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Chapter VIII - CharacterChapter VIII - Character
Chapter VIII - Character
The English race are reputed morose. I do not know that they have sadder
brows than their neighbors of northern climates. They are sad by comparison
with the singing and dancing nations: not sadder, but slow and staid, as
finding their joys at home. They, too, believe that where there is no
enjoyment of life, there can be no vigor and art in speech or thought that
your merry heart goes all the way, your sad one tires in a mile. This trait of
gloom has been fixed on them by French travellers, who from Froissart,
Voltaire, Le Sage, Mirabeau, down to the lively journalists of the
feuilletons, have spent their wit on the solemnity of their neighbors. The
French say, gay conversation is unknown in their island. The Englishman finds
no relief from reflection except in reflection. When he wishes for amusement,
he goes to work. His hilarity is like an attack of fever. Religion, the
theatre, and the reading the books of his country, all feed and increase his
natural melancholy. The police does not interfere with public diversions. It
thinks itself bound in duty to respect the pleasures and rare gayety of this
inconsolable nation; and their well-known courage is entirely attributable
to their disgust of life.
I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few words have obtained
this reputation. As compared with the Americans, I think them cheerful and
contented. Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy. The
English have a mild aspect, and a ringing, cheerful voice. They are large
natured, and not so easily amused as the southerners, and are among them as
grown people among children, requiring war, or trade, or engineering, or
science, instead of frivolous games. They are proud and private, and, even if
disposed to recreation, will avoid an open garden. They sported sadly: ils
s`amusaient tristement, selon la coutume de leur pays, said Froissart; and I
suppose never nation built their party-walls so thick, or their garden -
fences so high. Meat and wine produce no effect on them: they are just as
cold, quiet and composed at the end, as at the beginning of dinner.
The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six or seven hundred
years; and a kind of pride in bad public speaking is noted in the House of
Commons, as if they were willing to show that they did not live by their
tongues, or thought they spoke well enough if they had the tone of gentlemen.
In mixed company they shut their mouths. A Yorkshire mill-owner told me he
had ridden more than once all the way from London to Leeds, in the first -
class carriage, with the same persons, and no word exchanged. The club -
houses were established to cultivate social habits, and it is rare that more
than two eat together, and oftenest one eats alone. Was it, then, a stroke of
humor in the serious Swedenborg, or was it only his pitiless logic, that made
him shut up the English souls in a heaven by themselves?
They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic, and stubborn, -
and as mild, sweet, and sensible. The truth is, they have great range and
variety of character. Commerce sends abroad multitudes of different classes.
The choleric Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resident in the East or
West Indies, are wide of the perfect behavior of the educated and dignified
man of family. So is the burly farmer; so is the country `squire, with his
narrow and violent life. In every inn is the Commercial-Room, in which
"travellers," or bagmen who carry patterns, and solicit orders for the
manufacturers, are wont to be entertained. It easily happens that this class
should characterize England to the foreigner, who meets them on the road and
at every public house, whilst the gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude
themselves whilst in them.
But these classes are the right English stock, and may fairly show the
national qualities before yet art and education have dealt with them. They are
good lovers, good haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and in all things very
much steeped in their temperament, like men hardly awaked from deep sleep
which they enjoy. Their habits and instincts cleave to nature. They are of the
earth, earthy; and of the sea, as the sea-kinds, attached to it for what it
yields them, and not from any sentiment. They are full of coarse strength,
rude exercise, butcher`s meat, and sound sleep; and suspect any poetic
insinuation, or any hint for the conduct of life which reflects on this animal
existence, as if somebody were fumbling at the umbilical cord, and might stop
their supplies. They doubt a man`s sound judgment if he does not eat with
appetite, and shake their heads if he is particularly chaste. Take them as
they come, you shall find in the common people a surly indifference, sometimes
gruffness and ill temper; and, in minds of more power, magazines of
inexhaustible war, challenging
"The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland."
They are headstrong believers and defenders of their opinion, and not
less resolute in maintaining their whim and perversity. Hezekiah Woodward
wrote a book against the Lord`s Prayer. And one can believe that Burton, the
Anatomist of Melancholy, having predicted from the stars the hour of his
death, slipped the knot himself round his own neck, not to falsify his
horoscope.
Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness: they have extreme difficulty
to run away, and will die game. Wellington said of the young coxcombs of the
Life-Guards, delicately brought up, "But the puppies fight well;" and Nelson
said of his sailors, "They really mind shot no more than peas." Of absolute
stoutness no nation has more or better examples. They are good at storming
redoubts, at boarding frigates, at dying in the last ditch, or any desperate
service which has daylight and honor in it; but not, I think, at enduring the
rack, or any passive obedience, like jumping off a castle-roof at the word
of a czar. Being both vascular and highly organized, so as to be very sensible
of pain; and intellectual, so as to see reason and glory in a matter.
Of that constitutional force, which yields the supplies of the day, they
have the more than enough, the excess which creates courage on fortitude,
genius in poetry, invention in mechanics, enterprise in trade, magnificence in
wealth, splendor in ceremonies, petulance and projects in youth. The young men
have a rude health which runs into peccant humors. They drink brandy like
water, cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting,
swimming, and fencing, and run into absurb frolics with the gravity of the
Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their
turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They
chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases; swing their hammock in
the boughs of the Bohon Upas; taste every poison; buy every secret; at Naples,
they put St. Januarius` blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of
the "winking Virgin," to know why she winks; measure with an English footrule
every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish caaba, every Holy of holies;
translate and send to Bentley the arcanum bribed and bullied away from
shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror they cause.
These travellers are of every class, the best and the worst; and it may easily
happen that those of rudest behavior are taken notice of and remembered. The
Saxon melancholy in the vulgar rich and poor appears as gushes of ill-humor,
which every check exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. There are
multitudes of rude young English who have self-sufficiency and bluntness of
their nation, and who, with their disdain of the rest of mankind, and with
this indigestion and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for
uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad description of the Briton
generically, what was said two hundred years ago, of one particular Oxford
scholar: "He was a very bold man, uttered anything that came into his mind,
not only among his companions, but in public coffee-houses, and would often
speak his mind of particular persons then accidentally present, without
examining the company he was in; for which he was often reprimanded, and
several times threatened to be kicked and beaten."
The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal article in the bill
of social rights, that every man has a right to his own ears. No man can claim
to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room, or
to put upon the company with the loud statement of his crotchets or
personalities.
But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of nations are
written, and however derived, whether a happier tribe or mixture of tribes,
the air, or what circumstance, that mixed for them the golden mean of
temperament, - here exists the best stock in the world, broad-fronted, broad
- bottomed, best for depth, range, and equability, men of aplomb and reserves,
great range and many moods, strong instincts, yet apt for culture; war-class
as well as clerks; earls and tradesmen; wise minority, as well as foolish
majority; abysmal temperament, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on which no
sunshine settles; alternated with a common sense and humanity which hold them
fast to every piece of cheerful duty; making this temperament a sea to which
all storms are superficial; a race to which their fortunes flow, as if they
alone had the elastic organization at once fine and robust enough for
dominion; as if the burly, inexpressive, now mute and contumacious, now fierce
and sharp-tongued dragon, which once made the island light with his fiery
breath, had bequeathed his ferocity to his conqueror. They hide virtues under
vices, or the semblance of them. It is the misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll
again, who lifts the cart out of the mire, or "threshes the corn that ten day
- laborers could not end," but it is done in the dark, and with muttered
maledictions. He is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose speech is a
brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help you at a pinch. He says no, and
serves you, and your thanks disgust him. Here was lately a cross-grained
miser, odd and ugly, resembling in countenance the portrait of Punch, with the
laugh left out; rich by his own industry; sulking in a lonely house; who never
gave a dinner to any man, and disdained all courtesies; yet as true a
worshipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed, and profusely pouring
over the cold mind of his countrymen creations of grace and truth, removing
the reproach of sterility from English art, catching from their savage climate
every fine hint, and importing into their galleries every tint and trait of
sunnier cities and skies; making an era in painting; and, when he saw that the
splendor of one of his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his rival`s that hung
next it, secretly took a brush and blackened his own.
They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws to peck at. They
have that phlegm or staidness, which it is a compliment to disturb. "Great
men," said Aristotle, "are always of a nature originally melancholy." `T is
the habit of a mind which attaches to abstractions with a passion which gives
vast results. They dare to displease, they do not speak to expectation. They
like the sayers of No, better than the sayers of Yes. Each of them has an
opinion which he feels it becomes him to express all the more that it differs
from yours. They are meditating opposition. This gravity is inseparable from
minds of great resources.
There is an English hero superior to the French, the German, the Italian,
or the Greek. When he is brought to the strife with fate, he sacrifices a
richer material possession, and on more purely metaphysical grounds. He is
there with his own consent, face to face with fortune, which he defies. On
deliberate choice, and from grounds of character, he has elected his part to
live and die for, and dies with grandeur. This race has added new elements to
humanity, and has a deeper root in the world.
They have great range of scale, from ferocity to exquisite refinement.
With larger scale, they have great retrieving power. After running each
tendency to an extreme, they try another tack with equal heat. More
intellectual than other races, when they live with other races, they do not
take their language, but bestow their own. They subsidize other nations, and
are not subsidized. They proselyte, and are not proselyted. They assimilate
other races to themselves, and are not assimilated. The English did not
calculate the conquest of the Indies. It fell to their character. So they
administer in different parts of the world, the codes of every empire and
race; in Canada, old French law; in the Mauritius, the Code Napoleon; in the
West Indies, the edicts of the Spanish Cortes; in the East Indies, the Laws of
Menu; in the Isle of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing; at the Cape of Good Hope,
of the old Netherlands; and in the Ionian Islands, the Pandects of Justinian.
They are very conscious of their advantageous position in history.
England is the lawgiver, the patron, the instructor, the ally. Compare the
tone of the French and of the English press: the first querulous, captious,
sensitive about English opinion; the English press is never timorous about
French opinion, but arrogant and contemptuous.
They are testy and headstrong through an excess of will and bias;
churlish as men sometimes please to be who do not forget a bebt, who ask no
favors, and who will do what they like with their own. With education and
intercourse, these asperities wear off, and leave the good will pure. If
anatomy is reformed according to national tendencies, I suppose, the spleen
will hereafter be found in the Englishman, not found in the American, and
differencing the one from the other. I anticipate another anatomical
discovery, that this organ will be found to be cortical and caducous, that
they are superficially morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein differing
from Rome and the Latin nations. Nothing savage, nothing mean, resides in the
English heart. They are subject to panics of credulity and of rage, but the
temper of the nation, however disturbed, settles itself soon and easily, as,
in this temperate zone, the sky after whatever storms clears again, and
serenity is its normal condition.
A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception as the curtain of
the eagle`s eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first deal with English,
pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or
hide their strength. To understand the power of performance that is in their
finest wits, in the patient Newton, or in the versatile transcendent poets, or
in the Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams, Eldons, and Peels, one should see how
English day-laborers hold out. High and low, they are of an unctuous
texture. There is an adipocere in their constitution, as if they had oil also
for their mental wheels, and could perform vast amounts of work without
damaging themselves.
Even the scale of expense on which people live, and to which scholars and
professional men conform, proves the tension of their muscle, when vast
numbers are found who can each lift this enormous load. I might even add,
their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body.
No nation was ever so rich in able men; "gentlemen," as Charles I. said
of Strafford, "whose abilities might make a prince rather afraid than ashamed
in the greatest affairs of state;" men of such temper that, like Baron Vere,
"had one seen him returning from a victory, he would by his silence have
suspected that he had lost the day; and, had he beheld him in a retreat, he
would have collected him a conqueror by the cheerfulness of his spirit."^1
[Footnote 1: Fuller. Worthies of England.]
The following passage from the Heimskringla might almost stand as a
portrait of the modern Englishman: - "Haldor was very stout and strong, and
remarkably handsome in appearances. King Harold gave him this testimony, that
he, among all his men, cared least about doubtful circumstances, whether they
betokened danger of pleasure; for, whatever turned up, he was never in higher
nor in lower spirits, never slept less nor more on account of them, nor ate
nor drank but according to his custom. Haldor was not a man of many words, but
short in conversation, told his opinion bluntly, and was obstinate and hard:
and this could not please the king, who had many clever people about him,
zealous in his service. Haldor remained a short time with the king, and then
came to Iceland, where he took up his abode in Hiardaholt, and dwelt in that
farm to a very advanced age."^2
[Footnote 2: Heimskringla, Laing`s translation, vol. iii., p. 37.]
The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.
The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its
borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a long
memory, and, in its hottest heat, a register and rule.
Half their strength they put not forth. They are capable of a sublime
resolution, and if hereafter the war of races, often predicted, and making
itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty coming from
Eastern Europe), should menace the English civilization, these sea-kings may
take once again to their floating castles, and find a new home and a second
millennium of power in their colonies.
The stability of England is the security of the modern world. If the
English race were as mutable as the French, what reliance? But the English
stand for liberty. The conservative, money-loving, lord-loving English are yet
liberty-loving; and so freedom is safe: for they have more personal force than
any other people. The nation always resist the immoral action of their
government. They think humanely on the affairs of France, of Turkey, of
Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig-Holstein, though overborne by the statecraft
of the rulers at last.
Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent bias, which
though not less potent, is masked, as the tribe spreads its activity into
colonies, commerce, codes, arts, letters? The early history shows it, as the
musician plays the air which he proceeds to conceal in a tempest of
variations. In Alfred, in the Northmen, one may read the genius of the English
society, namely, that private life is the place of honor. Glory, a career, and
ambition, words familiar to the longitude of Paris, are seldom heard in
English speech. Nelson wrote from their hearts his homely telegraph, "England
expects every man to do his duty."
For actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or to appease
diseased or inflamed talent, the army and navy may be entered (the worst boys
doing well in the navy); and the civil service, in departments where serious
official work is done; and they hold in esteem the barrister engaged in the
severer studies of the law. But the calm, sound, and most British Briton
shrinks from public life, as charlatanism, and respects an economy founded on
agriculture, coal-mines, manufactures, or trade, which secures an
independence through the creation of real values.
They wish neither to command nor obey, but to be kings in their own
houses. They are intellectual and deeply enjoy literature; they like well to
have the world served up to them in books, maps, models, and every mode of
exact information, and, though not creators in art, they value its refinement.
They are ready for leisure, can direct and fill their own day, nor need so
much as others the constraint of a necessity. But the history of the nation
discloses, at every turn, this original predilection for private independence,
and, however this inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes with which
their vast colonial power has warped men out of orbit, the inclination
endures, and forms and reforms the laws, letters, manners, and occupations.
They choose that welfare which is compatible with the commonwealth, knowing
that such alone is stable; as wise merchants prefer investments in the three
per cents.
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