French Ways and Their Meaning

by Edith Wharton

The study of prehistoric art is just beginning, but already it has been found that drawing, painting and even sculpture of a highly developed kind were practised in France long before Babylon rose in its glory, or the foundations of the undermost Troy were laid. In fact, all that is known of the earliest historic civilisations is recent in date compared with the wonderful fore-shortened drawings and clay statues of the French Stone Age.

The traces of a very ancient culture discovered in the United States and in Central America prove the far-off existence of an artistic and civic development unknown to the races found by the first European explorers. But the origin and date of these vanished societies are as yet unguessed at, and even were it otherwise they would not count in our artistic and social inheritance, since the English and Dutch colonists found only a wilderness peopled by savages, who had kept no link of memory with those vanished societies. There had been a complete break of continuity.

II

In France it was otherwise.

Any one who really wants to understand France must bear in mind that French culture is the most homogeneous and uninterrupted culture the world has known. It is true that waves of invasion, just guessed at on the verge of the historic period, must have swept away the astounding race who adorned the caves of central and south-western France with drawings matching those of the Japanese in suppleness and audacity; for after that far-off flowering time the prehistorian comes on a period of retrogression when sculptor and draughtsman fumbled clumsily with their implements. The golden age of prehistory was over. Waves of cold, invasions of savage hordes, all the violent convulsions of a world in the making, swept over the earliest France and almost swept her away: almost, but not quite. Soon, Phœnicia and Greece were to reach her from the south, soon after that Rome was to stamp her once for all with the stamp of Roman citizenship; and in the intervals between these events the old, almost vanished culture doubtless lingered in the caves and river-beds, handed on something of its great tradition, kept alive, in the hidden nooks which cold and savages spared, little hearths of artistic vitality.

It would appear that all the while people went on obscurely modelling clay, carving horn and scratching drawings on the walls of just such river-cliff houses as the peasants of Burgundy live in to this day, thus nursing the faint embers of tradition that were to leap into beauty at the touch of Greece and Rome. And even if it seems fanciful to believe that the actual descendants of the cave-painters survived there can be little doubt that their art, or its memory, was transmitted. If even this link with the past seems too slight to be worth counting, the straight descent of French civilisation from the ancient Mediterranean culture which penetrated her by the Rhone and Spain and the Alps would explain the ripeness and the continuity of her social life. By her geographic position she seemed destined to centralise and cherish the scattered fires of these old societies.

What is true of plastic art must of course be true of the general culture it implies. The people of France went on living in France, surviving cataclysms, perpetuating traditions, handing down and down and down certain ways of ploughing and sowing and vine-dressing and dyeing and tanning and working and hoarding, in the same valleys and on the same river-banks as their immemorially remote predecessors.

Could anything be in greater contrast to the sudden uprooting of our American ancestors and their violent cutting off from all their past, when they set out to create a new state in a new hemisphere, in a new climate, and out of new materials?

How little the old peasant-tradition of rural England lingered among the uprooted colonists, who had to change so abruptly all their agricultural and domestic habits, is shown in the prompt disappearance from our impoverished American vocabulary of nearly all the old English words relating to fields and woods. What has become, in America, of the copse, the spinney, the hedgerow, the dale, the vale, the weald? We have reduced all timber to "woods," and, even that plural appearing excessive, one hears Americans who ought to know better speak of "a woods," as though the familiar word has lost part of its meaning to them.