The Englishman
certainly does not know himself, and outside England he is but guessed
at. Only a pure Englishman--and he must be an odd one--really knows the
Englishman, just as, for inspired judgment of art, one must go to the
inspired artist.
Racially, the Englishman is so complex and so old a blend that no one
can say what he is. In character he is just as complex. Physically,
there are two main types--one inclining to length of limb, narrowness of
face and head, (you will see nowhere such long and narrow heads as in
our islands,) and bony jaws; the other approximating more to the
ordinary "John Bull." The first type is gaining on the second. There is
little or no difference in the main character behind.
In attempting to understand the real nature of the Englishman certain
salient facts must be borne in mind:
THE SEA.--To be surrounded generation after generation by the sea has
developed in him a suppressed idealism, a peculiar impermeability, a
turn for adventure, a faculty for wandering, and for being sufficient
unto himself in far surroundings.
THE CLIMATE.--Whoso weathers for centuries a climate that, though
healthy and never extreme, is perhaps the least reliable and one of the
wettest in the world, must needs grow in himself a counterbalance of dry
philosophy, a defiant humor, an enforced medium temperature of soul.
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