An Irishman’s Notes on the Saxon Temperament

N the long quest for self-knowledge and self-fulfilment there are two types of men and two methods. There are some who would have the individual man care only for himself morning, noon, and night, for his spirit, his mind, his body, his temporal and eternal welfare. There are others who would say he should forget himself and lose himself in great ideas, great causes, great enthusiasms, in passionate love or humanitarianism, or even in the anger of battle. Of these two methods the second is found in France while the first is the Englishman’s creed.

The English are a fortunate people, or seemed so in the happy past, their primal good fortune being that they lived and grew up on an island surrounded by stormy seas and fenced in by high cliffs. Their second good fortune sprang out of the first; they never submitted themselves to a strong central government. Of all people in the known world, they were the least governed; of all men the Englishman was the freest, little more being required of him than that he should live on good terms with his neighbours. Doubtless one of these neighbours was the brutal Norman noble who regarded him as an inferior being of an inferior race, and as a landlord oppressed him. Outside this relation of landlord and tenant, and of superior and inferior, he lived a free man among his fellows without, indeed, the dignity and honour of being a soldier, but also without his constant subjection and unrelaxing discipline. He was a boor, but his thoughts were his own; and his language, being different from that of his oppressor, afforded him an additional protection. He lived in his own world—he lived apart among his own race and kindred.

The other nations on the continent of Europe, notably France, lay open to one another’s ravages; and for that reason had always to remain under arms, every man a soldier, martial law superseding all other laws. However England might war with other nations, however she might despoil them, pursuit and revenge were impossible; behind her cliffs she was safe. No matter how great the cloud of hatred or what it threatened, she lived in security and laughed at her enemies. The peasant returned in peace to his village and his plough, the merchant to his shop, and the noble to his castle; while crimes that could not be punished left no visitings of remorse. The English grew in liberty and in the arts of peace while other nations grew in the arts of war and lost their liberty. The English poor man was never taught his military dignity, but he was taught his social inferiority; yet, while he bowed down, as he still does, before his social superior, his thoughts remained free; the better part of liberty remained to him. Froissart was astonished at the squalor in which the English peasant lived; yet, had he looked a little closer, he would have seen that under the smouldering ashes on his hearth a fire was burning that had long been extinct in his own country.

The French government was a military despotism, and since tyranny begets tyranny and seeks to extend itself, it speedily drew to itself the forces of religion, art and education, and allied them in one vast conspiracy against the forces of freedom; so that from the first the people were trained in submission to power, authority and tradition. It was an eager and spontaneous submission, the soldier proud to follow his captain, the student eager to listen to his teacher, and the Catholic anxious to obey the command of his priest. The people were accomplices in their own enthralment; the more so since there was this discretion reserved in the exercise of dominion: all were free to think out and draw their own conclusions, provided that the State, the Church, and the academies furnished the premises. Deductive logic was free; inductive logic, the higher order, the kings, soldiers, magistrates and statesmen kept in their own hands. As time advanced the French became a nation of teachers and orators as well as soldiers, while the creative impulse was everywhere arrested and hampered Welded together and bound and clamped into a nation by their military and ecclesiastical organizations, the French rapidly acquired the instinct of solidarity; and the individual dwindled until he became a mere unit of the state. This feeling of solidarity combined with the free exercise of deductive logic, resulting in a fertility of beautiful ideas—beautiful as rainbows on a stormy sky—and the missionary habit. Of all men the Frenchman is the most picturesque and the most attractive, as he is also the most eloquent and the most persuasive. In literature, in life, in everything, the French genius is social and sympathetic and propagandist.

The Englishman is the contrary of all this. He has a passion for liberty and cares little for equality, fraternity, or any of the ideals which are the glory of the French intellect. He is, indeed, so entirely without the faculty of ideas that even his feeling for liberty has never become an idea or a doctrine; he has no intellectual cognizance of it; it is merely his habit. A something which from long use has grown into him and become part almost of his physiology, it is in his blood and in his bones and remains by him always, keeping vigilant watch and ward. But it is for himself alone; it is not for universal application; it is not his philosophy. So that when he robs another nation, as in the case of India or Ireland, and, in order to facilitate the theft, first takes away that nation’s liberty, his conscience does not smite him, for by liberty he always means English liberty, which includes the privilege of robbing any nation that is weak enough to stand it. To me a Frenchman is always like a student; either as he is when he works diligently at his studies or as he is when he plays truant, breaks away from discipline, and defies his teachers. An Englishman, on the other hand, is a person untutored, who has never been either to school or to college; he has neither the attractiveness of the diligent student nor the excesses of the rebel student. He is still almost what he was when he came first from his Maker’s hands.

Besides his exemption from military organization and a central government, there is yet another fact to be noted in the Englishman’s history. A peaceful immigration into his country has been as difficult as a warlike invasion. In other countries, when the population was reduced by plague and pestilence, the void was quickly filled up by an inrush of hungry foreigners; in England this was impossible. There a sudden fall in population meant a sudden rise in the abundance of food, because there was no one to come from outside to take the food out of men’s mouths. The population of mediÆval England remained always small. The Englishman’s native joviality and ease of heart were his song of triumph over a condition in which, if he managed to survive, he lived easily and fed well and clothed himself warmly. If other people died, so much the worse for them and the better for him. To this day the Englishman takes extraordinary care of his health. The French and Irish contempt for death is to him a continual and a shocking surprise. He never needed to work hard; he faced no great struggles; he merely took care of his health.

In those far-off days of ease, little work, and much mortality the Englishman acquired all his habits, all his positive and negative qualities, together with that fear of death which we know oppressed Dr. Johnson; and though the last hundred years have much blunted his characteristics, the pattern still remains. He is still given to much self-contemplation in its various forms of self-complacency, self-examination, self-condemnation, and self-exultation. He talks continually of himself; deprived of that subject and of what is akin to it, he is a silent man. Not to be the subject of conversation, neither to be praised nor abused, is to him a disconcerting experience. He is not vain; it is merely that his occupation is gone. The Americans are too busy with their own growing fortunes to remember his existence, and for that reason he is, here in New York, either so gentle and sad or so peppery and quarrelsome as to be quite unrecognizable. He is no longer himself. In his own country he is an unwearied egotist. When pleased it is with himself, when displeased it is still with himself. With his neighbours he is often sulky; yet his worst quarrels are with himself, and therefore the hardest to reconcile. His variations are variations not of idea, but of mood. The French live in a ferment of opinion; it is their atmosphere—man contending against man with noise, vociferation, oratory, and much action and movement. Among the English there is always the silence of inward communing, the stillness of a people overweighted with meditation. In France new schools of art and movements in literature are the triumphs or—it may be—the eccentricities and freaks of the logical process. In England such movements mean the welcome or unwelcome emergence into light of a new species. French impressionism was ushered into the world with loud argument. Turner’s art was something inscrutable and mysterious, the expression of a temperament that did not argue and looked for no converts. Under any strong excitement the Englishman withdraws into himself as into the security of his own home. The Frenchman, on the contrary, gets away from himself into the world of friends and ideas and starts a propaganda to embrace the world. He seeks to impress; his literature and art are full of dramatic surprises, while English art and literature have always avoided startling effects; and, if they impress, do so accidentally, as a tall mountain might the people who lived in the valley. They continually spring forth from the mysterious depths of personality, and, concerning themselves only with moods of feeling, rely for expression on rhythm and music. A personality cannot explain itself or account for itself; it can only cure its ache and soothe its irritability by the music—the long-drawn-out or fantastic music of artistic creation. French art and literature concern themselves with ideas, and their effort is to make these brilliant, orderly and specious, using the emphasis and animation and sonorousness of art rather that its deeper music. So that in France they watch for a distinguished intellect, while in England we look for an individuality that is at once powerful, strange, and intimate, its expression intelligible only to those who have explored the farthest recesses of consciousness. In France we find a garden, in England a wilderness. Yet, do not forget, the gardener will often visit the wilderness in search for new plants and shrubs. The inductive mind sows that which the deductive mind plants out and waters.

The egotist is popularly supposed to be a wearisome chatterbox incessantly talking about himself; and such men do abound in England. An egotist is any man who habitually and instinctively makes himself, his likings and dislikings, the sole test of truth; and it is only when there is some streak of folly or childishness that he becomes the garrulous chatterbox. Of these men some are delightful humorists, as was Charles Lamb, or undelightful, as was his boisterous brother John. Among them are, in fact, all sorts, including all the bores, cranks and faddists, with the innumerable company of monologists; including also the great pioneers and forerunners of thought in poetry and art: the Shakespeares, Turners, Hogarths, and Constables.

Socially, the egotist, where there is not some great compensating charm, is a failure; he does not amalgamate; he is ever an alien in the company, a difficult person. You don’t know whether to make much of him or drop him altogether. At a dinner-party the Englishman is apt to be that sad mistake, a guest who has to be apologized for. Lovers are always poor company except with each other. This is proverbial, and the Englishman is always in love—that is, with himself. The sociable man, the welcome guest, is in love with other people. As it is in the lighter matters of social intercourse, so it is in graver matters. Gladstone, who, as a Scotchman in England, was an acute critic, once wrote that the Englishman needed a great deal of discipline; and this is true. A community whose members are not spontaneously amenable to one another’s feelings must have definite rules laid down and enforced by definite penalties. On the other hand, the Frenchman, with his social impulses and social training, knows “how to behave.” He does not need to get rules by heart, for he has intuition; and where he has not this inner light he turns naturally to reason, the great sociable spirit, the friendly arbiter, the wise judge before whom all men are equal. The English egotist has not this social impulse; neither does he willingly appeal to reason. Latterly he has become saturated with class feeling, which is neither sociable nor reasonable; but his original instinct, to which he constantly returns, is to regard himself as neither a superior nor an inferior, but different; a humorist who cannot be classed and to whom no general rules can apply; and such a man will not readily appeal to a tribunal before which all men are equal.

The Frenchman is a gentleman; he has the finer instinct, the finer training, and the finer intelligence; wanting these, the Englishman has to be taught by the cumbrous methods of reward and punishment; he learns under the whip and becomes more like a well-trained animal than a reasonable human being. Yet—such is the blessedness of mere habit—even he ends by doing quite cheerfully what he learned most unwillingly. Legality, hard-and-fast rules that must not be broken and that are interpreted in the narrowest spirit, depressing enough in all conscience although they be, are to him an enjoyment and a matter of incessant thought; since if they circumscribe, they also define and secure the spaces of personal liberty. They are his substitute for ideas, and, if they excite no enthusiasm and are some of them admittedly bad, all the same, he makes it his glad duty to obey them. Outside these laws he is intractable and inclined to be surly, quarrels with his neighbours, and is as jealous and suspicious of his rights as a dog with a bone. Yet the Englishman is not unhappy. He has the happiness of a perpetual self-complacency. Indeed, your self-absorbed egotist will sometimes extract enjoyment of a kind out of the consciousness that he is a wet blanket and a perpetual embarrassment and kill-joy; it does not quicken the pulses, but it flatters his sense of power, and, strange as it may seem, his sense of hatred. At any rate, I have met such men both in England and elsewhere. And yet there is another side to the picture; for this self-contained egotist, when trained in a good school and taught the amenities of good behaviour, and when he has received the discipline which Gladstone said he so much needed, utters the best kind of talk, since it flows not out of the logic which divides, but out of the inner personality which makes the whole world kin. There is in his conversation almost always a flavour of the intimate and the confidential. He listens well, too, and never contradicts or seeks to convince. Indeed, it disappoints him to find one opinion where he thought there had been two. Cultivated Englishmen talking together are like men sitting in the woods through a long summer’s night and listening during the intervals of silence to the noise made by a near-by stream or of a wind among the branches or to the singing of a nightingale. So always should mortals talk: clamorous and confident argument are the resource of the intellectual half-breed.

Out of his habit of mind the egotist gains two valuable qualities. First of all he learns how to manage himself. This, of course, is not the same as the high and difficult art of self-mastery, yet it counts for much that a man should know how to get the best and leave out the worst from his life, even though that life be in its essential mean and meagre or vicious and self-indulgent. Self-management, smooth and adroit, is eminently the Englishman’s accomplishment. The other quality is still more important; the egotist makes the best of all husbands if regard be had to the ordinary woman’s needs; for what are these if they are not all summed up in the one word—companionship? Now a wife cannot find a sufficing companionship in her husband’s business concerns. Here she is beaten by the confidential clerk. There is, however, one kind of friendship, one kind of companionship, which she alone can supply in the required abundance; it is when the husband talks of himself. Here is the chamber into which the wife enters willingly when everybody else keeps away: the husband’s talk of his pains and aches and tribulations. There is the pain in his knee or his elbow, or the never-to-be-sufficiently-indicated pain in his head or his back, or his cough, and how it differs from every previous cough in his experience, or bears a dangerous resemblance to some other body’s cough, together with the innumerable aches of his wounded and exaggerated self-love. All this wearisome detail about what is mostly nothing at all and which everybody else flees from, the “pleasing wife” listens to with an attentive and intelligent and credulous ear. It is her duty, or so she thinks it, and the greater the intelligence the greater the credulity. There are happy wives married to husbands whom it would bore to talk about themselves, but the happiest woman, in whom content ripens to its fullest, is the egotist’s wife. Like a bee in a flower, she hides herself almost out of sight in wifely devotion. He finds happiness in living in and for himself, she in living out of herself and in him. Both are pleased. This is English conjugal life as I have observed it; and here in perfection we have side by side our two methods of human growth.