Increase of Luxury an Impediment to Hospitality.
I have said elsewhere that the increase of luxury in France acts as a restraint upon hospitality. People shrink from the disturbance, the trouble, and the expense of the state dinner, and so they end by giving no dinners at all. In former times hospitality was more a thing of the heart than of the purse, more of gaiety than ceremony, and was so common as to be a weekly, and in some houses almost a daily habit. Now it is a solemn function occurring at rare intervals.
Want of Intercourse amongst the French Peasantry.
My attention has been drawn by the French themselves to the decline of hospitality amongst the peasantry. I believe that this varies greatly in different parts of France. So far as I have been able to observe, the peasants never invite each other except to marriage-feasts, and then their hospitality is excessive and extravagant. In my neighbourhood, not only do the peasants abstain from invitations, they do not even meet for an evening’s chat in each other’s houses. The farm-houses may be a mile from each other by measurement; socially, they are a hundred miles apart.
The Club and the Cercle.
The club is, in a certain sense, a more sociable institution in France than in England. It exists in France for conversation and gambling, in England for the individual convenience of the members who may want a rest in an easy-chair with a newspaper or a review, or who desire a convenient place for dining in a kind of semi-privacy. The purpose of the English club is answered in some degree by the cafés and restaurants in France. They have no privacy, but they are to be found everywhere. The difference of title between “club” and “cercle” is an indication in itself. “Club” implies an association to meet common expenses for individual convenience, cercle is a circle of talkers.
Effects of Religious and Political Bigotry.
Internal Division in France and England.
Effects of Division in the Provinces.
The effects of religious and political bigotry in restricting social intercourse are lamentable enough in both countries, and especially because the more intercourse is needed the less it is likely to take place. Real toleration of differences in opinion is possible only for a few. It comes from largeness of mind, but there are few large minds. It is dictated by the highest reason, but few people are reasonable. The ordinary and practical social solution of the difficulty is to break off intercourse when differences of opinion manifest themselves. In this way it comes to pass, almost involuntarily, and as if by the operation of a natural law, that people who visit together have usually the same political and religious opinions, or, at least, profess them, which is equally conducive to harmony. And the few who have true liberality of sentiment, and could bear with the gentle and considerate expression of a different opinion, are often compelled to adopt the usual custom that they may not have to resent rudeness. So it happens that people in the same nation are divided even more trenchantly than if they belonged to different nations, and you find English people who will receive Catholic foreigners but not an English dissenter, or French people who will receive Americans but not a French republican. The evil resulting from this increases with the smallness of the place. In London and Paris it condemns nobody to solitude, because every one may find others who agree with him, but in provincial towns where petty class distinctions restrict people already to a very limited circle they may find themselves entirely shut out from social intercourse if they are even suspected of holding opinions not tolerated there. A want of delicacy and of hospitable feeling may even permit people to attack the known opinions of a guest at their own table, a proceeding not unexampled in civilised countries, though it would be thought barbarous in the tent of a nomadic Arab. Or, without going so far as that, a host, in mere weakness, may fail to defend his guest because it would be impossible to do that without establishing the forbidden principle that every one has a right to his own views.