Supplementary reading the english character

The English take it for granted that they have national characteristics which distinguish them from their neighbours; some due to their blood, others to their geographical position, others again to the impact of historical forces on the British Isles. All are contributions to the English character, a mixture of intangibles, which has had a tremendous influence on the destiny of the world/ It was a greatest asset of a small people, places by the Providence on a tiny island, from which they managed to found a huge Empire and impress their civilization upon five continents. What then is that character made of?

An amalgam of Races and Cultures

The English have been concisely defined as “a stream of Germans bottled up on a small island, with a few ingredients of native Celt, Roman and Norman French to make the cork pop,” with the result that the mixture not unnaturally spurted to the other ends of the world and in time flowed over one fourth of the habitable world. The definition serves its purpose, for the population is predominantly Anglo-Saxon, but not purely Nordic, as the invaders of course took wives among the earlier dark-haired inhabitants. The Englishman, therefore, is a more civilized German owing to the infusion of some Celtic or Latin blood. Of the blond, blue-eyed German he has the solid qualities: industry, domestic taste, fearlessness, tenacity, and sometimes the ruthlessness and acquisitive instinct; but he has also bee endowed, from other sources, with creative imagination and a sense of proportion, not to mention his most precious gift: humour. Was it mere coincidence that Shakespeare, the most universal of English poets, was born in the very heart of England, at the cross-roads where races and cultures met and mixed?

British Humour

The British, who have produced great poets and wise realists, have also given birth to countless humorists. Humour is a blend in various proportions, of poetry and common sense. Called by Shakespeare “a jest with a sad brow,” by Thackeray, a combination of “wit and love”, humour escapes and precise definition. It is a compromise between the national and the individual temperament, the undertone of everyday life in Britain, as well as a pervasive, influence in English literature. It implies that we are not slaves of hard facts, but perceive them keenly all the same, and are able to laugh at our own absurdities. It underlines, not unkindly, and always indirectly, the contrast between the real and the ideal world, and thus reconciles us with both.

The English Mind

When an Englishman says: “We are not very clever,” don’t take him too literally. It simply means: “We have no use for rhetoric and brilliant discussion leading nowhere. We stick to facts, use common sense and get results.” That is, indeed, the English way. They shrink from abstraction; loathe general ideas and distrust idle theorizing. “It is better to do a stupid thing which has been done before than an intelligent one which has never been tried,” Lord Balfour once remarked. And his countrymen heartily agreed with him, for tradition founded on human experience is obviously safer than purely intellectual constructions. The English act from instinct, and not from logic. Life, they believe, is far more complex than logic admits.

They have been accused of hypocrisy by strict logicians who see conscious sin where there is only mental disjunction between two attitudes equally sincere. The old gentleman loudly indignant at the Continental’s cruelty to animals quietly maintains that it is fair to run down a fox “because the fox rather enjoys the pursuit”, or to use goats as bait for the panther in India “because it is well established that goats hardly ever suffer (unless they do it for spite).” That’s not hypocrisy. Call it muddle-headedness if you like.

The Pattern of the Gentleman

The aspirations of the English people are social and ethnical rather than intellectual and aesthetic. They are best expressed in the type of the gentleman, an ideal aimed at by all classes of society, - with widely different results.

Pretenders to gentility “imagine the standards of the gentleman to be entirely ‘social’ – a matter of mannerism rather than manners. “They acquire the mannerism and leave out the moral qualities, unaware, in their mistaken zeal, that they merely cultivate snobbery at its worst: foolish reverence for upper class conventions. Fortunately all British snobs are not as bad as that. Most of them reconcile the cult of good form, futile as it may be, with a clear notion of what is “done” and “not done” in matters of greater moment. They help in their own way to improve the social ethics of the masses.

The complete gentleman stands higher in English esteem than any other human being. He is a model of courtesy, fairness, courage and self-control. He always behaves as he ought to do. It is only an ideal. But this ideal has worked unbrokenly since Elizabethan times as an inspiration to the fines men of England. Character, not success, is their test. Why among great explorers does the name of Captain R.F.Scott live in English memories? Not because he reached the Pole, not even because he died a heroic death, but because he was a noble soul, sensitive and shy, considerate and gentle, an unselfish leader devoted to duty, in short, all that an English gentleman should be.

QUESTIONS:

1. What are the various influences which have built up the English character?

2. What does ‘English humour” mean to you? Give an example of English humour.

3. What do most Englishmen prefer to theory and intellectual constructions?

4. Give an example of a typical English lack of logic in their attitude towards animals.

5. What is the difference between a gentleman and a snob?