DIAGNOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN

(From the Amsterdamer Revue, 1915.)

After many months of war, search for the cause thereof borders on the academic. Comment on the physical facts of the situation does not come within the scope of one who by disposition and training is concerned with states of mind.

But as to the result: The period of surprise is over; the forces known; the issue fully joined. It is now a case of “Pull devil, pull baker!” and a question of the fibre of the combatants. For this reason it may not be amiss to try to present to any whom it may concern as detached a picture as one can of the real nature of that combatant who is called the Englishman. Ignorance in Central Europe of his character tipped the balance in favour of war, and speculation as to the future is useless without right comprehension of his nature.

The Englishman is taken advisedly, because he represents four-fifths of the population of the British Isles.

And first let it be said that there is no more unconsciously deceptive person on the face of the globe. The Englishman does not know himself; outside England he is but guessed at.

Racially the Englishman is so complex and so old a blend that no one can say what he is. In character he is just as complex. Physically, there are two main types: one inclining to length of limb, narrowness of face and head (you will see nowhere such long and narrow heads as in our islands), and bony jaws; the other approximating more to the ordinary “John Bull.” The first type is gaining on the second. There is little or no difference in the main character behind.

In attempting to understand the real nature of the Englishman, certain salient facts must be borne in mind.

The Sea.—To be surrounded generation after generation by the sea has developed in him a suppressed idealism, a peculiar impermeability, a turn for adventure, a faculty for wandering, and for being sufficient unto himself in far and awkward surroundings.

The Climate.—Whoso weathers for centuries a climate that, though healthy and never extreme, is, perhaps, the least reliable and one of the wettest in the world, must needs grow in himself a counter-balance of dry philosophy, a defiant humour, an enforced medium temperature of soul. The Englishman is no more given to extremes than is his climate; against its damp and perpetual changes he has become coated with a sort of bluntness.

The Political Age of his Country.—This is by far the oldest settled Western Power, politically speaking. For eight hundred and fifty years England has known no serious military disturbance from without; for nearly two hundred she has known no serious political turmoil within. This is partly the outcome of her isolation, partly the happy accident of her political constitution, partly the result of the Englishman’s habit of looking before he leaps, which comes, no doubt, from the climate and the mixture of his blood. This political stability has been a tremendous factor in the formation of English character, has given the Englishman of all ranks a certain deep slow sense of form and order, an engrained culture—if one may pirate the word—that makes no show, being in the bones of the man, as it were.

The Great Preponderance for Several Generations of Town over Country Life.—Taken in conjunction with centuries of political stability, this is the main cause of a growing inarticulate humaneness, of which—speaking generally—the Englishman appears to be rather ashamed.

The Public Schools.—This potent element in the formation of the modern Englishman, not only in the upper but of all classes, is something that one rather despairs of making understood—in countries which have no similar institution. But! Imagine one hundred thousand youths of the wealthiest, healthiest, and most influential classes, passed, during each generation, at the most impressionable age, into a sort of ethical mould, emerging therefrom stamped to the core with the impress of a uniform morality, uniform manners, uniform way of looking at life; remembering always that these youths fill seven-eighths of the important positions in the professional administration of their country and the conduct of its commercial enterprise; remembering too, that, through perpetual contact with every other class, their standard of morality and way of looking at life filters down into the very toes of the land. This great character-forming machine is remarkable for an unself-consciousness which gives it enormous strength and elasticity. Not inspired by the State, it inspires the State. The characteristics of the philosophy it enjoins are mainly negative, and, for that, the stronger. “Never show your feelings—to do so is not manly, and bores your fellows. Don’t cry out when you’re hurt, making yourself a nuisance to other people. Tell no tales about your companions and no lies about yourself. Avoid all ‘swank,’ ‘side,’ ‘swagger,’ braggadocio of speech or manner, on pain of being laughed at.” (This maxim is carried to such a pitch that the Englishman, except in his Press, habitually understates everything.) “Think little of money, and speak less of it. Play games hard, and keep the rules of them, even when your blood is hot and you are tempted to disregard them. In three words: Play the Game”—a little phrase which may be taken as the characteristic understatement of the modern Englishman’s creed of honour, in all classes. This great, unconscious machine has great defects. It tends to the formation of “caste”; it is a poor teacher of sheer learning; and, æsthetically, with its universal suppression of all interesting and queer individual traits of personality—it is almost horrid. Yet it imparts a remarkable incorruptibility to English life; it conserves vitality, by suppressing all extremes; and it implants everywhere a kind of unassuming stoicism and respect for the rules of the great game—Life. Through its unconscious example, and through its cult of games, it has vastly influenced even the classes not directly under its control.

Three more main facts must be borne in mind:—

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.