I HAVE spoken of the "nature" handed down to us by our fore-parents. I
might have said "natures," for our inheritance, being not from one, but
from many, is not simple, but compound.
We too commonly think of a man as an Englishman or a Frenchman; as a
Londoner or a Yorkshireman; as good or bad.
We too commonly think of a man as one person, instead of as a mixture of
many persons. As though John Smith were _all_ John Smith, and _always_
John Smith.
There is no such thing as an unmixed Englishman, Irishman, or
Yorkshireman.
There is no such thing as an unmixed John Smith.
Englishmen are bred from the Ancient Briton, from the Roman, from
the Piets and Scots, from the Saxons, the Danes, the Norwegians, the
Normans, the French. All these varied and antagonistic bloods were mixed
in centuries ago.
Since then the mixing has gone on, plentifully varied by intermarriage
with Irish, Scots, Dutch, Germans, Belgians, French, Italians, Poles,
and Spaniards. We have had refugees and immigrants from all parts of
Europe. We have given homes to the Huguenots, and the Emigrés from
France, to the Lollards and Lutherans from the Netherlands, to crowding
fugitives from Russia, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and Greece. We have
absorbed these foreigners and taken them into our blood. And the
descendants of all these mixed races are called Englishmen.
The Londoner is a mixture of all those races, and more. From every part
of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales; from most parts of Europe, from
many parts of America and Asia, and even Africa, streams of foreign
blood have flowed in to make the Londoner.
In Yorkshire there are several distinct races, though none of them are
pure. There is one Yorkshire type bearing marks of descent from the
Norsemen, another bearing marks of descent from the Flemish and French
immigrants, and another from the Normandy invaders. I have seen Vikings,
Belgians, and Normans all playing cricket in the Yorkshire County team.
In Ireland there are Irishmen from Denmark and Norway, Irishmen from
Ancient Mongolia, and, especially in Kerry, Irishmen who seem to be of
almost pure Iberian type.
The Iberian Irishman is short, dark, aquiline, and sardonic, with black
hair and eyes, and a moustache more like a Tartar's than a European's.
The Viking Irishman is big and burly, with blue or grey eyes, and
reddish hair and beard; the difference between these two types is as
great as that between a Saxon and a Spaniard.
One of these Irish Iberians marries a Yorkshire Dane. Their son marries
the daughter of a Lancashire Belgian and an Ancient Briton from Flint;
and their children are English.
As I said just now, we think of John Smith as _all_ John Smith and
_always_ John Smith.
But John is a mixture of millions of men and women, many of them as
different from each other as John Ridd is different from Dick Swiveller,
or as Diana of the Crossways is different from Betsy Trotwood. And these
uncountable and conflicting natures are not extinct: they are alive and
busy in the motley jumble we call John Smith.
John is not all John. He is, a great deal of him, Roman soldier, Ancient
Briton, Viking pirate, Flemish weaver, Cornish fisherman, Lowland
scholar, Irish grazier, London chorus girl, Yorkshire spinner, Welsh
dairymaid, and a host of other gentle and simple, wild and tame, gay
and grave, sweet and sour, fickle and constant, lovable and repellent
ancestors; from his great-great-grandparent, the hairy treeman, with
flat feet and club like a young larch, to his respectable father, the
white-fronted, silk-hatted clerk in the Pudsey Penny Savings Bank.
And, being as he is, not all John Smith, but rather the knotted,
crossed, and tangled mixture of Johns and Marys, and Smiths and Browns
and Robinsons, that has been growing more dense and intricate for tens
of thousands of years, how can we expect our good John to be always the
same John?
We know John is many Johns in the course of a summer's day. We have seen
him, possibly, skip back to the cave-man in a spasm of rage, glow
with the tenderness of the French lady who died of the plague in the
Fourteenth Century, and then smile the smile of the merry young soldier
who was shot at Dettingen--all in the time it takes him to clench and
unclench his hand, or to feel in his pocket for a penny, or to flash a
glance at a pretty face in the crowd.
John Smith is not English, nor Yorkshire; but human. He is not one man;
but many men, and, which counts for more, many women.
And how can we say of John Smith that he is "good" or "bad"? It is like
saying of a bottle of beads, mixed of fifty colours, that it is red,
or blue. As John's ancestors were made up of good and bad, and as he is
made up of them, so John is good and bad in stripes or patches: is good
and bad by turns.
We speak of these mixed natures which a man inherits from his
fore-parents as his "disposition": we call them "the qualities of
his mind," and we wonder when we find him inconsistent, changeable,
undecided. Ought we to be surprised that the continual struggle for
the mastery amongst so many alien natures leads to unlooked-for and
unwished-for results?
Take the case of a council, a cabinet, a regiment, composed of
antagonistic natures; what happens? There are disputes, confusion,
contradictions, cross-purposes. Well: a man is like a crowd, a
Parliament, a camp of ill-matched foreign allies. Indeed, he _is_ a
crowd--a crowd of alien and ill-sorted ancestors.