Manners in the Eighteenth Century.
The French retain old Fashions.
In the eighteenth century manners were ceremonious in both countries. English people used “Sir” and “Madam,” they bowed and were punctilious, they went through complicated little performances of graceful attitudes and expressions. In the first half of the nineteenth century the English laid these old fashions aside and became simple in their manners. The French kept to the ancient ways, and so there was a great contrast. In the second half of the nineteenth century the French tendency is towards English simplicity, so that the two nations may ultimately be as near each other in simplicity as they were once in ceremony.
Politeness co-existing with Rudeness.
A Future of Mediocrity.
Another point of resemblance may deserve notice. When the English were very ceremonious and polite the ordinary manners of the nation were rude, with occasional explosions of coarse anger between gentlemen.[67] So the French have been, and still are, at once a very polite and a very rude nation. Their politeness and their rudeness are now decreasing together, which leads to the conclusion that ceremonious politeness is a defence against surrounding barbarism, and therefore the mark of an imperfect state of general civilisation. There may come, in the future, in both countries, a uniform mediocrity, when everybody will have tolerable manners, when a sort of informal serviceableness will be the universal rule, and all graces, delicacies, and refinements will be forgotten.
Mill on French and English Intercourse.
The reader may remember a passage in John Mill’s autobiography, where he makes a contrast between English and French manners in connection with his early residence in France at Sir Samuel Bentham’s house near Montpellier. “I even then felt,” he says, “though without stating it clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few or no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true, the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in ordinary intercourse, than in England; but the general habit of the people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper or middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.”
English Dignity.
English Hospitality.