French & English

European travellers in the more benighted parts of Asia, such, for example, as the interior of Arabia, have sometimes had to contend with a peculiar difficulty in making their nationality clear. The ignorant Orientals class all Europeans together as one nation. Mr. Palgrave even found, in his Eastern travels, that the people imagine all Europeans to be citizens of one town. “Europe they know to be Christian, but they conceive it to be one town, neither more nor less, within whose mural circuit its seven kings—for that is the precise number, count them how you please—are shut up in a species of royal cage to deliberate on mutual peace or war, alliance or treaty, though always by permission and under the orders of the Sultan of Constantinople.” These ideas, it may be supposed, could exist only in the most unenlightened regions of central Arabia, where the European traveller hardly ever penetrates. Not so. Mr. Palgrave tells us that this admirable geographical and political lesson was inculcated on him “not once, but twenty times or more, at Homs, Bagdad, Mosool, and even Damascus,” In central Arabia ignorance about foreigners went a little further, as might be expected from the ignorance of that part of the world. There he was often asked, with the utmost seriousness, “whether any Christians or other infidels yet existed in the world.”

This is an extreme case, but we find in the writings of other travellers the statement of a natural difficulty in distinguishing English from French, for example. English and French are men of the same nation; they have the same character, the same habits, the same faults, and when one of the two peoples has committed some injustice, the other is held responsible for it.

In England and France a sharper distinction is established. In both these countries it is clearly understood that the English are people of one nationality and the French of another. When, however, we pass from the nations considered only as two great masses, and try to find what each knows of the other in detail, we discover the existence of a quiet conviction that there is no variety in the human species on the opposite side of the Channel. Each nation is well aware that there is now, and always has been in past times, an infinite variety of character within its own borders, but it fails to imagine that a like variety can exist in a foreign country. Not only is this inability common amongst those who have travelled little and read little; it may also be found in writers of eminence, who frequently fall into the error of describing the inhabitants of a foreign country as if they were all alike, especially when the description is intended to be unfavourable.

I propose to point out a few of the chief causes of internal difference which act both in England and France. The first and most obvious is that neither of the two nations is homogeneous. They are formed by the joining together of old nations, they have not grown as single nations from the first.

The power which acts politically in Europe, and which is called l’Angleterre or la Grande Bretagne in diplomatic correspondence, is composed of four distinct nationalities. If we take one of these, the most northerly, we find that it is inhabited by two distinct races, the Highlanders and Lowlanders. They are spoken of equally as Scotch, yet the difference is not less marked, in reality, than if they were separate nations. The Highlanders still retain, or did retain when I knew them, many of the characteristics of a social state from which the Lowlanders have long since emerged. They were noble rather than industrial in their tastes and instincts, disposed for field sports rather than for the improvement of their condition by labour. Dr. Macculloch’s description of their inertia at the beginning of the century was still applicable. The people did not move, of themselves, towards a better condition; they had not the spirit of improvement. They were surrounded, it is true, by natural circumstances of some difficulty, especially those caused by the severity of their climate, but they were far from making the most of such opportunities as they possessed. For example, in gardening, they did not grow, and they could not be induced to grow, the vegetables which the climate allows, even although the want of them brought on scurvy. Their habitations were wanting in every comfort, being almost in the lowest stage of cottage-building, irregular walls of rude stone, with a small hole (glazed, however) for a window, and a low thatch, the fire very commonly on the floor, and the peat reek escaping through an opening in the roof. There was no spirit of enterprise to improve the ground about the habitations, or to make communication easier when the public road (itself due to English military energy) did not happen to be close at hand. In a word, there was nothing of that fruitful discontent which leads the advancing races to incessant improvements. Without the neighbourhood of the Lowland Scotch and the visits of the English, the Highlanders would certainly have remained in a very early stage of civilisation. That early stage has its qualities and merits. The Highlanders have good manners. Poor or rich, they are naturally gentlemen, and they show a fine endurance of hardship which, from the stoic and heroic side, is evidently superior to the love of luxury that develops itself so wonderfully in the South.

The Highlanders have, of themselves, no fine arts. Their degree of civilisation has developed no ecclesiastical architecture; they got no further than the building of a few rude small castles. They have not any graphic arts, and in those industrial products which are akin to art they have never got beyond the design of a brooch or the arrangement of the crossing stripes in a plaid. Their vernacular literature consists of little more than a few poems, said to be touching and pathetic in their simplicity. The one literary success in connection with the Highlands has been Macpherson’s Ossian.

Now, on all these points, let us compare the Lowlanders. We see at once that the difference of race is accompanied by a difference of aptitudes and of traditions. Good manners are not inbred in them, though they are acquired in the superior classes as a part of culture. In the lower classes there is a sluggish indisposition to be polite, a sort of repugnance to polish of manner as if it were an unmanly dandyism, a feeling that answers to a plain man’s dislike to jewellery and fine clothes. Even in religion the difference is discernible. It is true that the Highlanders are not Roman Catholics like the Irish, but they have little of the Protestant Pharisaism which is common in the Lowlands. If a map of Scotland were shaded in proportion to the malignity of Sabbatarianism, the darkest places would not be far north of the Clyde, nor west of the Kyles of Bute.

The Lowlanders are intensely industrious and of a very constructive genius. They have made the Clyde navigable up to Glasgow, they are bridging over the Forth and the Tay, they build great manufacturing towns, and are famous for all kinds of shipping. On the side of intellect and art we all know what they have done. In proportion to their small numbers, they are the most distinguished little people since the days of the ancient Athenians, and the most educated of the modern races. All the industrial arts are at home in Glasgow, all the fine arts in Edinburgh, and as for literature, it is everywhere. The contrast with Highland indolence, apathy, and neglect, could scarcely be stronger if London itself were transported to the banks of the Clyde. Yet a Frenchman lumps together Highlanders and Lowlanders and calls them “les Écossais,” and thinks that they all wear the tartan and the kilt. It is true that he knows little else about them except that their beautiful Queen was beheaded, and that “en Écosse l’hospitalité se donne.”

There is a greater difference, in the essentials of civilisation, between the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland than there is between the Lowlands and the county of Lancaster.

Lancashire has so strong a character of its own that it may almost be considered a nation. The accident by which it is a Royal Duchy, as Wales is a Principality, may be an additional excuse for considering Lancashire, for the present, as a little nation within its own frontiers. It is fairly comparable in wealth and population, not only to the Lowlands but to the entire Kingdom of Scotland. The population of Lancashire in 1881 was to that of Scotland as thirty-four to thirty-seven, and to that of Switzerland as thirty-four to twenty-eight, in round numbers.

All the characteristics that mark southern Scotchmen reappear in Lancashire, whilst those characteristics that belong especially to the Highlands are absent from Lancashire. The Lancastrians, like the Lowland Scotch, are a most energetic race, that would never rest contented with a low degree of material civilisation,—a race with a remarkable genius for industry and trade, having a great love of comfort, and yet at the same time a remarkable willingness to sacrifice personal ease for the attainment of greater wealth. I suppose there are more rich men in Lancashire with resolution enough to get up at five o’clock on a winter’s morning than in all the rest of England. Again, although Lancashire has not produced authors and artists of such fame as the greatest that have illustrated Scotland, it has given warm encouragement to literature and the fine arts, especially to modern painting. If you pass to the comparison of religion and manners, you find manners independent and often rude, as amongst the Lowlanders, and religion inclining to the severer forms of Protestantism, with a marked Sabbatarian tendency. I visited London once with a friend from Lancashire, who was truly representative of the county, which he had hardly ever quitted, and I well remember that he was quite as much put out by the London Sunday as a Scottish Lowlander could have been.

Some light may be thrown on these similarities by the recollection that the western Lowlands of Scotland and Lancashire are parts of old Strathclyde, so that the inhabitants may have an ethnological affinity, like the descendants of the true ancient Scots, who equally inhabited the West Highlands and the north of Ireland. Again, the Roman occupation of Britain included the north of England and the Lowlands of Scotland up to the firths of Clyde and Forth, so that the men of Lancashire and the Lowlands had the benefit of the same Roman example, whilst the Highlanders were left to develop a social state of their own. In later times Lancashire and the south of Scotland were equally open to the influences of European civilisation, whilst the Highlands remained completely outside of it, like the interior of Arabia to-day.

If Lancashire has many of the characteristics of an independent nation, is there no other part of England which in recent times has developed characteristics of its own? Yes, there is the great nation of London, more populous than Scotland, Holland, or Switzerland, and destined to surpass Belgium in population before the end of the century. In London the English character has certainly undergone a great and astonishing modification. London is geographically in England, but intellectually one can only say that it is in the world. A provincial coming to London has not quitted the island, yet otherwise he hardly knows where he is. At first he does not belong to the place at all; after some experience of it he finds out whether he belongs to London naturally or not—that is to say, whether there is the degree of adaptability in him which may enable him to breathe the open intellectual atmosphere of the place. Physically, London may be as big as Loch Lomond; socially and intellectually, it is larger than Russia, and may well form, not only a county by itself, but a state within the State. I have said that in London the English character has undergone a modification. It has become more open, more tolerant, better able to understand variety of opinion, and much more ready to appreciate talent and welcome thought of all kinds. The nation of London is essentially modern and democratic, not caring who your grandmother may have been if only you yourself are to its taste; but at the same time it does not desire to be a coarse and uneducated democracy; it values culture and taste far too highly to sacrifice them to a low equality. In a word, London clings to its own standard of civilisation. If you come up to that standard, if you have refinement and just money enough for housekeeping of unpretending elegance, you may be an infidel and a radical, yet London will not disown you, London will not cast you out into the cold.

Although London happens by chance to be situated on an island it is not insular. The nation of London is of all nations the most cosmopolitan, the most alive to what is passing everywhere upon the earth. It seems there as if one were not living so much the life of a nation as the world’s life. You speak of some outlandish place at a London dinner-table, and are never surprised if somebody present quietly gives a description of it from personal knowledge. There are more people in London who have travelled and are ready to start on travels than in any other place on the whole earth. It is there that all the ocean telegraphs converge and steamers are arriving daily from all parts of the world. Switzerland is London’s playground, Cannes and Nice are its winter garden, and so comprehensive do our ideas become in London that those places seem actually nearer to us there than they do in the heart of France.

The railway system is having the effect of making all the English aristocracy Londoners. I am old enough to remember the time when there were still provincial people of rank in the north who spoke sound northern English, not dialect, but English with vowels and consonants, including the letter r. Their successors talk the half-articulate London language. It is said that some young Highland chieftains of the present day speak southern English only too beautifully.

Still, the national differences remain deep seated in the people and show no sign of losing their ancient strength. The Irish may become friendly fellow-subjects, but they will not be Anglicised. Neither will the Scotch be Anglicised, nor the Welsh. The present tendency is to accentuate nationality, not in hostility to England, but from the sentiment of a special patriotism. This is most significant, for hostility to England might pass away, but special patriotism is not likely to pass away.

In addition to these causes of variety there must ever remain the infinite differences of individual character. Shakespeare lived only in the English midlands, then scantily populated, and in the little London of his time. He had not travelled abroad, nor learned Italian,[89] nor talked like Milton with the literati of the Continent; he had not, like Spenser, lived in the north of England and in Ireland; yet the diversities of character in his plays are as numerous as the dramatis personæ. Scott lived at the northern end of the island, in or near a minor capital city; he could speak no foreign tongue,[90] he knew England and London only by brief occasional visits, and hardly anything of the Continent, yet his novels abound in a variety like that of Shakespeare. These writers got their knowledge of human nature from the variety visible around them. Imagine, then, what must be the presumptuous outrecuidance of the Frenchman who thinks that all the inhabitants of Great Britain have one character, and that he—the Frenchman—has got to the bottom of it, and can describe it, and tell his countrymen all about it, though he knows neither the land, nor the language, nor the people!

Besides the denial of any æsthetic quality to English art, we find in French critics a peculiar disposition to describe it as being all alike. Eminent English artists (Reynolds, Gainsborough, De Wint, Müller, Cox, and many others) have preferred breadth to detail, yet French critics delight in representing the English painter as studying nature with an opera-glass, and representing all details with a wearisome and unnatural minuteness. Patriotic hostility, in art criticism as in the criticism of character, closes the eyes to variety.

There used to be a ridiculous monument of the Duke of Wellington on Constitution Hill, and now there is a very noble one by Alfred Stevens in St. Paul’s. The same terms of utter contempt were applied by a French critic to the work of the man of genius that Frenchmen formerly applied to the monstrosity. He could not endure any kind of monument to Wellington.