among them, as just _being_ Arthur Pendennis to know so
well, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what they might be.
They were floated on the tide of the manners then prevailing, I judge,
with a rich processional effect that so many of our own grand lapses,
when not of our mere final flatnesses, leave no material for; so that
the living note of Boulogne was really, on a more sustained view, the
opposition between a native race the most happily tempered, the most
becomingly seasoned and salted and self-dependent, and a shifting
colony--so far as the persons composing it _could_ either urgently or
speculatively shift--inimitably at odds with any active freshness. And
the stale and the light, even though so scantly rebounding, the too
densely socialised, group was the English, and the "positive" and hardy
and steady and wind-washed the French; and it was all as flushed with
colour and patched with costume and referable to record and picture, to
literature and history, as a more easily amusing and less earnestly
uniform age could make it. When I speak of this opposition indeed I see
it again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one side and the
other, swallowed all differences at a gulp. The general British show, as
we had it there, in the artless mid-Victorian desert, had, I think, for
its most sweeping sign the high assurance of its dowdiness; whereas one
had only to glance about at the sea-faring and fisher-folk who were the
real strength of the place to feel them shed at every step and by their
every instinct of appearance the perfect lesson of taste. There it was
to be learnt and taken home--with never a moral, none the less, drawn
from it by the "higher types." I speak of course in particular of the
tanned and trussed and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, all
so short-skirted and free-limbed under stress; for as by the rule of the
dowdy their sex is ever the finer example, so where the sense of the
suitable, of the charmingly and harmoniously right prevails, they
preserve the pitch even as a treasure committed to their piety. To hit
that happy mean of rightness amid the mixed occupations of a home-mother
and a fishwife, to be in especial both so bravely stripped below and so
perfectly enveloped above as the deep-wading, far-striding,
shrimp-netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens who played,
waist-high, with the tides and racily quickened the market, was to make
grace thoroughly practical and