I know not where any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and no man gives himself any concern with it. An Englishman walks in a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella like a walking-stick; wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands on his head, and no remark is made. And as he has been doing this for several generations, it is now in the blood. . . .
To be king of their word is their pride. When they unmask cant, they say, ‘The English of this is,’ etc.; and to give the lie is the extreme insult. The phrase of the lowest of the people is ‘honour-bright,’ and their vulgar praise, ‘His word is as good as his bond.’ . . .
The prestige of the English name warrants a certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or Belgian could not carry. At all events, they feel themselves at liberty to assume the most extraordinary tone on the subject of English merits. An English lady on the Rhine hearing a German speaking of her party as foreigners, exclaimed, ‘No, we are not foreigners; we are English; it is you that are foreigners.’ . . .
London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of today. . . . England is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is not so public in its bias; private life is its place of honour. Truth in private life, untruth in public, marks these home-loving men. Their political conduct is not decided by general views, but by internal intrigues and personal and family interest. They cannot readily see beyond England. . . . ‘English principles’ mean a primary regard to the interests of property. . . . In England, the strong classes check the weaker. In the home population of near thirty millions, there are but one million voters. The Church punishes dissent, punishes education. Down to a late day, marriages performed by dissenters were illegal. A bitter class-legislation gives power to those who are rich enough to buy a law. The game laws are a proverb of oppression. Pauperism encrusts and clogs the state, and in hard times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was diluted. . . .
It is a people of myriad personalities. Their many-headedness is owing to the advantageous position of the middle classes, who are always the source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty of their aesthetic production. As they are many-headed, so they are many-nationed: their colonization annexes archipelagoes and continents, and their speech seems destined to be the universal language of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (1856 and 1876)
RAIN
Sunday in London in the rain: the shops are shut, the streets are almost deserted; the aspect is that of an immense and a well-ordered cemetery. The few passers-by under their umbrellas, in the desert of squares and streets, have the look of uneasy spirits who have risen from their graves; it is appalling.
I had no conception of such a spectacle, which is said to be frequent in London. The rain is small, compact, pitiless; looking at it one can see no reason why it should not continue to the end of all things; one’s feet churn water, there is water everywhere, filthy water impregnated with an odour of soot. A yellow, dense fog fills the air, sweeps down to the ground; at thirty paces a house, a steam-boat appear as spots upon blotting-paper. After an hour’s walk in the Strand especially, and in the rest of the City, one has the spleen, one meditates suicide.
Hippolyte Taine (trans. W.F. Rae), Notes on England (1872)
GENTEEL ENGLAND
Once, on coming from the Continent, almost the first inscription I saw in my native English was this: ‘To let, a Genteel House, up this road.’ And it struck me forcibly, for I had not come across the idea of gentility, among the upper limestones of the Alps, for seven months; nor do I think that the Continental nations in general have the idea. They would have advertised a ‘pretty’ house, or a ‘large’ one, or a ‘convenient’ one; but they could not, by any use of the terms afforded by their several languages, have got at the English ‘genteel’. Consider, a little, all the meanness there is in that epithet, and then see, when next you cross the Channel, how scornful of it that Calais [cathedral] spire will look.
Of which spire the largeness and age are opposed exactly to the chief appearances of modern England, as one feels them on first returning to it; that marvellous smallness both of houses and scenery, so that a ploughman on the valley has his head on a level with the tops of all the hills in the neighbourhood; and a house is organised into complete establishment – parlour, kitchen, and all, with a knocker to its door, and a garret window to its roof, and a bow to its second storey – on a scale of 12 feet wide by 15 high, so that three such at least would go into the granary of an ordinary Swiss cottage; and also our serenity of perfection, our peace of conceit, everything being done that vulgar minds can conceive as wanting to be done; the spirit of well-principled housemaids everywhere, exerting itself for perpetual propriety and renovation, so that nothing is old, but only ‘old-fashioned,’ and contemporary, as it were, in date and impressiveness only with last year’s bonnets. . . . Then that spirit of trimness. The smooth paving stones; the scraped, hard, even, ruthless roads; the neat gates and plates, and essence of border and order, and spikiness and spruceness.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. IV (1856)
PODSNAP AND THE CONSTITUTION
Hideous solidity was the characteristic of the Podsnap plate. Everything was made to look as heavy as it could, and to take up as much room as possible. Everything said boastfully, ‘Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much an ounce; – wouldn’t you like to melt me down?’ A corpulent straddling epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather than been ornamented, delivered this address from an unsightly silver platform in the centre of the table. Four silver wine-coolers, each furnished with four staring heads, each head obtrusively carrying a big silver ring in each of its ears, conveyed the sentiment up and down the table, and handed it on to the pot-bellied silver salt-cellars. All the big silver spoons and forks widened the mouths of the company expressly for the purpose of thrusting the sentiment down their throats with every morsel they ate.
The majority of the guests were like the plate, and included several heavy articles weighing ever so much. But there was a foreign gentleman among them; whom Mr Podsnap had invited after much debate with himself – believing the whole European continent to be in mortal alliance against the young person – and there was a droll disposition, not only on the part of Mr Podsnap, but of everybody else, to treat him as if he were a child who was hard of hearing.
As a delicate concession to this unfortunately-born foreigner, Mr Podsnap, in receiving him, had presented his wife as ‘Madame Podsnap’; also his daughter as ‘Mademoiselle Podsnap’, with some inclination to add ‘ma fille’, in which bold venture, however, he checked himself. The Veneerings being at that time the only other arrivals, he had added (in a condescendingly explanatory manner), ‘Monsieur Vey-nair-reeng’, and had then subsided into English.
‘How Do You Like London?’ Mr Podsnap now inquired from his station of host, as if he were administering something in the nature of a powder or potion to the deaf child; ‘London, Londres, London?’
The foreign gentleman admired it.
‘You find it Very Large?’ said Mr Podsnap, spaciously.
The foreign gentleman found it very large.
‘And Very Rich?’
The foreign gentleman found it, without doubt, enormément riche.
‘Enormously Rich, We say,’ returned Mr Podsnap, in a condescending manner. ‘Our adverbs do Not terminate in Mong, and We Pronounce the “ch” as if it were a “t” before it. We Say Ritch.’
‘Reetch,’ remarked the foreign gentleman.
‘And Do You Find, Sir,’ pursued Mr Podsnap, with dignity, ‘Many Evidences that Strike You, of our British Constitution in the Streets of the World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London?’
The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether understand.
‘The Constitution Britannique,’ Mr Podsnap explained, as if he were teaching in an infant school. ‘We
Say British, But You Say Britannique, You Know’ (forgivingly, as if that were not his fault). ‘The Constitution, Sir.’
The foreign gentleman sais, ‘Mais, yees; I know eem.’
A youngish sallowish gentleman in spectacles, with a lumpy forehead, seated in a supplementary chair at a corner of the table, here caused a profound sensation by saying, in a raised voice, ‘ESKER’, and then stopping dead.
‘Mais oui,’ said the foreign gentleman, turning towards him. ‘Est-ce-que? Quoi donc?’
But the gentleman with the lumpy forehead having for the time delivered himself of all that he found behind his lumps, spake for the time no more.
‘I Was Inquiring,’ said Mr Podsnap, resuming the thread of his discourse, ‘Whether You Have Observed in our Streets as We should say, Upon our Pavvy as You would say, any Tokens – ’
The foreign gentleman with patient courtesy entreated pardon; ‘But what was tokenz?’
‘Marks,’ said Mr Podsnap; ‘Signs, you know, Appearances – Traces.’
‘Ah! Of a Orse?’ inquired the foreign gentleman.
‘We call it Horse,’ said Mr Podsnap, with forbearance. ‘In England, Angleterr, England, We Aspirate the “H”, and We Say “Horse”. Only our Lower Classes Say “Orse”!’
‘Pardon,’ said the foreign gentleman; ‘I am alwiz wrong!’
‘Our Language,’ said Mr Podsnap, with a gracious consciousness of being always right, ‘is Difficult. Ours is a Copious Language, and Trying to Strangers. I will not Pursue my Question.’
But the lumpy gentleman, unwilling to give it up, again madly said, ‘ESKER ’, and again spake no more.
‘I merely referred,’ Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious proprietorship, ‘to Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir. It Was Bestowed Upon Us By Providence. No Other Country is so Favoured as This Country.’
‘And ozer countries? – ’ the foreign gentleman was beginning, when Mr Podsnap put him right again.
‘We do not say Ozer; we say Other; the letters are “T” and “H”; you say Tay and Aish, You Know’ (still with clemency). ‘The sound is “th” – “th”!’
‘And other countries,’ said the foreign gentleman. ‘They do how?’
‘They do, Sir,’ returned Mr Podsnap, gravely shaking his head; ‘they do – I am sorry to be obliged to say it – as they do.’
‘It was a little particular of Providence,’ said the foreign gentleman, laughing; ‘for the frontier is not large.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ assented Mr Podsnap; ‘But So it is. It was the Charter of the Land. This Island was Blest, Sir, to the Direct Exclusion of such Other Countries as – as there may happen to be. And if we were all Englishmen present, I would say,’ added Mr Podsnap, looking round upon his compatriots, and sounding solemnly with his theme, ‘that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of everything calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.’
Having delivered this little summary, Mr Podsnap’s face flushed as he thought of the remote possibility of its being at all qualified by any prejudiced citizen of any other country; and, with his favourite right-arm flourish, he put the rest of Europe and the whole of Asia, Africa and America nowhere.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865)
FROM ‘MR MOLONEY’S ACCOUNT OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE’
[In mock Irish]
With ganial foire
Thransfuse me loyre,
Ye sacred nymphs of Pindus,
The whoile I sing
That wondthrous thing,
The Palace made o’ windows! . . .
’Tis here that roams,
As well becomes
Her dignitee and stations,
VICTORIA Great,
And houlds in state
The Congress of the Nations.
Her subjects pours
From distant shores,
Her Injians and Canajians;
And also we,
Her kingdoms three,
Attind with our allagiance.
Here come likewise
Her bould allies,
Both Asian and Europian;
From East and West
They send their best
To fill her Coornucopean. . . .
There’s holy saints
And window paints,
By Maydiayval Pugin;
Alhamborough Jones
Did paint the tones
Of yellow and gambouge in. . . .
There’s Statues bright
Of marble white,
Of silver, and of copper;
And some in zinc,
And some, I think,
That isn’t over proper.
There’s staym Ingynes,
That stands in lines,
Enormous and amazing,
That squeal and snort
Like whales in sport,
Or elephants a-grazing. . . .
Look, here’s a fan
From far Japan,
A sabre from Damasco;
There’s shawls ye get
From far Thibet,
And cotton prints from Glasgow. . . .
There’s granite flints
That’s quite imminse,
There’s sacks of coals and fuels,
There’s swords and guns,
And soap in tuns,
And Ginger-bread and Jewels.
There’s taypots there,
And cannons rare;
There’s coffins filled with roses;
There’s canvass tints,
Teeth insthrumints,
And shuits of clothes by Moses. . . .
So let us raise
VICTORIA’S praise,
And ALBERT’S proud condition,
That takes his ayse
As he surveys
This Cristial Exhibition.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Punch (1851)
YOUR TRUE RELIGION
My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here [Bradford] among your hills that I might talk to you about this Exchange you are going to build; but, earnestly and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little, about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other things . . .
Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste . . .
Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality – it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are. . . .
I notice that among all the new buildings which cover your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions; and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic. May I ask the meaning of this? . . . Am I to understand that you are thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic; and that you treat your churches experimentally, because it does not matter what mistakes you make in a church? Or am I to understand that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved for your religious services? For if this be the feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and reverent, at the root of the matter, it signifies neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from your life. . . .
I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunderstanding me when I come to the gist of what I want to say tonight – when I repeat
, that every great national architecture has been the result and exponent of a great national religion. . . .
You know we are speaking always of the real, active, continual national worship; that by which men act, while they live; not that which they talk of, when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property and six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a great deal about the nominal religion: but we are all unanimous about this practical one; of which I think that you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the ‘Goddess of Getting-On’, or ‘Britannia of the Market’. . . . And all your great architectural works are, of course, built to her. It is long since you built a great cathedral; and how you would laugh at me if I proposed building a cathedral on the top of one of those hills of yours, to make it an Acropolis! But your railroad mounds, vaster than the walls of Babylon; your railroad stations, vaster than the temple of Ephesus, and innumerable; your chimneys, how much more mighty and costly than cathedral spires! your harbour piers; your warehouses; your exchanges! – all these are built to your great Goddess of ‘Getting-On’; and she has formed, and will continue to form, your architecture, as long as you worship her; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to build to her; you know far better than I. . . .
Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times Page 2