\vith foreigners as they are in everything else; they rush at a ne\v arrival as thPy do at a comic actor or an acrobat and give him no peace, but they hardly disguise their sense of their own superiority and even a certain aversion they feel for him. If the foreigner keeps to his own dress, his ovvn \vay of doing his hair,
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his own hat, the offended Englishman jeers at him, but by degrees grows used to recognising him as an independent person. If in his first alarm the foreigner begins to adapt his manners to the Englishman's, the latter does not respect him but treats him superciliously from the height of his British haughtiness. Here i t i s sometimes hard, even with great tact, t o steer one's course so as not to err either on the minus or the plus side; it may well be imagined what the Germans do, who are devoid of all tact, are familiar and servile, too stiff and also too simple, sentimental without reason and rude without provocation.
But if the Germans look upon the English as upon a higher species of the same genus, and feel themselves to be inferior to them, it by no means follows that the attitude of the French, and especially of the French refugees, is any wiser. Just as the German respects everything in England without discrimination, the Frenchman protests against everything and loathes everything English. This peculiarity sometimes, I need hardly say, is pushed to the most comically grotesque extreme.
The Frenchman cannot forgive the English, in the first place, for not speaking French; in the second, for not understanding him when he calls Charing Cross Sharan-Kro, or Leicester Square Lessesstair-Skooar. Then his stomach cannot digest the English dinners consisting of two huge pieces of meat and fish, instead of five little helpings of various ragouts, fritures, salmis and so on. Then he can never resign himself to the 'slavery' of restaurants being closed on Sundays, and the people being bored to the glory of God, though the whole of France is bored to the glory of Bonaparte for seven days in the week. Then the whole habitus, all that is good and bad in the Englishman, is detestable to the Frenchman. The Englishman pays him back in the same coin, but looks with envy at the cut of his clothes and like a caricature attempts to imitate him.
All this is of significance for the study of comparative physiology, and I am not describing it in order to amuse. The German, as we have observed, recognises that he is, in a civilian capacity at any rate, an inferior specimen of the same breed to which the Englishman belongs, and subordinates himself to him. The Frenchman, belonging to a different breed, not so distinct that he may be indifferent, as the Turk is to the Chinese, hates the Englishman, especially because both nations arc each blindly convinced of being the foremost people in the world. The German, too, is inwardly convinced of this, particularly auf dem theoretisclzen Gabictc, but is ashamed to own it.
The Frenchman is really the opposite of the Englishman in
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every respect. The Englishman is a solitary creature, who likes to live alone in his own lair, obstinate and impatient of control ; the Fr('nchman is a gregarious animal, impudent but easily shepherded. Hence two completely parallel lines of development with the Channel lying between them. The Frenchman is constantly anticipating things, meddling in everything, educating everybody, giving instructions about everything. The Englishman waits to sec, does not meddle at all in other people's business and \vould be readier to be taught than to teach, but has not the time: he has to get to his shop.
The two corner-stones of the whole of English life, personal independence and family tradition, hardly exist for the Frenchman. The> coarsc>nc>ss of English manners drives the Frenchman frantic. and it really is repugnant and poisons life in London, but behind it he fails to see the rude strength with which this people has stood up for its rights, the stubbornness of character which makes it impossible to turn an Englishman into the slave who dc>lights in the gold lace on livery and is in raptures over his chains entwined with laurel, though by flattering his passions you may do almost anything else with him.
The> world of self-government, decentralisation, expanding capriciously of its own initiative>. sc>ems to the Frenchman so savage, so incomprehensible that, however long he lives in England, he never understands its political and civic life, its rights and its judicial forms. He is lost in the incongruous multiplicity of precedents on which English law rests, as in a dark forest, and does not observe the immense and majestic oaks that compose it, nor S£'e the charm, the poetry, and the significance of its very variety. His little Codex, with its sanded paths, its clipped shrubs and polic£'men-gardcners in every avenue, is a very different matter.
Shakespeare and Racine again.
If a Frenchman se('s drunken men fighting in a tavern and a policeman looking at them with th£' s£'renity of an outsid£'r and the curiosity of a man watching a cock-fight, he is furious with the policeman for not flying into a rage and carrying someone off au violon. He does not reflect that personal freedom is only possiblP when a policeman has no parental authority, when his intervention is reduced to passive readiness to come when he is summoned. The confidc>nce that every poor fellow feels when he shuts the door of his cold, dark, damp little hovel transforms a man's attitude. Of course, behind these jealously guarded, strictly observed rights, the criminal sometimes hides-and so be it. It is far better that the clever thief should go unpunished
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than that every honest man should be trembling like a thief in his own room. Before I came to England every appearance of a policeman in the house in which I lived gave me an irresistibly nasty feeling, and morally I stood en garde against an enemy. In England the policeman at your door or within your doors only adds a feeling of security.
As the successor of Maximilien Robespierre, Louis Blanc worshipped Rousseau, and was somewhat cold in his attitude to Voltaire. In his History he has separated all leading men into two flocks in biblical fashion-on the right hand, the sheep of brotherhood, on the left, the goats of greed and egoism. For the egoists such as Montaigne he had no mercy, and he caught it properly. Louis Blanc did not stick at anything in this classification, and meeting the speculator, Law, he boldly reckoned him among the brotherhood, which the reckless Scot had certainly never expected.
In 1 856 Barbes arrived in London from The Hague. Louis Blanc brought him to see me. I looked with emotion at the sufferer who had spent almost his whole life in prison. I had seen him once before, and where? At the window of the Hotel de Ville, on the 1 5th of May, 1 848, a few minutes before the National Guard broke in and seized him.2
I invited them to dine with me next day; they came, and we sat on till late at night.
They sat on recalling the year 1 848; when I had seen them into the street, and gone back alone into my room, I was overcome by an immense sadness. I sat down at my writing-table and was ready to weep.