The Egregious English

T. W. H. Crosland

The Egregious English

Published by Good Press, 2019

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EAN 4064066151188

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CHAPTER I

APOLLO

It has become the Englishman's habit, one might almost say the Englishman's instinct, to take himself for the head and front of the universe. The order of creation began, we are told, in protoplasm. It has achieved at length the Englishman. Herein are the culmination and ultimate glory of evolutionary processes. Nature, like the seventh-standard boy in a board school, can get no higher. She has made the Englishman, and her work therefore is done. For the continued progress of the world and all that in it is, the Englishman will make due provision. He knows exactly what is wanted, and by himself it shall be supplied. There is little that can be considered distinguishingly English which does not reflect this point of view. As an easy-going, entirely confident, imperturbable piece of arrogance, the Englishman has certainly no mammalian compeer. Even in the blackest of his troubles he perceives that he is great. I shall muddle through, he says. He is expected and understood to muddle through; and, muddle through or not, he invariably believes he has done it. Sheer complacency bolsters him up on every hand. At his going forth the rest of the world is fain to abase itself in the dust. He is the strong man, the white man of white men. He is the rich, clean sportsman, the incomparable, the fearless, the intolerable. And by Englishman the world has learned not to mean Briton. The world has been taught to discriminate. It has regarded the Britannic brotherhood; and though it forgets that the Gael and the Celt are Britons, it takes its Englishman for a Briton, only with a difference. On the other hand, it is keenly sensible of sundry facts—as that it is the Englishman who rules the waves and the Englishman upon whose dominions the sun never sets; that the British flag is the English flag, the British army the English army, and the British navy the English navy, and that Scotland and Ireland, with Wales, are English appanages. It would be foolish to assert that the Englishman has greatly concerned himself in either the promulgation or the acceptance of these notions. But he holds them dear, and they are ineradicably planted in his subconsciousness.

One is inclined to think, however, that, while the supremacy and superiority of the Englishman have been received without traverse in his own dominions, there are those in outer darkness—on the Continent, in Ireland, and even in Scotland—who admit no such supremacy and no such superiority. Nay, there be persons breathing the breath of life who, so far from looking upon the Englishman with the eyes with which the early savage must have regarded Captain Cook, look upon him with the eyes with which Captain Cook regarded the early savage. In Ireland, particularly, hatred of the English has become a deep-grounded national characteristic. The French dislike of perfidious Albion may be reckoned to a great extent an intermittent matter. It sputters and flares when a Fashoda or a Boer War comes along, and it has a way of finding its deadliest expression in caricature. But the Irish hatred is as persistent and concrete as it is ancient. In Scotland the feeling about the English amounts in the main to good-humoured tolerance, touched with a certain amazement. The least cultivated of Scotsmen—and such a man is quite a different being from the least cultivated of Englishmen—will tell you that thae English are chiefly notable by reason of their profound ignorance and a ridiculous passion for the dissipation of money. The Scot of the middle class thinks his neighbour is a feckless, foolish person who would pass muster if he could be serious, and who has got what he possesses by good luck rather than by good management. Up to a point both are right, for the English in the mass are at once much more ignorant and much less thrifty than the people of Scotland, and their good-nature and happy-go-luckiness are things to set a Scot moralising.

Years ago Matthew Arnold put the right names on the two more creditable and powerful sections of English society. The aristocracy he set down for Barbarians, the middle class for Philistines. The aristocracy were inaccessible to ideas, he said; the middle class admired and loved the aristocracy. It is so to this day, and so to an extent which is in entire consonance with the circumstance that for sheer stupidity the Englishman of the upper class is without parallel, while the Englishman of the middle class cannot be paralleled for snobbishness. Arnold's complaint that neither class was a reading class or at all devoted to the higher matters still holds. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman whom Tennyson sang and at whom Arnold gibed is still with us. That he is as great and as broad-shouldered and as genial as ever nobody will deny. And, broadly speaking, his outlook upon life remains exactly what it was. To be ruddy and healthy, to go out mornings with dogs, to dine hilariously and dance evenings, to be generous to the poor, and to honour oneself and the King are the rule of his life if he be a Barbarian; and to ape these things and consider them gifts of price, if he be a Philistine. Since Arnold, however, the Englishman, egregious though he undoubtedly was, has taken unto himself a new and altogether alarming demerit. Out of his love of health and ease and security and pleasure and well-ordered materialism there has sprung up a trouble which is like to cost him exceeding dear—a trouble, in fact, which, if he be not careful, will go far to emasculate him, if not wholly to destroy him. Of the higher matters, as has been said, he has taken but the smallest heed. Writer fellows, painter fellows, philosopher Johnnies, and so forth are not of his world, except in so far as they may entertain his women-folk, or deck his halls with commercial canvas, or assist him in the eking out of his small talk before dessert. It is not to be expected of him that he should take to his heart persons whom he cannot by any possibility understand. Even Arnold could forgive him that failing. It was the build of the man, the breed and constitution of him, that justified him. But since, being English, he has found his way to the unpardonable sin. It was well that he should despise persons who, however much they might think, did little and got little for doing it. It was well that brains which could not sit a horse, and preferred bed to the moors, and had no rent-roll, should be despised. It would have been well, too, if that other kind of brains, which, beginning with nothing, ends in millionairedom and flagrant barbarianism, might also have continued to be despised and to be kept at arm's-length. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, however, has succumbed. Park Lane has become a Ghetto; my lord's house parties reek of gentlemen with noses, and names ending in baum; and the English Houses of Parliament, the finest club in Europe, the mother of parliaments, the most dignified assemblage under the sun, is just a branch of the Stock Exchange. As the exceedingly clever young man who recently wrote a book about the Scot might say, this shows what the English really are.

It has been remarked, and possibly not without truth, that the Scot keeps the Sabbath and everything else he can lay his hands upon. He is credited with being the perfect money-grubber; his desire for competence, we have been told by the clever young man before mentioned, has blighted his soul and brought him into opprobrium among Turks and Chinamen. Well, the Scot does look after money: he desires competence, he loves independence; and, when he can get them, ease and pleasure are gratifying to him. If he comes off the rock and attains affluence, he is not averse to the goodnesses that affluence commands. He will start a castle and a carriage and a coat-of-arms with the best of them; he will lift up his family and leave his children well provided for. In these connections he is just as human as the next man; but he never has played and he never will play the English game of lavishness and wastefulness and swaggering profusion, and, least of all, will he play it on a basis of undesirable association. The Scotsman who has compassed wealth, even though he be the son of a mole-catcher or a sweetie-wife or a Glasgow beer-seller, can always remember that there is such a thing as spiritual integrity. And though he may or may not boo and boo and boo in accordance with the good old kindly English legend, he certainly will not do it in Jews' houses. This, I take it, is where he has some little advantage over Englishmen.

Perhaps no finer indication of the English spirit, and of the greed and corruption that have overtaken it, could have been offered than has been offered by the trend of recent events in South Africa. To go thoroughly over the ground in such an essay as the present is, of course, impossible; to state the arguments for both sides would be to reproduce writing of which everybody is heartily tired. The battling newspapers have said their say, and we are just beginning to feel the comfort of a more or less reasonable settlement. All that need be said here is that the Englishman has not come out of this war with anything like the honour and the glory and the éclat that he has been accustomed to expect of himself in similar undertakings. His bodily prowess, his hardihood, his Spartan capacity for withstanding the rigours of campaigning, his military abilities, and his very patriotism have all had to be called in question during the past two and a half years. When he went out to the fray, his cry was, Ha! ha! and the war was to be over in six weeks. He had the finest equipment, the finest munitions, the finest men, the finest system, the world had seen. He was as fit as a fiddle and as hard as nails, and his love of