In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street. We
talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is the
man in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with these
lamp-posts and pavements; everything from his meals to his martyrdoms.
When first an Englishman looks at a French town or village his
first feeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town
or village; when he looks again he sees that this comparative
absence of the picturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain,
precipitous frontage of the houses standing up hard and flat
out of the street like the cardboard houses in a pantomime--
a hard angularity allied perhaps to the harshness of French logic.
When he looks a third time he sees quite simply that it is all because
the houses have no front gardens. The vague English spirit loves to have
the entrance to its house softened by bushes and broken by steps.
It likes to have a little anteroom of hedges half in the house
and half out of it; a green room in a double sense. The Frenchman
desires no such little pathetic ramparts or halting places, for the
street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him.
. . . . .
The French have no front gardens; but the street is every man's
front garden. There are trees in the street, and sometimes fountains.
The street is the Frenchman's tavern, for he drinks in the street.
It is his dining-room, for he dines in the street. It is his
British Museum, for the statues and monuments in French streets are not,
as with us, of the worst, but of the best, art of the country,
and they are often actually as historical as the Pyramids.
The street again is the Frenchman's Parliament, for France has
never taken its Chamber of Deputies so seriously as we take our House
of Commons, and the quibbles of mere elected nonentities in an official
room seem feeble to a people whose fathers have heard the voice
of Desmoulins like a trumpet under open heaven, or Victor Hugo
shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of the second Republic.
And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines in the street
so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, so that
the street can never be commonplace to him.
Take, for instance, such a simple object as a lamp-post. In London
a lamp-post is a comic thing. We think of the intoxicated
gentleman embracing it, and recalling ancient friendship.
But in Paris a lamp-post is a tragic thing. For we think
of tyrants hanged on it, and of an end of the world. There is,
or was, a bitter Republican paper in Paris called LA LANTERNE.
How funny it would be if there were a Progressive paper in England
called THE LAMP POST! We have said, then, that the Frenchman is the man
in the street; that he can dine in the street, and die in the street.
And if I ever pass through Paris and find him going to bed in the street,
I shall say that he is still true to the genius of his civilisation.
All that is good and all that is evil in France is alike connected
with this open-air element. French democracy and French indecency
are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors.
Compared to a café, a public-house is a private house.
. . . . .
There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through
the mind in the streets of this especial town of Belfort.
First of all, it lies close upon the boundary of France and Germany,
and boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world.
To love anything is to love its boundaries; thus children will always
play on the edge of anything. They build castles on the edge
of the sea, and can only be restrained by public proclamation
and private violence from walking on the edge of the grass.
For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come
to the beginning of it.
Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the very margin
of Germany, and although there were many German touches in the place--
German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatrical barmaids
dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants--yet the fixed
French colour seemed all the stronger for these specks of something else.
All day long and all night long troops of dusty, swarthy, scornful little
soldiers went plodding through the streets with an air of stubborn
disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised you, but French
soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even more than you.
It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nation which has made
it good at war and science and other things in which what is necessary
is combined with what is nasty. And the soldiers and the civilians
alike had most of them cropped hair, and that curious kind of head
which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call
a bullet-head. Indeed, we are speaking very appropriately when we call
it a bullet-head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen
have been bullets--yes, and explosive bullets.
. . . . .
But there was a second reason why in this place one should think
particularly of the open-air politics and the open-air art
of the French. For this town of Belfort is famous for one of
the most typical and powerful of the public monuments of France.
From the café table at which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town
on which hangs the high and flat-faced citadel, pierced with
many windows, and warmed in the evening light. On the steep
hill below it is a huge stone lion, itself as large as a hill.
It is hacked out of the rock with a sort of gigantic impression.
No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a common statue;
no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish
the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises,
shaking the world. The face of the lion has something of the bold
conventionality of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left
like a shapeless cloud of tempest, as if it might literally
be said of him that God had clothed his neck with thunder.
Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and in some
sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago.
It commemorates the fact that this town was never taken
by the Germans through all the terrible year, but only laid
down its arms at last at the command of its own Government.
But the spirit of it has been in this land from the beginning--
the spirit of something defiant and almost defeated.
As I leave this place and take the railway into Germany the news comes
thicker and thicker up the streets that Southern France is in a flame,
and that there perhaps will be fought out finally the awful modern battle
of the rich and poor. And as I pass into quieter places for the last
sign of France on the sky-line, I see the Lion of Belfort stand at bay,
the last sight of that great people which has never been at peace.