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from London to Moscow it is a commonplace that every stage-manager and every dramatic author looks constantly toward Paris, where each has learned his trade and whence most have borrowed their substance. And in the art of conversation, which plays in private life the part of colloquy on the stage, the nation is equally unrivalled. All the French activities are called into exercise, and all French qualities are illustrated in the conversational crackle and sparkle of daily intercourse, in which constant practice and ceaseless pleasure lead to a marvellous artistic proficiency. At the table, in the drawing-room, in the cafés, in the open-air public rendezvous which abound everywhere and vary in importance but hardly in character from the Champs Elysées or the potinière of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne to the little place or boulevard extérieur of a village en province, at every leisure moment in the day-and overflowing into the hours of industry, which themselves, indeed, are never, even in their most secret recesses, sheltered from its spray-the stream of conversation ripples ceaselessly on and on. All Frenchmen breathe the atmosphere thus affected and, how ever great their differences, are thus subject in common to a potent unifying influence; so that each individual, even supposing him to have no natural bent therefor, no Gallic alertness and lingual felicity, becomes an educated artist in the great French art. To be convinced of this, one does not need to remind himself of the Hotel Rambouillet, of the salons which since Richelieu's time have flour ished on every hand, of the society of the grand siècle; one has only to enter a café or even a cabaret, or chat with an omnibus-driver, or one's next neighbor in black coat or blouse on a seat in a public square.

About this conversation there are two striking peculiarities: It is in the first place literally conversation, and in the second it is, like any other fine-art, practised for its own sake. It need hardly be said that in each of these respects French conversation differs from our own. What in general passes for good conversation with us is really monologue -sometimes, in fact, so circumscribed as to constitute a sort of informal lect

ure; what the French, indeed (who are strangers to our lyceum, for which they substitute a considerable higher education), call a conférence. This is the sense in which it is discussed by Dr. Holmes, than whom no one has touched the subject with a lighter charm. Dr. Holmes's view of conversation is extremely autocratic, and would be intolerable to a democratic people like the French. In his opinion the cardinal offence is interruption; the literal and unimaginative interrupter is the individual he denounces, but it is plain that it is the fact of the interruption not the interruption of fact, as he might say, that really exasperates him. French conversation is in great part made up of interruptions. Its essence consists in "give and take." The most brilliant conversationalist is he, or she (for in France women practise this art as well as men) who succeeds best in donner la réplique. Hence epigram and repartee abound. With us the analogous triumph is to state some truth, sentiment, fact most felicitously and to draw from it some apposite conclusion. Hence the little preachments, anecdotes, sermonettes which season our dinners. As for post-prandial eloquence, in which our prandial conversation so often culminates upon the slightest excuse, to which it is merely the modest prelude, and toward which it tends with increasing momentum from the soup on, it is nearly unknown in France. Imagine Mr. Evarts at a French dinner. On such an occasion his "speech" (for which the French language has no word) would, we may be sure, be qualified with an epithet for which the English tongue has no equivalent; it would be pronounced assommant. after the formal speaking at a Delmonico dinner, say, is over, and the toasts (another word which illustrates the poverty of the French vocabulary) have all been drunk, and what we understand by general conversation again sets in, conducted by General Horace Porter, that prince of anecdotists, the Frenchman would certainly find himself at fault. In an analogous position at home he would be sure to interrupt. The French raconteur is, it is true, a well-known type, but he is oftener than not, perhaps, a bore, owing in great measure to the per

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fection to which he has carried his style, which tempts him to apply it to the decorative presentment of wholly trivial substance. And in France when a man is a bore the fact is discovered with electric promptitude. And in any event, bore or not, the raconteur never enjoys the esteem of our "good-story-teller" who frequently possesses not merely a local but a national reputation, as it is called. The introduction of the personal note is distinctly disagreeable. The force of our "good-story-teller" though always personal is often histrionic, and the French have, it is true, a talent and a passion for acting. But even in acting they care most for the ensemble. On the stage an actor who should force his part into the foreground would displease, however admirable in itself his performance might be. And in actual life the social comes to the aid of the artistic instinct in protecting an entire company from resolving itself into a lyceum audi

ence and an amateur lecturer.

French conversation thus is social and artistic first of all-never personal and utilitarian. Communication being its end, it is moreover always admirably clear. Precision is as eminent a characteristic of spoken as of written French. Each nuance, and nuances abound, is unmistakable. More even than by its grace and its vivacity it contrasts with our own more serious conversation in absolute exactness. The exactness is in expression merely; it never becomes literal and exacting. When a trivial mistake is made, a sophism uttered, a person or thing unfairly ridiculed or ridiculously praised, the Frenchman does not experience the temptation, so irresistible with us, to set wrong right at any expense to the conversation. The conversation itself is the object of his solicitude. Besides, he realizes that out of the pulpit persiflage is as potent as preaching. His expertness in treating serious subjects with the light touch that avoids flippancy has its moral side as, imitating Carlyle's obtuseness about Voltaire, we are slow to perceive. With us it is the essential levity of the subject discussed rather than a deft and lively treatment of it that causes the superficial sparkle. We associate the two things so closely as to infer one from the presence of the

other, an error which French clearness avoids. Hence French conversation is far freer than ours. It not only compromises no personality, and essays no ulterior result, but its scope and style are in consequence very extensive and very varied. It has terms summing up phases of social life to characterize which we should need long phrases, and employs them as counters, as bankers do checks and drafts instead of exchanging coin. It tends naturally out of its abundance to include topics with which we easily dispense, in mixed company at all events. It is very outspoken without being brutal. It makes, indeed, such a specialty of suggestion for the sake of the art itself as sometimes to lose all sense of the substance suggested; otherwise at least some allusions are unaccountable. And this freedom, which occasionally no doubt fringes license-but probably less often than with us offends the proprieties conventionally determined-helps to confer the great charm of naturalness upon French intercourse. One's impulses find themselves less restrained in being more explicitly directed. The manner is as artificial as you choose, the matter is apt to be genuine and to lack the quality which constitutes pose. On a high level and in a rarefied atmosphere there is far more naturalness because there is a far greater sense of freedom than in the lower regions, amid denser air, in which the sense of freedom is really the lack of energy and to issue out of which demands discipline and attention.

"But are they sincere?" is the universal Anglo-Saxon demand in reply to all that one can say in characterization of French manners and of their articulate manifestation in the exquisite art of French conversation. On this point we are, apparently, all agreed. Charming, intelligent, graceful, everything else you will that is admirable, at that vague quality known to us as sincerity we draw the line. A recent clever book makes a character say that "French sincerity is a subject he never cares to enter upon. He likes too many French people." That is the utmost concession I at least have ever seen made. Yet an intelligent observer familiar with the French must, I think, whether he like them or not,

feel disposed to plead weariness whenever the time-honored question of French sincerity is mooted anew. One sympa thizes with Hawthorne's exasperation at the public curiosity concerning the ears of his Donatello. In this instance also a delightful and delicate thing is being brutally treated. The stupidity is carried so far as to awaken that sense of helpless resentment which one feels in the presence of wilful wrong-headedness on a large scale among intelligent people. The truth is the French are as sincere as any other people, only they manifest the virtue in their own way. French manners include a great deal of compliment, and compliment is taken literally only by the savage. To argue individual insincerity from the perfection which compliment has reached among the French is like arguing that every American who pays his bills in silver dollars is personally corrupt. Compliment is merely the current coin of the French social realm. Nor in nine cases out of ten is it actually debased. Very slight familiarity with French compliment is sufficient to enable one to see that the French sense of intellectual self-respect almost invariably prevents them from trusting solely to the intelligence of the complimented for a complete understanding of the fact that the accuracy of compliment is not that of algebra. Somewhere in most French compliments you are sure to find the intellectual corrective of their sensuous charm. Your unfamiliarity with this circumstance and your failure to notice it may lead you to blush at the moment of receiving a genuine French compliment yourself, but subsequent reflection is apt to make you blush at having blushed; there was really, you will infallibly perceive, less cause for confusion than you imagined. Take, for example, a typical compliment by a characteristically courteous and sincere Frenchman. During a visit to England in 1868 the late Prevost-Paradol was received avec ces empressements flatteurs," says a French writer, "que la société anglaise sait si bien prodiguer pour peu que l'envie lui en prenne with those flattering attentions which English society knows so well how to lavish when it happens to take a notion to do

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Ladies contended for the honor of being taken down to dinner by the brilliant French journalist. The London press commenting on this engouement, and on its striking contrast with the lack of consideration manifested for English journalists of equal parts, called attention anew to the important rôle which the esteem of his compatriots permits the French journalist personally to play in his own country;-to which the Frenchman naturally replied by a compliment. "Un Français," said he, "a rarement une passion réelle pour le véritable pouvoir ou pour la fortune. Son ambition vise surtout à la réputation, à l'éloge, à l'espoir de donner une haute idée de lui à ses concitoyens, ou même à un cercle étroit de familiers; il se console aisément de bien des déboires s'il peut croire que ceux qui l'entourent le considèrent comme supérieur à sa fortune. .. II donne le premier rang aux plaisirs de l'esprit ;""A Frenchman rarely has a sincere passion for real power or for fortune. His ambition is above all else to achieve a reputation, to win eulogiums, to succeed in giving a high idea of himself to his fellow-citizens, or even to a narrow circle of intimate friends. He is easily consoled for many mortifications if he can convince himself that those who surround him consider him superior to his fortune. He gives the first place to the pleasures of the mind." Fancy the audience to which that compliment was addressed speculating as to its sincerity!

The truth is that the matter of personal genuineness is not at all in question. So far as sincerity in compliment is concerned it depends upon the specific truth or falsity of the words employed and their impersonal suggestion. Of course the French do intrude the personal equation into this sphere; they do occasionally endeavor to make one believe they mean what they say in a special and intense sense; the phenomenon is not absolutely unknown. But it is far less common than with us; and it invariably denotes in the practitioner a lower grade of person. The large part played by the emotions in our activities of this kind causes us to regard the passage from compliment to flattery as venial whenever the heart is

in the right place. The circumstance that compliment is in France a fine-art makes the same error there far more grave, and consequently far less frequent. It becomes a sign of grossièreté which is the French unpardonable

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Furthermore the French compliment never means more than it says. The national turn for intelligence serves as a great safeguard for sincerity here, whereas if we examine closely our own way of allowing the heart to dictate to the judgment we cannot fail to see how inexact our sincerity often becomes. The Frenchman if he wishes to compliment you will select some point about you that will bear it. His language regarding this may at first (and, as I have indicated, only at first) seem exaggerated, but the basis of it will be sound. With us in sincere instances the process is this: a genuine esteem precedes the desire to please; the desire to please takes the form of an expression of this general feeling of esteem; this form itself has nothing more to do with the facts it states than had the compliant admissions of Polonius to Hamlet, very like a whale," "it is backed like a weasel" which furnish a not bad illustration indeed of our ordinary form of compliment, all question of Polonius's sincerity, of course, aside. The foreigner's notion that the French "do everything with an air" is perfectly sound. The author of "Living Paris," who is an unusually liberal observer, adds that "they do it all the same." This is quite true. If there was ever a practical and positive people under the sun it is the French. But it answers only an elementary vulgar error. A more plausible yet equally erroneous notion is that this "air" is affected and theatrical. Theatrical it may sometimes become in that excess which is uncongenial to the French character and therefore rare. But the noticeable thing about it is that it is not theatrical. Such poses, tones, and gesture as are common to our stage and occasionally overflow into so opposite a place as our pulpit would excite amazement at a théâtre de banlieue. Dramatic is the true epithet for that systematization of expression noticeable in the French. The "air" with which

they do everything has nothing of illregulated emotion in it; nor, on the other hand, is it often characterized by that sensuous magic inseparable from Italian native grace. It is in nowise sentimental; it is simply expressive. It may be more or less ornate, now structural, now decorative, as individuals differ. But what is to be noted is that it is invariably the "air" which the individual deems appropriate, and that fitness is his sole criterion. The reason for our failure to perceive this is that in every serious matter we rely on the impression produced by personal character to convey its importance to the listener or spectator. The more weighty the substance the more condensed the statement, the more poetic the theme the balder or at least the briefer its expression. In fine our idea of expression is repression. We appeal to the imagination, not to the sense or the reason. We find the French "air" theatrical instead of logically and aptly dramatic because our ideal is to have no air" at all. We are egoists, not artists; it is not what we say or do that we wish to count, but ourselves.

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Hence manifestly the paradox of which we are guilty in accusing the French of affectation at the same time that we speak of them as naturally theatrical But they are no more affected than they are theatrical. By our exaltation of character over manners, by our adjusting of manners to personal expression, by our sentimental and inartistic substitution of a thoroughly contained and intense air for the natural and spontaneous one which fits the thought, we are in far graver peril from this subtle foe than is the Frenchman, whose manner alone, at any rate, is attacked and whose character escapes. Tell over scrupulously the list of your friends, American or English. How many of them are there who do not affect some character or other, some moral rôle foreign to their native disposition, with which their effort to harmonize their demeanor is quite as obvious as it is successful? In one's own case this may be aspiration, but in that of others it is invariably affectation. And the attempt to impose it results in a kind of pervasive and general hypocrisy beside which the explicit and defi

nite cafardise of the French has the merit of being a frank foe. In France a man's valuation of himself is much more nearly that which his friends set upon him. Even in the French manner what we mistake for affectation is merely intention. To bring all one's physical activities into the sphere of culture and reason, to suit the gesture to the word and the word to the thought, to stand and walk and sit decorously, to enter a room, to bow to a lady, to carry on a tête-à-tête, or share a general conversation, to avoid controversy, to attain repose to do all this respectably requires intention. So far as communities are concerned fine natural manners are a myth, but this probably does not prevent the Sioux and Apaches from considering our manners artificial, or us from finding affectation in those of the French, owing to the distinctness which unfamiliarity gives to intention in either instance, and to the failure in each case to appreciate the importance of intention in everything of importance.

In fine the vulgar mistrust of French sincerity is based on nothing more nor less than the fact that French manners are studied, artificial, conventional, which does not of course mean that they are of necessity inelastic or excessive or superficial, but that the French put the same intention into manners that all civilized peoples do into language, and have systematized them with the same care for correctness on the one hand and pliability on the other. We have no exactly equivalent word for what the French call tenue, and if we have exactly the thing it is infinitely less developed and less nearly universal than in France, where it is as characteristic of manners as are the impersonal and artistic spirit. Tenue means restraint, order, measure, style, consciousness, intention in demeanor and bearing. Owing to his natural turn for these qualities the Frenchman is rarely tempted to permit himself indiscretions. He is not solicited by whimsical impulses. He has no desire for relaxation, and does not chafe under restraint. It is not difficult for him to feel at ease in an erect posture; he supports the greater muscular tension involved with less evident fatigue; his hands do not automatically seek his

VOL. IV.-66

trousers pockets nor his knees cross one another. Consciousness and self-consciousness are not identical terms to him. Nor does the artificiality of the drawing-room atmosphere oppress him and entice him into mistaking buffoonery for the talismanic touch of thawing nature, into spasmodic laughter, into long stories, into that amusement of the ensemble, which involves neglect of the members of the company. Of course perfect breeding is perfect breeding the world over. But the perfectly bred man is born, not bred, if the paradox may be permitted. The mass of mankind have no more genius for manners than for tight-rope dancing, but it is easy to see that the mass of Frenchmen have a talent for them in adding a talent for tenue to the social and the artistic instincts.

It would be difficult to find in any bourgeois interior the entire absence of form characteristic of many of our own average homes. Not that in momentsor hours of mutual ennui and common délassement, the average bourgeois interior does not, from the point of view of pure form, leave something to be desired. But, in seasons of entire sanity, the respective shapes expansiveness takes in a French home and in one of our own differ prodigiously. Take a large French family reunion. Few social pictures are prettier. There is very likely an entire absence of that hearty familiarity which characterizes our Thanksgiving or Christmas gatherings. The children do not romp, the grown people do not appear as if at last the moment had come when all outward restraint and formality could be thrown aside with a clear conscience. The visitors do not "make themselves perfectly at home," the hosts do not invite them to do so, or treat them as if such were the case. There is everywhere perfectly apparent the French veneer of artificial courtesy. Children are treated with politeness and not hugged; babies are banished-are generally, in fact, in a state of chronic exile; if at times everyone is talking at once it is evidently because of the social desire to contribute to the conversation, rather than because of the unsocial disposition to neglect one's neighbor's appreciations—an abys

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