Art. 5.-FRENCH IDEALISM AND THE WAR.

By

1. La Crise Française. Faits, Causes, Solutions. André Chéradame. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1912. 2. Cardinal Manning; The Decay of Idealism in France; The Institute of France. By John Edward Courtenay Bodley. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912.

3. The New France. By William Samuel Lilly. London: Chapman & Hall, 1913.

4. Histoire de Deux Peuples: La France et l'Empire Allemand. By Jacques Bainville. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1915.

'FRENCH hearts were then as vagabond as were the regiments;' 'Les cœurs furent alors nomades comme les régiments.' It is thus that Balzac, in a brilliant formula, depicts the soul of Frenchmen during the Napoleonic épopée. The Republican armies were careering over the toppling thrones of Europe, planting, to the music of the Marseillaise, their banner inscribed with the mystic words: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It was a romantic, almost Walkyrie dash; and, as the great adventure developed, they who shared the intoxication of its glory found themselves drifting from their moral moorings, and making light of the most consecrated values.

To those who know the France of 1914 and 1915 the state of mind of the France of Napoleon I will seem almost prehistoric. In 1914 and in 1915 the peoples of the planet have been watching with wondering admiration the grandiose spectacle of a nation in which 'hearts are as disciplined as an army corps. Heirs of a very peculiar civilisation and of a very special tradition, inhabitants of a territory where the ideas of family and of society, and the conception of civic duty, have assumed special forms, the French are fighting for the defence of their homes and of the fairest realm beneath the sky; but they are fighting, above all, for the cause of the human race, because it is their everlasting glory frequently to be allowed to labour disinterestedly for humanity. To be doing this wittingly is in itself a distinction of noble birth. After the present War, in which the French will surely be the victors, the nations should erect a Pantheon of a new sort, a Pantheon of

Peoples, bearing the inscription: A la France, les Patries reconnaissantes.'

If militarist and aggressive Germany had not existed, it would have been infinitely desirable, in the interests of the national integrity of her neighbours, to invent it. The radicalism of France and the liberalism of England, the doctrinaire humanitarianism of both France and England-and I am speaking not so much of the influence of well-known political parties, as of certain tendencies characteristic of a whole class of reflex feelings and reactions peculiar to the civilisation of the French and the British-would have gangrened and disorganised the body-politic and society in both countries, and left them an easy prey to the methods of pacific penetration' peculiar to the Germans, if the German menace had not finally led even them to subordinate everything to the urgent problems of national defence.

During fourteen long months, the world has witnessed the peaceful citizens of the French Republic holding at bay the armies of an Empire that had been preparing war for more than forty-four years. Within eight weeks after the fatal 1st of August, 1914, it was evident to competent observers that a decisive battle in the history of the world had just been fought along the Marne, which made it probable that, for a generation at least, the Western World would eventually be free to live an unmolested life, safe at last against the chronic invasion of an unassimilable race. But competent observers are In spite of the unambiguous evidence of the facts, notwithstanding even the testimony of those who, many months before the Great War, had told the world the full meaning of the unmistakable rebirth of French selfrespect, public opinion outside of France still doubted the reality, not of French resiliency, but of French moral discipline and stability of character. Even to-day, so profound is the ignorance of the foreigner as to the temperament of Frenchmen, the nature of French society, and the organisation of the French State, that some of the friends of France dread, and all of her enemies count on, the nervous exhaustion of her people.

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The foreigner, indeed, has uniformly been the victim of optical illusions whenever he has turned his gaze towards the plastic, too clear-cut, events of France. How should

it be otherwise in the case of a land where crisp formulas like 'Le Cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi,' and shibboleths like 'Panama,'Boulanger,' 'Dreyfus,' have assumed periodically the aspect of a portentous cometary menace in the pellucid atmosphere that, uniformly there, bathes everything? The same telegraphic wire that brought to foreign readers, on July 20, 1914, the knowledge of President Poincaré's arrival at St Petersburg, transmitted columns of scandalous news concerning the opening audience in Paris of a trial, in which the wife of an ex-prime Minister, M. Caillaux-who was at that very hour the 'Boss' of the most powerful political group in the French Chamber-was arraigned for the deliberate murder of a distinguished journalist, whose crime had been to criticise the French statesman for his conduct of the public affairs of his country. And the same newspapers that, on July 21, reported the fact that Count Berchtold had just submitted to Francis-Joseph at Ischl the text of a Note to be sent to Serbia, invited their readers, with display headlines, preferably to devote their attention to the incidents connected with the second audience of the same monstrous trial.

The tragic error of perspective, inevitably determined in the appreciations of the foreigner by such a case as the one just cited-and the case is not altogether uncharacteristic-would seem to illustrate a kind of misunderstanding to which France has always been foredoomed. In presence of the chronic proofs of an injustice so flagrant, a less sane people might easily have suffered from the mania of persecution. On the contrary the French have always preserved their urbanity; they, and almost they alone among the nations, have steadily and frankly looked at life as a whole, and at things as they are; they, and almost they alone, have cultivated one of the highest of the arts, the art of pleasant social intercourse, while maintaining the bourgeois virtues of the Latin family; and they have recklessly opened wide their arms, the while, to the foreigner, who fancied he was the confidant of their real secrets because no effort was ever made to conceal from him the squabbles of their Gallic politicians, though these were only the family quarrels of a nation, which is, after all, the most spiritually homogeneous on the planet.

That France should thus be the victim of evil report was inevitable. But it is one of the ironies of History that the real victims have not been France and the French, but the gullible peoples who have taken the surface-impressions of their agents, or of sciolistic and incompetent observers of French things, for an adequate account of French human nature. There are fine shades, and above all there is a deep background, in France, which most foreigners, above all the Germans, have failed to perceive. Whatever the mechanical perfection and methodical complexity of their admirable system of espionage, the Germans may always be counted on to misinterpret the facts they so abundantly and so meticulously assemble; and this consideration, indeed, has all along been one of the chief grounds for hope for other than German patriots. The Germans have no gift of psychologic insight. Their testimony as to 'states of mind' has usually been worthless.

This obtuseness, which is certainly a national trait, accounts for many things, but it accounts above all for the happy blundering of the Germans as to the real mentality of Frenchmen. For some years, the Paris correspondent of one of the great newspapers of Germany was the 'syndic' of the Foreign Parliamentary Press; it was through him that the leading correspondents of England, the United States, Italy, Russia and of the world, communicated with the President and the Bureaux of the French Chamber of Deputies. This German passed his entire time in the lobbies of the Palais Bourbon. He became the comrade of his colleagues of the Parisian and French Departmental Press. Installed there, at the very heart of French political life, he was the eavesdropper gazing over the shoulder of the deputies as they hobnobbed in shifting groups in the Hall of the 'Lost Steps.' Every rumour that circulated in that hothouse of political scandal, every scrap of information, every secret of State, known to anyone, became known to him. No Ambassador had surer access to the sources of a certain kind, and often a very valuable kind, of information. Following the great tradition of Bismarck, who, conservative and reactionary at home, was the champion in France of every form of Radicalism, thinking thereby to weaken

the secular enemy, this amiable, serviceable, well-informed German conspired openly and unremittingly to further the interests of the Socialist-Radical parties in France. He took sides with effrontery; he had decided that he knew the winning secret, and that it was, at all events, a patriotic duty to cultivate Socialist-Radicalism in France. What was the tenour of his reports to his Ambassador or to Berlin I can judge solely from what I know to have been his scorn of the 'Real France,' and his affiliations among the parties, led by the Caillaux and the Jaurès, who, whether they knew it or not, were playing into the hands of Germany. In any case, the important fact is that all that he saw, all that he learned, tended to the distortion of his judgment; and if Germany in 1914, as well as during the seven or eight previous years, so woefully miscalculated the consequences of her policy of aggression against France, it was due to the biassed reports of just such observers as the newspaper correspondent in question. Contemplated, during the last five years before the War, from the viewpoint of the janissaries of the Palais Bourbon, in fact, France could easily appear to be dashing headlong to the legendary dogs. Among the scores of German agents, official or other, whom I have known and watched in Paris, I have never seen one whose acquaintance with things French penetrated beneath the surface. All were the willing victims of their short-sightedness; and they regularly and unwittingly duped their compatriots who confided in them.

Nor were the friends of France much more far-sighted. The bias of pro-radicalism, from hatred of France, on the part of her enemies, was no more heinous a crime against Truth than was the prejudice of anti-radicalism, from so-called love of France, on the part of her 'friends.' In these circumstances it was inevitable that the real character of the French should be misjudged abroad; that the elevation of their moral ideas should be ignored; and that the ignorant and the misinformed should doubt their having any moral ideas at all.

Mr J. E. C. Bodley, who obtained much fame among reactionary Frenchmen some years ago, for a laborious study of the Third Republic, wrote, three years before