CHAPTER VIII
NATIONAL ANTIPATHIES
The prejudice we entertain against foreigners is not in the first instance owing to any ill-will we bear them, so much as to the untractableness of the imagination, which cannot admit two standards of moral value according to circumstances, but is puzzled by the diversity of manners and character it observes, and made uneasy in its estimate of the propriety and excellence of its own. It seems that others ought to conform to our way of thinking, or we to theirs; and as neither party is inclined to give up their peculiarities, we cut the knot by hating those who remind us of them. We get rid of any idle, half-formed, teazing, irksome sense of obligation to sympathise with or meet foreigners half way, by making the breach as wide as possible, and treating them as an inferior species of beings to ourselves. We become enemies, because we cannot be friends. Our self-love is annoyed by whatever creates a suspicion of our being in the wrong; and only recovers its level by setting down all those who differ from us as thoroughly odious and contemptible.
It is this consideration which makes the good qualities of other nations, in which they excel us, no set-off to their bad ones, in which they fall short of us; nay, we can forgive the last much sooner than the first. The French being a dirty people is a complaint we very often bring against them. This objection alone, however, would give us very little disturbance; we might make a wry face, an exclamation, and laugh it off. But when we find that they are lively, agreeable, and good-humoured in spite of their dirt, we then know not what to make of it. We are angry at seeing them enjoy themselves in circumstances in which we should feel so uncomfortable; we are baulked of the advantage we had promised ourselves over them, and make up for the disappointment by despising them heartily, as a people callous and insensible to every thing like common decency. In reading Captain Parry’s account of the Esquimaux Indian woman, who so dexterously trimmed his lamp by licking up half the train-oil, and smearing her face and fingers all over with the grease, we barely smile at this trait of barbarism. It does not provoke a serious thought; for it does not stagger us in our opinion of ourselves. But should a fine Parisian lady do the same thing (or something like it) in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the infinite superiority of the French in delicacy and refinement, we should hardly restrain our astonishment at the mixture of incorrigible grossness and vanity. Unable to answer her arguments, we should begin to hate her person: her gaiety and wit, which had probably delighted us before, would be changed into forwardness, flippancy, and impertinence; from seeing it united with so many accomplishments, we should be led to doubt whether sluttishness was not a virtue, and should remove the doubt out of court by indulging a feeling of private resentment, and resorting to some epithet of national abuse. The mind wishes to pass an act of uniformity for all its judgments: in defiance of every day’s experience, it will have things of a piece, and where it cannot have every thing right or its own way, is determined to have it all wrong.
A Frenchman, we will say, drops what we think a frivolous remark, which excites in us some slight degree of impatience: presently after, he makes a shrewd, sensible observation. This rather aggravates the mischief, than mends it; for it throws us out in our calculations, and confounds the distinction between sense and nonsense in our minds. A volley of unmeaning declamation or frothy impertinence causes us less chagrin than a single word that overturns some assertion we had made, or puts us under the necessity of reversing, or imposes on us the still more unwelcome task of revising our conclusions. It is easy in this case to save ourselves the trouble by calling our antagonist knave or fool; and the temptation is too strong, when we have a whole host of national prejudices at our back to justify us in so concise and satisfactory a mode of reasoning. A greater fund of vivacity and agreeable qualities in our neighbours is not sure to excite simple gratitude or admiration; it much oftener excites envy, and we are uneasy till we have quieted the sense of our deficiency by construing the liveliness of temper or invention, with which we cannot keep pace, into an excess of levity, and the continued flow of animal spirits into a species of intoxication or insanity. Because the French are animated and full of gesticulation, they are a theatrical people; if they smile and are polite, they are like monkeys—an idea an Englishman never has out of his head, and it is well if he can keep it between his lips.[[24]] No one assuredly would appear dull and awkward, who can help it. Many an English belle, who figures at home in the first circles of fashion and is admired for her airy, thoughtless volubility, is struck dumb, and looks a mere dowdy (as if it were a voluntary or assumed transformation of character) the moment she sets foot on French ground; and the whispered sounds, lourde or elle n’est pas spirituelle, lingering in her ears, will not induce her to dissuade her husband (if he is a Lord or Member of Parliament) from voting for a French war, and are answered by the thunders of our cannon on the French coast! We even quarrel with the beauty of French women, because it is not English. If their features are regular, we find fault with their complexions; and as to their expression, we grow tired of that eternal smile upon their faces; though their teeth are white, why should they be always shewing them? Their eyes have an unpleasant glitter about them; and their eye-brows, which are frequently black and arched, are painted and put on! In short, no individual, no nation is liked by another for the advantages it possesses over it in wit or wisdom, in happiness or virtue. We despise others for their inferiority, we hate them for their superiority; and I see no likelihood of an accommodation at this rate. The English go abroad; and when they come back, they brood over the civilities or the insults they have received with equal discontent. The gaiety of the Continent has thrown an additional damp upon their native air, and they wish to clear it by setting fire to a foreign town or blowing up a foreign citadel. We are then easy and comfortable for a while. We think we can do something, that is, violence and wrong; and should others talk of retaliating, we say with Lord Bathurst, ‘Let them come!—our fingers tingling for the fray, and finding that nothing rouses us from our habitual stupor like hard blows. Defeated in the arts of peace, we get in good humour with ourselves by trying those of war. Ashamed to accost a lady, we dare face a bastion—without spirit to hold up our heads, we are too obstinate to turn our backs—and give ourselves credit for being the greatest nation in the world, because our Jack Tars (who defend the wooden walls of Old England—the same that we afterwards see with sore arms and wooden legs, begging and bawling about our streets) are the greatest blackguards on the face of the globe; because our Life Guardsmen, who have no brains to lose, are willing to have them knocked out, and because with the incessant noise and stir of our steam-engines and spinning-jennies (for having no wish to enjoy, we are glad to work ourselves to death) we can afford to pay all costs!
What makes the matter worse, is the idle way in which we abstract upon one another’s characters. We are struck only with the differences, and leave the common qualities out of the question. This renders a mutual understanding hopeless. We put the exceptions for the rule. If we meet with any thing odd and absurd in France, it is immediately set down as French and characteristic of the country, though we meet with a thousand odd and disagreeable things every day in England (that we never met before) without taking any notice of them. There is a wonderful keeping in our prejudices; we reason as consistently as absurdly upon the confined notions we have taken up. We put the good, wholesome, hearty, respectable qualities into one heap and call it English, and the bad, unwholesome, frivolous, and contemptible ones into another heap, and call it French; and whatever does not answer to this pretended sample, we reject as spurious and partial evidence. Our coxcomb conceit stands over the different races of mankind, like a smart serjeant of a regiment, and drills them into a pitiful uniformity, we ourselves being picked out as the élite du corps, and the rest of the world forming the forlorn hope of humanity. One would suppose, to judge from the conversation of the two nations, that all Frenchmen were alike, and that all Englishmen were personified by a particular individual, nicknamed John Bull. The French have no idea that there is any thing in England but roast-beef and plum-pudding, and a number of round, red faces, growing fat and stupid upon such kind of fare; while our traditional notion of the French is that of soup-maigre and wooden shoes, and a set of scare-crow figures corresponding to them. All classes of society and differences of character are by this unfair process consolidated into a sturdy, surly English yeoman on the one side of the Channel, or are boiled down and evaporate into a shivering, chattering valet-de-chambre, or miserable half-starved peasant on the other. It is a pleasant way of settling accounts and taking what we please for granted. It is a very old method of philosophizing, and one that is quite likely to last!
If we see a little old hump-backed withered Frenchman about five feet high, tottering on before us on a pair of spindle-shanks, with white thread stockings, a shabby great-coat, and his hair done up into a queue, his face dry, grey, and pinched up, his cheeks without blood in them, his eyes without lustre, and his body twisted like a corkscrew, we point to this grotesque figure as a true Frenchman, as the very essence of a Parisian, and an edifying vestige of the ancient régime and of the last age, before the French character was sophisticated. It does not signify that just before we had passed a bluff, red-faced, jolly-looking coachman or countryman, six feet four inches high, having limbs in proportion, and able to eat up any two ordinary Englishmen. This thumping make-weight is thrown out of the scale, because it does not help out our argument, or confirm our prejudices. This huge, raw-boned, heavy, knock-kneed, well-fed, shining-faced churl makes no impression on our minds, because he is not French, according to our idea of the word; or we pass him over under the pretext that he ought to be an Englishman. But the other extreme we seize upon with avidity and delight; we dandle it, we doat upon it, we make a puppet of it to the imagination; we speak of it with glee, we quote it as a text, we try to make a caricature of it; our pens itch to describe it as a complete specimen of the French nation, and as a convincing and satisfactory proof, that the English are the only people who are of sound mind and body, strong wind and limb, and free from the infirmities of a puny constitution, affectation, and old age! An old woman in France, with wrinkles and a high-plaited cap, strikes us as being quite French, as if the old women in England did not wear night-caps, and were not wrinkled. In passing along the streets, or through the walks near Paris, we continually meet a gentleman and lady whom we take for English, and they turn out to be French; or we fancy that they are French, and we find on a nearer approach, or from hearing them speak, that they are English. This does not at all satisfy us that there is no such marked difference between the two nations as we are led to expect; but we fasten on the first lusus naturæ we can find out as a striking representative of the universal French nation, and chuckle over and almost hug him to our bosoms as having kindly come to the relief of our wavering prejudices, and as an undoubted proof of our superiority to such a set of abortions as this, and of our right to insult and lord it over them at pleasure! If an object of this kind (as it sometimes happens) asks charity with an air of briskness and politesse, and does not seem quite so wretched as we would have him, this is a further confirmation of our theory of the national conceit and self-sufficiency; and his cheerfulness and content under deformity and poverty are added to his catalogue of crimes![[25]] We have a very old and ridiculous fancy in England, that all Frenchmen are or ought to be lean, and their women short and crooked; and when we see a great, fat, greasy Frenchman waddling along and ready to burst with good living, we get off by saying that it is an unwholesome kind of fat; or, if a Frenchwoman happens to be tall and straight, we immediately take a disgust at her masculine looks, and ask if all the women in France are giantesses?
It is strange we cannot let other people alone who concern themselves so little about us. Why measure them by our standard? Can we allow nothing to exist for which we cannot account, or to be right which has not our previous sanction? The difficulty seems to be to suspend our judgments, or to suppose a variety of causes to produce a variety of effects. All men must be alike—all Frenchmen must be alike. This is a portable theory, and suits our indolence well. But, if they do not happen to come exactly into our terms, we are angry, and transform them into beasts. Our first error lies in expecting a number of different things to tally with an abstract idea, or general denomination, and we next stigmatize every deviation from this standard by a nickname. A Spaniard, who has more gravity than an Englishman, is an owl; a Frenchman, who has less, is a monkey. I confess, this last simile sticks a good deal in my throat; and at times it requires a stretch of philosophy to keep it from rising to my lips. A walk on the Boulevards is not calculated to rid an Englishman of all his prejudices or of all his spleen. The resemblance to an English promenade afterwards makes the difference more mortifying. There is room to breathe, a footpath on each side of the road, and trees over your head. But presently the appearance of a Bartlemy-fair all the year round, the number of little shabby stalls, the old iron, pastry, and children’s toys; the little white lapdogs, with red eyes, combing and washing; the mud and the green trees, wafting alternate odours; the old women sitting like terra cotta figures; the passengers running up against you, (most of them so taken up with themselves that they seem like a crowd of absent people!) the noise, the bustle, the flutter, the hurry without visible object; the vivacity without intelligible meaning; the loud and incessant cry of ‘Messieurs’ from a bawling charlatan inviting you to some paltry, cheating game, and a broad stare or insignificant grin from the most ill-bred and ill-looking of the motley set at the appearance of an Englishman among them; all this jumble of little teazing, fantastical, disagreeable, chaotic sensations really puts one’s patience a little to the test, and throws one a little off one’s guard. I was in this humour the other day, and wanted some object to conduct off a superfluity of rising irritability, when, at a painted booth opposite, I saw a great lubberly boy in an ecstacy of satisfaction. He had on a red coat, a huge wig of coarse yellow hair, and with his hat was beating a monkey in the face, dressed en militaire—grinning, jabbering, laughing, screaming, frantic with delight at the piteous aspect and peevish gestures of the animal; while a tall showman, in a rusty blue coat and long pig-tail, (which might have been stolen from the monkey) looked on with severe complacency and a lofty pride in the bizarrerie, and the ‘mutually reflected charities’ of the scene. The trio (I am vexed to think it) massed themselves in my imagination, and I was not sorry to look upon them as a little national group, well-matched, and tricked out alike in pretensions to humanity.[[26]]
I was relieved from this fit of misanthropy, by getting into the shade of the barrier-wall, and by meeting a man, (a common French mechanic,) carrying a child in his arms, and the mother by its side, clapping her hands at it, smiling, and calling out ‘Mon petit ami!’ with unmingled and unwearied delight. There was the same over-animation in talking to the child as there would have been in talking to a dog or a parrot. But here it gave pleasure instead of pain, because our sympathies went along with it. I change my opinion of the French character fifty times a day, because, at every step, I wish to form a theory, which at the next step, is contradicted. The ground seems to me so uncertain—the tenure by which I hold my opinions so frail, that at last I grow ashamed of them altogether—of what I think right, as of what I think wrong.
To praise or to blame is perhaps equally an impertinence. While we are strangers to foreign manners and customs, we cannot be judges; it would take almost a life to understand the reasons and the differences; and by the time we can be supposed to do this, we become used to them, and in some sense parties concerned. The English are the fools of an hypothesis, as the Scotch are of a system. We must have an opinion—right or wrong; but, in that case, till we have the means of knowing whether it is right or wrong, it is as well to have a qualified one. We may at least keep our temper, and collect hints for self-correction; we may amuse ourselves in collecting materials for a decision that may never be passed, or will have little effect, even when it is, and may clear our eyesight from the motes and beams of prejudice by looking at things as they occur. Our opinions have no great influence on others; but the spirit in which we form them has a considerable one on our own happiness. It is of more importance to ourselves than to the French, what we think of them. It would be hard if a mental obliquity on their parts should ‘thrust us from a level consideration,’ or some hasty offence taken at the outset should shut up our eyes, our ears, and understandings for the rest of a journey, that we have commenced for no other purpose than to be spectators of a new and shifting scene, and to have our faculties alike open to impressions of all sorts.
What Englishman has not seen the Cemetery of Père la Chaise? What Englishman will undertake either to condemn or entirely approve it, unless he could enter completely into the minds of the French themselves? The approach to it (a little way out of Paris) is literally ‘garlanded with flowers.’ You imagine yourself in the neighbourhood of a wedding, a fair, or some holiday-festival. Women are sitting by the road-side or at their own doors, making chaplets of a sort of yellow flowers, which are gathered in the fields, baked, and will then last a French ‘Forever.’ They have taken ‘the lean abhorred monster,’ Death, and strewed him o’er and o’er with sweets; they have made the grave a garden, a flower-bed, where all Paris reposes, the rich and the poor, the mean and the mighty, gay and laughing, and putting on a fair outside as in their lifetime. Death here seems life’s playfellow, and grief and smiling content sit at one tomb together. Roses grow out of the clayey ground; there is the urn for tears, the slender cross for faith to twine round; the neat marble monument, the painted wreaths thrown upon it to freshen memory, and mark the hand of friendship. ‘No black and melancholic yew-trees’ darken the scene, and add a studied gloom to it—no ugly death’s heads or carved skeletons shock the sight. On the contrary, some pretty Ophelia, as general mourner, appears to have been playing her fancies over a nation’s bier, to have been scattering ‘pansies for thoughts, rue for remembrances.’ But is not the expression of grief, like hers, a little too fantastical and light-headed? Is it not too much like a childish game of Make-Believe? Or does it not imply a certain want of strength of mind, as well as depth of feeling, thus to tamper with the extremity of woe, and varnish over the most serious contemplation of mortality? True sorrow is manly and decent, not effeminate or theatrical. The tomb is not a baby-house for the imagination to hang its idle ornaments and mimic finery in. To meet sad thoughts, and overpower or allay them by other lofty and tender ones, is right; but to shun them altogether, to affect mirth in the midst of sighing, and divert the pangs of inward misfortune by something to catch the eye and tickle the sense, is what the English do not sympathize with. It is an advantage the French have over us. The fresh plants and trees that wave over our graves; the cold marble that contains our ashes; the secluded scene that collects the wandering thoughts; the innocent, natural flowers that spring up, unconscious of our loss—objects like these at once cherish and soften our regrets; but the petty daily offerings of condolence, the forced liveliness and the painted pride of the scene before us, are like galvanic attempts to recall the fleeting life—they neither flatter the dead nor become the living! One of the most heartless and flimsy extravagances of the New Eloise, is the attempt made to dress up the daughter of Madame d’Orbe like Julia, and set her in her place at the table after her death. Is not the burying-ground of the Père la Chaise tricked out and over-acted much on the same false principle, as if there were nothing sacred from impertinence and affectation? I will not pretend to determine; but to an English taste it is so. We see things too much, perhaps, on the dark side; they see them too much (if that is possible) on the bright. Here is the tomb of Abelard and Eloise—immortal monument, immortal as the human heart and poet’s verse can make it! But it is slight, fantastic, of the olden time, and seems to shrink from the glare of daylight, or as if it would like to totter back to the old walls of the Paraclete, and bury its quaint devices and its hallowed inscriptions in shadowy twilight. It is, however, an affecting sight, and many a votive garland is sprinkled over it. Here is the tomb of Ney, (the double traitor) worthy of his fate and of his executioner;—and of Massena and Kellerman. There are many others of great note, and some of the greatest names—Molière, Fontaine, De Lille. Chancellors and charbottiers lie mixed together, and announce themselves with equal pomp. These people have as good an opinion of themselves after death as before it. You see a bust with a wreath or crown round its head—a strange piece of masquerade—and other tombs with a print or miniature of the deceased hanging to them! Frequently a plain marble slab is laid down for the surviving relatives of the deceased, waiting its prey in expressive silence. This is making too free with death, and acknowledging a claim which requires no kind of light to be thrown upon it. We should visit the tombs of our friends with more soothing feelings, without marking out our own places beside them. But every French thought or sentiment must have an external emblem. The inscriptions are in general, however, simple and appropriate. I only remarked one to which any exception could be taken; it was a plain tribute of affection to some individual by his family, who professed to have ‘erected this modest monument to preserve his memory forever!’ What a singular idea of modesty and eternity! So the French, in the Catalogue of the Louvre, in 1803, after recounting the various transmigrations of the Apollo Belvidere in the last two thousand years (vain warnings of mutability!) observed, that it was at last placed in the Museum at Paris, ‘to remain there forever.’ Alas! it has been gone these ten years.