mal difference in itself; there are no uncomfortable silences passed in simply "sitting round" and cudgelling one's brains as to what to do next; the great art and enjoyment of social life being conversation-exchange of ideas, or notions, original or trite, but always cast in more or less careful form-games are far seldomer than among us resorted to as a substitute, and being invariably for money probably owe their popularity to the ingrained French disposition toward avarice; an avarice which always seems curious to us but about which in its milder manifestations there is never any concealment. Games themselves are never conducted in silence. The solemn stillness that with us accompanies the rubber of whist which is more and more tending to become, even as played by the young and frivolous, a tremendously serious thing, and which indicates clearly that the game is an end in itself and not a pastime, is unknown outside the clubs in France. An occasional old gentleman who when the stakes are high insists on a subordination of talk and vigorously represses his partner's tendency to discursiveness is voted a nuisance. Naturally thus, there is nowhere to be seen, perhaps, such wretched whist-playing as in French salons.

Universally in French interiors an American perceives at once the absence of effort at "entertaining people," in our phrase. The entertainment is a phenomenon spontaneously generated when people come together. The various social amusements are certainly cultivated; dancing and singing and the piano are, of course, merely subordinated, not suppressed-one cannot converse forever. But dancing is nowhere the passion that it is with us; if it were, the French, who dance detestably, would perhaps dance better. People dance, but then, also, occasionally they desist from dancing; in the cotillion the prettiness of the figure occupies much more attention than its duration. As for music the French are decidedly ahead of us. They already very generally recognize the caricature which ordinary amateur effort is; they are well known to have far less respect than our race for what bores them; and now that so much professional effort is had at soirées they have become exacting

and only extraordinary amateur skill is tolerated. As for our readings, Browning societies, and in general the class of literary entertainment provided by the thousands of provincial and rural "sociables" from one end of our country to the other-many of these half-acknowledged pisallers would seem grotesque to the most long-suffering Latin; in France, especially, elocution and erudition, general and special information and all cognate acquirements are taken seriously. The end and aim of society is in fact simply human intercourse, decorated with infinite variety but never needing to be buttressed-recognized as a natural satisfaction of a profound instinct and needing no extraneous stimulus, only a careful and elaborate development and ordering.

We have

This ordering necessarily results in uniformity of manners, and uniformity is as foreign to our manners as is the impersonal, artistic, or conventional spirit. But it is to be observed that uniformity of manners is a great humanizer. It is perhaps the simplest means of bringing persons of different idiosyncrasies into sympathetic relations. Our own diversity is grotesque and is responsible for much estrangement between our different sections. A Chicago journal, for example, treating of courtship, apostrophizes plaintively "the turned down light, the single chair," but it would be idle to pretend that the milieu thus briefly characterized is congenial to all of us. As yet with us every man is his own Chesterfield. individuals with the charm which in Emerson struck Carlyle as elaborate, not to say excessive. We have the average rural New Englander whom Emerson found picturesque, but whose charm is distinctly not excessive. We have the entire gamut run by the Southron describing a dinner party composed to his sense of "an elegant gentleman from Virginia, a gentleman from Kentucky, a man from Ohio, a fellow from New York, and a galoot from Boston." Our society thus has the advantage of not being monotonous to the artist; but the dead level of steel rails has this superiority over the interesting diversity of corduroy roads that it makes travel easier and arrival more hopeful. The avoidance

of friction secured is incalculably delightful. The social machinery so scrupulously attended to runs far more smoothly than ours, which we imagine will quite take care of itself if we fulfil the condition that made such a carver of men's casques of the sword and such a sure-thruster of the lance of the purehearted Sir Galahad. No Frenchman to whom you talk punctuates your sentences with an eager and admonitory "yes, yes, yes." Nor does appreciation of his own wit or of yours involve distracting excursions. Nor does he show you plainly how hard it is for him to wait till you have finished, or let his attention wander, or try to save time by the surreptitious reading of a letter or a glance at a newspaper heading, or indicate in any way as so many of us do, the manner varying with individual character, that conversation is not the most important affair in the world. He knows that for the moment it is. On the other hand susceptibilities escape wounding with a completeness that seems as wonderful as the means by which it is secured is seen to be simple. In France it is in the first place bad manners to be too susceptible; in the second place it is a mark of that conceit always ascribed to a lack of intelligence; in the third place one's susceptibility is justly wounded only when an offence has been committed against the code of manners. These sound like commonplaces. But they are practically not accepted by us. Practically we believe in "taking no offence where none is intended;" and we really think that when the social code of the Golden Age comes to be discovered this will be found to have been its spirit, too. On the contrary giving unintentionally just ground for offence is precisely what the French find it impossible to support. Provided with a conventional and uniform code, they concentrate their attention upon the grossièreté--to them the most repugnant quality in the world-of the offence, and whether or no it is accompanied by design, by malhonnêteté, is a subordinate consideration. Accompanied by malhonnêteté it may or may not be, but aggravated by it or by anything it cannot. In this way the French avoid the habit so prevalent with us of

always seeking the motive of everyone's speech or behavior and the suspicion, the morbid sensitiveness, which is the inevitable result of this habit. So long as the convenances remain undisturbed people's motives are assumed to be amiable. It is our notion on the contrary that observance of conventions can mean very little, and our own experience, in fact, teaches us that they are often extremely deceptive indices of both the feelings and the character. So long, accordingly, as we are sure that a person is well-disposed and worthy, he may, within certain ill-defined limits, say and do what he chooses; so long as we are convinced that right feeling presides at their sacrifice our solicitude for conventions ceases. We do not in this way reach much eminence in what is strictly defined as civility, but that is a commonplace which does not greatly disturb us; we readily reconcile ourselves to the impeachment; we easily console ourselves with the notion that we possess what is far more important and perhaps after all inconsistent with that "outward grace" which Mr. Lowell assures us we know to be but "dust." But this attitude compels us to be continually "making allowances" for people who are, though kind, still uncouth or inconsiderate; and uncouthness and inconsiderateness are, however tolerable, nowhere agreeable qualities in a positive sense. And one cannot continually "make allowances" or have them made for him without great detriment to his dignity. Consequently we do feel a vague discomfort, which the French with their concentration on the dust of outward grace are spared, in a hundred more or less trifling details of social intercourse. And occasionally when an individual of either of the two great branches of our race contemplates such an individual of the other as chance may be trusted now and then to bring into contact with him, in encounters of this sort with which every travelled American or Englishman is familiar, scales seem to fall from his eyes. French manners appear transfigured to him. Mere "outward grace" rises prodigiously in his esteem. Few cultivated Englishmen probably have escaped a shock when subjected for the first time to the

unrestrained familiarity and the emptyheaded effusiveness characteristic of many of our compatriots. Few Americans probably have not flushed with a sense of outrage at the tactless incivility of the worthy but forbidding Briton. The American "drummer" narrating his experiences and making his "effect" at a Continental table d'hôte, and the English lady opposite him visibly wondering how he can eat butter with hot meats and carefully manifesting an exaggerated disgust in consequence, tend, for example, to excite in each other a feeling of toleration for manners as the French conceive them-manners which in seasons of calmer weather they find excessive.

Nothing, however, could be more erroneous than the popular Anglo-Saxon notion that French manners are excessive. Like all our notions about the French this is with us an inheritance. English manners are in general reserved, brusque, embarrassed perhaps in reality, if you choose to examine into the real nature of puerilities, but superficially-that is to say in the sole sphere of their action -splenetic, bald, absurdly uncivilized as manifested toward strangers, and characterized in intimacy by what Emerson calls unbuttoned ease. By force of contrast French manners are bound to appear excessive to Englishmen. Positively speaking, of all possible qualities that of excess is the most foreign to French demeanor as it is to the French mind. The Italian manner is excessive, if you choose-and are ill-natured enough to mention it. And curiously enough our own and that of the English -when any value is attached to it, when account is really taken of it, when we wish to be "especially polite," as the singular phrase is-may certainly be thus described. But French manners are saved from excess by the very fact that they are so thoroughly conventional. Nowhere is convention more esteemed, although nowhere are its terms more elastic. Nowhere, as one has occasion to remark there at every turn, is a given convention so frankly accepted as the formulated opinion of mankind concerning the subject of it. To dispute it, to advance individual notions in modification of it, is clearly regarded as more

naïf than even courageous. That "common consent of mankind” which certain moralists make the arbiter in ethics is in France applied to almost every conceivable act of man with an elaborateness and system that rival those of the Code Napoléon itself. Nowhere, perhaps, outside the precincts of the Court of Castille, is etiquette, that codified system of manners, carried so far; nowhere is an offence against it more quickly noticed. Violations of it are readily excused if justifiable; there is no pedantry; there is even a special interest exhibited in originalité-a word which it is significant that we have to render by eccentricity. But violations are invariably remarked and the proper deduction made therefrom. Nevertheless, etiquette itself being not a court affair but something thoroughly understood and practised by everybody, French manners are thereby saved from excess, as they are from every other form of eccentricity. They strike one, rather, as being almost businesslike; at any rate their design is clearly to remove friction as well as to decorate intercourse. In Peking, doubtless, the French manner would seem meagre. In Virginia, "before the war," the Frenchman would certainly have found much in that courtly and elaborate bearing of which we still read in Southern literature and of which we observe the majestic remains whenever a Southern orator delivers a set speech, which would have seemed to him Oriental. The grandiose is almost never to be encountered in France-except in art or literature where it is sought of set purpose and expressly, as who should say " let us now intone instead of simply speaking." On the other hand the sincerely familiar manner, that manner which is the absolute absence of manner, is quite as uncommon. Drop into the little stuffy hall in the Boulevard des Capucines of a Thursday evening, and listen to one of M. Francisque Sarcey's charming conférences on the stage, on poetry, on literature. His manner is admirably free from pose of any kind; it passes in Paris for the manner suited to a bonhomie almost, if not quite, bourgeoise. It is familiar in a sense unknown to our lyceum; M. Sarcey, who is in the first place seated, stops over a citation to laugh or admire with

his auditors; occasionally one of these hazards a suggestion to which the conférencier bows agreement or shrugs dissent; one is almost en famille. But the family is clearly a French family. There is no relaxation, no unbending, no flaccid abandonment. Of familiarity as we understand the term and as we illustrate it on the rostrum, as well as in the "back-store," there is none at all. Quite as watchful a guard is kept over the moral muscles as if the occasion were a wholly different onc. M. Sarcey and his auditors are as much on "dress-parade," as we sometimes say of this attitude, as the soldiers at a Longchamps review. They have simply, morally speaking, learned so well to use their faculties by the habit which is a second nature that that first nature which as Pascal observed (long before Mr. Darwin) is perhaps only a first habit, seems to them rudimentary rather than specifically natural, as it appears to us. Suppose if such a thing can be supposed -M. Sarcey forming one of the late Mr. Beecher's audience at Plymouth Church on a Sunday morning. The time, the place, the theme are sacred, but he would be certain to find a lack of correspondence between this fact and the manners of the occasion-he would be sure to esteem unfair any criticism of French manners as excessive which should be based on the standard there confronting and surrounding him. He would be sure, on the other hand, to find excess in the occasion's absence of tenue. He would reflect: "Our manner is business-like rather than Italian, it is direct rather than rococo. We are familiar, we are free, we are frank, we are gay; but we are not gay like that."

Finally, French manners are gentle. A certain mildness of demeanor, which is among us mainly confined to such individuals as do not fear the consequences of failure in self-assertion, is everywhere observable. The fiercely mustachioed concierge shares it with the bland academician. It is the rarest imaginable chance to hear an oath. There is something feeble and inefficient, an acknowledgment of inarticulateness, about the intenser sort of expletives, which are wholly foreign to the French

temper, accustomed to perfect facility and adequacy of expression. Similarly with slang. French argot is almost a language by itself. Slang as we comprehend the term, and as Walt Whitman eulogizes and employs it—namely, as the riotous medium of the under-languaged, is unknown. One may in a week hear more oaths and more slang of the coarse and stupid sort in Wall Street, at the seaside, in the hotel corridors and street-cars and along the sidewalks of New York and Philadelphia, say, and in public generally among us than in the length and breadth of France in a year. There is not the same burlesque of "heartiness," the same slapping on the back, the same insistent invitations to drink, the same brutalité; in fine there is infinitely more gentleness. Their occasional savagery strikes us as ineffective aud amateur, their fury seems fustian. The "rapier-thrusts of sarcasm, the kind of writing and talking to which some of our newspapers apply their most eulogistic epithet, "scathing," the bitter banter to which not a few of the best bred of our young girls seem just now especially addicted would excite amazement in France. Persiflage, there, is never personal when it is not also good-natured. In any event there is far less of it than of compliment; and this compliment is less factitious than are our personalities of the uncomplimentary kind. The difference shows an important temperamental distinction as well as anything can. The French are as inclined to the amiable, the agreeable, the social, the impersonal as we are to avoid being the dupe of these qualities; perhaps they are less duped than we are, and at any rate the amount of fruitless friction which they save over us is very great. Indeed with us this friction grows by natural selection; it is popular because, conscious of immense kindliness at bottom and our own withers being for the moment unwrung, we like to see the galled jade wince. The Chamber of Deputies is sometimes a bear garden, and the air is thick with denunciation, but such a speech as Mr. Blaine's famous characterization of Mr. Conkling or Mr. Conkling's of Mr. Curtis was never heard there. In private life there is more refined malice, more gayety, and more

gossip if possible-in a Paris salon than in a Fifth Avenue drawing-room or on a Newport piazza: but there is nothing of what we have come to know as personal "rallying," and the gossip is about the absent.

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We, on the other hand, are all familiar, Mr. Arnold reminds us, with the notion of "hewing Agag in pieces," and our ungentleness of manners proceeds largely from the astonishing way in which this Teutonic and Puritan passion has penetrated our very nature. How English literature witnesses this from the time of Milton to the very latest number of the Saturday Review we all know. The greatest and kindliest natures are not exempt from it on the other side of the water. Not only does Macaulay riot in it, but such a good-natured soul as Mr. James Yellowplush indulges in many a swing of the axe-when Agag is for the moment personated by Bulwer, let us say. Not only is the hewing done with the grandiose strokes of Carlylean brutality, but it is amiably and dexterously performed by the advocate par excellence of "sweet reasonableness" and the chief critic of the custom, Mr. Matthew Arnold himself. Carlyle's description of Mr. Swinburne as sitting in a sewer and adding to it" differs mainly by its outrageousness from the implacable way in which a long catalogue of saints and sinners is subjected at the hands of Mr. Arnold to an illumination as indiscreet as it is discriminating. There is much discussion as to whether it is as a critic or a poet that he will appeal to 'the next ages," but there is a side of his admirable and elevated genius in virtue of which it is not difficult occasionally to fancy him gracing the Pantheon of the future in the harmonious guise of Apollo flaying Marsyas. No Anglo-Saxon would wish Mr. Arnold different, but it is worth pointing out that the respectably sized and felicitously executed "Dunciad" which might be collected from his works is incontestably due to the personal attitude, the personal way of looking at many questions and discussing many subjects. His gentleness in consequence is rather express than ingrained and now and then has something feline in its velvety

caress.

In this country, I think, we are less disposed to censoriousness. At any rate our more refined spirits are-from the various reasons which spring from the American differentiation of the race. We have more room, and more equality. Our manners are affected by our greater amenity. But we do not need the abundant testimony of the daily journals to assure us how thoroughly personal is, in general, our point of view, how instinctive is our protest against the impersonal and artistic way of discussing and deciding any serious problem, how distrustful we are of the earnestness of whatever bears no personal indorsement. "It makes a great difference to a sentence," says Emerson somewhere, "whether or no there be a man behind it." That is our universal feeling. It is impossible to conceive the serene and charitable Emerson finding the flaying of Marsyas work so congenial as to be worthy his best and most vivacious effort, but it cannot be doubted that the operation would awaken his interest and, if neatly performed, win his approval. To the most malicious Frenchman on the other hand, the flaying of Marsyas by Apollo would seem a work of supererogation. Neither in literature nor in life does he practise it. "That is a fine legend, a most significant myth," he would remark to us, "but you materialize it atrociously. The only part of it with which we are directly and actively concerned is the contest-that part which Raphael painted with a real personal feeling, as you may see in the Louvre. The consequences to incompetence of its insolence are, as he has conventionalized them in the Vatican, natural and necessary; they follow without the interposition of the god, who was born for higher things. Agag is sure to be satisfactorily hewn in pieces, and the work is accomplished by the matter-of-course operation of impersonal forces. Individually and socially we are only concerned with recognizing Agag when we see him and with showing ourselves superior to him. He is so little liked among us, his following is so entirely inconsiderable compared with that he can boast among you that his fate, indeed, is sealed from the beginning. To denounce him would be to utter platitudes."