If you dig down to the fundamental, the real difference is not so much that one mood goes in everywhere for smartness, and the other allows all things to get dirty and slipshod, as that one mood wants smartness in one kind of thing, and the other wants it in another kind of thing; one mood wants accuracy and the satisfaction of proportion in one set of things, and another wants it in another set of things. The difference to the eye is very striking. I fancy it is the difference which the average casual and rapid observer notes most strongly in travel. Everyone has remarked it in the contrast between Belfast and Dublin, between an English ship and a French one, between a Basque village or road, and a Castilian or Galician one over the boundary: between the Swiss-German railway management and the Italian. I am told, by those familiar with those countries, that there is a similar sharp change when you pass over the border of Finland from Russia.
It is exceedingly difficult in so subtle a matter of human motive to ferret out the root, though obviously that root must lie in the mind, and we have to seek for some mental need which is being satisfied. It is no good, for instance, saying that the Italian railway looks more slipshod than the German-Swiss railway because the Italian is lazy and the German-Swiss is industrious. We all know that both are industrious, and that of the two the Italian is, on the whole, the harder worker. It would not be true to say that Englishmen aboard ship were men of more energy than Frenchmen aboard ship. The whole point of a Frenchman is the intensity of his energy—indeed, its excess—which is what accounts for most of the achievements of the French, and also for all their disasters. What one has to do in examining the thing is to find out what it is which makes the Englishman, say, or the Dutchman or the Prussian uncomfortable in circumstances which he feels to be dirty and slipshod, so that he cannot rest until they have been put right, while the other sort of man is equally uncomfortable in another set of slack circumstances, and cannot rest until they are put right.
What are the two categories?
I say again it is exceedingly difficult to judge, and still more difficult to put into words, but they seem to me in my travels something of this kind. The one set of people feel their whole community to be dependent upon a “gentry,” a class possessed of more than the average of wealth in their society. When people take such a standard, an appetite spreads throughout the whole of the community to reduce all, as far as possible, to the conditions under which a wealthy person would live. While in the other set of people you have a conception that the community must be taken as a whole. Their centre of gravity is necessarily much lower than a gentry: it is lower even than a middle-class. It is the standard of the people. Thus, in the one sort of community certain forms of decoration in a room, such as having a carpet and curtains, will seem essential. If that standard cannot be maintained, then one must expect degradation and dirt—as in our lodging-houses of London. But in the other sort of community they aim at the cleanliness of a very poor room, of which the floor is bare boards. They wash and scrub the bare boards, as in every cottage of Normandy.
Yet that difference in social ideals is not really the heart of the difference. The heart of the difference lies surely in the relative values which people put upon different human activities. In the one community people will take it for granted that a certain smartness of externals is essential to what they call efficiency: in the other the actual working of the instrument towards its end is alone considered. The impression produced upon the citizen of the one type when he sees untidy accessories, even where these are of no service at all to the end the instrument has to serve, is that such untidiness connotes inefficiency throughout. But the other kind of man disassociates those two ideas, and is contemptuous of anyone who confuses such different things. In Picardy they keep out cows with chance thorns, in England with a three-pound gate. Both keep out cows.
I have had sharp personal experience of the matter in one definite instance, and that is a battery of field artillery. In the ideas of the English service, a French field battery is extremely slack. The harness is dull, often old, and pieced together, sometimes shamefully tied up with string. The uniforms are not over-clean. There is nothing too smart about the pieces themselves, even when they are prepared for a review. The conclusion is immediately arrived at that these foreigners ought not to have guns at all, seeing they do not know how to treat them. It is the same connotation of ideas as makes one think that a man without a collar is poor, though he may be a millionaire who has just taken it off to ease his neck. Now the other commentary is worth remarking, for I have heard it from the lips of many men, and it shows the difference of mood. The smartness of the English batteries I have always heard vastly admired by the French gunners, but never in connection with gunnery. They regard it as an adjunct, as a sort of ornament which a wealthy nation possessed (as England normally is in peace time) of but a small armed force can afford. They think it rather like wearing a top hat, or like a woman wearing jewels; something having no relation whatsoever to the function of a gun and its gunners, which is to deliver projectiles accurately and rapidly rather than to
