August 15, 1 9 1 8 
Land & Water 
21 
Our Blunder about France : By Winifred Stephens 
■~"^HE war has brought to many of us brutal 
I awakenings from the too sanguine dreams of 
I human progress. It has also brought us visions 
I of fine human qualities never suspected before. 
-^^ But it has not yet completely taught us to know 
France ; though it is teaching the French to know them- 
selves. "To think," writes a popular French author, "that 
people believed us to be, and that we believed ourselves to be 
light-minded ! On the contrary, we are almost too serious." 
We English, after years of comradeship, while we 
admire the gallantry and heroism of our Allies, still find it 
difficult to regard them as really serious. An English 
lawyer, settled in Canada, whom I used to think intelligent, 
writes to me that he found Paris "vicious and materialistic." 
" French literature neither elevating nor instructive, and 
much of it puerile." Then he adds a sentence which may 
explain, if not excuse, his error. " Out here we have French 
both from France and Canadian born, and there are some 
■charming people among them ; but we don't mix much. 
There is a difference. They are clever and refined in many 
•ways, but seem lacking in that vision or idealism, or whatever 
it is, that makes the average Anglo-Saxon strive more or less 
for better things." 
Here persists the age-old prejudice. Probably to this 
miscomprehension of the French spirit several causes have 
contributed. It may arise from long centuries of military 
warfare and commercial rivalry. It may proceed from our 
own and from the French national temperament ; and it 
may not be unconnected with the intrigues of our common 
enemy. 
Our British insularity blinds us. It renders us almost as 
incapable of grasping the psychology of other people as the 
German \yhose dullness in this respect we are so fond of 
decrying. We are too prone to judge everything by British 
standards, to adopt a Podsnapian attitude, and to condemn 
wholesale all that does not exactly correspond with the 
ideas prevailing in these northern islands. "Not until we 
have ceased to urge our schemes of morality or our habits 
of thought on our charming and beloved neighbours," writes 
Mr. Edmund Gosse, "can we regard the Entente as not 
merely cordial, but complete." 
Nevertheless, in mitigation of our error, it must be 
admitted that the French people are not easy to know. 
And we have been content with a superficial acquaintance, 
based for the most part on what we have seen on the Paris 
boulevards, read in the latest French novel,* or witnessed 
on the boards of some Paris theatre. When on such trivial, 
superficial evidence we ventured to pass sentence on a whole 
nation we were no better than the man who tried to sell his 
house by producing a sample brick from his pocket. 
How should we in England like our nation to be judged 
from the conjugal scandals related in some popular novel, 
from the dramas on the stage of some second-rate theatre ? 
Moreover, in judging any nation we shall inevitably go 
astray if we consider it merely from the metropolitan point 
of view. Life in great metropolitan cities — whether Paris, 
London, New York, Vienna, Berlin^s not only more or 
less identical, but it is totally unrepresentative of the life of 
either the French, British, American, Austrian, or Prussian 
nation as a whole. 
One of the English writers who has best understood certain 
phases of French life is Mr. J. E. C. Bodley. When pre- 
paring for his book on France he travelled ceaselessly 
up and down the provinces, from Marseilles to Bordeaux, 
from Concarneau to Lyons, from Toulouse to Lille. 
Other writers to whom France has revealed her heart — Gilbert 
Hamerton, Madame Duclaux, for example — ^have not 
neglected the provinces. I have always been glad that 
my parents sent me to school — not to some fashionable 
Parisian pensionnat, but to Protestant Provence. There I 
was first initiated into that intimate family circle which we 
English have too often believed to be non-existent in France. 
In that remote region an English girl was a curiosity. Con- 
sequently I was brought down into the salon in the evening 
when friends came, and China tea, with its delicate perfume, 
was handed round, and punch was brewed in a great 
silver bowl, stirred with a long-handled silver spoon. 
It was in these simple social gatherings that 1 first 
learnt to appreciate the cultured salon life, driven out 
of fashionable Paris by American restlessness and passion 
• Seed. Kudlcr. Professor of French Literature at the TJniversity 
of London, on la Moraliti- de la LilUrature Fran^aise, a lecture dehvered 
to the Anglo-French Society in London, published (igi.S) by "le 
Fran9ais." 
for card-playing. In these circles, young as I was, I heard 
freely discussed those fundamental questions which Anglo- 
Saxon shyness, to call it by its most charitable name, causes 
to be tabooed in British drawing-rooms. Occasionally, when 
it was proposed to read aloud some rather advanced play 
or to discuss some progressive book, the youthfulness of 
Mees might be called in- question. But the touchstone was : 
" Have you read Shakespeare ? " And my affirmative reply 
banished all misgivings. If Mees had read Shakespeare, 
then she might read anything, discuss anything. Mees 
refrained from explaining that her knowledge of her great 
national poet had been gained from the well-expurgated 
Clarendon Press edition. Indeed, at that time she had 
probably never even heard of the estimable Mr. Bowdler. 
Seldom, however, did such questions arise ; for our favourite 
entertainments were the reading aloud, by a grand-daughter 
of Guizot, of some new poem, or the declaiming by the pastor 
of a scene from some seventeenth century classic. 
Such tranquil, cultured existences, however, were not 
confined to the provinces. Even in Paris, down to the very 
eve of the war, in quarters remote from the noise and glitter 
of the boulevards, far from the fashionable Champs Elysees 
or Pare Monceau, away in some side street on the left bank, 
or out beyond the Luxembourg Gardens, there were hundreds 
of salons like those I have described. In one of them, only 
a few weeks before the mobilisation, I heard, a young historian 
read his introduction to a work that would have created 
a great sensation in the academic world had not the'author's 
call to the trenches intervened to prevent its completion. 
But well concealed were these sequestered lives of people 
who loved things of the mind, from the throngs of British 
tourists, who flocked over to France for a gay week-end, or 
spent a few crowded days in Paris en route for Switzerland 
or Italy, and who returned to their native islands with a 
sense of superiority, not unmingled with secret rehsh at 
having witnessed, if not participated in, the frjvolity of 
modern Babylon. 
Nevertheless, for the prevailing belief in French decadence 
we have not only ourselves to blame ; the French, as we 
have said, were partly responsible.* They, perhaps more 
than any other race — more, even, than ourselves, and we 
are by no means immune from such a weakness — are addicted 
to self-depreciation. The reason for this is not far to seek. 
The French are essentially of a logical temperament. And 
it is this quality which makes them face the worst of every- 
thing. In personal matters they may be tempted to veil 
truths for the sake of politeness, but in questions of principle 
their intellectual sincerity is uncompromising. They are 
fearlessly honest thinkers, and sc averse to comfortable self- 
delusion that they "take a sort of bitter pleasure in believing 
the worst: 
We English — a sentimental, poetical race — are content to 
dwell in a more or less cloudy intellectual sphere. And 
when we depreciate ourselves it is not because of our fondness 
for reality, nor because of our logical temperament, but 
through inverted pride. We are always inclined to run 
away from facts. In our literature we like things to be 
represented not as they are, but as they should be. We 
skim and film the ulcerous part. We have our realists, but 
even they are not as frankly and vividly realistic as their 
literary brethren across the Channel. We have never had a Zola. 
That master of realism of set purpose constituted himself the 
man with the muck-rake. And by riveting his readers' attention 
on the foul spots, which defile not only French, but every 
form of our so-called "modern civilisation," he created an 
impression that his country was rotten to the core. 
It was not in England alone that this myth of French 
degeneracy was credited. In Germany the pernicious seed 
fell upon fruitful soil. The Pan-Germanists, puffed up by 
their victory over France, were glad to attribute her defeat 
to her moral inferiority. France was hopelessly decadent, 
they proudly affirmed ; and not France alone, but the whole 
Latin race. It was imperative, therefore, that for the world's 
welfare Latin civilisation should be superseded by Teutonic 
Ktiltur. 
According to these arrogant supe^-men, it was the women 
of France who were chiefly responsible for the degeneracy 
of the French race ; on the French women, to whose industry, 
frugality, and courage not France only but the whole allied 
cause is so deeply indebted, the Pan-Germans laid the chief 
blame for French decadence. 
French women themselves were painfully conscious of the 
• See La Troisieme France, by Victor Giraud (Hachette, 191 7). 
pp. II-I3- 
