现代大学英语精读6-notes-on-english-character

First note I had better let the cat out of the bag at once and record my opinion that the character of the English is essentially middle class There is a sound historical reason for this for since the end of the eighteenth century the middle classes have been the dominant force in our community They gained wealth by the Industrial Revolution political power by the Reform Bill of 1832 they are connected with the rise and organization of the British Empire they are responsible for the literature of the nineteenth century Solidity caution integrity efficiency Lack of imagination hypocrisy These qualities characterize the middle classes in every country but in England they are national characteristics also because only in England have the middle classes been in power for one hundred and fifty years Napoleon in his rude way called us a nation of shopkeepers We prefer to call ourselves a great commercial nation it sounds more dignified but the two phrases amount to the same Of course there are other classes there is an aristocracy there are the poor But it is on the middle classes that the eye of the critic rests just as it rests on the poor in Russia and on the aristocracy in Japan Russia is symbolized by the peasant or by the factory worker Japan by the samurai the national figure of England is Mr Bull with his top hat his comfortable clothes his substantial stomach and his substantial balance at the bank Saint George may caper on banners and in the speeches of politicians but it is John Bull who delivers the goods And even Saint George if Gibbon is correct wore a top hat once he was an army contractor and supplied indifferent bacon It all amounts to the same in the end Second Note Just as the heart of England is the middle classes so the heart of the middle classes is the public school system This extraordinary institution is local It does not even exist all over the British Isles It is unknown in Ireland almost unknown in Scotland countries excluded from my survey and though it may inspire other great institutions Aligarh for example and some of the schools in the United States it remains unique because it was created by the Anglo Saxon middle classes and can flourish only where they flourish How perfectly it expresses their character far better for instance than does the university into which social and spiritual complexities have already entered With its boarding houses its compulsory games its system of prefects and fagging its insistence on good form and on esprit de corps it produces a type whose weight is out of all proportion to its numbers On leaving his school the boy either sets to work at once goes into the army or into business or emigrates or else proceeds to the university and after three or four years there enters some other profession becomes a barrister doctor civil servant schoolmaster or journalist If through some mishap he does not become a manual worker or an artist In all these careers his education or the absence of it influences him Its memories influence him also Many men look back on their school days as the happiest of their lives They remember with regret that golden time when life though hard was not yet complex when they all worked together and played together and thought together so far as they thought at all when they were taught that school is the world in miniature and believed that no one can love his country who does not love his school And they prolong that time as best they can by joining their Old Boys society indeed some of them remain Old Boys and nothing else for the rest of their lives They attribute all good to the school They worship it They quote the remark that The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton It is nothing to them that the remark is inapplicable historically and was never made by the Duke of Wellington and that the Duke of Wellington was an Irishman They go on quoting it because it expresses their sentiments they feel that if the Duke of Wellington didn t make it he ought to have and if he wasn t an Englishman he ought to have been And they go forth into a world that is not entirely composed of public school men or even of Anglo Saxons but of men who are as various as the sands of the sea into a world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception They go forth into it with well developed bodies fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts And it is this undeveloped heart that is largely responsible for the difficulties of Englishmen abroad An undeveloped heart not a cold one The difference is important and on it my next note will be based For it is not that the Englishman can t feel it is that he is afraid to feel He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form He must not express great joy or sorrow or even open his mouth too wide when he talks his pipe might fall out if he did He must bottle up his emotions or let them out only on a very special occasion Once upon a time this is an anecdote I went for a week s holiday on the Continent with an Indian friend We both enjoyed ourselves and were sorry when the week was over but on parting our behaviour was absolutely different He was plunged in despair He felt that because the holiday was over all happiness was over until the world ended He could not express his sorrow too much But in me the Englishman came out strong I reflected that we should meet again in a month or two and could write in the interval if we had anything to say and under these circumstances I could not see what there was to make a fuss about It wasn t as if we were parting forever or dying Buck up I said do buck up He refused to buck up and I left him plunged in gloom The conclusion of the anecdote is even more instructive For when we met the next month our conversation threw a good deal of light on the English character I began by scolding my friend I told him that he had been wrong to feel and display so much emotion upon so slight an occasion that it was inappropriate The word inappropriate roused him to fury What he cried Do you measure out your emotions as if they were potatoes I did not like the simile of the potatoes but after a moment s reflection I said Yes I do and what s more I think I ought to A small occasion demands a little emotion just as a large occasion demands a great one I would like my emotions to be appropriate This may be measuring them like potatoes but it is better than slopping them about like water from a pail which is what you did He did not like the simile of the pail If those are your opinions they part us forever he cried and left the room Returning immediately he added No but your whole attitude toward emotion is wrong Emotion has nothing to do with appropriateness It matters only that it shall be sincere I happened to feel deeply I showed it It doesn t matter whether I ought to have felt deeply or not This remark impressed me very much Yet I could not agree with it and said that I valued emotion as much as he did but used it differently if I poured it out on small occasions I was afraid of having none left for the great ones and of being bankrupt at the crises of life Note the word bankrupt I spoke as a member of a prudent middle class nation always anxious to meet my liabilities but my friend spoke as an Oriental and the Oriental has behind him a tradition not of middle class prudence but of kingly munificence and splendour He feels his resources are endless just as John Bull feels his are finite As regards material resources the Oriental is clearly unwise Money isn t endless If we spend or give away all the money we have we haven t any more and must take the consequences which are frequently unpleasant But as regards the resources of the spirit he may be right The emotions may be endless The more we express them the more we may have to express True love in this differs from gold and clay That to divide is not to take away Says Shelley Shelley at all events believes that the wealth of the spirit is endless that we may express it copiously passionately and always that we can never feel sorrow or joy too acutely In the above anecdote I have figured as a typical Englishman I will now descend from that dizzy and somewhat unfamiliar height and return to my business of notetaking A note on the slowness of the English character The Englishman appears to be cold and unemotional because he is really slow When an event happens he may understand it quickly enough with his mind but he takes quite a while to feel it Once upon a time a coach containing some Englishmen and some Frenchmen was driving over the Alps The horses ran away and as they were dashing across a bridge the coach caught on the stonework tottered and nearly fell into the ravine below The Frenchmen were frantic with terror they screamed and gesticulated and flung themselves about as Frenchmen would The Englishmen sat quite calm An hour later the coach drew up at an inn to change horses and by that time the situations were exactly reversed The Frenchmen had forgotten all about the danger and were chattering gaily the Englishmen had just begun to feel it and one had a nervous breakdown and was obliged to go to bed We have here a clear physical difference between the two races a difference that goes deep into character The Frenchmen responded at once the Englishmen responded in time They were slow and they were also practical Their instinct forbade them to throw themselves about in the coach because it was more likely to tip over if they did They had this extraordinary appreciation of fact that we shall notice again and again When a disaster comes the English instinct is to do what can be done first and to postpone the feeling as long as possible Hence they are splendid at emergencies No doubt they are brave no one will deny that bravery is partly an affair of the nerves and the English nervous system is well equipped for meeting physical emergency It acts promptly and feels slowly Such a combination is fruitful and anyone who possesses it has gone a long way toward being brave And when the action is over then the Englishman can feel There is one more consideration a most important one If the English nature is cold how is it that it has produced a great literature and a literature that is particularly great in poetry Judged by its prose English literature would not stand in the first rank It is its poetry that raises it to the level of Greek Persian or French And yet the English are supposed to be so unpoetical How is this The nation that produced the Elizabethan drama and the Lake Poets cannot be a could unpoetical nation We can t get fire out of ice Since literature always rests upon national character there must be in the English nature hidden springs of fire to produce the fire we see The warm sympathy the romance the imagination that we look for in Englishmen whom we meet and too often vainly look for must exist in the nation as a whole or we could not have this outburst of national song An undeveloped heart not a cold one The trouble is that the English nature is not at all easy to understand It has a great air of simplicity it advertises itself as simple but the more we consider it the greater the problems we shall encounter People talk of the mysterious East but the West also is mysterious It has depths that do not reveal themselves at the first gaze We know what the sea looks like from a distance it is of one color and level and obviously cannot contain such creatures as fish But if we look into the sea over the edge of a boat we see a dozen colors and depth below depth and fish swimming in them That sea is the English character apparently imperturbable and even These depths and the colors are the English romanticism and the English sensitiveness we do not expect to find such things but they exist And to continue my metaphor the fish are the English emotions which are always trying to get up to the surface but don t quite know how For the most part we see them moving far below distorted and obscure Now and then they succeed and we exclaim Why the Englishman has emotions He actually can feel And occasionally we see that beautiful creature the flying fish which rises out of the water altogether into the air and the sunlight English literature is a flying fish It is a sample of the life that goes on day after day beneath the surface it is a proof that beauty and emotion exist in the salt inhospitable sea And now let s get back to terra firma The Englishman s attitude toward criticism will give us another starting point He is not annoyed by criticism He listens or not as the case may be smiles and passes on saying Oh the fellow s jealous Oh I m used to Bernard Shaw monkey tricks don t hurt me It never occurs to him that the fellow may be accurate as well as jealous and that he might do well to take the criticism to heart and profit by it It never strikes him except as a form of words that he is capable of improvement his self complacency is abysmal Other nations both Oriental and European have an uneasy feeling that they are not quite perfect In consequence they resent criticism It hurts them and their snappy answers often mask a determination to improve themselves Not so the Englishman He has no uneasy feeling Let the critics bark And the tolerant humorous attitude with which he confronts them is not really humorous because it is bounded by the titter and the guffaw Turn over the pages of Punch There is neither wit laughter nor satire in our national jester only the snigger of a suburban householder who can understand nothing that does not resemble himself Week after week under Mr Punch s supervision a man falls off his horse or a colonel misses a golfball or a little girl makes a mistake in her prayers Week after week ladies show not too much of their legs foreigners are deprecated originality condemned Week after week a bricklayer does not do as much work as he ought and a futurist does more than he need It is all supposed to be so good tempered and clean it is also supposed to be funny It is actually an outstanding example of our attitude toward criticism the middle class Englishman with a smile on his clean shaven lips is engaged in admiring himself and ignoring the rest of mankind If in those colorless pages he came across anything that really was funny a drawing by Max Beerbohm for instance his smile would disappear and he would say to himself The fellow s a bit of a crank and pass on This particular attitude reveals such insensitiveness as to suggest a more serious charge is the Englishman altogether indifferent to the things of the spirit Let us glance for a moment at his religion not indeed at his theology which would not merit inspection but at the action on his daily life of his belief in the unseen Here again his attitude is practical But an innate decency comes out he is thinking of others rather than of himself Right conduct is his aim He asks of his religion that it shall make him a better man in daily life that he shall be more kind more just more merciful more desirous to fight what is evil and to protect what is good No one could call this a low conception It is as far as it goes a spiritual one Yet and this seems to be typical of the race it is only half the religious idea Religion is more than an ethical code with a divine sanction It is also a means through which man may get into direct connection with the divine and judging by history few Englishmen have succeeded in doing this We have produced no series of prophets as has Judaism or Islam We have not even produced a Joan of Arc or a Savonarola We have produced few saints In Germany the Reformation was due to the passionate conviction of Luther In England it was due to palace intrigue We can show a steady level of piety a fixed determination to live decently according to our lights little more Well it is something It clears us of the charge of being an unspiritual nation That facile contrast between the spiritual East and the materialistic West can be pushed too far The West also is spiritual Only it expresses its belief not in fasting and visions not in prophetic rapture but in the daily round the common task An incomplete expression if you like I agree But the argument underlying these scattered notes is that the Englishman is an incomplete person Not a cold or an unspiritual one But undeveloped incomplete I have suggested earlier that the English are sometimes hypocrites and it is not my duty to develop this rather painful subject Hypocrisy is the prime charge that is always brought against us The Germans are called brutal the Spanish cruel the Americans superficial and so on but we are perfide Albion the island of hypocrites the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand a pistol in the other and financial concessions in both pockets Is the charge true I think it is but what we mean by hypocrisy Do we mean conscious deceit Well the English are comparatively guiltless of this they have little of the Renaissance villain about them Do we mean unconscious deceit Muddle headedness Of this I believe them to be guilty When an Englishman has been led into a course of wrong action he has nearly always begun by muddling himself A public school education does not make for mental clearness and he possesses to a very high degree the power of confusing his own mind How does it work in the domain of conduct Jane Austen may seem an odd authority to cite but Jane Austen has within her limits a marvelous insight into the English mind Her range is limited her characters never attempt any of the more scarlet sins But she has a merciless eye for questions of conduct and the classical example of two English people muddling themselves before they embark upon a wrong course of action is to be found in the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility Old Mr Dashwood has just died He has been twice married By his first marriage he has a son John by his second marriage three daughters