John Mill pointed out long ago the advantage that the French have in the cultivation of the feelings. This is very much an affair of utterance in language, for it is utterance which best keeps feelings alive. French sympathy is often, no doubt, assumed; that is inevitable where so much sympathy is expressed; still, it is certain that in France all true sympathy does get expressed, and in this way people live surrounded by an atmosphere in which feeling remains active. In England the national reserve and the sharp distinction of classes are both against the cultivation of feelings, but besides this there is the pride of stoicism, the fear of seeming soft. The Frenchman’s love for his mother is ridiculous in England; in France it is only natural. In truth, perhaps, it is not so much the sentiment that is ridiculous for Englishmen as the association of it with French expressions. The English do not laugh at it in Latin. The affection of Euryalus for his mother is thought beautiful in the Æneid, but turn it into French and it comes in those very phrases that Englishmen cannot abide. “J’ai une mère issue de l’antique race de Priam, une mère infortunée qui a voulu me suivre et que n’ont pu retenir le rivage natal d’Ilion ni les mûrs hospitaliers d’Aceste. Cette mère je la quitte sans l’instruire des dangers où je cours et sans l’embrasser. Non, j’en prends à témoin et la Nuit et votre main sacrée, je ne pourrais soutenir les larmes de ma mère. Mais vous, je vous en conjure, consolez-la dans sa douleur, soutenez-la dans son abandon.” The words that I have italicised are so perfectly French that they might be quoted from the last yellow-backed novel. The warm promise of friendship from Ascanius is also excessively French in sentiment. “Pour toi, Euryale, dont l’âge se rapproche plus du mien, admirable jeune homme, dès ce jour mon cœur est à toi, et je t’adopte à jamais comme compagnon de ma fortune: sans toi je n’irai plus chercher la gloire, et, soit dans la paix, soit dans la guerre, ma confiance reposera sur ton bras et sur tes conseils.” One young Englishman would never speak like that to another, he might possibly go so far as to say, “Hope you’ll come back all right.”

Do the English suppress feeling, or have they no feeling to be suppressed? The true answer to this question cannot be a simple one. English usages have a tendency to prevent the expression of feeling where it exists, and therefore they are not favourable to the culture of the feelings, still these exist naturally as blades of grass will grow between the hard stones of a pavement. It must, however, be admitted that although in England a man of feeling may certainly live, the moral climate is not so favourable to him as it is to one who feels much less and is therefore hardier. The Englishman who is best constituted for life in his own country is one who has just feeling enough to keep him right in all matters of external duty, but not enough to make him very sympathetic, or to give him any painful craving for sympathy. If he is sympathetic he will offer his sympathy where it is not wanted, and be hurt by the chilling acceptance of it, and if he has the misfortune to crave for sympathy he will suffer. So it comes to pass that the tenderer natures try to harden themselves by an acquired and artificial insensibility, whilst those which are not very tender find the conditions of existence more suitable for them. I had collected a number of examples, but do not give them, because instances prove nothing, and because it would be so easy to affirm that my examples were not truly representative. I prefer to take another course, and to suggest to the reader, if he is familiar with English life, the idea of making a little investigation on his own account, by consulting his own recollections. First, as to family affections, the reader has probably met with many cases in which the paternal and filial relations were cool and rather distant, so that separation was not painful to either party. If he has observed brothers he may have seen them practically almost strangers, living far apart, in different spheres, and seldom, if ever, corresponding. He may have known cousins, even first cousins, who did not remember their relationship so far as to announce to each other the occurrences of marriages and deaths. He may have observed that a slight impediment of distance or occupation is sometimes enough to prevent a relation from coming to a funeral, and that the tombs of dead relations are sometimes left unvisited, uncared for, and untended. The reader may have noticed cases in which a difference of fortune produces a complete estrangement between very near relations, and finally he may have met with Englishmen who declared that friends were worth having because they could be selected, but that relations were a nuisance or “a mistake.”

Cases like these are very numerous in England, because the affections are left to the chances of accident; they are not sedulously cared for and cultivated. When they are of great strength naturally, and when the conditions happen to be very favourable, there is nothing to prevent their growth, but in less favourable conditions there is nothing to keep them alive. In France all very near relations write to each other when they cannot meet personally on their fête days, all friends write at least a line or two for the New Year, and acquaintances exchange cards. An intelligent Frenchman said to me, “Our culture of the family affections is sometimes insincere, we sometimes express sentiments which are assumed for the occasion, but, on the whole, our customs tend to keep alive the reality of affection as well as its appearance, by reminding us of our relations and friends and of our duties towards them.”

What is the cause of this difference? Do the English really care less for each other than the French, or is there some hidden reason why they are less demonstrative?

There is one reason—the English shyness, the English fear of giving verbal utterance to feeling. Now, this is distinctly a want of culture, for the due expression of feeling is, in all the higher arts, one of the best results of culture. There can be no doubt that many Englishmen feel much more than they are able to express, and they certainly appreciate the power of utterance in others, as, for example, in their orators. A few Englishmen boldly go beyond and do express feeling, even in ordinary life, just as a few venture to talk like intellectual men. These few are not uncommonly found among the clergy, at least it has been so in my experience; and this may be due to the culture which religion gives to feeling, and, in the clergy, to the practice gained by the utterance of it in sermons and exhortations.

The idea that feeling is a weakness, and that it is well to suppress it in the education of boys, is more in accordance with the opinion of the Red Indians than with that of the ancient Greeks. The best education would respect all natural and healthy sentiment, such as a boy’s love for his mother, without ridiculing it, but would at the same time train the boy in the courage which has always been compatible with tenderness, ay, and even with tears. Amongst the services of an unobtrusive kind which Queen Victoria has rendered to the English, one of the best has been by setting an example of openness in matters of feeling. She has permitted her subjects to see what she felt on many occasions, and has done this simply, plainly, and without the dread of sneering depreciation. The same healthy influence is often exercised by women in narrower spheres. There is more than ever room for this feminine influence in an age like ours, when the positivism of the scientific and industrial temper, and the fierce competition amongst individual men, as well as between nations, are hardening the heart of the world. The due exercise and culture of the feelings are always appreciated at their right value in literature and the fine arts; it is a strange and striking anomaly that we fail to perceive their equal importance in the reality of life itself.

There is one department of the culture of feeling in which the English are far superior to the French—that of sympathy with the lower animals. The French are humane enough where human beings are concerned, but their humanity, as a rule, is confined to pity for the sufferings of their own species. There are exceptions, of course. I know several Frenchwomen who are full of sympathy for cats and dogs, and I have known French grooms who were thoughtful and kind and even affectionate in their treatment of horses; nevertheless, as a nation, the French are hard and pitiless in comparison with the English. All sentiments appear ridiculous when we do not share them, so the French laugh at English humanitarianism as the British critic laughs at a Frenchman’s tenderness about his mother. My favourite French newspaper, the Temps, never misses an opportunity for a hit at this English eccentricity. French hardness dates from the time when the influence of the Church was universal; and, whether she taught the doctrine formally or not, her followers believed that animals, being unbaptized, had no rights. A dog or a horse is an infidel, and therefore cruelty to it is blameless. The decline of religious influence might have led one to hope for a broader charity, but there unhappily came the scientific spirit, which, though not cruel for the sake of cruelty, is heedless of animal suffering, and ready to inflict tortures on the lower animals worse than the torments of the Inquisition. So, in fact, the condition of the poor brutes has gone from bad to worse. There is, indeed, a French law for the protection of animals, but it is nearly a dead letter. The great practical difficulty in cultivating the feelings on this subject comes from the general but most unreasonable idea that there is something manly in being indifferent to the sufferings of brutes, and something childish in having pity for them. I remember a French gentleman who considered himself strong-minded because he made his carriage horses work when they had raws. In the lower classes men are proud of overloading and of making their horses go over unreasonable distances.[11] In both countries men are ready to inflict pain on animals whenever they think that they can get pleasure out of it for themselves. The passions for sport and gourmandise are the two which come next after science for pitilessness. The infliction of wounds for amusement, and the boiling alive of lobsters, are common to England and France, but the following is, I believe, peculiarly French:—When we lived at Sens my wife discovered that it was the custom, when selling rabbits on the market-place, to put their eyes out with a skewer, from a belief that this cruelty improved the flavour.[12] I find that cooks are all convinced that boiling alive is necessary to the flavour of a lobster, and there is no reasoning with cooks and gourmands if they believe that cruelty heightens the delicacy of tortured flesh.

Amongst the sentiments that have been much cultivated in the past there is one which is less and less cultivated in modern France, the sentiment of reverence. The difficulty is to find objects for reverence that can effectually withstand the desecrating light of modern criticism. Good Catholics have still an object of veneration in the Pope and, in minor degrees, in the bishops and other priests; but since the death of the Count de Chambord there is not a single political personage left who excites veneration even in the mind of a royalist. The republicans venerate nobody, not even poor ex-president Grévy. Victor Hugo was, no doubt, regarded with veneration, but he has left no successor. Father Ingres was also really venerated by a certain sect of younger artists in his time. Chevreul, the centenarian, is respected for his achievements and for his hundred years. In this way two or three individuals in a century may excite some veneration, but the sentiment, outside of the Church, lacks continuity of culture. The true royalist sentiment is dead in France, the religious sentiment survives only in a part of the population, and is failing even there, whilst the French have not the vulgar veneration for titles which would at least exercise the faculty, though on low objects. Neither do the posts occupied by high officials under the Republic excite veneration in anybody. The royalists unanimously despise them, the republicans generally want to dismiss the present occupants and put other men in their places. In family life there is much affection certainly, and no doubt there is some respect, but there is no veneration. “Your sons,” I said to an intelligent Frenchman, “treat you with much freedom. They do not seem to be in the least impressed by any idea of the paternal dignity.”—“How can we expect them,” he answered, “to be deferential and reverential to us when we, on our part, have set them, on every possible occasion, the example of a want of reverence towards the beliefs and the institutions of our fathers? They have heard nothing but criticism from our lips, they have grown up in an age of criticism, when there is nothing for the faculty of veneration to cling to.” In a word, veneration had never been exercised or developed in their minds.

In England this sentiment is less cultivated than in former times, but there still remain the Bible and the Throne. The House of Commons does not inspire it, the House of Lords is more and more failing to inspire it. The critical writing which is most keenly enjoyed is absolutely destitute of veneration. Looking to the future, a philosopher might ask himself whether the faculty was not destined to die out as having become useless. It is poetical, but it is not critical. When a poet does not feel it he feigns it; the critic knows that to approach a subject in a reverential spirit is to abdicate his own function. The misfortune is that when the common people cease to venerate they lose their interest in things. The fate of the Apocrypha is a significant illustration. The English no longer believe it to be inspired, they no longer venerate it, consequently they have ceased to read it. In France the Bible, for the same reason, is left unread by the Voltairean world. The old veneration for the Greek and Latin classics is passing away, and they will soon only be read by a few specialists. The French are losing their faith in the classics, once so staunch, with a rapidity that astonishes even those who are most familiar with French impulses. That was the last-surviving religion in intellectual France, and it is moribund.