It is always surprising, if not always agreeable, to see ourselves as others see us. The picture we present to others is never the picture we present to ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally it is a much plainer picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always a strange picture. Just now we English are having our portrait painted by an American lady, Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been appearing in the press. It is not a flattering portrait, and it seems to have angered a good many people who deny the truth of the likeness very passionately. The chief accusation seems to be that we have no manners, are lacking in the civilities and politenesses of life, and so on, and are inferior in these things to the French, the Americans, and other peoples. It is not an uncommon charge, and it comes from many quarters. It came to me the other day in a letter from a correspondent, French or Belgian, who has been living in this country during the war, and who wrote bitterly about the manners of the English towards foreigners. In the course of his letter he quoted with approval the following cruel remark of Jean CarriÈre, written, needless to say, before the war:

“Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal ÉlevÉ du fait qu'il manque de maniÈres; il ignore encore la politesse, voilÀ tout.”

The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.

I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and we suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should be told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At the same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's warning about the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty millions of us, and we have some forty million different manners, and it is not easy to get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will take this “copy” to the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who preceded him was a monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all civility; another is all bad temper, and between the two extremes you will get every shade of good and bad manners. And so through every phase of society.

Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the widest differences of manner in different parts of the country. In Lancashire and Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There is a deep-seated distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the code of conduct differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral town as the manner of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But even here you will find behind the general bearing infinite shades of difference that make your generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more you know of any people the less you feel able to sum them up in broad categories.

Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting—apropos of the Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because of the strangeness of his appearance—lamenting the deplorable manners of the people. “Lord!” he says, “to see the absurd nature of Englishmen that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks strange.” Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him describing the English as the most boorish nation in Europe.

But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. “To mention but a single attraction,” he says in one of his letters, “the English girls are divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses. They have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive, they kiss you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you return. Go where you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if you had once tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish to spend your life there.” Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens a good deal changed to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a cigarette.

I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing and less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the saying of O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good criticism. Our lack of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but more probably it is traceable not to a physical but to a social source. Unlike the Celtic and the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have not the ease that comes from the ingrained tradition of human equality. The French have that ease. So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So have the Americans. But the English are class conscious. The dead hand of feudalism is still heavy upon our souls. If it were not, the degrading traffic in titles would long since have been abolished as an insult to our intelligence. But we not only tolerate it: we delight in this artificial scheme of relationship. It is not human values, but social discriminations that count. And while human values are cohesive in their effect, social discriminations are separatist. They break society up into castes, and permeate it with the twin vices of snobbery and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is subdivided into infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious restraints of a people uncertain of their social relationships create a defensive manner which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true root is a timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his ground tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is proud: it may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away from this fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners for independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.

The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from a sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented to keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression that he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he had more abandon. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which makes the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably what Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the impression that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good manners that they exist most where they do not exist at all—that is to say, where conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told James Hogg that no man who was content to be himself, without either diffidence or egotism, would fail to be at home in any company, and I do not know a better recipe for good manners.

II

I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a conversation between a couple of smartly dressed young people—a youth and a maiden—at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed, I could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist chiefly of “Awfullys” and “Reallys!” and “Don't-you-knows” and tattle about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but because of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers were alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.

The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear, while others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of approval. They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an air of being unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not being aware that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their manner indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They were really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus. If they had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite reasonable tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and defiantly to an empty bus. They would have made no impression on an empty bus. But they were happily sensible of making quite a marked impression on a full bus.

But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the window at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption behind the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an announcement to the world that we are someone in particular and can talk as loudly as we please whenever we please. It is a sort of social Prussianism that presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a superior egotism. The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the world is mistaken. On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted self-consciousness. These young people were talking loudly, not because they were unconscious of themselves in relation to their fellows, but because they were much too conscious and were not content to be just quiet, ordinary people like the rest of us.

I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not lived abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience of those who travel to find, as I have often found, their country humiliated by this habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is unlovely at home, but it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is not only the person who is brought into disrepute, but the country he (and not less frequently she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus could afford to bear the affliction of that young couple with tolerance and even amusement, for they only hurt themselves. We could discount them. But the same bearing in a foreign capital gives the impression that we are all like this, just as the rather crude boasting of certain types of American grossly misrepresent a people whose general conduct, as anyone who sees them at home will agree, is unaffected, unpretentious, and good-natured.

The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a disproportionate number of its “bounders.” It is inevitable that it should be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who have made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved in the capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune his voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation, this congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school it is apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus yesterday.

So far from being representative of the English, they are violently unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take an average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust the sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted with egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy mean between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the overbearing note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk of our affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without desiring to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without wishing to be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we have achieved that social ease which consists in the adjustment of a reasonable confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the sensibilities of others.

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