: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 05 No. 29 March 1860 A Magazine of Literature Art and Politics by Various - American periodicals The Atlantic Monthly

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ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

THE FRENCH CHARACTER.

In every phase of life, manners, and action, we see a characteristic excellence in detail and process, and an equally remarkable deficiency in grand practical idea and consistent moral sentiment. The French chemists have the art to extract quinine from Peruvian bark and conserve the juices of meats; but one of their most patriotic writers calls attention to the wholly diverse motives addressed by Napoleon and Nelson to their respective followers. "Soldiers," exclaimed the former, "from the summit of those Pyramids forty ages are looking down upon you." "England," said the latter, "expects every man to do his duty." In Paris, the science of dissection is perfect; in London, that of nutrition;--Dumas has reduced plagiarism to a fine art; Cobbett made common-sense a social lever;--a British merchant or statesman attaches his name to a document in characters of such individuality that the signature is known at a glance; a French official invents a flourish so intricate that the forger's ingenuity is baffled in the attempt to imitate it;--government, on one side of the Channel, employs a taster to detect adulteration in wine whose sensitive palate is a fortune; on the other, the hereditary fame of a brewery is the guaranty of the excellence of ale.

This minute observance of detail has made the French leaders in fashion; it directs invention to the minutiae of dress, and confirms the sway of the conventional, so as to give la mode the force of social law to an extent unknown elsewhere. The tyranny and caprice of fashion were as characteristic in Montaigne's day as at present. "I find fault with their especial indiscretion," he says, "in suffering themselves to be so imposed upon and blinded by the authority of the present custom as every month to alter their opinion." "In this country," writes Yorick, "nothing must be spared for the back; and if you dine on an onion, and lie in a garret seven stories high, you must not betray it in your clothes."

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, 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:--

In the family of nations France is the child of illusions, and excites the sympathy of the magnanimous because her destinies have been marred through the errors of the imagination rather than of the heart. Government, religion, and society--the three great elements of civil life--have nowhere been so modified by the dominion of fancy over fact. Take the history of French republicanism, of Quietism, of court and literary circles; what perspicuity in the expression, and vagueness in the realization of ideas! In each a mania to fascinate, in none a thorough basis of truth; abundance of talent, but no faith; gayety, gallantry, wit, devotion, dreams, and epigrams in perfection, without the solid foundation of principles and the efficient development in practice, either of polity, a social system, or religious belief,--the theory and the sentiment of each being at the same time luxuriant, attractive, and prolific.

The popular writers are eloquent in abstractions, but each seems inspired by a thorough egotism. Descartes, their philosopher, drew all his inferences from consciousness; Madame de S?vign?, the epistolary queen, had for her central motive of all speculation and gossip the love of her daughter; Madame Guyon eliminated her tenets from the ecstasy of self-love; Rochefoucauld derived a set of philosophical maxims from the lessons of mere worldly disappointment; Calvin sought to reform society through the stern bigotry of a private creed; La Bruy?re elaborated generic characters from the acute, but narrow observation of artificial society; Boileau established a classical standard of criticism suggested by personal taste, which ignored the progress of the human mind.

The redeeming grace of the nation is to be found in its wholesome sense of the enjoyable and the available in ordinary life, in its freedom from the discontent which elsewhere is born of avarice and unmitigated materialism. The love of pleasing, the influence of women, and a frivolous temper everywhere and on all occasions signalize them. "Why, people laugh at everything here!" naively exclaimed the young Duchess of Burgundy, on her arrival at the French court.

"The English," says a celebrated writer, "like ancient medals, kept more apart, preserve the first sharpness which the fair hand of Nature has given them; they are not so pleasant to feel, but, in return, the legend is so visible, that, at the first look, you can see whose image and superscription they bear." This is a delicate way of setting forth the superior honesty and bluntness and the inferior smoothness and assimilating instinct of the Anglo-Saxon,--a vital difference, which no alliance or intercourse with his Gallic neighbors can essentially change.

As a pendant, take the description of one of the last French novels:--"? Paris tout s'oublie, tout se pardonne. Par convenance, par d?cence, quelquefois par crainte, on s'absente, ou fait un entr'acte: puis le rideau se r?leve pour le spectacle de nouvelles fautes et de nouvelles folies; toute la question est de savoir s'y prendre."

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