ENGLISH AND FRENCH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 219, 15 September 1932, Page 6

ENGLISH AND FRENCH.

THE SPIRIT OF GAIETY.

Let me again remonstrate Avith Mrs. Charlotte Haldane, author of the novel "I Bring Not Peace" (writes Mr. St. John Ervino in the "Observer"). She supposes that there is a gaiety to be found in the French which is not to be found in "the introspective Northern" people, among whom she includes the English. I demur to her assumption that the French are gay or, at all events, gayer than the English or any Northern European people. Heaven forbid that I should fall into the sin of the generaliser, and lump the inhabitants of France into one category, as if a man from the Midi were exactly like a Norman, and a Breton were no different from a Gascon. The people of Tourraine are among the most genial and likeable I have met, anyone who wanfa the Normans can have them, so far as I am concerned. Gaiety for gaiety, however, the English are as lively as the French, and, in general degree, are much livelier. How often, during the war, one saw companies of frowning French soldiers scowling in bewilderment at the singing English soldiers, whom they accused of flippancy because they went over the top laughing and shouting to each other, "This Sway for the early doors!" Only a month or two ago a professor informed an audience at the Sorbonne that "Alice in Wonderland" could not have been written by a Frenchman because the French are an adult race!! Only an irresponsible, infantile people, he suggested, could have produced such fantastic stuff! Impossible, he averred, to imagine- a French professor of mathematics inventing the Mad Hatter! That, someone should have said, is precisely what is wrong with the French professors of mathematics! This charge, that the English are not adult, is commonly made against them. Mr. Shaw has spent his life in complaining that they are not grown-up and are seldom serious. Every Irishman and every Scot periodically wants to take the tavvse to the English, but is prevented from doing so by the disconcerting discovery that there is a wisdom within this English flippancy which surpasses logic and reason. On one occasion, that profane man Lord Palmerston said the practical people were in one camp and the damned fools in another. And, by God, said Palmerston, the damned foods were right! There is a wild sanity in the English which keeps them balanced even when they are performing fantastic tricks before high heaven.

But tolerance has become a vice among the English, who will good-naturedly submit to exactions and impositions and sloppy service which ought not to be endured. It is not a sign of strength to avoid "making a fuse" on all occasions: it is a sign of cowardice or lethargy or sheer servility. There comes a point at which to continue to be patient is to prove yourself a slave. A high percentage of the troubles of this country are due to the reluctance of the English to "make a fuss" and their maddening patience with things that are insufferable. This habit is contradictorily expressed in two ways in the popular Press, which assures "the little man" and "John Citizen" that he is the salt of the community, and at the same time portrays him as a crushed and insignificant creature who has not the courage to say "Bo" to a civil servant. The custom of portraying the generality of citizens as meanly submissive persons, whose single effort at remonstrance is to go into a corner and bleat about their wrongs, seems to me contemptible and debasing and likely to produce a population of snivellers and winners, since we grow into the images that our artists make of us. The temper of our time is largely one of complacence with common things. i