And, at all times, all of them, all Frenchmen, talk about France. Englishmen do not perpetually talk about England, nor Americans about America, but Frenchmen are for ever talking about France. ‘La France qui marche à la tête de la civilisation ... la France qui a fait tant de sacrifices ... la France! la France!’ It is unendurable.
I do not like to think in either of these two ways about the French; there is too much passion, too much prejudice, in both estimates. I would like to think of them as I have no difficulty in thinking of the English or the Italians ... as individuals, good and bad, very mixed. But I cannot, no matter how many individual Frenchman I meet; for they will not let me. The truth, I say to myself, should lie somewhere about half-way between; but, instead, I swing helplessly from one of these two exasperating estimates to the other and back again, until, in a pet, I give up for a time thinking about the French at all.
Obnoxiously overdressed as nationality is to-day, one cannot simply dismiss it, deny its existence or even, I suppose, its importance. The things that men do and think and feel are the same everywhere, but in each of certain circles made up of language, climate and, in some slight degree, race, the angle of approach to these things is, roughly, unified and somewhat different from that in the other circles. That a man is a man is far more significant than that he is a Swede or an Englishman; still, in saying that he is a Swede or an Englishman you have said something significant about him, you have suggested certain probable variations (though even then you must be very careful; a Swedish poet is, in most ways, likely to resemble an English poet more closely than he resembles a Swedish butcher).
It is difficult and quite fruitless to determine whether in the past these differences of nationality have been more beneficial than harmful or vice versa. They have been the cause of infinite bloodshed and misery, but we are also the richer for inheriting, say, both Dutch painting and Spanish painting. Presumably they are still of some value. No great poet could write in Esperanto, and German music is composed in German idiom.
But it is, I think, fair to say that the value of nationality is at the origin, the bottom. Nationality is like the essential underground roots of a tree; the tree itself springs up into the universal air. Thus, in all countries national prejudices are strongest among the uneducated and the half-educated; whereas the more men become truly cultivated, the less marked in them become their national differences. There are no barriers between an intelligent educated American and an intelligent educated Englishman or Italian; merely subtle distinctions in point of view that add to the richness of their mutual relationship. Their nationality is behind them, not with them. Men of genuine cultivation grow impatient at all this flaunting of nationalism. They find themselves too similar to men of other countries to believe any longer in the grosser national generalizations. Indeed, they distrust generalizations of any sort, and grow more and more inclined to take everything, fact by fact, as they find it. Thus, as the mature man whose development has not halted feels an increasing desire to get away from himself, so, too, does he feel an increasing desire to get away from his nationality—not, like the petty Anglomaniac or Francophile, into some other, but into a broader human fellowship. Neither desire can ever be completely realized, but each is noble—a craving to shake off fetters of the mind. Perhaps the two desires are really one. When emancipated men of this sort witness the disagreeable act of some foreigner, it is to them simply a disagreeable act committed by an individual of faulty breeding. They do not say, with a shrug: ‘Characteristically Italian, that, eh?’ or, ‘A Boche is always a Boche.’
That, I fear, is precisely what, with fewer exceptions than among any other western people, a Frenchman would say—or, at any rate, feel. It appears, for some reason, extremely difficult for him to emerge from being a Frenchman into being a man. Perhaps the desire is not very strong. Far more than the Englishman, whose sense of racial superiority is currently supposed to be enormous (and is, of course, among the half-educated, but I am not considering them here), the Frenchman leans on his nationality for support, assumes its heritage of greatness as his own. So far as I am aware, no Frenchman has ever written anything similar to the famous song in Pinafore—‘For he himself has said it, and it’s greatly to his credit, that he is an Englishman, that he i-i-i-i-i-i-is an Eng-lish-man.’
Doubtless there is some measure of compensation for this willing narrowness of outlook, even though to-day one can hardly believe in Emerson’s neat pattern of balance, life appearing to us too confused and rich. Something of the French sureness, something of the French clarity, probably derives from the Frenchman’s persistent cultivation of his own garden and refusal to allow himself to be intrigued by the vast variety of exotic plants to be found elsewhere. He does know his own garden better than any of the rest of us know ours. And it is true that wide acquaintance with the varying minds of many different groups often leads to sterility, a poised inaction.
Often, but not always. Here it seems to me that the French sacrifice a possible rare greatness to a moderate average of success. One admires French achievement for being so French, and yet, even while admiring, is faintly dissatisfied that it is not something other than that, and greater. One wearies of so much perfection. It does not seem an adequate interpretation of a chaotic world. French art is noble; yet it has never produced a Tolstoy, a Wagner, a Shakespeare, or a Michelangelo. It is not universal enough; it is too French. At an earlier day, when it was still but half formed, it came perhaps closest to such heroic stature in Rabelais.
Probably more than any other one factor, it is their language that cuts the French off from other peoples and renders them so circumscribed. For it is, when spoken, very different from other languages. The whole system of voice production is different. A foreigner with no knowledge of any language save his own might mistake Spanish for Italian or Italian for Spanish, but he could not possibly mistake either for French. Its system of prosody is so different from that of other related languages that foreign poetry simply cannot be even approximately translated into French poetry. You can translate Shakespeare into German or into Italian and hear some echo of the original sonority—not into French. It is curious that the spoken language should have developed into this unique isolated instrument, since written French is extremely like any of the other Latin languages; but so it is.
There are no worse linguists in Europe than the French. But this may also be because they care so little about learning foreign languages, have so little esteem for them, since, while almost any cultivated Englishman can speak French correctly enough, if often with a pronounced accent, it is rare indeed to find a cultivated Frenchman who can speak English with even tolerable ungrammatical fluency. (Shopkeepers and hotel porters in France of course speak some English, because it is to their financial advantage to do so). Moreover, even a literary knowledge of other languages is rare among the French. When reputable English or Italian authors have occasion to insert a French sentence in a novel, the sentence is usually correct; a French author can seldom so much as quote a foreign phrase correctly. Paul Morand, who, I believe, has spent many years in the Diplomatic Service, and whose brilliant cosmopolitan short stories do reveal interest in the national characteristics of other people, is frequently guilty of solecisms in the foreign phrases he now and then employs. In Henri Béraud’s excellent historical novel, Le Vitriol-de-Lune, the principal character is an Italian who is called, throughout the book, ‘Guiseppe,’ though Giuseppe is one of the commonest Italian names. Alone among the contemporary French writers with whose work I am acquainted, André Maurois reveals a genuine knowledge of English. And it is significant that he, too, is practically alone in revealing a genuine sympathetic understanding of the English people. Les Silences du Colonel Bramble occasionally crosses the line into national caricature; but it is at least caricature based on knowledge, not wild unrelated caricature like Abel Hermant’s. As for Ariel, a work of far greater importance—well, written by an Italian, it would have been, if surprising, at least credible, since there are many Italians who love and understand Shelley; written by a Frenchman, it appears little short of miraculous. Nor is this solely a personal judgment of my own, employed for the sake of my thesis. English critics fairly gasped with amazement at Ariel. But I repeat that André Maurois stands alone. You would have to go back to Taine to find any similarly lonely figure.[2]