I was remarking to myself that these Britishers were surely a
strange race of beings - that if England produced so delectable a
thing as green corn we in America would import it by the shipload
and serve it on every table; whereas here it was so rare that they
needs must label it as belonging to the vegetable kingdom, lest
people should think it might be an animal - when I chanced to look
more closely at the building occupied by the fruiterer and saw
that it was an ancient house, half-timbered above the first floor,
with a queer low-browed roof. Inquiring afterward I learned that
this house dated straight back to Elizabethan days and still on
beyond for so many years that no man knew exactly how many; and I
began to understand in a dim sort of way how and why it was these
people held so fast to the things they had and cared so little for
the things they had not.
Better than by all the reading you have ever done you absorb a
sense and realization of the splendor of England's past when you
go to Westminster Abbey and stand - figuratively - with one foot on
Jonson and another on Dryden; and if, overcome by the presence of
so much dead-and-gone greatness, you fall in a fit you commit a
trespass on the last resting-place of Macaulay or Clive, or somebody
of equal consequence. More imposing even than Westminster is St.
Paul's. I am not thinking so much of the memorials or the tombs
or the statues there, but of the tattered battleflags bearing the
names of battles fought by the English in every crack and cranny
of the world, from Quebec to Ladysmith, and from Lucknow to Khartum.
Beholding them there, draped above the tombs, some faded but still
intact, some mere clotted wisps of ragged silk clinging to blackened
standards, gives one an uplifting conception of the spirit that
has sent the British soldier forth to girth the globe, never
faltering, never slackening pace, never giving back a step to-day
but that he took two steps forward to-morrow; never stopping - except
for tea.
The fool hath said in his heart that he would go to England and
come away and write something about his impressions, but never
write a single, solitary word about the Englishman's tea-drinking
habit, or the Englishman's cricket-playing habit, or the Englishman's
lack of a sense of humor. I was that fool. But it cannot be done.
Lacking these things England would not be England. It would be
Hamlet without Hamlet or the Ghost or the wicked Queen or mad
Ophelia or her tiresome old pa; for most English life and the bulk
of English conversation center about sporting topics, with the
topic of cricket predominating. And at a given hour of the day
the wheels of the empire stop, and everybody in the empire - from
the king in the counting house counting up his money, to the maid
in the garden hanging out the clothes - drops what he or she may
be doing and imbibes tea until further orders. And what oceans of
tea they do imbibe!
There was an old lady who sat near us in a teashop one afternoon.
As well as might be judged by one who saw her in a sitting posture
only, she was no deeper than any other old lady of average dimensions;
but in rapid succession she tilted five large cups of piping hot
tea into herself and was starting on the sixth when we withdrew,
stunned by the spectacle. She must have been fearfully long-waisted.
I had a mental vision of her interior decorations - all fumed-oak
wainscotings and buff-leather hangings. Still, I doubt whether
their four-o'clock-tea habit is any worse than our
five-o'clock cocktail habit. It all depends, I suppose, on whether
one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled. But we are
getting bravely over our cocktail habit, as attested by figures
and the visual evidences, while their tea habit is growing on
them - so the statisticians say.
As for the Englishman's sense of humor, or his lack of it, I judge
that we Americans are partly wrong in our diagnosis of that phase
of British character and partly right. Because he is slow to laugh
at a joke, we think he cannot see the point of it without a diagram
and a chart. What we do not take into consideration is that,
through centuries of self-repression, the Englishman has so drilled
himself into refraining from laughing in public - for fear, you
see, of making himself conspicuous - it has become a part of his
nature. Indeed, in certain quarters a prejudice against laughing
under any circumstances appears to have sprung up.
I was looking one day through the pages of one of the critical
English weeklies. Nearly all British weeklies are heavy, and this
is the heaviest of the lot. Its editorial column alone weighs
from twelve to eighteen pounds, and if you strike a man with a
clubbed copy of it the crime is assault with a dull blunt instrument,
with intent to kill. At the end of a ponderous review of the East
Indian question I came on a letter written to the editor by a
gentleman signing himself with his own name, and reading in part
as follows:
SIR: Laughter is always vulgar and offensive. For instance,
whatever there may be of pleasure in a theater - and there is not
much - the place is made impossible by laughter ... No; it is very
seldom that happiness is refined or pleasant to see - merriment
that is produced by wine is false merriment, and there is no true
merriment without it ... Laughter is profane, in fact, where it
is not ridiculous.
