French Respect and Indifference.
Matthew Arnold.
It is sometimes asserted, and perhaps still more generally believed, that the sentiment of the poor towards the rich is one of adoration in England and of hatred in France. The truth about English sentiment I have endeavoured, in a general way, to tell. The peculiar advantage of wealth in England is that it so soon confers caste—that the rich are so soon believed to have rank, even without parchments and the royal signature. They become “gentlefolks,” when in France they would be only “gros bourgeois.” The French sentiment about wealth varies generally between a kind of respect that is not at all servile, and unfeigned indifference. The English have a great difficulty in understanding this indifference. I find, for instance, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s article in the Nineteenth Century for February 1885, the statement about France that “wealth creates the most savage enmity there, because it is conceived as a means for gratifying appetites of the most selfish and vile kind.” There may, of course, be instances of such feeling amongst poor French anarchists and radicals. It exists even in England itself, and was expressed long ago with sufficient vigour by a poet of the people in fiery stanzas all ending with the refrain—
Gerald Massey.
“Our Sons are the rich men’s Serfs by day,
And our daughters his Slaves by night.”
Those two lines express exactly the sentiment attributed by Mr. Arnold to the French; the last of them, especially, is a precise translation into poetic form of what Mr. Arnold says about “gratifying appetites of the most selfish and vile kind.”[77]
When I read very comprehensive statements I always adopt the rather prosaic method of looking back on my own experience, if I have any experience that can throw light upon the subject. In this case, having lived much in the country, both in England and France, and known poor and rich people in the numerical proportion that they bear to one another in real life, I may perhaps be accepted as a competent witness. My testimony is as follows.
The Author’s Testimony.
Lancashire.