A Sheaf

by John Galsworthy

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.