FRENCH AND ENGLISH

It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cosmopolitan.  All good men are international.  Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan.  If we are to be international we must be national.  And it is largely because those who call themselves the friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinction that they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which they belong.  International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the destruction of personality.  The golden age of the good European is like the heaven of the Christian:  it is a place where people will love each other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be each other.  And in the case of national character this can be seen in a curious way.  It will generally be found, I think, that the more a man really appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less he will attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is something in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate.  The Englishman who has a fancy for France will try to be French; the Englishman who admires France will remain obstinately English.  This is to be particularly noticed in the case of our relations with the French, because it is one of the outstanding peculiarities of the French that their vices are all on the surface, and their extraordinary virtues concealed.  One might almost say that their vices are the flower of their virtues.

Thus their obscenity is the expression of their passionate love of dragging all things into the light.  The avarice of their peasants means the independence of their peasants.  What the English call their rudeness in the streets is a phase of their social equality.  The worried look of their women is connected with the responsibility of their women; and a certain unconscious brutality of hurry and gesture in the men is related to their inexhaustible and extraordinary military courage.  Of all countries, therefore, France is the worst country for a superficial fool to admire.  Let a fool hate France:  if the fool loves it he will soon be a knave.  He will certainly admire it, not only for the things that are not creditable, but actually for the things that are not there.  He will admire the grace and indolence of the most industrious people in the world.  He will admire the romance and fantasy of the most determinedly respectable and commonplace people in the world.  This mistake the Englishman will make if he admires France too hastily; but the mistake that he makes about France will be slight compared with the mistake that he makes about himself.  An Englishman who professes really to like French realistic novels, really to be at home in a French modern theatre, really to experience no shock on first seeing the savage French caricatures, is making a mistake very dangerous for his own sincerity.  He is admiring something he does not understand.  He is reaping where he has not sown, and taking up where he has not laid down; he is trying to taste the fruit when he has never toiled over the tree.  He is trying to pluck the exquisite fruit of French cynicism, when he has never tilled the rude but rich soil of French virtue.