Of their want of ideal passion, or of the poetry of painting, and tendency to turn every thing either into comic or tragic pantomime, the picture of Cain after the Murder of Abel, by Paul Guerin, is a striking example. This composition does not want power. It would be disingenuous to say so. The artist has done what he meant in it. What, then, has he expressed? The rage of a wild beast, or of a maniac gnashing his teeth, and rushing headlong down a precipice to give vent to a momentary frenzy; not the fixed inward anguish of a man, withered by the curse of his Maker, and driven out into the wide universe with despair and solitude and unavailing remorse for his portion. The face of his wife, who appears crouched behind him, possesses great beauty and sweetness. But the sweetness and beauty are kept quite distinct. That is, grief absorbs some of the features, while others retain all their softness and serenity. This hypercriticism would not have been possible, if the painter had studied the expression of grief in nature. But he took a plaster-model, and tried to melt it into becoming woe!
I have said enough to explain my objections to the grand style of French art; and I am sure I do not wish to pursue so unpleasant a subject any farther. I only wish to hint to my countrymen some excuse for not admiring these pictures, and to satisfy their neighbours that our want of enthusiasm is not wholly owing to barbarism and blindness to merit. It may be asked then, ‘Is there nothing to praise in this collection?’ Far from it. There are many things excellent and admirable, with the drawbacks already stated, and some others that are free from them. There is Le Thiere’s picture of the Judgment of Brutus; a manly, solid, and powerful composition, which was exhibited some years ago in London, and is, I think, decidedly superior to any of our West’s. In Horace Vernet’s Massacre of the Mamelukes, no English critic will deny the expression of gloomy ferocity in the countenance of the Sultan, or refuse to extol the painting of the drapery of the Negro, with his back to the spectator, which is, perhaps, equal to any thing of the Venetian School, and done (for a wager) from real drapery. Is not ‘the human face divine’ as well worth studying in the original as the dyes and texture of a tunic? A small picture, by Delacroix, taken from the Inferno, Virgil and Dante in the boat, is truly picturesque in the composition and the effect, and shews a real eye for Rubens and for nature. The forms project, the colours are thrown into masses. Gerard’s Cupid and Psyche is a beautiful little picture, and is indeed as beautiful, both in composition and expression, as any thing of the kind can well be imagined; I mean, that it is done in its essential principles as a design from or for sculpture. The productions of the French school make better prints than pictures. Yet the best of them look like engravings from antique groups or cameos.[[23]] There is also a set of small pictures by Ducis, explaining the effects of Love on the study of Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry, taken from appropriate subjects, and elegantly executed. Here French art appears in its natural character again, courtly and polished, and is proportionably attractive. Perhaps it had better lay aside the club of Hercules, and take up the distaff of Omphale; and then the women might fairly beat the men out of the field, as they threaten almost to do at present. The French excel in pieces of light gallantry and domestic humour, as the English do in interiors and pig-styes. This appears to me the comparative merit and real bias of the two nations, in what relates to the productions of the pencil; but both will scorn the compliment, and one of them may write over the doors of their Academies of Art—‘Magnis excidit ausis.’ The other cannot even say so much.
CHAPTER VIII
NATIONAL ANTIPATHIES
The prejudice we entertain against foreigners is not in the first instance owing to any ill-will we bear them, so much as to the untractableness of the imagination, which cannot admit two standards of moral value according to circumstances, but is puzzled by the diversity of manners and character it observes, and made uneasy in its estimate of the propriety and excellence of its own. It seems that others ought to conform to our way of thinking, or we to theirs; and as neither party is inclined to give up their peculiarities, we cut the knot by hating those who remind us of them. We get rid of any idle, half-formed, teazing, irksome sense of obligation to sympathise with or meet foreigners half way, by making the breach as wide as possible, and treating them as an inferior species of beings to ourselves. We become enemies, because we cannot be friends. Our self-love is annoyed by whatever creates a suspicion of our being in the wrong; and only recovers its level by setting down all those who differ from us as thoroughly odious and contemptible.
It is this consideration which makes the good qualities of other nations, in which they excel us, no set-off to their bad ones, in which they fall short of us; nay, we can forgive the last much sooner than the first. The French being a dirty people is a complaint we very often bring against them. This objection alone, however, would give us very little disturbance; we might make a wry face, an exclamation, and laugh it off. But when we find that they are lively, agreeable, and good-humoured in spite of their dirt, we then know not what to make of it. We are angry at seeing them enjoy themselves in circumstances in which we should feel so uncomfortable; we are baulked of the advantage we had promised ourselves over them, and make up for the disappointment by despising them heartily, as a people callous and insensible to every thing like common decency. In reading Captain Parry’s account of the Esquimaux Indian woman, who so dexterously trimmed his lamp by licking up half the train-oil, and smearing her face and fingers all over with the grease, we barely smile at this trait of barbarism. It does not provoke a serious thought; for it does not stagger us in our opinion of ourselves. But should a fine Parisian lady do the same thing (or something like it) in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the infinite superiority of the French in delicacy and refinement, we should hardly restrain our astonishment at the mixture of incorrigible grossness and vanity. Unable to answer her arguments, we should begin to hate her person: her gaiety and wit, which had probably delighted us before, would be changed into forwardness, flippancy, and impertinence; from seeing it united with so many accomplishments, we should be led to doubt whether sluttishness was not a virtue, and should remove the doubt out of court by indulging a feeling of private resentment, and resorting to some epithet of national abuse. The mind wishes to pass an act of uniformity for all its judgments: in defiance of every day’s experience, it will have things of a piece, and where it cannot have every thing right or its own way, is determined to have it all wrong.
A Frenchman, we will say, drops what we think a frivolous remark, which excites in us some slight degree of impatience: presently after, he makes a shrewd, sensible observation. This rather aggravates the mischief, than mends it; for it throws us out in our calculations, and confounds the distinction between sense and nonsense in our minds. A volley of unmeaning declamation or frothy impertinence causes us less chagrin than a single word that overturns some assertion we had made, or puts us under the necessity of reversing, or imposes on us the still more unwelcome task of revising our conclusions. It is easy in this case to save ourselves the trouble by calling our antagonist knave or fool; and the temptation is too strong, when we have a whole host of national prejudices at our back to justify us in so concise and satisfactory a mode of reasoning. A greater fund of vivacity and agreeable qualities in our neighbours is not sure to excite simple gratitude or admiration; it much oftener excites envy, and we are uneasy till we have quieted the sense of our deficiency by construing the liveliness of temper or invention, with which we cannot keep pace, into an excess of levity, and the continued flow of animal spirits into a species of intoxication or insanity. Because the French are animated and full of gesticulation, they are a theatrical people; if they smile and are polite, they are like monkeys—an idea an Englishman never has out of his head, and it is well if he can keep it between his lips.[[24]] No one assuredly would appear dull and awkward, who can help it. Many an English belle, who figures at home in the first circles of fashion and is admired for her airy, thoughtless volubility, is struck dumb, and looks a mere dowdy (as if it were a voluntary or assumed transformation of character) the moment she sets foot on French ground; and the whispered sounds, lourde or elle n’est pas spirituelle, lingering in her ears, will not induce her to dissuade her husband (if he is a Lord or Member of Parliament) from voting for a French war, and are answered by the thunders of our cannon on the French coast! We even quarrel with the beauty of French women, because it is not English. If their features are regular, we find fault with their complexions; and as to their expression, we grow tired of that eternal smile upon their faces; though their teeth are white, why should they be always shewing them? Their eyes have an unpleasant glitter about them; and their eye-brows, which are frequently black and arched, are painted and put on! In short, no individual, no nation is liked by another for the advantages it possesses over it in wit or wisdom, in happiness or virtue. We despise others for their inferiority, we hate them for their superiority; and I see no likelihood of an accommodation at this rate. The English go abroad; and when they come back, they brood over the civilities or the insults they have received with equal discontent. The gaiety of the Continent has thrown an additional damp upon their native air, and they wish to clear it by setting fire to a foreign town or blowing up a foreign citadel. We are then easy and comfortable for a while. We think we can do something, that is, violence and wrong; and should others talk of retaliating, we say with Lord Bathurst, ‘Let them come!—our fingers tingling for the fray, and finding that nothing rouses us from our habitual stupor like hard blows. Defeated in the arts of peace, we get in good humour with ourselves by trying those of war. Ashamed to accost a lady, we dare face a bastion—without spirit to hold up our heads, we are too obstinate to turn our backs—and give ourselves credit for being the greatest nation in the world, because our Jack Tars (who defend the wooden walls of Old England—the same that we afterwards see with sore arms and wooden legs, begging and bawling about our streets) are the greatest blackguards on the face of the globe; because our Life Guardsmen, who have no brains to lose, are willing to have them knocked out, and because with the incessant noise and stir of our steam-engines and spinning-jennies (for having no wish to enjoy, we are glad to work ourselves to death) we can afford to pay all costs!
What makes the matter worse, is the idle way in which we abstract upon one another’s characters. We are struck only with the differences, and leave the common qualities out of the question. This renders a mutual understanding hopeless. We put the exceptions for the rule. If we meet with any thing odd and absurd in France, it is immediately set down as French and characteristic of the country, though we meet with a thousand odd and disagreeable things every day in England (that we never met before) without taking any notice of them. There is a wonderful keeping in our prejudices; we reason as consistently as absurdly upon the confined notions we have taken up. We put the good, wholesome, hearty, respectable qualities into one heap and call it English, and the bad, unwholesome, frivolous, and contemptible ones into another heap, and call it French; and whatever does not answer to this pretended sample, we reject as spurious and partial evidence. Our coxcomb conceit stands over the different races of mankind, like a smart serjeant of a regiment, and drills them into a pitiful uniformity, we ourselves being picked out as the élite du corps, and the rest of the world forming the forlorn hope of humanity. One would suppose, to judge from the conversation of the two nations, that all Frenchmen were alike, and that all Englishmen were personified by a particular individual, nicknamed John Bull. The French have no idea that there is any thing in England but roast-beef and plum-pudding, and a number of round, red faces, growing fat and stupid upon such kind of fare; while our traditional notion of the French is that of soup-maigre and wooden shoes, and a set of scare-crow figures corresponding to them. All classes of society and differences of character are by this unfair process consolidated into a sturdy, surly English yeoman on the one side of the Channel, or are boiled down and evaporate into a shivering, chattering valet-de-chambre, or miserable half-starved peasant on the other. It is a pleasant way of settling accounts and taking what we please for granted. It is a very old method of philosophizing, and one that is quite likely to last!
If we see a little old hump-backed withered Frenchman about five feet high, tottering on before us on a pair of spindle-shanks, with white thread stockings, a shabby great-coat, and his hair done up into a queue, his face dry, grey, and pinched up, his cheeks without blood in them, his eyes without lustre, and his body twisted like a corkscrew, we point to this grotesque figure as a true Frenchman, as the very essence of a Parisian, and an edifying vestige of the ancient régime and of the last age, before the French character was sophisticated. It does not signify that just before we had passed a bluff, red-faced, jolly-looking coachman or countryman, six feet four inches high, having limbs in proportion, and able to eat up any two ordinary Englishmen. This thumping make-weight is thrown out of the scale, because it does not help out our argument, or confirm our prejudices. This huge, raw-boned, heavy, knock-kneed, well-fed, shining-faced churl makes no impression on our minds, because he is not French, according to our idea of the word; or we pass him over under the pretext that he ought to be an Englishman. But the other extreme we seize upon with avidity and delight; we dandle it, we doat upon it, we make a puppet of it to the imagination; we speak of it with glee, we quote it as a text, we try to make a caricature of it; our pens itch to describe it as a complete specimen of the French nation, and as a convincing and satisfactory proof, that the English are the only people who are of sound mind and body, strong wind and limb, and free from the infirmities of a puny constitution, affectation, and old age! An old woman in France, with wrinkles and a high-plaited cap, strikes us as being quite French, as if the old women in England did not wear night-caps, and were not wrinkled. In passing along the streets, or through the walks near Paris, we continually meet a gentleman and lady whom we take for English, and they turn out to be French; or we fancy that they are French, and we find on a nearer approach, or from hearing them speak, that they are English. This does not at all satisfy us that there is no such marked difference between the two nations as we are led to expect; but we fasten on the first lusus naturæ we can find out as a striking representative of the universal French nation, and chuckle over and almost hug him to our bosoms as having kindly come to the relief of our wavering prejudices, and as an undoubted proof of our superiority to such a set of abortions as this, and of our right to insult and lord it over them at pleasure! If an object of this kind (as it sometimes happens) asks charity with an air of briskness and politesse, and does not seem quite so wretched as we would have him, this is a further confirmation of our theory of the national conceit and self-sufficiency; and his cheerfulness and content under deformity and poverty are added to his catalogue of crimes![[25]] We have a very old and ridiculous fancy in England, that all Frenchmen are or ought to be lean, and their women short and crooked; and when we see a great, fat, greasy Frenchman waddling along and ready to burst with good living, we get off by saying that it is an unwholesome kind of fat; or, if a Frenchwoman happens to be tall and straight, we immediately take a disgust at her masculine looks, and ask if all the women in France are giantesses?
It is strange we cannot let other people alone who concern themselves so little about us. Why measure them by our standard? Can we allow nothing to exist for which we cannot account, or to be right which has not our previous sanction? The difficulty seems to be to suspend our judgments, or to suppose a variety of causes to produce a variety of effects. All men must be alike—all Frenchmen must be alike. This is a portable theory, and suits our indolence well. But, if they do not happen to come exactly into our terms, we are angry, and transform them into beasts. Our first error lies in expecting a number of different things to tally with an abstract idea, or general denomination, and we next stigmatize every deviation from this standard by a nickname. A Spaniard, who has more gravity than an Englishman, is an owl; a Frenchman, who has less, is a monkey. I confess, this last simile sticks a good deal in my throat; and at times it requires a stretch of philosophy to keep it from rising to my lips. A walk on the Boulevards is not calculated to rid an Englishman of all his prejudices or of all his spleen. The resemblance to an English promenade afterwards makes the difference more mortifying. There is room to breathe, a footpath on each side of the road, and trees over your head. But presently the appearance of a Bartlemy-fair all the year round, the number of little shabby stalls, the old iron, pastry, and children’s toys; the little white lapdogs, with red eyes, combing and washing; the mud and the green trees, wafting alternate odours; the old women sitting like terra cotta figures; the passengers running up against you, (most of them so taken up with themselves that they seem like a crowd of absent people!) the noise, the bustle, the flutter, the hurry without visible object; the vivacity without intelligible meaning; the loud and incessant cry of ‘Messieurs’ from a bawling charlatan inviting you to some paltry, cheating game, and a broad stare or insignificant grin from the most ill-bred and ill-looking of the motley set at the appearance of an Englishman among them; all this jumble of little teazing, fantastical, disagreeable, chaotic sensations really puts one’s patience a little to the test, and throws one a little off one’s guard. I was in this humour the other day, and wanted some object to conduct off a superfluity of rising irritability, when, at a painted booth opposite, I saw a great lubberly boy in an ecstacy of satisfaction. He had on a red coat, a huge wig of coarse yellow hair, and with his hat was beating a monkey in the face, dressed en militaire—grinning, jabbering, laughing, screaming, frantic with delight at the piteous aspect and peevish gestures of the animal; while a tall showman, in a rusty blue coat and long pig-tail, (which might have been stolen from the monkey) looked on with severe complacency and a lofty pride in the bizarrerie, and the ‘mutually reflected charities’ of the scene. The trio (I am vexed to think it) massed themselves in my imagination, and I was not sorry to look upon them as a little national group, well-matched, and tricked out alike in pretensions to humanity.[[26]]