There is a private national success as well as a public one. Private success, for a nation, is to have got the kind of religion and the kind of government that are suitable to the national idiosyncrasy, to have sufficient wealth and at the same time a light burden of taxation, to be free from civil discord of any dangerous acuteness, to pursue the arts and sciences fruitfully, and to live without dread of an enemy.

Which of the two, France or England, has hitherto reached the highest point of success in these several ways?

On the subject of religion and government enough has been said already in this volume. I think it is clear that on these important points England has been the more successful nation of the two. The Gallican Church was a failure, it has had to give way to Ultramontanism; the Anglican Church has been a great success, it has not only preserved, it has intensified its national character. It is true that Anglicanism is surrounded by Dissent; but Romanism is only suited to a part of the French people, and lives in opposition to its guiding secular principles. England has also enjoyed a more complete political success than France. Her system of government has not, as yet, excluded or alienated any class. Patricians and plebeians sit in the same Cabinet, speak from the same platforms, appeal to the same public in the same ways, and that whether they are Conservative or Radical. In England a popular leader may be associated with great nobles and received by the Sovereign; in France he would not be recognised by the smallest aristocrat. No Frenchman with any pretensions to aristocracy would be seen on the same platform with a French Gladstone. The French “Conservatives” have not the faintest hope of forming a Cabinet so long as the Republic lasts. To them the Republican power is like a foreign occupation, and their only hope is to plot against it and enfeeble it; for them it is not a national, but only a party government. All that can be said of the internal success of France, from the political point of view, is that since the overthrow of the Paris Commune she has maintained both liberty and order. No previous French Government has ever maintained both. The Republic has done this, but without being able to effect any reconciliation between parties which live in a state of latent civil war. The English system of government is accepted by the whole nation; it is national; whereas the French system is accepted by a part of the nation, and is national only in the sense of having the majority on its side.

The subject of wealth has been treated in another chapter. It is not wealth that is wanting. Both nations are enormously rich, France having the advantage of a more even distribution, England the advantage, if it is one, of possessing a greater number of prodigiously rich men.

With regard to taxation, both countries inherit vast debts accumulated by previous wars. The Franco-German War cost France altogether about as much as England had to pay for the great contest with Napoleon the First. Taxation is heavier in France, and every year there is a deficit. Even if the present peace were to continue indefinitely, it is so costly that French finances must succumb beneath the strain of it. The difference between the two nations is that England can go on indefinitely as she is living now, in times of peace, whilst France cannot. A great conflict for national existence might utterly ruin both. Imagine an additional debt, for each, of a thousand millions sterling, the possible cost of the next European war!

The next condition that I mentioned as essential to national happiness was freedom from civil discord of any dangerous acuteness. Now, although the French have shown considerable, even admirable self-restraint since 1871, so that civil war has never broken out amongst them in spite of much suppressed excitement, I think it is evident that there has been, and that there is yet, much less danger of civil war in England. Such an evil is still possible in France, though with the present orderly French temper it is not probable; in England, during this century at least, it seems absolutely out of the question. Civil discord exists in France to the degree of dangerous acuteness, in England only to the degree that makes it bitter and unpleasant. French political dissension leads to personal rancour, which is constantly breaking forth in insults and in duels; in England the forms of courtesy between parties are still in some measure preserved. If a distinguished English statesman dies, or is seriously ill, his opponents express and feel regret for his loss, or sympathy with his sufferings; but French political hatred follows a man even to the grave. In a word, Frenchmen of opposite political tenets are really enemies; Englishmen who sit opposite to each other in the House are political adversaries only, and may meet pleasantly at the same dinner-table.

The superior amenity of English public life is clear proof of its more successful working. It shows that both parties have something in common—their country—and that they do not lose sight of the national welfare, though they differ as to the measures supposed to be most conducive to it.

My next point was that a successful nation would pursue the arts and sciences fruitfully. Both France and England may look back with satisfaction to all that has been done during the last fifty years. There has been absolutely no sign in either country of decadence, notwithstanding frequent self-depreciation. Of the scientific progress that has been made I will say little, from simple incompetence to deal with a subject so vast and so much beyond my grasp. I only know, as an ignorant yet interested spectator, that hardly any enterprise now seems to be too great for the intelligence of English and French engineers, or for the skill of the workmen whom they direct. If they do not build pyramids greater than those of Egypt and hippodromes more substantial than the Coliseum, it is only because there is no demand for them. Ours is the age of communication, and here England takes the lead with her railways, France with her admirable system of common roads and her complete inland navigation. France has made the Suez Canal, has attacked Panama, and is looking forward to a ship canal from Paris to the sea. Lancashire is making Manchester a seaport, and Scotland is bridging over the Firth of Forth. A gigantic project for a bridge from Dover to Calais is on the list of things that French engineers consider possible. It is difficult to state fairly what has been contributed by each country to the improvement of the railway and the telegraph; it is plain, however, that the practical art of railway travelling first originated in England. The first balloon rose in French air, and a balloon was for the first time successfully steered in France. The French are generally a little ahead of the English in military inventions, as in the use of breech-loading cannon and improved rifles and gun-powder, as well as other explosives, and now in the strength and perfection of armour-plating. Almost all the improvements in scientific agriculture are of English origin, and so are the machines used in it which are now extensively sold in France. Whilst the English are the greater maritime nation of the two and have an incomparably larger carrying trade, improvements in ship-building have usually originated either with the French or the Americans. In the construction of pleasure-boats, the English are ahead of the French for sea-going yachts (though inferior to the Americans), but the French with their great rivers have studied and brought to perfection the small centre-board sloop which tacks rapidly.

I am not a good judge of any kind of manufacture except those connected with literature or the fine arts, so I will pass by the cottons of Manchester and the silks of Lyons with the simple observation that Lancashire has produced the spinning jenny and Lyons the Jacquard loom. With regard to the printing of newspapers and books, which I understand better, the French are admirable in the exquisite, but their common work is not so good as the English. French éditions de bibliophile, such as those of Lemerre, Jouaust, Tross, and the Société de Saint Augustin, not to mention many publications by Quantin and others, are equal to the best work of English printers in the mechanical qualities of type-cutting and clearness of impression, whilst they are, I think, a little superior to it in taste. All the French éditions de bibliophile that I possess or have examined are scrupulously correct in their freedom from typographic errors, whilst with common French editions it is just the contrary. There is a very well known Parisian publishing house that issues an immense quantity of volumes so rich in typographic faults that no English publisher would own them; yet ordinary French readers, who are very inattentive and also very patient, either do not notice or do not object to them. The fact is that there are two distinct classes of book-buyers in France—les amateurs and le vulgaire. The first are hard to please, and will have nothing to do with ugly or faulty editions, whilst they will give any price for exquisitely perfect work; the second neither know nor care anything about the matter, and in producing for them it does not signify how bad the work may be, provided only that the price does not exceed three francs fifty centimes per volume. The carelessness of the French about cheap work used to be very conspicuous in their newspapers, but these have improved during the last decade. I well remember the time when it was almost impossible to find a single English name or quotation, however brief, correctly printed in a French newspaper. English critics always attributed these faults to the writers of the articles, but they were more frequently due to absolute carelessness in correcting.[87] The press-work, too, used to be disgraceful; it is now fairly good in the daily papers and excellent in the illustrated weeklies. France is not a good country for presentable editions at moderate prices. The two most popular poets—Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset—are not to be had in anything answering to the readable current editions of Tennyson. There are the big octavos and the little exquisite Elzevirs for amateurs, and the vulgar editions for the public.

This contrast between the exquisite and the vulgar is usually very strong in France. We find it in the most visible form in French painting, which leads us to the conclusion that art does not refine a nation, but only expresses, and expresses equally and indifferently, whatever natural refinement and whatever inborn coarseness and vulgarity may already be existing in the race. If all the refined work in a French Salon could be put into an exhibition by itself it would be delightful; but the Salons as they exist at present are quite as much an annoyance as an enjoyment. A student with plenty of physical energy may by sheer hard labour arrive at a kind of noisy performance which attracts attention to his name, but the delicate and tender spirit of true art is absent from such work. Painting having been understood in France very much as a matter of apprenticeship, like the handicraft trades, all the technical part of it is taught by the straightest and surest methods to any lad who will be at the pains to go steadily through them, and the consequence is that a great number of men in France possess the handicraft without either intellectual culture or poetic invention, and it is they who have vulgarised the art. The English have been, and are still, inferior in manual force; they cannot attack a large canvas with the same certainty of covering it in a workmanlike manner, and some of their artists, like gifted amateurs, have not technical ability equal to the realisation of their ideas. Still there is less of coarseness in the English school, and more amenity and tenderness; its art is more gentle and nearer to poetry and music. There was a time when the French had such a horror of crude colouring that, to avoid it, they took refuge in dull grays and browns, but that time is now so completely past that the most glaring colours are admitted into the Salon. English painting, on the contrary, has become more sober than in the early days of uncompromising naturalism. An art critic who understood the English and French minds, and who was not himself turned aside from justice by the perversions of vulgar French or vulgar English patriotism, would probably say that, on the whole, the artists of both nations had been equally successful with regard to the interior of their own countries. As for foreign success, that is quite another thing, and I reserve it for the following chapter. At present I mean simply that English artists delight and instruct English people as much as French artists delight and instruct the French, and that the modern renaissance of the fine arts has been as effectual, nationally, in one country as in the other. On the ground of pure merit (always without reference to foreign estimation) an impartial critic would probably say that there were more draughtsmen in France and more colourists in England. Technical comparisons are difficult, because the art of painting contains, in reality, several different arts according to the ways in which it is practised, and they cannot be compared with each other. The popular comparison of Landseer with Rosa Bonheur is foolish, because they have nothing in common. There is no English artist who might be profitably compared with Meissonier; he is comparable only with the Dutch. Several clever Frenchmen have taken up water-colour of late, and some of them have done interesting work; but not one of them has either the aims or the qualities of Turner. A comparison can be usefully established only between artists who paint the same class of subjects in the same technical manner. The comparison of Turner, as an oil-painter, with Claude is one that no intelligent critic would ever have made if Turner had not himself provoked it. Turner proved only that he could imitate Claude with a part of himself, as a very clever English Latinist might studiously imitate Virgil. The complete Turner is so much outside of Claude that the comparison stops short for want of material in the Frenchman.

The revival of etching, which has been the most remarkable phenomenon in the artistic history of our own time, has been common to England and France, but more vigorously pursued by Frenchmen. This is due to the great superabundance of young unemployed painters in France who are happy to turn to anything that does not compel them to abandon art. It is the peculiarity of etching that men are better trained for it by the education of a painter than by the hard manual discipline of the engraver. Line engraving has now died out in England. In France it still maintains a feeble and precarious existence by the encouragement of the State (through the Chalcographie du Louvre) and a society of lovers of art who are trying to keep it alive.

All the photographic processes for the reproduction of works of art have been carried to perfection sooner in France than in England, and France always keeps the lead. Photography, itself, is due to efforts made by Niepce for the production of engraved plates.

Literature is probably more influential in England than in France, because the English read so much more. A great proportion of the reading done in both countries is, however, only rest, or an escape from surrounding reality, so that it does little for the true success of authors, which is the dissemination of ideas. I do not know the name of any English author who has exercised so much direct power as either Rousseau or Voltaire. That of Carlyle is thought to have been considerable, because his personal energy was of the imperative order; but the English world does not follow his teaching. He was hostile to the fine arts, and they are more appreciated than ever; he condemned fiction, and novels were never more diligently read; he preferred despotism to popular government, and we see the rise of the English democracy; he was without scientific ideas, and science is penetrating all the departments of thought and action. The influence of John Mill is said to be great amongst thinking men in the English lower classes; but it is purely rational, and can awaken no enthusiasm beyond the disinterested love of truth. Mr. Ruskin’s influence on art has been powerful in praise, but feeble in condemnation. He did much for the fame of Turner, but little or nothing against Constable and Claude; and notwithstanding his open hostility to etching, that art is now better appreciated than ever. Contemporary artists go on their own paths without deference to critical advice. A more interesting and important subject is Mr. Ruskin’s influence on working men. He appeals more to the feelings than Spencer or Mill, and is welcome to many wanderers in search of a moral authority and master. They like the strength of faith in the master himself, which is ready to carry theory into practice, even when the theory is ruinous. Matthew Arnold, though a poet, was more rational, cooler, less fitted for popular leadership. His influence was directly felt by cultivated readers only; but it will have consequences not always traceable to the source. I think he erred in taking certain things to be specially English which are only English forms of something to be found elsewhere. The best criticism of this mistake in Arnold was made by Herbert Spencer with reference to nonconformity.[88] And Arnold’s celebrated division of the English into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, though it throws a light upon the nation, has the defect of making it seem an English peculiarity to be so divided, whereas you find the same characteristics in the three great and very distinct French classes. The French aristocracy is more ignorant than the English, the French bourgeoisie more narrow in its concentration of thought upon money matters, and the populace less easily led and influenced by the possessors of wealth and culture.

Of Englishmen now living (1888), Mr. John Morley has the best equipment for a literary influence upon his countrymen; because he is at the same time a born writer and a man versed in affairs. Unfortunately a political career like his must have the effect of limiting a writer’s influence to a single political party. John Morley might be useful to all Englishmen at the present time because he unites complete intellectual freedom with a vigorous moral sense. In this he is the Englishman of the future, the Englishman who will be intellectually emancipated, yet who will preserve the moral sense of his forefathers and hate, let us hope, as they did, “that horrid burden and impediment on the soul,” as Morley describes it, “which the Churches call Sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of man.”

Of the literary influences which consist chiefly in giving æsthetic pleasure, that of poetry maintains itself more than was expected in the middle of the century, and it is better understood now than it was then that poetry must remain itself and not get entangled in the actual. A poet may, like Victor Hugo and William Morris, be in sympathy with advanced radicals, but in his verse he is likely to go back to the past as in the Earthly Paradise and the Légende des Siècles, or to pure mythology with Lewis Morris in the Epic of Hades, or to dim traditions as Tennyson to the Court of King Arthur, or even project himself into the future state like Sully Prudhomme in Le Bonheur. The office of poetry in the modern world is still its ancient office of deliverance. It delivers us from the actual by the imagination, and the older we get the less completely satisfactory does the actual become for us, and the more we need poetry to help us out of it. Those who do not read verses may receive their poetry through other channels. They may receive it in great purity and strength through religion, which is always successful in exact proportion to the sum of poetry that it contains, and unsuccessful in proportion to its rationalism. Or, if not consciously religious, men may get their poetry through music, architecture, and painting, of which it always was and always will be the mysterious vital principle, the immortal soul.

The immense popularity of Victor Hugo was not so much due to the love of poetry in Frenchmen as to their gratitude for his fidelity to the popular cause, and admiration for his steady resistance to Napoleon III. Had he remained a royalist to the last, his fame would have been of a quieter kind. The French have a way of taking up a man and making political capital out of him, increasing his reputation as much as possible for that purpose. Hugo’s name and his portraits were familiar to multitudes who knew nothing of his poetry. This deprives the observer of what might have been otherwise a good opportunity for appreciating the degree of interest that the French take in poetry on its own account, but even without political popularity there remained Hugo’s celebrity as a novelist. The case is a very complex one. Great vigour in old age is deeply respected and admired in France, and Hugo was a very fine old man. I am told that the generation now passing away took a much keener interest in literature than the present. As for poor Lamartine, his fame has been for a while completely eclipsed, but there are now some signs of a revival. Alfred de Musset is read by all French people of a literary turn, especially by young men, who delight in him as young Englishmen delighted in Byron before Tennyson became the fashion. The minor French poets of the present day are numerous, and the tendency amongst them is to a great perfection of technical finish, which is praiseworthy as a proof of labour and self-discipline. But it is the novelists and the playwrights who have the substantial success. They earn ten times more money than that hard-working man of genius, Balzac, would even have dreamed of as a possibility in his then wretched profession. There is a young school of philosophers, very sane and very sage, who are trying earnestly to win some nearer approach to the hidden truths of life and the universe, but they only reach the small intellectual class. Renan has literary qualities of the highest order, but like the majority of first-rate men of letters he is disgusted with the sight of practical politics, and more inclined to make the combatants a subject for sarcasm than to help them out of the sloughs they fall into, either on one side or the other. Practical influence with the pen appears now to belong, in France, almost exclusively, to journalists, and they are constantly under the temptation to get up sensational excitements, to make a fuss, and convert every little crisis into a great one. As English journalism is anonymous, the writers cannot aspire to make themselves personally conspicuous, and are somewhat quieter. That which, in England, now answers in some degree to French journalism is review-writing with signed articles.

As for the dread of war, which is the most important of all drawbacks to national happiness, the inferiority of the English in land armies subjects them to occasional panics about the possibility of a French invasion, and has led them, as all know, to forbid the execution of the Channel Tunnel, though they would not have been more exposed by its means than the French to an English invasion. Since then, it has been conclusively proved that the use of the steam-engine in warships has made the offensive stronger than the defensive by permitting the choice of a landing-place, and therefore much of the former security of an insular kingdom has been taken away. The feeling that invasion was possible formerly afflicted only the timid, but now the bravest are fully aware that it is so, and sleep, like good watch-dogs, with an eye open.

The position of France is still more precarious. On both sides of a perfectly artificial frontier two armies have been watching each other for seventeen years as they watch for a night in war-time. The slightest imprudence of one or the other Government, even the zeal of some subordinate official, may at any moment precipitate that conflict which both alike look forward to, and which both nations equally dread. It is impossible, under such circumstances, that life in France can be happy. The war cloud is perpetually visible on the eastern horizon. Sometimes it swells and covers half the sky and darkens the land with gloom, then it lessens and seems to be more distant, but it never wholly disappears.