Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of
characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The
Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon
others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all
men. He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with
“a little Latin and less Greek” from his earliest visitors and invaders.
This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his
nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I
propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be
able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the
contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.
I
No error of the Englishman’s latest invader is commoner than the notion,
which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of American,
tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the disadvantages
of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in unfriendly
conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be a sort
of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides with
us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a possible
future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of
American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort
of Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever
outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather
too largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he
will speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King,
or the Royal Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to
prevail. The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good
writer, but in no case does he spell American. He prefers, as far as
he remembers it, the Norman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said
“_geôle_,” the Conquered print “gaol,” which the American invader must
pronounce “jail,” not “gayol.”
The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of
all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is
not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned
principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever
it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly
pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago--say, fifteen
or twenty--it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known
at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or
the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of
Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the
masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I
should not be going farther than some Englishmen if I said that her
personal character saved the monarchy; when she died there was not a
vestige of the republican dream which had remained from a sentiment
for “the free peoples of antiquity” rather than from the Commonwealth.
Democracy had indeed effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the
kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen’s subjects when the Prince
of Wales, who was the first of them, went about praising loyalty as
prime among the civic virtues and duties. The notion took the general
fancy, and met with an acceptance in which the old superstition of kings
by divine right was resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar
lately said to an American woman who owned that we did not yield an
equal personal fealty to all our Presidents, “Oh yes, but you know that
it is only your _people_ that choose the President, but _God_ gave us
the King.” Nothing could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the
churches of the eldest faith the humble worshipper could not well be
told that the picture or the statue of his adoration was not itself
sacred. In fact, it is not going too far, at least for a very
adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with the English is a sort of
religious principle. What is with us more or less a joke, sometimes
bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the powers that be in the
person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most serious thing, at
which no man may smile without loss.
I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most
respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the
mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, “What is loyalty? How
did you come by it? Why are you loyal?”--I felt that it would be
embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead
in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it
seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in
the English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used
to be mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at.
That sort of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the
King, or any of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill
bred, and quite unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to
criticism. Even the Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though
in their hearts, if not in their sleeves, they must all the while be
smiling at the notion of anything sacred in the Sovereign.
[Illustration: A PRESENTATION AT COURT]