Rural France.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 8, 19 August 1908, Page 45

Rural France.

People who don’t know France usual';/ associate anything French with gaiety, cliicness, and light words of a. similar r.a*ure, and th ry will meet with an agreeable surprise in a charming book just published, called “The Pleasant Land >f France,” by Mr. Rowland Prothero. it is a collection of miscellaneous essays, instinct with knowledge amd observat.i >:i, and written in most attractive styie. The book commences with four essays 0:1 the French peasant, continues with hi interesting paper on Rabelais, and concludes with a dainty translations of French poems, ill. Prothero has a vw/ acute appreciation of the French character, and this helps him to a suggestive comparison of the French and English temperaments. He says: “The average Frenchman remains, throughout his life, in many respects a child, just as L‘i? average Englishman remains, if not a schoolboy, an undergraduate. The Frenchman ‘sc range,’ when his English contemporary is wandering in the Rocky Mountains of tiimight -or of reality. “'Sometimes for better, sometimes lor worse, many of the national characteristics are governed by the fact that the intermediate stage between the child and the man—that of boyhood—is a transition through which the one never passes, and from which the other never emerges. A Frenchman, for example, courts admiration with the simplicity of a. child; lie has a child's boastfulness, and a child’s power of making believe. . . . “He has fathomed the true secret of happiness, and is a wiser philosopher than the man who sneers. At least lie is no hypocrite, like the Englishman, who would rather bite his tongue oil than express all the admiration that lie feels for his own possessions. . “It is, again, because he is never a boy that the Frenchman remains a child in the zest with which he pursues his immediate end, the naturalness of his enjoyment, the perpetual freshness of his interests. He never mortgages the present for the future.” This is a very masterly summary of the essential differences between the two peoples. Mr. Prothero mentions the provincial Frenchman’s universal delight in gudgeon-fishing, and this leads to further reflections. He remarks: — “Morally it (gudgeon fishing) has revealed to him the secret that happiness consists not in an isolated day of expensive enjoyment, purchased by a vast outlay of time and trouble, but in the succession of small pleasures which lie at his feet—that it is, in fact, rather a mosaic of an infinite number of tiny gems than the single jewel of great cost which philosophers seek and seldom find. “The jostling of young and old in pursuit of the same sport, keeps the. grandpere in touch with the bebo. The juxtaposition of rags and respectability on the banks of the same stream carries on the' work of the cafe, and promotes the kindly feeling of rural classes. “It also fosters that contempt for appearances which enables the country gentleman to tether his cows under his diningroom windows, to dispense with liveries for his servants, and to drive in his antiquated shay a horse not unacquainted with the plough. Gudgeon fishers can have no false shame.” The chapters on French farming are particularly interesting and informative. The success of the small holding is, to an extent, owing to peculiar local conditions: “The squalid haunts of English trade are surrounded at the best by blackened waters; in French Flanders dense population and high farming advance hand in hand. At the doors of factories, at the brink of coal-pits, is some of the best cultivated land in the world

land which affords recreation and profit to thousands of artisans. The importance ol“this feature in its bearing mi the happiness of the industrial population ami on the alleged pulverisation of the ownership of French soil can hardly bo exaggerated.” Mr. Prothero states the ease for and against peasant proprietorship. He notes the squalor in which the small proprietor sometimes lives, but he points out that the conditions vary in different departments. “In Brittany many of the peasants live on porridge made of buckwheat without milk, potatoes, rye bread, and buckwheat pancakes without butter. If they are a little better oft', they add milk and salt butter, and pork and cabbage two or three times a week. Their drink is water or eider. “In Normandy, on the other hand, food is good and abundant; at its worst, it consists of galcttes of maize, with a little bacon, butcher’s meat once a week, and cider. In Anjou the farmer is well fed, and the peasant proprietor and the hired labourer share the same simple abundance. “In Touraine all classes can enjoy abundance of food. Tire hired labourer expects, if fed on the farm, to have meat once a day ; he turns up his nose at mutton, and prefers white wine to red. In the central districts of France chestnuts are the staple diet of the rural population.”