AN UNACCOUNTABLE PEOPLE.
ALETTER from Voltaire about England was offered at a recent Red Cross sale at Messrs. Christie's. It was written from London to a French friend in 1726. Voltaire, as we all know, liked and admired the English, learning our language easily, and consequently entering easily into our minds. This letter forms a sort of epitome of his criticism of us. He writes of " the strong spirit of this unaccountable nation . . . a nation fond of their liberty, learned, witty, despising life and death, a nation of philoso- phers; not," he goes on, "but there are some fools in England, every country has its madmen ; it may be French folly is pleasanter than English madness, but by God Englieh wisdom and English honesty is above yours." When a man says that a nation excels his own in such an essential as wisdom, and when he calls God to witness his words, we suspect his intellectual mood. He is for the moment angry with his own country and sees something in need of correction. It is his own country which he is scolding, not a neighbouring country which he is magnifying. The last sentence of the quotation has little meaning. The great satirist thought us wise ; that is the most we can gather from it.
But the other things that he says of us, are they true ? Our love of liberty.is obvious. It is outwardly greater even than that of the French. We are effusive towards liberty; we constantly demonstrate our affection. In little things we positively vaunt our devoticn. There is no other country in Europe whore the official knows and does not seek to disguise the fact that he is the humble servant and not the dreaded master of the public. A certain amount of demon- stration of affection smooths domestic life, and wo smooth public) life by caressing liberty. There is, however, always a danger in both spheres that the real thing should be lost under too much protesta- tion. There are critics who suggest that the French ideal of discipline is a more reasonable thing than the English, that they accomplish even in the Army the desired end of free surrender more perfectly than we. We need not be ashamed to learn of our friends.
That we are a nation who despise death our history proves ; right up to the present day of the month it proves it. But the other nations of Europe despise it too. Voltaire, if he meant that we showed this heroic peculiarity in any special manner, must have alluded to our spirit of adventure. He meant that we despised life in every sense. The spirit of adventure not only involves courage for death, it is in a measure contrary to the art of life, an art which the English practise very little. A Frenchwoman will consent to sacrifice her son to a great cause perhaps more readily than any woman who has over lived, but she does not like to see her home broken up, as it were, for fun. She does not teach her boys that some day when they are men they will be restless, and long for change, and go to a far country to seek a new life, and be content to say "Good-bye" not only as a duty but for pleasure's sake. That seems to her to be a barbarous way of despising life. She would like to see them learn how to live as their fathers lived before them, a life made pleasant by the intelligent study of life—by highly civilized effort within given limits. A Frenchwoman would consider that a suitor whose profession compelled him to live abroad was ineligible for her daughter's hand. An Englishwoman would con- sider such an objection to be frivolous. We send our children without a sigh to live where living has not boon made an art. We ask, " Is it a healthy place ? " and that is all. We do despise, we always have despised, life.
As to English wits, fools, and philosophers, Voltaire is a little startling at first. Are we a nation of philosophers ? Perhaps it would be more true to say that we are a nation of moralists. There is nothing so dull as to hear a dull man moralize ; but brilliant morality, comprising as it dons almost the whole field of satire, is very much like wit, and popular philosophy has always a moral bins and is always terse in England. The moralizing man must reflect, and if he has any gift of language and any sense of humour he does become a philosopher. It is our moral bias, again, which accounts for our peculiar brand of fools. Every country has not the fools which it deserves. We think " The greater the country, the greater the fool" would bo a truer saying. There is no fool like as English fool, we believe. The Continental fool has a thick heat:. You cannot get much into it, but it is not so impossible to fill witti now ideas as is the head of the English fool. Whether he be a toddle:, or a stick-in-the-mud, he brings his natural moral bias to the con fusion of every question. He cannot believe in the bona fides of an opponent ; consequently it is not only an intellectual pleasure but a real duty to confound him. Ho is in the eyes of the fool a self- interested bad man whose errors should be penalized. The whole force of the fool's character is thrown into the defence of his ignorance. Perhaps this is why Voltaire calls him mad, and finds his folly so little pleasant. The French fool may be a blockhead, but he is not a professional condemner. His stupidity is passive, while the Englishman's is nearly always aggressive. Now and then among women we see the passive fool—the amiable, inconsequent creature with the reasoning power of a child, and none of a child's intuition or predilection for big intellectual issues. We imagine that there are some fools everywhere of this sort. They are cosmopolitan and of no living interest. Their portraits drawn by the greater masters give us delight ; but it takes a man of genius to see any worth in them, any material which can produce either love or laughter.
But the worst result of that tendency to moral preoccupation which has made the Englishman great is not the English fool. It is a person whom Voltaire said nothing about—the English hypo- crite. Ho is the worst sort of bad man, and only a really good people could produce him. He could only thrive where there is a certain innocence in the public, a certain real zest for duty. For one man who finds him out ten admire him, and it is sad that lie so often brings discredit on religion. Protestantism makes much of morality. Popular Protestantism is a moral rather than a religious system. A bad Protestant is a specially bad type of hypocrite. As a rule ho is self-deceived up to a point. He would like to do right, and if it paid him ho would. Ho does what is by no means agree- able to him for gain. Evil is not his good ; he had rather avoid it, other things being equal. Unfortunately other things never are equal, and he goes on talking about his tastes and never indulging them.
There is an odd sort of whimsicality in the sober English nation which leads the modern Continental to call us " mad." Had Voltaire this in his mind at all when ho said that our folly was peculiarly unpleasant ? We do as a people forgive whimsicality in a manner which contrasts oddly with our conventionality. Wo do not always want to know what is coming. It is part of our love of change and part of our love of adventure that we are so tolerant of unexpected actions, even those of us who never ourselves step outside the beaten track. Are Frenchmen over whimsical ? Voltaire no doubt was. Genius is apt to be. But the ordinary Frenchman is not, and divorced from genius he finds the peculiarity hard to forgive and unpleasantly startling. It is perhaps allied to our sense of humour, this almost childish pleasure of ours in surprise. Wfien the whimsicality has a moral tinge, and the eccentric man or woman is notably disinterested, we take him or her to our hearts instantly. Many ordinarily kind persons got a reputation for something like saintliness because their kindnesses are done in an out-of-the-way manner. We can quite understand that to a foreigner these sins against a recognized art of life—against the by-laws of civilization—would give something of the sense of dis- comfort that all the sane experience when talking to those they know to be medically mad. We are, we always shall be, "an unaccountable " nation.
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