for thefts; like him, he receives money with both hands; like him, he contrives to have his friends caught and hung when they trouble him; he uses, like him, parliamentary language and classical comparisons; he has, like him, gravity, steadiness, and is eloquently indignant when his honour is suspected. You will answer, perhaps, that he quarrels with a comrade about the profits, and stabs him? But lately, Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Townsend had taken each other by the collar on a similar question. Listen to what Mrs. Peachum says of her daughter: 'Love him (Macheath) worse and worse! I thought the girl had been better bred.'1

The daughter observes :

'A woman knows how to be mercenary though she has never been in a court or at an assembly.'2

And the father remarks:

'My daughter to me should be, like a court lady to a minister of state, a key to the whole gang.'3

As to Macheath, he is a fit son-in-law for such a politician. If less brilliant in council than in action, that only suits his age. Point out a young and noble officer who has a better address, or performs finer actions. He is a highwayman, that is his bravery; he shares his booty with his friends, that is his generosity:

'You see, gentlemen, I am not a mere court-friend, who professes everything and will do nothing. . . . But we, gentlemen, have still honour enough to break through the corruptions of the world.'4

For the rest, he is gallant; he has half a dozen wives, a dozen children; he frequents stews, he is amiable towards the beauties whom he meets, he is easy in manners, he makes elegant bows to every one, he pays compliments to all:

'Mistress Slammekin! as careless and genteel as ever! all you fine ladies, who know your own beauty affect undress. . . If any of the ladies chuse gin, I hope they will be so free as to call for it.-Indeed, sir, I never drink strong waters, but when I have the colic.-Just the excuse of the fine ladies! why, a lady of quality is never without the colic.'5

Is it not the genuine tone of good company? And would you doubt that Macheath is a man of quality when you learn that he has deserved to be hung, and is not? Everything yields to such a proof. If, however, you wish for another, he would add that,

'As to conscience and nasty morals, I have as few drawbacks upon my pleasures as any man of quality in England; in those I am not at least vulgar.'6 After such a speech one must give in. Do not bring up the foulness of these manners; you see that there is nothing repulsive in them. These interiors of prisons and stews, these gambling-houses, this whiff of

1 Gray's Plays, 1772; The Beggars' Opera, i. 1. 4 Ibid. iii. 2.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

5 Ibid. ii. 1.

I cannot find these lines in the edition I have consulted.-TR.

gin, this pander-traffic, and these pickpockets' calculations, by no means disgust the ladies, who applaud from the boxes. They sing the songs of Polly; their nerves shrink from no detail; they have already inhaled the filthy odours from the highly polished pastorals of the amiable poet.1 They laugh to see Lucy show her pregnancy to Macheath, and give Polly 'rats-bane.' They are familiar with all the refinements of the gallows, and all the niceties of medicine. Mistress Trapes expounds her trade before them, and complains of having 'eleven fine customers now down under the surgeon's hands.' Mr. Filch, a prison-prop, uses words which cannot even be quoted. A cruel keenness, sharpened by a stinging irony, flows through the work, like one of those London streams whose corrosive smells Swift and Gay have described; more than a hundred years later it still proclaims the dishonour of the society which is bespattered and befouled with its mire.

III.

These were but the externals; and close observers, like Voltaire, did not misinterpret them. Betwixt the slime at the bottom and the scum on the surface rolled the great national river, which, purified by its own motion, already at intervals gave signs of its true colour, soon to display the powerful regularity of its course and the wholesome limpidity of its waters. It advanced in its native bed; every nation has one of its own, and flows down its proper slope. It is this slope which gives to each civilisation its degree and form, and it is this which we must endeavour to describe and measure.

To this end we have only to follow the travellers from the two countries who at this time crossed the Channel. Never did England regard and imitate France more, nor France England. To see the distinct current in which each nation flowed, we have but to open our eyes. Lord Chesterfield writes to his son:

'It must be owned, that the polite conversation of the men and women at Paris, though not always very deep, is much less futile and frivolous than ours here. It turns at least upon some subject, something of taste, some point of history, criticism, and even philosophy, which, though probably not quite so solid as Mr. Locke's, is however better, and more becoming rational beings, than our frivolous dissertations upon the weather or upon whist.'*

In fact, the French became civilised by conversation; not so the English. As soon as the Frenchman quits mechanical labour and coarse material life, even before he quits it, he converses: this is his

1 In these Eclogues the ladies explain in good style that their friends have their lackeys for lovers: Her favours Sylvia shares amongst mankind; such gen'rous Love could never be confin'd.' Elsewhere the servant girl says to her mistress: Have you not fancy'd, in his frequent kiss, th' ungrateful leavings of a filthy miss?' * Chesterfield's Letters, ii. April 22, O. S., 1751, p. 131. See, for a contrast, Swift's Essay on Polite Conversation.

goal and his pleasure.1 Barely has he escaped from religious wars and feudal isolation, when he makes his bow and has his say. With the Hotel de Rambouillet we get the fine drawing-room talk, which is to last two centuries: Germans, English, all Europe, either novices or dullards, listen to France open-mouthed, and from time to time clumsily attempt an imitation. How amiable are French talkers! What discrimination! What innate tact! With what grace and dexterity they can persuade, interest, amuse, stroke down sickly vanity, rivet the diverted attention, insinuate dangerous truth, ever soaring hundred feet above the tedium-point where their rivals are floundering with all their native heaviness. But, above all, how sharp they have soon become! Instinctively and without effort they light upon easy gesture, simple speech, sustained elegance, a characteristic piquancy, a perfect clearness. Their phrases, still formal under Balzac, are looser, lightened, launch out, flow speedily, and under Voltaire find their wings. Did any one ever see such a desire, such an art of pleasing? Pedantic sciences, political economy, theology, the sullen denizens of the Academy and the Sorbonne, speak but in epigrams. Montesquieu's l'Esprit des Lois is also 'TEsprit sur les lois.' Rousseau's periods, which begat a revolution, were balanced, turned, polished for eighteen hours in his head. Voltaire's philosophy breaks out into a million sparks. Every idea must blossom into a witticism; thought is made to leap; all truth, the most thorny and the most sacred, becomes a pleasant drawing-room conceit, cast backward and forward, like a gilded shuttlecock, by delicate women's hands, without sullying the lace sleeves from which their slim arms emerge, or the garlands which the rosy Cupids unfold on the wainscoting. Everything must glitter, sparkle, or smile. The passions are refined, love is dimmed, the proprieties are multiplied, good manners are exaggerated. The refined man becomes 'sensitive.' From his wadded taffeta dressinggown he keeps plucking his worked handkerchief to whisk away the moist omen of a tear; he lays his hand on his heart, he grows tender; he has become so delicate and correct, that an Englishman knows not whether to take him for an hysterical young woman or a dancingmaster. Take a clear view of this beribboned puppy, in his light-green dress, lisping out the songs of Florian. The genius of society which has led him to these fooleries has also led him elsewhere; for conversation, in France at least, is a chase after ideas. To this day, in spite of

1 Even in 1826, Sidney Smith, arriving at Calais, writes (Life and Letters, ii. 274): What pleases me is the taste and ingenuity displayed in the shops, and the good manners and politeness of the people. Such is the state of manners, that you appear almost to have quitted a land of barbarians. I have not seen a cobbler who is not better bred than an English gentleman.'

2 See Evelina, by Miss Burney, 3 vols., 1784; observe the character of the poor, genteel Frenchman, M. Dubois, who is made to tremble even whilst lying in the gutter. These very correct young ladies go to see Congreve's Love for Love; their

modern distrust and sadness, it is at table, over the coffee especially, that deep politics and the loftiest philosophy crop up. To think, above all, to think rapidly, is a recreation. The mind finds in it a sort of ball; think how eagerly it hastens thither. This is the source of all French culture. At the dawn of the age, the ladies, between a couple of bows, produced studied portraits and subtle dissertations; they understand Descartes, appreciate Nicole, approve Bossuet. Presently little suppers are introduced, and during the dessert they discuss the existence of God. Are not theology, morality, set forth in a noble or piquant style, pleasures for the drawing-room and adornments of luxury? Fancy finds place amongst them, floats about and sparkles like a light flame over all the subjects on which it feeds. What a flight was this of the eighteenth century! Was society ever more anxious for lofty truths, more bold in their search, more quick to discover, more ardent in embracing them? The perfumed marquises, these laced coxcombs, all these pretty, well-dressed, gallant, frivolous people, crowd to philosophy as to the opera; the origin of animated beings, the eels of Needham, the adventures of Jacques the Fatalist, and the question of free judgment, the principles of political economy, and the calculations of the Man with Forty Crowns,2-all is to them a matter for paradoxes and discoveries. All the heavy rocks, which the men who had made it their business, were hewing and undermining laboriously in solitude, being carried along and polished in the public torrent, roll in myriads, mingled together with a joyous clatter, hurried onwards with an everincreasing rapidity. There was no bar, no collision; they were not hindered by the practicability of their plans: they thought for thinking's sake; theories could be expanded at ease. In fact, this is how in France men have always conversed. They play with general truths; they glean one nimbly from the heap of facts in which it lay concealed, and develop it; they hover above observation in reason and rhetoric; they find themselves uncomfortable and common-place when they are not in the region of pure ideas. And in this respect the eighteenth century continues the seventeenth. The philosophers had described good breeding, flattery, misanthropy, avarice; they now examined liberty, tyranny, religion; they had studied man in himself; they now study him in the abstract. Religious and monarchical writers are of the same family as impious and revolutionary writers; Boileau leads up to Rousseau, Racine to Robespierre. Oratorical reasoning formed

parents are not afraid of showing them Miss Prue. See also, in Evelina, by way of contrast, the boorish character of the English captain; he throws Mrs. Duval twice in the mud; he says to his daughter Molly: 'I charge you, as you value my favour, that you'll never again be so impertinent as to have a taste of your own before my face' (i. 190). The change, even from sixty years ago, is surprising.

1 The title of a philosophical novel by Diderot.—TR.

2 The title of a philosophical tale by Voltaire.-TR.

the regular theatre and classical preaching; oratorical reason produces the Declaration of Rights and the Contrat Social. They form for themselves a certain idea of man, of his inclinations, faculties, duties; a mutilated idea, but the more clear as it was the more reduced. From being aristocratic it becomes popular; instead of being an amusement, it is a faith; from delicate and sceptical hands it passes to coarse and enthusiastic hands. From the lustre of the drawing-room they make a brand and a torch. Such is the current on which the French mind floated for two centuries, caressed by the refinements of an exquisite politeness, amused by a swarm of brilliant ideas, charmed by the promises of golden theories, till, thinking that it touched the cloud-palace, made bright by the future, it suddenly lost its footing and fell in the storm of the Revolution.

Altogether different is the path which English civilisation has taken. It is not the spirit of society which has made it, but moral sense; and the reason is, that here man is not as he is in France. The Frenchmen who became acquainted with England at this period were struck by it. In France,' says Montesquieu, 'I become friendly with everybody; in England with nobody. You must do here as the English do, live for yourself, care for no one, love no one, rely on no one.' They were of a singular genius, yet 'solitary and sad. They are reserved, live much in themselves, and think alone. Most of them having wit, are tormented by their very wit. In scorn or disgust of all things, they are unhappy amid so many reasons why they should not be so.' And Voltaire, like Montesquieu, continually alludes to the sombre energy of this character. He says that in London there are days when the wind is in the east, when it is customary for people to hang themselves; he relates shudderingly how a young girl cut her throat, and how the lover, without a word, bought back the knife. He is surprised to see so many Timons, so many splenetic misanthropes.' Whither will they go? There was one path which grew daily wider. The Englishman, naturally serious, meditative, and sad, did not regard life as a game or a pleasure; his eyes were habitually turned, not outward to smiling nature, but inward to the life of the soul; he examines himself, ever descends within himself, confines himself to the moral world, and at last sees no other beauty but that which shines there; he enthrones justice as the sole and absolute queen of humanity, and conceives the plan of disposing all his actions according to a rigid code. He has no lack of force in this; for his pride comes to assist his conscience. Having chosen himself and by himself the route, he would blush to quit it; he rejects temptations as his enemies; he feels that he is fighting and conquering,1 that he is doing a difficult thing, that he is worthy of admiration, that he is a man. Moreover, he rescues himself from his capital foe,

1 The consciousness of silent endurance, so dear to every Englishman, of standing out against something and not giving in.'-Tom Brown's School Days.