I find a typical specimen of this kind of explanation in Hazlitt’s “Notes of a Journey through France and Italy,” made about a century ago, when France was the very France (think of it!) that was being observed, and about to be described, by Balzac. One would have thought that the Londoner of 1824 (who must have been pretty well used to smells at home) would have found some other explanation than the physiological and psychological inferiority of the French. But hear him. “A Frenchman’s senses and understanding are alike insensible to pain—he recognizes (happily for himself) the existence only of that which adds to his importance or his satisfaction. He is delighted with perfumes, but passes over the most offensive smells and will not lift up his little finger to remove a general nuisance, for it is none to him.” To which he appends a note:—“One would think that a people so devoted to perfumes, who deal in essences and scents, and have fifty different sorts of snuffs, would be equally nice, and offended at the approach of every disagreeable odour. Not so. They seem to have no sense of the disagreeable in smells or tastes, as if their heads were stuffed with a cold, and hang over a dunghill, as if it were a bed of roses, or swallow the most detestable dishes with the greatest relish. The nerve of their sensibility is bound up at the point of pain.... They make the best of everything (which is a virtue)—and treat the worst with levity or complaisance (which is a vice).” Well, well. When this was written French and English had not long ceased to be at war, and Hazlitt was never a sweet-tempered man. But you can still find the censorious Englishman who is ready decisively to mark off French characteristics into “virtues” and “vices,” according to his own English standard. There may, for all I know, be some Frenchman who gives us tit for tat. This type of critic is tiresome enough; but there is another that seems to me quite intolerable, the critic who detests all national peculiarities as such, and would level down all humanity to one monotonous level of sameness. As though uniformity were not already the plague of the modern world! We men all wear the same hat (despite the efforts of the _Daily Mail_), women all powder their noses in the same way, and the “cinema palaces” all show the same films, with the same “Mary” and the same “Dug.” For heaven’s sake, let us cling to our national peculiarities!