The Englishman
George Santayana had the chance to observe our national character at the height of Empire.
1922
King George V 1910-1936
George Santayana had the chance to observe our national character at the height of Empire.
1922
King George V 1910-1936
Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) spent the Great War (1914-1918) in England, which gave him a chance to see the average Englishman at the height of Empire, and in the midst of crisis. His affectionately teasing sketch perhaps flatters to excess, and many at home and abroad would have drawn a different one; but his fears proved to be only too well founded.
INSTINCTIVELY the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror.* He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being;* he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration.
His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes,* and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.* It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.*
* The notion of the Englishman as an ‘absent minded’ imperialist was also put forward by historian Sir John Seeley (1834-1895) a few years earlier. See The Absent Minded Conquerors.
* John Bright (1811-1889) had noted this long before, speaking before the House of Commons on June 24th, 1858, though it came with a caveat. “When Natives of India come to this country, they are delighted with England and with Englishmen. They find themselves treated with a kindness, a consideration, a respect, to which they were wholly strangers in their own country; and they cannot understand how it is that men who are so just, so attentive to them here, sometimes, indeed too often, appear to them in a different character in India.”
* Santayana had written a little earlier: “What governs the Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the weather in his soul... never is it a precise reason, or purpose, or outer fact that determines him; it is always the atmosphere of his inner man.”
* Santayana is presumably referring to Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), the King of Macedon who brought Greece, Israel, Asia Minor, Persia, Egypt and northern India under his sway before he was thirty. Alexander’s boyish charm completely won over Sisygambis, mother of the conquered Darius of Persia: see What It Is to Be a King. Others found the appeal wore off very quickly: see A Conqueror Has No Friends.
* Santayana apparently shared historian and novelist John Buchan’s view of the German Empire. See The Garden and the Machine. He also closely echoed Edmund Burke’s judgment on the French Revolution and the churlish treatment of Marie Antoinette: “The age of chivalry has gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever”.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.