But perhaps the literature of the two countries most
emphatically displays their respective points of view and tone of
feeling. While a popular French author sums up the elements of life in
England as being _la vie de famille, la politique, et les
affaires_,--'domestic life, politics, and business,'--he complacently
infers that _le fond du caractere Anglais_, 'the basis of the English
character,' is nothing more nor less than _le manque de bonheur_--'a
want of anything like happiness.' An English thinker, on the other hand,
finds in the very language of France the evidence of superficial emotion
and unaspiring, irreverent intelligence. 'How exactly,' writes Julius
Ham, 'do _esprit_ and _spirituel_ express what the French deem the
highest glory of the human mind! A large part of their literature is
_mousseux_; and whatever is so, soon grows flat. Our national quality is
sense, which may, perhaps, betray a tendency to materialism; but which,
at all events, comprehends a greater body of thought, that has settled
down and become substantiated in maxims.'[A] How far a Frenchman is from
appreciating this distinction, as unfavorable to his own race, we can
realize from the following estimate of the historical evil which an
admired modern writer considers that race has suffered from the English,
and from the character of the latter as recognized by another equally a
favorite:--
[Footnote A: Guesses at Truth.
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