ions. Nations can love each
other as men and women love each other, not because they are alike but
because they are different. It can easily be shown, I fancy, that in
every case where a real public sympathy was aroused for some unfortunate
foreign people, it has always been accompanied with a particular and
positive interest in their most foreign customs and their most foreign
externals. The man who made a romance of the Scotch High-lander made a
romance of his kilt and even of his dirk; the friend of the Red Indians
was interested in picture writing and had some tendency to be
interested in scalping. To take a more serious example, such nations as
Serbia had been largely commended to international consideration by the
study of Serbian epics, or Serbian songs. The epoch of negro
emancipation was also the epoch of negro melodies. Those who wept over
Uncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus. And just as the admiration for
the Redskin almost became an apology for scalping, the mysterious
fascination of the African has sometimes almost led us into the fringes
of the black forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is felt
even in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer and the
devil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never been felt in the
Englishman.

And this is the more extraordinary because the Englishman is really very
interesting. He is interesting in a special degree in this special
manner; he is interesting because he is individual. No man in the world
is more misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordinary
sense national. A description of English life must be a description of
private life. In that sense there is no public life. In that sense there
is no public opinion. There have never been those prairie fires of
public opinion in England which often sweep over America. At any rate,
there have never been any such popular revolutions since the popular
revolutions of the Middle Ages. The English are a nation of amateurs;
they are even a nation of eccentrics. An Englishman is never more
English than when he is considered a lunatic by the other Englishmen.
This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. Johnson, who has become
national not by being normal but by being extraordinary. To express this
mysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges and
heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences,
and why they alone among Christians have kept quite c