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法国人和英国人
It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cos-mopolitan. All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national. And it is largely because those who call themselves the friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinction that they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which they belong. International peace means a peace between nations,not a peace after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be each other. And in the case of national character this can be seen in a curious way. It will generally be found, I think, that the more a man really appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less he will attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is something in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate.The Englishman who has a fancy for France will try to be French; the Englishman who ad-mires France will remain obstinately English. This is to be particularly noticed in the case of our relations with the French, because it is one of the outstanding peculiarities of the French that their vices are all on the surface, and their extraordinary virtues concealed. [3] One might almost say that their vices are the flower of their virtues.
在国际化和见多识广中存在着非常大的差异，这是显而易见的。所有的好人都是国际化的，所有的坏人都是见多识广的。我们如果想变得国际化，首先必须具备民族性。很大程度上正是由于那些自称热爱和平的人并未真正理解这种区别，因此他们的努力甚至不为自己国家的大多数人所接受。国际间的和平意味着民族间的和平，并非破坏一个民族以后的和平，就像破坏个人特性的佛教那样。欧洲最好的时代是像基督教的天堂那般，在那里人们相亲相爱；而非像印度教那样，人们在那里成为彼此。关于民族特性这一点，可以被看作是一种稀奇的方式。我认为总体来说，是一个人不仅仅于欣赏和景仰另一个民族的气质和精神，但也不至于去模仿；他会意识到其他民族文化是很难模仿的，因为有极深极难掌握的东西在其中。对法国着迷的英国人会尝试着变成法国人；而敬仰着法国的英国人却始终坚定地有着英国的痕迹。我们英国同法国的关系需要被多加关注，因为法国人其中一个杰出的特点就是所有的邪恶都在表面上，而且他们特别的美德被封存了。你几乎可以说他们的“恶”其实是他们的“善之花”。
Thus their obscenity is the expression of their passionate love of dragging all things into the light. The avarice of their peasants means the independence of their peasants. What the English call their rudeness in the streets is a phase of their social equality. The worried look of their women is connected with the responsibility of their women; and a certain unconscious brutality of hurry and gesture in the men is related to their inexhaustible and extraordinary military courage. Of all coun-tries, therefore, France is the worst country for a superficial fool to admire. Let a fool hate France: if the fool loves it he will soon be a knave.He will certainly admire it, not only for the things that are not creditable, but actually for the things that are not there. He will admire the grace and indolence of the most industrious people in the world. He will admire the romance and fantasy of the most determinedly respectable and common-place people in the world. This mistake the Englishman will make if he admires France too hastily; but the mistake that he makes about France will be slight compared with the mistake that he makes about himself. An Englishman who professes really to like French realistic novels, really to be at home in a French modern theatre,really to experience no shock on first seeing the savage French caricatures, is making a mistake very dangerous for his own sincerity. He is admiring something he does not understand. He is reaping where he has not sown, and taking up where he has not laid down; he is trying to taste the fruit when he has never toiled over the tree. He is trying to pluck the exquisite fruit of French cynicism, when he has never tilled the rude but rich soil of French virtue.
因而法国式的下流其实是他们热衷将事情公之于众的一种表达方式。法国农民的贪婪其实意味着他们的独立。当英国人在街头看到的粗鲁实际上是社会平等的阶段。法国妇女面带恶容与她们的责任
有关系，而他们男人不经意间流露的匆忙和姿态的残酷与他们不知疲倦和和非凡的军事勇气有关。因此从所有国家看来，对于那些嘴肤浅的傻瓜来说法国是最不值得崇拜的国家。让我们调侃一下法国：如果一个傻瓜爱上法国那么不久之后他会变成恶棍。他会真真切切地爱上法国，不仅仅因为那些根本不值得的事物，甚至是一些不存在的东西。他们会崇拜世界上最勤奋的人的优雅和慵懒，也会敬仰世界上最值得令人尊敬或者是普通人的浪漫和迷人。英国人会急匆匆地崇拜法国，这是他们会犯的错误；但是他在法国犯的错几乎没有办法和自己身上犯的错误做对比。一个自称真正喜欢法国现实主义小说的英国人，真正喜欢呆在法国现代戏剧里，第一次看到野蛮的法国漫画就不会感到震惊，他犯了一个错误，这对他自己的真诚来说是非常危险的。犯下的严重错误有损于他的真诚。他崇拜着他不理解的东西，他收获着他并未播种的东西，占领着他从未拥有过的东西，品尝着他从未悉心照料的果实。他是在试着采摘法国式玩世不恭的果实，然而却从未耕种过法国式美德未开化但肥沃的土壤。
3 The thing can only be made clear to Englishmen by turning it round. Suppose a Frenchman came out of democratic France to live in England, where the shadow of the great houses still falls everywhere, and where even freedom was, in its origin, aristocratic. If the Frenchman saw our aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if he set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all know that we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive little gnat. He would be imitating English aristocracy; he would be imitating the English vice. But he would not even understand the vice he plagiarized: especially he would not under-stand that the vice is partly a virtue.He would not understand those elements in the English which balance snobbishness and make it human: the great kindness of the English, their hospitality, their unconscious poetry, their sentimental conservatism, which really admires the gentry. The French Royalist sees that the English like their king. But he does not grasp that while it is base to worship a King, it is almost noble to worship a powerless King. The importance of the Hanoverian Sovereigns has raised the English loyal subject almost to the chivalry and dignity of a Jacobite. The Frenchman sees that the English servant is respectful: he does not realize that he is also dis-respectful; that there is an English legend of the humorous and faithful servant, who is as much a personality as his master; the Caleb Balderstone, the Sam Weller. He sees that the English do admire a nobleman; he does not allow for the fact that they admire a nobleman most when he does not behave like one. They like a noble to be unconscious and amiable: the slave may be humble, but the master must not be proud. The master is Life, as they would like to enjoy it; and among the joys they desire in him there is none which they desire more sincerely than that of gen-erosity, of throwing money about among mankind, or, to use the noble mediaeval word, largesse—the joy of largeness. That is why a cabman tells you you are no gentleman if you give him his correct fare. Not only his pocket, but his soul is hurt. You have wounded his ideal. You have de-faced his vision of the perfect aristocrat. All this is really subtle and elusive; it is very difficult to separate what is mere slavishness from what is a sort of vicarious nobility in the English love of a lord. And no Frenchman could easily grasp it at all. He would think it was mere slavishness; and if he liked it, he would be a slave. So every Englishman must (at first) feel French candor to be mere brutality. And if he likes it, he is a brute. These national merits must not be understood so easily. It requires long years of plentitude and quiet, the slow growth of great parks, the seasoning of oaken beams, the dark enrichment of red wine in cellars and in inns, all the leisure and the life of England through many centuries, to produce at last the generous and genial fruit of English snobbishness. And it requires battery and barricade, songs in the streets, and ragged men dead for an idea, to produce and justify the terrible flower of French indecency.
只有把它翻转过来，才能让英国人明白这一点。假设一个法国人从民主的法国来到英国，在那里，显赫世家的影响依然处处存在，甚至那里的民主自由，追本溯源也弥漫着贵族的气息。如果法国人看到我们的贵族，喜欢它，如果他看到我们的势利，喜欢它，如果他让自己模仿它，我们都知道我们应该有什么感觉。我们都知道，我们应该感到那个法国人是一个令人厌恶的小虫子。他会模仿英
国贵族;他会模仿英国的恶习。但他甚至不明白他剽窃的恶习：尤其是他不明白，恶习在一定程度上是一种美德。他不理解那些在英语中平衡势利和人性的元素：如英国人的善良，他们的热情好客，他们不经意间流露出来的诗意风情，以及他们令人感伤的保守主义。所有这些，着实令绅士们羡慕不已。法国保皇派认为英国人喜欢他们的国王。但他不明白，当崇拜一个流亡国王是多么高贵。汉诺威王朝的君主们没有实权，造就了忠诚的英国臣民们几乎可以与英王詹姆斯二世退位后的拥护者相媲美的骑士精神与高贵品质。法国人认为英国仆人是彬彬有礼的：他没有意识到自己也不光彩的一面;有一个英国的传说，幽默而忠实的仆人，他和他的主人一样是个人物;迦勒巴尔德斯通，山姆韦勒。他看到英国人崇拜一个贵族;他不允许这样的事实：当他不像一个贵族时，他们最崇拜一个贵族。他们喜欢对自我地位意识不强，且待人亲切友善的贵族。主人就是仆人们的平常生活，他们也乐于过这样的生活。主人是生命，他们想要享受它;在他所渴望的快乐中，没有一种比慷慨更真诚的愿望更大的快乐，也就是在人类中撒钱，或者，用高贵的中世纪的话语，慷慨。这就是为什么一个出租车司机告诉你，如果你给他正确的票价，你就不是绅士了。不仅是他的口袋，而且他的灵魂受到了伤害。你伤了他的理想。所有的东西都是很隐晦、难以捉摸的，英国人对贵族的热爱之中，我们很难将纯粹的奴性与高尚的情操分离开来。没有一个法国人能轻易地抓住它。他会认为这只是简单的奴性;如果他喜欢，他就会成为奴隶。因此，每个英国人都必须（一开始）觉得法国的坦率只是一种残忍。如果他喜欢，他就是个粗鲁的人。这些民族品格不应如此容易理解。它需要多年的充分和安静,缓慢扩大的公园,橡木树干的季节变化,地窖里和餐桌上在黑暗中浓缩的红酒，经过几个世纪的英国的所有生活和文化，最终产生英国势利的慷慨和善良的果实。如果要使法国式的下流开出“恶之花”并为它开脱罪责的话，那就需要理解磨难锤打、街头的小曲，理解衣衫褴褛者的 “舍生取义”。
I was in Paris a short time ago, I went with an English friend of mine to an extremely brilliant and rapid succession of French plays, each occupying about twenty minutes. They were all aston-ishingly effective; but there was one of them which was so effective that my friend and I fought about it outside, and had almost to be separated by the police. It was intended to indicate how men really behaved in a wreck or naval disaster, how they break down, how they scream, how they fight each other without object and in a mere hatred of everything. And then there was added,with all that horrible irony which Voltaire began, a scene in which a great statesman made a speech over their bodies, saying that they were all heroes and had died in a fraternal embrace. My friend and I came out of this theatre, and as he had lived long in Paris, he said, like a Frenchman: “What admi-rable artistic arrangement! Is it not exquisite?” “No,” I replied, assuming as far as possible the tradi-tional attitude of John Bull in the pictures in Punch—“No, it is not exquisite. Perhaps it is unmean-ing; if it is unmeaning I do not mind. But if it has a meaning I know what the meaning is; it is that under all their pageant of chivalry men are not only beasts, but even hunted beasts. I do not know much of humanity, especially when humanity talks in French. But I know when a thing is meant to uplift the human soul, and when it is meant to depress it. I know that Cyrano de Bergerac (where the actors talked even quicker) was meant to encourage man. And I know that this was meant to discourage him.” “These sentimental and moral views of art,” began my friend, but I broke into his words as a light broke into my mind. “Let me say to you,” I said,“What Jaurès said to Liebknecht at the socialist Conference: ‘You have not died on the barricades.’ You are an Englishman, as I am, and you ought to be as amiable as I am. These people have some right to be terrible in art, for they have been terrible in politics. They may endure mock tortures on the stage; they have seen real tortures in the streets. They have been hurt for the idea of Democracy. They have been hurt for the idea of Catholicism. It is not so utterly unnatural to them that they should be hurt for the idea of literature. But, by blazes, it is altogether unnatural to me! And the worst thing of all is that I, who am an Englishman, loving comfort, should find comfort in such things as this. The French do not seek comfort here, but rather unrest. This restless people seeks to keep itself in a perpetual agony of the revolutionary mood. Frenchmen, seeking revolution, may find the humiliation of humanity inspiring. But God forbid that two pleasure-seeking Englishmen should ever find it pleasant!”