French Openmindedness

“ OUR pale and empty college graduates ! ” (“ Nos pâles et vides bacheliers! ”)

This phrase, launched by Jules Lemaître in the great hall of the Sorbonne (June 5, 1898), is at once the catchword and the summary of a vigorous campaign now being carried on in France for educational reform. The paragraph in which the brusque but luminous phrase occurred is as follows : —

“ A boy of spirit and energy, robust, daring, expert in bodily exercises, fed on solid commercial studies, fortified by practical ideas, possessing a business or trade, and well read, because reading is pleasure, in the French classic authors, is a being more interesting, of greater moral worth, and, to speak plainly, more distinguished, than three quarters of ourpale and empty bachelors of arts.”

M. Victor Charbonnel, commenting on the significance of the Sorbonne utterance, wrote : “ Up to the present, there were, to deny the social grandeur and the literary importance of the bacealau-réat [bachelor’s degree], only certain revolutionary writers, certain university men of irreverent temper, and certain professors of Anglo-Saxon energy. Our mandarins maintained about the first degree of their mandarinat a prestige which tickled the vanity of the bourgeois. Monsieur Prudhomme, gently fooled by this prestige, promised his son the honor of ' pursuing his studies.’ And behold, one of the first mandarins of France cries out, ‘ Fraud!’ He dares to pretend that to 'pursue one’s studies ’ — that is to say, to learn Latin and Greek — is a useless torture and a ridiculous vanity. The benefit of Latin escapes him, mandarin though he is.”

Astounding as it is that the mandarin-academician Lemaître, Petronius Arbiter turned St. Paul, should have vented such a revolutionary sentiment in such a place, it is more astounding that a refined and serious audience should have approved it; the scathing fulmination being received, not as a death-dealing bolt, with the pallor of dazzled dismay, but with a flush of joy, as a ray of healthgiving sunlight. The explanation of the cordiality is to be found in the fact that the listeners had been partially prepared for Lemaître’s heresy by a long series of able if less authoritative criticisms of the efficiency of the college graduate in the world of affairs, and of the uselessness, as a preparation for life, of the course leading to the bachelor’s degree, — a series of which the periodical studies of M. Edmond Demolins (since grouped together under the title A Quoi Tient la Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons) were the finest flower. Demolins’ book assigns the growing inferiority of the French in industrial and commercial matters to a sad lack of individual initiative, and this lack of initiative to inadequate education. It suggests, by way of remedy, the transformation of the lycée into an institution which shall turn out men “well equipped for life ” (bien armés pour la vie) instead of pâles et vides bacheliers, and would supplant, to that end, the present rigid classical lycée curriculum by a more practical and flexible one.

The zeal of the apostles Demolins and Lemaître (social scientist and mandarin) seems in a fair way to achieve something tangible. Lemaître’s Sorbonne discourse so stirred the university world that more than one hundred of that year’s prize distribution addresses treated the question of educational reform. The government has interested itself in the movement to the extent of carrying on an exhaustive educational investigation through a special commission. M. Demolins, distrustful of governmental sincerity, fearful of the proverbial Platonism of investigating commissions, and impatient of the inevitable governmental deliberateness, has already opened a school in Normandy — M. Demolins’ prompt suiting of the action to the word has been playfully characterized as American — on the model of the English schools of Bedale and Abbotsholm. With the government officially seized with the matter, on the one hand, and a laboratory experiment in progress for the government to watch and shape its recommendations by, on the other, it only ought to depend, it would seem, on M. Demolins to demonstrate the value of his ideas to have them ultimately incorporated into the lycée system.

In this united and earnest attempt on the part of Frenchmen of widely different characters, antecedents, and social, political, and religious sympathies to improve the lycée, three traits are agreeably conspicuous : —

(1.) A willingness to admit home defects and weaknesses, — frankness.

(2.) A willingness to give foreign peoples full credit for their better qualities, — generosity.

(3.) A willingness, not for a moment to be confounded with a spirit of servile imitation, to learn from the better qualities of foreign peoples, — teachableness.

And the sum of these, the sum of the frankness, the generosity, and the teachableness, is the one trait which may be called, in the absence of a more accurate term, openmindedness.

The contemporary crusade just outlined is only the latest incident of a grand educational movement, dating from the close of the Franco-Prussian war, which has been marked throughout by an openmindedness both engaging and heroic.

“ We have something more important to do than to make a constitution,” declared M. Thiers, after the disaster of 1870: “ we must reorganize France.”

“ The nation that has the best schools,” added Jules Simon, “ is the first nation in the world. If it is not so to-day, it will be to-morrow.” “ We were defeated by the German schoolmaster,” some one said, and everybody’s lips repeated it.

France, which up to that time had had no common schools worthy of the name, straightway took the common school system of Germany as a point of departure (not as a model) for a system of her own. School attendance, up to a certain age, was made compulsory. Public schools were forcibly set up in all the towns, and normal colleges, to train teachers for the public schools, in all the departments. The relative inutility, the possible harmfulness even, of unsupported book-learning was recognized from the start, and all sorts of ingenious devices were employed against it. Gymnastics and manual training were introduced to fortify the body; school savings banks to inculcate thrift; school gardens to create an affection for the land ; and a course of ethical instruction to develop the moral nature. Special industrial, commercial, dairying, and agricultural schools, intended to make the boys efficient master workmen, merchants, farmers, and dairymen, and the girls capable domestic managers and independent breadwinners, were distributed judiciously over the area of France.

Notwithstanding various drawbacks, the net result of a quarter of a century of honest, persistent, well-directed effort is a closely articulated and truly national public school system, admitted by all wellinformed and impartial educators to be excellent, and pronounced by some the best in existence.

French scholarship was justly discredited during the latter days of the Empire ; in spite of a few commanding names, its inferiority to German scholarship was notorious. The humiliating truth was confessed, after the war, with complete and commendable grace and frankness. France set about winning a fair fame for herself in the company of the sages, and the rehabilitation of the university was undertaken in a large and teachable spirit. French educators studied German university methods officially and unofficially, on the ground. The Chamber, which might almost have been excused for skimping such a department at such a time, granted a university appropriation four times larger than had been granted in previous years, quite as if the hard and pressing realities of war indemnities and unprecedented public school taxes were unsubstantial fancies. Thanks to this high-minded outlook and far-seeing liberality, original research was stimulated by new honors and rewards ; new university buildings were erected, new libraries collected, new laboratories opened, new professorships founded and old ones strengthened. A brilliant renaissance succeeded. Intellectual France was literally reborn. Nowhere is learning fresher and lustier to-day, nowhere more aspiring and selfrenouncing. Scholars everywhere acknowledge the newly won prestige. " In the domain of the exact and experimental, of the historical, archæological, and economical sciences,” wrote a well-known German scholar recently, “ our western neighbors within the last quarter of a century have been active in a most remarkable degree.” And the special glory of the situation is that German seriousness, thoroughness, and profundity have been attained without the taking on of German fogginess, slovenliness, and uncouthness; without the sacrifice of a single iota of French clearness, luminousness, neatness, and perfection of literary form.

Another radical change in French policy dates from the close of the war, or very near it. Systematic scrutiny of the internal resources of France, of the colonial activity of rival powers, and of the field of European politics and France’s situation therein, having led French statesmen to conclude — whether rightly or wrongly only time can tell — that the prosperity of their country, if not her very existence, demanded colonial expansion, they proceeded with superb energy to take unto themselves vast domains in Asia, Africa, and the islands of the sea. If the complete and permanent success of the French colonial movement is as yet far from assured, it is not because the French have failed to make a serious study of the varied aspects of the colonial problem, not because they are unfamiliar with the methods of the successful colonizing nations, not because they are unwilling to draw lessons from their own experience and the experience of others, but because they are constitutionally ill suited to expatriation, and to the daring and gigantic commercial enterprises which seem to be the backbone of contemporary colonization.

The same sensitiveness to their own deficiencies and to the finer issues and richer activities of environing life, to the " best that is being thought, said, and done in the world,” which impelled the French, immediately after the war, to create the common school, re-create the university, and engage in colonizing, is now impelling them to several large undertakings, of which the chief is the reorganization of the government. Tired of unstable policies of reprisals, of riotous sessions of the Chambers, of interpellations of ministers upon matters of only local importance or of no importance, and of the consequent bewildering rise and fall of ministries, men of every shade of political belief institute courageous comparisons between the workings of their own constitution and those of the constitutions of other progressive peoples, and draw unflattering conclusions therefrom. They do not hesitate to declare their constitution so puerile, self-contradictory, and inadequate in its daily applications as to be in need of a speedy and thorough overhauling. The French ship of state is, if so strained a figure may be pardoned, a monarchic bottom flying a republican flag ; and the French people, whose hatred of sham is innate and immutable, are naturally up in arms against the transparent hypocrisy of a régime that is republican in form, but monarchic in substance. They are insisting, more logically than philosophically, — philosophy tolerates endless anomalies, so they are not positively unwholesome, while logic tolerates none, — that this annoying anomaly be somehow got rid of ; that the government be made either more republican or less so ; that the form be modified to correspond with the substance, or the substance to correspond with the form ; that, to resume the strained figure, a new republican bottom be built to fly the republican standard, or a monarchic standard be scared up in some secondhand bricabrac shop of the Faubourg St. Germain to proclaim the monarchic bottom.

In 1884, Dumas fils, who was a serious student of social conditions, predicted that Frenchwomen would vote in ten years. He blundered in his arithmetic, and lived to know it. But other changes in the status of women, almost as extraordinary and quite as far-reaching, have occurred within a little more than the decade included in his prediction, and go far to justify it. A recent novel of M. André Theuriet, Villa Tranquille, contains the following conversation between a French father and his daughter fresh from a Paris pension, apropos of the desire of the latter to climb a certain peak of the Savoyard Alps:—

“ ‘ Unfortunately, I am not strong enough to accompany you, and since you cannot go alone ’ —

“ ‘ Bah ! ’ she interrupted, ' with a guide! ’

“ ' A girl of your age cannot run the mountains with a guide.’

“ ‘ Why not ? ’

“ ‘ It ’s not proper.’

“ ' Oh, you ’re still there ? Well, you are behind the times. A girl to venture out only when chaperoned by pa and ma ! Why, that went out of fashion ages ago ! ’

“ ‘What! ’

“ The father was dumfounded by the tranquil assurance with which this girl of eighteen uttered the subversive sentiment. He scrutinized her for a moment with an anxious eye. There was so much ingenuousness in Odette’s limpid and honest gaze that he was ashamed of his suspicions.

“ ‘ Was it the superior of the Assumption,’ he queried ironically, ' who inculcated these —advanced — ideas ? ’

“ ' Oh dear, no ! Madame Ste. Marie des Anges was too much of the old school for that. But I was acquainted at the convent with some English and American girls, who always went out alone, and who were none the less very respectable. They held opinions which I share absolutely, on this point and on many others.’ ”

Odette’s fresh, girlish admiration for the unconventional ways of her foreign sisters is typical, as the novelist intended it should be, of the change that is taking place in the French attitude toward women, and might be duplicated in more sophisticated quarters. The traditional French parental authority over children (both sons and daughters) is slowly falling down under the stress of English and American example. The tendency of young hearts to supersede old heads in the matter of match-making is becoming more and more pronounced. Easier marriage is bringing in its train easier divorce, and the laws of property are being materially modified in the woman’s favor. Lycées for girls were established twenty years ago, since which time the providing of educational opportunities for women has gone on apace. For good or for evil, the “ higher education ” is an accomplished fact in France.

Frenchwomen, who have long played a large part in industry and commerce, may now enter most of the liberal professions, if they choose. They have their own art exhibitions, their own daily, weekly, and monthly press, and their own theatre. They are gaining their rights and surrendering their privileges less rapidly, perhaps, than the women of England and America (for a score of reasons which may not be gone into here), but rapidly enough to make the French word féminisme stand for a very real and live thing. “ Emancipation, " in the full Anglo-Saxon awfulness of the term, is in the air.

French appreciation of foreign literature is to-day ample. Thus, several of the American classics are held in general high esteem. Poe — I say it boldly, without qualification — is better known and understood by the present generation of the French than by the present generation of his countrymen; Cooper also (though the American schoolboy remains more or less faithful to the Leather Stocking Tales), if adults alone are considered. Cooper complete may be bought in four-cent volumes at the tiniest faubourg or village bookstall. Emerson and Hawthorne have a fair following. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman, about the validity of whose right to be rated as classics we in America are still hesitating, have received their credentials as such in France as they have in England. Of our newer celebrities, Henry James, Marion Crawford, Richard Harding Davis, Hamlin Garland, Mary E. Wilkins, and others have been awarded the honor of translation by high-grade journals and reviews.

A young French lawyer, as much addicted to letters as is his average American craft brother, and no more, recently said to me, with a comical pride in his cosmopolitanism he was at no effort to conceal : “ I know American literature, and I like it well. I have read your American novels. I have read three works of Monsieur Gunter. They are Miss Dividends, Mr. Potter of Texas, and Mr. Barnes of New York, and I call them very thrilling. I am now reading a nice ” (“ nice,” I take my oath, was his very word) “book of poems by a Monsieur Lowell. I find these poems thoughtful, but very obscure ” (the poor fellow was probably struggling with the dialect and local and circumstantial allusions of Hosea Biglow, with the odds largely in favor of Hosea), — “almost as obscure as our Mallarmé.”

To one judgment of such an absurd sort, as innocent of malice as it is of literary perspective, and so not to be taken in bad part, it is safe to count on a score of sound ones like the following : “ In a century, this people has produced such men of letters as Emerson and Edgar Poe, such poets as Walt Whitman and Longfellow, . . . artists who are equal in importance to Flaubert. Chateaubriand, Hugo, Baudelaire. . . . Baudelaire owed much to Edgar Poe, whose work he translated ; Emerson has assisted our serious youth to an understanding of great moral truths; Walt Whitman inspires certain of our poets.”

As a corollary of the enthusiasm for foreign literatures, the ambition to acquire a speaking familiarity with foreign languages — English especially — has entered France, and flourishing societies pour la propagation des langues étrangères have come into being. The results obtained are divertingly scant by the side of the energy expended ; but this always, nationality quite apart, is the doom reserved for people who hazard the indiscretion of studying alien tongues where they are not habitually spoken.

The appreciation bestowed on the literature of foreign nations is extended to foreign achievements in most of the amenities.

The tradition is that Frenchmen do not travel; and this tradition, in spite of France’s long list of explorers and her ability to point to world-famous travelers, contains a larger element of truth than most traditions. Still, they travel much more than formerly. There is a “ new Frenchman ” as there is a “ new woman,” and the “ new Frenchman ” is both tourist and polyglot. Goethe’s famous definition, “ The Frenchman is a person who speaks only his own language and is ignorant of geography,” has lost nearly all its original point.

Occupation with the literature and the other elegant arts of foreign peoples, combined with the newly acquired habits of travel and language study, has produced a well-based appreciation of the whole range of foreign life, but particularly of those phases which display marked superiority to the same phases of French life. The admiration of things English is so blended with faddism — affectations of dress, drinks and modes of drinking, sports and the sporting and society vocabularies — on the one hand, and with a chivalrous straining to be just and courteous to a hereditary enemy (never more an enemy than now) on the other, that it is not easy to separate the genuine in it from the counterfeit. Of things American, however, it is all genuine and well-nigh unbounded, being extended to political ideas and machinery, rapid journalism, social devices, postal, telegraph, telephone, railway, and municipal transit systems and management, feats of engineering, library, hospital, and police administration, conduct of charities and philanthropies, prison policy and discipline, hotel and household comforts, and “ Yankee notions.”

In short, while it may not be saying a great deal to affirm it, — international misapprehensions are so inevitable a part of the established order of things, — it nevertheless should be said and resaid that France now knows herself and other nations as well as other nations know themselves and her; and that, furthermore, she practices quite as large a benevolence of judgment toward most other nations as most other nations practice toward her.

Boston has possessed for many years a certain clergyman, of national repute, who is so large-hearted that he lends his name, influence, and energy to every cause in which he detects good, and so large-minded that he detects good in nearly every cause brought to his notice. The result is that Boston has come to accuse him, for all he is very dear to her, of indulging in philanthropy to excess. Similarly, if there is a fault to be found with French openmindedness, it is that it is carried to excess. It bends over backward, literally, in its attempt at fairness. It does scant justice to France and exaggerated justice to other nations, like those mirrors which produce the illusion of abnormal corpulence or abnormal emaciation, according to the way they are turned. To know the very worst that can be said about France and the very best that can be said about the enemies of France, it is necessary to go to the French. Now one half truth plus another half truth make, in such a case, not two half truths nor one whole truth, as the rules of arithmetic teach, but one whole falsehood. In comparing themselves with other peoples, the French do not invoke the mitigating circumstances, make the allowable reservations, or insert the saving clauses in their own behalf. They do not assert, at least not as often and as firmly as they ought, that there are French institutions which merit serious consideration from the Anglo-Saxons and others ; that France may furnish an international copy book as well as another nation, since she has as many lessons to teach as she has to learn. It would be as easy, provided the attention were concentrated upon the proper points, to write a bulky volume of truth on the superiority of the French—our own Brownell has proved it — as on the superiority of the English, the Americans, the Germans, or any people whatsoever.

In the French admiration of the spirit of individual business initiative which pervades the life of England, and the deprecation of its relative absence in France, little or no account is taken of England’s exceptional geographical position, of her comparative freedom from the burden of a standing army, of her relatively feeble agricultural resources, of her venerable law of primogeniture which drives the majority of her young men into active careers, —

of the virtues of French solidarity, of the relatively even distribution of wealth and the humane and beneficent public initiative which are its partial corollaries, of the disgust with the egoism of individualism and the yearning for solidarity on the part of some of the most consecrated English thinkers, and of the powerful trend among the English masses toward a larger public initiative.

Dazzled by the superb spectacle of England’s stupendous colonial career, France does not give credit enough to the zeal and intrepidity of her own explorers, the valor and patience of her armies of occupation, the reclaiming and civilizing efficiency of her outposts, the volume and vigor of her colonial trade ; nor make the capital she might of the brutality and duplicity engendered by British colonial greed, and of the perilous instability of the British colonial empire.

In contrasting the masterful positiveness and firmness of German public policy with the hesitancy and vacillation of her own, she does not lay enough stress upon the fundamental differences between a despotism and a democracy, or upon the hopeless disadvantage a democracy labors under in conceiving and executing national or international projects of long range to which the delicacy, reticence, and continuity, impossible in a democracy, are absolutely indispensable.

In emphasizing the hermaphrodite nature of her present régime, she does not make allowance enough for the exceptional circumstances which ushered it in, and for the complexity of the problems raised by the century of incessant convulsion incident to the as yet really unfinished Revolution, as well as by her position in Europe. She does not give credit enough to the centralization (now outworn, perhaps, and ready to be sloughed off) without which post-bellum reconstruction would have been less easy and rapid, if not impossible, or to the paper constitution for the several points (such as the election of the President) at which it has worked with phenomenal smoothness. Nor does she throw into sufficient relief the defects of the régimes she holds superior, — American lynching, rioting, and municipal misgovernment, for example. In approving the freedom of the American girl and the independence of the American woman, Frenchmen ignore — is it chivalry or ignorance ? — the woeful lack of respect of youth for age, the rapidly diminishing importance of the family as a social unit, the epidemic of divorce, the young girl’s shrill and grating bumptiousness, and the domestic incapacity, extravagance, nervous invalidism, morbid sex consciousness, and unlovely pedantry of the women, which are the temporary — God grant it be only temporary ! — outcome of this vaunted independence and freedom. And they ignore, further, the fact that their own women — a thousand apologies to American women for the ungracious word — are, to the thinking of many, the most feminine, the most intellectual (in the good, unbookish use of the word), the most capable in business, the most influential in politics, and, though nominally “ unemancipated,” the most essentially independent women on the planet.

In the movement for educational reform along English lines, no counter claim is set up by Demolins and his fellows for past French influence on English education. No pains are taken by them to make clear that their most severe criticisms regard a single section of the educational system only, the section intermediate between the school and the university, the ancient lycée, which, in the rehabilitation of the schools, was left practically untouched ; that it is not the whole French educational structure, but this venerable, worm-eaten, moss-grown stairway within the structure which it is proposed to demolish, and replace—if the image may be allowed — by a thoroughly up - to - date elevator ; and that their agitation is not a reaction, as on the face of it it seems to be, against the educational activity deployed since the great humiliation, but the logical outcome and fitting consummation of this activity. Nor are any pains taken to explain that the English schools by which it is proposed that the lycée shall he made to profit are not the typical secondary schools of England, but exceptional, expensive, and select institutions for rich men’s sons.

The sweeping and irresponsible world judgment that denies affability to the Englishman, modesty to the American, alertness to the German, energy to the Turk, and tolerance to the Russian denies openmindedness to the Frenchman. By universal usage, who says Frenchman says Chauvinist. Chauvinism and the French spirit are convertible terms in the world vocabulary. There was a time, perhaps, when France merited this reputation for excessive self-complacency. She does not merit it now, and has not done so for a quarter of a century. If ever a country has been given over to self-examination, self-blame, and the search within and without for the wherewithal to remedy her defects; if ever a country, in other words, has been openminded, France is that country to-day. In the interests of truth and of international fairness, the fact deserves to be stated and emphasized.

This openmindedness redounds largely to the intellectual and moral credit of the French people. Thus far it seems to have redounded to their advantage as well through the force it has lent to the various enterprises of national reconstruction, — the establishment of the republic and of the free school system, the redemption of the university, the now progressing regeneration of the Iycée, and, less obvious, though possible, blessing, the acquisition of colonial possessions. But there are signs that receptiveness to new ideas is beginning to be carried beyond the limits of discretion. All new ideas are not sound ideas, — shall we never learn the lesson?—all change is not progress, all openmindedness is not wisdom. Was not Tennyson, enlightened, far less eager to have

in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After than in Locksley Hall ? It may well be queried whether certain efforts now being put forth to make France like other nations — notably the attempt, inspired by the material prosperity of England and America, to transform her into a commercial and industrial power — may not be sad blunders.

Despite the astounding way France has of doing whatever she sets out to do, from building a boulevard to paying a war debt, from demolishing a slum to dethroning a dynasty, she cannot achieve the impossible. She cannot do a thing contrary to her nature; and it looks very much as if industry and trade, in the complex, colossal, audacious sense in which these terms are now employed, are so nearly contrary to her nature that if she succeeds ultimately in doing what a nation with a genius for affairs does automatically, it will be only at the price of almost superhuman exertion.

Why may not the commercial, industrial, and colonial enterprise of England and America be admired by France as a superb exhibition of force without being taken as a pattern ? May it not be unwisdom amounting to positive rashness to allow herself to be pricked thereby to emulation ? However absolute and cosmopolitan a thing truth the abstraction may be, truths are relative and national ; truths know frontiers. English truths are not necessarily German truths or French truths. To be her best, France must be herself, must live in harmony with French truths. To carry herself most gracefully, she must walk in paths that are her own, shod with shoes that habit has conformed to her feet. Industry and trade are not the only worthy things in the world ; culture, beauty, and emotion certainly count for something. While other worthy things quite in accord with her temperament and quite in the line of her traditions remain for France to do, other things which she alone can do, or at least can do easiest and best, why should she spend herself — like a hen trying to swim or a duck to fly — in awkward, fluttering, sputtering efforts to do the thing for which she has little or no fitness, while she lets

The peculiar mission of France, if we read her history and her character aright, is now, as it usually has been, intellectual and æsthetic, — the dissemination of beauty and the kindling of thought. France neglecting her peerless power to stimulate and captivate in order to seize world markets produces precisely the same unpleasant impression as does a beautiful and talented woman willfully despising the privileges of her womanhood to yell and jostle with men on the floor of the stock exchange.

All success to France in her new emprise of competing in a business way with the business nations, of remoulding her life after the similitude of the Anglo-Saxon life, if her heart is set upon it, and it is really in the long run the best thing. So, surely, will her now too humble heart regain some portion of its old-time Chauvinistic pride. And yet it is impossible not to feel — sentimental error, perhaps — that civilization will have less cause for regret if she fails than if she succeeds; for her kingdom seems not to be of the world of dickerings, dollars, and deals, but of the world of intellectuality and charm.

Alvan F. Sanborn.