which he now most commonly quotes is, 'The kingdom of heaven is within
you.' That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and
prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in
creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace
that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it
is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a
little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but
the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It
is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is
outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his
appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that
the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it
somewhere else.
_The Spirit of England_
Nine times out of ten a man's broad-mindedness is necessarily the
narrowest thing about him. This is not particularly paradoxical; it is,
when we come to think of it, quite inevitable. His vision of his own
village may really be full of varieties; and even his vision of his own
nation may have a rough resemblance to the reality. But his vision of
the world is probably smaller than the world. His vision of the universe
is certainly much smaller than the universe. Hence he is never so
inadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when he
generalises. This is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at a
creedless creed, at something variously described as essential
Christianity or undenominational religion or a world faith to embrace
all the faiths in the world. It is that every sectarian is more
sectarian in his unsectarianism than he is in his sect. The emancipation
of a Baptist is a very Baptist emancipation. The charity of a Buddhist
is a very Buddhist charity, and very different from Christian charity.
When a philosophy embraces everything it generally squeezes everything,
and squeezes it out of shape; when it digests it necessarily
assimilates. When a theosophist absorbs Christianity it is rather as a
cannibal absorbs Christian missionaries. In this sense it is even
possible for the larger thing to be swallowed by the smaller; and for
men to move about not only in a Clapham sect but in a Clapham cosmos
under Clapham moon and stars.
But if this danger exists for all men, it exists especially for the
Englishman. The Englishman is never so insular as when he is imperial;
except indeed when he is international. In private life he is a good
friend and in practical politics generally a good ally. But theoretical
politics are more practical than practical politics. And in theoretical
politics the Englishman is the worst ally the world ever saw. This is
all the more curious because he has passed so much of his historical
life in the character of an ally. He has been in twenty great alliances
and never understood one of them. He has never been farther away from
European politics than when he was fighting heroically in the thick of
them. I myself think that this splendid isolation is sometimes really
splendid; so long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself to be
imperialism or internationalism. With the idea of being international,
with the idea of being imperial, comes the frantic and farcical idea of
being impartial. Generally speaking, men are never so mean and false and
hypocritical as when they are occupied in being impartial. They are
performing the first and most typical of all the actions of the devil;
they are claiming the throne of God. Even when it is not hypocrisy but
only mental confusion, it is always a confusion worse and worse
confounded. We see it in the impartial historians of the Victorian Age,
who now seem far more Victorian than the partial historians. Hallam
wrote about the Middle Ages; but Hallam was far less mediaeval than
Macaulay; for Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more mediaeval
sympathies than Herbert Spencer for the same reason; that Huxley was a
fighter. They both fought in many ways for the limitations of their own
rationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth than the men who
simply assumed those limitations as rational. The war of the
controversionalists was a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters.
And in the same way the Englishman never cuts a less convincing figure
before other nations than when he tries to arbitrate between them.
I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity of saving
Anglo-American friendship, a necessity which I myself feel rather too
strongly to be satisfied with the ambassadorial and editorial style of
achieving it. I have already said that the worst style of all is to be
Anglo-American; or, as the more illiterate would express, to be
Anglo-Saxon. I am more and more convinced that the way for the
Englishman to do it is to be English; but to know that he is English and
not everything else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irish
nationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality; and not English
imperialism, which is a reactionary fiction, or English
internationalism, which is a revolutionary one.
For the English are reviled for their imperialism because they are not
imperialistic. They dislike it, which is the real reason why they do it
badly; and they do it badly, which is the real reason why they are
disliked when they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because she
has absorbed Brittany. But everybody calls England imperialistic because
she has not absorbed Ireland. The Englishman is fixed and frozen for
ever in the attitude of a ruthless conqueror; not because he has
conquered such people, but because he has not conquered them; but he is
always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy of a better cause.
For the really native and vigorous part of what is unfortunately called
the British Empire is not an empire at all, and does not consist of
these conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire but an adventure;
which is probably a much finer thing. It was not the power of making
strange countries similar to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing
strange countries because they were different from our own. The
adventurer did indeed, like the third son, set out to seek his fortune,
but not primarily to alter other people's fortunes; he wished to trade
with people rather than to rule them. But as the other people remained
different from him, so did he remain different from them. The adventurer
saw a thousand strange things and remained a stranger. He was the
Robinson Crusoe on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained as
insular as on his own island.
What is wanted for the cause of England to-day is an Englishman with
enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the
inside. That is, we need somebody who will do for the English what has
never been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantry
or even any savage tribe. We want people who can make England
attractive; quite apart from disputes about whether England is strong or
weak. We want somebody to explain, not that England is everywhere, but
what England is anywhere; not that England is or is not really dying,
but why we do not want her to die. For this purpose the official and
conventional compliments or claims can never get any farther than
pompous abstractions about Law and Justice and Truth; the ideals which
England accepts as every civilised state accepts them, and violates as
every civilised state violates them. That is not the way in which the
picture of any people has ever been painted on the sympathetic
imagination of the world. Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us that
the Japs recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that they
lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint-brushes. Men who
wished to interest us in Arabs did not confine themselves to saying that
they are monotheists or moralists; they filled our romances with the
rush of Arab steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. What we
want is somebody who will do for the Englishman with his front garden
what was done for the Jap and his paper house; who shall understand the
Englishman with his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word,
what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that really wants
doing. It is to make England attractive as a nationality, and even as a
small nationality.
For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each other
because they are alike. They will never really do that unless they are
really alike; and then they will not be nations. Nations can love each
other as men and women love each other, not because they are alike but
because they are different. It can easily be shown, I fancy, that in
every case where a real public sympathy was aroused for some unfortunate
foreign people, it has always been accompanied with a particular and
positive interest in their most foreign customs and their most foreign
externals. The man who made a romance of the Scotch High-lander made a
romance of his kilt and even of his dirk; the friend of the Red Indians
was interested in picture writing and had some tendency to be
interested in scalping. To take a more serious example, such nations as
Serbia had been largely commended to international consideration by the
study of Serbian epics, or Serbian songs. The epoch of negro
emancipation was also the epoch of negro melodies. Those who wept over
Uncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus. And just as the admiration for
the Redskin almost became an apology for scalping, the mysterious
fascination of the African has sometimes almost led us into the fringes
of the black forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is felt
even in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer and the
devil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never been felt in the
Englishman.
And this is the more extraordinary because the Englishman is really very
interesting. He is interesting in a special degree in this special
manner; he is interesting because he is individual. No man in the world
is more misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordinary
sense national. A description of English life must be a description of
private life. In that sense there is no public life. In that sense there
is no public opinion. There have never been those prairie fires of
public opinion in England which often sweep over America. At any rate,
there have never been any such popular revolutions since the popular
revolutions of the Middle Ages. The English are a nation of amateurs;
they are even a nation of eccentrics. An Englishman is never more
English than when he is considered a lunatic by the other Englishmen.
This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. Johnson, who has become
national not by being normal but by being extraordinary. To express this
mysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges and
heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences,
and why they alone among Christians have kept quite consistently the
great Christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and
stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, who study the
souls of strange peoples. That would be the true way to create a
friendship between England and America, or between England and anything
else; yes, even between England and Ireland. For this justice at least
has already been done to Ireland; and as an indignant patriot I demand a
more equal treatment for the two nations.
I have already noted the commonplace that in order to teach
internationalism we must talk nationalism. We must make the nations as
nations less odious or mysterious to each other. We do not make men love
each other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but by
describing the men as men, with their separate and even solitary
emotions. As this has a particular application to the emotions of the
Englishman, I will return to the topic once more. Now Americans have a
power that is the soul and success of democracy, the power of
spontaneous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane ideals
are really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions; we might
almost say in unofficial officialism. Nobody who has felt the presence
of all the leagues and guilds and college clubs will deny that Whitman
was national when he said he would build states and cities out of the
love of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm collides with the
Englishman, it too often seems literally to leave him cold. They say he
is reserved; they possibly think he is rude. And the Englishman, having
been taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take the
criticism as a compliment. He admits that he is reserved because he is
stern and strong; or even that he is rude because he is shrewd and
candid. But as a fact he is not rude and not especially reserved; at
least reserve is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real difference
lies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not only high
but level; that the hilarious American spirit is like a plateau, and the
humorous English spirit like a ragged mountain range.
The Englishman is moody; which does not in the least mean that the
Englishman is morose. Dickens, as we all feel in reading his books, was
boisterously English. Dickens was moody when he wrote _Oliver Twist_;
but he was also moody when he wrote _Pickwick_. That is, he was in
another and much healthier mood. The mood was normal to him in the sense
that nine times out of ten he felt and wrote in that humorous and
hilarious mood. But he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods; and
all the more of a typical Englishman for being a man of moods. But it
was because of this, almost entirely, that he had a misunderstanding
with America.
In America there are no moods, or there is only one mood. It is the same
whether it is called hustle or uplift; whether we regard it as the
heroic love of comrades or the last hysteria of the herd instinct. It
has been said of the typical English aristocrats of the Government
offices that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and play from
ten till four; and it is true that an Englishman, even an English
aristocrat, is not always inclined to play any more than to work. But
American sociability is not like the Trafalgar fountains. It is like
Niagara. It never stops, under the silent stars or the rolling storms.
There seems always to be the same human heat and pressure behind it; it
is like the central heating of hotels as explained in the advertisements
and announcements. The temperature can be regulated; but it is not. And
it is always rather overpowering for an Englishman, whose mood changes
like his own mutable and shifting sky. The English mood is very like the
English weather; it is a nuisance and a national necessity.
If any one wishes to understand the quarrel between Dickens and the
Americans, let him turn to that chapter in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, in which
young Martin has to receive endless defiles and deputations of total
strangers each announced by name and demanding formal salutation. There
are several things to be noticed about this incident. To begin with, it
did not happen to Martin Chuzzlewit; but it did happen to Charles
Dickens. Dickens is incorporating almost without alteration a passage
from a diary in the middle of a story; as he did when he included the
admirable account of the prison petition of John Dickens as the prison
petition of Wilkins Micawber. There is no particular reason why even the
gregarious Americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly obscure
steerage passenger like young Chuzzlewit. There was every reason why
they should throng the portals of the author of _Pickwick_ and _Oliver
Twist_. And no doubt they did. If I may be permitted the aleatory image,
you bet they did. Similar troops of sociable human beings have visited
much more insignificant English travellers in America, with some of whom
I am myself acquainted. I myself have the luck to be a little more
stodgy and less sensitive than many of my countrymen; and certainly less
sensitive than Dickens. But I know what it was that annoyed him about
that unending and unchanging stream of American visitors; it was the
unending and unchanging stream of American sociability and high spirits.
A people living on such a lofty but level tableland do not understand
the ups and downs of the English temperament; the temper of a nation of
eccentrics or (as they used to be called) of humorists. There is
something very national in the very name of the old play of _Every Man
in His Humour_. But the play more often acted in real life is 'Every Man
Out of His Humour.' It is true, as Matthew Arnold said, that an
Englishman wants to do as he likes; but it is not always true even that
he likes what he likes. An Englishman can be friendly and yet not feel
friendly. Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or he can
feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom he really loves. He can
think, almost with tears of tenderness, about people at a distance who
would be bores if they came in at the door.
American sociability sweeps away any such subtlety. It cannot be
expected to understand the paradox or perversity of the Englishman, who
thus can feel friendly and avoid friends. That is the truth in the
suggestion that Dickens was sentimental. It means that he probably felt
most sociable when he was solitary. In all these attempts to describe
the indescribable, to indicate the real but unconscious differences
between the two peoples, I have tried to balance my words without the
irrelevant bias of praise and blame. Both characteristics always cut
both ways. On one side this comradeship makes possible a certain
communal courage, a democratic derision of rich men in high places,
that is not easy in our smaller and more stratified society. On the
other hand the Englishman has certainly more liberty, if less equality
and fraternity. But the richest compensation of the Englishman is not
even in the word 'liberty,' but rather in the word 'poetry.' That humour
of escape or seclusion, that genial isolation, that healing of wounded
friendship by what Christian Science would call absent treatment, that
is the best atmosphere of all for the creation of great poetry; and out
of that came 'bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang' and
'Thou wast not made for death, immortal bird.' In this sense it is
indeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity; which may
be extended to mean affection remembered in loneliness. There is in it a
spirit not only of detachment but even of distance; a spirit which does
desire, as in the old English rhyme, to be not only over the hills but
also far away. In other words, in so far as it is true that the
Englishman is an exception to the great truth of Aristotle, it is
because he is not so near to Aristotle as he is to Homer. In so far as
he is not by nature a political animal, it is because he is a poetical
animal. We see it in his relations to the other animals; his quaint and
almost illogical love of dogs and horses and dependants whose political
rights cannot possibly be defined in logic. Many forms of hunting or
fishing are but an excuse for the same thing which the shameless
literary man does without any excuse. Sport is speechless poetry. It
would be easy for a foreigner, by taking a few liberties with the facts,
to make a satire about the sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimately
to shoot the skylark. It would be easy to answer these poetic
suggestions by saying that he himself might be responsible for ruining
the choirs where late the sweet birds sang, or that the immortal bird
was likely to be mortal when he was out with his gun. But these
international satires are never just; and the real relations of an
Englishman and an English bird are far more delicate. It would be
equally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire against
American democracy; and represent Americans merely as birds of a feather
who can do nothing but flock together. But this would leave out the fact
that at least it is not the white feather; that democracy is capable of
defiance and of death for an idea. Touching the souls of great nations,
these criticisms are generally false because they are critical.
But when we are quite sure that we rejoice in a nation's strength, then
and not before we are justified in judging its weakness. I am quite sure
that I rejoice in any democratic success without _arrière pensée_; and
nobody who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer at civic
equality. And this being granted, I do think there is a danger in the
gregariousness of American society. The danger of democracy is not
anarchy; on the contrary, it is monotony. And it is touching this that
all my experience has increased my conviction that a great deal that is
called female emancipation has merely been the increase of female
convention. Now the males of every community are far too conventional;
it was the females who were individual and criticised the conventions of
the tribe. If the females become conventional also, there is a danger of
individuality being lost. This indeed is not peculiar to America; it is
common to the whole modern industrial world, and to everything which
substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the State for the personal
atmosphere of the home. But it is emphasised in America by the curious
contradiction that Americans do in theory value and even venerate the
individual. But individualism is still the foe of individuality. Where
men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each
other. They become featureless by 'featuring' the same part.
Personality, in becoming a conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. In
this respect perhaps there is really something to be learnt from the
Englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of private life.
Those who have travelled in such a fashion as to see all the American
hotels and none of the American houses are sometimes driven to the
excess of saying that the Americans have no private life. But even if
the exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must balance it with the
corresponding truth; that the English have no public life. They on their
side have still to learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic;
and how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption when the very
State itself has become a State secret.