French & English

This kind of success is of importance only so far as it affects the wealth or the independence of a nation. Otherwise, success abroad is merely a subject of national vanity of a very empty kind. It is not the same with nations as with individuals. Personal celebrity is really a legitimate object of ambition for a wise man, because it makes life pleasanter to him in various very practical ways, and especially by bringing him into contact with people interested in his own pursuits. There is no national reward of that kind. It matters nothing to the English people whether their authors and artists have a continental celebrity or not. We shall understand the subject better by considering, at first, the case of England separately, and her celebrity in France, for different achievements of genius and industry. Certainly, if English genius is visible in anything it is in poetry, yet no Englishman who knew the French would attach the slightest weight to their opinion on the English poets. They often know the language well enough to read prose of a clear and simple kind; I quite believe that some Frenchmen of cultivated taste may appreciate Addison’s prose, or Goldsmith’s prose, and a few, a very few, may perhaps enjoy some verses of Byron or Pope; but English blank verse is usually quite beyond French appreciation as to its technical qualities, and so indeed are the more delicate and subtle cadences of English rhymed metres such as those which occur, for example, in the “Lotos-Eaters.” I should think it highly improbable that there are ten Frenchmen with ear enough to seize upon the very different qualities that artists so different as Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can give to a metre, blank verse, which appears to be identical in the three cases, or who would know the difference between the heroic couplet as employed by Pope and the same measure in the hands of William Morris. There is the Spenserian stanza, too, as its inventor used it, and as it has been used by Thomson and Byron. Try to explain these differences, which in reality are enormous, to a Frenchman. Try to explain to him anything about the musical qualities of the English language. He will laugh at you for your “patriotism”; it being a received opinion in France that English never is and never can be musical. There is Vice-Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, for example, probably the most cultivated officer in the French navy, an Academician, a scholar, a charming and very instructive writer, altogether a man who would do honour to any nation. Of course he knows English, and he certainly has no narrow prejudice against Englishmen, yet in his touching reminiscence of Lieutenant Gore, in the last Figaro Illustré, I find the following passage. He is telling about an evening on board a French ship of war near Rhodes, spent in Gore’s society after a separation.

“La soirée passa comme un songe. Un seul orage faillit la troubler. Je soutenais que la langue anglaise était rude, complètement dépourvue d’harmonie. ‘Elle est rude pour vous, qui ne savez pas la prononcer,’ ripostait l’insulaire avec véhémence.”

Here we have first the impression of the uneducated French ear, then the truth about the matter from the Englishman. Another Frenchman (whose name is not worth mentioning in connection with that of M. Jurien de la Gravière) says that the English language is scarcely intelligible when spoken, even for the English themselves, and that is why they are so taciturn. Another calls English “cet idiome sourd.” How are these Frenchmen to appreciate the “mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies”?—how are their ears to hear the “God-gifted organ-voice of England”?

What really happens is this. English authors are known in France by translations, and as neither the music of verse nor the style of prose can be reproduced in a translation, the author is judged by a criterion outside of his literary workmanship. His reputation is constructed over again, without reference to his mastery of language, on the grounds of thought or invention only. Herbert Spencer has a great reputation in France as a thinker, Dickens as an inventor. Thackeray is very little appreciated, because the French can never know how superior he was in style to Dickens. Of English writers on art, Sir Joshua Reynolds is appreciated in France because his doctrine contained nothing particularly English, and his style was simple and clear; Ruskin has no French readers because his views on art are English and his style complex, elaborate, ornate. The name of Byron is known to every educated Frenchman, that of Tennyson is known to students of English literature only. All the chief English and Scotch philosophers are familiar to French students of philosophy, and in fact accepted by them as their great teachers and guides, but they are utterly unknown to the French public.

Independently of literary merit, foreign literatures are sometimes called upon to supply an element of human interest that is wanting in the home productions. The French are aware that Russian novels are not so well constructed as their own, yet there is a poignancy, a profundity of feeling, and a strength of primitive barbaric nature in the Russian novel that are wanting in the French, and this has given the foreign novelist a great success even through translations. The desire for more nature always brings on a reaction against any conventionalism, and the foreigner who brings more nature has his assured success. A modern English conventionalism, quite unknown to our forefathers, forbids the complete portraiture of men and women in fiction. This has created a desire to see another side of life, and the French novelist supplies the want. The English want immoral literature and buy French novels; the French want moral literature and buy English novels—in translations. It would be better, perhaps, to have for both countries a kind of fiction that should be simply truthful, rather than the English novel that makes life better than it is and the French that makes it worse.

It has been erroneously affirmed that painting is cosmopolitan because the fame of certain artists is universal. That of others is purely national. There may be national elements in painting repulsive to other national elements in the mind of a foreigner. If the reader could have before him all the French criticisms of English art that I have read, or all the French allusions to it, nothing would strike him so much in them as the attitude of stubborn resistance in the French mind to English artistic influences. Such notices bristle all over with antagonism. It is not simply that the French usually consider the English bad artists, they resent the attempt of England to enter the domain of art as if it were an unwarrantable intrusion, or a ridiculous attempt to do something for which Englishmen were never qualified by nature. As Punch looks upon a Frenchman trying to play cricket or venturing on horseback after English foxhounds, even so the French critic looks upon the misguided Englishman who attempts to paint a picture or carve a statue. In a volume of French art criticism on my table I find two or three allusions to English painters, to Reynolds, “who imitated everybody,” and to Turner, “the copyist of Claude.” The latest French critic of London says that in the National Gallery, with the exception of some portraits by Gainsborough and some dogs by Landseer, there are no English pictures to detain a visitor. No French Government has ever yet dared to purchase an English picture for one of the French galleries. M. Chesneau says that a French collector would never think of having one in his house otherwise than as a curiosity. He would not have it “comme une satisfaction esthétique, encore moins comme un motif d’élévation offert à son âme.”

The one great and honourable exception to this narrowness has been the illustrated art journal l’Art, which has certainly done all in its power to overcome the narrowness of French prejudice against English painting, but l’Art is not a purely French enterprise. One of its editors is a Belgian who speaks English and visits England very frequently.

The most cultivated French artists are not insensible to the qualities of English art. Those who know Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilkie, Turner, Constable, see that there are some interesting qualities in their works. Flaxman, too, has considerable reputation in France through his designs in illustration of Homer. English engravings after Landseer have been bought in France rather extensively by lovers of animals, and la vignette anglaise, such as the vignettes after Turner, has long been esteemed as rather a favourable example of the pretty in art as distinguished from what is serious and elevated.

Constable alone, of all English artists, has had a practical effect in France. For readers unacquainted with the fine arts I may say that two of Constable’s pictures, exhibited in Paris during his lifetime, produced such a revolution in French ways of looking at nature that they founded the modern French school of landscape. They were, in fact, much more influential in France than in the painter’s native land.

With this unique exception, due to French weariness of conventionalism and thirst for freshness at that particular time, there has never been any English force in art comparable, beyond the frontier, to that of the French school which radiates all over the world. The fame of an English painter is insular, that of a Frenchman, of the same relative rank, is planetary. Even the United States of America, bound as they are to England by close ties of language and literature, follow, almost exclusively, French direction in painting. The Americans appear not only to have accepted all French painters who have any celebrity at home, but they have adopted, almost without question, the antagonism of French critics towards everything that is English in the fine arts. This is the more remarkable that the inhabitants of the United States certainly look to English opinion in other matters much more than to French. They do not greatly respect or esteem the French, and they do certainly respect and esteem the English, in spite of occasional differences.

The most signal triumph of French art has not been its influence on the continent of Europe but in England itself, where it has modified the tendencies of the existing school both in choice of subject and in technical execution. Through French influence English painting has been brought nearer to continental painting. At the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 there was not that shock of surprise on passing from foreign sections to the British that seized the spectator in 1855. It is safe to predict that in 1889 the sense of strangeness will have still further diminished.

The English are not narrow in opposition to French artistic influences. Rosa Bonheur’s reputation in England was made quite as easily as if she had been an Englishwoman. The French Gallery in London has extended the fame of many a foreign artist. Meissonier, Gérôme, Edouard Frère, are appreciated in London as in Paris. So it has been with the best French etchers, Méryon, Rajon, Waltner.

Still, there exists or has existed amongst some Englishmen a prejudice against French art. The older Leslie was so patriotic as to believe that before the peace “the British school had possessed the wine and the other schools the water only of art, and that the peace, by mingling these, had strengthened the art of the continent exactly in the degree in which it had diluted art with us.” The French got the wine of art from England and mixed it with their water. Leslie thought too that it would be time enough for the French to talk of “high art” when they produced pictures that would bear even a distant comparison with the works of the great old masters, whereas those of a dozen English painters, including Fuseli’s and the best of Haydon’s, could “hang with credit amongst those of the greatest painters that ever lived.” Haydon himself said, “The present French artists have immense knowledge but their taste is bad, they know not how to avail themselves of what they know, how to marshal, order, and direct it.” Etty said of the French, “It is lamentable, the narrow nationality of their school; Titian, Correggio, Paolo, Rubens, throw down their pearls in vain. The husks of their own school are preferred.” In the five volumes of Modern Painters, modern French painters are treated as if they did not exist.

Italian and Dutch masters had the immense advantage of belonging to nations that excited no political jealousy. If Titian and Correggio belonged to the Italy of to-day, the Italy that has a fleet and an army, and a place in the councils of Europe, they would be judged in the same hostile spirit as the English. In like manner it was an advantage for Italian musical composers, as to their fame in France, that they belonged to feeble principalities. No English musical composer has a chance of recognition in France. When Germany was feeble her music was judged on its own merits; since she became strong it has been found impossible to represent the works of her most recent musical genius on the French stage; and when an attempt was made to do so there was almost an émeute, whilst his talents and even his morals became objects of violent attacks in the French press.

The powerful effects of the French patriotic bias have been noticed already by Herbert Spencer. He observed, as examples, that in the picture by Ingres of the “Crowning of Homer” French poets are conspicuous in the foreground, while the figure of Shakespeare in one corner is half in and half out of the picture, and the name of Newton is conspicuous by its absence from those of great men on the string-course of the Palais de l’Industrie, though many unfamiliar French names are engraved upon it.

The intensity of these prejudices always diminishes with the dignity of the work to be judged. As the French admit the superior quality of English varnishes for carriages (their coach-builders will use no other), so they appreciate English cutlery and broadcloth, they even go so far as to copy English fashions in masculine dress. Most of the agricultural machines employed in France are of British make. The horses that run on French racecourses are of English blood, and English grooms attend to the best French stables. The British, on their side, know the merits of French gloves, silks, and champagne, and the French cook is as much a recognised personage in England as the English groom in France.

It is a mistake in the people of any nation to suppose that by any kind of magnificence and splendour, however artistic it may be, they can exalt their country in the minds of foreigners. The foreigner perceives the attempt to subjugate him, and resents it. There is that gorgeous building, the British Houses of Parliament. I do not wish to laugh at it myself, being one of the few who believe that it has artistic merit, that it is even a kind of architectural poem intended to glorify the greatness of England. The foreigner, however, does not want the greatness of England to be glorified, and no sooner is he aware of the attempt than he immediately begins to sneer at the building and to belittle it in every way as much as he can. In reality, the House of Lords is a chamber of noble dimensions, all the materials used in it are of the best quality, and the workmanship is thoroughly and unsparingly good. Although the ceiling is decorated, the wainscot is simply of carved oak. Well, one French writer compares the House of Lords to a shop where coloured glasses are sold for a shilling, another says it is as small as the public room of the mairie in a French village, a third likens it to a café concert, a fourth receives an impression of ferblanterie, that is, of tinner’s work. These French critics are angry at the costliness and excellence of the sound English work, and do all they can to cheapen it. In the House of Commons the Speaker’s chair is compared to an organ in a Dutch beer-house, and the Speaker himself, when adorned with his wig, to an actor in a comic opera. If the French will not venerate the Speaker’s wig, what is there on earth that they will venerate?

There is but one unquestioned and unquestionable superiority in great things—that of a victorious army. And that brings other superiorities with it. Nothing could be more encouraging to the spirit of conquest than the exalted moral eminence which the Germans attained in Europe after Sedan, and the moral degradation of the French when they had been compelled to pay two hundred millions sterling. God had rewarded German virtue with victory and had chastised the wicked Frenchmen for their sins. And not only does victory exhibit moral worth, but it glorifies the intelligence of the victorious nation, making all its statesmen wise. Their mistakes are all forgotten; the evidence of their sagacity remains. It is now almost unimaginable that Napoleon III was held to be the profoundest statesman in Europe until he had been beaten in the field. After Sedan there was an immediate discovery of his weakness, dreaminess, ineptitude. All the faults of the beaten army, in all ranks, became suddenly apparent in the same way. During the Crimean war, and the campaign that ended in Solferino, the absence of stiffness in the French soldiers, and the comparatively easy relations between them and their officers, were considered signs of the practical qualities of the French. After Sedan the same characteristics were treated as evidence of a want of discipline.

It is an error to suppose that displays even of military power in time of peace will produce a subjugating effect on the imagination of foreigners. The only utility of them is to make the taxpayers at home believe that they have something for their money. The foreigner carps and sneers. The English made a great naval display at the time of the Queen’s jubilee, and there have been English naval manœuvres since. The effect of the review outside of England was to provoke a depreciating analysis of the shipping, by which it was shown that most of the vessels were either badly armed or of an obsolete construction. As to the manœuvres, they demonstrated, to the satisfaction of foreigners, how easily the English coast might be ravaged by a hostile fleet.

There is this difference in the present situation of England and France, that whilst the defeat of England has hitherto, at any rate since the Norman Conquest, been nothing more than a subject of prophecy welcome to the jealousy of other nations, that of France has actually taken place. England is always to be humiliated, France really has been humiliated. The difference is considerable—it is that which exists between a vase that has been broken and another that might be broken if it were not properly taken care of. And the French have no longer the consolation which cheered them a little after Waterloo, of having yielded to Europe in arms. They have been beaten fairly in a duel with one nation, or at least with one people that became a nation before the war was over, and they have submitted, not willingly, but in fact, to all the consequences of the war. The situation will be equalised whenever a foreign Power shall surround London with an impassable ring of troops and dictate terms of peace in Windsor Castle, holding the English Sovereign as a prisoner in some fortress or palace on the continent.

The English are in a very peculiar state of mind with regard to the possibility of a great national disaster. They have not anything like the blind confidence, the foolish security in ignorance, that the French had before 1870. I well remember how the French in those days looked forward to European wars. They felt as safe as if God Himself had guaranteed the inviolability of their frontier. A war meant sending troops out of the country with affectionate kisses and hand-shakings, and receiving them with the honours due to a victorious army on their return. The present English temper resembles that kind of anxiety which troubles people in private life when their money matters are not satisfactory or they have a painless but incurable disease. The anxiety comes on at odd times, one cannot say when or why, and occupies the mind for a while. Then, as no real remedy presents itself, the anxiety is thrust aside and forgotten as much as possible, till it becomes importunate in the same accidental way again. The common English people alternate between times of false security, or forgetfulness, and panics, the intelligent English know always that the situation is precarious, and do what they can to remedy it, regretting that they can do so little.

It is useless to argue about success in literature with people too uneducated to read English. It is useless to affirm the greatness of English art, for that can be systematically denied. There is but one kind of greatness that need give England a thought or a care in reference to foreign countries, and that is her power of offence and defence by sea and land. The only unanswerable superiority is superiority in arms. Commercial and colonial greatness is but the filling of the sponge; a victorious enemy would squeeze it. If ever the day should unhappily come when an enemy clutches England by the throat as Germany held France in 1871, he will make her sign away the Colonies, and India too, and Malta, and Gibraltar, as France made “proud Austria” sign away Lombardy and Venice, and as France herself signed away Alsatia and Lorraine. Commercial prosperity, at such a time, is as vain as poetry and painting, or that insular music that French ears will not listen to. It is useless as a showman’s profits when his skull is cracking between the lion’s jaws.