The Frivolous French
I
IT was my fate to be born in a country that knows very little of the Bible. When we were children, it is true, we were told stories from the Bible, and at school we had the Acts of the Apostles. But in Catholic Ireland, if the full horror of such things must be revealed, we never saw or touched or dipped into the Holy Book. We had no such furniture as a family Bible. In short, we dwelt in outer darkness.
This does not mean that we did not have family prayers. The rosary, which is a very long prayer, a garland of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, was said around the oil lamp every evening. Confession, which in its auricular form the Irish themselves invented, was a weekly, or at least a fortnightly, episode. On Saturdays, in the gaunt, shadow-draped churches, we waited our turn to enter the little confessional and lisp our sins; and on Sundays we had Communion and ten-o’clock Massand-teaching. Our upbringing was religious, amid throngs of the sincerest Christian Brothers, well-soaped, smiling nuns, lay sisters, lay brothers, sacristans, priests, canons, archdeacons, and the Bishop. The religious element was a large part, perhaps the main part, of our early culture. Only it had nothing to do with the Bible.
To measure the gulf between a tradition such as this and the common English tradition, one has simply to read any of the great Victorians. Few people knew the tricks of her trade better than George Eliot, or employed them more hardily; and when she wanted to create one of the big scenes in The Mill on the Floss she made the fierce old Mr. Tulliver direct his son to write a terrible curse on the flyleaf of the Bible, while ‘Maggie trembled like a leaf.’ Not once, indeed, but twice, the family Bible stalks on to the stage — since Tom Tulliver himself makes his sister swear on it in words he dictates. I seem to remember that St. John Ervine, over half a century later, employed a similar gesture. In Ulster such scenes could still be enacted — not to speak of Tennessee.
But if the Irish Sea separates Ireland from the tradition of the Bible, except in Belfast, the Channel no less separates France from this great popular tradition. Offering myself as a sort of Biblometer, I record that the tension is so released when I come into France that it is almost like getting back to the atmospheric pressure of childhood. I admit a cultural difference between Ireland and France, all the difference between the Liffeyand the Seine; but, whatever this difference, there is an extraordinary, a pervasive, moral similarity that comes from neither country having imbibed the Scriptures.
In the case of France, this was largely accident. One cannot doubt that it was touch and go whether the French would take the Reformation. Mr. Lawres of Milwaukee wrote the other day that before the first Protestant version of the Bible was printed there were thirty printed editions in German, nineteen in Flemish, twenty-six in French. The ground was ready for the Reformation in France, just as well as in Germany or England. The race, ethnologically speaking, was the same. John Calvin, moreover, was a true French type, and his French admirers to-day do not hesitate to claim for him all the nation’s intellectual characteristics. But this latent possibility was not enough. Though François I and his remarkable sister Marguerite showed how open they were to Lutheranism in theory and on principle, in practice the French king was not eager to push too hard against the parliament and the university. He was not cut off, as was Henry VIII, from the goods of the Church and the clergy. He had no positive incentive to induce a religious reform which might become embarrassingly political. He did not relish the rude tone of the reformers in regard to the luxury and gayety of his court. And the shifting balances of the European game made the Vatican too important a makeweight for a negotiator like himself to commit France to the way of the Bible. Hence the du Bellays, who might so easily have been Lutheran, found their outlet instead in protecting and encouraging Rabelais; and French intellect, French private judgment, took the channel of Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire.
It is piquant, of course, that when Bernard Shaw wants to commend Joan of Arc he says she was a Protestant. I am surprised he did not say she wore Jaeger underwear. Gallant as it is of him to ‘opt’ her into the Fabian set and qualify her in general type for the London School of Economics, I can see no reality in this anticipatory ‘Protestantism.’ She used private judgment, but private judgment is not confined to the Protestant tradition. Private judgment is, in fact, a great French tradition. Joan might have arrived at hers Protestantly, but she actually arrived at it in her own honest way. To use the word ‘Protestant’ is to suggest the connection ‘Protestant Bible,’ and this is misleading.
It is misleading because it is blind to the main fact of French life, which is borne in so immediately on anyone who has had an ordinary Irish upbringing. The Bible, which has had an enormous influence on English culture, has lacked influence on French culture. The Bible has not been a main element in moulding French psychology, where it has been a main element in moulding English, German, and American psychology. From this fact, almost too obvious to mention, has sprung a whole menagerie of misunderstandings on both sides. My effort here is to note the misunderstanding on the side of those who have had Bible culture.
II
I wish at this point I could pose as really knowing France. I wish I could say, ‘Such and such are the French people.’ But after two years in France I am too oppressed by my ignorance to hope to be able to conceal it. Buoyed up, however, by Socrates, who saw in the consciousness of ignorance the beginning of wisdom, and buoyed up also by the obliviousness of most nationals to the real nature of other nationals, I address myself to those who, in consequence of this lamentable French discrepancy, have silent moral doubt as to the French people.
Is it a fact that this moral doubt exists?
In trying to answer this question I leave aside those witnesses who tell you with bated breath of quite hair-raising French orgies and French wickedness, or who give you anecdotes of smart sinfulness in Tout-Paris. I know from M. Pierre-Quint that Marcel Proust was carried off in the middle of the night to a sexual salad of some kind, and that Proust had asthma for three weeks afterward. But I beg leave, at an age when I begin to have gray hairs, to cancel all yarns of night life in Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, Petrograd, and Brooklyn. These activities follow biological, not national, lines, and are not open to the great majority who are regularly employed. I do not take as witness anyone who whispers or anyone who is too relentless. I leave aside, for example, the incomparable woman who said to me, ‘I just adore France, but I simply can’t stand the French people.’
But there are all sorts of real people who do betray an unease, a reservation, about the French. There is the poet who tells me that French women are all skin and brain, that they have no chastity and no soul. There is the Scotch idealist who says that the French have no mysticism and that André Maurois misses the essence of Shelley just as much as André Gide misses the essence of Dostoevski. I include the antirationalist who smiles in his beard when you mention Anatole France, and the publicist who suddenly explodes at breakfast that the French are ‘dirty dogs.’ I advert to the League of Nations official who privately declares that the French are hopeless liars, and the German sculptor who sombrely lays it down that the French are moribund spiritually and artistically. I include, that is to say, a lot of witnesses I have personally encountered, whether from the side of Romantic or of Biblical England, from Aberdeen or from Boston, who deplore the moral levity of the French.
These witnesses, I may say, have a spokesman. Their case was summed up with much precision by no less a man than Matthew Arnold. Forty years ago he put on the black cap. ‘It is not enough perceived,’ he said sorrowfully, ‘what it is which gives to France her attractiveness for everybody, and her success, and her repeated disasters. France is l’homme sensuel moyen, the average sensual man; Paris is the city of l’homme sensuel moyen. This has an attraction for all of us. We all have in us this homme sensuel, the man of the “wishes of the flesh and of the current thoughts”; but we develop him under checks and doubts, and unsystematically and often grossly. France, on the other hand, develops him confidently and harmoniously. She makes the most of him, because she knows what she is about and keeps in a mean, as her climate is in a mean, and her situation.’
Climate, one must note in passing, cannot have been Matthew Arnold’s strong point, at least the climate of this terrestrial pill; otherwise he couldn’t have put under the tent of one ‘ mean ‘ Normandy and Provence, the red dryness of Agay, the wet greenness of Hendaye, the suavity of the Loire, the extremes of Auvergne. But one must not interrupt a man who is passing judgment on a whole people. ‘All of us feel, at some time or other in our lives, a hankering after the French ideal, a disposition to try it. More particularly is this true of the Latin nations; and therefore everywhere, among these nations, you see the old indigenous type of city disappearing, and the type of modern Paris, the city of l’homme sensuel moyen, replacing it. La Bohême, the ideal, free, pleasurable life of Paris, is a kind of Paradise of Ishmaels.’
But disaster always overtakes Ishmael. ‘Cast out he is, and always must be, because his ideal, which is also that of France in general, however she may have noble spirits who contend against it and seek a better, is after all a false one. Plausible and attractive as it may be, the constitution of things turns out to be somehow or other against it. And why? Because the free development of our senses all round, of our apparent self, has to undergo a profound modification from the law of our higher real self, the law of righteousness.’
There, without disguise, is the case against the French. Enjoy them if you must. They are gay, they are volatile, they are charming. But they haven’t built on Protestantism and the Bible; therefore the poor devils cannot be righteous. Watch them glitter as they sail by, but know that disaster awaits them, because their nature has not been modified by the law of righteousness.
Suzanne Lenglen, Alain Gerbault, Georges Carpentier, Jean Borotra, may have shaken a great number in their conviction about the unmanliness of Latins, but the moral doubt is longerlived. Being naturally irreverent, I used to think it was enough to quote such cant as Matthew Arnold’s to show its hollowness, but I have learned by experience that these things are not self-evident. It is better to demand seriously whether these solemn assertions as to the unspirituality of the French are borne out by acquaintance with them. Is Paris a city of free, pleasurable, sensual life? Is France submerged in the wishes of the flesh? Is it indifferent to the laws of righteousness?
One has to have an extraordinary faith in the exclusive ethical value of the Bible not to be able to imagine other people reaching the good life in other ways. But this is mere deduction. It is better to mention the assurances that are conveyed to one in the daily round of French life. And by this I don’t mean the assurances that are offered by the heroism of French live-saving crews, the self-sacrifice of a cheminot to-day and of a clerk the next day, the weekly toll of men who risk their lives in aviation, the toll of men who die in experimental science, the men and women who give up property to help working girls, to aid the sick and the handicapped. I don’t mean even the assurance that is conveyed by the modest lives of the most eminent French savants. Who can walk through the dinginess of the rue Monge without thinking, ‘Faguet always lived here, five floors up,’ in one of these sour-faced apartment houses. But this sort of evidence, the evidence of ‘noble spirits,’ walks on stilts in every country. The only difference I see in the French in this department is that, so far, they don’t talk so much about their modest y, their strong silent modesty, as the English do.
III
Did Matthew Arnold really know the worker’s Paris? In the arrondissement where I lived in Paris, the thirteenth, we were in no Paradise of Ishmaels. Under our windows was a church belonging to a new sect, the Antoinistcs, a flourishing young religion. In the glove factory up the hill or the chocolate factory at the foot of it there was nothing remarkably free or pleasurable, and the old ragpickers and paper-sorters at the head of the street had nothing about them of La Bohême. We had a prison near us, the Santé, and a big lunaticasylum. If the conditions in the prisons and asylums of France have outraged one’s sense of righteousness, let me say that Albert Londres, the journalist, has made a winning crusade on behalf of the afflicted which surpasses any crusade of a similar kind that has been made in America — and God knows how badly America needs to back up the fine crusades that have been made in regard to her own prisons.
There was not much of La Bohême about our greengrocer who was up at three o’clock every morning to go to Les Halles, and kept his shop open till eight in the evening. True, he favored sensuality. He sold a creamy Brie cheese which was full of volupté, he sold marvelous mandarins before Christmas, and cherries and strawberries and asparagus in early spring of a quality that no one could suspect from his dim windows or his earth floor or his prices. But this wicked sensualist, six feet two, had stood his way all through the war without a whimper; he had the rank of a corporal and the style of a colonel, the integrity of an artist and the validity of any real man. That is to say, he pleased one, like a sound apple, like work well done. Across the street from him was a charwoman from ‘Bor-r-deaux’ who worked so well, so furiously well, that one was ashamed not to double her wages. She did her work to help her husband, nervously shattered by the war. Among the gamins and gamines of this neighborhood there was gayety, certainly, and liveliness, but who ever jeered at the Antoinistes in their Puritan Father costume or the lady Antoinistes in black veils? The concierge, atheist to the bone, smiled benevolently at them. ‘Chacun à son goût. Après tout, c’est une nouvelle religion! ‘
This concierge, forty-seven, all alone, husband and son dead in the war, got pneumonia and had a temperature of 103. Would she have a doctor? Bah! Doctors were for the rich. She lay in her loge, still commanding the door, and lost weight, sleep, vitality, everything except her nerve. A very unreconstructed and ignorant woman.
In the school across the way from us, the pupils kept hours that seemed to me much too long — hours which help to give them that pallid, big-eyed, sombre look, so that later on it seems as if they are morbidly citified and perhaps consumed by passion. Beneath us, in the apartment house, was a bistro, where undesirable citizens took undesirable beverages. These were outdoor workers, strapping fellows, magnificent feeders. They were noisy at times, but the saloon-keeper was a very helpful human being, the father of a large family, and very much the sort of man whom Edgar Lee Masters bemoaned when Prohibition came. ‘Who’ll give me my nickel now, if I go out in Chicago without remembering to take my carfare?’
We went, my wife and I, to hear a Christian Republican, Marc Sangnier. It might have been a meeting at Cooper Union. It savored of Emerson. After his talk, indeed, a small fiery man with a red face and a red sash caught our eye and, making a shrug, declared pityingly, ‘C’est pas mal, mais, pouf, je suis athée.’ At the next meeting in the same hall Pierre Hamp spoke — a rather pacifist speech. He is the man who has written such dramatic books on the underlying population, on the fish industry, linen, perfume, champagne. He is a dapper figure, with youth and verve. When he finished, a hollow-cheeked worker got up and in a trembling voice challenged him because he had spoken to a different effect and given different leadership during the war. A deep, a quivering silence followed this question. Hamp tried no evasion. He said, ‘I can only admit that I was wrong.’
Such incidents arc tiny, but I could multiply them indefinitely to show a movement of heart and conscience in ordinary life no less characteristic than Anatole France’s stand in the Dreyfus case, or his story, Crainquebille.
Ah, Anatole France. I am afraid I cannot claim that his was the tone of ‘An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible.’ The Imitation of Christ was a favorite book of Anatole France’s, and we now learn that it was a Frenchman who wrote The Imitation of Christ. But if Anatole France was pagan, it is not to the point; at the moment I suppose there is no famous Frenchman who has less influence than he. If he is mentioned at all, it is to deprecate him, despite the loyalty of contemporaries like Maurras the royalist and the loyalty of subcontemporaries like Paul Souday.
Anatole France is at the other side of the great divide of 1914, bathed in the same far sunshine as Phidias and the Parthenon. Gone is the lambent afternoon light, the classic mood, the smile that hovered so delicately before it stung. Young France is neither lambent nor delicate. It has suffered. Its suffering has given it great pity, as in the case of Georges Duhamel, or analytic tension, as with Lacretelle and Martin du Gard, or curious high spirits, as with Cocteau and Giraudoux, or a grave philosophic scrupulosity, as with Paul Valéry. The preoccupation with philosophy, in fact, dominates every other preoccupation in the world of criticism and thought. Particularly is it to be noted in the effort of the Catholic critics to smash up Taine and Renan in the interest of the system of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It is only in these critics, Massis and Maritain, that one finds more heat than light on occasion, but in general the controversy goes back and forth on its merits, and every attack breeds a defender who knows his job. They are saying things to-day that will occupy American critics some years from now, just as Faguet and Brunetière gave the lead thirty years ago.
IV
This seriousness, one may object, is intellectual seriousness, not moral seriousness. The French do not spend their time urging good conduct, as such.
From French schoolbooks I gather the impression that the monopoly of moral platitude has been conceded to French educators. Their grammars simply pullulate with moral propaganda — propaganda in pills, capsules, powder form, and bottles. If the French are gay and volatile, it is on the rebound from their early edification. But it is still true that the French motto is ‘Brain, more brain.’ The English pacifists, I note, say that war is wrong, the Italians — there are Italian pacifists — that war is ugly, the French that war is stupid. The French hate stupidity. They do not make the direct moral appeal very often — they appeal to bon sens, to intelligence. If mauvais sang is reprehended, and méchanceté, the word bête or maladroit rises quicker to the lips. I heard a dignified old man coming out of the Institut lash out the sole word maladroit to a chauffeur who had backed up abruptly. The rebuke made the chauffeur blush to the roots of his hair. A group of his comrades waited till the irate old cock had passed on; then they all laughed. ‘ Hein, Georges, tu es maladroit!’ His face, angry and red, slowly reversed its expression and expanded into a grin.
The intelligence of the French has its unsentimental and grim aspects, and most English people find unsentimentality hard to forgive. But if one reads such a book as Thibaudet’s recent analysis of Baudelaire and Fromentin and Amiel one sees how exquisitely sensitive the introspective French nature can be. The intangible values of life have nowhere been more appreciated, and nowhere has the spiritual struggle been more heroically detailed. But of course they don’t, they can’t, sentimentalize. Or rather the French sentimentalist is immediately spotted by the critics, and relegated to the Académie Française. Not that there is n’t poignancy in the French, but where the Victorians habituated us to the organ the French used the violin, and in the religious mood the violin is profane.
The French are not evangelical with the same facility as the English. If you want to see a difference between French intellect and English intellect read what a passionate liberal like Edgar Quinet could write about Machiavelli, and then see what all the English liberals have said about him, from Macaulay to H. G. Wells. It is, in a way, the difference between the intellectual method and the evangelical method. Edgar Quinet tries to understand Machiavelli in spite of his resistance, while Macaulay and Wells cry to high heaven.
This perhaps is what Matthew Arnold means by accepting our lower self, developing it confidently and harmoniously, as against developing it under checks and doubts, and unsystematically and often grossly. But it seems to me that the French, for all their frivolity, have not done so badly with their lower selves. It is not they, but the more Biblical peoples, who have taken so ravenously to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is needed by those whose souls are divided against themselves, and whose grossness is not in hand.
I do not say that the French have not tried to enforce righteousness like the English and the Americans. At the very time Matthew Arnold was writing, many Parisians were holding up their hands in holy horror over an opera that was almost as wicked as Madame Bovary. It was condemned as ‘impressionistic,’ as ‘Wagnerian in bad taste,’ as pestiferous, as cheap. Its heroine was described as ‘ une hideuse drôlesse,’ ‘une ignoble gueuse,’ offensive against delicacy and morals. The name of this revolting opera was Carmen!
The fact that such prudery once existed does not mean that all moral indignation is prudery. I have no doubt that certain plays in Paris to-day are lewd. I am quite sure that Paris harbors many vicious and dangerous people. I am quite sure that money will buy almost anything a cynic wants in Paris, and I suppose it is best to go to that city expecting to battle for your virtue against fearful odds. But I suggest it is not these concrete wickednesses that create misunderstanding and moral doubt in the good people I know. These ugly things simply fatten up the antecedent prejudice that was born long ago of the struggle of Protestantism against Rome and reënforced by the godlessness of the French Revolution.
V
It seems to me important, then, to approach the French with a firm recognition that their moral idiom is not, and cannot be, the familiar idiom of the English-speaking and Bible-reading peoples. And it is well to trace to its source the prejudice that is so ingrained in those who do not share this recognition. I remember a British editor who came to New York to work in the opinion factory at the beginning of the war. In answer to a question as to the value of the French he lowered his eyes and piously said, ‘The French, I am afraid, are decadent.’ The good man believed it. He did not know that his belief was the child of Matthew Arnold’s misunderstanding, which in turn was the grandchild of Wordsworth’s moralizing, which in turn descended from national conflicts that were only too glad to cluster around, and build on, the Bible.
Decadent? I should rather say vigorous and virile. They have developed an extreme mental flexibility, a tough fibre, a fine craftsmanship which calls for its own sort of righteousness, an exquisite art of life. Traveling by one road from Rome, as the English traveled by another, since all roads seem to lead from Rome, they have yet traveled with sure and philosophic foot. ‘A great and splendid people,’ as Buckle said, ‘a people full of mettle, high-spirited, abounding in knowledge, and perhaps less oppressed by superstition than any other in Europe.’
Buckle added, ‘always found unfit to exercise political power.’ With the examples before us of the Hungarians, the Italians, the Spanish, the Russians, the Chinese, with the high triumph of European diplomacy and Biblical culture that came to a head in 1914, and with the glories of the Versailles peace, I do not know who can boast of political genius. But the French have not the virtues of a machine tradition. I am struck, I admit, by a certain sociological infantility in the French. They are bad on social statistics, which means on social knowledge and management. They are to be criticized on public hygiene. They have not the habit of machine organization in regard to society, in the sense that the English and Germans and Americans have. Any small problem — clean milk for Paris, for example — seems to find the French without the right machinery. There are facts about their hospitals that make one shudder. I am glad I was not born a French foundling. I am glad I am not one of the poor slaves who are petitioning the French Government, or the French banks, for a tiny little raise. But if the lack of sentimentality sometimes goes to the edge of a lack of sentiment, if property is sometimes Moloch, and inheritance laws like Chinese foot-binding, this hardness has been bred in a country specially placed. Even Buckle, so luminous, did not grasp the military reasons for French centralization. I mean, the military superstition. He thought it was some sort of incapacity for political power.
But the French are educable. In these matters, as in all matters, they do not lie to themselves, and this is a supreme virtue. Observe the beautiful art of honesty in an unbeliever like Jules Lemaître writing of a believer like Louis Veuillot. Read Lanson’s revisions in the later edition of his French Literature. These men have a virility that I find lacking in, for instance, Mr. H. G. Wells revamping his Outline of History for the W. J. Bryan belt. It is an old-fashioned virility, perhaps, the sort one finds in an old-fashioned American like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
It is with these virtues in mind that I am surprised at the temerity of those who feel morally superior to the French. Is it not to the account of righteousness that theirs is the white country in which colored folk may be sure of the most liberty, equality, fraternity? I see French women given the lead in many situations where Maggie Tulliver was expected to weep and cling. I have read reports of a French school inspector, in a remote commune, as fine in perception and idealism as anything Matthew Arnold ever wrote. I hold it for righteous, even, that the French tolerate on the Paris news stands both the royalist and the communist dailies. When one knows the French, and I know a half dozen, one feels, ‘Here at last is civilization.’ That is to say, the suffusion of right feeling by good taste and good sense. It has n’t the Biblical idiom, but neither had Plato nor Zoroaster, neither had Confucius nor Lao-tse.
One may say, ‘But you miss the point. They have n’t the Inner Light; they are n’t carried away; they are n’t poetic like the English, musical like the Germans, religious like the Russians.’
No, I answer, they are unique. I don’t ask Wagner from the English, Byron from the Danes, Degas from the Germans, Anatole France from the Spanish, Fragonard from the Russians. I don’t ask the English Inner Light from la ville lumière.
Is it not specifically Victorian to discover l’homme sensuel moyen in this French civilization? I remember when I was a small boy hearing my mother exclaim about the wickedness of Paris. On urging her to go into details, she became mysterious and vague, but at last she said there were ‘naked women’ in the Tuileries. Standing before one of the statues in the Tuileries not long ago, I could not help laughing. The elaborate coiffure, the wasp waist, and the general suggestion of the fashion plate gave to this lady and her sisters an aspect purely comic. Could anyone ever have looked on her as shocking? But my mother, though a Catholic, viewed these things as a Victorian, no leas than Matthew Arnold. It was part of a radical misunderstanding which has its roots in a religious question. The Victorians firmly believed there was only one law of righteousness, and that was Victorian. Must we go on with the same prejudice, even if we do not all insist on the Bible?