FRENCH AND ENGLISH

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1507, 17 January 1901, Page 33

FRENCH AND ENGLISH

France and the French are little understood in this country (says an English contemporary), ana! Miss Betham-Ed-wards’s comparisons between the two peoples, which are published in “Greater Thoughts/” will probably occasion some surprise. In her opinion w T e are becoming frivolous, and the French more serious. “Think of the scenes/’ sli© said, “I so often see here in Hastings when a cheap trip is in the town, and 1 the streets are. full of drunken girls and young men. And then. I am asked to illMaitifliUUiiifiiHiSiUHfiUttite

French are far and away the superior.? of -the dreadful • creatures who so forget their manhood and their womanhood here in England.”

Miss Betham-Edwards also had some interesting remarks ,o:i the higher classes in France. She objected to their being judged from the typical French novel, and added I —-“My opinion, based on actual personal experience, is that ordinary French domestic life is as strict, and as moral, as our own. Indeed, there is not in high society anything like that sad laxity of life- which is -so characteristic of what is called “smart” society in England to-day. You- can't meet in France the slangy girl? you meet here. I heard one young lady of good birth and high connection the other day talking of those ‘beastly Russian sneak? trying to annex China.’ Then, again, French girls of the upper class are much less flirty than our young women; they are more restrained.” In fact. Mis? Betham-Edwards views the British nation in an unfavourable light. “We are literally changing our national characteristics. We, as a nation. are far more pleasure loving than the French,and in many ways not nearly so deep-seated in ow views of life and its responsibilities. French family ties are much stronger than with us. A French family is a clan ; they stick together, hang together in a way undreamed of here in England. I have known ■two families, including two mothers-in-law., living amicably together in one Souse in France. The French, on this account, and because they do thus stick together, are much' more conservative than we are. They stick together as Abraham to the cave of Macpelah. 7 ’* Closely associated as she has been with the French people. Miss Betham-Ed-wards thinks well of the friends who have honoured her by their appreciation, and defend? them as thrifty, moral and wellbehaved. She discredits the setatement that the two nations must necessarily be bitter rivals. “They have no real bad feeling against us, and there is nothing they would like better than to be able to set to know us really well and inti-

mately. As it- is, they try and adopt everything English that they can, English dress, English literature, English language, everything English in short.”