THE ENGLISH SPIRIT.*

Fr would surely be mere affectation to refrain from acknow- ledging some transitory glow of Pharisaic satisfaction at the turn of opinion which latterly has brought across the Channel, intent on fathoming the secret of the English temperament, so many more or less gifted scribes. But perhaps the abiding sentiment is rather regret that in the formidable list, extending from A quoi tient la Supdriorite des Anglo-Saxons ? to L'Ame des Anglais, the successes should have been so deplorably few. Content, as a rule, to re-echo spent impres- sions, the majority, it would seem, have confined their researches to misrepresentation at second hand. The excep- tions leave one proportionately grateful.

, To those acquainted with M. Andre Chevrillon's original Etudes Anglaises, published some ten years since, a further series requires no commendation. The same discerning and personal vision, the same perfection of supple and vivid prose, distinguish the present collection no less than its predecessor. Typically French in his craftsmanship, but unhampered by their characteristic bias for abstraction and rigidity of thought, having doubtless also inherited from Taine, his grandfather, a tradition of intimacy with English ideas, M. Chevrillon, who has observed our race in India as well as at home, and, moreover, has been able to contrast it on the spot with the Anglo-Saxon of the United States, is exceptionally equipped for his task of analyst and interpreter. Discarding the Procrustean method of handling facts, so instinctively natural to the French mind in its preference for flees *grace, and so arid in result, he has chosen the less simple alternative of proceeding by induction to distil the essence of our mentality. The conse- quence is a tissue, not of preconceptions, but of conclusions, and therefore a genuinely valuable criticism, as different from the amiable futilities of "Feemina " and her kind as chalk from cheese.

Unlike these talented dabblers in this also, M. Chevrillon has neither shirked his pitfalls nor, worse still, nimbly tripped across them on the tight-rope of epigram. On the contrary, a glance at the table of contents suggests the deliberate courting of difficulties almost insuperable to a foreign critic. Of the six essays that make up the volume, one is an appreciation of Kipling, another of Ruskin, two deal with separate works of Mr. Wells, while a fifth—perhaps the most striking tour de force of all—ex- amines Mr. Chesterton's theory of Christianity. The brilliantly sustained success with which he resumes and compares the individuality of these writers, so antipodal in tone and sub- stance not only to each other but to any formula of French literature, gives the measure of his insight and discrimina- tion, and reveals incidentally a detailed acquaintance with our letters in general such as might put to the blush all but the best-read of Englishmen. Happy throughout in his accurate and pictorial judgments, he is at his best, perhaps, in his treatment of " The Case of Rudyard Kipling." Opening in praise of Meredith, of whom he writes (p. 192),

" One thing only is hard to follow in Meredith—the amazing rapidity and keenness of a vision which comprehends in a glance the totality of man, from the twilit underworld in which, unknown

• Nouvelles Etudes Anglaises. Aadrd Checrillon. Paris Hachette. pfr. 50c.) to itself, the life of mind and soul burgeons and gropes for Ali beginning, to the sunshine-flooded summit of its full develop- ment ";

and referring to his style as

"that art, keener, subtler, and more secret than any known before, indirect, as a rule, and progressing in swift sidelong flashes of allusion,"

he proceeds to contrast the quintessential genius of the two writers (p. 194) :—

" Both worship to the same degree the spiritual energy WI man—life and the will to live " :

but while Meredith,

"as a Celt and cosmopolitan, . . . finds its purest and mash godlike manifestation in the supreme emanations of the mind, in the refinement and blossoming of culture,"

Kipling

"loves it near the root, where the direct, abounding stream et primordial sap gushes forth to meet the forces in its path. Ideas he despises, at heart, with that unerring English contempt which divines in the complications of the intellect an expenditure of energy, a wasting at the core, a cause as well as a sign of &ea- dm:me—above all, a. loophole for indecision, something hostile to the original, spontaneous and vital categories revealed by instinct" (p. 194).

That there is no ground for the uneasy suspicion of mockery which this judgment might primarily suggest becomes clear

on reference to another passage, where he develops the same view.

"In the case of this people, the mind has remained a natural and practical instrument, a function of life itself. It has not drawn aside to observe life from without, to judge its instinctive motions and subject them to the absolute canons of reason: it still le. spends to life's intrinsic impulses " (p. 76).

Tracing to the influence of Meredith's lambent irony the modern spirit of pessimism that seems bent on arraigning all

our institutions—a spirit fur which, in England no less than on the Continent, Ibsen and Brieux are surely more

truly responsible—the author appraises no less skilfully the attitude of Mr. Chesterton—whom he describes untranslatably as " ce jeune et bon geant a, la ceinture large, 1 la face de soleil levant, a la grande gaiti oonta.gieuse " (p. 213)—and of Mr. Wells. The former he considers essentially "religions

and constructive " ; the latter, extravagantly bitter, prejudiced and sterile.

"Mr. Wells is the most modern, in other words the least 'English, of Englishmen. . . . In him, the intellectual element has destroyed, once for all, the ethnic " (p. 276). " On everything typically English he cast an ironic and disenchanted eye. . . . This, indeed, is a feature common to the whole school of young Radicals who, with so much eagerness and hope, opposed the aggressive realism of Kipling and Chamberlain by their faith in the reign of reason. Now that the victory of their political comrades has directed legislation towards their ideal, that ideal apparently seems to them less accessible than ever " (p. 274).

With this captious discontent, the symptom of an anaimic and profoundly disquieting hysteria, M. Chevrillon contrasts the full-blooded invective of Carlyle, whose source he discerns in a paradox of character-

" Contemptuous of Celt and Latin . . . . Carlyle admired at heart only those qualities which he deemed peculiarly English. Subtle flattery, he abused the English for not being English enough " (p. 308) :

whereas the sympathies of Mr. Wells, Mr. GaLsworthy, Mr. Shaw, and their several disciples he regards as unquestionably Continental.

But though professing, with one exception ("La Psychologie d'un Couronnement"), merely to study certain phases of our modern literature, the book is in substance a penetrating

analysis of the English spirit, and by some way the most striking that has yet been attempted. So thorough, in fact, are the perceptions it expresses that one has difficulty at times in believing it the work of a foreigner. • Like another Plato visiting Sparta at her apogee, AL Chevrillon appears almost to find embodied in our system the philosopher's conception of

a ruling caste, superlatively fitted for service and command, and though reluctantly admitting that a change is imminent, if it has not already taken place, he declares that " one tells societe fut, a son heure . . . . une des belles et raves reussites de l'histoire." In M. Chevrillon, indeed, there is much of Plato : the same aristocratic Puritanism and dislike

of men and things unchastened by tradition, the same worship of restraint, the same mistrust of untempered intellectualism, explain the similar orientation of both minds. Turning with

relief from the cynical individualism and absence of political and religious conviction at home, their eyes have rested perhaps too optimistically on the nearest approximation to their ideal. As a stranger, M. Chevrillon has been able to set forth our aims and the measure of our achievement with a generously outspoken enthusiasm which no Englishman, for obvious reasons, could allow himself. In 'a passage almost Periclean in the eager intensity of its pregnant antithesis (pp. 76, 77), he extols the genius of the English people, the plastic stability of its character and institutions, " the instinc- tive wisdom that keeps this nation soundin our unbalancedage." Pithily summing up as " pragmatique Bien avant que le mot fit invents " (p. 216) the spirit of compromise and adjust- ment that has moulded its development, preserved it from revolution, and enabled it to govern with success in the most disparate conditions of race and circumstance, he points out surely and simply the cardinal distinction that differentiates from the Latin peoples the "strongly marked personality of England. She is a person because she has a system of habits—habits of thought, of feeling, of activity. . . . This system is her past itself, ingrained and living in her present" (p. 75). Remembering the thirteen " unchangeable " consti- tutions which France has essayed and rejected in the course of the last century, it is easy to appreciate why such con- servatism in progress, "slowly broadening from precedent to precedent," and to the English mind so inevitably natural, should rank as an exception when viewed from without.

Of that continuity M. Chevrillon takes the Coronation as the appropriate symbol, and the first of his six articles is a study of its meaning and atmosphere. Emphasizing its affinity to ancestor-worship, he describes it as

"a solemn anniversary in a proud family of high caste: on that day . . . the clan sees itself as a distinct and integral person, whose extended life comprises and connects the tiny lives that successively compose it" (p. 31). . "It is a Wagnerian opera which, three or four times a century, the nation stages for itself. Its characters are an aristocracy, a people, a Church, a king. . . . It is a communion in which every member of the State unites " (p. 33).

The review of the Indian troops is

• a dance, a kind of quadrille . . . almost a rite . . . serious and significant as the warlike and religious dances of the East . . . These rhythmic movements symbolize and exalt a mighty power—the English idea, which, striving always by an immemorial and unflagging effort to subdue and fashion more and more human material, . . . has gradually expanded over the whole world " (p. 59).

Repeatedly accentuating this dynamic aspect of our race— the race of Sahibs—" ii part, presque en dehors de l'humanitS ordinaire " (p. 196), he is in his happiest vein when describing "l'energie pmtique et lyrique de l'ime anglaise " (p. 207). " Action," he says (p. 245), " action and poetry, these are the special provinces of the English spirit. They are the province of youth."

Comparing the present studies with the first, it is evident that the experience of another decade, with its inevitable readjustments, has revealed us more fully to the author's understanding, and rounded it with the final grace of sympathy. In the faint raillery that occasionally seasons his appreciation there is traceable now none of the veiled antipathy that embittered his earlier writing. On this occasion, indeed, he has been, if anything, too kind in in- clining to exaggerate the harmony of our system and ignoring how gravely its stability has been compromised by the powerful acids that are fretting its base. In any such criticism from without, however clear-sighted, there is, of course, necessarily involved a simplification of lines, a scarcely perceptible overstatement of type, a certain dis- regard of the interplay of opposites in national charac- ter; and in his apparent admiration for the imperialist spirit M. Chevrillon has • allowed himself to overlook the prominence of that freakish passion for chimera so mercilessly satirized in John Bull's Other Island, and hardly less typically British, in its dogged refusal to be beaten by the common facts of existence, than the instinctive grasp of concrete organization that makes the Sahib. If these Nouvelles Etudes Anglaises furnish any ground at all for cavil, it is this, and the remedy lies to M. Chevrillon's hand : he has merely to write another volume. Its reception is assured,.