Scott.
In addition to these causes of variety there must ever remain the infinite differences of individual character. Shakespeare lived only in the English midlands, then scantily populated, and in the little London of his time. He had not travelled abroad, nor learned Italian,[89] nor talked like Milton with the literati of the Continent; he had not, like Spenser, lived in the north of England and in Ireland; yet the diversities of character in his plays are as numerous as the dramatis personæ. Scott lived at the northern end of the island, in or near a minor capital city; he could speak no foreign tongue,[90] he knew England and London only by brief occasional visits, and hardly anything of the Continent, yet his novels abound in a variety like that of Shakespeare. These writers got their knowledge of human nature from the variety visible around them. Imagine, then, what must be the presumptuous outrecuidance of the Frenchman who thinks that all the inhabitants of Great Britain have one character, and that he—the Frenchman—has got to the bottom of it, and can describe it, and tell his countrymen all about it, though he knows neither the land, nor the language, nor the people!
Besides the denial of any æsthetic quality to English art, we find in French critics a peculiar disposition to describe it as being all alike. Eminent English artists (Reynolds, Gainsborough, De Wint, Müller, Cox, and many others) have preferred breadth to detail, yet French critics delight in representing the English painter as studying nature with an opera-glass, and representing all details with a wearisome and unnatural minuteness. Patriotic hostility, in art criticism as in the criticism of character, closes the eyes to variety.
There used to be a ridiculous monument of the Duke of Wellington on Constitution Hill, and now there is a very noble one by Alfred Stevens in St. Paul’s. The same terms of utter contempt were applied by a French critic to the work of the man of genius that Frenchmen formerly applied to the monstrosity. He could not endure any kind of monument to Wellington.
CHAPTER II
VARIETY IN FRANCE
The Rue de Rivoli, the Champs Elysées, and the Boulevard des Italiens are familiar to the travelling English, but they know little of provincial France, and they reciprocate, in a great degree, the French indifference about provincial England. Both nations prefer travelling in Switzerland and Italy to visiting each other. This encourages the notion of uniformity which would be greatly modified by a more detailed acquaintance with the provinces.
Physical Geography.
Effects on Population.
The variety in the physical geography of France, and in the climate, would be enough already to lead one to expect a corresponding variety in human characteristics. We find in the British Islands that the mountaineers are unlike the inhabitants of the plains, that the people of the north, whose climate is severe, are in some respects unlike those of the south, whose climate is milder, that the maritime population differs from the inland population and the manufacturing from the agricultural. The Englishman is familiar with these contrasts in his own country, yet instead of expecting them in France he supposes French people to be all alike.
The Size of France.