Chapter 5

Civilisation would seem rather to have fostered than opposed this prejudice. In the feudal ages, the strength of a brawny right arm, the strong hand that could wield a mace, the firm seat in a saddle, were the qualities most in request; and were physical strength more estimated than the gifts of a higher order, the fine distinctions of national character either did not exist, or were not attended to. Now, however, the tournament is not held on a cloth of gold, but on a broad sheet of paper; the arms are not the lance and the dagger, but the printing-press. No longer a herald in all the splendour of his tabard proclaims the lists, but a fashionable publisher, through the medium of the morning papers, whose cry for largess is to the full as loud. The result is, nations are better known to each other, and, by the unhappy law of humanity, are consequently less esteemed. What signifies the dislike our ancestors bore the French at Cressy or Agincourt compared to the feeling we entertain for them after nigh thirty years of peace? Then, indeed, it was the strong rivalry between two manly natures: now, the accumulated hate of ages is sharpened and embittered by a thousand petty jealousies that have their origin in politics, military glory, society, or literature; and we detest each other like quarterly reviewers. The Frenchman visits England as a Whig commissioner would a Tory institution--only anxious to discover abuses and defects--with an obliquity of vision that sees everything distorted, or a fecundity of imagination that can conjure up the ills he seeks for. He finds us rude, inhospitable, and illiterate; our habits are vulgar, our tastes depraved; our House of Commons is a riotous mob of under-bred debaters; our army an aristocratic _lounge_, where merit has no chance against money; and our literature--God wot!--a plagiarism from the French. The Englishman is nearly as complimentary. The coarseness of French habits is to him a theme of eternal reprobation; the insolence of the men, the indelicacy of the women, the immorality of all, overwhelm him with shame and disgust: the Chamber of Deputies he despises, as a contemptible parody on a representative body, and a speech from the tribune a most absurd substitute for the freedom of unpremeditated eloquence: the army he discovers to be officered by men, to whom the new police are accomplished gentlemen; and, in fact, he sums up by thinking that if we had no other competitors in the race of civilisation than the French, our supremacy on land, is to the full as safe, as our sovereignty over the ocean. Here lie two countries, separated by a slip of sea not much broader than an American river, who have gone on for ages repeating these and similar puerilities, without the most remote prospect of mutual explanation and mutual good-will.

"I hate prejudice, I hate the French," said poor Charles Matthews, in one of his inimitable representations, and really the expression was no bad summary of an Englishman's faith. On the other hand, to hate and detest the English is the _sine qua non_ of French nationality, and to concede to them any rank in literature, morals, or military greatness, is to derogate from the claims of his own country. Now the question is, are the reproaches on either side absolutely just? They are not. Secondly, if they be unfair, how comes it that two people pre-eminently gifted with intelligence and information, should not have come to a better understanding, and that many a long year ago? Simply from this plain fact, that the opinions of the press have weighed against those of individuals, and that the published satires on both sides have had a greater currency and a greater credit than the calm judgment of the few. The leading journals in Paris and in London have pelted each other mercilessly for many a year. One might forgive this, were the attacks suggested by such topics as stimulate and strengthen national feeling; but no, the controversy extends to every thing, and, worse than all, is carried on with more bitterness of spirit, than depth of information. The reviewer "par excellence" of our own country makes a yearly incursion into French literature, as an Indian would do into his hunting-ground. Resolved to carry death and carnage on every side, he arms himself for the chase, and whets his appetite for slaughter by the last "_bonne bouche_" of the day. We then have some half introductory pages of eloquent exordium on the evil tendency of French literature, and the contamination of those unsettled opinions in politics, religion, and morals, so copiously spread through the pages of every French writer. The revolution of 1797 is adduced for the hundredth time as the origin of these evils; and all the crime and bloodshed of that frightful period is denounced as but the first step of the iniquity which has reached its pinnacle, in the novels of Paul de Kock. To believe the reviewer, French literature consists in the productions of this writer, the works of George Sand, Balzac, Frederic Soulie, and a few others of equal note and mark. According to him, intrigue, seduction, and adultery, are the staple of French romance: the whole interest of every novel turning on the undiscovered turpitude of domestic life; and the great rivalry between writers, being, to try which can invent a new future of depravity and a new fashion of sin. Were this true, it were indeed a sad picture of national degradation; was it the fact that such books, and such there are in abundance, composed the light literature of the day--were to be found in every drawing-room--to be seen in every hand--to be read with interest and discussed with eagerness--to have that wide-spread circulation which must ever carry with it a strong influence upon the habits of those who read. Were all this so, I say it would be, indeed, a deplorable evidence of the low standard of civilisation among the French. What is the fact, however? Simply that these books have but a limited circulation, and that, only among an inferior class of readers. The _modiste_ and the _grisette_ are, doubtless, well read in the mysteries of Paul de Kock and Madame du Deffant; but in the cultivated classes of the capital, such books have no more currency than the scandalous memoirs of our own country have in the drawing-rooms of Grosvenor-square or St. James's. Balzac has, it is true, a wide-spread reputation; but many of his books are no less marked by a powerful interest than a touching appeal to the fine feelings of our nature. Alfred de Vigny, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, Leon Gozlan, Paul de Muset, Alexandre Dumas, and a host of others, are all popular, and, with the exception of a few works, unexceptionable on every ground of morality; but these, after all, are but the skirmishers before the army. What shall we say of Guizot, Thiers, Augustin Thierry, Toqueville, Mignet, and many more, whose contributions to history have formed an era in the literature of the age?

The strictures of the reviewers are not very unlike the opinions of the French prisoner, who maintained that in England every one eat with his knife, and the ladies drank gin, which important and veracious facts he himself ascertained, while residing in that fashionable quarter of the town called St. Martin's-lane. This sweeping mode of argument, _a particulari_, is fatal when applied to nations. Even the Americans have suffered in the hands of Mrs. Trollope and others; and gin twist, bowie knives, tobacco chewing, and many similarly amiable habits, are not universal. Once for all, then, be it known, there is no more fallacious way of forming an opinion regarding France and Frenchmen, than through the pages of our periodical press, except by a _short_ residence in Paris--I say short, for if a little learning be a dangerous thing, a little travelling is more so; and it requires long experience of the world, and daily habit of observation, to enable any man to detect in the ordinary routine of life the finer and more distinctive traits that have escaped his neighbour; besides, however palpable and self-evident the proposition, it demands both tact and time to see that no general standard of taste can be erected for all nations, and, that to judge of others by your own prejudices and habits, is both unfair and absurd. To give an instance. No English traveller has commented on the French Chamber of Deputies, without expending much eloquence and a great deal of honest indignation on the practice of speaking from a tribune, written orations being in their opinion a ludicrous travestie on the freedom of debate. Now what is the fact; in the whole French Chamber there are not ten, there are not five men who could address the house extempore; not from any deficiency of ability--not from any want of information, logical force, and fluency--the names of Thiers, Guizot, Lamartine, Dupin, Arago, &c. &c. are quite sufficient to demonstrate this--but simply from the intricacy and difficulty of the French language. A worthy alderman gets up, as the phrase is, and addresses a speech of some three quarters of an hour to the collective wisdom of the livery; and although he may be frequently interrupted by thunders of applause, he is never checked for any solecisms in his grammar: he may drive a coach and six through Lindley Murray; he may inflict heaven knows how many fractures on poor Priscian's head, yet to criticise him on so mean a score as that of mere diction, would not be thought of for a moment. Not so in France: the language is one of equivoque and subtlety; the misplacement of a particle, the change of a gender, the employment of any phrase but the exact one, might be at any moment fatal to the sense of the speaker, and would inevitably be so to his success. It was not very long since, that a worthy deputy interrupted M. Thiers by alleging the non-sequitur of some assertion, "_Vous n'est pas consequent_," cried the indignant member, using a phrase not only a vulgarism in itself, but inapplicable at the time. A roar of laughter followed his interruption. In all the journals of the next day, he was styled the deputy _consequent_; and when he returned to his constituency the ridicule attached to his blunder still traced his steps, and finally lost him his election.

"Thank God I am a Briton," said Nelson; a phrase, doubtless, many more of us will re-echo with equal energy; but while we are expressing our gratitude let our thankfulness extend to this gratifying fact, that the liberty of our laws is even surpassed by the licence of our language. No obscure recess of our tongue is so deep that we cannot by _habeas corpus_ right bring up a long-forgotten phrase, and provided the speaker have a meaning and be able to convey it to the minds of his hearers, we are seldom disposed to be critical on the manner, if the matter be there. Besides this, there are styles of eloquence so imbued with the spirit of certain eras in French history, that the discussion of any subject of ancient or modern days, will always have its own peculiar character of diction. Thus, there is the rounded period and flowing sententiousness of Louis XIV., the more polished but less forcible phraseology of the regency itself, succeeded by the epigrammatic taste and pointed brevity introduced by Voltaire. The empire left its impress on the language, and all the literature of the period wore the _esprit soldatesque_; and so on down to the very days of the barricades, each changing phase of political life had its appropriate expression. To assume these with effect, was not of course the gift of every man, and yet to have erred in their adoption, would have been palpable to all; here then is one important difference between us, and on this subject alone I might cite at least twenty more. The excitable Frenchman scarcely uses any action while speaking, and that, of the most simple and subdued kind. The phlegmatic Englishman stamps and gesticulates with all the energy of a madman. We esteem humour; they prefer wit: we like the long consecutive chain of proof that leads us step by step to inevitable conviction; they like better some brief but happy illustration that, dispensing with the tedium of argument, presents a question at one glance before them. They have that general knowledge of their country and its changes, that an illustration from the past is ever an effective weapon of the orator; while with us the force would be entirely lost from the necessity of recounting the incident to which reference was made.

A NUT FOR DIPLOMATISTS.

Man is the most imitative of all animals: nothing can surpass the facility he possesses of simulating his neighbour; and I question much if the press, in all the plentitude of its power, has done as much for the spread of good or evil, as the spirit of mimicry so inherent in mankind. The habits of high life are transmitted through every grade of society: and the cheesemonger keeps his hunters, and damns his valet, like my lord; while his wife rolls in her equipage, and affects the graces of my lady. So long as wealth is present, the assumption of the tastes and habitudes of a different class, can merely be looked upon as one of those outbreaks of vanity in which rich but vulgar people have a right, if they like, to indulge. Why shouldn't they have a villa at Twickenham--why not a box at the opera--a white bait dinner at Blackwall--a yacht at Southampton? They have the money to indulge their caprice, and it is no one's affair but their own. They make themselves ridiculous, it is true; but the pleasure they experience counterbalances the ridicule, and they are the best judges on which side lies the profit. Wealth is power: and although the one may be squandered, and the other abused, yet in their very profusion, there is something that demands a kind of reverence from the world; and we have only to look to France to see, that when once you abolish an hereditary _noblesse_, your banker is then your great man.

We may smile, if we please, at the absurd pretensions of the wealthy alderman and his lady, whose pompous mansion and splendid equipage affect a princely grandeur; yet, after all, the knowledge that he is worth half a million of money, that his name alone can raise the credit of a new colony, or call into existence the dormant energy of a new region of the globe, will always prevent our sarcasm degenerating into contempt. Not so, however, when poverty unites itself to these aspirings, you feel in a moment that the poor man has nothing to do with such vanities; his poverty is a scanty garment, that, dispose it as he will, he can never make it hang like a toga; and we have no compassion for him, who, while hunger gnaws his vitals, affects a sway and dominion his state has denied him. Such a line of conduct will often be offensive--it will always be absurd--and the only relief presented by its display, is in the ludicrous exhibition of trick and stratagem by which it is supported. Jeremy Diddler, after all, is an amusing person; but the greater part of the pleasure he affords us is derived from the fact, that, cunning as he is in all his efforts to deceive us, we are still more so, for we have found him out.

Were I to characterise the leading feature of the age, I should certainly say it is this pretension. Like the monkeys at Exeter 'Change, who could never bear to eat out of their own dish, but must stretch their paws into that of their neighbour, so every man now-a-days wishes to be in that place most unsuitable to him by all his tastes, habits, and associations, and where once having attained to, his life is one of misery and constraint. The hypocrisy of simulating manners he is not used to, is not more subversive of his self-respect, than his imitation is poor, vulgar, and unmeaning.

Curran said that a corporation was, a "thing that had neither a body to be kicked, nor a soul to be damned." And, verily, I begin to think that masses of men are even more contemptible than individuals. A nation is a great household; and if it have not all the _prestige_ of rank, wealth, and power, it is a poor and miserable thing. England and France, Germany and Russia, are the great of the earth; and we look up to them in the political world, as in society we do to those whose rank and station are the guarantees of their power. Many other countries of Europe have also their claims upon us, but still smaller in degree. Italy, with all its association of classical elegance--Spain, whose history shines with the solemn splendour of an illuminated missal, where gold and purple are seen blending their hues, scarce dimmed by time; but what shall we say of those newly-created powers, which springing up like mushroom families, give themselves all the airs of true nobility, and endeavour by a strange mockery of institutions and customs of their greater neighbours, to appear of weight and consequence before the world. Look, for instance, to Belgium the _bourgeois gentilhomme_ of politics, which, having retired from its partnership with Holland, sets up for a gentleman on its private means. What can be more ludicrous than its attempts at high-life, its senate, its ministry, its diplomacy; for strange enough the ridicule of the individual can be traced extending to a nation, and when your city lady launched into the world, displays upon her mantelpiece the visiting cards of her high neighbours, so the first act of a new people is, to open a visiting acquaintance with their rich neighbours, and for this purpose the first thing they do is to establish a corps of diplomacy.

Now your city knight may have a fat and rosy coachman, he may have a tall and portly footman, a grave and a respectable butler; but whatever his wealth, whatever his pretension, there is one functionary of a great household he can never attain to--he can never have a groom of the chambers. This, like the "chasseur" abroad, is the appendage of but one class, by constant association with whom its habits are acquired, its tastes engendered, and it would be equally absurd to see the tall Hungarian in all the glitter of his hussar costume, behind the caleche of a pastrycook, as to hear the low-voiced and courteous minion of Devonshire House announce the uncouth, unsyllabled names, that come east of St. Dunstan's.

So, in the same way, your new nations may get up a king and a court, a senate, an army, and a ministry, but let them not meddle with diplomacy--the moment they do this they burn their fingers: your diplomate is like your chasseur, and your groom of the chambers; if he be not well done, he is a miserable failure. The world has so many types to refer to on this head, there can be no mistake. Talleyrand, Nesselrode, Metternich, Lord Whitworth, and several more, have too long given the tone to this peculiar walk to admit of any error concerning it; however, your little folk will not be denied the pleasures of their great acquaintance. They will have their diplomacy, and they will be laughed at: look at the Yankees. There is not a country in Europe, there is not a state however small, there is not a Coburgism with three thousand inhabitants and three companies of soldiers, where _they_ haven't a minister resident with plenipotentiary powers extending to every relation political and commercial, although all the while the Yankees would be sorely puzzled to point out on the map the _locale_ of their illustrious ally, and the Germans no less so to find out a reason for their embassy. Happily on this score, the very bone and marrow of diplomacy is consulted, and secrecy is inviolable; for, as your American knows no other tongue save that spoken on the Alleghanies, he keeps his own counsel and theirs also.

Have you never in the hall of some large country house, cast your eye, on leave-taking, at the strange and motley crew of servants awaiting their masters--some well fed and handsomely clothed, with that look of reflected importance my lord's gentleman so justly wears; others, in graver, but not less respectable raiment, have that quiet and observant demeanour so characteristic of a well-managed household. While a third class, strikingly unlike the other two, wear their livery with an air of awkwardness and constraint, blushing at themselves even a deeper colour than the scarlet of their breeches. They feel themselves in masquerade--they were at the plough but yesterday, though they are in powder now. With the innate consciousness of their absurdity, they become fidgetty and uneasy, and would give the world for "a row" to conceal the defaults of their breeding. Just so, your petty "diplomate" suffers agony in all the quiet intercourse of life. The limited opportunities of small states have circumscribed his information. He is not a man of the world, nor is he a political character, for he represents nothing; nothing, therefore, can save him from oblivion or contempt, save some political convulsion where any meddler may become prominent; he has thus a bonus on disturbance: so long as the company behave discreetly, he must stay in his corner, but the moment they smash the lamps and shy the decanters, he emerges from his obscurity and becomes as great as his neighbour. For my part, I am convinced that the peace and quietness of Europe as much depends on the exclusion of such persons from the councils of diplomacy, as the happiness of every-day life does upon the breeding and good manners of our associates.

And what straits, to be sure, are they reduced to, to maintain this absurd intercourse, screwing the last shilling from the budget to pay a _Charge d'affaires_, with an embroidered coat, and a decoration in his button-hole.

The most amusing incidents might be culled from such histories, if one were but disposed to relate them.

Balzac mentions, in one of his novels, the story of a physician who obtained great practice, merely by sending throughout Paris a gaudily-dressed footman, who rang at every door, as it were, in search of his master; so quick were the fellow's movements, so rapid his transitions, from one part of the city to the other, nobody believed that a single individual could ever have sufficed for so many calls; and thus, the impression was, not only that the doctor was greatly sought after, but that his household was on a splendid footing. The Emperor of the Brazils seems to have read the story, and profited by the hint, for while other nations are wasting their thousands in maintaining a whole corps of diplomacy, he would appear like the doctor to have only one footman, whom he keeps moving about Europe without ceasing: thus _The Globe_ tells us one day that the Chevalier de L----, the Brazilian ambassador, has arrived in London to resume his diplomatic functions; _The Handelsbad of the Hague_ mentions his departure from the Dutch Court; _The Allgemeine Zeitung_ announces the prospect of his arrival at Vienna, and _The Moniteur Parisien_ has a beautiful article on the prosperity of their relations with Mexico, under the auspices of the indefatigable Chevalier: "_non regio terrae_," exempt from his labours. Unlike Sir Boyle Roche, he has managed to be not only in two, but twenty places at once, and I should not be in the least surprised to hear of his negotiations for sulphur at Naples, at the same moment that he was pelting snowballs in Norway. Whether he travels in a balloon or on the back of a pelican, he is a wonderful man, and a treasure to his government.

The multiplicity of his duties, and the pressing nature of his functions, may impart an appearance of haste to his manner, but it looks diplomatic to be peremptory, and he has no time for trifling.

Truly, Chevalier de L----, thou art a great man--the wandering Jew was but a type of thee.

A NUT FOR FOREIGN TRAVEL.