English people are called dull—“heavy” is the more popular word—because they do not gather on street-corners or in cafés, arguing and gesticulating, but go methodically about their business; leaving the stranger to do the same. Of course, if the latter has no business, this is depressing. Here he is in an unknown country, with nothing to do but sight-see, which bores him infinitely. There is no one with whom to talk, no pleasant congregating-spot where he could at least look on at, if not share in, the life of the people. He is thrown dismally back upon himself for diversion. So what does he do? He goes and sees the sights, which was his duty from the beginning. Just as he goes to bed at midnight because every place except bed is closed against him; and to church on Sundays because every building except church is shut. England not only expects every man to do his duty, she makes it practically impossible for him to do anything else; by which she shrewdly gains his maximum efficiency when and where she needs it.
In return, or rather in preparation, she gives him a remarkably fine groundwork, both mental and physical, to start with. No foreigner can fail to be impressed with the minute care and thought bestowed upon English children, and the sacrifices gladly made to secure their health and best development. In comparison with French and American and Spanish parents, the English mother and father may seem undemonstrative, even cold; they do not gush over their children in public, nor take them out to restaurants, or permit them to share their own meals at home. Neither, however, do they give them the least comfortable rooms in the house, and decree that their wants and needs shall be second to those of the adult members of the family. The children have a routine of their own, constructed carefully for them, and studied to fit their changing requirements. They have their own rooms—as large and light and sunny as the parents can contrive—their own meals, of wholesome food served at sensible hours; their fixed time for exercise and study alike: everything is planned to give them the best possible start for mind and body.
“But,” the French or American mother objects, when one extols this system, “it takes so much money; so many rooms, so many servants—two distinct households, in fact.” It takes a different distribution of money, that is all. As the children are never on show, their clothes are simple; the clothes of the parents are apt to be simple too. Amusement is not sought outside the home in England, as it is in other countries; both interest and money are centred within the house and garden that is each man’s castle. This makes possible many comforts which people of other countries look upon as luxuries, but which to the Englishman and woman are the first necessities. And primary among these is a healthful, cheerful place to rear their children.
Not only the wealthy, but people in very modest circumstances insist upon this; and in houses of but six or seven rooms one finds the largest and airiest given over to the day and night nurseries for the children. Fresh chintz and white paint and simple furniture make these the most attractive as well as most sensible surroundings for the small people. Nurses, teachers, school-fellows, the whole chain of influence linking the development of the English child, emphasize the idea of physical fitness as a first essential. And this idea is so early instilled, and so constantly and emphatically fostered, that it becomes the kernel of the grown man’s activity. The stern creed that only the fit survive rules England almost as it ruled old Sparta: a creed terrible for the weak, but splendid for the strong; and that has produced such men as Gordon, Rhodes, Kitchener, Curzon and Roberts—and hundreds of others, the fruit of this rigorous policy.
First the home, then the public schools teach it. At school, a boy must establish himself by his proven prowess in one direction or another. To gain a footing, and then to hold it, he must do something—row, or play cricket or football; but play, and play hard, he must. The other boys force him to it, whether he will or no; hardness is their religion, and those who do not conform to it are practically finished before they begin. The reputation won at school lays or permanently fails to lay the foundation of after success. “Hm ... yes, I remember him at Eton,” has summarized many a man’s chances for promotion or failure. Rarely does he prove himself to be worth later more than he was worth then.
It is interesting to follow the primitive ideal, of bodily perfection, throughout this old and perhaps most finely developed civilization of the present. In the hurry-scurry of modern affairs, when other men pay little or no heed to preserving their bodily strength, never does this cease to be the first consideration of the Englishman. He wants money and position and power quite as keenly as other men want them; but he has been born and reared in the knowledge that to gain these things, then to enjoy them, sound nerves are necessary. His impulse is to store up energy faster than he spends it, and not to waste himself on a series of trifles someone else can do as well if not better than he.
Hence the carefully ordered routine he follows from childhood; the systematic exercise, the frequent holidays his strenuous American cousin scoffs at. All are designed to keep him hard and fit, and ready for emergencies that may demand surplus strength. Middle-aged men play the game and follow the hobbies of young men; the elderly vie with the middle-aged. In England, the fast and fixed lines that divide youth from maturity are blurred by the hearty good comradeship of sport; in which all ages and classes share alike. Sport is not a hobby with the Englishman; it is the backbone of his existence. Therefore, I think, it is so hard for the foreigner to enter into the real sports spirit of England: he never quite appreciates the vital motive behind it. With the Frenchman and the American and the Spaniard—even with the Austrian—sport is recreation; they take it apart from the business of life, where the Englishman takes it as essential to life itself. By it he establishes and maintains his working efficiency, and without it he would have lost his chief tool, and his perennial remedy for whatever ills befall him.
Obviously, it is this demand for physical perfection that underlies and engenders the national worship of race; and that is responsible, in the last analysis, for the renowned snobbishness of the English. Someone has said that English Society revolves round the King and the horse—or, as he might have added, round the supreme symbols of human and animal development. That towards which everyone is striving—to breed finer and stronger creatures—is crystallized in these two superlative types. While from the King down, on the human side, the scale is divided into the most minute shades of gradation.
As government in England tends to become more and more democratic, society tends to become more aristocratic—as far as magnifying ancient names and privileges is concerned. “A title is always a title,” said a practical American lady, “but an English title is just a bit better.” It is, because English people think so, and have thought it so long and so emphatically that they have brought everyone else to that opinion. The same is true of many English institutions, admirable in themselves but which actually are admired because the English admire them. Every nation is more or less egoist, but none is so sincerely and consistently egoist as the English. They travel the earth, but they travel to observe and criticize; not to assimilate foreign things.
The American is a chameleon, taking on the habits and ideas of each place as he lives in it; Latins have not a little of this character too. But the Briton, wherever he goes, remains the Briton: you never mistake him, in Palestine or Alaska or the South Sea Islands: no matter where he is, he has brought his tea and his tub and his point of view with him. And, though he may be one among thousands of another nationality, somehow these others become impressed with his traditions rather than he with theirs. Perhaps because away from home, he calmly pursues the home routine, adjusting the life of his temporary habitation to himself, rather than himself to it. If he is accustomed to dress for dinner, he dresses; though the rest of the company may appear in corduroys and neckerchiefs. And continues to dress, imperturbably, no matter how mercilessly he may be ridiculed or even despised. If he is accustomed to take tea at a certain hour, he takes it—in Brazil or Thibet, it makes no difference. And the same is true of his religious observance, his beloved exercise, his hobbies and his study: of all these things he is too firmly convinced to change them by one jot. Such an attitude is bound to have its effect on these persistently confronted with it; resentment, then curiosity, finally a certain grudging respect is born in the minds of the people on whom the Englishman serenely forces his superiority. They wonder about his country—he never sounds its praises or urges them to visit it. He simply speaks with complete contentment of “going home.”