XI

EMOTION

We are a curious nation, we English! Stendhal says that our two most
patent vices are bashfulness and cant. That is to say, we are afraid
to say what we think, and when we have gained the courage to speak, we
say more than we think. We are really an emotional nation at heart,
easily moved and liking to be moved; we are largely swayed by feeling,
and much stirred by anything that is picturesque. But we are strangely
ashamed of anything that seems like sentiment; and so far from being
bluff and unaffected about it, we are full of the affectation, the
pretence of not being swayed by our emotions. We have developed a
curious idea of what men and women ought to be; and one of our
pretences is that men should affect not to understand sentiment, and
to leave, as we rudely say, "all that sort of thing to the women." Yet
we are much at the mercy of clap-trap and mawkish phrases, and we like
rhetoric partly because we are too shy to practise it. The result of
it is that we believe ourselves to be a frank, outspoken, good-natured
race; but we produce an unpleasant effect of stiffness, angularity,
discourtesy, and self-centredness upon more genial nations. We defend
our bluffness by believing that we hold emotion to be too rare and
sacred a quality to be talked about, though I always have a suspicion
that if a man says that a subject is too sacred to discuss, he
probably also finds it too sacred to think about very much either; yet
if one can get a sensible Englishman to talk frankly and unaffectedly
about his feelings, it is often surprising to find how delicate they
are.

One of our chief faults is our love of property, and the consequence
of that is our admiration for what we call "businesslike" qualities.
It is really from the struggle between the instinct of possession and
the emotional instinct that our bashfulness arises; we are afraid of
giving ourselves away, and of being taken advantage of; we value
position and status and respectability very high; we like to know who
a man is, what he stands for, what his influence amounts to, what he
is worth; and all this is very injurious to our simplicity, because we
estimate people so much not by their real merits but by their
accumulated influence. I do not believe that we shall ever rise to
true greatness as a nation until we learn not to take property so
seriously. It is true that we prosper in the world at present, we keep
order, we make money, we spread