Good and evil sides of French gaiety.
What we may reasonably be reproached with is not our love for art and science, but our love for a facile art and a superficial science. We may rightfully be reproached also with a somewhat Attic lightness, a lack of perseverance and of seriousness. Naturally, one does not mean that we should imitate the superstitious Slave who attributes an involuntary burst of laughter to the devil, and who, after having laughed, expectorates indignantly to exorcise the sweet spirit of gaiety whom he regards as a spirit of evil. If French gaiety is one of our weaknesses it is also one of the elements of our national strength; but let us be quite clear about the sense to be put upon the word. The gaiety which is genuine and charming consists simply in high-heartedness and vivacity of mind. One’s courage is strong enough, confident enough, to be able to afford not to look at things on their painful side. Everything has two handles, says the Greek sage; and by one handle it is light and easy to manage; it is by that handle that the French are fond of taking destiny and fortune. Gaiety of that kind is simply a form of hope; thoughts which come from the heart, great thoughts are often the most smiling. What one calls aptness, that swift fitness and appropriateness in which the French delight, is itself an evidence of mental detachment, an affirmation to the effect that things which appeared at first so enormous really possess slight importance, a mark of high courage in the face of disaster; it is simply a less theatrical rendering of the ancient non dolet. A French officer, in a guerilla war (in New Caledonia, I think), felt himself struck in the breast by a bullet; “Well aimed, for a savage,” he said, as he fell. That is French heroism; not going the length of ignoring the fact, but maintaining a just appreciation of it as it is. But there is a gaiety that cannot be too much blamed or too steadily repressed, a gaiety undistinguished by subtlety or high courage, and one to which other peoples are quite as inclined as the French, the gross laugh which follows horse-play like an echo, and inhabits taverns and cafés chantants. That species of gaiety is the vicious gaiety of peasants out for a holiday, of commercial travellers at dinner. It is undeniable that the Gaul has a weakness for gaudriole. I know a promising young physician who was obliged to leave Paris, where he had won a name as a hospital surgeon, obliged to quit work and to go to a distant country for his health; in a moment of expansion he confided to me that what he regretted most were the jolly evenings at the Palais-Royal. There are thousands of distinguished young men subjected to this species of education, of discipline in “chaff,” and it is inevitable that it should result in a loss, for them, of something that is fine. The Palais-Royal, the vaudeville, cafés-concerts are places which corrupt the taste as the palate is corrupted by drinking wood eau-de-vie. It is difficult to be a really remarkable man and at the same time to possess a serious taste for the gross pleasantry of second-class theatres. The two are irreconcilable. And it is a melancholy thing to think that the pick of the young men of France should be exposed to precisely that influence, should pass a number of years in such an environment and lose their taste as surely as their ear for music. Whatever is anti-æsthetic in laughter is degrading; witticisms must be spiritual, must really expand the heart with healthy mirth; laughter should positively embellish the face. Nihil inepto risu ineptius est; the reason is that in such cases laughter is simply an explosion of silliness. The wise man, says the Bible, laughs with an inner laugh. Laughter should illuminate and not disfigure the visage, because it reveals the soul, and the soul should be beautiful, should resemble an outburst of frankness, of sincerity. The charm of laughter lies, in a great measure, in the sincerity of the joy which renders us, for the time being, transparent to those about us. Human thought and the human heart, with the entire world that they contain, may be embodied in a tear.
Parisian wit an epitome of all that is evil in French gaiety.
Parisian wit, which in some quarters is regarded as the very type and ideal of French wit, is in some respects no more than an epitome of its defects; among the working classes it consists in chaff, what they call blague; among the upper classes it consists in a superficial varnish, an inability to fix the mind on a logical succession of ideas. In the salon frivolity is a convention, it has positively attained the height of being good manners. My attention was attracted a minute ago by a fly buzzing about my window, its transparent wings described curve after curve on the luminous surface that arrested its flight. Its graceful and futile progress reminded me of the conversation of a lady to whom I had just been listening in the salon, and who for an hour had described a series of scarcely larger circles, upon the surfaces of everything, and beneath the surface of nothing. The whole world of Parisian frivolity was typefied by the shimmering flight of the fly on the window-pane, ignorant of the open air, playing with stray rays of the great sun toward which it was unable to mount.
True inwardness.
But must one be serious to the point of ennui? Certainly not, it is not necessary. It does not belong to our temperament. Let us recognize, however, that to be enduring of ennui is a great power; it is the secret of slow, patient, painstaking labour, which spares no detail, which guarantees solidity in the foundations and remote and hidden elements of knowledge; it is the secret of the superiority of men of northern race over men of southern. In the south, owing to an impatience of what is tedious, there is manifested an inability to stick to one thing, to follow one pursuit, to venture into the darkness beyond where the light stops. Tasks pursued with obstinacy in the certitude of an ultimate success, indefatigable labour at the desk, reading understood as the absolute appropriation of every word and thought between the covers of the book in hand, are unknown to those superficial intelligences which are quick to take a birds-eye view of a subject in its entirety, but are impatient of details and of course among others of essential details. There are races of men who are incapable of anything exacting more attention than “skimming”; they skim their books, they skim the world, they turn the leaves of life. Neither true art nor true science is within their reach. “Live inwardly,” says the “Imitation.” It is an ideal which Frenchmen, who are particularly inclined to lose themselves in external details, might well pursue. But true inwardness does not necessarily consist in sterile meditation on a dogma. “Live inwardly” should signify, be serious, be yourself, be original, independent, and free; bestir your own powers of thought, take a pleasure in developing them and yourself; bloom inwardly like certain plants which lock up within themselves their pollen, their perfume, their beauty; but give out your fruit. The natural expansiveness which leads a Frenchman to be so communicative is one of his good qualities; the bad side of it, where there is a bad side, consists simply in not having anything serious to communicate.
Remedy for French levity.
Our defects are curable, and their remedy does not lie in a sort of religious asceticism, but in a more profound and complete understanding of the great objects of love that have always attracted the French mind—science, art, law, liberty, universal fraternity. There is a Japanese legend of a young girl who procured some flower seeds and was surprised to find them nothing but little black prickly grains; she offered them to her playmates, who would not accept them; then she sowed them, in some anxiety as to the results, and by and by a superb flower sprang from every grain and all her playmates begged for the seeds that they had refused. Philosophic and scientific truths are just such seeds; they are unattractive at first, but the day will come when mankind will prize them at their just worth.