Another great change of custom in England, separating her from France, is of quite modern introduction. There was a time when both countries were total abstainers from tea-drinking, and, so far, exactly alike; now England is a great tea-drinking country and France is not. Here is a new subject on which they are not in sympathy. It may seem a trifle; but has the reader ever observed Englishwomen in France deprived of tea or supplied with the beverage in a weaker condition than they like? At such times they have a very low opinion of Gallic civilisation. Far-seeing Englishwomen who are accustomed to the continent take their own teapots with their private supplies, and make the indispensable decoction themselves. When drinking it they feel like Christians in a pagan land. Is that nothing? Does it not produce a perceptible sense of estrangement from the French? Tea-drinking has now become one of those immensely important customs, like smoking and coffee in the East, that have connected themselves with the amenities of human intercourse, and to brew your cup in the solitude of a foreign hotel is to feel yourself an alien. Yet how long is it since the English began to drink tea? They began tasting it experimentally, as a few Englishmen now smoke hashish, about the middle of the seventeenth century. Compared with ale and wine, it is a novelty. The greatest of Englishwomen, Queen Elizabeth, who was of English blood by father and mother, and thoroughly national, never drank a cup of tea in her life, and did her work energetically without it.
The Peculiarly English Meals.
The use of tea has produced a special meal in the English middle classes which is unknown in France as it was unknown in England two hundred years ago. The French way of living, under other names, bears a near resemblance to old English habits. The déjeuner à la fourchette is the early dinner, the dîner is the supper. The French first breakfast is modern, when café au lait is taken, but great numbers of French people take soup or a glass of white wine with a crust of bread, and many take nothing at all. Breakfast and tea are the peculiarly English meals, and they are modern. The one great English innovation which the French have never been able to accept is that of eating salty and greasy food, such as fried bacon, and drinking hot and sweet tea or coffee at the same time.
The Beard and Moustache.
Shaving.
As an example of an old English fashion that is now looked upon as French, I may mention the way of treating the beard adopted by Napoleon III., and in imitation of him by many French soldiers and civilians. The moustache in combination with the barbiche was looked upon as a French fashion by the English, and very few contemporary Englishmen adopted it for that reason. They forgot that it was an old English fashion,—much older than the pair of whiskers with the shaven chin and upper lip which used to be looked upon as national in the highest degree. At the same time the English did not notice that the way of shaving the chin and upper lip which they believed to be so much the national mark of an Englishman was a rigorous contemporary French fashion for two classes, namely, magistrates (with barristers) and domestic servants. This is now somewhat relaxed, the tendency in both nations being towards complete liberty about the wearing of the beard.
CHAPTER II
COMFORT
The English hardy yet Comfort-loving.
There seems to be a contradiction in the English character on this very important subject, for the English are at the same time one of the hardiest peoples in the world and quite the most self-indulgent up to that point which is defined by the national word “comfort.”
Real and Ideal Comfort.