The secret of English mastery is self-mastery. The Englishman
establishes a sort of satisfaction and equilibrium in his inner man,
and from that citadel of rightness he easily measures the value of
everything that comes within his moral horizon. In what may lie beyond
he takes but a feeble interest. Enterprising enough when in a roving
mood, and fond of collecting outlandish objects and ideas, he seldom
allows his wanderings and discoveries to unhinge his home loyalties or
ruffle his self-possession; and he remains, after all his adventures,
intellectually as indolent and secure as in the beginning. As to
speculative truth, he instinctively halts short of it, as it looms
in the distance and threatens to cast a contemptuous and chilling
shadow across his life. He would be very severe to any who dreaded
cold water and wouldn't learn to swim; yet in the moral world he is
himself subject to illusions of timidity. He does not believe, there,
in the overwhelming rewards of courage. His chosen life is indeed
beautiful--as the shy boy's might be--ill its finitude; all the more
beautiful and worth preserving because, like his country, it is an
island in the sea. His domestic thermometer and barometer have
sufficed to guide him to the right hygiene.
Hygiene does not require telescopes nor microscopes. It is not
concerned, like medicine or psychology, with the profound hidden
workings of our bodies or minds, complexities hardly less foreign
to our discoursing selves than are the mysteries of the great outer
world. Hygiene regards only the right regimen of man in his obvious
environment, judged by his conscious well-being. If it goes afield
at all, it does so in the interests of privacy. All it asks of life
is that it should be comely, spontaneous, and unimpeded: all it asks
of the earth is that it should be fit for sport and for habitation.
Men, to be of the right hygienic sort, must love the earth, and must
know how to range in it. This the Englishman knows; and just as, in
spite of his insularity, he loves this whole terraqueous globe simply
and genuinely, so the earth, turned into mud by the vain stampings of
so many garrulous and sickly nations, would doubtless say: Let the
Englishman inhabit me, and I shall be green again.
In matters of hygiene the Englishman's maxims are definite and his
practice refined. He has discovered what he calls good form, and
is obstinately conservative about it, not from inertia, but in the
interests of pure vitality. Experience has taught him the uses to which
vitality can be put, so as to preserve and refresh it. He knows the
right degree of exertion normally required to do things well--to walk
or to talk, for instance; he does not saunter nor scramble, he does
not gesticulate nor scream. In consequence, perhaps, on extraordinary
occasions he fails at first to exert himself enough; and his eloquence
is not torrential nor inspired, even at those rare moments when it
ought to be so. But when nothing presses, he shows abundant energy,
without flurry or excess. In manners and morals, too, he has found the
right mean between anarchy and servitude, and the wholesome measure
of comfort. What those who dislike him call his hypocrisy is but
timeliness in his instincts, and a certain modesty on their part in not
intruding upon one another. Your prayers are not necessarily insincere
because you pray only in church; you are not concealing a passion if
for a time you forget it and slough it off. These alternations are
phases of the inner man, not masks put on in turn by some insidious
and calculating knave. All the Englishman's attitudes and habits--his
out-of-door life, his clubs, his conventicles, his business--when they
are spontaneous and truly British, are for the sake of his inner man
in its privacy. Other people, unless the game calls for them, are in
the way, and uninteresting. His spirit is like Wordsworth's skylark,
true to the kindred points of heaven and home; and perhaps these points
seem to him kindred only because they are both functions of himself.
Home is the centre of his physical and moral comfort, his headquarters
in the war of life, where lie his spiritual stores. Heaven is a realm
of friendly inspiring breezes and setting suns, enveloping his rambles
and his perplexities. The world to him is a theatre for the soliloquy
of action. There is a comfortable luxuriousness in all his attitudes.
He thinks the prize of life worth winning, but not worth snatching. If
you snatch it, as Germans, Jews, and Americans seem inclined to do, you
abdicate the sovereignty of your inner man, you miss delight, dignity,
and peace; and in that case the prize of life has escaped you.
As the Englishman disdains to peer and is slow to speculate, so
he resents any meddling or intrusion into his own preserves. How
sedulously he plants out his garden, however tiny, from his neighbours
and from the public road! If his windows look unmistakably on the
street, at least he fills his window-boxes with the semblance of a
hedge or a garden, and scarcely allows the dubious light to filter
through his blinds and lace curtains; and the space between them, in
the most dingy tenement, is blocked by an artificial plant. He is quite
willing not to be able to look out, if only he can prevent other people
from looking in. If they did, what would they see? Nothing shocking,
surely; his attitude by his fireside is perfectly seemly. He is not
throwing anything at the family; very likely they are not at home. Nor
has he introduced any low-class person by the tradesman's entrance,
in whose company he might blush to be spied. He is not in deshabille;
if he has changed any part of his street clothes it has not been from
any inclination to be slovenly in private, but on the contrary to
vindicate his self-respect and domestic decorum. He does not dress to
be seen of men, but of God. His elegance is an expression of comfort,
and his comfort a consciousness of elegance. The eyes of men disquiet
him, eminently presentable though he be, and he thinks it rude of them
to stare, even in simple admiration. It takes tact and patience in
strangers--perhaps at first an ostentatious indifference--to reassure
him and persuade him that he would be safe in liking them. His frigid
exterior is often a cuticle to protect his natural tenderness, which he
forces himself not to express, lest it should seem misplaced or clumsy.
There is a masculine sort of tenderness which is not fondness, but
craving and premonition of things untried; and the young Englishman is
full of it. His heart is quiet and full; he has not pumped it dry, like
ill-bred children, in tantrums and effusive fancies. On the other hand,
passions are atrophied if their expression is long suppressed, and we
soon have nothing to say if we never say anything. As he grows old the
Englishman may come to suspect, not without reason, that he might not
reward too close a perusal. His social bristles will then protect his
intellectual weakness, and he will puff himself out to disguise his
vacuity.
It is intelligible that a man of deep but inarticulate character
should feel more at ease in the fields and woods, at sea or in remote
enterprises, than in the press of men. In the world he is obliged to
maintain stiffly principles which he would prefer should be taken for
granted. Therefore when he sits in silence behind his window curtains,
with his newspaper, his wife, or his dog, his monumental passivity is
not a real indolence. He is busily reinforcing his character, ruffled
by the day's contact with hostile or indifferent things, and he is
gathering new strength for the fray. After the concessions imposed
upon him by necessity or courtesy, he is recovering his natural tone.
To-morrow he will issue forth fresh and confident, and exactly the same
as he was yesterday. His character is like his climate, gentle and
passing readily from dull to glorious, and back again; variable on the
surface, yet perpetually self-restored and invincibly the same.
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