And to each of us there will be some ingle-nook where the spirit of our country most inhabits, where the fire of hearth and home glows best, and draws us with its warmth from wanderings bodily or spiritual. To know that in these isles no native-born but has a quiet shrine, be it lovely, or devoid of earthly beauty, where he or she in fancy worships the whole land, gives reality to the word Patriotism.
This love of country is so deep and sacred that we cannot utter it; let us not forget that it is as deep and sacred to the natives of other lands!
Looking back into the dark of history, how quaint is our origin—offspring of invading robbers, wave after wave, for some two thousand years before the Norman Conquest! If these be not in truth the blessed islands that the ancients dreamed of, they seem to have been sufficiently attractive. Who our Neolithic forerunners were, whence they came, or whether they were here before our isles cut loose from the mainland and set out on an endless voyage, we shall never, I suppose, know. A strain of their blood, more than we think perhaps, must still be alive within us; the rest of it is freebooting fluid—Celts and Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, all robbers; blent at last—and in Ireland not yet quite blent—to the observance of honour among thieves.
Ever since the sea brought us here—all but the Neolithic few—in the long-ships of the past, what a slow, ceaseless fusing has gone to the making of the modern Briton—that most singular among men! I hold the theory—how far scientifically tenable I know not—that the continued vitality of a race depends on two main conditions: the presence of many strains of blood not too violently differing one from the other, and the absence of too much sun. I hold that nations may become too inbred; or may have the sap dried out of them by heat. In Britain we cannot yet have reached the point of perfect fusion—are not in danger for a long time of becoming too inbred. Nor can the sun be called a desperate peril. We are “game,” as they say, for centuries yet; unless——! For our besetting danger is another.
How many of us realize that far beyond all other nations we are town dwellers, subject to town blight? That is a new, an insidious, malady, whose virulence we have hardly yet appreciated or had time to study. Can it be arrested by homœopathy—or must sweeping allopathic remedies be applied? Will town blight be cured by better town conditions, and our gradual adaptation—or by going back to the land? By both. But, if not by both within the next half-century, then—I fear—by neither. Town blight has had as yet but two full generations to lay its grip on us. We have time for its defeat if we have courage and sense. But it is an enemy more deadly than the Germans; not so easy to see and to fight against!
When children first discover gooseberries or other kindly fruits of the earth, they eat too quickly and too much. We were the first people to discover the means to “happiness” known as modern industrialism. With huge appetite we set upon it, and are caught by surfeit. I have heard this view of our case seriously countered—the Cockney and the northern townsman are thought to be our most vital types. Verily they have a pretty courage; but to such as are light-hearted on this matter I would say: “Go, in summer, to some seaside place where humble townsfolk have come to make holiday, as healthy and little pallid as they ever are, and—watch. Then wing off to some remote fishing village, or countryside where such peasants as are left are not too badly off, and—watch. Then summon your candour, and tell in which of your two fields of observation you have seen more vigour of limb, beauty of face, or at all events more freedom from petty distortions and a look of dwindling.”
I cannot explain exactly what I mean by town blight. It is not mere pallor or weakliness, but rather a loss of balance—a tendency to jut here and be squashed in there; an over-narrowness of head; an over-development of this feature at the expense of that; with a look of living too fast, of giving out more than is taken in. The modifications of the Briton through town life are countless, and all the time subtly going on. I do not deny that there is much good, too, in the transformation—the quickening of a temperament by no means quick; a widening of sympathies in a character not too sympathetic; the deepening of humaneness and the love of justice in a nature with an old Adam in it of brutality. A frank humanitarian and humanist, like myself, dwells cheerfully on that, for it does seem, while other changes in human life are always arguable—such as the increase of efficiency purchased by loss of breadth and kindliness; economic gain by loss of health and balance; greater will-power by loss of understanding and tolerance—that the increase of humane instinct, with which is bound up the love of justice, is alone sheer gain. Some, I know, think it bought at the expense of what is called “virility.” To those I recommend a steady glimpse at the modern British sailor. Of late years I have been reading accounts of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. There is no better study for those who doubt whether men can be brave and hard and at the same time chivalrous and gentle. One returns from mental travel with those heroes convinced that true humanity and gentleness and justice actually depend on bravery and stoicism. Picked men, you say! Well, go to the British Fleet, or the British Army—in a word, to the British male population of robust age—and you will come back, I believe, with the same general conviction—that where the truest bravery is there also is humaneness—that these qualities grow naturally twined together. All evidence from the war proves that the Briton is as hard a fighter, and far better behaved, than he ever was. Better behaviour under war conditions means nothing but increase in each individual fighter, of just and humane instinct, and that sense of personal responsibility which is the other main advantage coming to us from town life. In towns a man finds his level, acquires the corporate sense, sees himself as part of the civic whole, learns that his own ills are shared by too many, to bear thinking of save with a touch of humour and contempt. The British sailor whose shattered arm was being dressed in the battle of Jutland well summed up what I mean: “To hell with my arm, doctor; I want to get up there again and give the boys a hand!” That would seem very much the spirit of the modern town-bred British.
Now, is there anything which in some sort differentiates this Britain of ours from other lands?
A country is such a huge conglomeration of types and qualities; such a seething mass of energies! It seems sometimes as impossible to thread one’s way to the heart of that maze as to fix the pattern of a thousand gnats dancing in a sunlit lane! One turns eyes here, there, follows this movement and that, thinks one has the clue, falls back gaping. Is there any essence which sets the British soul apart, as an oak is set apart from beech or lime tree? Can there, indeed, be any single essence in a land where Iberian and Celt, Saxon and Norseman, still quarrel in the blood? I think there is, and will hazard an attempt to throw on the screen some faint shadow of the elusive thing.
Take certain salient British characteristics: Our peculiar national under-emphasis and stolidity; our want of imagination; that desire to have things both ways—which is generally called our “hypocrisy”; our turn of ironic humour; our bulldog grip; our lack of joie de vivre; our snobbishness—dying, but dying very hard; our perpetual desire for the moral in action or art; our regard for “good form”; our slow dumb idealism, hand in hand with our profound distrust of ideas; our propensity for grumbling under prosperity, and our cheeriness under hardship; our passion for games, and our creed of “playing the game”; our love of individual liberty—even our perversity and crankiness. . . . Take them all, and consider whether there is not some fundamental underlying instinct.