[lit-ideas] Re: On the Recent Improvement in Our Opinions

  • From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 10:40:45 +0900

Marvelous! Shall we bring back the style?

John


On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 9:16 AM, David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Into this quiet moment allow me to inject excerpts from a recent find, a
> book once owned by A.E. Scott of Rugby School.  "Once" in this instance
> refers to purchase in 1860.  The title is "History of France," the author,
> Rev James White.
>
> We come in on a moment when White has described France's rise from
> barbarism, "If we do not go quite so far as to grant [the French] the
> position they arrogate, and agree with their own historians, that they are
> at the head of modern civilisation in all its branches, we shall not be
> blind or disingenuous enough to deny that, in all the departments of
> intellectual exertion, they hold a foremost place..."
>
> The Rev. is generous, you say.  Maybe not,  "...if they have no Newton, no
> Locke, nor Shakespeare, they have many philosophers and many poets..."
>
> He continues,  "Some years ago it would have been an unexampled stretch of
> liberality to have confessed that France had any good qualities at all.  We
> were in the habit of wrapping ourselves up very comfortably in the folds of
> our own conceit, and looking down on the rest of mankind as a very inferior
> race of mortals.  We took the additional precaution of maintaining our own
> superiority by calling our neighbours by the most insulting names.  We
> pictured them as the most ludicrous imitations of humanity, as if one of
> Nature's journeymen had made the Frenchman, and not made him well.  He was
> a lean, half-starved, lanky-legged creature, looking in hopeless despair,
> with watery mouth and bleared eyes, at a round of English beef."
>
> Or, one might add if knows one's Burns, "at a haggis."
>
> "His attitudes were grotesque, his language even became immensely amusing,
> because he did not speak our tongue with the slang of a hackney-coachman
> and the pronunciation of a Cockney.  We called him Jack Frog, because we
> believed he fed on those unsubstantial animals, which we also fancied the
> exact image of himself in hoppiness of motion and yellowness of skin.  His
> cowardice was unvarying.  One Englishman was always equal to half-a-dozen
> of the 'mounseers;' and, in short, we were a most unjust, narrow-minded,
> pudding-headed set of self-glorifiers, adding to the isolation that belongs
> to the whole nation in right of its four seas the more separating
> insularity of our own individual opinions.  We were islands altogether,
> nowhere connected with the rest of mankind.  Our country was an island, we
> despised the rest of Europe; our county was an island, we despised the
> other shires..."
>
> (Apparently county is a Norman French term, shire an Anglo-Saxon one.)
>
> "...our parish was an island, with peculiar habits, modes and
> institutions; our households were islands; and, to complete the whole, each
> stubborn, broad-shouldered, strong-backed Englishman was an island himself,
> surrounded by a misty and tumultuous sea of prejudices and hatreds,
> generally unapproachable, and at times utterly repudiative of a permanent
> bridge.  We are better now."
>
> How is that?  (I'll skip and snip.)
>
> "We can believe...that a Dutchman does not wear seven pairs of trousers;
> that an Italian sometimes succeeds in *not* murdering his mother; and that,
> granted the same conditions, the conduct of a Swede, of an Austrian, of a
> Prussian, and even of a Muscovite, would be very much the same.  It is
> lucky that this change of opinion and widening of our sympathies has taken
> place..."
>
> Why?
>
> "...if all our inquiries in these historic sketches were to end in the
> production of the cringing, grinning, trembling mountebank and imposter it
> was anciently the fashion to consider the Frenchman, the labour would be
> greatly misapplied."
>
> What a way to begin a book!
>
> David Ritchie,
> not in France.
>
>
>
>
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-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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