"AS OTHERS SEE US."'"
THE idea of this series is certainly good. It is to present the English reader with the impressions formed with regard to England and placed on record in their own respective languages by competent Continental visitors who have recently visited our shores. The editor, Mr. Joseph Jacobs, fully recognises that such books as these must contain
many errors of detail, and many misconceptions of the English national character, but therein," as he claims, "lies their value." For there is real national danger in our ignorance as to what is thought about us abroad. We live in a fool's paradise if we suppose that the views of England
and the English honestly held by foreigners at all necessarily coincide with, or even approximate to, those which seem to us obviously natural and correct. It is, perhaps, not the worst of such a supposition that it leads us, when in presence of an Anglophobe outburst like that which was witnessed rather more than a twelvemonth ago, and which has had its echoes since, both to attribute the imputations made by Continental journals upon English aims and methods to deliberately malicious inspiration, and to believe that they will find no echo except in minds dominated either by corresponding malice or by crass ignorance. The fact is otherwise, and is illustrated only too effectively by the first volume of the present series. The England of To-day, which is a translation from the Portuguese of Oliveira Martins, is far from being altogether pleasant reading. Here is a citizen of a small country between which and our own there are memories of the most intimate alliance, who comes to spend a summer here for the purpose, as it would appear, of studying no. And be goes away having found us consumed by the lust for money, not indeed for its own sake, but as the means of acquiring material luxuries and making display, hard and indifferent to the sufferings of the poor, unswayed by abstract ideas—even that of the family, incapable of the highest flights in thought or of original conceptions in art, abounding no doubt in animal energy, but not less remarkable for prone- ness to animal excesses.
"The merest caricature" (will it be said ?), "not deserving of any sensible Englishman's attention." But the point is, Are such things thought of us by foreigners possessing fair intelligence and powers of observation ? That they are thought of us this book is evidence. And while we see nothing in it to indicate that the author is a person of remarkable gifts, we recognise plenty of proofs that he possesses considerable intelligence and a faculty of observa- tion quite up to the average. Let us put aside, if we like, as unworthy even of a moment's consideration, the views on our artistic capabilities entertained by a visitor who, when travelling from Southampton to London, when the chestnut- trees were in flower, was struck by the absence of "the tone and varied colour of Continental vegetation," and who noticed nothing in Turner's pictures but "frenzy bordering on insanity," out of which "there came prominently forth one conspicuous idea,—the sea."
But Senhor Martins by no means went about here with his eyes and mind closed to all the merit of everything to which he could not recall a Southern counterpart. He pays a tribute to the "tender-hearted sweetness of character, the loveable ingenuousness, the gentle kindness that the English- men—and, as is natural, the Englishwomen—possess within them, in combination with the energy of bulls." He acknow- ledges our natural vein of sentiment and romance, and that
• As Others See Pa. Edited by Joseph Jacobs. I. "The England of To-day." From the Portuguese of Oliveira Martins. Translated by C. J. Withley. II. "Across the Channel (Life and Art in London)." From the French of Mabriel Mourey. Translated by Georgina Latoner. London: George Allen.
"there is no modern lyric poetry in Europe comparable to English poetry." And in the following sentences he shows himself able to appreciate to a nicety a strain of thought and aspiration very common among well-bred and well-to-do Englishmen :—" They are brought up in games from the first. The end they have in view is not to produce intellectual instruments; it is to form healthy and active individuals, sound and herculean, brave and good Englishmen, useful, serviceable, truthful, honest gentlemen, and Christians, with- out the theorising conjectures that the race so much dislikes." This is singularly just, and quite unaffected by the ludicrously erroneous statement which immediately follows, that "the teaching in the schools is all practical and applied." Yet it is this same observer who finds in "the aphoristic counsel of the Scotch mother to her son who was going away from home —‘ Make money, my son ; honestly if you can, but make it" —something which "lets in the light to the innermost recesses of the national character." It is no matter whether this passage is difficult to harmonise with other opinions quoted above from the same writer. Certain it is that the con- centration of the British mind on the pursuit of gain, the want of effective scruple as to the means of attain- ing it, the addiction to material comforts and pleasures, and the indifference to considerations of an abstract or speculative character, are traits in the British tem- perament which profoundly impressed this Portuguese visitor. And it is that impression which, together with that of enormous energy and resolution, mainly dominates Senhor Martins's studies of England. If that be so, in the case of a man who appears to have no feeling against this country on grounds of high politics, and indeed to look with something like sympathetic admiration on the vastness of the British Empire, and our strength as an Imperial race, it seems likely enough that similar impressions are honestly entertained with regard to us by many people in many countries, and form a too congenial soil for the sowing of misrepresentations by our enemies with regard to the objects and methods of British policy. If so, can it be claimed that we are altogether the victims of groundless prejudice ? Can it be said, for example, that there is no truth in Senhor Martins's observation that, while formerly gambling in the form of mercantile specula- tion applied to capital was exclusively practised by people in trade, and was looked upon with general disapprobation, it ie now common in society P "The vice has become the
fashion That which was formerly but the sleight-of- band of the thimble-rigger is now a mode of procedure current among people embroidered with dignities and titles, and moving in grave and pompons circles." This state of things, indeed, as Senhor Martin seems to recognise, is not altogether peculiar to England; but is it not conspicuously established among us P Again, who can deny that our Portuguese visitor has much justification for dwelling as he does upon the extraordinary complication of the material accessories of life here, and the absorption of time upon them, as compared with Southern countries ? "This com- plication and absorption," he observes, "added to the money which so artificial a life costs, causes the genius of the people to sterilise itself in the indispensable necessity of earning much money, in order to spend much money, so as to imagine that it is enjoying the inalienable pleasures of fortune." And with this "slavery to the tangible externals of life," thus justly criticised, is closely associated, on the one hand, that worship of the so-called "practical," which is so strongly marked a feature, especially of middle-class English people, and, on the other hand, that attitude of cold indifference towards the [hardships of the poor which appears to have struck Senhor Martins as characterising the upper dame, even when they gave money in charity. We should have hoped that genuine sympathy with the lot of the least fortu- nate of our fellow-countrymen was now widely enough diffused to impress the sense of its existence even upon a summer visitor to our shores. In regard to this, as to other points in national character, much, of course, depends upon the luck of a foreign visitor ; but it would be rash indeed to say that no foundation exists for Senhor Martins's severe animadversions, reckless as he is certainly apt to be in his generalisations.
The second volume of the present series, as to which there is too little space left for us to speak fully, is much pleasanter and much more strikingly written, but also much less elaborate, than its predecessor. M. Gabriel Mourey has an imaginative and poetic style, and writes of English life and art as one who loves them. He deals tenderly even with our weaknesses and vices, and throughout his pages, which, it is agreeable to think, are reproduced from the widely read Pigaro, he habitually manifests a warm respect for the British national character. He has the courage to acknowledge that he derives "a happy sense of comfort" from "the English Sunday, which so much exasperates the French." He notes the demeanour of the visitors to Richmond Park on Sundays as illustrating a "love for the country which is not as ours" [his own countrymen's], "but real and deep, a devotion, a religion." To him English conscientiousness does not seem another name for hypocrisy, and the soul of England is a mysterious combination of "delightful melancholy phases, Puritanic coldness, passionate frenzies, weird, intense poetry, and creative, ideal art." In these last words, and much else of M. Mourey's writing, any susceptibilities that have been hurt by our Portuguese visitor's very depreciating remarks on English painting may find solace. A large part of M. Monrey's little book is devoted to an extremely sym- pathetic and effective analysis of the aims of the Pre- raphaelite movement, and a criticism of the work of several of its chief representatives. He rightly regards that move- ment as having been the most powerful inspiration of the renaissance of industrial art in England which is so bright a feature of the latter half of the century, and he describes the results of that renaissance in its leading departments in language of eloquent appreciation. Nor is it without a cer- tain elation that Englishmen will read, as a French critic's ver- dict, intended in the first instance not for them but for the most cultivated circles in France, that thanks to the teaching and influence of William Morris and Walter Crane, "English Decorative Art holds to-day the highest place in modern Europe." This is very pleasant to read, no doubt, and we are cordially grateful to M. Mourey for the unvaryingly generous tone of his studies of our country. At the same time, there are, let it be admitted, not a few aspects of our national life in regard to which a perusal of the roughly expressed judgments of Senhor Martins, notwithstanding their frequent one-sidedness and occasional grotesqueness, may be recom- mended to the majority of Englishmen as a wholesome, if bitter, tonic.
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