PROVINCIAL CHARACTERISTICS.
THE series of papers which the Times recently began to publish upon the characteristics that distinguish the North and South of England, is so interesting as well as amusing that we hope when it is completed we shall have another describing the specialities of the East Anglian, the Western man, and, above all, the man of the Midlands and the Londoner, in some ways the most separate of them all. Owing partly, we fancy, to accident, and partly to the marked opposition between their politics, the contrast between the Northern man, and especially the Yorkshire man, with his self-assertion, his independence, and his republicanism, and the man of the South, with his comparative smoothness, his readiness to obey when he is led, and his tendency to untruth, has struck the general imagination. The intense self-esteem of the Northerner, especially as to his own virtues, his con- sciousness of his ego, and his raciness of speech, arising from his carelessness of giving offence, his general masterfulness, in fact, have increased this perception until it has gradually pervaded all literature, and men who never consciously spoke to a Northerner accept John Browdie as typical, which he is, though only of the good side of his countrymen. The real John Browthe has a grand difficulty in forgiving, is apt when he encounters a stranger mentally to smell him as a dog does before he will accord him amity, and like the Scotchman, whom he is in some ways so unlike, never quite forgives him for not having been born north of the Trent. The best description of him in literature is perhaps Carrer Bell's Mr. Yorke. The Southerner is far less dominant, though he has a tenacity of his own ; his hatred is perhaps
meaner, but less vindictive, as if his memory were not quite so perfect; and he has much less felicity in expressing him- self, being essentially, we fancy—though, curiously enough, this is not apparent in literature—a less humorous man,
Charles Dickens, the great-eat of modern English humourists, was essentially. by birth and mental habitude, of the South.
Even in religion there is a difference, the Northerner inclining to a vehement Protestantism, the Southerner, when not partly Celtic, being either a strongly convinced but not vehement professor or deeply tinctured with secularist indifference. In intellectual ability there is little to choose between them, nor curiously enough, in the bad peculiarity of cunning or the good peculiarity of adroitness ; but the Northerner is, if we omit the Londoner for a moment from the .calculation, decidedly the more efficient man, partly, no doubt, because of his dominance, efficiency depending mainly on the power of securing obedience, but partly also because he cannot bear the sense, even to himself, of not doing his work well. The Southerner is more content to be just as efficient as circum- stances require, being in disposition, though not always in fact, comparatively a lazy being. A world of Yorkshiremen would not be a pleasant world, or of Wiltshire men a stirring one.
Dr. Jessopp, who knows them well, implies in all his writings that the natives of East Anglia are on the whole the worst product among the men of England, and in some respects his judgment cannot be honestly gainsaid. Without the burly independence of the Northerner or the smoothness of the Southern man, the typical East Anglian tends to be, like his Saxon and Danish ancestor, a boor, with a vein in him of acridity, often improving into a keenness rather too self- regardant—though selfishness, in sooth, is of no county—and as often degenerating into habitual spitefulness. He would not " 'eave arf a brick" at the stranger for the world, nor walk ten yards to put him in his way. He dislikes humour, particularly farcical humour, which he characterises as " jeerin' and fleerin'," and has in him a vein of querulous- ness, which in Suffolk is so strong as to impart a special tone to his voice, which in the real people tends to be the shrill voice of the natural virago. He is brave in a dull sort of way —the way that induces a man when in danger to lower his head as he charges instead of raising it ; but he submits when he must submit more readily than either the Northerner or the Southerner, with less of the anger of the former and less of the good-tempered "well, so it must be" of the latter. The typical East Anglian seldom resists a superior from whom he gains anything or whom he is accustomed to obey, and still more rarely cordially likes him. That churchwarden must have been an East Anglian who protested against his vicar turning on the prayer for rain after he had mown the glebe and stacked the hay therefrom. He is not a good servant, evading duty with little scruple, and being too indifferent to truth, and comes out at his best when there is no one over him or under him, and he can work on in a queer half-sullen, dogged way, as if he were always expecting that east wind which plays so important a part in his daily life, especially towards the coast. Those, we agree with Dr. Jessopp, are his faults, but this writer, who belongs to the most despised section of this despised community, even to "silly Suffolk," would put in a word for the East Anglian's virtues and good qualities. The East Anglian is the least capricious of man- kind, rarely swerving from his first decision about anybody or anything ; he has a quality of endurance which often shows itself in steady devotion to those he loves ; he does not really dislike half as often as his inherently bad, because shy, manners suggest, and he has a quite separate free- dom from the impulse to be actually unjust. He is capable of very intense though narrow religious feeling, and, though decidedly anxious to make money, has more fair- ness towards those who make it of him than almost any man in England. He is not a specially cheerful person, being something of a pessimist, and always, as we said, expecting that east wind—but he is the man in England most capable of submitting himself to the will of the Lord, and once sure of it, making his neighbours submit too, as witness the regi- ment full of Essex men known to history as the Ironsides. He is not highly intelligent, though Wolsey came from East Anglia, but he takes culture easily, and once cultivated glides into the ranks of the indistinguishable with remarkable
facility. Why, however, should we describe him when all the world has read Sam Slick and Miss Wilkin and Mrs. Stowe, and knows through and through the New Englander, who came from East Anglia and remains to this hour in every peculiarity, down to the very tone of his voice, an East Anglian ? Only the look of him has changed, the American variety of the species approximating slowly, but unmistakably, to the Red Indian type.
The Western man, when he is of Somerset, is half a Celt, of the South Irish type, with its faults and virtues and its quality of fascinating rougher men; and when not of Somerset ancestry, is the typical Englishman, softened and, as he thinks, ennobled by a strain of gentlemanliness as ,hard to describe as to account for. Its essence is that he is not his own first thought; but how that peculiarity came to him it would be hard to say, perhaps because he was the first to wander over the whole world, and learn the one grand lesson which the sea teaches to all men, that if a storm is blowing up you must furl sail even in the middle of dinner. The Western man is not all he thinks of himself, or all Kingsley thought of him, but he is by far the pleasantest of Englishmen, and, we should say, the most hopeful, if we could forget that it was the slow, rural Midlands, where life is not all fret, and men have time to ruminate, and humour is born not of effort but of placid serenity, which produced the greatest man and the greatest woman in intellect who have used English to express their thoughts. Shakespeare and George Eliot came neither from North or South, East or West, but from the Midlands, where in the last generation the majority lived and died without seeing the sea, and learned in lives of sameness and tranquillity the secret of reflection which we all tend so rapidly to lose.
We wonder whether the essayist in the Times when he has finished his description will tell us what he thinks is the cause of local differences so considerable in so small an island, and among a race so little mixed with foreign blood, or rather so little touched with any strange blood except the Celtic, the influence of which is almost equally perceptible in every division except East Anglia. Is it anything beyond what the philosophers of to-day call "environment," and their fathers used to describe as "force of circumstances"? We ask because there are two facts which, on any other theory, remain inexplicable. The population of the North, and especially of Yorkshire, which is so separate, must be in a great degree sprung from emigrants who were attracted from all parts of Britain and Ireland by the high wages to be earned there. That great population only began to appear there after 1815, and cannot be the result of any natural increment. Finding the tone of manners and the way of life acceptable, it has allowed itself to be absorbed and dominated by the original population, so that you will now find armies of residents, descendants of families from the South, who are more Yorkshire than the old "tykes," who have been there ever since William the Conqueror desolated all England north of the Humber. That cer- tainly looks as if local peculiarities were due to environ- ment, and not to breed, and so does the fact that London, which absorbs immigrants from everywhere, rapidly impresses on them all a distinctive character. The Londoner, while quite curiously tenacious of his rights, apt to be talkative and vain, and anxious to a fault to "get on," is recognised every- where as one of the most efficient of mankind, as full of resource as he is of impudence, quite fearless of other men, -with a separate readiness to learn anything, and, what you would hardly expect, a power of becoming the best of sailors and non-commissioned officers. His circumstances, in fact, which have made him wiry and lithe, and taught him to walk with a step radically dif- ferent from that of any yokel, a springy step learned on the pavement, have rendered him the most adaptable of all Englishmen. Adaptability and "cheek," that is, indepen- dence vulgarised by city life, are the dominant characteristics of the Londoner, who cannot bear to be "put upon," cannot bear being lectured, cannot bear in fact anything to which he can apply the word " nonsense; " who is, perhaps, of all man- kind the least religious and the most orderly, who is always defending himself, but will stop even in the extremity of haste when an unarmed policeman holds up his finger, the least contented and the least querulous among the sons of men. He is said to be sickly, but he does not die; he is said to be stunted, but no peasant can thrash a "streetv " London costermonger ; he is said to be anwmic, but try the children of any London Board. school against the children of any Board-school in the country. The Empire would sorely miss the distinctive qualities of the Londoner if he disappeared, and yet what is the Londoner any more than the Yorkshire. man, but the product of an emigration from all Britain, a composite being made as much by the streets and the houses and the rush, and the necessity of putting up with the irre- sistible forces around him, as by his ancestry ?
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