Philip Gilbert Hamerton

“ Brittany is the land of the apple-tree, Provence the land of the olive. The shores of Brittany are washed by the tides of the Atlantic, those of Provence by the waves of the tideless Mediterranean. It is like comparing Wales with Italy and the Welsh with the Italians. The Bretons have their ancient language still, the Provençaux retain their beautiful soft modulated Latin, one of the most exquisitely perfect instruments for poetry in the world. The Bretons preserve their costumes; their ways of living, their temper, their ideas, are all different from those of Provence. ”

“ If ever the day should unhappily come when an enemy clutches England by the throat as Germany held France in 1871, he will make her sign away the Colonies, and India too, and Malta, and Gibraltar, as France made “proud Austria” sign away Lombardy and Venice, and as France herself signed away Alsatia and Lorraine. Commercial prosperity, at such a time, is as vain as poetry and painting, or that insular music that French ears will not listen to. It is useless as a showman’s profits when his skull is cracking between the lion’s jaws. ”

“ Of late years France is to the republicans the one country where political and religious liberty is complete. It is, of course, the land where French people feel most at home, where they can most readily get the superfluities which are necessary to them—the elaborately-ordered and complete repasts, the abundant fruits, the varied drinks, the talk in the café, the lively and pointed newspaper articles that they can understand at a glance, the clever plays that they listen to with such rapt attention. ”

“ It is the sign of an ideal which may constitute caste or something else, for it often traverses caste. You frequently, in England, meet with men who are not of high birth, who are not very rich, yet whom all recognise as gentlemen, and this simple recognition places them on an equality, of a certain kind, with people of higher rank. In France, this peculiar kind of equality is unknown. The bourgeois is never the equal of the noble, though he may be the better gentleman of the two. It is undeniable that, in this peculiar sense, English society is more égalitaire than French. ”

“ I believe Parliamentary Government to be the only system possible and practicable in England and France at the present day. I believe this without illusion and without enthusiasm. The parliamentary system is so imperfect that it works slowly and clumsily in England, whilst in France it can hardly be made to work at all. With two parties the prize of succession is offered to the most eloquent fault-finder, with three a Cabinet has not vitality enough for bare existence. At the present moment the English Parliament inspires but little respect and the French no respect whatever. ”

“ The natural gravity of Englishmen causes them to be misunderstood in France, where it is taken for sadness. English gravity is not incompatible with happiness. The grave mind is happy in its gravity as the light mind in its levity; and the English are not so grave as the French believe them to be. Cheerfulness (a word for which there is no equivalent in the French language) is an English characteristic, though the English have not the champagne in the blood that bubbles up in merriment and nonsense on the top of a Frenchman’s brain. They had it long ago, in Shakespeare’s time. ”

“ The French temper is not generally very sociable, yet in Paris there is great openness of manner, and a charming readiness to enter into that kind of intercourse which is lightly agreeable without involving much beyond the passing hour. For the free play of the mind, without any pretension to make it more than play, there is no place in the world like Paris. It is a great art or a great gift to make social intercourse bright and truly a relaxation equally removed from pedantry on one side and the dulness of indifference on the other. ”

“ France, he believed, or rather he knew, was at the head of all nations both in arts and arms, the most military of countries, the most artistic, the most scientific—in all things and in all ways the greatest, the most illustrious, the best. ”

“ Football, as practised in English public schools, is a brutal pastime, but it is an excellent discipline in courage. French duelling, though infinitely more refined in its forms, is in principle thoroughly barbarous, but as a school of courage there is nothing to equal it, and the great advantage of it in that respect is the constant possibility of an encounter that hangs over the head of every Frenchman, and accustoms him to the idea of danger. He goes through life like an armed knight riding through a wood. ”

“ In any attempt to judge of manners, especially in a foreign nation, we are liable to two mistakes. We are likely to think that a degree of polish inferior to our own is rudeness, whilst the refinement that surpasses ours is affectation, we ourselves having exactly that perfection of good breeding which is neither one nor the other. An Englishman is particularly liable to think in this way, because the present English ideal of good manners is a studied simplicity. We come to think that a simple manner is unaffected, whilst high polish must have been learned from the etiquette-book. ”

“ The purity of nationality in a man’s ideas is only compatible with pure ignorance. An English agricultural labourer may be purely English. The gentleman’s son who learns Latin and Greek becomes partly latinised and partly hellenised; if he learns to speak French at all well he becomes, so far, gallicised. To preserve the pure English quality you must exclude everything that is not English from education. You must exclude even the natural sciences and the fine arts, as they have been built up with the aid of foreigners and constantly lead to the study of foreign works. ”

“ England is always to be humiliated, France really has been humiliated. The difference is considerable—it is that which exists between a vase that has been broken and another that might be broken if it were not properly taken care of. And the French have no longer the consolation which cheered them a little after Waterloo, of having yielded to Europe in arms. They have been beaten fairly in a duel with one nation, or at least with one people that became a nation before the war was over, and they have submitted, not willingly, but in fact, to all the consequences of the war. ”

“ The French noblesse, as a caste, is spoiled by this intrusion and acceptance of false nobles, but if there were not this fatal objection it would be much more truly a caste than the British nobility and gentry. There is, in fact, no pure and well-guarded upper caste in England except simply the holders of titles. You may belong to the highest nobility in England by descent, and there will be nothing to distinguish you from a plebeian unless you are a son of the representative of the family. In every genuine noblesse noble blood continues to bear some distinctive mark of caste. ”

“ I cannot conclude this chapter without frankly admitting that national jealousy is reasonable so long as it confines itself to the truth. It is quite reasonable that the French should want to push the English out of Canada and Egypt, and that the English should wish to sink the French fleet. What is unreasonable is for two peoples to depreciate each other in books and newspapers, and blacken each other’s private characters because both are formidable in a military or a naval sense. How is it that we hear so much of French immorality, and nothing, or next to nothing, of Italian? ”

“ All varieties of formalism have one quality in common, that the strength they give to religion is not vital, it is only social and external. They have a weakening effect upon faith, even in the faithful. Formalism lowers the temperature, not on one side only, but all round it, like an iceberg floating in the sea. ”

“ Every extension of the suffrage is a popular gain, not for a time only, but for ever. Every gain made by the friends of religious toleration, and by those who work in hope for a future condition of religious equality, is a sure and permanent gain. There is a great deal of conservatism in England, there is little or no reaction. Indeed, the words “reaction” and “reactionary” are scarcely English words at all in a political sense; they are French words. No Englishman ever has that spiteful hatred of the present which distinguishes the French réactionnaire. ”

“ It is useless to argue about success in literature with people too uneducated to read English. It is useless to affirm the greatness of English art, for that can be systematically denied. There is but one kind of greatness that need give England a thought or a care in reference to foreign countries, and that is her power of offence and defence by sea and land. The only unanswerable superiority is superiority in arms. ”

“ If a modern Englishman tried to live like Epictetus he would inflict a kind of social paralysis upon himself, he would deny himself his due share in English life. That is the great practical difficulty in the way of hard living and high thinking. It is well for the philosopher, but he cannot require the same austerity of his family and his guests. No individual Englishman is responsible for the national standard of comfort. It has grown as custom grows, and is now so firmly fixed that Wisdom herself has to submit to it. ”

“ Nothing is more characteristic of the English, or more unlike the French, than the courage to go and settle in some place where they know nobody and with which they have no previous associations. French people do it when forced by necessity, but they do it with a sad heart; English people of their own free will have the courage to sever old ties and begin new experiments of life. ”

“ The kind of national courage which consists in offering a determined though hopeless resistance to a successful enemy was very nobly displayed by the French after Sedan, especially during the siege of Paris. Some English writers called this mere obstinacy, and had nothing but contemptuous blame for it, yet I venture to say that if an invading army surrounded London the English would show exactly the same kind of noble obstinacy themselves. In such a case a nation does not fight without a purpose, though it may struggle without hope. It fights for its self-respect. ”

“ I have mentioned the poor incomes of French priests, the miserable incomes as they will appear to the English reader. The very poverty of these men is, in the best cases, a part of their success. If they want to leave all and follow Christ, a bare subsistence is all that they require for that. Their poverty is a part of the dignity and reality of their office. Success, for a priest, has absolutely nothing to do with money, or even with preferment; it consists in moral and religious influence, and in nothing else. ”

“ Arnold’s studies of other nations, other ages, and other creeds would, I should have thought, have led him to regard Nonconformity as an universal power in societies, which has, in our time and country, its particular embodiment, but which is to be understood only when contemplated in all its other embodiments; the thing is one in spirit and tendency, whether shown amongst the Jews or the Greeks—whether in Catholic Europe or Protestant England. Wherever there is disagreement with a current belief, no matter what its nature, there is Nonconformity. ”

“ The Parisian nation has not the same characteristics as the nation of Londoners. The distinguishing character of London is to be, not local, but world-wide; the character of Paris is to be as local as ancient Athens, and as contemptuous of all that lies outside. It is commonly believed that Paris is France, but how can it be France when it is so utterly unlike the provinces? This error comes from the foreigners’ habit of staying in Paris only, so that Paris is very really and truly all France to them, being the only France they know. ”

“ The Highlanders have, of themselves, no fine arts. Their degree of civilisation has developed no ecclesiastical architecture; they got no further than the building of a few rude small castles. They have not any graphic arts, and in those industrial products which are akin to art they have never got beyond the design of a brooch or the arrangement of the crossing stripes in a plaid. Their vernacular literature consists of little more than a few poems, said to be touching and pathetic in their simplicity. The one literary success in connection with the Highlands has been Macpherson’s Ossian. ”

“ Not only does the place of education give no social position to a Frenchman, but education itself now gives him very little, because it has been made accessible to poor men. Eton and Oxford are respected because they are expensive;—if the same education, or a better, were given in cheap schools, it would lose its social significance. France seems to have reached, or almost reached, that point towards which the whole world is tending, when education will be too common to confer rank, and it is even possible we may get back to the middle-age idea that it is lordly to be illiterate. ”

“ Political celebrity in England is quite as strong as title. Any one who has the ear of the House of Commons, however humble his birth, is listened to in the country quite as attentively, quite as respectfully, as a lord. But title certainly overshadows literary and artistic celebrity. Not that this is of any real importance, for literary and artistic celebrity is not in its nature powerful, except over the intelligent, who are a minority in every population. ”

“ All testimony that comes to me about French interiors confirms the belief that the number of people who form libraries has greatly diminished. It was once the custom in the upper class, but nobody would say that it is the custom now. In twelve or fifteen country houses known to a friend of mine there was only one library, and, what is more significant, only one man deserving the name of a reader. Even in England, where people read certainly three times as much as they do in France, the expenditure on books bears no proportion to income, except in the case of a few scholars. ”

“ In literature, success is merely encouragement to express our genuine and best selves; it is not to be splendidly rewarded for producing work adapted for the market. In painting, success is nothing more than encouragement to paint the pictures that form themselves in the mind; it is not successful commerce. Corot, the French landscape painter, produced his own work and succeeded late, yet it was a pure success for him, and he could wait for it patiently on fifty pounds a year. ”