Devotion to Barbaric Sports.
Contempt for Trade and Commerce.
Liberty of Primæval Instincts.
Passing from ordinary education to that higher culture which can only be attained by a sedulous attachment to intellectual pursuits in mature life, I should say that here, again, mental elevation has nothing to do with social rank. In France the time is at hand, if it has not already arrived, when high culture may be taken as evidence that its possessor does not belong to the aristocracy. Speaking for the present of France only, I may offer two or three reasons in explanation of this curious anomaly. The French aristocracy, disdaining all work that is remunerative, does not enter the professions, and so misses the culture that the professions give. But, beyond this, the French aristocracy is unaccustomed to work of any kind, and as culture is usually unattainable without work, and as there is not even a high standard of early education in that aristocracy, it passes its time in ways that do not tend to culture except so far as polite and graceful social intercourse favours it. If the reader wishes to be just he will not think of the minor French rural aristocracy as “a class of rakes,” but as a very numerous class of more or less wealthy idlers, living half the year on their estates, four months in some country town, and a month or two at Paris or the sea-side. Their life is healthy and natural for the most part, and they often attain a great age; but they are, as a class, much more addicted to rural sports than to intellectual or artistic pursuits of any kind. There are exceptions, of course, yet even the exceptions suffer from the benumbing influence of their surroundings, and usually stop short of any noteworthy attainment. I may repeat in this place a remark made to me by an observant Frenchman. He said, “In our country the men who cultivate themselves with effect are more frequently retired tradesmen than men born to independence. The retired tradesman has habits of industry which he applies to any pursuit that he takes up, and the want of these habits is fatal to the aristocrat.” Another Frenchman, himself a man of culture, coincided, quite independently, with Matthew Arnold’s well-known description of another aristocracy. “It is a strange result of the wealth and intelligence of the modern world,” he said, “to give the upper classes the pursuits of the savage without the necessity which is his excuse for them. Our country gentlemen are not our intellectual leaders, they live a sort of perfected barbaric life. They are barbarians armed with the complicated appliances of civilisation. Their greatest glory is to have killed a large number of big wild boars, and they exhibit the heads as trophies. Another savage characteristic is that they despise trade and commerce, and consider all professions beneath them except that of the warrior. Their ideas of government by the simple authority of a despotic chief are also those of primitive man; they have not patience to endure the delays and the complicated action of parliamentary institutions. In a word, the liberty that wealth gives in the modern world means for them the liberty of the primæval instincts.”
PART II
PATRIOTISM
CHAPTER I
PATRIOTIC TENDERNESS
Tenderness has increased in France and diminished in England.
The tender feeling of patriotism, as distinguished from the proud, is more general in France than in England, and it has increased in France during the last twenty years, whilst it has diminished in England in the course of a generation, or during the transition from one generation to another.
Causes of the Difference.
This difference and these changes are due to causes that may easily be seen in operation. We may be able to fix upon some of them, and whilst we are so occupied the reader is especially requested to bear in mind that the tenderness of patriotism is not the whole of patriotism, and that the Englishman who has little tenderness may be as patriotic in other ways as the Frenchman who has more.