Chapter VII: In Conclusion 122 (1)

NOTE.--In the last two chapters of this book I have incorporated,
in a modified form, the principal passages of two articles
published by me respectively in _Scribner's Magazine_ and in the
_Ladies' Home Journal_, the former entitled "The French as seen by
an American" (now called "In Conclusion"), the other "The New
Frenchwoman."

FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING

I

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I

Hasty generalisations are always tempting to travellers, and now and then they strike out vivid truths that the observer loses sight of after closer scrutiny. But nine times out of ten they hit wild.

Some years before the war, a French journalist produced a "thoughtful book" on the United States. Of course he laid great stress on our universal hustle for the dollar. To do that is to follow the line of least resistance in writing about America: you have only to copy what all the other travellers have said.

This particular author had the French gift of consecutive reasoning, and had been trained in the school of Taine, which requires the historian to illustrate each of his general conclusions by an impressive array of specific instances. Therefore, when he had laid down the principle that every American's ruling passion is money-making, he cast about for an instance, and found a striking one.

"So dominant," he suggested, "is this passion, that in cultivated and intellectual Boston--the Athens of America--which possesses a beautiful cemetery in its peaceful parklike suburbs, the millionaire money-makers, unwilling to abandon the quarter in which their most active hours have been spent, have created for themselves a burying-ground in the centre of the business district, on which they can look down from their lofty office windows till they are laid there to rest in the familiar noise and bustle that they love."

This literal example of the ruling passion strong in death seems to establish once for all the good old truth that the American cares only for money-making; and it was clever of the critic to find his instance in Boston instead of Pittsburg or Chicago. But unfortunately the cemetery for which the Boston millionaire is supposed to have abandoned the green glades of Mount Auburn is the old pre-revolutionary grave-yard of King's Chapel, in which no one has been buried since modern Boston began to exist, and about which a new business district has grown up as it has about similar carefully-guarded relics in all our expanding cities, and in many European ones as well.

It is probable that not a day passes in which the observant American new to France does not reach conclusions as tempting, but as wide of the mark. Even in peace times it was inevitable that such easy inferences should be drawn; and now that every branch of civilian life in France is more or less topsy-turvy, the temptation to generalise wrongly is one that no intelligent observer can resist.

It is indeed unfortunate that, at the very moment when it is most needful for France and America to understand each other (on small points, that is--we know they agree as to the big ones)--it is unfortunate that at this moment France should be, in so many superficial ways, unlike the normal peace-time France, and that those who are seeing her for the first time in the hour of her trial and her great glory are seeing her also in an hour of inevitable material weakness and disorganisation.

Even four years of victorious warfare would dislocate the machinery of any great nation's life; and four years of desperate resistance to a foe in possession of almost a tenth of the national territory, and that tenth industrially the richest in the country, four such years represent a strain so severe that one wonders to see the fields of France tilled, the markets provided, and life in general going on as before.

The fact that France is able to resist such a strain, and keep up such a measure of normal activity, is one of the many reasons for admiring her; but it must not make newcomers forget that even this brave appearance of "business as usual" does not represent anything resembling the peace-time France, with her magnificent faculties applied to the whole varied business of living, instead of being centred on the job of holding the long line from the Yser to Switzerland.

In 1913 it would have been almost impossible to ask Americans to picture our situation if Germany had invaded the United States, and had held a tenth part of our most important territory for four years. In 1918 such a suggestion seems thinkable enough, and one may even venture to point out that an unmilitary nation like America, after four years under the invader, might perhaps present a less prosperous appearance than France. It is always a good thing to look at foreign affairs from the home angle; and in such a case we certainly should not want the allied peoples who might come to our aid to judge us by what they saw if Germany held our Atlantic sea-board, with all its great cities, together with, say, Pittsburg and Buffalo, and all our best manhood were in a fighting line centred along the Ohio River.

One of the cruellest things about a "people's war" is that it needs, and takes, the best men from every trade, even those remotest from fighting, because to do anything well brains are necessary, and a good poet and a good plumber may conceivably make better fighters than inferior representatives of arts less remote from war. Therefore, to judge France fairly to-day, the newcomer must perpetually remind himself that almost all that is best in France is in the trenches, and not in the hotels, cafes and "movie-shows" he is likely to frequent. I have no fear of what the American will think of the Frenchman after the two have fraternized at the front.

II

One hears a good deal in these days about "What America can teach France;" though it is worth noting that the phrase recurs less often now than it did a year ago.

In any case, it would seem more useful to leave the French to discover (as they are doing every day, with the frankest appreciation) what they can learn from us, while we Americans apply ourselves to finding out what they have to teach us. It is obvious that any two intelligent races are bound to have a lot to learn from each other; and there could hardly be a better opportunity for such an exchange of experience than now that a great cause has drawn the hearts of our countries together while a terrible emergency has broken down most of the surface barriers between us.

No doubt many American soldiers now in France felt this before they left home. When a man who leaves his job and his family at the first call to fight for an unknown people, because that people is defending the principle of liberty in which all the great democratic nations believe, he likes to think that the country he is fighting for comes up in every respect to the ideal he has formed of it. And perhaps some of our men were a little disappointed, and even discouraged, when they first came in contact with the people whose sublime spirit they had been admiring from a distance for three years. Some of them may even, in their first moment of reaction, have said to themselves: "Well, after all, the Germans we knew at home were easier people to get on with."

The answer is not far to seek. For one thing, the critics in question knew the Germans at home, _in our home_, where they had to talk our language or not get on, where they had to be what we wanted them to be--or get out. And, as we all know in America, no people on earth, when they settle in a new country, are more eager than the Germans to adopt its ways, and to be taken for native-born citizens.

The Germans in Germany are very different; though, even there, they were at great pains, before the war, not to let Americans find it out. The French have never taken the trouble to disguise their Frenchness from foreigners; but the Germans used to be very clever about dressing up their statues of Bismarck as "Liberty Enlightening the World" when democratic visitors were expected. An amusing instance of this kind of camouflage, which was a regular function of their government, came within my own experience in 1913.

For the first time in many years I was in Germany that summer, and on arriving in Berlin I was much struck by the wonderful look of municipal order and prosperity which partly makes up for the horrors of its architecture and sculpture. But what struck me still more was the extraordinary politeness of all the people who are often rude in other countries: post-office and railway officials, customs officers, policemen, telephone-girls, and the other natural enemies of mankind. And I was the more surprised because, in former days, I had so often suffered from the senseless bullying of the old-fashioned German employe, and because I had heard from Germans that state paternalism had become greatly aggravated, and that, wherever one went, petty regulations were enforced by inexorable officials.

As it turned out, I found myself as free as air, and as obsequiously treated as royalty, and I might have gone home thinking that the German government was cruelly maligned by its subjects if I had not happened to go one evening to the Opera.

It was in summer, but there had been a cold rain-storm all day, and as the Opera House was excessively chilly, and it was not a full-dress occasion, but merely an out-of-season performance, with everybody wearing ordinary street clothes, I decided to keep on the light silk cloak I was wearing. But as I started for my seat I felt a tap on my shoulder, and one of the polite officials requested me to take off my cloak.

"Thank you: but I prefer to keep it on."

"You can't; it's forbidden. _Es ist verboten._"

"Forbidden? Why, what do you mean?"

"His Majesty the Emperor forbids any lady in the audience of the Royal and Imperial Opera House to keep on her cloak."

"But I've a cold, and the house is so chilly----"

The polite official had grown suddenly stern and bullying. "Take off your cloak," he ordered.

"I won't," I said.

We looked at each other hard for a minute--and I went in with my cloak on.

When I got back to the hotel, highly indignant, I met a German Princess, a Serene Highness, one of the greatest ladies in Germany, a cousin of his Imperial Majesty.

I told her what had happened, and waited for an echo of my indignation.

But none came. "Yes--I nearly always have an attack of neuralgia when I go to the Opera," she said resignedly.

"But do they make you take your cloak off?"

"Of course. It's the Emperor's order."

"Well--I kept mine on," I said.

Her Serene Highness looked at me incredulously. Then she thought it over and said: "Ah, well--you're an American, and American travellers bring us so much money that the Emperor's orders are never to bully them."

What had puzzled me, by the way, when I looked about the crowded Opera House, was that the Emperor should ever order the ladies of Berlin to take their cloaks off at the Opera; but that is an affair between them and their dressmaker. The interesting thing was that the German Princess did not in the least resent being bullied herself, or having neuralgia in consequence--but quite recognised that it was good business for her country not to bully Americans.

That little incident gave me a glimpse of what life in Germany must be like if you are a German; and also of the essential difference between the Germans and ourselves.

The difference is this: The German does not care to be free as long as he is well fed, well amused and making money. The Frenchman, like the American, wants to be free first of all, and free anyhow--free even when he might be better off, materially, if he lived under a benevolent autocracy. The Frenchman and the American want to have a voice in governing their country, and the German prefers to be governed by professionals, as long as they make him comfortable and give him what he wants.

From the purely practical point of view this is not a bad plan, but it breaks down as soon as a moral issue is involved. They say corporations have no souls; neither have governments that are not answerable to a free people for their actions.

III

This anecdote may have seemed to take us a long way from France and French ways; but it will help to show that, whereas the differences between ourselves and the French are mostly on the surface, and our feeling about the most important things is always the same, the Germans, who seem less strange to many of us because we have been used to them at home, differ from us totally in all of the important things.

Unfortunately surface differences--as the word implies--are the ones that strike the eye first. If beauty is only skin deep, so too are some of the greatest obstacles between peoples who were made to understand each other. French habits and manners have their roots in a civilisation so profoundly unlike ours--so much older, richer, more elaborate and firmly crystallised--that French customs necessarily differ from ours more than do those of more primitive races; and we must dig down to the deep faiths and principles from which every race draws its enduring life to find how like in fundamental things are the two people whose destinies have been so widely different.

To help the American fresh from his own land to overcome these initial difficulties, and to arrive at a quick comprehension of French character, is one of the greatest services that Americans familiar with France can render at this moment. The French cannot explain themselves fully to foreigners, because they take for granted so many things that are as unintelligible to us as, for instance, our eating corned-beef hash for breakfast, or liking mustard with mutton, is to them. It takes an outsider familiar with both races to explain away what may be called the corned-beef-hash differences, and bring out the underlying resemblances; and while actual contact in the trenches will in the long run do this more surely than any amount of writing, it may nevertheless be an advantage to the newcomer to arrive with a few first-aid hints in his knapsack.

The most interesting and profitable way of studying the characteristics of a different race is to pick out, among them, those in which our own national character is most lacking. It is sometimes agreeable, but seldom useful, to do the reverse; that is, to single out the weak points of the other race, and brag of our own advantages. This game, moreover, besides being unprofitable, is also sometimes dangerous. Before calling a certain trait a weakness, and our own opposite trait a superiority, we must be sure, as critics say, that we "know the context"; we must be sure that what appears a defect in the character of another race will not prove to be a strength when better understood.

Anyhow, it is safer as well as more interesting to choose the obviously admirable characteristics first, and especially those which happen to be more or less lacking in our own national make-up.

This is what I propose to attempt in these articles; and I have singled out, as typically "French" in the best sense of that many-sided term, the qualities of _taste_, _reverence_, _continuity_, and _intellectual honesty_. We are a new people, a pioneer people, a people destined by fate to break up new continents and experiment in new social conditions; and therefore it may be useful to see what part is played in the life of a nation by some of the very qualities we have had the least time to acquire.

II

REVERENCE

I

"Take care! Don't eat blackberries! Don't you know they'll give you the fever?"

Any American soldier who stops to fill his cap with the plump blackberries loading the hedgerows of France is sure to receive this warning from a passing peasant.

Throughout the length and breadth of France, the most fruit-loving and fruit-cultivating of countries, the same queer conviction prevails, and year after year the great natural crop of blackberries, nowhere better and more abundant, is abandoned to birds and insects because in some remote and perhaps prehistoric past an ancient Gaul once decreed that "blackberries give the fever."

An hour away, across the Channel, fresh blackberries and blackberry-jam form one of the staples of a great ally's diet; but the French have not yet found out that millions of Englishmen have eaten blackberries for generations without having "the fever."

Even if they did find it out they would probably say: "The English are different. Blackberries have always given _us_ the fever." Or the more enlightened might ascribe it to the climate: "The air may be different in England. Blackberries may not be unwholesome there, but here they are poison."

There is not the least foundation for the statement, and the few enterprising French people who have boldly risked catching "the fever" consume blackberries in France with as much enjoyment, and as little harm, as their English neighbours. But one could no more buy a blackberry in a French market than one could buy the fruit of the nightshade; the one is considered hardly less deleterious than the other.

The prejudice is all the queerer because the thrifty, food-loving French peasant has discovered the innocuousness of so many dangerous-looking funguses that frighten the Anglo-Saxon by their close resemblance to the poisonous members of the family. It takes a practised eye to distinguish cepes and morilles from the deadly toadstool; whereas the blackberry resembles nothing in the world but its own luscious and innocent self. Yet the blackberry has been condemned untried because of some ancient taboo that the French peasant dares not disregard.

Taboos of this sort are as frequent in France as the blackberries in the hedges, and some of them interfere with the deepest instincts of the race.

Take, for instance, the question of dinner-giving. Dining is a solemn rite to the French, because it offers the double opportunity of good eating and good talk, the two forms of aesthetic enjoyment most generally appreciated. Everything connected with dinner-giving has an almost sacramental importance in France. The quality of the cooking comes first; but, once this is assured, the hostess' chief concern is that the quality of the talk shall match it. To attain this, the guests are as carefully chosen as boxers for a championship, their number is strictly limited, and care is taken not to invite two champions likely to talk each other down.

The French, being unable to live without good talk, are respectful of all the small observances that facilitate it. Interruption is considered the height of discourtesy; but so is any attempt, even on the part of the best talkers, to hold the floor and prevent others from making themselves heard. Share and share alike is the first rule of conversational politeness, and if a talker is allowed to absorb the general attention for more than a few minutes it is because his conversation is known to be so good that the other guests have been invited to listen to him. Even so, he must give them a chance now and then, and it is they who must abstain from taking it, and must repeatedly let him see that for once they are content to act as audience. Moreover, even the privileged talker is not allowed to dwell long on any one topic, however stimulating. The old lady who said to her granddaughter: "My dear, you will soon learn that an hour is enough of anything" would have had to reduce her time-limit to five minutes if she had been formulating the rules of French conversation.

In circles where interesting and entertaining men are habitually present the women are not expected to talk much. They are not, of course, to sit stupidly silent, responsiveness is their _role_, and they must know how to guide the conversation by putting the right question or making the right comment. But above all they are not to air their views in the presence of men worth listening to. The French care passionately for ideas, but they do not expect women to have them, and since they never mistake erudition for intelligence (as we uneducated Anglo-Saxons sometimes do) no woman can force her way into the talk by mere weight of book-learning. She has no place there unless her ideas, and her way of expressing them, put her on an equality with the men; and this seldom happens. Women (if they only knew it!) are generally far more intelligent listeners than talkers; and the rare quality of the Frenchwoman's listening contributes not a little to the flashing play of French talk.

Here, then, is an almost religious ritual, planned with the sole purpose of getting the best talk from the best talkers; but there are two malicious little taboos that delight in upsetting all these preparations.

One of them seems incredibly childish. It is a rule of French society that host and hostess shall sit exactly opposite each other. If the number at table is uneven, then, instead of the guests being equally spaced, they will be packed like sardines about one half the board, and left on the other with echoing straits between them thrown.

If the number is such that, normally seated, with men and women alternating, a lady should find herself opposite the hostess, that unthinkable sacrilege must also be avoided, and three women be placed together on one side of the table, and three men on the other. This means death to general conversation, for intelligent women will never talk together when they can talk to men, or even listen to them; so that the party, thus disarranged, resembles that depressing dish, a pudding in which all the plums have run into one corner.

The plums do not like it either. The scattered affinities grope for each other and vainly seek to reconstitute a normal pudding. The attempt is always a failure, and the French hostess knows it; yet many delightful dinners are wrecked on the unrelenting taboo that obliges host and hostess to sit exactly opposite each other.

"Precedence" is another obstacle to the realisation of the perfect dinner. Precedence in a republic--! It is acknowledged to be an absurd anomaly except where official rank is concerned; and though its defenders argue that it is a short-cut through many problems of vanity and _amour-propre_ it might certainly be disregarded to the general advantage whenever a few intelligent people have been brought together, not to compare their titles but to forget them.

But there it is. The French believe themselves to be the most democratic people in the world--and they have some of the democratic instincts, though not as many as they think. But an Academician must sit on his hostess' right, unless there is a Duke or an Ambassador or a Bishop present; and these rules, comic enough where peer meets prelate, become more humorous (and also grow more strict) when applied to the imperceptible differences between the lower degrees of the immense professional and governmental hierarchy.

But again--there it is. A hostess whose papa helped to blow up the Tuileries or pull down the Vendome column weighs the relative claims of two Academicians (always a bad stumbling block) as carefully as a duchess of the old regime, brought up to believe in the divine right of Kings, scrutinises the genealogy of her guests before seating them. And this strict observance of rules is not due to snobbishness; the French are not a snobbish people. It is part of _les bienseances_, of the always-have-beens; and there is a big bullying taboo in the way of changing it.

In England, where precedence has, at any rate, the support of a court, where it is, so to speak, still a "going concern," and works automatically, the hostess, if she is a woman of the world, casts it to the winds on informal occasions; but in France there is no democratic dinner-table over which it does not permanently hang its pall.

II

It may seem curious to have chosen the instance of the blackberry as the text of a homily on "Reverence." Why not have substituted as a title "Prejudice"--or simply "Stupidity"?

Well--"Prejudice" and "Reverence," oftener than one thinks, are overlapping terms, and it seems fairer to choose the one of the two that is not what the French call "pejorative." As for "Stupidity"--it must be remembered that the French peasant thinks it incredibly stupid of us not instantly to distinguish a mushroom from a toadstool, or any of the intermediate forms of edible funguses from their death-dealing cousins! Remember that we Americans deprive ourselves of many delicious dishes, and occasionally hurry whole harmless families to the grave, through not taking the trouble to examine and compare the small number of mushrooms at our disposal; while the French avoid blackberries from a deep and awesome conviction handed down from the night of history.

There is the key to my apologue. The French fear of the blackberry is not due to any lack of curiosity about its qualities, but to respect for some ancient sanction which prevents those qualities from being investigated.

There is a reflex of negation, of rejection, at the very root of the French character: an instinctive recoil from the new, the untasted, the untested, like the retracting of an insect's feelers at contact with an unfamiliar object; and no one can hope to understand the French without bearing in mind that this unquestioning respect for rules of which the meaning is forgotten acts as a perpetual necessary check to the idol-breaking instinct of the freest minds in the world.

It may sound like a poor paradox to say that the French are traditional about small things because they are so free about big ones. But the history of human societies seems to show that if they are to endure they must unconsciously secrete the corrective of their own highest qualities.

"Reverence" may be the wasteful fear of an old taboo; but it is also the sense of the preciousness of long accumulations of experience. The quintessential is precious because whatever survives the close filtering of time is likely to answer to some deep racial need, moral or aesthetic. It is stupid to deprive one's self of blackberries for a reason one has forgotten; but what should we say of a people who had torn down their cathedrals when they ceased to feel the beauty of Gothic architecture, as the French had ceased to feel it in the seventeenth century?

The instinct to preserve that which has been slow and difficult in the making, that into which the long associations of the past are woven, is a more constant element of progress than the Huguenot's idol-breaking hammer.

Reverence and irreverence are both needed to help the world along, and each is most needed where the other most naturally abounds.

In this respect France and America are in the same case. America, because of her origin, tends to irreverence, impatience, to all sorts of rash and contemptuous short-cuts; France, for the same reason, to routine, precedent, tradition, the beaten path. Therefore it ought to help each nation to apply to herself the corrective of the other's example; and America can profit more by seeking to find out why France is reverent, and what she reveres, than by trying to inoculate her with a flippant disregard of her own past.

The first thing to do is to try to find out why a people, so free and active of thought as the French, are so subject to traditions that have lost their meaning.

The fundamental cause is probably geographical. We Americans have hitherto been geographically self-contained, and until this war did away with distances we were free to try any social and political experiments we pleased, without, at any rate, weakening ourselves in relation to our neighbours. To keep _them_ off we did not even have to have an army!

France, on the contrary, has had to fight for her existence ever since she has had any. Of her, more than of any other great modern nation, it may be said that from the start she has had, as Goethe puts it, to "reconquer each day the liberty won the day before."

Again and again, in the past, she has seen her territory invaded, her monuments destroyed, her institutions shattered; the ground on which the future of the world is now being fought for is literally the same as that Catalaunian plain (the "Camp de Chalons") on which Attila tried to strangle France over fourteen hundred years ago. "In the year 450 all Gaul was filled with terror; for the dreaded Attila, with a host of strange figures, Huns, Tartars, Teutons, head of an empire of true barbarians, drew near her borders. Barbarism ... now threatened the world. It had levied a shameful tribute on Constantinople; it now threatened the farthest West. If Gaul fell, Spain would fall, and Italy, and Rome; and Attila would reign supreme, with an empire of desolation, over the whole world."[A]

"The whole world" is a bigger place nowadays, and "farthest West" is at the Golden Gate and not at the Pillars of Hercules; but otherwise might we not be reading a leader in yesterday's paper?

Try to picture life under such continual menace of death, and see how in an industrious, intelligent and beauty-loving race it must inevitably produce two strong passions:

Pious love of every yard of the soil and every stone of the houses.

Intense dread lest any internal innovations should weaken the social structure and open a door to the enemy.

There is nothing like a Revolution for making people conservative; that is one of the reasons why, for instance, our Constitution, the child of Revolution, is the most conservative in history. But, in other respects, why should we Americans be conservative? To begin with, there is not much as yet for us to "conserve" except a few root-principles of conduct, social and political; and see how they spring up and dominate every other interest in each national crisis!

In France it is different. The French have nearly two thousand years of history and art and industry and social and political life to "conserve"; that is another of the reasons why their intense intellectual curiosity, their perpetual desire for the new thing, is counteracted by a clinging to rules and precedents that have often become meaningless.

III

Reverence is the life-belt of those whose home is on a raft, and Americans have not pored over the map of France for the last four years without discovering that she may fairly be called a raft. But geographical necessity is far from being the only justification of reverence. It is not chiefly because the new methods of warfare lay America open to the same menace as continental Europe that it is good for us to consider the meaning of this ancient principle of civilised societies.

We are growing up at last; and it is only in maturity that a man glances back along the past, and sees the use of the constraints that irritated his impatient youth. So with races and nations; and America has reached the very moment in her development when she may best understand what has kept older races and riper civilisations sound.

Reverence is one of these preserving elements, and it is worth while to study it in its action in French life. If geographical necessity is the fundamental cause, another, almost as deep-seated, is to be found in the instinct of every people to value and preserve what they have themselves created and made beautiful.

In Selden's "Table-talk" there is told the story of a certain carver of idols. Being a pious man he had always worshipped his own idols till he was suddenly called upon to make one in great haste, and, no other wood being available, had to cut down the plum-tree in his own garden and make the image out of that.

He could not worship the plum-tree idol, because he knew too much about the plum-tree. That, at least, is Selden's version; but how little insight it shows into human processes! Of course, after a time, the carver came to worship the plum-tree idol, and to worship it just because he had grown the tree and carved the image, and it was therefore doubly of his making. That is the very key to the secret of reverence; the tenderness we feel for our own effort extending to respect for all fine human effort.

America is already showing this instinct in her eagerness to beautify her towns, and to preserve her few pre-Revolutionary buildings--that small fragment of her mighty European heritage.

But there are whole stretches of this heritage that have been too long allowed to run to waste: our language, our literature, and many other things pertaining to the great undefinable domain of Taste.

A man who owns a vast field does not care for that field half as much when it is a waste as after he has sweated over its furrows and seen the seeds spring. And when he has turned a bit of it into a useless bright flower-garden he cares for that useless bit best of all.

The deeper civilisation of a country may to a great extent be measured by the care she gives to her flower-garden--the corner of her life where the supposedly "useless" arts and graces flourish. In the cultivating of that garden France has surpassed all modern nations; and one of the greatest of America's present opportunities is to find out why.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] Kitchin: "History of France," vol. I.

III

TASTE

I

French taste? Why, of course--everybody knows all about that! It's the way the women put on their hats, and the upholsterers drape their curtains.

Certainly--why not?

The artistic integrity of the French has led them to feel from the beginning that there is no difference in kind between the curve of a woman's hat-brim and the curve of a Rodin marble, or between the droop of an upholsterer's curtain and that of the branches along a great avenue laid out by Le Notre.

It was the Puritan races--every one of them non-creative in the plastic arts--who decided that "Art" (that is, plastic art) was something apart from life, as dangerous to it as Plato thought Poets in a Republic, and to be tolerated only when it was so lofty, unapproachable and remote from any appeal to average humanity that it bored people to death, and they locked it up in Museums to get rid of it.

But this article is headed "Taste," and taste, whatever it may be, is not, after all, the same thing as art. No; it is not art--but it is the atmosphere in which art lives, and outside of which it cannot live. It is the regulating principle of all art, of the art of dress and of manners, and of living in general, as well as of sculpture or music. It is because the French have always been so innately sure of this, that, without burdening themselves with formulas, they have instinctively applied to living the same rules that they applied to artistic creation.

II

I remember being told when I was a young girl: "If you want to interest the person you are talking to, pitch your voice so that only that one person will hear you."

That small axiom, apart from its obvious application, contains nearly all there is to say about Taste.

That a thing should be in scale--should be proportioned to its purpose--is one of the first requirements of beauty, in whatever order. No shouting where an undertone will do; and no gigantic Statue of Liberty in butter for a World's Fair, when the little Wingless Victory, tying on her sandal on the Acropolis, holds the whole horizon in the curve of her slim arm.

The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.

Suitability--fitness--is, and always has been, the very foundation of French standards. Fitness is only a contraction of fittingness; and if any of our American soldiers in France should pause to look up at the narrow niches in the portal of a French cathedral, or at the group of holy figures in the triangle or half-circle above, they are likely to be struck first of all by the way in which the attitude of each figure or group is adapted to the space it fills.

If the figure is cramped and uncomfortable--if the saint or angel seems to be in a straitjacket or a padded cell--then the sculptor has failed, and taste is offended. It is essential that there should be perfect harmony between the natural attitude of the figure and the space it lives in--that a square saint should not be put in a round hole. Range through plastic art, from Chaldaea to France, and you will see how this principle of adaptation has always ruled composition.

III

It is the sense of its universal applicability that makes taste so living an influence in France. French people "have taste" as naturally as they breathe: it is not regarded as an accomplishment, like playing the flute.

The universal existence of taste, and of the standard it creates--it insists on--explains many of the things that strike Americans on first arriving in France.

It is the reason, for instance, why the French have beautiful stone quays along the great rivers on which their cities are built, and why noble monuments of architecture, and gardens and terraces, have been built along these quays. The French have always felt and reverenced the beauty of their rivers, and known the value, artistic and hygienic, of a beautiful and well-kept river-front in the heart of a crowded city.

When industrialism began its work of disfigurement in the great cities of the world, long reaches of the Thames were seized upon by the factory-builder, and London has only by a recent effort saved a short stretch of her river front; even so, from the Embankment, whether at Westminster or Chelsea, one looks across at ugliness, untidiness and squalor.

When industrialism came to the wise old Latin cities--Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, Florence--their river banks were already firmly and beautifully built up, and the factory chimneys had to find a footing in the outskirts. Any American with eyes to see, who compares the architectural use to which Paris has put the Seine with the wasteful degradation of the unrivalled twin river-fronts of New York, may draw his own conclusions as to the sheer material advantage of taste in the creation of a great city.

Perhaps the most curious instance of taste-blindness in dealing with such an opportunity is to be found in Boston, where Beacon Street calmly turned its wealthy back to the bay, and fringed with clothes-lines the shores that might have made of Boston one of the most beautifully situated cities in the world. In this case, industry did not encroach or slums degrade. The Boston aristocracy appropriated the shore of the bay for its own residential uses, but apparently failed to notice that the bay was there.

Taste, also--the recognition of a standard--explains the existence of such really national institutions as the French Academy, and the French national theatre, the Theatre Francais. The history of the former, in particular, throws a light on much that is most distinctively French in the French character.

It would be difficult for any one walking along the Quai Malaquais, and not totally blind to architectural beauty, not to be charmed by the harmony of proportion and beauty of composition of a certain building with curved wings and a small central dome that looks across the Seine at the gardens of the Louvre and the spires of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois.

That building, all elegance, measure and balance, from its graceful cupola to the stately stone vases surmounting the lateral colonnades--that building is the old "College des Quatre Nations," the Institute of France, and the home of the French Academy.

In 1635, at a time when France was still struggling with the heavy inheritance of feudalism, a bad man and great statesman, the mighty Cardinal Richelieu, paused in his long fight with the rebellious vassals of the crown to create a standard of French speech: "To establish the rules of the language, and make French not only elegant, but capable of dealing with the arts and sciences."

Think of the significance of such an act at such a moment! France was a welter of political and religious dissension; everything in the monarchy, and the monarchy itself, was in a state of instability. Austria and Spain menaced it from without, the great vassals tore it asunder from within. During the Great Assizes of Auvergne some of the most powerful of these nobles were tried, punished and stripped of their monstrous privileges; and the record of their misdeeds reads like a tale of Sicilian brigandage and Corsican vendetta.

Gradually the iron hand of Richelieu drew order--a grim pitiless order--out of this uninhabitable chaos. But it was in the very thick of the conflict that he seemed to feel the need of creating, then and there, some fixed principle of civilised life, some kind of ark in which thought and taste and "civility" could take shelter. It was as if, in the general upheaval, he wished to give stability to the things which humanise and unite society. And he chose "taste"--taste in speech, in culture, in manners,--as the fusing principle of his new Academy.

The traditional point of view of its founder has been faithfully observed for nearly three hundred years by the so-called "Forty Immortals," the Academicians who throne under the famous cupola. The Academy has never shrunk into a mere retreat for lettered pedantry: as M. Saillens says in his admirable little book, "Facts about France": "The great object of Richelieu was national unity," and "The Forty do not believe that they can keep the language under discipline by merely publishing a Dictionary now and then (the first edition came out in 1694). They believe that a standard must be set, and that it is for them to set it. Therefore the Academy does not simply call to its ranks famous or careful writers, but soldiers as well, bishops, scientists, men of the world, men of social rank, so as to maintain from generation to generation a national conservatory of good manners and good speech."

For this reason, though Frenchmen have always laughed at their Academy, they have always respected it, and aspired to the distinction of membership. Even the rebellious spirits who satirise it in their youth usually become, in maturity, almost too eager for its recognition; and, though the fact of being an Academician gives social importance, it would be absurd to pretend that such men as Pasteur, Henri Poincare, Marshal Joffre, sought the distinction for that reason, or that France would have thought it worthy of their seeking if the institution had not preserved its original significance.

That significance was simply the safeguarding of what the French call _les choses de l'esprit_; which cannot quite be translated "things of the spirit," and yet means more nearly that than anything else. And Richelieu and the original members of the Academy had recognised from the first day that language was the chosen vessel in which the finer life of a nation must be preserved.

It is not uncommon nowadays, especially in America, to sneer at any deliberate attempts to stabilise language. To test such criticisms it is useful to reduce them to their last consequence--which is almost always absurdity. It is not difficult to discover what becomes of a language left to itself, without accepted standards or restrictions; instances may be found among any savage tribes without fixed standards of speech. Their language speedily ceases to be one, and deteriorates into a muddle of unstable dialects. Or, if an instance nearer home is needed, the lover of English need only note what that rich language has shrunk to on the lips, and in the literature, of the heterogeneous hundred millions of American citizens who, without uniformity of tradition or recognised guidance, are being suffered to work their many wills upon it.

But at this point it may be objected that, after all, England herself has never had an Academy, nor could ever conceivably have had one, and that whatever the English of America has become, the English of England is still the language of her great tradition, with perfectly defined standards of taste and propriety.

England is England, as France is France: the one feels the need of defining what the other finds it simpler to take for granted. England has never had a written Constitution; yet her constitutional government has long been the model of free nations. England's standards are all implicit. She does not feel the French need of formulating and tabulating. Her Academy is not built with hands, but it is just as powerful, and just as visible to those who have eyes to see; and the name of the English Academy is Usage.

IV

I said just now: "If any of our American soldiers look up at the niches in the portal of a French cathedral they are likely to be struck first of all by" such and such things.

In our new Army all the arts and professions are represented, and if the soldier in question happens to be a sculptor, an architect, or an art critic, he will certainly note what I have pointed out; but if he is not a trained observer, the chances are that he will not even look up.

The difference is that in France almost every one has the seeing eye, just as almost every one has the hearing ear. It is not a platitude, though it may be a truism, to say that the French are a race of artists: it is the key that unlocks every door of their complex psychology, and consequently the key that must be oftenest in the explorer's hand.

The gift of the seeing eye is, obviously, a first requisite where taste is to prevail. And the question is, how is the seeing eye to be obtained? What is the operation for taste-blindness? Or is there any; and are not some races--the artistically non-creative--born as irremediably blind as Kentucky cave-fishes?

The answer might be _yes_, in the case of the wholly non-creative races. But the men of English blood are creative artists too: theirs is the incomparable gift of poetic expression. And any race gifted with one form of artistic originality is always acutely appreciative of other cognate forms of expression. There has never been a race more capable than the English of appreciating the great plastic creators, Greece, Italy and France. This gift of the critical sense in those arts wherein the race does not excel in original expression seems an inevitable by-product of its own special endowment. In such races taste-blindness is purely accidental, and the operation that cures it is the long slow old-fashioned one of education. There is no other.

The artist races are naturally less dependent on education: to a certain degree their instinct takes the place of acquired discrimination. But they set a greater store on it than any other races because they appreciate more than the others all that, even to themselves, education reveals and develops.

It is just because the French are naturally endowed with taste that they attach such importance to cultivation, and that French standards of education are so infinitely higher and more severe than those existing in Anglo-Saxon countries. We are too much inclined to think that we have disposed of the matter when we say that, in our conception of life, education should be formative and not instructive. The point is, the French might return, what are we to be formed for? And, in any case, they would not recognise the antithesis, since they believe that, to form, one must instruct: instruct the eye, the ear, the brain, every one of those marvellous organs of sense so often left dormant by our Anglo-Saxon training.

It used to be thought that if savages appeared unimpressed by the wonders of occidental art or industry it was because their natural _hauteur_ would not let them betray surprise to the intruder. That romantic illusion has been dispelled by modern investigation, and the traveller now knows that the savage is unimpressed because _he does not see_ the new things presented to him. It takes the most complex assemblage of associations, visual and mental, to enable us to discover what a picture represents: the savage placed before such familiar examples of the graphic art as "The Infant Samuel" or "His Master's Voice" would not _see_ the infant or the fox-terrier, much less guess what they were supposed to be doing.

As long as America believes in short-cuts to knowledge, in any possibility of buying taste in tabloids, she will never come into her real inheritance of English culture. A gentleman travelling in the Middle West met a charming girl who was a "college graduate." He asked her what line of study she had selected, and she replied that she had learnt music one year, and languages the next, and that last year she had "learnt art."

It is the pernicious habit of regarding the arts as something that can be bottled, pickled and absorbed in twelve months (thanks to "courses," summaries and abridgments) that prevents the development of a real artistic sensibility in our eager and richly endowed race. Patience, deliberateness, reverence: these are the fundamental elements of taste. The French have always cultivated them, and it is as much to them as to the eagle-flights of genius that France owes her long artistic supremacy.

From the Middle Ages to the Revolution all the French trade-guilds had their travelling members, the "Compagnons du Tour de France." Not for greed of gold, but simply from the ambition to excel in their own craft, these "companions," their trade once learned, took their staves in hand, and wandered on foot over France, going from one to another of the cities where the best teachers of their special trades were to be found, and serving an apprenticeship in each till they learned enough to surpass their masters. The "tour de France" was France's old way of acquiring "Efficiency"; and even now she does not believe it can be found in newspaper nostrums.

IV

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

I

Most people, in their infancy, have made bogeys out of sofa-pillows and overcoats, and the imaginative child always comes to believe in the reality of the bogey he has manufactured, and toward twilight grows actually afraid of it.

When I was a little girl the name of Horace Greeley was potent in American politics, and some irreverent tradesman had manufactured a pink cardboard fan (on the "palmetto" model) which represented the countenance of the venerable demagogue, and was surrounded with a white silk fringe in imitation of his hoary hair and "chin-beard." A Horace Greeley fan had long been knocking about our country-house, and was a familiar object to me and to my little cousins, when one day it occurred to us to make a bogey with my father's overcoat, put Mr. Greeley's head on top, and seat him on the verandah near the front door.

When we were tired of playing we started to go in; but there on the threshold in the dusk sat Mr. Greeley, suddenly transformed into an animate and unknown creature, and dumb terror rooted us to the spot. Not one of us had the courage to demolish that supernatural and malevolent old man, or to dash past him into the house--and oh, the relief it was when a big brother came along and reduced him into his constituent parts!

Such inhibitions take the imagination far back to the childhood of the human race, when terrors and taboos lurked in every bush; and wherever the fear of the thing it has created survives in the mind of any society, that society is still in its childhood. Intellectual honesty, the courage to look at things as they are, is the first test of mental maturity. Till a society ceases to be afraid of the truth in the domain of ideas it is in leading-strings, morally and mentally.

The singular superiority of the French has always lain in their intellectual courage. Other races and nations have been equally distinguished for moral courage, but too often it has been placed at the service of ideas they were afraid to analyse. The French always want to find out first just what the conceptions they are fighting for are worth. They will not be downed by their own bogeys, much less by anybody else's. The young Oedipus of Ingres, calmly questioning the Sphinx, is the very symbol of the French intelligence; and it is because of her dauntless curiosity that France is of all countries the most _grown up_.