a regiment at a review, and the ladies kept their places. Nothing, in this little adventure, violates the English decorum of former days. The Frenchman could not have presented himself, like Adam, in a garden, but on the sea-beach il n’y avait rien à dire. The ladies bravely acted on the fiction that a sea-bather is invisible, and they consistently carried out that fiction to the end. The Frenchman knew not that he had the ring of Gyges, the talisman of invisibility.

The French have a conventionalism about bathing-dresses which does not exist in England to the same degree. French decorum permits men and women to bathe together freely on condition that they have a costume. At the sea-side a “full costume” is required, but that is not much, and the feminine form of it is very pretty—rather too pretty, in fact, as it is too obviously intended to attract eyes rather than turn them away. Besides being pretty, the feminine bathing-dresses are extremely varied, leaving free play to the inventive fancy. A puritan legislator would feel tempted to replace those charming costumes by the plain old English bathing-gown, which was doubly useful, as it concealed both ugliness and beauty with equal impartiality.

French decorum always requires a man to bathe at least with the minimum of dress. Attired in his caleçon de bain a Frenchman seems to think that it covers the whole body, and he does not lose his self-possession in any society, but will exhibit his short and muscular person to all observers.

It may be noted as a curiosity of modern English decorum, that when the young men at Cambridge played the Birds of Aristophanes, their legs and feet were bare in the Greek fashion. This would certainly not have been done or tolerated in contemporary France, though the imitation of antiquity went equally far under the first Empire, for example, in the costume of Madame Tallien and her imitators.

Every class has its own decorum. Amongst artists’ models there is a kind of professional dignity which makes it disagreeable for the better class of them to be seen by any one who is not an artist. A French girl who was posing in an atelier before thirty students screamed and wrapped herself in a sheet because an unprofessional man had entered the room. In this case there was some reason in the model’s conception of decorum. She was there for her own hard work, but not to be stared at by strangers.

There is a very important practical question of decorum with regard to natural necessities. Although no human being can escape from that law, and although by mere healthy living we all openly confess that we have conformed to it, a foolish decorum refuses to recognise it. In England this foolish decorum has long been tyrannically prevalent, but railways have done much to break it down by accustoming travellers of both sexes to acknowledge without shame the existence of the need, and it has now become customary in England to provide for it, both at railway stations and in exhibitions. This is a triumph of reason which acknowledges the whole of human nature over a conventionalism which would set up a false and impossible ideal. There still remains the inconsistency by which a need provided for by all railway companies and organisers of exhibitions is ignored in the streets of the great English towns. This way of treating the matter is, in truth, directly contrary to its own purpose of an ideally decorous life, as these lower wants occupy a very small space in a man’s time and thought when they can be immediately satisfied, whereas they become intrusive and importunate when the satisfaction is denied. In obedience to this unreasonable decorum the English still inflict upon themselves very frequent inconvenience, occasionally amounting to torture, and in some cases to serious physical injury.[69]

The French have always been more simple and natural in regard to these matters; but they may be justly blamed for cynicism in the sound original meaning of the word. They are now beginning to imitate the English by establishing a proper degree of privacy. This is one of those numerous cases in which the two countries may improve each other’s customs.

English decorum has a weakness in its choice of French words to express what it will not venture to say in English, as if the French words were not either equally plain for anybody who knew the language, or useless for one who did not. There is a good old English word for a woman’s shirt, the English for it is “shift,” which gives the cleanly idea of a thing that is to be often changed. This word has been abandoned from an unpatriotic modesty or prudery, and replaced by the French word “chemise,” as if “chemise” were more decorous. In the same way “nude” and “nudity” (French words) are somehow believed to be much more chaste than “naked” and “nakedness,” and “enceinte” purer than “with child.” This fancy for French terms is the more remarkable that the English translation of the Bible, which is considered a model of pure and dignified language, does not give the slightest encouragement to it, but says everything in the plainest native way.

Liberty of language in conversation is very much a matter of dates. In Queen Anne’s time people said things at English tables that would be thought monstrous under Queen Victoria. In fact, at the present time, the purification of talk has gone so far in England that people will neither utter nor listen to what they constantly read in the newspapers which lie about in their own rooms. In France there still remains a certain old-fashioned tolerance, an inheritance from the eighteenth century; but with this reserve or proviso, that every infraction of strict decorum must be witty. On that condition it is likely to be pardoned. The most astounding instance I ever heard of was the song of the Mayor of Eu. That functionary was invited to the Château of Eu, in the days of Louis Philippe, so he made or learned a song about his mayoralty, and sang it to the royal family at dessert according to the old-fashioned French usage. The composition had two senses, one perfectly innocent and on the surface, the other not immoral but prodigiously indecorous. The royal family understood, laughed, and forgave. Such a thing might have been done in England at the court of Queen Elizabeth. A President of the French Chamber, being annoyed by one of the members, saw an opportunity for a witticism like those of the audacious mayor. It was a pun on the member’s name, and all parties in the House received it with unanimous appreciation.

To estimate these breaches of decorum justly, we must remember how extremely recent the present English decorum is. It belongs almost exclusively to the present century, and is the mark of maturity in the public mind. In the youth of nations, as in that of individuals, grossness of a certain kind seems amusing. It makes schoolboys laugh, even when it is quite devoid of wit; and I have said that in contemporary French society it is tolerated only on condition of being witty. English society is older and graver, older by a hundred years, just as it is more experienced in politics and religion, having got through its great political and religious crises earlier.

Here, as in other things, there are inequalities that quite put out the inexperienced observer. He is likely to imagine that the French have no decorum because he believes them to be immoral. He forgets that decorum is often of itself the morality of immoral societies, as going to church is the religion of the worldly. Venetian society, in Byron’s time, was extremely strict, not as to the realities of conduct, but in regard to certain outward appearances. French society, in the present day, is more strict in some respects than either English or Scotch. The behaviour of English girls, and still more that of American girls, is not positively wrong or immoral in French opinion, but it is indecorous. Even married ladies, in French country towns, have to be extremely careful not to incur the censure of public opinion, and in some towns they live in a kind of half-oriental retirement that English readers could not realise or believe. Before marriage anything more intimate than respectful politeness on the part of the gentleman, and reserve on that of the lady, is looked upon as a sign of ill breeding. After the marriage the husband’s masculine friends may remain for twenty years very distant acquaintances of his wife. It is certain that, in general, French decorum keeps up a much stronger barrier between the sexes than English decorum does.

The French, too, are stricter observers of decorum in regard to the dead. They are very careful about funerals, and about subsequent references to the dead, either in ceremonies, such as visits to the tomb and services for the repose of the soul, or in conversation. The obligations felt by the living in consequence of a death are more stringent and more widely spread in France than in England. A French lady who knew her countrymen well enumerated a few things which were essential to any one who lived amongst them; and one of the chief of these was attendance at funerals, just as in Scotland one would recommend the observance of the Sabbath.

The principle of decorum being the study of external appearances, it is not likely to be much observed by an excited and turbulent democracy. Still, a kind of artistic instinct desires decorum, and re-establishes it even after the most violent commotions. It is interesting to see how regularly and inevitably it has been re-established in France, so soon as a new form of government has been settled. M. Mollard, the Introducer of Ambassadors, was the Grand Master of Decorum for the Élysée, and had as much to occupy him as a Lord Chamberlain.

Decorum in literature and the fine arts is quite distinct from morality. A book may be irreproachably decorous, yet very immoral at the same time, and this is a combination that many readers seem to approve of. I could hardly mention a better instance of it than the famous little novel Manon Lescaut, by the Abbé Prévost, a French classic made still more famous in recent times by the opera which Massenet founded upon it. That is one of the most immoral books ever written; the situations are doubly and triply immoral; there is no sense of conduct in the leading personages, who are vicious and unprincipled in all their dealings; yet, at the same time, the author is much more decorous (according to modern ideas) than either Swift or Sterne. Critics who condemn modern novels as being “filthy,” because the sexual arrangements in them are lawless, are inexact in the application of their censure. In the French literature of the present day the combination of decorum with immorality is very common; and decorum is so far from acting as an effective restraint upon immorality that under certain circumstances it positively favours it. Immoral writers know how to conciliate the slaves of decorum, and win not only their tolerance, but even their protection.

The English deserve great respect for the general decency of their modern literature, and certainly they get this respect even from the French themselves. But there are some curious anomalies in connection with this subject. English decorum permits the publication of details in the reports of divorce cases which French decorum absolutely forbids. The French tolerate certain matters provided that they be fictitious, the English on condition that they be real. The French admit disgusting art, the English disgusting nature. The French novelist may be more attractive, but the English newspaper reporter is a thousand times more impressive, having all the force of reality on his side. The fictitious adulteress is but a phantom in comparison with the living beauty who is seen and heard in a court of justice; and what fall of an imaginary hero ever impressed us like that of the gifted and ambitious politician who barred his own path to the premiership of England?

It strikes one, too, as rather surprising that the English, whose sense of decorum is so easily offended by modern authors of books, should still be so indulgent to those who wrote before modern decorum was invented. Young maids and old maids read Shakespeare in unexpurgated editions; but what is still more surprising is that many English people should go out of their way to express admiration for Rabelais. Have they read him? Can they understand his old French? If they can, and read him still, they need not be afraid of Zola.

Being in the house of an English clergyman, I found on the shelves of his library a copy of Byron’s works in the one-volume edition. That edition includes Don Juan, but my clerical friend had excluded the poem, I found, by cutting every leaf of it out. I do not question his right to spoil a volume he had paid for, but what struck me as inconsistent was the reverent preservation, on the same shelves, of a complete Shakespeare in large print. Byron is incomparably the more decorous poet of the two, but he is not protected, as Shakespeare is, by a date. Shakespeare wrote before the invention of decorum, and therefore could not offend against that which did not exist. Byron wrote after its invention, and offended against it consciously and deliberately. The indecency of old authors is not only pardoned in a decorous age, but valued as a release from contemporary strictness. Some of them, particularly in France, are now reprinted in luxurious editions for their indecency, which is highly appreciated now.

In spite of these and other inconsistencies, and notwithstanding the recent efforts of some English poets to recover a certain licence, it is certain that decorum is better observed in English literature than in French. One of the best signs of matured health in the English mind is its capacity for wit and humour without the coarse and facile expedient of indecorous allusion. The far superior decency of the English comic papers is combined with superior wit. The inanity of the French illustrations of the Demi-monde is equalled only by their excessive sameness. Men like Leech and Charles Keene have attained far more variety by studying respectable Englishwomen, who are occupied in a thousand ways, than Grévin could ever get out of the monotonous lives of his French lorettes. Nor is the reason for this difficult to discover. The life of vice is essentially dull, because the women are usually uneducated; and the men themselves become half idiotic, not only through excesses of all kinds, but in consequence of their frivolous waste of time.

In serious art the naked figure is more frequently presented in France than in England, and it is quite customary in England to look upon it as a French evil. I need hardly remind the reader that the country where the naked figure was first studied with attention was not France, but Greece, and that every nation where art has been a serious pursuit has sedulously revived that study. It is trying to the patience to attempt any reasoning with people who can see nothing but lasciviousness in the higher forms of art. It seems to me natural that men who have devoted years to the study of the human form should desire to express their knowledge in works more important than the studies they make for their private use, in works that may have some possible chance of immortality. The study itself can never be repressed. The clothed figures in pictures that the Philistine does not object to can only be drawn well by a student of the nude. Many artists, like the President of the Royal Academy, first take the praiseworthy trouble to draw every figure naked, even when it is draped afterwards. Why the objection should be so specially raised against French art I do not know, unless it be for the same reason which makes people cry aloud against French immorality and pass in charitable silence Italian and Austrian immorality. As a matter of fact, with a few exceptions, the French school of sculpture is as dignified as it is learned.

French painting is less dignified because nearer to ordinary nature, but the fault to be found with it is chiefly that the nude figures of the present day are insufficiently idealised; it is not indecency as such, but a low prosaic realism that has established itself in this art; you do not meet with a nymph or a dryad, but with a portrait of some model. I remember hearing a French artist (himself an exhibitor of severely ideal nude figures) maintain that the nude by itself was decent, and so was clothing, but he abominated the two in the same picture. There have been plenty of examples of this unnatural union in past times, and in pictures which are now the pride of the great galleries; however, the most important contemporary instance is not a French picture but an Austrian, the Entry of Charles the Fifth into Antwerp, by Hans Makart.