English Traits: One Hundred Years Later

by HENRY STEELE COMMAGER

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IT Is a little over a century ago that Ralph Waldo Emerson landed at Liverpool, spoke famously at Manchester, visited and lectured throughout England, and began writing that wonderful essay on English traits which remains the most astute and penetrating analysis of the English character in our literature. We expect perspicacity from the wisest American of his day: even from Emerson we have no right to expect prophecy, yet what is perhaps most remarkable about English Traits is its instinct for the permanent rather than for the transient. For if we review those traits which Emerson distinguished as peculiarly English we find that most of them persist today, flourishing vigorously after a century which has changed profoundly the position of Britain in the world, flourishing defiantly in an England dedicated to austerity and prudence as a century ago she was dedicated to luxury and power.

And not only do English traits persist, but the reasons which Emerson submitted for American interest in them. For it is still true, as Emerson observed, that “the whole world is an interested party,” and particularly the American world. It is still true — as all whose memories go back to 1940 will acknowledge — that “the stability of England is the security of the modern world.” It is still true that “what lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish to see England is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race — its commanding sense of right and wrong.” It is still, was may hope, true that “let who will fail, England will not fail.” It is still true, in short, that the American concern for the English character is lively, personal, interested, and justified.

National character is, to be sure, everywhere wonderfully tenacious, but nowhere is it more tenacious than with the English, who have, after all something of a patent on tenacity. And this is the first and most obvious of English traits — the stability and permanence of the English character. Come hell or high water, the Englishman remains imperturbably English. He is, it would seem, less alfected by the currents and crosscurrents of history than people of any other nation; he is less affected, too, by passing fashions whether of literature or of dress or of food. Nothing will make him false to his word or discourteous to his guest; nothing will keep him from his tea or change his cooking.

For a hundred and fifty years — from John Adams to Frank Dobie — Americans have been busy describing the English. That they have so largely repeated each other is a comment not on their lack of originality but on a persistence of national traits almost monotonous. It makes, perhaps, for dullness, but there is this to be said about England: you can count on her, you can set your sights by her, you can almost set your watch by her. “What kind of people do they think we are?” cried Churchill at a fateful moment in history, and those who forgot what kind of people they were — the Germans and the French, for example — paid heavily for their failure.

Yet what is interesting about all this is that while the underlying character has remained palpably the same, that character itself is no simple thing, but wonderfully complex and even paradoxical. “England is the land of mixture and surprise,” wrote Emerson, and the mixture has perplexed most of the interpreters. For the English character is not only stable and uniform, but various and heterogeneous; it is at once obvious and elusive, and almost every generalization must be not so much qualified as confounded.

A materialistic people — who can doubt it? — the English have produced more than their share of mystics and poets, of idealists and transcendentalists, more than their share of the Donnes and Herberts, the Blakes and Shelleys, the Wordsworths and Coleridges, the Foxes and Penns. The greatest colonizing people of modern times, they confess the most passionate attachment to their own country, their own county, their own community: they are at once the most indefatigable globe-trotters and the best gardeners. Their wealth and their wanderlust have enabled them to know the best of all other nations, but they remain true to their own: they carry their language with them wherever they go, and though every Englishman delights in French cooking, none permits his chef to imitate it.

A small nation, with a population highly mobile and highly urban, their differences in idiom and dialect and accent are the despair of foreigners; Vermonters and Texans can understand each other better than men from Devon and Lancashire, or from Glasgow and London, and if the observation that the best English is spoken in Dublin is an exaggeration, it is interesting that it should be made: no one ever suggested that the best American was spoken in Toronto. A unified and harmonious people, the English have persisted in class distinctions, and divisions far more ostentatious than those to be found in most other countries; while politically they have achieved as great a degree of democracy as any other people, they remain class-conscious, and every Englishman is branded on the tongue with his class mark.

A peaceful people, tender and kind, they are, when aroused, the most belligerent of men, good friends and bad enemies, with the indomitable qualities of the bulldog. Allegedly without a sense of humor, or with a belated one, they have produced, after all, the greatest humorists of our time, and the nation which boasted Herbert Spencer boasted, at the same time, Gilbert and Sullivan. The most law-abiding of people, they write the best of all detective and mystery stories and their literature is stained with violence. Monuments of conformity — no sin is more grievous than to do what is not done — they are at the same time passionate individualists, and the nation where nonconformity is a term of rebuke is that in which eccentricity flourishes unrestrained.

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THIS is all paradox, and it is perhaps an additional paradox that the English character, though sometimes paradoxical, is rarely puzzling and never unreliable. The broad traits are clear enough; they persist through the years, they run through all classes of society. The qualities that tend to unify are far stronger than those which divide. What, then, are the traits which have persisted?

They are a law-abiding people. Probably no other people confess the same profound respect for the law, no other conform so instinctively to the rules and regulations of government or of any organization that has authority. They do not smoke where smoking is forbidden, or walk on grass in defiance of signs, nor do they dabble in the black market or try to evade payments on their income tax, or get out of place in a queue. Property is safe, women and children are safe, life is safe, and the critic George Orwell has recently suggested that the trait which distinguishes the English from all other people is their habit of not killing one another. Nor does all this rest upon law, or upon the police force: the whole of society is one vast law-enforcement agency and public opinion is fiercely hostile to law-breakers and rule-breakers.

That the English pay a price for this trait cannot be doubted. They are, if anything, too law-abiding and too acquiescent. They do not revolt readily enough against bad laws and troublesome regulations, but where law is concerned, they take the attitude that theirs is not to reason why.

The English have a highly developed sense of justice and of right. No phrase is more commonly used, by the ordinary people, than “it’s right” or “it’s not right,” and that pretty much concludes the matter. They want to know where they stand, and they usually do. They believe in fair play, on the playing field and in the law courts and in business. They have little patience with subtlety or cleverness: they do not want rights that can be argued about. They hate all chicanery, all evasiveness and slipperiness. They are upright and downright, foursquare and simple and stanch. They carry their sense of justice over into the political realm — in large matters of national or international policy, in small matters which have their day as questions in the House. Their law is at once just and heartless, and in matters outside the law they are philanthropic but not charitable.

They believe that every man should have his due, neither more nor less, and they have contrived a complex and rigid system to see that each has his due — and no more nor less. The English instinct for observing laws should make most controls superfluous, but much of English life seems organized on the basis of suspicion rather than of trust, and an expensive and pernicious system of checks and controls permeates life. No Englishmen cheat on their railway tickets, yet where in America a single functionary looks at a ticket, in England there are no fewer than three who perform this unnecessary service. When you ride on a bus or in a subway, you must be ready to prove that you have paid for your ride. Accounts are kept scrupulously; the crossed check is an English invention, and a man could as easily burgle the Bank of England as cash a check where he is not known.

The insistence that every man have his due extends from formal arrangements, like food rationing, to informal relationships, like gratuities: it is the enemy not only of favoritism but of carelessness. Before he will admit you to his libraries or his schools, before he will trade with you even, the Englishman wants to know who you are and what claims you have on him, and he will make clear, too, what claims he has on you.

In all this the English are at once the most courteous and the most discourteous of people, and the combination has confused observers for two centuries. It is the courtesy that is instinctive and pervasive, displaying itself formally in the ease of all social relationships and the quiet efficiency of all public ones, and informally in a thousand little acts of thoughtfulness. It is in part the product of training and habit — no children are more courteous than the English; it springs from respect for the individual; it is inspired by natural kindliness. It is to be found alike in individuals, in organizations, and even in crowds; it is habitual but rarely, as with the French, ostentatious.

The discourtesy is a more complicated matter, a mixture of suspicion, indifference, and arrogance, and it is, as often as not, calculated. Its explanation, like that of so many English traits, can be found in the class structure and class-consciousness of English society, and the danger to that structure from anything either incomprehensible or inharmonious. Once an individual is placed, whether as publican or gentleman, as charwoman or lady, all is smooth, but the social sport, whose position and whose claims threaten the structure of the class society, is subject to endless rebuffs. For until he has presented acceptable credentials, the stranger is suspected of asking more than his due, usurping a position which is not his by right, making claims which may be unfounded. Nowhere is the accredited visitor received more hospitably, nowhere is the unaccredited stranger — one whose dress or accent betrays a dubious position — so coldly rebuffed.

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THE English are an intensely practical people, infatuated with common sense. They have produced few great speculative philosophers but many practical ones: Bacon and Locke, Bentham and Mill, Spencer and Huxley, are their typical products, not men like Spinoza or Kant. They like to see a program, and they judge by results. In politics they have a wonderful feeling for the practical and the actual, an instinctive repugnance for the doctrinaire. They distrust all extremes: their Conservatives are liberal and their Liberals conservative, and even their socialism is a bundle of compromises. They will not waste their votes, and they will not waste their time on men or parties that are too subtle or fanatical, and no people are less susceptible to demagoguery.

For all their open-mindedness and their tolerance, they are an intensely conservative people. They hate innovation, wrote Emerson, and their instinct is to search for a precedent. Even where they are forced to make changes, they change the substance rather than the form, and though English law is certainly as modern as American, the English judge still wears a wig and a King’s Counsel takes the silk. They know the advantages of steam heat but distrust anything quite so modern; all the propaganda of the Food Ministry has failed to introduce experiments in cooking, and they still have, as a French wit put it a century ago, but one sauce. Where to an American the fact that something has always been done a certain way is sufficient reason for changing it, to an Englishman it is sufficient reason for retaining it. When asked why Britain does not print an air-mail stamp instead of requiring two stamps to be pasted on every airmail letter that is not written on air-mail stationery, one of the most unconventional of British scholars answered simply that they never had printed special stamps—and thought the answer conclusive.

For all their conservatism the English are progressive, and it is a peculiarity of the English character to achieve revolution through evolution. Those who speak in the House of Commons are still required to wear a hat, but what they say is rather more radical than anything that can be heard in the American Congress, and if top hats are still required at Eton, education there seems to produce men fit for the responsibilities of the new day. Oxford and Cambridge are still, to all appearances, aristocratic and even feudal institutions, yet they select their students on the basis of talent and each takes a larger percentage of its student body on scholarships than any American university. Everywhere this process of evolutionary adjustment can be seen: ostentatiously in the realm of politics, less spectacularly in the church, in education, in the relations of labor and industry, in the military.

For all their conservatism, their phlegm, they are one of the most adventurous of people. What other nation boasts a comparable galaxy of explorers, mountain climbers, navigators; what other could maintain a Hakluyt Society? From the day of Drake and Frobisher to that of Doughty and Burton the English have led the way to the strange places of the earth — always carrying with them their Englishness, even their afternoon tea, for while they are wonderfully adaptable in large matters, they make no concessions in little ones. They penetrate every river, conquer every mountain, levy upon the whole globe for their collections of flora or fauna, or of esoteric lore, and the adventures of Richard Hannay were not wholly imaginative.

Although they are the greatest explorers and colonizers, and have spread the English language and laws throughout the earth, they are the most parochial of people. Even their patriotism is parochial rather than imperial, and Englishmen would find it hard to sing the praises of things they do not know as Americans of the prairie states sing the praises of rocks and rills, of woods and templed hills. The English love their own county rather than their nation, and every acre of England has its historian and its muse. The London Times and the Manchester Guardian give adequate attention to world news, but few other papers do, and English journalism, generally, is far less cosmopolitan than American.

Though proud of their Empire, the English know little about it, and they know even less of America. More Canadian history is taught at Columbia University than at Oxford, and over a period of a century and a half no English scholar has contributed anything of lasting importance to the study of American history or literature. In matters of language, too, they are parochial. They do not take readily to foreign languages, expecting foreigners rather to learn English, and they are still inclined to think the American language a sort of debased dialect.

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ENGLISH conservatism and parochialism are not unconnected with self-satisfaction. On the whole the English approve of themselves, as well they may. Instinctively, rather than intellectually, they know that theirs is the best of societies, and their highest compliment is still that a thing is “so English.” Recent events have, superficially, shaken this Gibraltar-like assurance of superiority, but it persists in little things, subconsciously as it were. Thus English scholars acknowledge the achievements of Harvard or Columbia or the University of Chicago, but they know in their hearts that Oxford and Cambridge are better, and when they are not on guard their pens slip into the assertion that their higher education is the highest in the world. Most of them are still convinced that the Times is the greatest newspaper in the world and that if a book is not in the Bodleian it is not literature. It was equally characteristic that an Oxford don should gravely inquire if any American law library had as many books as the library of his college, and that some passengers from Grimsby should refuse to touch any of the wonderful variety of fish prepared by the chef of the De Grasse because they knew no fish could compare with the fish of Grimsby.

The English have, needless to say, ground for complacency. It is still true, as Emerson remarked, that they make well those things which are ill made elsewhere in the world. It is not skill alone that accounts for the superiority of their automobiles or their moving pictures over the American, but certain traits of character. They believe in durability, and make things to last — cars and boots and houses, for example. They take pride in their work, and have infinite patience. They carry into affairs even of business their standards of integrity and propriety: if their books are not always exciting they are almost always well written; if their advertisements rarely lure, they do not outrage decency.

They are a thrifty people — thrifty of property, of speech, of their emotions above all. It is not merely that they prefer understatement to exaggeration; they suspect any public expression of emotion, verbal or by gesture. There is far less public love-making in England than in either America or France, and far less public manifestation of family affection. The English do not shout themselves hoarse at games, but are content to murmur “Well played,” and are careful to applaud the play rather than the team. They dislike a fuss and, above all, a scene; they will endure any discomfort rather than complain about it publicly, will waste an hour looking for a road rather than accost a stranger for information.

They are thrifty of the products of their minds, as well. They prefer, on the whole, a performance that is not too brilliant, a conversationalist who is not too clever. Churchill has been suspect, all his public life, for his incomparable oratorical gifts They distrust the ready speaker, the facile actor, the brilliant player, as they distrust men or women who are too well-dressed. They resist styles, prefer old clothes to new, and have made tweeds and the umbrella national emblems.

They have created a masculine country — a society made for men and run by men; the contrast, here, with either France or America is striking. The English home belongs to the man, not the woman — belongs legally, as far as the ownership is concerned, and psychologically, where furnishings and conveniences are concerned. In the United States, advertisements are directed to women, in England to men, and the advertisers know what they are about. England has few magazines designed primarily for women, and English banks are not fitted with special rooms where women can transact their business. The whole tone of English society is masculine: the importance of clubs, the role of the pub, the concentration of family money on the education of sons.

There are no girls’ schools with the standing of Eton or Harrow or Westminster, and only this year is Cambridge University conceding degrees to women. Of twenty-one Cambridge colleges, two are for girls; when it was observed recently that the number was scarcely sufficient, there was prompt agreement: there should be, said a young don, at least four. An American would have said, almost automatically, that there should be eighteen. Yet it should be added that all this has nothing to do with politics, or with literature and the arts. There are more women M.P.’s than Congresswomen, and for a generation, now, the best English novelists and critics have been women.

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NOT the most important, but the most pervasive and the most pernicious of English traits is classconsciousness. It is not political, it is only in small part economic; it is social and psychological and philosophical. Its persistence is a tribute to the tenacity of traditional ways of thinking and acting, for it has resisted, stubbornly and successfully, the whole twentieth-century movement of democratization. Originating with the privileged classes, it is retained by the unprivileged, and class sentiment today is stronger with the lower than with the upper classes, and strongest perhaps with the middle.

It reveals itself in a thousand ways, most of them insignificant in themselves, but cumulatively not only important but controlling. In England, alone of English-speaking countries, accent betrays class. There are not only dialects for every section of England, but for each class, and the dividing lines are all but impassable, in less than two generations. The terms “lady” and “gentleman” still have meaning, and have not yielded to the leveling process; other terms, too, confess a special class significance — “top drawer,” for example, while the innocuous phrase “not quite” is loaded with dynamite when applied socially. The distinctions between officers and privates in the Army, officers and ratings in the Navy, are more decisive than in the American services, and even in the recent war a public school accent was helpful in obtaining a commission.

Nowhere else have domestics played a comparable role, nowhere was the hierarchy of the domestic staff more implacable, nowhere was Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous waste more fully validated than in pre-war England. The use of the phrase “master and servant” to cover the field of labor relations derives from the Common Law, and there is a social as well as a professional distinction between solicitor and barrister.

Class distinctions extend even into the intellectual realm, where they are least justifiable. The intellectual pre-eminence of Oxford and Cambridge may be challenged, but never the social: it is interesting to note that though both are located in the provinces, it is the other universities — those at Manchester and Birmingham and Liverpool — that are called provincial. Any man can get a good education at the provincial universities, but if he has social ambitions he might as well cut his throat as go to them. A comparable hierarchy prevails in secondary education, and it is little exaggeration to say that half a score public schools, with Dartmouth and Sandhurst, dominate England socially.

The class distinctions in newspapers and journals is sharper than elsewhere: the Times and the Manchester Guardian appeal to a small and select audience, as does the Spectator or the Economist. Even religious affiliations have a class tincture: the Church of England is the church of the upper, and perhaps the lower, classes, and the term “chapel” still has social connotations. Socially it is almost as fatal to be a Wesleyan as to have gone to a council school or to pay your tailor in pounds. For England alone of all countries has a special coin for social purposes. The guinea is fictitious, to be sure, but no fiction was ever more real, and the distinction between schools, doctors, writers, tailors, who are paid in aristocratic guineas and those who are paid in vulgar pounds is profound.

Logically this pervasive class-consciousness should poison English society, but in fact it does no such thing. English social relationships seem, in defiance of all logic, easy and even happy. Ease, good nature, and happiness characterize English social life.

Crisis tests character. The English character is made for normal times and enables the English to jog along cheerfully from day to day. But it is made for crisis, too. Honor, courage, tenacity, pluck, ability, practicality, fortitude, integrity — these have ever been English traits.

said Shakespeare, over three centuries ago, and Emerson’s memorable speech at Manchester concluded on the same note: —

Is it not true that the wise ancients did not praise the ship parting with flying colors from the port, but only that brave sailor which came back with torn sheets and battered sides, stropt of her banners, but having ridden out the storm? And so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, with the possessions, honors, and trophies, and also with the infirmities, of a thousand years gathering around her, irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new and all but incalculable mores, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing populations — I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before; — indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. I see her in her old age, not decrepit, but young, and still daring to believe in her power of endurance and expansion.

Who that knows England today, struggling so gallantly to pay for the grandeur and misery of victory, can doubt that she is at her best in adversity, or refuse to have faith in her power of endurance and expansion?