ESSENTIAL DEMOCRACY OF GOVERNMENT.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THE PRESS.
ABSENCE HITHERTO OF COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE.
These, the outcome of the quiet and stable home life of an island
people, have done more than anything to make the Englishman a deceptive
personality to the outside eye. He has for centuries been licensed to
grumble. There is no such confirmed grumbler—until he really has
something to grumble at; and then, no one perhaps who grumbles less.
There is no such confirmed carper at the condition of his country, yet
no one really so profoundly convinced that it is the best in the world.
A stranger might well think from his utterances that he was spoiled by
the freedom of his life, unprepared to sacrifice anything for a land in
such a condition. Threaten that country, and with it his liberty, and
you will find that his grumbles have meant less than nothing. You will
find, too, that behind the apparent slackness of every arrangement and
every individual are powers of adaptability to facts, elasticity,
practical genius, a spirit of competition amounting almost to disease,
and a determination, that are staggering. Before this war began, it was
the fashion amongst a number of English to lament the decadence of the
race. These very grumblers are now foremost in praising the spirit shown
in every part of their country. Their lamentations, which plentifully
deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles; for if, in truth,
England had been decadent, there could have been no such universal
display for them to be praising now. All this democratic grumbling, and
habit of “going as you please,” serve a deep purpose. Autocracy,
Censorship, Compulsion, destroy humour in a nation’s blood and
elasticity in its fibre; they cut at the very mainsprings of national
vitality. Only if reasonably free from control can a man really arrive
at what is or is not national necessity, and truly identify himself with
a national ideal by simple conviction from within.
Two words of caution to strangers trying to form an estimate of the
Englishman: He must not be judged from his Press, which, manned (with
certain exceptions) by those who are not typically English, is much
too-highly-coloured to illustrate the true English spirit; nor can he be
judged from his literature.
The Englishman is essentially inexpressive, unexpressed. Further, he
must not be judged by the evidence of his wealth. England may be the
richest country in the world per head of population, but not 5 per cent.
of that population have any wealth to speak of, certainly not enough to
have affected their hardihood; and, with inconsiderable exceptions,
those who have enough are brought up to worship hardihood. For the vast
proportion of Englishmen, active military service is merely a change
from work as hard, and even more monotonous.
From these main premises, then, we come to what the Englishman really
is.
When, after months of travel, one returns to England, he can taste,
smell, and feel the difference in the atmosphere, physical and
moral—the curious damp, blunt, good-humoured, happy-go-lucky,
old-established, slow-seeming formlessness of everything. You hail a
porter; if you tell him you have plenty of time, he muddles your things
amiably with an air of, “It’ll be all right,” till you have only just
time. But if you tell him you have no time—he will set himself to catch
that train for you, and catch it faster than a porter of any other
country. Let no foreigner, however, experiment to prove the truth of
this, for a porter—like any other Englishman—is incapable of taking a
foreigner seriously (after a year of war he is not even yet taking the
Germans seriously); and, quite friendly, but a little pitying, will lose
him the train, assuring the unfortunate that he can’t possibly know what
train he wants to catch.
The Englishman must have a thing brought under his nose before he will
act; bring it there and he will go on acting after everybody else has
stopped. He lives very much in the moment because he is essentially a
man of facts and not a man of imagination. Want of imagination makes
him, philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it
handicaps him at the start; but once he has “got going”—as we say—it
is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly
through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through
his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimising the expression of
everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is
very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this his unimaginative
practicality, and tenacious moderation, his inherent spirit of
competition—not to say pugnacity—a spirit of competition so extreme
that it makes him, as it were, patronize Fate; add the sort of vulgarity
that grows like fungus on people who despise ideas and analysis, and
make a cult of unintellectuality; add a peculiar, ironic, “don’t care”
sort of humour; an underground humaneness, and an ashamed idealism—and
you get some notion of the pudding of English character. It has a kind
of terrible coolness, a rather awful level-headedness—by no means
reflected in his Press. The Englishman makes constant small blunders;
but few, almost no, deep mistakes. He is a slow starter, but there is no
stronger finisher, because he has by temperament and training the
faculty of getting through any job he gives his mind to with a minimum
expenditure of vital energy; nothing is wasted in expression, style,
spread-eagleism; everything is instinctively kept as near to the
practical heart of the matter as possible. He is—to the eyes of an
artist—distressingly matter-of-fact; a tempting mark for satire. And
yet he is at bottom an idealist, though it is his nature to snub,
disguise, and mock his own inherent optimism. To admit enthusiasm is
“bad form” if he is a “gentleman”; and “swank,” or mere waste of good
heat, if he is not a “gentleman.” England produces more than its proper
percentage of cranks and poets; this is Nature’s way of redressing the
balance in a country where feelings are not shown, sentiments not
expressed, and extremes laughed at. Not that the Englishman is cold, as
is generally supposed in foreign countries—on the contrary, he is
warm-hearted and feels strongly; but just as peasants, for lack of words
to express their feelings, become stolid, so does the Englishman, from
sheer lack of the habit of self-expression. The Englishman’s proverbial
“hypocrisy”—that which I myself have dubbed his “island
Pharisaism”—comes chiefly, I think, from his latent but fearfully
strong instinct for competition which will not let him admit himself
beaten, or in the wrong, even to himself; and from an ingrained sense of
form that impels him always to “save his face”; but partly it comes from
his powerlessness to explain his feelings. He has not the clear and
fluent cynicism of expansive natures, wherewith to confess exactly how
he stands. It is the habit of men of all nations to want to have things
both ways; the Englishman wants it both ways, I think, more strongly
than any; and he is unfortunately so unable to express himself, _even to
himself_, that he has never realized this truth, much less confessed
it—hence his “hypocrisy.”
He is sometimes abused for being over-attached to money. His island
position, his early discoveries of coal, iron, and processes of
manufacture have made him, of course, a confirmed industrialist and
trader; but he is more of an adventurer in wealth than a heaper-up of
it. He is far from sitting on his money-bags—has no vein of proper
avarice (the humble Englishman is probably the least provident man in
the world)—and for national ends he will spill out his money like
water, if convinced of the necessity.
In everything it comes to that with the Englishman—he must be
convinced; and he takes a lot of convincing. He absorbs ideas slowly;
would rather not imagine anything decidedly till he is obliged; but in
proportion to the slowness with which he can be moved, is the slowness
with which he can be removed! Hence the symbol of the bulldog. When he
does see and seize a thing, he holds fast.
For the particular situation which the Englishman has now to face, he is
terribly well adapted. Because he has so little imagination, so little
power of expression, he is saving nerve all the time. Because he never
goes to extremes he is saving energy of body and spirit. That the men of
all nations are about equally endowed with courage and self-sacrifice,
has been proved in these last six months; it is to other qualities that
one must look for final victory in a war of exhaustion. The Englishman
does not look into himself; he does not brood; he sees no further
forward than is necessary; and he must have his joke. These are fearful
and wonderful advantages. Examine the letters and diaries of the various
combatants, and you will see how far less imaginative and reflecting
(though often shrewd, practical, and humorous) the English are than any
others; you will gain, too, a deep, a deadly conviction that behind them
is a fibre like rubber, that may be frayed and bent a little this way
and that, but can neither be permeated nor broken.
When this war began, the Englishman rubbed his eyes steeped in peace, he
is still rubbing them just a little, but less and less every day. A
profound lover of peace by habit and tradition, he has actually realized
by now that he is “in for it” up to the neck. To any one who really
knows him—that is a portent!
Let it be freely confessed that from an æsthetic point of view the
Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and
superhumanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the
wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the
Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous,
competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist,
and terribly tenacious—is equipped with victory.