On the mutual understanding of each other by Britons and Americans the
future happiness of nations depends more than on any other world cause.
I have never held a whole-hearted brief for the British character. There
is a lot of good in it, but much which is repellent. It has a kind of
deliberate unattractiveness, setting out on its journey with the words:
"Take me or leave me." One may respect a person of this sort, but it is
difficult either to know or to like him. I am told that an American
officer said recently to a British staff officer in a friendly voice:
"So we're going to clean up Brother Boche together!" and the British
staff officer replied "Really!" No wonder Americans sometimes say: "I've
got no use for those fellows."
The world is consecrate to strangeness and discovery, and the attitude
of mind concreted in that "Really!" seems unforgivable, till one
remembers that it is manner rather than matter which divides the hearts
of American and Briton.
In a huge, still half-developed country, where every kind of national
type and habit comes to run a new thread into the rich tapestry of
American life and thought, people must find it almost impossible to
conceive the life of a little old island where traditions persist
generation after generation without anything to break them up; where
blood remains undoctored by new strains; demeanour becomes crystallised
for lack of contrasts; and manner gets set like a plaster mask. The
English manner of to-day, of what are called the classes, is the growth
of only a century or so. There was probably nothing at all like it in
the days of Elizabeth or even of Charles II. The English manner was
still racy when the inhabitants of Virginia, as we are told, sent over
to ask that there might be despatched to them some hierarchical
assistance for the good of their souls, and were answered: "D----n your
souls, grow tobacco!" The English manner of to-day could not even have
come into its own when that epitaph of a lady, quoted somewhere by
Gilbert Murray, was written: "Bland, passionate, and deeply religious,
she was second cousin to the Earl of Leitrim; of such are the Kingdom of
Heaven." About that gravestone motto was a certain lack of the
self-consciousness which is now the foremost characteristic of the
English manner.
But this British self-consciousness is no mere fluffy _gaucherie_, it is
our special form of what Germans would call "Kultur." Behind every
manifestation of thought or emotion the Briton retains control of self,
and is thinking: "That's all I'll let them see"; even: "That's all I'll
let myself feel." This stoicism is good in its refusal to be foundered;
bad in that it fosters a narrow outlook; starves emotion, spontaneity,
and frank sympathy; destroys grace and what one may describe roughly as
the lovable side of personality. The English hardly ever say just what
comes into their heads. What we call "good form," the unwritten law
which governs certain classes of the Briton, savours of the dull and
glacial; but there lurks within it a core of virtue. It has grown up
like callous shell round two fine ideals--suppression of the ego lest it
trample on the corns of other people, and exaltation of the maxim:
"Deeds before words." Good form, like any other religion, starts well
with some ethical truth, but soon gets commonised and petrified till we
can hardly trace its origin, and watch with surprise its denial and
contradiction of the root idea.
Without doubt good form had become a kind of disease in England. A
French friend told me how he witnessed in a Swiss Hotel the meeting
between an Englishwoman and her son, whom she had not seen for two
years; she was greatly affected--by the fact that he had not brought a
dinner-jacket. The best manners are no "manners," or at all events no
mannerisms; but many Britons who have even attained to this perfect
purity are yet not free from the paralytic effects of "good form"; are
still self-conscious in the depths of their souls, and never do or say a
thing without trying not to show what they are feeling. All this
guarantees a certain decency in life; but in intimate intercourse with
people of other nations who have not this particular cult of
suppression, we English disappoint, and jar, and often irritate. Nations
have their differing forms of snobbery. At one time the English all
wanted to be second cousins to the Earl of Leitrim, like that lady bland
and passionate. Nowadays it is not so simple. The Earl of Leitrim has
become etherealised. We no longer care how a fellow is born so long as
he behaves as the Earl of Leitrim would have, never makes himself
conspicuous or ridiculous, never shows too much what he's really
feeling, never talks of what he's going to do, and always "plays the
game." The cult is centred in our public schools and universities.
At a very typical and honoured old public school the writer of this
essay passed on the whole a happy time; but what a curious life,
educationally speaking! We lived rather like young Spartans; and were
not encouraged to think, imagine, or see anything that we learned in
relation to life at large. It's very difficult to teach boys, because
their chief object in life is not to be taught anything, but I should
say we were crammed, not taught at all. Living as we did the herd-life
of boys with little or no intrusion from our elders, and they men who
had been brought up in the same way as ourselves, we were debarred from
any real interest in philosophy, history, art, literature and music, or
any advancing notions in social life or politics. I speak of the
generality, not of the few black swans among us. We were reactionaries
almost to a boy. I remember one summer term Gladstone came down to speak
to us, and we repaired to the Speech Room with white collars and dark
hearts, muttering what we would do to that Grand Old Man if we could
have our way. But he contrived to charm us, after all, till we cheered
him vociferously. In that queer life we had all sorts of unwritten rules
of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with
your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not
walk more than two-a-breast till you reached a certain form, nor be
enthusiastic about anything, except such a supreme matter as a drive
over the pavilion at cricket, or a run the whole length of the ground at
football. You must not talk about yourself or your home people, and for
any punishment you must assume complete indifference.
I dwell on these trivialities because every year thousands of British
boys enter these mills which grind exceeding small, and because these
boys constitute in after life the great majority of the official,
military, academic, professional, and a considerable proportion of the
business classes of Great Britain. They become the Englishmen who say:
"Really!" and they are for the most part the Englishmen who travel and
reach America. The great defence I have always heard put up for our
public schools is that they form character. As oatmeal is supposed to
form bone in the bodies of Scotsmen, so our public schools are supposed
to form good, sound moral fibre in British boys. And there is much in
this plea. The life does make boys enduring, self-reliant, good-tempered
and honourable, but it most carefully endeavours to destroy all original
sin of individuality, spontaneity, and engaging freakishness. It
implants, moreover, in the great majority of those who have lived it the
mental attitude of that swell, who when asked where he went for his
hats, replied: "Blank's, of course. Is there another fellow's?"
To know all is to excuse all--to know all about the bringing-up of
English public school boys makes one excuse much. The atmosphere and
tradition of those places is extraordinarily strong, and persists
through all modern changes. Thirty-seven years have gone since I was a
new boy, but cross-examining a young nephew who left not long ago, I
found almost precisely the same features and conditions. The war, which
has changed so much of our social life, will have some, but no very
great, effect on this particular institution. The boys still go there
from the same kind of homes and preparatory schools and come under the
same kind of masters. And the traditional unemotionalism, the cult of a
dry and narrow stoicism, is rather fortified than diminished by the
times we live in.
Our universities, on the other hand, are now mere ghosts of their old
selves. At a certain old college in Oxford, last term, they had only two
English students. In the chapel under the Joshua Reynolds window,
through which the sun was shining, hung a long "roll of honour," a
hundred names and more. In the college garden an open-air hospital was
ranged under the old city wall, where we used to climb and go wandering
in the early summer mornings after some all-night spree. Down on the
river the empty college barges lay void of life. From the top of one of
them an aged custodian broke into words: "Ah! Oxford'll never be the
same again in my time. Why, who's to teach 'em rowin'? When we do get
undergrads again, who's to teach 'em? All the old ones gone, killed,
wounded and that. No! Rowin'll never be the same again--not in my time."
That was _the_ tragedy of the war for him. Our universities will recover
faster than he thinks, and resume the care of our particular "Kultur,"
and cap the products of our public schools with the Oxford accent and
the Oxford manner.
An acute critic tells me that Americans reading such deprecatory words
as these by an Englishman about his country's institutions would say
that this is precisely an instance of what an American means by the
Oxford manner. Americans whose attitude towards their own country is
that of a lover to his lady or a child to its mother, cannot--he
says--understand how Englishmen can be critical of their own country,
and yet love her. Well, the Englishman's attitude to his country is that
of a man to himself, and the way he runs her down is but a part of that
special English bone-deep self-consciousness. Englishmen (the writer
amongst them) love their country as much as the French love France and
the Americans America; but she is so much a part of them that to speak
well of her is like speaking well of themselves, which they have been
brought up to regard as "bad form." When Americans hear Englishmen
speaking critically of their own country, let them note it for a sign of
complete identification with that country rather than of detachment from
it. But on the whole it must be admitted that English universities have
a broadening influence on the material which comes to them so set and
narrow. They do a little to discover for their children that there are
many points of view, and much which needs an open mind in this world.
They have not precisely a democratic influence, but taken by themselves
they would not be inimical to democracy. And when the war is over they
will surely be still broader in philosophy and teaching. Heaven forbid
that we should see vanish all that is old, and has, as it were, the
virginia-creeper, the wistaria bloom of age upon it; there is a beauty
in age and a health in tradition, ill dispensed with. What is hateful in
age is its lack of understanding and of sympathy; in a word--its
intolerance. Let us hope this wind of change may sweep out and sweeten
the old places of our country, sweep away the cobwebs and the dust, our
narrow ways of thought, our mannikinisms. But those who hate intolerance
dare not be intolerant with the foibles of age; we should rather see
them as comic, and gently laugh them out. I pretend to no proper
knowledge of the American people; but, though amongst them there are
doubtless pockets of fierce prejudice, I have on the whole the
impression of a wide and tolerant spirit. To that spirit one would
appeal when it comes to passing judgment on the educated Briton. He may
be self-sufficient, but he has grit; and at bottom grit is what
Americans appreciate more than anything. If the motto of the old Oxford
college, "Manners makyth man," were true, one would often be sorry for
the Briton. But his manners do not make him; they mar him. His goods are
all absent from the shop window; he is not a man of the world in the
wider meaning of that expression. And there is, of course, a
particularly noxious type of travelling Briton, who does his best,
unconsciously, to deflower his country wherever he goes. Selfish,
coarse-fibred, loud-voiced--the sort which thanks God he is a Briton--I
suppose because nobody else will do it for him.
We live in times when patriotism is exalted above all other virtues,
because there happen to lie before the patriotic tremendous chances for
the display of courage and self-sacrifice. Patriotism ever has that
advantage, as the world is now constituted; but patriotism and
provincialism are sisters under the skin, and they who can only see
bloom on the plumage of their own kind, who prefer the bad points of
their countrymen to the good points of foreigners, merely write
themselves down blind of an eye, and panderers to herd feeling. America
is advantaged in this matter. She lives so far away from other nations
that she might well be excused for thinking herself the only people in
the world; but in the many strains of blood which go to make up America
there is as yet a natural corrective to the narrower kind of patriotism.
America has vast spaces and many varieties of type and climate, and life
to her is still a great adventure. Americans have their own form of
self-absorption, but seem free as yet from the special competitive
self-centrement which has been forced on Britons through long centuries
by countless continental rivalries and wars. Insularity was driven into
the very bones of our people by the generation-long wars of Napoleon. A
distinguished French writer, André Chevrillon, whose book[B] may be
commended to any one who wishes to understand British peculiarities,
used these words in a recent letter: "You English are so strange to us
French, you are so utterly different from any other people in the
world." Yes! We are a lonely race. Deep in our hearts, I think, we feel
that only the American people could ever really understand us. And
being extraordinarily self-conscious, perverse, and proud, we do our
best to hide from Americans that we have any such feeling. It would
distress the average Briton to confess that he wanted to be understood,
had anything so natural as a craving for fellowship or for being liked.
We are a weird people, though we seem so commonplace. In looking at
photographs of British types among photographs of other European
nationalities, one is struck by something which is in no other of those
races--exactly as if we had an extra skin; as if the British animal had
been tamed longer than the rest. And so he has. His political, social,
legal life was fixed long before that of any other Western country. He
was old, though not mouldering, before the _Mayflower_ touched American
shores and brought there avatars, grave and civilised as ever founded
nation. There is something touching and terrifying about our character,
about the depth at which it keeps its real yearnings, about the
perversity with which it disguises them, and its inability to show its
feelings. We are, deep down, under all our lazy mentality, the most
combative and competitive race in the world, with the exception,
perhaps, of the American. This is at once a spiritual link with America,
and yet one of the great barriers to friendship between the two
peoples. We are not sure whether we are better men than Americans.
Whether we are really better than French, Germans, Russians, Italians,
Chinese, or any other race is, of course, more than a question; but
those peoples are all so different from us that we are bound, I suppose,
secretly to consider ourselves superior. But between Americans and
ourselves, under all differences, there is some mysterious deep kinship
which causes us to doubt and makes us irritable, as if we were
continually being tickled by that question: Now am I really a better man
than he? Exactly what proportion of American blood at this time of day
is British, I know not; but enough to make us definitely cousins--always
an awkward relationship. We see in Americans a sort of image of
ourselves; feel near enough, yet far enough, to criticise and carp at
the points of difference. It is as though a man went out and
encountered, in the street, what he thought for the moment was himself,
and, wounded in his _amour propre_, instantly began to disparage the
appearance of that fellow. Probably community of language rather than of
blood accounts for our sense of kinship, for a common means of
expression cannot but mould thought and feeling into some kind of unity.
One can hardly overrate the intimacy which a common literature brings.
The lives of great Americans, Washington and Franklin, Lincoln and Lee
and Grant, are unsealed for us, just as to Americans are the lives of
Marlborough and Nelson, Pitt and Gladstone and Gordon. Longfellow and
Whittier and Whitman can be read by the British child as simply as Burns
and Shelley and Keats. Emerson and William James are no more difficult
to us than Darwin and Spencer to Americans. Without an effort we rejoice
in Hawthorne and Mark Twain, Henry James and Howells, as Americans can
in Dickens and Thackeray, Meredith and Thomas Hardy. And, more than all,
Americans own with ourselves all literature in the English tongue before
the _Mayflower_ sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh,
Ben Jonson, and the authors of the English Bible Version are their
spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language
is all-powerful--for language is the food formative of minds. A volume
could be written on the formation of character by literary humour alone.
The American and Briton, especially the British townsman, have a kind of
bone-deep defiance of Fate, a readiness for anything which may turn up,
a dry, wry smile under the blackest sky, and an individual way of
looking at things which nothing can shake. Americans and Britons both,
we must and will think for ourselves, and know why we do a thing before
we do it. We have that ingrained respect for the individual conscience
which is at the bottom of all free institutions. Some years before the
war an intelligent and cultivated Austrian, who had lived long in
England, was asked for his opinion of the British. "In many ways," he
said, "I think you are inferior to us; but one great thing I have
noticed about you which we have not. You think and act and speak for
yourselves." If he had passed those years in America instead of in
England he must needs have pronounced the same judgment of Americans.
Free speech, of course, like every form of freedom, goes in danger of
its life in war-time. The other day, in Russia, an Englishman came on a
street meeting shortly after the first revolution had begun. An
extremist was addressing the gathering and telling them that they were
fools to go on fighting, that they ought to refuse and go home, and so
forth. The crowd grew angry, and some soldiers were for making a rush at
him; but the chairman, a big, burly peasant, stopped them with these
words: "Brothers, you know that our country is now a country of free
speech. We must listen to this man, we must let him say anything he
will. But, brothers, when he's finished, we'll bash his head in!"
I cannot assert that either Britons or Americans are incapable in times
like these of a similar interpretation of "free speech." Things have
been done in our country, and will be done in America, which should make
us blush. But so strong is the free instinct in both countries that some
vestiges of it will survive even this war, for democracy is a sham
unless it means the preservation and development of this instinct of
thinking for oneself throughout a people. "Government of the people by
the people for the people" means nothing unless individuals keep their
consciences unfettered and think freely. Accustom people to be nose-led
and spoon-fed, and democracy is a mere pretence. The measure of
democracy is the measure of the freedom and sense of individual
responsibility in its humblest citizens. And democracy--I say it with
solemnity--has yet to prove itself.
A scientist, Dr. Spurrell, in a recent book, "Man and his Forerunners,"
diagnoses the growth of civilisations somewhat as follows: A
civilisation begins with the enslavement by some hardy race of a tame
race living a tame life in more congenial natural surroundings. It is
built up on slavery, and attains its maximum vitality in conditions
little removed therefrom. Then, as individual freedom gradually grows,
disorganisation sets in and the civilisation slowly dissolves away in
anarchy. Dr. Spurrell does not dogmatise about our present civilisation,
but suggests that it will probably follow the civilisations of the past
into dissolution. I am not convinced of that, because of certain factors
new to the history of man. Recent discoveries are unifying the world;
such old isolated swoops of race on race are not now possible. In our
great industrial States, it is true, a new form of slavery has arisen,
but not of man by man, rather of man by machines. Moreover, all past
civilisations have been more or less Southern, and subject to the
sapping influence of the sun. Modern civilisation is essentially
Northern. The individualism, however, which, according to Dr. Spurrell,
dissolved the Empires of the past, exists already, in a marked degree,
in every modern State; and the problem before us is to discover how
democracy and liberty of the subject can be made into enduring props
rather than dissolvents. It is the problem of making democracy genuine.
And certainly, if that cannot be achieved and perpetuated, there is
nothing to prevent democracy drifting into anarchism and dissolving
modern States, till they are the prey of pouncing dictators, or of
States not so far gone in dissolution. What, for instance, will happen
to Russia if she does not succeed in making her democracy genuine? A
Russia which remains anarchic must very quickly become the prey of her
neighbours on West and East.
Ever since the substantial introduction of democracy nearly a century
and a half ago with the American War of Independence, Western
civilisation has been living on two planes or levels--the autocratic
plane, with which is bound up the idea of nationalism, and the
democratic, to which has become conjoined the idea of internationalism.
Not only little wars, but great wars such as this, come because of
inequality in growth, dissimilarity of political institutions between
States; because this State or that is basing its life on different
principles from its neighbours. The decentralisation, delays, critical
temper, and importance of home affairs prevalent in democratic countries
make them at once slower, weaker, less apt to strike, and less prepared
to strike than countries where bureaucratic brains subject to no real
popular check devise world policies which can be thrust, prepared to the
last button, on the world at a moment's notice. The free and critical
spirit in America, France, and Britain has kept our democracies
comparatively unprepared for anything save their own affairs.
We fall into glib usage of words like democracy and make fetiches of
them without due understanding. Democracy is inferior to autocracy from
the aggressively national point of view; it is not necessarily superior
to autocracy as a guarantee of general well-being; it may even turn out
to be inferior unless we can improve it. But democracy is the rising
tide; it may be dammed or delayed, but cannot be stopped. It seems to be
a law in human nature that where, in any corporate society, the idea of
self-government sets foot it refuses to take that foot up again. State
after State, copying the American example, has adopted the democratic
principle; the world's face is that way set. And civilisation is now so
of a pattern that the Western world may be looked on as one State and
the process of change therein from autocracy to democracy regarded as
though it were taking place in a single old-time country such as Greece
or Rome. If throughout Western civilisation we can secure the single
democratic principle of government, its single level of State morality
in thought and action, we shall be well on our way to unanimity
throughout the world; for even in China and Japan the democratic virus
is at work. It is my belief that only in a world thus uniform, and freed
from the danger of pounce by autocracies, have States any chance to
develop the individual conscience to a point which shall make democracy
proof against anarchy and themselves proof against dissolution; and
only in such a world can a League of Nations to enforce peace succeed.
But even if we do secure a single plane for Western civilisation and
ultimately for the world, there will be but slow and difficult progress
in the lot of mankind. And unless we secure it, there will be only a
march backwards.
For this advance to a uniform civilisation the solidarity of the
English-speaking races is vital. Without that there will be no bottom on
which to build.
The ancestors of the American people sought a new country because they
had in them a reverence for the individual conscience; they came from
Britain, the first large State in the Christian era to build up the idea
of political freedom. The instincts and ideals of our two races have
ever been the same. That great and lovable people, the French, with
their clear thought and expression, and their quick blood, have
expressed those ideals more vividly than either of us. But the
phlegmatic and the dry tenacity of our English and American temperaments
has ever made our countries the most settled and safe homes of the
individual conscience, and of its children--Democracy, Freedom and
Internationalism. Whatever their faults--and their offences cry aloud to
such poor heaven as remains of chivalry and mercy--the Germans are in
many ways a great race, but they possess two qualities dangerous to the
individual conscience--unquestioning obedience and exaltation. When they
embrace the democratic idea they may surpass us all in its logical
development, but the individual conscience will still not be at ease
with them. We must look to our two countries to guarantee its strength
and activity, and if we English-speaking races quarrel and become
disunited, civilisation will split up again and go its way to ruin. We
are the ballast of the new order.
I do not believe in formal alliances or in grouping nations to exclude
and keep down other nations. Friendships between countries should have
the only true reality of common sentiment, _and be animated by desire
for the general welfare of mankind_. We need no formal bonds, but we
have a sacred charge in common, to let no petty matters, differences of
manner, or divergencies of material interest, destroy our spiritual
agreement. Our pasts, our geographical positions, our temperaments make
us, beyond all other races, the hope and trustees of mankind's advance
along the only line now open--democratic internationalism. It is
childish to claim for Americans or Britons virtues beyond those of other
nations, or to believe in the superiority of one national culture to
another; they are different, that is all. It is by accident that we find
ourselves in this position of guardianship to the main line of human
development; no need to pat ourselves on the back about it. But we are
at a great and critical moment in the world's history--how critical none
of us alive will ever realise. The civilisation slowly built since the
fall of Rome has either to break up and dissolve into jagged and
isolated fragments through a century of wars; or, unified and reanimated
by a single idea, to move forward on one plane and attain greater height
and breadth.
Under the pressure of this war there is, beneath the lip-service we pay
to democracy, a disposition to lose faith in it because of its undoubted
weakness and inconvenience in a struggle with States autocratically
governed; there is even a sort of secret reaction to autocracy. On those
lines there is no way out of a future of bitter rivalries, chicanery and
wars, and the probable total failure of our civilisation. The only cure
which I can see lies in democratising the whole world and removing the
present weaknesses and shams of democracy by education of the individual
conscience in every country. Good-bye to that chance if Americans and
Britons fall foul of each other, refuse to pool their thoughts and
hopes, and to keep the general welfare of mankind in view. They have
got to stand together, not in aggressive and jealous policies, but in
defence and championship of the self-helpful, self-governing, "live and
let live" philosophy of life.
The house of the future is always dark. There are few corner-stones to
be discerned in the temple of our fate. But of these few one is the
brotherhood and bond of the English-speaking races, not for narrow
purposes, but that mankind may yet see faith and good-will enshrined,
yet breathe a sweeter air, and know a life where Beauty passes, with the
sun on her wings.
We want in the lives of men a "Song of Honour," as in Ralph Hodgson's
poem:
"The song of men all sorts and kinds,
As many tempers, moods and minds
As leaves are on a tree,
As many faiths and castes and creeds,
As many human bloods and breeds,
As in the world may be."
In the making of that song the English-speaking races will assuredly
unite. What made this world we know not; the principle of life is
inscrutable and will for ever be; but we know that Earth is yet on the
up-grade of existence, the mountain-top of man's life not reached, that
many centuries of growth are yet in front of us before Nature begins to
chill this planet till it swims, at last, another moon, in space. In the
climb to that mountain-top of a happy life for mankind our two great
nations are as guides who go before, roped together in perilous ascent.
On their nerve, loyalty, and wisdom the adventure now hangs. What
American or British knife will sever the rope?
He who ever gives a thought to the life of man at large, to his miseries
and disappointments, to the waste and cruelty of existence, will
remember that if American or Briton fail himself, or fail the other,
there can but be for us both, and for all other peoples, a hideous slip,
a swift and fearful fall into an abyss, whence all shall be to begin
over again.
We shall not fail--neither ourselves, nor each other. Our comradeship
will endure.
1917.
[B] "England and the War." Hodder & Stoughton.