THE ENGLISH WANT OF TRADITIONS.
THE accounts of the grand historic spectacles now delighting the people of Dresden remind us once more of a question which we have often asked,—but to which we have never obtained a reply,—Why is the English people so utterly ignorant of its own traditions Eight hundred years have, it appears, expired since the Wettin family, which now reigns in Saxony, first became Markgraves of Meissen ; and the Saxons, considering that not only a notable but also a pleasing fact, have resolved to do special
honour to their King, the head of the Wettin House. Their Parliament, which is elected• on a wide suffrage, and has not much money to waste, has voted him 2150,000 to add a new wing to his palace that he is known to wish for; Dresden has organised and paid for grand displays illustrating the history of the family ; and the whole people have given themselves up to a transport of jollification and loyalty to the Wettins. They are all loud in praise of their King, who is not of their own faith, but a Catholic ; they all recall in- cidents in the record of the House of Wettin with a sense of household pride, and they all seem interested in the historic scenes which bring those incidents before their eyes. Why is such a display as that impossible in Great Britain? The Wettin dynasty declares itself not only the oldest in Germany, but the oldest in Europe ; but the pretension, not true in Germany while the Wend reigns in Mecklenburg, has no historic foundation as regards the broader claim. Not to mention certain doubts as to the precise relation between the Wettins and Meissen, accepting the Saxon account as, on the whole, the most probable, and waiving the question as to the independent sovereignty of the older Wettins, the English dynasty is the older by at least two hundred years. Descent through females does not alter the fact of descent, except by making it more certain, and the Queen represents by direct descent every family which has ever sat on the thrones of England and Scotland, and is as undoubtedly the heir of Egbert, though possibly not the nearest heir, as the King of Saxony is heir of the Wettin line. In glory, success, and services to mankind, the two dynasties cannot be compared ; and though the English line has produced few"epoch-making men "—William the Con- queror, Edward III., and Henry VIII. (from the last of whom Queen Victoria is not descended) nearly completing the list—neither has the House of Wettin. We do not know that hostility to Germany and friendship for France ought to be counted among the sins of the Wettins, for the tie of race has rarely been respected by Sovereigns ; but the best of the line have been average folk, and two or three have sunk below the level of our own Charles II. Augustus the Strong, who is the best-remembered outside his own dominion, was not a Sovereign of whom any country could be proud. Yet a festival, a historic festival, in honour of the English dynasty would be nearly impossible in England. Suppose we took for our date 1891, the millennium of the death of King Alfred, our Queen's ancestor, and proposed in the autumn of that year to get up all over England pageants illustrating the history of the dynasty—not of the Guelfs, mind, but of the whole House of England—would there be any chance of a national response We think there would be none ; yet the refusal would not arise from want of loyalty, as was shown in the Jubilee year, or from carelessness about such shows, for the people delight in pageantry as much as ever they did, and will go miles to see a festival of any kind, or from meanness about expense. The English, though they think themselves generous, are mean about a few things, more especially pensions given in payment for special service instead of for longevity ; and they would not in their present mood vote a great sum for a festival; but they would, if they approved it, subscribe a great one with a readiness no people in the world could surpass. The truth is, they would not care about such a festival because they would not understand it, or remember who the personages represented were, or be in the least touched by the incidents recalled,—incidents which to them would be mere occurrences, possibly interesting or possibly dull, but with no direct relation to themselves. They have, as a body, forgotten their past as if it had never been. They do not know how the throne began, or how the House of Commons arose, how Scotland, Ireland and Wales were acquired, or how the Kingdom was defended from Continental conquest. They cannot recall the names of any battles, except Waterloo —and the recollection of that is dying out—and of the greatest incidents in our story, the Reformation, the Great Rebellion, the Revolution of 1688, they know absolutely nothing, the very children who keep Oak-Apple Day confessing to Mr. Hughes that. they knew nothing about it, not even that Charles became a King. The English people has no traditions of its own glorious corporate life ; no recollections of its own calamities, such as the Black Death, which in 1348-51 swept away half the population; no images in its mind of its own great per- sonages. There is some dim cognisance, like a half-recollection of an old story, that Alfred and William the Conqueror, and Bloody Mary and Elizabeth, and Oliver Cromwell and George had something 'to do with them ; but who they were and what they did, the people know no more than they know the successors of Alexander, or how they divided the world. They have no traditions, accurate or inaccurate, about their history, nor any ballads to illustrate it, and they tell each other no stories of the great deeds, or the dead heroes, or the survived misfortunes of any passed-away time. The whole past is a blank to them as it is to no other people under the sun ; and if Mr. Gladstone told them to-morrow that they were all descended from the Trojans, and that it was fEneas who conquered Ireland, they would all believe him—as, indeed, their fathers, as Milton mentions, believed in that origin—and would all forget next day that they bad ever heard so ; for, in truth, their own history interests them not at all.
We wish we could understand accurately that phenomenon and its cause. It is, so far as we know, absolutely peculiar in the present day to our own people, though the French up to the Revolution exhibited a somewhat similar ignorance and indifference. It is not a matter of race, for the Scandinavians know their own legendary history as familiarly as the culti- vated English know theirs, and the Teutons recollect all broad facts, and expect the revival of Barbarossa ; while the Lowland Scotch, who are as Saxon and Scandinavian as we are, are as full of their history as Arabs or the tribes of Rajpootana. They grow quite angry if anybody asserts that Wallace was a brigand, or Knox a fanatic, or Mary a worthy pupil of the House of Valois, and would keenly feel, and possibly resent, any misrepre- sentation in a festival procession of any one of the three. We might here send on Falstaff for Cromwell, or Imogene for Queen Elizabeth, and nobody beneath the cultivated would either know or care. It is not any special incompetence of mind, for the English have produced a splendid school of history ; and granted one or two conditions, a History often succeeds with the public like a novel. Nor is it lack of interest in things not productive of money, for the people attend to politics, read or hear newspapers read with avidity, and have a deep respect for knowledge, which influences much more than is always admitted their deep feeling about caste. Is it per- chance lack of imagination ? That would partly explain the deficiency, and we suppose we must admit there is such a lack; yet what do we mean when we say this about a race which has produced such a wealth of poetry, and a body of fiction beyond compare, which is at heart deeply religious, and which makes of all the favourites it takes to itself demigods for a time," investing them with attributes of character which are almost poetical ? What do we mean, either, by attributing such a defect to the most emotional people that ever lived, a people which can be stirred into an enthusiasm of pity or regard for people they never saw?
The only explanation we can offer is this, and we believe it to be a good though an incomplete one. The main cause of the English forgetfulne.ss of history is their inarticulateness. Until a people becomes educated, which the Lowland Scotch have been, in a way, for two hundred years, they can hand down their history only by word of mouth, which in practice means by reciting its most stirring incidents in such a way that thb listeners are excited, and can remember and repeat them. Now, that is precisely the one thing that the uncultivated English cannot do. They have no natural eloquence, they cannot tell a long story well, they have developed no class of reciters, and they are invincibly shy of reciting to each other. Each generation, therefore, fails to carry on its story to the next, and the result when those who actually assisted in the deed are dead, is almost instantaneous oblivion. That inarticu- lateness has its good side, for it is one cause of the forgiving nature of the people, the absence in them of the rancorous memory of wrong which makes many races so passionately vindictive ; but it destroys any possibility of transmitting history, and especially pictorial history, with its stirring deeds, and heavy misfortunes, and grand personages. It takes a free tongue to describe them, and give them life, and make the hearers' memory so receptive that they in their turn can carry on the torch, and send the story down as Arabs do, or Bretons, or Irishmen, from generation to generation. The English have not that free tongue ; and it is of their silence, their stuttering incapacity for relating a moving narrative, not of their indifference to it, that their history has so nearly died that they can keep up a ceremonial for ages after they have forgotten what it meant. If that is true, and we think it is, books must take the place in England, as in Scotland, of the free tongue, and we must rely on the School Boards to reawaken that memory of the past without which patriotism can hardly exist, and the history of a country may be slashed by demagogues as fish-dealers crimp a cod.
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