An Admirable Variety: Further Diversities of National Character

I

NOTHING could be more typical of the national character of Spain, of France, and of England than the fact that the idea expressed in English by the word ‘leaders’ should be expressed in French by les élites and in Spanish by las minonas. ‘Leaders’ suggests a people led — willingly, spontaneously led.Les élites suggests a mere selection of the best, a setting aside of quality. Las minorías is but the bare statistical recognition of the fact that a certain type of man, endowed with a certain number of powers, is in a minority.

The people of action is always on the move — on the move as a people, knowing that it has a collective existence and that it goes forward. It wants, therefore, to be led. The people of action trains its leaders for this high task. It develops in them the qualities which are indispensable in the man of action: resolution, self-confidence, selfdiscipline, authority, knowledge of the laws of things, knowledge of men. It carefully avoids weakening their will power by developing in them any taste for intellectual sport, which not only deflects our vitality from the channels of action, but, by making us wonder, makes us hesitate. The wouldbe leader must beware of the light of reason as of the fire of passion. He must concentrate on sense and will.

This exacting education is carried out in two kinds of establishments: the public schools and the universities. It would be absurd to deny that there are considerable differences between the several types of public school and of university which cater for the education of English youth. It is a far cry from Eton and Harrow to the Manchester Grammar School. Similarly, between the University of Oxford and that of Glasgow the differences in spirit and atmosphere are so deep as to make all generalization impossible. Yet we know that the social structure of England is solidly built on the principle of classes, each of which endeavors consciously or unconsciously to follow the fashions and to imitate the ways of the class above. To all intents and purposes, therefore, the type of education which has made England what she is must be found in the types of public school and university which are looked up to by all Englishmen as models of the kind. There are two such public schools, Eton and Harrow; and two such universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

The most important items in the curricula of these schools are undoubtedly the sundry types of sport which they cultivate. Their heroes and representative men are the captains of their cricket, football, and rowing teams. Their true competitions are those in which these teams are pitted against each other. Here, in his early youth, through the play of his muscles and not by any brain work, the Englishman cultivates the sense of fair play, the spirit of coöperation, the self-denial for the sake of the community to which he belongs, the capacity for fighting with grit and determination, yet with detachment and good humor—in a word, all the virtues in action which are those of his race.

Here, also, he receives on his yet tender soul the impress of the group. One by one, all the elements of the psychology of the people of action in action will appear and play their rôle in the life of the public-school and university student. The force of tradition in these public schools and universities of England could hardly be exaggerated. Ways of living and dressing, relations between masters and boys and between boys themselves, festivals, religious services — every step in life is regulated by precedent, and, as in the portraits scene in Victor Hugo’s Hernani, an impressive gallery of old Eton or Harrow boys of worldwide fame, hanging from the walls of history, watch in eloquent silence every one of the boys in every one of their actions.

Self-control develops rapidly in this closely watched environment so strongly dominated by group influences, and self-consciousness follows self-control. Though apparently free and easy, at any rate in what concerns the material liberty of the boys, — moving about, coming and going, working or playing, — the public school, and perhaps, in a lesser degree, the university, keep a close watch over their actions. It is no official, no State watch; but the mere action of a vigorous collective being controlling all its members. The boy or student is free to do what he likes, but he is fully aware of the things which his school or university does not want him to do.

In the immense majority of cases, this education is completed by tuition in classical languages, history, and English. Here again we meet the wisdom of the race, instinctively choosing the best possible preparation for its leaders. A general study of the roots of European culture, to be found in the classical languages and literatures; history — that is, facts about human nature; English — that is, information about English character. The man of action is now ready. He knows all he needs to know. He does not know enough to doubt and moon at inaccessible truths.

Sometimes — this is particularly the case with many a political leader — the student reads law. (Let us underline, in passing, that word ’read.’ It is a delightful revelation of the empirical character of English tuition.) Law, however, — that is, English law, — is an absolutely safe occupation for a future man of action. The possession — either on his desk or in his brain — of a bulky repertory of precedents can hardly be said to hamper his resolution through an excessive development of intellectual activity. The fact may be recalled here that, to be called to the Bar, a would-be barrister must eat a certain number of dinners at the Inns of Court, on the registers of which his name has been written down. In this quaint custom we may see a valuable symbol: manners and environment are as compulsory as knowledge in the formation of the man of law.

The French word élites is the nearest approach to the English ‘leaders.’ But we may observe that while ‘ leaders’ implies leading, and therefore movement, élites conveys more than an idea of position: it is static. All it suggests is that the persons it designates are the selected few, and therefore occupy the highest ranks in the hierarchy of the established order.

The French system differs from the English in two points — both of which were to be expected: it is directed toward the cultivation of the intellect, not of the will; and it is organized by the State.

The whole apparatus whereby the élites are selected and educated is State-manufactured and State-handled. The secondary schools, or lycées, dotted all over the country are built on a uniform pattern and, so to say, on an interchangeable system. Their staff is organized on a national basis as part of the Civil Service, so that teachers pass from one lycée to another as a major or a colonel changes garrison. These teachers, moreover, teach whatever subject they happen to specialize in, but do not otherwise interfere with the life of the boys. If day boys, as the immense majority of lycée students are, they come to the lycée for their lectures and then go home. If boarders, they lodge within the walls of the lycée, subjected to a quasi-military discipline. There may be some football played in the quadrangle; perhaps, now and then, a game in the open, on Thursdays or Sundays; but that is a matter for the boys. Their teachers have no concern with sports.

French secondary education is therefore specialized in the development of the brain. As an intellectual education, it is excellent. It does not limit itself to providing information. It does aim at the exercise of intellectual powers both for themselves and with a view to the creation of an élite as an indispensable part of the order which underlies the State. The education of the will and character is no special concern of the school. This does not mean that character and will are left uncultivated in France, but that, in this sphere, the school abstains in favor of t he family — a fact which shows both that the family has a stronger formative importance than in England, and that character and will are not thought to be the concern of the nation to the same extent as they are in a community so strongly self-conscious as the English.

French secondary education is, therefore, one of the manifestations of that official order and uniformity which stand in France in lieu of the genius for coöperation characteristic of England. By means of an extensive system of scholarships, this educational apparatus automatically selects the more intelligent types of students, enabling them, whatever their financial limitations, to rise to the higher ranks of the established order. Here again we must observe the contrast with the English system. Though scholarships are not lacking in England, the system is not sufficiently uniform and, above all, the costly public schools provide too safe a filter for a great, or even a moderate, influx of fresh blood to invade the upper ranks of society. England believes too much in other than intellectual gifts to allow such a revolution to transform her body politic. But in France the aim of education is to develop the intellect of the educated, and, as we know, the true basis of French hierarchy is intellectual distinction. Hence no obstacles prevent the State from organizing the picking of the best brains of the people on a uniform and automatic basis in order to utilize them to the best advantage. A true intellectual measure, this system is radical in its theory and profoundly conservative in its effects.

From this uniform ground of secondary teaching the future élites pass on to an admirable system of higher education. As befits an intellectual nation, this system is carefully specialized, in striking contrast with the somewhat general character of English university education. A considerable number of the young élites are absorbed by what is known in France as les grandes écoles. The École Polytechnique, the École Normale Supérieure, the several technical schools, make a powerful appeal to French youth. They stand for a highly specialized education of the mind. Technical schools, yes; but, profoundly theoretical and ambitiously universal in the scope of their teachings and in their outlook, they prepare first-rate leaders for industrial and State services and provide a continuous flow of scientific workers for the nation. The universities in their turn are also organized on the basis of specialized work. Though they aim at the formation of all-round intellects, they demand from each of their students a thorough knowledge of a particular subject. They are exacting in point of intellectual discipline, but also in point of originality. And above all they develop in their students the love of knowledge, culture, and ideas.

Thus it is that we often find in France types of men whose intellectual refinement far exceeds not only their physical appearance, but even their refinement in other than the intellectual sides of nature; while it sometimes happens in England that men of great physical and social distinction go about quite at their ease, with a mind so incurious and undeveloped that it is unable to realize its own shortcomings.

When passing from the English idea of ‘leaders’ to the French idea of élites we lose the notion of movement, but retain that of hierarchy. In passing now from the French élites to the Spanish minorías, the notion of hierarchy itself goes by the board. The minorias are merely a small number of people who happen to have reached a higher mental development than the rest. That is all.

So far as it manifests itself, the educational tendency of Spain is directed toward the education of an all-round man, and particularly of his passions. Spain’s great humanists of the past, such as Luis Vives, or of recent times, such as Don Francisco Giner, may be quoted as excellent examples in this connection. But the primal tendency cannot manifest itself in actual collective life without the coöperation of tendencies of thought and action which are notoriously weak in the Spanish character. Hence it is that the intellectual minority of the country is reared under conditions amounting to the absence of any system whatsoever.

Secondary education is given in State institutos and in a number of private establishments, many of which are owned, staffed, or controlled by the Church. Their level and value depend entirely on the persons in charge. Some of the best and no doubt some of the worst secondary schools are to be found in Spain. As for the spirit and orientation of this education, these also depend on the persons in charge. The Church, of course, has its own standards and tendencies. But on the whole it cannot be said that Spanish education specializes in either character or intellect. Wherever it is conscious and conscientious it is humanistic and general, and aims at the formation of all-round men for the sake of the men themselves.

Over the anarchy of secondary education rises the anarchy of the universities. All State-owned, enjoying a modicum of autonomy, they are but just beginning to revive from the long period of atony they have suffered since the days when Alcalá led the world in Biblical studies and edited the wonderful Polyglot Bible, and Salamanca ranked with Paris and Oxford as one of the three leading universities of Christendom. But, though there is a general revival, this revival is worth what the particular men behind it make it, and considerable differences may be observed not only between the several universities, but even between the several faculties of each university.

As if further to complicate the conditions under which the intellectual minority of Spain is reared, the Spanish family is a most unreliable organ for choosing studies for the young. Sometimes for lack of means, sometimes for other reasons of a greater or lesser importance, it often happens that Spanish students are bound to devote themselves to studies for which they feel but little inclination, to the neglect of others for which perhaps they were born. Add to this the typical Spanish tendency against specialization, and it will be understood why Spain should be the land of missed vocations. When a Spaniard speaks convincingly of medicine, the chances are that he is an artist; if he shows a more than usual knowledge of painting, he may be a colonel; should he appear to be a specialist in strategy, he is sure to be a cathedral dean. Men of letters come from all professions.

A minority so chaotically raised could hardly be expected to be homogeneous and compact. Exceptional men in Spain rise therefore from sea level, not from the high lands of a social culture already established. They bring to their position all the peculiarities, singularities, and angularities of their isolated growth.

II

Left at this point, the parallel between the social structures of England, France, and Spain would give an incomplete picture of our three peoples. The comparison of the family in the three countries concerned is also indispensable. As was to be expected, we find the English family much weakened by the all-powerful influence of the national group. The dominant feature in this respect is the public school, for the public school substitutes itself for the family as the character-moulding agency. Now, the public school is a powerful element of standardization. In it the English boy is carefully moulded to type. The little Toms, Dicks, and Harrys of England are transformed into the one-only type: the British gentleman. The public-school boy is undoubtedly one of the greatest assets of the British nation. But the measure of his success as a type is precisely the measure of the victory of the national group over the family group. What the public school begins, the university completes. Public school and university standardize the men, leaving but few characteristics, but few outstanding features to mark the family line. Every family is as every other family. They have, no doubt, the virtues which characterize all English human units — stability, continuity, coöperation. They are all solidly built on a hard-working paterfamilias, whose life is safely insured and whose income is devoted to the welfare of the little community for which he feels himself responsible. But the foreign observer, used to a somewhat warmer, more spontaneous, and less official, if less well organized, family life, is apt to feel that the English family owes more to the English nation than the English nation to the English family. Whatever there is of strong and stable in this family is, one feels, of exactly the same nature as what is strong and stable in the English Civil Service or English banking. The father, in one word, is the governor. The dominant feature in the French family is, perhaps, the mariage de raison. A marriage in France is a carefully discussed business, in which, the feelings of the future partners being taken for granted, the positive side of the contemplated concern is attentively examined in consultation with the family solicitor. The situation is the main preoccupation of both sides. The typical French tendencies connected with foresight, planning, scheming, marshaling one’s forces, contribute to enlarge the idea of the family so as to include in it all collaterals, each in its place in the family army. This tendency works alongside of the tendency toward intellectual order, — droit, règlement, — and thus it is that the French family acquires an almost official dignity and rigidity. Hence that proclivity toward official stiffness to be noticed in French family gatherings, particularly in funerals. A French funeral is probably the most rigidly regulated ceremony of the present time.

There is no doubt that, within the framework of the State, the framework of the family is one of the strongest elements, if not the strongest, in the social structure of France. It does not, as in England, yield before the pressure of the national group. Yet through it the individual perceives the pressure of the group, and thanks to it a sufficient standard of collective behavior is maintained in the nation.

The family is the strongest of the group units in Spanish life. In Spain a bad citizen, a mediocre civil servant, even a doubtful friend, may often be, in fact generally is, an excellent husband and father.

That is due to the fact that the family falls more directly within the vital experience of the individualistic Spaniard. The Spanish family is therefore rich in emotion and life. And its strength does not lie in the formal traditions and rigid organization which are so characteristic of the French family. Far from it. Family life is in Spain singularly free from formalistic laws, as may be observed often in the matter of style and language. In fact, the strength of the Spanish family life lies in its strong feeling of consanguinidad, community of blood, a vital feeling which brings home to each member of the family the natural unity of the whole.

Hence its solidarity. But we are not, of course, to expect in the Spanish family a kind of solidarity like that which is fostered in all English group forms of life by the English genius for spontaneous organization. The solidarity of the Spanish family is not directed toward action. It is a solidarity of feeling, perhaps even only of being, and if it manifests itself in action it does so independently of the merits of the action considered, and in particular independently of the claims of the community at large.

By virtue of this solidarity, the family in Spain is often a self-sustained unit, or nearly so. In other countries, and notably in England, the family sheds its surplus individuals right and left; the community, moreover, absorbs the loose individuals in national activities, but this is by the way. In Spain the family keeps them by it and utilizes them to the advantage of the whole. Thus to the spinster, a social type in England, there corresponds in Spain the maiden aunt, a family type, without whose devotion and help large families would be impossible.

III

Love has its roots in sex, but its foliage and flowers are in the pure light of spirit. It is truly human in its complex impurity. It refuses to be dragged to earth by the cynic, or subtilized into the thin air of platonic heights by the idealist. Considered thus as an absolute, all-round, allabsorbing passion, it will be found to fit in with the most typical features of Spanish psychology.

And, in actual fact, love is in Spain the vigorous human passion which we expect it to be. It is absolute, complete, exacting, and exhausting. It demands the complete surrender of the lover and possession without reservation. But to say that it demands is to misinterpret it, for it obtains without asking. Love is in Spain as spontaneous, as uncalculating, as volcanic as Spanish nature would lead us to expect.

This all-round character of Spanish love explains why it is at the same time deeply carnal yet strangely chaste. The mutual gift of the body is but the natural manifestation in the realm of matter of the more intimate relation established by the blending of the individual ‘passions,’ the two individual life-streams turned by love into one. No intellectual or ethical elements come to disturb the free flow of a passion which feels itself in so direct a contact with life’s own sources. No social elements come to complicate or alter its primitive laws. The two sexes keep to their original and natural rôles: the assertive and possessive man, the self-denying and self-giving woman. However willful, capable, and energetic, — and Spanish women often are all three, — women accept as a matter of course, nay, as a matter of nature, the supremacy of the male. There is in all this nothing but instinctive fidelity to natural laws. Thus love, in Spain, is often found to act with that implacable strength which made of it an awe-inspiring myth in antiquity.

We know that envy is the specific Spanish vice. In the realm of love, envy becomes jealousy. Love is jealous in Spain. Not merely because it fears to lose the beloved, but still more, perhaps, because it cannot bear the idea that any portion of her beauty should be diverted from its own true owner. The beloved becomes part of the lover with such intensity that any movement on her part, the inner tendency of which points away from the lover, is felt by him as an unbearable tearing asunder of his own being.

But such diseases of love belong to its feverish period. Love of man and woman, if a genuine, simple, natural, and spontaneous passion as we know it to be in Spain, is bound to evolve from the satisfaction of sex to that of parenthood. Such is the evolution of Spanish love. The beloved gradually merges into the mother, the lover into the father. The children become the true centre and interest of love. It is a striking fact, often observed in Spain, that even irregular liaisons, born under a purely erotic impulse, gradually become homes peopled with children, as if they had begun with a priest’s benediction at the parish church.

Love in France is, like everything else, dispassionate. Hence, it loses the primitive warmth which alone can weld together the heterogeneous elements with which nature composes it. The clear rationalistic bent of the French mind tends also to deprive it of much of its spiritual glow. Thus it is that French love may not unfairly be understood as a series of variations on the theme of pleasure.

French love is reasonable, and does not lose its head. An association of two persons for the purpose of amorous pleasure, not a furnace in which two beings melt into one. The two persons remain sufficiently themselves to enjoy their relationship.

In such an attitude there is, of course, that mastery over the passions which is to be expected in the intellectualist character. But the cool calm of the Frenchman in love comes also from his freedom from ethical fetters. The passions, we know, are for him perfectly legitimate manifestations of human life. So are the pleasures of the body. The all-embracing, or rather the all-comprehending, intellect admits as legitimate all actions, all ways, but those which run counter to the predominant French requirement— truth. Truth, that urge for truth which is the mainspring in the French soul, strengthens this frank and open attitude in matters of sex. In French psychology, no ’lid,’ no censor, no repression. Everything is aboveboard and matter-of-course. Hence no sentimentalism. An intimacy which, in other types of humanity, would imply a permanent connection may mean in France no more than a passing nod.

In the collective sphere, all these tendencies harmonize happily with the tendency toward moral tolerance which we have noted in French social life. Superficial observers believe French society to be effete because it is tolerant. But the fact is that, since ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’liberties which would prove a grave social corruption in other countries are in France but healthy signs of life.

So far as it is a passion, love, individual love, is bound to be considered by the man of action as something of a nuisance. And in fact the community, being possessed of this opinion, protects its young men against the nuisance by turning their vitality toward sports. Race, climate, and the athletic education of the English youth retard in them by many years the manifestations of sexual emotion which appear so early in most Continental countries.

When they appear, the community frowns at them unmistakably, and even calls them names— such as ‘calf love.’

Thus from its very inception love lives in England under the close supervision of the community. Repression follows; the world of emotions rooted in sex becomes an underworld. It has a respectable manifestation — sentimentalism; and an escape — all that vast area of vaguely defined lands, with an unhealthily damp and warm climate, which goes by the name of ‘romance.’

Pretense and unreality hover about English love from its early days, while self-discipline exerts itself as an important force on the side of reality. This mixture of real and unreal elements is perhaps the atmosphere necessary for the growth of some of the peculiarly English love flora; for instance, the frequent friendships between men and women — from the truly genuine, in which the sexual element is really absent, to the extreme cases in which the friendship in question is but the sublimation of a sexual attraction which dares not come out into the open.

England is thus the ideal field for the psychoanalyst. Through social pressure the passions lose caste. Driven under, lacking air, they develop more strongly if more morbidly. As an alternative, the passions lose vitality altogether and lead to types in which sex plays an unimportant rôle, or even no rôle at all. England is undoubtedly the country which can show the greatest number of unsexed men and women. In most of these cases, the central activity of life has been absorbed by some public interest. The wider group, the nation, has again proved victorious over the smaller ones, the family and the individual.

This domination of love by social and ethical influences carries with it considerable advantages for the community. Energy which in other countries is — from the collective point of view — wasted in love experiences is kept within the channels which lead to the mill of the community. Health and vigor are the reward of the individual’s restraint; yet signs are not lacking of the unhealthy interest in sex which such healthy restraints tend to foster. A typical example will be found in a comparison between English and French illustrated periodicals. French ones treat sex as an open affair, even as a joke, but, though dwelling on it to the point, of monotony, they are not obsessed by it. English illustrated periodicals are, with some honorable exceptions, obsessed by it, and serve it under all sorts of disguises, — art, sport, society, — which may dress it, however scantily, with a few trappings of respectability.

IV

If it be true that the first instant of art belongs to passion, we must expect to find Spain the richest of our three nations in the raw material of art. And this is, in fact, what experience shows. Of the three countries, Spain is the only one in which an æsthetic attitude is natural, spontaneous, innate, and general. The river of life flows in the Spanish people, carrying with it like rich gold sands these ‘instants’ of æsthetic sensibility, which shine here and there in the multitude. Hence the exceptional wealth of popular art. The strongly popular cha racter of Spanish art is a byword with students of literature and music.

Life is not always artistic, still less beautiful, in Spain. But an artistic, or rather an æsthetic, attitude does not necessarily mean an artistic achievement. Far from it. Precisely because art in Spain is always, as chemists say, ‘in its native state,’ it is often unripe for consumption. Like the fruits of nature, the fruits of art require a maturing process which must take place under the light of intellect.

The success of Spanish art is in inverse ratio to its distance from nature, and in this observation must be found the key to numerous characteristics of Spanish artistic life. Thus its ‘untranslatable character,’ the strong local flavor which typifies it. Spanish art, whatever its manifestations, is above all Spanish; one might even say that it is more Spanish than art. For in it nature has the strongest say, from the fact that Spanish nature is in itself æsthotic. Thus we touch again that vital and integral character which we recognized before in all forms of Spanish life, and particularly in those closely connected with passion. There are some forms of Spanish art which are hardly more than spontaneous movements of life without any training or conscious attempt at form. A typical example is dancing. Spanish dancing is untranslatable. It must be performed by a Spanish dancer or else result in failure.

One other feature of Spanish art which follows from its close dependence on nature is that it is strongly individualistic, yet at the same time strongly national. Let us observe Spanish painting, for instance, though our remarks would equally apply to any other art. How little in common there is between Ribera, Velazquez, El Greco, Goya, Picasso, Zuloaga, and yet how forceful the impression of their country in them all. Precisely because all these Spaniards are so strongly themselves and therefore so different as men, they are so strongly Spanish, and therefore so equally Spanish-like.

The contrast between the strength of its creative genius and the weakness of its critical talent is the keynote of Spanish artistic development. It may be observed equally in plastic arts, music, or literature. It explains the disparity of the various artists who happen to be producing at the same period, with hardly any other feature in common than the fortuitous fact of their being coevals. It explains also the inequality of the production of each artist.

Color is the predominant category of Spanish art. Color is the spontaneous gift of nature to the artist, that which leaps to the eye. Drawing, composition, arrangement, purpose, are more complex and later elements. Color is the first impact of nature on our senses. It is therefore in color that Spanish art manifests itself in its strength. This may seem at first sight somewhat paradoxical. Spanish classic painters do not revel in color as do Italians, and particularly some of their Venetian masters. But we are not dealing here with the respective intensities of color in this or that painter. What concerns us is more the respective value of the several elements of art in each artist. Now it is evident that the general rule of Spanish painting is that it is predominantly painting and not colored drawing. That is no doubt what El Greco had in mind when, in conversation with Pacheco, he said that Michelangelo was ‘a good man, but he could not paint.’ He could not, that is, paint direct, catch color, and put it neatly on canvas. What he did was to draw superbly and then to color his drawing with a masterly hand. That is not the Spanish way. The impression of a great Spanish picture is not that of a colored drawing, but of a flaming picture vibrating with living color.

If Ribera or El Greco is compared with Raphael, the contrast will become impressive. Italian painting is an exquisite production of art. When it clothes with its formal perception the deep insight and intellectual excellence of Leonardo, the result is a marvel; but even when its perfect form holds nothing but the smiling inanity of a Raphael, it is still a joy. An inane Spanish painter is an impossibility, for if his soul does not give itself to the canvas his art will not be sufficient to conceal the fact or to compensate for it. Ribera, El Greco, are creators, transmitters of life, of their own life; Raphael is an exquisite designer who remains outside his work.

This and other features common to all Spanish art may perhaps be best observed in literature. George Borrow was, I believe, the first to remark that the Spanish language was superior to its literature. True, but is not that another way of saying ‘more nature than art’? There is no doubt that, of the three languages, Spanish is the richest in spontaneous æsthetic effects. The pith, the energy, the picturesque quality, the sonority, the color, the relief of Spanish expressions, sayings, proverbs, popular songs, are unrivaled.

The creative element in Spanish literature predominates over the critical and conscious. No country has ever worked with greater disregard for rules in literature; yet in no country have men of letters believed in rules with greater faith; while the critical intellect of Spain asserts the rules of the literary game, its creative spirit breaks through them, and this opposition appears even in one and the same person. A score of names might be quoted, but all may be represented by Cervantes himself. Don Quixote contains in one and the same work the masterpiece of freedom from rules and the precepts which Cervantes respected in theory, and which in practice he fortunately forgot.

Cervantes may serve also as an example of another feature of Spanish literature and art in general — its concentration on man. This is, as we know, consonant with our views on the Spanish character in general. Landscape, for instance, plays an insignificant rôle in Spanish art. There is hardly a scene of nature in the whole of Spanish painting, and as to literature, we have to wait till the nineteenth century to read an outstanding description of nature in a Spanish book. Animals are also rare, save for references to one or two famous horses. Cervantes has written an immortal dialogue between two dogs, and he has, of course, made Rocinante and Rucio climb the steep heights to Parnassus with their respective masters, Don Quixote and Sancho. But that is about all, and even that is not genuine literature about animals. For neither the two dogs of the dialogue nor the two quadrupeds in Don Quixote are presented from a really objective point of view.

Man, in fact, is the centre and almost sole subject of Spanish art. Man complete and precise. He fills the galleries of Spanish art with its unforgettable faces, created with so much intensity that one seems to remember them as one does friends.

French art is a polished surface. Spanish art is a cross section in human nature, cutting through every layer from the polished surface to the deepest formations.

If passion is the first instant in the creative process, the second or formgiving phase is controlled by the intellect; in its narrower and more concrete sense, the word ‘art’ means precisely the form-giving power of the intellect moved by æsthetic emotion. France is therefore the country which excels in art. She is, we know, poorer in the raw materials of art than Spain. Her people cannot compare with the Spanish in those spontaneous manifestations of æsthetic life which we have observed in Spain. The stress in France comes a little later in the creative process; it is a moment in which conscious effort and constructive thought have a wider share.

Hence that sense of objectivity which we find as the keynote of all French art, in contrast with the subjective value of Spanish æsthetic manifestations. When Baudelaire, in one of his most purely lyrical songs, draws the picture of the ideal land of love, he defines for all time the ideal features of the French mind in lines of cold and perfect beauty: —

In contrast with Spanish art, we find in France a better balance between the critical and creative elements. This can be observed in all the arts. French artists are conscious, they know where they are going, they know what they want. Racine, writing to a friend, ‘I have finished my tragedy; nothing remains but to write it,’ is a signal example of the French attitude toward creative work. Method, foresight, all the qualities we know to be those of the intellectual, shine with special brilliancy in French art.

This importance of the critical element at work in the individual contributes to keep up the high standard of formal excellence in French artistic work. The critical mind it is which puts into shape the shapeless lava thrown up by the imagination, after having purified it of all the worthless material that usually comes up with it. France is the teacher of the world in matters of form and of composition.

A French literary and artistic generation always feels happier when it is working under a banner and knows what it is doing. Hence those ‘isms which appear periodically in the fields of literary and artistic criticism in France: symbolism, parnassism, romanticism, classicism, are the names of generations, banners, labels which the critical intellect affixes to this or that period of French literary and artistic life. They usually have but little meaning outside France, and if non-French critics were not, as they usually are, bamboozled by their brilliant French colleagues into believing that things must happen in the world as they happen in France, these isms would have remained what they really are, mere accidents of French life, perfectly clear and plausible in a country which evolves according to plan, but inapplicable elsewhere. The least exclusively French of them, romanticism itself, when applied outside France leads to such utter absurdities as classifying Victor Hugo and Lamartine with Wordsworth, Byron, Schiller, Espronceda, and Leopardi — a strange cauldron of eagles.

In point of fact these isms of French artistic life must be considered in the same light as similar manifestations in other spheres of French history; for instance, the constitutions in French political life. They began like new political eras, with a manifesto and a fight. Victor Hugo’s manifesto is a kind of declaration of the rights of man, and Théophile Gautier’s famous red waistcoat is — if an Irish bull can be permitted in these matters — a kind of tricolor.

This is of course another sign of the French tendency to plan out future work. Theory precedes practice; manifestoes precede poems and plays. Schools, isms, and literary generations bring intellectual order into the anarchical field of æsthetic creation. So much for artists. But what about their work? A similar effort toward intellectual order leads to their classification in genres. The garden of the Muses, as seen by a true French critic, resembles a botanical garden in which every work bears a label with its genus and species clearly set out.

There is more than meets the eye in this invasion of literary lands by scientific preoccupations. A mind given to thought and thinking is predominantly interested in knowledge. France can no longer keep that wholly disinterested æsthetic attitude, spontaneous in the Spaniard. No sooner is he moved by an æsthetic emotion than the Frenchman instinctively and unconsciously deflects it toward intellectual aims, toward aims of knowledge. French literature would seem a branch of science, so keenly interested is it in truth rather than in beauty. Naturalism, verism (the very word is a revelation), are the manifestations of this scientific invasion of art. Impressionism itself, the nineteenth-century revolution in painting, is little more than the application of scientific methods to the technique of the painter, and a French artist can put forward as his greatest claim to glory that he painted a haystack under all possible laboratory —I mean natural — conditions of light and shade.

More art than nature, more intellect than passion, more line than color — French art is always on a high level of distinction and excellence, but shows no giants. Giants, in fact, are an insult to that sense of measure which we know to be a French psychological category. The strength of French arts and letters is not in its peaks, but in its general level. The truly specifically great French men are not geniuses, but supreme talents: Voltaire, Racine, Anatole France. Like France herself, her art is even, cultured, fine, and never overwhelmingly great. And this is one of the reasons why French culture is universal. It is the only culture which covers the whole world; for, being black and white, it does not lose so much in passing from country to country and from continent to continent as do other cultures more varied and colored, richer in irrational and untranslatable elements. The same qualities and shortcomings which make French culture universal make it less apt to receive and understand other cultures. Of course, the small minority, the well-read and welltrained critic, can understand anything. France possesses to-day perhaps the best exponents in the world of other than French cultures. But her cultivated mind is, as a whole, less open to other cultures than are the cultivated people of most other countries, for, again, it is a mind that must rationalize, simplify, and project everything on the two-dimensional plane of the intellect, so losing many of the vital elements in which the essence of non-French culture often resides.

Art does not justify itself in the eye of the man of action. England, therefore, provides as poor an atmosphere for the life of her great artists as does Spain for the life of her great men of action. The people do not feel art. We find thus, by a curious effect of symmetry, small groups of devoted men trying to preach the gospel of art to the English people, as similar groups of devoted men try to preach to the Spanish people the gospel of collective action. No one who knows the two countries can fail to notice the strange likeness of the two movements, the striking family air between the two types of men. The preachers of virtue in Spain and the preachers of beauty in England have, among other common characteristics, that of being selfconscious about it.

The bulk of English art is more subservient to the community than is the case in France or Spain. Its mood is less purely æsthetic, more blended with considerations of time and space, more anecdotical. The work of art in England must tell a story; art must ’deliver the goods.’ This feature of English artistic life will recall to mind English utilitarianism, that tendency which expects fruits of action from every expense of energy. The story is the form which action takes in art. And moreover, by insisting that art must have a story, the Englishman makes it carry an ethical load; it must mean something. It is all very well for the artist to say that his art is meant to convey an emotion. The true Englishman asks what is the good of an emotion; are your emotions fit to move the wheels of the social mill? If so, show it. If not, keep them to your unholy self.

But the ethical is only one of the forms of the utilitarianism of action. The other is the social. Social influences act deeply on English art. The sense of social distinction is the predominant impression which remains in the mind after a mental review of the great English painters: Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney, Constable, Landseer.

Of all the arts, that which best tolerates the addition of unæsthetic matter is literature, and that is probably why literature is by far the best and most successful of English arts. Literature is in England eminently social. The novel is a direct reflection of the life of the people, woven with all the complicated threads which cross and recross in so evolved a society. Along with the novel, England produces in abundance other kinds of works which would be incomprehensible, nay, which would not exist, were it not for the intensity of the social life which feeds them. To this kind belong books such as Boswell’s Johnson, or Pepys’s Diary, as well as the impressive mass of biographical works which is an English speciality, and, last but not least, the flow of memoirs and reminiscences which endeavor to give some kind of literary dignity to drawing-room gossip.

With Wordsworth the ethical social tendency reaches its zenith. Wordsworth becomes the most representative English poet, the poet best appreciated in England and least abroad, the poet of goodness, purpose, and utility. But in a greater or lesser degree that which he stands for manifests itself also in all but one or two of the great names of English literature, even in those who at first sight might appear least Wordsworthian. Shelley himself, the Shelley at least of the great poems, has a strong didactic and ethical propensity which prevents him from reaching poetical serenity. Hence the superiority of his shorter and more truly poetical works, such as the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ or ‘Adonais,’ over his long poems, such as ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ which carry too great an ethical load really to soar as pure works of art.

Now we know that the English people tends to organize itself along the lines of a natural hierarchy led by an aristocracy. In direct contrast with the case of the Spanish people, literature in general and poetry in particular are in England the almost exclusive appanage of the upper classes. In these classes social and moral experience is particularly rich. Hence it is that English literature, though loaded with moral tendencies, and as such defective, is rich in moral substance, and as such valuable. Hence also that when England produces a genius of passion, able in his poetic mood to stand aloof from all moral preoccupations, his creations reach such heights of excellence, for they are cast in the crucible of pure beauty, while made of the rich moral metal of the people of action.

Such seems to be the true explanation of this apparent paradox, that the usually inartistic, unpoetic people of England should have produced the greatest poets in Europe. Her poets are by definition men of passion, able — Shakespeare always, Keats nearly always, and the others often — to conceive their poems in a mood of serene contemplation, but, as men born of the people of action, endowed with a rich substratum of moral values. And it is obvious that such a combination is the ideal one for the creation of great art.

V

Let us imagine that the English convert the whole world to their philosophy. The earth would become an immense tennis-golf-cricket-swimming club, with elegant and simple clothes, mediocre food, excellent roads, magnificent sanitation, and impeccable police. Sundays a little dull perhaps, but first-rate week-ends, and not too strenuous weeks in between. Good humor, a sprinkling of wit, and even at times cleverness, though in moderation, and worn, so to say, with tactful decency. Greek known, but half forgotten; Latin on the visible horizon; an extensive reading of bad novels, and some conversation about those recognized as good ones. In all, a pleasurable world for the well-to-do, and therefore for the others, whose main pleasure would be to look at them. Plenty of physical movement, but moral adventures reserved for the few. Men would learn the experience of things rather than that of their own selves.

Should the French succeed in shaping the world to their liking, it would go like clockwork, according to schedule. All would speak French like Mirabeau and write it like Racine. Wit and cleverness would shine upon the world like strings of diamonds, and every minute of life would be a drop of exquisite pleasure for man to enjoy. There would be Titians in cookery and Tintorettos in the art of the butler. Nature would keep her secrets just long enough for man to enjoy their discovery. All men would be able to predict eclipses and to understand Einstein at a first reading. A salon would be a kind of paradise in which all women would be Aphrodites and all men Platos. Now and then a first-rate fight for a principle, irrespective of the eventual application thereof. All things permitted, though in moderation, but no more than a reasonable importance granted to the experience thus acquired.

Should the world wish to take Spain for its model, it would considerably abate the speed and efficiency of its mechanical activities. There would be less coöperation, but less to coöperate about; less order, less technique, less grinding of individuals in the social mill. The general level of life would tend to be simpler and more primitive. There would be more leisure, if less comfortably spent. Men would be more inclined to let things go by, as they did centuries ago, and would accept with equal serenity events generally held as good and events generally held as bad. The world of things would be less active and the world of men less smooth, so that physical movements would be slower and scarcer, and moral movements more violent and frequent. There would be more depth and less surface; more fundamentals, fewer accessories. Men would live life more and be less lived by it. They would toss up and down the social hillocks, shaken by fickle fortune as single individuals with loose social ties and little weight, and the experience thus gained would be more that of the soul than the experience of things.

In the name of what could we wish to impoverish the world by reducing these three types to one? The ideal of a world-regulated community is but a mirage. The conception of a wellorganized community implies criteria — well organized for what? from the point of view of whom? — which in their turn depend on national character. Moreover, even if a common criterion were found, it is surely wrong to consider the community as an aim in itself. The community at most may be accepted as an immediate aim toward the ultimate aim, which is the individual. This admitted, we might then consider the different national characters of the world — the three characters here studied being the three typical examples of them — as different ways of rearing individual souls. And it is obvious that there is no possibility of choosing the best between them, for in these matters there is no standard of better and best.

Nor, if there were, would it be possible or desirable to effect a choice. For what would be our means? Conquest? It is as dangerous to the national character of the conqueror as it is ineffective for assimilating the national character of the conquered. Education? You may train a pony into an excellent horse, but you will never educate it into a hound. What then?

The obvious answer is that the admirable variety of national characters is one of the manifestations of the wealth of Creation, and that, as such, men owe it to the Creator to respect it as a manifestation and to themselves to enjoy it as a spectacle and a gift.