WHY GOOD PEOPLE DO NOT SYMPATHIZE WITH FRANCE.
IN the Fortnightly Review and the Pall Mall Gazette Mr. Frederic Harrison has vigorously expressed his amazement that good Liberals should display any sympathy for what he calls Bismarck- ism. But the reason is not far to seek. It was set forth in the lecture of Father Hyacinthe last week. At least half of the stern -anger with which France is visited by the most moral, most upright, class of Englishmen comes from the fact, not that the gauntlet was thrown down by France, or that her pretext for declaring war was the most transparently wicked ever employed by a great nation, but that she has done more than any other country to clothe vice with splendour and grace. People whose Christianity did not drive them away from the side of the Southern States, but permitted them to wink at slavery, loth upon France with disgust and vehement passion, because Paris has raised vice to the dignity of a fine art, because the literature of France recalls the licence of decaying Rome, and because the moral tone of France betrays a depraved taste revolting to the instincts which are generated by the sweet delicacy of an English household. Some of the best men and women resolutely refuse to look beyond the proposition that Germany is a nation of purity, and France a nation of licence. They cannot bring themselves to hold with a firm grip the equally manifest proposition, that Prussia may now be going as certainly down the abyss of political immorality, as France did on the eve of the war. Or, even if they hold that Germany is doing wrong by seizing Alsace and Lorraine against the will of the inhabitants, they will not face the logical result,—that she is doing a deed only one degree less heinously bad than the partition of Poland, and that she merits a large measure of the stern judgment which has followed the crime of France. They have but one answer,—that the French are a wicked people. Nor can it be denied that Mr. Carlyle has a firm substratum of truth for the vehement rhetoric in which he clothes the counts of the indictment. Paris alone would go far to condemn a whole people. London may be only a gradation less wicked, if indeed it be less wicked at all ; London may be a sink of vice equally gross and equally hideous in its abundance ; but the vice of London is not gilded, or taken under the wing of wit and taste, like that of the French capital. The vice of London is coarsely vulgar, idiotically inane ; it does not give a tone to society, nor has it a literature devoted to the cele- bration of its own infernal fascinations ; men of letters do not enlist in what Mr. Carlyle might justly call "the Devil's Regi- ment of the Line," or sell their souls into his service. Mr. Swinburne has striven hard, no doubt, to erect an English literature of impurity, based on the best models of France ; but when the thing was done in plain English, its vileness, its want of manliness, its imp-like orgies filled men of the world with unutter- able loathing, which was only intensified by the plaudits of the little clique who placed the young poet in the same rank with Shelley. France, on the other hand, has nourished a large school of letters to which the artistic treatment of vice is the abiding theme. In no other country would such a writer as Theophile Gautier be possible. Here is a man gifted with wit, charming sentiment, a delicate perception of the intricate machinery of passion, tenderness of soul, an easy and melodious eloquence ; and all these endowments are employed to teach, so far as art can teach, that the aim of art is to bring back the gilded and msthetic licence of Greece. One of Gautier's books, which we do not choose to name, is so full of subtle analysis, so enriched with beauty of expression, and so infernal in its vicious- ness, that even a man of the world might be excused for calmly and deliberately tearing it to pieces leaf by leaf, for carefully placing the fragments in the fire, and watching till every fragment of the lazar-like stuff be turned to ashes. The literature of Eng- land presents no such phenomenon of genius wedded to a satyr- like depravity. Even Byron, the most flagrant of our poetic sinners, won the enthusiastic homage of the reading mob by the intensity of his passion, by the marvellous force with which he gave utterance to the Philistine craving for free- dom from the shackles of a prim civilization, by the intensity with which he reflected the unrest and the weariness that trouble the meanest souls, by powers that might in noble hands have been consecrated to noble ends. The vileness of Byron has not helped him to become the favourite poet of the untutored young, and of what Mr. Matthew Arnold would term the unregenerate middle- class, but has rather hindered him from reaching the chief place in the Pantheon of Philistia. And the moral. taint on such poetry as that of Byron belongs to a different genus from the artistic depravity which casts the blight of a moral leprosy over the lighter literature of France. The typically French school has raised vice to the dignity of a fine art, has crowned it with poetic garlands, and chanted it& praises with song ; so that, if the new gospel has the warrant of truth, it undoes all the Christian teach- ing of the last two thousand years, and sets us drearily down once more amid the Paganism of a viler and less-gifted Greece. France has been the corrupter of youth. She has been the evangelist of depravity. Armed with a literature as perfect in form as that of Athens, she has waged war against that purity of tone and prin- ciple which is the most distinctive heritage of Christianity, and in comparison with which all the glories of literature, all the graces of art, all the triumphs of our electric telegraph and steam-engine civilization are only so much dust and ashes.
Germany, on the other hand, is not less specially a land of domestic purity than England itself. The Germans are good hus- bands, good wives, good sons and brothers. Much, it is true, must be said on the other side. Vienna, Berlin, hamburg, and some other German cities are not the most exemplary in the world. The gambling hells" which existed at Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden, and some other German places of fashion, until they were found intolerable by the stern Lutheranism of King William, did shock the English sense of propriety. And amid the established gods of morality and religion, the German thinking class wields the Thor- hammer of revolution more remorselessly than the most intrepid of the French iconoclasts. German thought has given a new depth to the French instinct for the destruction of the sanctities and the proprieties. Germany can claim half the parenthood even of such distinctively French products as Positivism. Germany has done a thousandfold more than France to disturb the quiet of orthodox England, by directly or indirectly sending across her frontiers a crowd of Goths and Visigoths in the shape of Essayists and Reviewers, Colensos, Voyseys, and the apostolic 'band of devout atheists who are guided by the one orthodox fol- lower of Auguste Comte, and who find salvation in the commemo- ration of their grandmothers. All these facts are sorrowfully ad- mitted by the good apologists for Bismarckism. But, in reply, they point to the purity of moral atmosphere in Germany. Immorality is not in the air. The people are too much swayed by the dictates 'of manly virtue to breed Theophile Ganders. His masterpieces -would excite the loathing of every cultivated man outside that dilettante clique which is characterized by an incapacity for logical thought, and a picturesque hostility to the moral law. He would be " cut " dead by the literary class, which would tell tim that, although he might wield the scalpel as remorselessly as he pleased, and might state the results of dissection with the 'fearlessness of science, he degraded the divinity of intellect by giving an unhallowed glory to passion. He would excite the same scorn and disgust as a man of genius who habitually got drunk and rolled in the gutter. He would be classed with Edgar Allan Poe. And it is because Germany sets up a high standard of purity in speech and act, that her triumphs -over France have been celebrated with the hallelujahs of many good Englishmen. It is, on the other hand, because the typical literature of France is a literature of licence, and because her moral atmosphere is murky, that she excites absolute loathing in many English homes which have taken the noble side in all the -great contests of recent years, such as the fight to liberate the American slaves, and the contest to free Ireland from the iniquity of -an alien Church Establishment. The tremendous punishment of France excites such fierce joy as might have fired the spirit of the Hebrews when they heard that the priests of Baal had been utterly 'destroyed, and the Canaanitish women and children smitten with -the edge of the sword. The hatred is so absorbing as to blind the 'eye to the lines of political rectitude. The unscrupulous intrigues of Bismarck; that barrack-room piety of the King, which thanks God for victories, and cuts Providence in a season of defeat ; the barbaric 'spirit of the squireen caste which is permitted to rule the best in- structed people in the world ; the detestable military spirit which threatens to make Prussia the pest of Europe ; the sanguinary even- ,gel of professors who would set Europe in a flame to make good 'their own ethnological dogma, that Germany is gifted with a divine right to rule everybody who speaks a German patois ; the abomin- able wickedness which has punished the firing of stray shots by -setting fire to whole villages and sending innocent women and children adrift on the world ;—all this display of a dull brutality and -a blind fury which history will execrate and God will judge, wrings 'from many of the best Englishmen the comment of silence or of -condonation.
Those literary apostles to the Gantiles who have sat at the feet ,of the French G-amaliel will sneer at a preference for Germany -which is built solely on the idea that the domestic life of the 'Fatherland is purer than that of France. They will dismiss such a preference with a contemptuous sneer at the highly-organized -irrationality of the British Philistine. And we certainly offer no apology for the apathy with which a section of the Liberal party -sees the most caste-bound and essentially un-Liberal of all Courts preparing to transfer a million and a half of people from the rule ,of France to that of Germany, and treating the protests of those ;people as contemptuously as if Alsace and Lorraine were inhabited 'by a race of Cattle. That many of the persons who were on the side of the North during the American War should now be singing hallelujahs over the aggressive policy of Bistnarck, shows the Liberal instincts even of many Liberals to be only skin-deep, and "their moral sense to be at the mercy of their prejudices. And -equally unjust, we also grant, is the accusation of whole- -sale immorality which is flung at the French people. The peasantry of France, who form the bulk of the nation, 'compare favourably as respects morality of act and tone -with the peasantry of typically " moral " countries like home- loving, Presbyterian, and pious Scotland. The idea that France is represented by Paris, and that French novels are a true index -of French life, is on a par, in point of accuracy, with the belief that the United States are faithfully represented by New York. Hence a signal injustice is done to the cause of Liberalism and to -the morality of France by the good people whom we have in view, when they shut their eyes to the criminal folly of annexing Alsace and Lorraine, and to the wickedness of burning villages full of inno- cent women and children, because a Thdophile Gautier can be bred 'by France, and because the moral atmosphere of France is less pure
than that of Germany. But such a protest against the good people does not satisfy the professional despisers of the British Philistine. They exclaim that the morality which can con- demn the Gautiers must be the morality of Churchwardenism, and must be as far beneath the dignity of philosophical discussion as the political creed of an average Tory squire, or the theology of an average clergyman. Nevertheless, the British Philistine is guided in this instance by a sure instinct, which enables him to detect, in a confused way, truths a thousand times deeper than the philosophy of the light brigade of "thinkers" that half know Hegel and wholly know Dumas. They see that whatever is best and most enduring in modern civilization does rest on purity of life. They see that the nation which dis- plays a pure family life, and generates a pure tone of thought, is dowered with elements of lastingness for which we look in vain amid the most splendidly gifted of those peoples that have ac- cepted the Athenian edition of the moral law. They see that the nation which finds its guidance in that abbreviated code of duty is on the high road to death. And if these are the counsels of Philistinism, as they are contemptuously charac- terized by some poetical rhetoricians whose peculiarity of mind enables them to exhaust the possibilities of shallow- ness, it is time for all of us to seek in Philistinism a school. If, on the one hand, the German war has led many good people to forget the principles of Liberalism, and utter unduly sweeping judgments on the morality of the French people ; on the other hand, it has brought into healthy prominence the detestation with which the best part of the English people regard vice, however gilded it may be by fashion, or however glorified by intellect and art.
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