Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 29, March, 1860

The excellence of the French character, intellectually speaking, consists in routine and detail. How well their authors describe and their artists depict peculiarities! how exact the evolutions of a French regiment, and the statements of a French naturalist! how apt is a Parisian woman in raising gracefully her skirts, throwing on a shawl, or carrying a basket! In loyalty to a method they are unrivalled, in the triumph of individualities weak; their artisans can make a glove fit perfectly, but have yet to learn how to cut out a coat; their authors, like their soldiers, can be marshalled in groups; means are superior to ends; manners, the exponent of Nature in other lands, there color, modify, and characterize the development of intellect; the subordinate principle in government, in science, and in life, becomes paramount; drawing, the elemental language of Art, is mastered, while the standard of expression remains inadequate; the laws of disease are profoundly studied, while this knowledge bears no proportionate relation to the practical art of healing; the ancient rules of dramatic literature are pedantically followed, while the "pity and terror" they were made to illustrate are unawakened; the programme of republican government is lucidly announced, its watchwords adopted, its philosophy expounded, while its spirit and realization continue in abeyance: and thus everywhere we find a singular disproportion between formula and fact, profession and practice, specific knowledge and its application. The citizen of the world finds no armory like that which the institutions, the taste, and the genius of the French nation afford him, whether he aspire to be a courtier or a chemist, a soldier or a savant , a dancer or a doctor; and yet, for complete equipment, he must temper each weapon he there acquires, or it will break in his hand.

In every epoch a word rules or illustrates the dominant spirit: citoyen in the Revolution, moustache during the Consulate, victoire under the Empire, to-day la Bourse . "To a Frenchman," says Mrs. Jameson, "the words that express things seem the things themselves, and he pronounces the words amour, grâce, sensibilité , etc., with a relish in his mouth as if he tasted them, as if he possessed them. They talk of " le sentiment du métier "; in travelling, Paris is the eternal theme. A sagacious observer has remarked in their language the "short, aphoristic phrase, the frequent absence of the copulative, avoidance of dependent phrases, and disdain of modifying adverbs. Naiveté, abandon, ennui , etc., are specific terms of the language, and designate national traits. When Beaumarchais ridiculed a provincial expression, the Dauphiness, we are told, composed a head-dress expressly to give it a local habitation and a name."

The mania for equality, in the first Revolution, De Tocqueville shows was not so much the result of political aspiration as the fierce protest against those exclusive rights once enjoyed by the nobility, (shown by Arthur Young to have been the primary impulse to revolution,) to hunt, keep pigeons, grind corn, press grapes, etc. For a long period, the man of letters was never combined with the statesman, as in England. In France, speculation in government ran wild, because the thinkers, suddenly raised to influence in affairs, had enjoyed no ordeal of public duty. Hence certain imaginary fruits of liberty were sought, and its absolute worth misunderstood. And now that experience, dearly bought, has modified visionary and moulded practical theories, how much of the normal interest of the French character has evaporated! Even the love of beauty and the love of glory, proverbially its distinctions, are eclipsed by the sullen orb of Imperialism; the Bourse is more attractive than the battle-field, material luxury than artistic distinction.

One of their own philosophers has summed up, with justice, the anomalous elements of the versatile national character:—

"Did there ever appear on the earth another nation so fertile in contrasts, so extreme in its acts,—more under the dominion of feeling, less ruled by principle; always better or worse than was anticipated,—now below the level of humanity, now far above; a people so unchangeable in its leading features that it may be recognized by portraits drawn two or three thousand years ago, and yet so fickle in its daily opinions and tastes that it becomes at last a mystery to itself, and is as much astonished as strangers at the sight of what it has done; naturally fond of home and routine, yet, when once driven forth and forced to adopt new customs, ready to carry principles to any lengths and to dare anything; indocile by disposition, but better pleased with the arbitrary and even violent rule of a sovereign than with a free and regular government under its chief citizens; now fixed in hostility to subjection of any kind, now so passionately wedded to servitude that nations made to serve cannot vie with it; led by a thread so long as no word of resistance is spoken, wholly ungovernable when the standard of revolt is raised,—thus always deceiving its masters, who fear it too much or too little; never so free that it cannot be subjugated, never so kept down that it cannot break the yoke; qualified for every pursuit, but excelling in nothing but war; more prone to worship chance, force, success, éclat , noise, than real glory; endowed with more heroism than virtue, more genius than common sense; better adapted for the conception of grand designs than the accomplishment of great enterprises; the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation of Europe, and the one that is surest to inspire admiration, hatred, terror, or pity, but never indifference?" 1 1 De Tocqueville.

What other social sphere could afford room for the vocation so aptly described in the following sketch of his "ways and means," given in a recent picture of life in Paris by a sycophant of millionnaires, at a period when interests, not rights, are the watchwords of the nation?—"Mon rôle de familier dans une véritable population d'enrichis me donnait du crédit dans les boudoirs, et mon crédit dans les boudoirs ajoutait à ma faveur près ces pauvres diables de millionaires, presque tous vieux et blasés, courant toujours en chancelant après un plaisir nouveau. Les marchands de vin me font la cour comme les jolies femmes, pour que je daigne leur indiqner des connaisseurs assez riches pour payer les bonnes choses le prix qu'elles valent. Mon métier est de tout savoir,—l'anecdote de la cour, le scandale de la ville, le secret des coulisses." And this species of adventurer, we are told, has always the same commencement to his memoirs,—" Il vint à Paris en sabots. "

The numerous avocations of women in the French capital explain, in a measure, their superior tact, efficiency, and force of character. This is especially true of females of the middle class, who have been justly described as remarkable for good sense and appropriate costumes. The participation of women in so many departments of art and industry affects, also, the social tone and the manners. Sterne, long ago, remarked it of the fair shopkeepers. "The genius of a people," he says, "where nothing but the monarchy is Salique , having ceded this department totally to the women, by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and sizes, from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles in a bag, by amicable collisions, they have worn down their asperities and sharp angles, and not only become round and smooth, but will receive, some of them, a polish like a brilliant."

How distinctly may be read the political vicissitudes of France in her literature,—classic, highly finished, keen, and formal, when a monarch was idolized and authors wrote only for courts and scholars: Bossuet, with his rhetorical graces; La Bruyère, with his gallery of characters, not one of which was moulded among the people; De la Rochefoucauld's maxims, drawn from the arcana of fashionable life; Racine, whose heroes die with an immaculate couplet and speak the faint echoes of Grecian or Roman sentiment! When politics became common property, and the walls of a prescriptive and conventional system fell, how wild ran speculation and sentiment in the copious and superficial Voltaire and the vague humanities of Rousseau! When an era of military despotism supervened upon the reign of license, how destitute of lettered genius seemed the nation, except when the pensive enthusiasm of Chateaubriand breathed music from American wilds or a London garret, and Madame de Staël gave utterance to her eloquent philosophy in exile at Geneva! " Napoléon eût voulu faire manoeuvrer l'esprit humain comme il faisait manoeuvrer ses vieux bataillons ." Yet more emphatic is the reaction of political conditions upon literary development after the Restoration. The tragic horrors and protracted fever of the Revolution, and the passion for military glory exaggerated by the victories of Napoleon, legitimately initiated the intense school, which during the present century has signalized French literature. The prestige of the scholar revived, and literary eclipsed warlike fame; but with the revival of letters came the revolutionary spirit before exhibited on the battle-field and in cabinets. For the artificial and elegant was substituted the melodramatic and effective; lyrics from the overwrought heart broke in dreamy sweetness from Lamartine and in simple energy from Béranger; fiction the most elaborate, incongruous, and exciting, here quaintly artistic, there morbidly scientific, revealed the chaos and the earthquakes that laid bare and upheaved life and society in the preceding epochs; the journal became an intellectual gymnasium and Olympic game, where the first minds of the nation sought exercise and glory; the feuilleton almost necessitated the novelist to concentrate upon each chapter the amount of interest once diffused through a volume; criticism, from tedious analysis, became a brilliant ordeal; egotism inspired a world of new confessions, political questions a new school of popular writing, the love of effect and the passion for excitement a multitude of dramatic, narrative, and biographical books, wherein the serenity of thought, the tranquil beauty of truth, and the healthful tone of nature were sacrificed, not without dazzling genius, to immediate fame, pecuniary reward, and the delight d'éprouver une sensation . Even in the history of the fine arts, we find the political element guiding the pencil and ruling the fortunes of genius. David was the government painter, and regarded Gros and Girodet as suspects . He effected a revolution in Art by going back to severe anatomical principles in design. There were conspiracies against him in the studios, and war was declared between color and design; the palette and the pencil were in conflict; David, the Napoleon of the former,—Prud'hon, Géricault, Delacroix, and others, leaders in the latter faction. Each party was surrounded by its respective corps of amateurs; and military terms were in vogue in the atelier and academy. " S'il est permis " says Delacroix, speaking of his Sardanapalus, "de comparer les petites choses aux grandes, ce fut mon Waterloo. Je devenais l'abomination de la peinture; il fallait me refuser l'eau et le sel." "If you wish to share the favors of the government," said an official to another artist, "you must change your manner." From the tyranny of external influences have arisen the incongruities of the French schools of painting, and especially what has been well called "that meretricious breed which continue to depict the Magdalen with the united attractions of Palestine and the Palais Royal." The large pictures which Gros painted during the Empire were consigned to long obscurity at the Restoration. The lives, too, of many of these cultivators of the arts of peace had a tragic close. Haydon's fate made a deep impression in England, because it was an exceptional case; while, of the modern painters of France, whose career was far more harmonious and successful than his, Gros drowned himself, Robert cut his throat, Prud'hon died in misery, and Greuze was buried in Potter's Field. The side of life we naturally associate with tranquillity thus offers, in this dramatic realm, scenes of excitement and pity. It is the same in literature. Witness the fierce struggle between the Romantic and Classic schools,—the early victories of the enfant sublime , Victor Hugo. And we must acknowledge that " les lettres et les arts ont aussi leurs émeutes et leurs révolutions ," and accept the inference of one of the Parisian literati ,—that " l'esprit a toujours quelque chose de satanique ." Every revolution is identified with some musical air: when Louis XVIII. first appeared at the theatre, after his long exile, he was greeted with the "Vive Henri IV.," and the new constitution of 1830 was ushered in by the "Marseillaise." The Vaudeville theatre, we are told, during the Revolution and under the Empire, was essentially political. An imaginary resemblance between la chaste Suzanne and Marie Antoinette caused the prohibition of that drama; and the interest which Cambacères took in an actress of this establishment led him to give it his official protection.