MAKING A CHANGE.
N times of emotion and trial men's characteristics become I
more marked and take new emphasis. Sometimes a dis- agreeable quality which was hardly to be noticed in the pleasant ensemble stands out with startling clearness. Sometimes a hitherto half-hidden virtue seems suddenly to colour the whole character. Still more often the result of the stress is to determine the nature of one of those peculiarities which count as moral assets or defects, according to circumstances. A mall's pride may be his salvation or his undoing ; so may his ambition ; so may his restless energy.
Restlessness is an English characteristic, and jusf now it is more obvious than usual. We have as individuals a marked love of change, not in theory but in practice. We do not weary of our political institutions so often as our neighbours, but we have an extraordinary wish for change of scene and conditions. Hitherto this national peculiarity has expressed itself in an Imperial not in a revolutionary manner. We are not a violent nor, as peoples go, a cruel people. When we are discontented we wander ; but wo are never aimless ; we wander effectively. The dark places of the earth into which we stray become ours, but they are never able to take their revenge in making on —figuratively—theirs. Mentally we are little susceptible of influence, and apparently immune from domination. No man is less Eastern than an Anglo-Indian. No man, indeed, is more markedly, more conservatively, more obstinately, Western. He is as English at forty as he was at nineteen, when his love of change took him in roaring high spirits half across the world.
A cynic might say with a good deal of truth that the criterion of a commonplace Englishman's success in life is the amount of regular change (if we may be allowed the expression) which he is able to give his family. If his success is a very little one, he cannot do more than give them a sight of the sea each year. He is an islander. He craves to feast his eyes upon the glittering expanse. The desire belongs to the romantic side of his nature, even when he can satisfy it by a month at Margate. Give him a little more money and lie will have a cottage in the country, and his wife and children will have frequent short changes as well as a longer one once a year. If he attains to a moderately large fortune, his cottage will become a house. And if he ever attains to the height of his ambition, his sons and daughters will not only have two homes, but will pass every year a short time in Scotland and three or four weeks abroad. Even then it is not unlikely that his sons will want to travel "for a change." Those who are born rich are accustomed to all these "changes " from their birth. They seem to them the normal thing. A rich man under seventy who had one home and remained in it solidly for three years, with no variety but an occasional visit to a friend within the British Isles, would be accounted eccentric, and, if his children were of an age to expect amusement, would certainly not pass for en indulgent father. If they were of school age and he elected to keep them all at home with him, he would certainly be very much criticized by his friends. "His children will blame him hereafter," they would say, "for giving them this dull life. No change year hi, year out ! The boys at least ought to go to school ! Kind relations would ask them to stay, " to give the children some sort of change." Our Con- tinental friends are shocked at the calm manner in which English parents part with their children. But English people know that, quite apart from educational reasons, the pleasure of the variety will soon make up for a few days of homesickness. " I wish," said a schoolboy the other day to the present writer, " that both terms and holidays were shorter. One gets tired of both." It is difficult for French parents to believe that we really love our children, we send them so readily all over the Empire. The Germans had a difficulty at one time in believing that we really loved our country.
Every English doctor recommends "a change" to every sick man who can afford one. The patient may plead to remain at home in the midst of his comforts. No one listens to the sick man's fancy. The physician orders, the friends persuade. " You will be all right when you have had a good change," Bay his acquaintance. The invalid has not strength to hold out. and ninety-nine times in a hundred he comes back converted to the time-honoured prescription, and resolved to force it to the beat of his ability on all those he loves in all their indis- positions. "Do go," he will say. " I loathed the thought when I was ill, but they made me go, and the change cured me."
The mass of the people cannot, of course, command variety. They must remain always in one scene, they must always breathe the same air ; but they do so from necessity, not from choice. The highest praise which simple people give to any "treat" is that it has " made a change." The fact that they have long cherished a wish for more variety than they get has become very obvious during the last four years. It would be as untrue as it would be ill-natured to say that the women who left every duty and pleasure behind them and flewto war work, andjhe menwho shut up their workshops and enlisted at the outbreak of hostili- ties, were not primarily actuated by patriotism. They most certainly were. But there is an alloy in all motives, and, though the smallest part of the metal, it is often its most characteristic part. Love of change influenced them strongly, and they have come back still restless. Now that patriotic motives are once more in abeyance we are far from asserting that lova of change is the chief cause of the present hubbub. Men and women are agitating for great reforms, new standards of life. Their ambition is noble, as their patriotism was noble, but the alloy is still there—and still the same.
We do not know whether there is any country in the world but this in which no " national dress " has ever existed. Hera there has never, to the best of our knowledge, been any " peasant costume." The grandchildren have not been satisfied to follow the fashion of their grandparents. They wanted "a change." Nowadays the Englishwoman's ambition to be " well dressed " centres in the notion of " suitability " rather than beauty. The wearer of a becoming dress not suited to the occasion is considered ill-dressed, almost vulgarly dressed. The result of this at first sight very sensible view is that numbers of clothes matter more than their quality or appearance. Occasions are so many. That is why the Englishwoman dresses for them. She is not, generally speaking, a vain woman. She is "interested in clothes," and she likes change.
Fashions of speech change very rapidly in England, and that not only among the classes which follow fashions out of a sort of frivolity. The London working man has very few of the peculiarities which Dickens recorded. The Cockney of to-day speaks no more like the Cockney of seventy years ago than he speaks like the young American of the present. We are not a people of traditions. We forget how we got even the things we value most; for instance, the Constitution. We have very little folk-literature. Our " folks " would laugh at it as soon as the language became out of fashion. They would prefer anything which was "topical" and " madam " to the greatest songs of the past. It has its very good side, this short memory. We forgive very easily—especially ourselves. No national sins will ever hang round our necks, and no wicked spite will ever endure. We cannot think what Ireland is talking about when she reminds us of what we did once. She might as well bring her accusations in Erse for any meaning that they have to us. As to what she has done since, we shall forget that to-morrow if she will only be reasonable now.
The grumbling of the Englishman is the direct reflection of his love of change. It is its symbol, and, like it, it is a surface thing. No one sits so loose to the habitual, yet no one is so tenacious of his idiosyncrasies. His grumbling has nothing to do with despair, and it does not produce the bitter fierceness which despair breeds. He does not want any change because things are unbearable; he wants this and that change because things might be better. When ho has got this and that he wants the other. Such is the constancy of his inconstancy. But there is no element of desperation in his discontent; it is rather the product of an ungracious optimism. His mutations have never yet upset the social system that ho has made— he forgets how. He never will upset it, not if he knows it. The danger is lest there should come a time when he does not know what he is doing.
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