Chapter XVI: The Candid Friend of England

“_A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of actual nations, and an American has more reasons than another to visit Britain._”

When in 1833 Emerson first visited England, his chief interest was in a few great men whose writings had inspired him with a desire to see their faces. He met Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor and Carlyle; but he had few opportunities to become acquainted with the English people.

In 1847 he was invited to give a course of lectures before various Mechanics’ Institutes in different parts of England. This visit gave him an opportunity to compare the Englishman at home with his own countrymen. The results of his observations were embodied in a volume entitled “English Traits.” This book differs from the other works of Emerson in that it follows a distinct method. The writer gives us a picture of England and the English as he saw them in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The book gives the impressions of a philosophic traveler who was anxious to get beneath the surface and get at the secrets of power. He treats of wealth, race, literature, journalism, aristocracies, religion, education.

Emerson differs from his contemporary Americans in treating England not as “the mother country,” but as a foreign country. The result of this is a detachment of mind which enables him to give judgments which are free from prejudice. The thing which impressed Emerson the most was the robustness of the people. There was a rude vigor which had not been impaired by centuries of civilization. The Englishman seemed a better animal than the American. In common sense, in practical sagacity, in the adoption of means to ends the English manifested themselves to be a masterful race.

“Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their realistic logic or coupling of means to ends have given them the leadership of the modern world. Montesquieu said, ‘No people have true common sense but those who were born in England.’ This common sense is a perception of all the conditions of our earthly existence, of laws that can be stated, and of laws that cannot be stated, or that are learned only by practice, in which allowance for friction is made. They are impious in their skepticism of theory, and in high departments they are cramped and sterile. But the unconditional surrender to facts, and the choice of means to reach their ends, are as admirable as with ants and bees.

“The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They love the lever, the screw and pulley, the Flanders draught-horse, the waterfall, windmills, tide mills, the sea and the wind to bear their freight-ships. More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown-jewels, they prize that dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. They are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at the coarse; not good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron-masters, colliers, wood-combers, and tanners in Europe. They apply themselves to agriculture, to draining, to resisting encroachment of sea, wind, travelling sands, cold and wet subsoil; to fishery, to manufacture of indispensable staples,--salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery and brick,--to bees and silkworms; and by their steady combinations they succeed. A manufacturer sits down to dinner in a suit of clothes which was wool on a sheep’s back at sunrise. You dine with a gentleman on venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, poultry, mushrooms and pineapples, all the growth of his estate. They are neat husbands for ordering all their tools pertaining to house and field. All are well kept. There is no want and no waste. They study use and fitness in their building, in the order of their dwellings and in their dress. The Frenchman invented the ruffle, the Englishman added the shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible coat buttoned to the chin, of rough but solid and lasting texture. If he is a lord he dresses a little worse than a commoner. They have diffused the taste for plain substantial hats, shoes and coats through Europe. They think him the best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or remember to describe it.”

There is a delightful chapter on English manners.

“The Englishman is very petulant and precise about his accommodation at inns and on the roads; a quiddle about his toast and his chop, and every species of convenience, and loud and pungent in his expressions of impatience at any neglect. His vivacity betrays itself at all points, in his manners, in his respiration and the inarticulate noises he makes in clearing the throat,--all significant of burly strength. He has stamina; he can take the initiative in emergencies. He has that _aplomb_ which results from a good adjustment of the moral and physical nature and the obedience of all the powers to the will; as if the axes of his eyes were united to his backbone and only moved with the trunk.

“This vigour appears in the incuriosity and stony neglect, each of every other. Each man walks, eats, drinks, shaves, dresses, gesticulates, and, in every manner, acts and suffers without reference to the bystanders, in his own fashion, only careful not to interfere with them or annoy them; not that he is trained to neglect the eyes of his neighbours,--he is really occupied with his own affair, and does not think of them. Every man in this polished country consults only his convenience, as much as a solitary pioneer in Wisconsin. 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.

“In short, every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a company of strangers you would think him deaf; his eyes never wander from his table and newspaper. He is never betrayed into any curiosity or unbecoming emotion. They have all been trained in one severe school of manners, and never put off the harness. He does not give his hand. He does not let you meet his eye. It is almost an affront to look a man in the face without being introduced. In mixed or in select companies they do not introduce persons; so that a presentation is a circumstance as valid as a contract. Introductions are sacraments. He withholds his name. At the hotel he is hardly willing to whisper it to the clerk at the book-office. If he gives you his private address on a card, it is like an avowal of friendship; and his bearing on being introduced is cold, even though he is seeking your acquaintance and is studying how he shall serve you.”

In regard to America the Englishman was in those days apt to be condescending.

“The English dislike the American structure of society, whilst yet trade, mills, public education and chartism are doing what they can to create in England the same social condition. America is the paradise of the economists; is the favourable exception invariably quoted to the rules of ruin; but when he speaks directly of the Americans, the islander forgets his philosophy and remembers his disparaging anecdotes.”

Emerson’s criticism of the England which he saw is of interest to-day because most Englishmen would agree with it. It is a penetrating study of a period that has now passed away. From the consideration of defects he turns to the wealth and plenitude of the English nature, and the essential soundness of character.

“I feel in regard to this aged England with the possessions, honours and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her, inevitably committed to many old customs which cannot be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts 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 rather better in a cloudy day, and that in the 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.”