XX Travels in France 



The Travels in France and Italy are read to-day less for their 

 agricultural and technical details ^ — though these are of 

 inestimable value to the student of rural economy — than for 

 their social and historical importance. Essentially an English- 

 man, returning from his travels with a profounder " love for 

 our BLESSED ISLE," Arthur Young was one of those rare 

 sympathetic observers whose clear-eyed contemplation of great 

 events is unclouded by native prejudice or conventional 

 phrases. His love of his kind, his warm and affectionate 

 nature was singularly free from petty national jealously: his 

 was a voice, not an echo. The picture his lively curiosity 

 affords of the great palingenesis of modem Europe, whose 

 beginnings he witnessed in France, is unparalleled in English 

 literature and indeed has only been adequately appreciated in 

 France. " Our old French social life," says M. Baudrillart,^ 

 " is reproduced as in a mirror, his judgments are characterised 

 by justness, precision, and severity, tempered by a sincere 

 sympathy: De Tocqueville's Ancien Regime owes much to 

 Ai'thur Young." 



The same admirable qualities which rendered his Tour in 

 Ireland so productive of good — he almost discovered the real 

 Ireland to English statesmen — permeate his judgments of Italy 

 as weU as of France. The universal commonplace, in the 

 eighteenth century, that Italians lacked energy of character 

 he qualifies by adding " perhaps unjustly." The conventional 

 argument that because Italians took great precautions against 

 robbery that the lower classes were more thievish there than 

 elsewhere he refutes by, " but this is always unjust; they are 

 ever what the police, law, and government of a country make 

 them." 



How strikingly, too, the permanency of national traits is 

 evidenced in these Travels ! The same taciturnity at provincial 

 tables d'hdte in France that astonished Arthur Young has 

 often impressed the present writer; and the same power of 

 adaptability to changed conditions in the French peasant 

 proprietor came under his observation at Avignon where owing 

 to the invention of aniline dyes ruin threatened the cultivators 

 of madder. Instead of lying down under the blow, they dis- 

 covered the soil was admirably suitable for the cultivation of 

 teazles for the use of clothdressers, and, by changing their 

 crops, maintained their prosperity. The passionate love of 



' See Part 11. of the Travels, not reprinted in this edition. 

 ' Publicistes Modernes, Paris, 1862. 



