BOOKS.

THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH.*

FRIINCITMEN and Englishmen are under the obligation of coming into a closer relation and into more fruitful co-opera- tion with each other. To anyone who reads the political

signs of the times this seems as certain as anything can be. It is well that the two peoples should be as free as possible from those mutual misunderstandings which are the legacy of their different derivations. The misunderstandings arising out of distinct national characteristics and the temperament of race are not, of course, altogether avoidable in the long run, but they can be avoided sufficiently to make co-operation practical and agreeable. We shall make a mistake if we pretend that it is easy for an Englishman to get inside the mind of a Frenchman. It is easier for him to get inside the mind of a Teuton. But the attempt to appreciate the primary motives of the French is, happily, also a process of great charm and pleasure. It is almost the exact reverse of the depressing experiment of those rare Occidentals who try to achieve a mental identification with Asiatics. A working scheme of methodical contact may, indeed, be arranged with Orientals, as everyone knows who has studied, for instance, the governance of India, but the effort towards intellectual and spiritual identification ends—no doubt rightly—in a great measure of defeat. Mr. Laurence Jerrold has shown by his previous writings that he understands France and French life perhaps as well as any Englishman resident in Paris. He gives us in this book a very useful comparison of French and English character. It is uniformly clever, but we are inclined to say that sometimes it is too clever, as the breadth and gravity of the subject are cheated here and there by paradox or the snare of a too formal antithesis.

In many passages Mr. Jerrold strikes a broad contrast between the two nations, but we may quote the following as typical of them all :—

" The mistakes we make about the French and the mistakes the French make about us are characteristic of both peoples. Everyone knows that our first blunder is to call Frenchmen feather-brained and the first French blunder is to call us matter-of-fact. The former comes from our honest delusion that the individual Englishman is the standard of common sense for the world, and the latter from the half-belief, half-pretence of the French that they are a people swayed by political sentiment. We share at the outset the mistake the French make about themselves and suppose them whimsical politically, but we carry the misunderstanding further and imagine them fantastio through and through in their own lives, and no Frenchman can ever go so wrong about himself as to think himself that. We are well persuaded that particularly our political methods are the only sane methods ; those of the French immediately appear to us fanciful because we do not understand that mere common sense is not the first thing the French ask for in politics. It takes us a long time to discover that in their lives they are greater realists than we. The French at the outset gaze with admiration upon the solid frontage of our political and social fabric. There are no ornaments here, con- sequently no weak spots. They are deluded by familiarity with the amusements of their own political games; here is no amuse- ment, therefore no game, all is hard business. The truth is, on the contrary, that French games of politics are more earnest than ours ; ours are only more solemn. English houses seem to the Frenchman as solid as the English political fabric, English private lives as businesslike as English public life. He is remarkably soon undeceived. When he gets to know the English, in three weeks, he at once comes to his final conclusion ; we are sane in the mass and mad in the individual. He makes this discovery much sooner than we that of the sanity of French lives. It seems to be a discovery much easier to make ; it is the thick French wall of • The French and tits English. By Laurence Jerrold. London: Chapman yid Hall. [7s. 6d. net.] reserve that is hard to break through, once reached behind the gay creepers hiding it."

The old-fashioned English view of the French was of a people volatile and mercurial to the point of instability. It seemed that they were incapable of an ordered discipline, though we frequently admitted the perfections of their theory of govern-

ment. And up to the present day this misconception has lasted. We hear of anti-militarism in the schools, of chronic strikes in the arsenals, of the General Confederation of Labour sowing anarchism among the working classes, of general strikes, of attempts to paralyse Government, of revolts of the Civil Service, of civil insurrections in the mining and wine districts, and we ask ourselves how such a country can go on. Mr. Jerrold's answer in effect is that the realism of the French presses every process of the intellect straight to its logical conclusion, and that the symptoms which often seem to us the prelude of final catastrophe are not a whit more serious than the political, social, and labour movements which disturb English life. They are only more realistic.

The Frenchman sees life "rarer, intenser," than we do ; for him all the values stand out more sharply contrasted ; and no movement loses point or vividness in the narratives of French journalists. In the newspapers politicians are heroes or fiends ; every episode is shaped and rounded off with the deftness of the full-blooded romancer. If a French journalist got to work on the Constitutional question in Great Britain, on Home Rule, on National Service and the opposition to it, or on our own coal strikes and railway strikes, we should begin to wonder whether we ourselves could exist as a nation more than a few weeks longer. Yet we should be in no more danger of collapse than the French Third Republic, which has indeed become a very stable institution.

We may see France safeguarding herself even while she throws herself into convulsions. The extremists have modera- tion within them and it is all ready for use when they are promoted to office. Take the cases of M. Clemenceau and M. Briand, the one a famous frondeur, the other in his earliea days an iconoclastic Socialist. No man could have been more positive in the assertion of the right of the existing Government to govern than M. Clemenceau was when he became Premier ; no man could have been more stern in making the maintenance of order precede concession than M. Briand was when he was Premier. Such behaviour in such men was, of course, only the familiar French mental habit of being perfectly sure and per- fectly definite in everyday things. The Frenchman builds his own organic scheme of the universe and fits everything into it. The vision of a logical conclusion remains, though the

momentary methods may seem wildly contradictory or retro- gressive. Mr. Jerrold tells a delightful story of a French teacher who bade his pupils map out their lives when they were young men

"A philosophy master in Paris year after year urged his pupils to plan their lives in advance to the end, and on a blackboard he planned an ideal life divided by braces and sub-braces, drawn with dashing curves in chalk : youth, prime of life, middle-age, old-age; youth—observation, self-control, training ; prime of life —assimilation, execution, fatherhood ; middle-age—experience, responsibility, meditation; old-age—retrospection, serenity, dis- solution."

The story is perhaps only a legend, but it is symbolical, and scarcely amounts to a caricature. The French, more than any nation, have an art of life. The tenacity of ideas and the vividness of historical memories are startling. Consider the national obsession of the lost provinces, which provide at once a secret and a public scandal, a provocation and a beautiful dream. There is force and nobility in this affection, and the Frenchman, as we understand Mr. Jerrold to mean, would regard the great causes of Englishmen as heavily and stupidly handled. Mr. Jerrold, at all events, thinks British Imperialism (though we believe be is himself an Imperialist) dull through and through. What a romance Frenchmen

would have made of the successful grant of self-government to South Africa so soon after the war 1 Mr. Jerrold thinks

next to nothing was made of it in England. For ourselves we think that Liberals would certainly have been justified in bragging of the success of their boldness, and we have always regarded the South African episode as one of the few feathers

in the cap of the present Government. Few who read Mr. Jerrold's book will fear that the perilous

aspect of the present revival in France—we mean Chauvinism, from exuberance of confidence—will be allowed to spread st) far as to launch France into aggression. A moderating power is naturally vested in the French people themselves. Mr. Jerrold says that French politicians are not really the professionals foreigners often suppose them to be, but amateurs, and rather viewy amateurs. There is no hereditary legislative class as there is in Britain, where in a more real sense politicians may be said to be professionals. We fancy, however, that Mr. Jerrold uses the word " professional " in something other than the ordinary sense. The " ruling classes " in England are professionals in a purely intellectual sense. In England, Mr. Jerrold goes on, Parliament is a brake on the people ; in France the people are a brake on Parliament. We fear he could not justify his statement as regards England by recent events. But we can accept what

be says of the character of the French Socialist politician. He gives a sort of " Noodle's Oration " in imitation of a

deputy:— "Having spoken for three hours and a quarter Chrysostomos Bedoulle, a Unified Socialist by profession and an individualist with a voice by temperament, feels that he has presumed too much upon his strength and requests an adjournment of half an hour to recuperate. At the resumption: Gentlemen, I had endeavoured with, alas, only too unskilled a brush, but with an enthusiasm second to none in sincerity, to paint in your minds' eye some faint sketch of that dim yet vivid, that unborn yet surely to be born future which already throbs in the womb of time, that future which we may not but which our sons will see, which will heal the wounds of this searing day, which will console the now unconsolable, bring estranged hearts together, settle upon the disinherited their inheritance, perhaps, indeed, visit retribution upon the grasping heirs of yesterday, not, it may be, without some just severity, for to-morrow will be generous, but it will yet be a day of anger to the unrighteous, like that imaginary day once announced in splendid words by a childish and discounted, yet not wholly, gentlemen, even to us Socialists, unsympathetic legend. I bad feebly tried to paint that future. I will not return to it. I will not dwell with my all too weak voice again upon that picture. I will not endeavour again to describe its splendours. I will not again fail even in so sublime a cause. I will not again soar and fall. I will not again attempt to grapple with the great to-be, not again throw before you the awful vision—at which even as my inadequate words tried to draw it I saw some satisfied egoisms shudder—not again project, even haltingly, the dread foreboding of an age of goodness, of justice, of brotherhood. No, gentlemen, my heart swells with love of that sublime future, tears tremble on my eyelashes when my yearning dreams go out passionately towards it, but I will force myself back into the present, into this tragic, this cruel, this drab present. Yet is this a drab to-day ? Is it not a day with germs of a glorious to-be, with the fore- shadowings of sumptuous colours ? And, gentlemen, this France of ours, has she not her part in these great forebodings ? Is hers not the greatest part ? Is it not from her womb that the sublime to-morrow may be brought forth into the light ? Ah, gentlemen, do not claim the monopoly of patriotism l Do not call us inter- nationalists, anti-patriots. We are the truest sons of France. -To-morrow us alone she will not disown. We alone believe in her, we the Socialists."

And so on; at the end of the speech Noodle is congratulated by seventy-four United Socialists who shake hands with him. It needs only knowledge of human nature, not necessarily of French human nature, to perceive that such a hubbub of

words leads to nothing.

It might surprise Englishmen to be told that any foreign nation could think them volatile or sentimental in their quick adaptations of feeling. But perhaps the way in which the Entente Cordiale came about might give Frenchmen the excuse for regarding English emotion as a wayward passion. Mr.

Jerrold says :—

" During the Boer War and the Paris Exhibition of 1900, which we well-nigh boycotted, we had talked of frog-eaters and French vices. The French spent two years or so wondering whether they would take our proffered band, after having called us all the names they could think of during the Boer War. No matter, we went on pretending they were wringing it warmly all the time, and when they did at last honestly take it, we had exhausted all our protestations of friendship. When we remember Fashoda and the beginning of the Entente Cordiale, can we really still call the French mercurial and ourselves steady-going?"