makes about himself. An Englishman who professes really to like
French realistic novels, really to be at home in a French modern
theatre, really to experience no shock on first seeing the savage French
caricatures, is making a mistake very dangerous for his own sincerity.
He is admiring something he does not understand. He is reaping where he
has not sown, and taking up where he has not laid down; he is trying to
taste the fruit when he has never toiled over the tree. He is trying to
pluck the exquisite fruit of French cynicism, when he has never tilled
the rude but rich soil of French virtue.

The thing can only be made clear to Englishmen by turning it round.
Suppose a Frenchman came out of democratic France to live in England,
where the shadow of the great houses still falls everywhere, and where
even freedom was, in its origin, aristocratic. If the Frenchman saw our
aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if he
set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all know
that we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive
little gnat. He would be imitating English aristocracy; he would be
imitating the English vice. But he would not even understand the vice he
plagiarised: especially he would not understand that the vice is partly
a virtue. He would not understand those elements in the English which
balance snobbishness and make it human: the great kindness of the
English, their hospitality, their unconscious poetry, their sentimental
conservatism, which really admires the gentry. The French Royalist sees
that the English like their King. But he does not grasp that while it is
base to worship a King, it is almost noble to worship a powerless King.
The impotence of the Hanoverian Sovereigns has raised the English loyal
subject almost to the chivalry and dignity of a Jacobite. The Frenchman
sees that the English servant is respectful: he does not realise that he
is also disrespectful; that there is an English legend of the humorous
and faithful servant, who is as much a personality as his master; the
Caleb Balderstone, the Sam Weller. He sees that the English do admire a
nobleman; he does not allow for the fact that they admire a nobleman
most when he does not behave like one. They like a noble to be
unconscious and amiable: the slave may be humble, but the master must
not be proud. The master is Life, as they would like to enjoy it; and
among the joys they desire in