“And they are the pleasantest company.”
“Certainly,” answered he, “that is so.”
“And what adds so much to the attractiveness of their conversation,” I continued, “is their delicate wit and keen perception of irony.”
I confess that after I had made this outrageous speech I shook in my shoes and looked down at my plate. I ought never to have said it, and indeed I would not have said it if he had not led me on until it became irresistible. But there was no occasion for alarm. When I raised my eyes to my neighbor’s face I found it irradiated with smiles. He laid his hand on my arm quite affectionately.
“What you say is perfectly true,” he cried; “but do you know you are the very first stranger I have ever met who has had the sense to discover it?”
And then he explained to me that the Germans were absurdly considered by Frenchmen and other superficial observers to be a rather dull-witted and heavy race.
Now I really do not see how any one is to help liking a nation so happily self-complacent. The Prussians are said to be arrogant and overbearing; but I don’t think they are so, unless they are rubbed the wrong way; and what pleasure is there in rubbing people the wrong way? When Victor Hugo announces that France is supreme among nations, when he invites us to worship the light that emanates from the holy city of Paris, and hints that we might do well to worship also the proclaimer of that light, we are half shocked and half incredulous. The bombast seems too exaggerated to be sincere; it has the air of challenging and expecting contradiction. We find it impossible to believe that any sane man can really mean much of what this great poet tells us that he means. French vanity—and Victor Hugo, whether at his highest or at his lowest, is always essentially French—is not amusing. It is the kind of vanity which is painful to witness, and which cannot but be degrading to those who allow themselves to give way to it. But in the placid North German self-approval there is a child-like element, which is not unpleasing nor even wholly undignified. It may provoke a smile; but the smile is a friendly one. These excellent stout professors and bearded warriors who are so thoroughly pleased with themselves, and who never suspect that anybody can be laughing at them, command our sympathies—perhaps because John Bull himself is not quite a stranger to the sensations that they experience.
Yet, when all is said and done, John Bull remains John Bull. German philosophy, French wit, American acuteness, the “garbo of the Italians”—these things are not for him, nor is he specially desirous of assimilating them. He is as God made him, and has an impression that worse types have been created. At the bottom of his heart—though he no longer speaks it out as freely as of yore—there still lurks the old contempt for “foreigners.” As I have already made so bold as to say, I do not think that the hustle and bustle of the present age have brought him any clearer comprehension of these foreigners than his forefathers possessed, or that the advent of the universal republic has been at all hastened by the rise of democracy and the triumph of steam. Certainly all men are human, and all dogs are dogs; but you will not convert a bulldog into a setter by taking him out shooting, nor a mastiff into a spaniel by keeping them in one kennel. It is doubtless well that those who own a large number of dogs should encourage familiarity among them, and restrain them from delighting to bark and bite, and it might also be a good thing to induce them, if possible, to recognise each others respective utilities. But they never do recognise these. On the contrary, they contemplate one another’s performances with the deepest disdain, and if we could see into the workings of their canine minds we should very likely discover that each is perfectly satisfied with himself, and as convinced that his breed is superior to all others as Victor Hugo is that Paris is the light of the world.
Recent inventions have dealt some heavy blows at time and space, but have not as yet done much towards abolishing national distinctions of character. One result of them, as melancholy as it is inevitable, is the slow vanishing of the picturesque. The period of general dead-level has set in; old customs have fallen into abeyance and old costumes are being laid aside. The “Ranz des Vaches” no longer echoes among the Swiss mountains; the Spanish sombrero has been discarded in favor of a chimney-pot hat; the Hungarian nobles reserve their magnificent frippery for rare state occasions, and the black coat, deemed so significant a sign of the times by Alfred de Musset, is everywhere replacing the gay clothing of a less material era. But, for all that, mastiffs are mastiffs and spaniels spaniels. Democracy claims to be cosmopolitan: perhaps some of us may live long enough to see what the boast is worth. If it be permitted to ground a prophecy upon the lessons of history, we may say that co-operation is possible only so long as interests are identical, and that the mainspring of all human collective action is, and will be, nothing more or less than that selfishness which, as Lord Beaconsfield once told us, is another word for patriotism.—Cornhill Magazine.