of grief as to engage in rhetorical panegyrics over the fresh graves
of departed friends? Compare the high dead wall with its range of
flower-pots, the porches undecked by woodbines or jessamine, the formal
paths, the proximate kitchen, stables, and ungarnished _salon_ of
a French villa, with the hedges, meadows, woodlands, and trellised
eglantine of an English country-house; and a glance assures us that
to the former nation the country is a _dernier ressort_, and not an
endeared seclusion. Yet they romance, in their way, on rural subjects:
"_A la campagne_," says one of their poets, "_ou chaque feuille qui
tombe est une elegie toute faite_." Through an avenue of scraggy poplars
we approach a dilapidated _chateau_, whose owner is playing dominoes
at the cafe of the nearest provincial town, or exhausting the sparse
revenues of the estate at the theatres, roulette-tables, or balls of
Paris. People leave these for a rural vicinage only to economize, to
hide chagrin, or to die. So recognized is this indifference to Nature
and inaptitude for rural life in France, that, when we desire to
express the opposite of natural tastes, we habitually use the word
"Frenchified." The idea which a Parisian has of a tree is that of a
convenient appendage to a lamp. The traveller never sees artificial
light reflected from green leaves, without thinking of his evening
promenades in the French capital, or a dance in the groves of
Montmorency. The old verbal tyranny of the French Academy, the
painted wreaths sold at cemetery-gates, the colored plates of fashions,
powdered hair, and rouged cheeks, typify and illustrate this irreverent
ambition to pervert Nature and create artificial effects; they are but
so many forms of the theatrical instinct, and proofs of the ascendency
of meretricious taste. It is this want of loyalty to Nature, and
insensibility to her unadulterated charms, which constitute the real
barrier between the Gallic mind and that of England and Italy, and
which explain the fervent protest of such men as Alfieri and Coleridge.