THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SOUTH AFRICANS.
OF the many nations which England is slowly throwing off, there is one of which, as a nation in the future, we seldom or never hear, the nation which has as yet no name, its natural appellation, Africander, being used for other purposes, the nation of white colonists in South Africa. We hear more and more frequently of "the Australian" and his separate characteristics, his courage, ambition, love of adventure, and peculiarities of hopefulness and cheeriness. The Englishman in Australia is becoming differentiated in physique, the usual or average man of the Southern Continent showing himself tall, sallow, or rather greyish, with a tendency to black hair, and a look in his eye of gazing at distance, that is not quite European, and all travellers begin to attribute to him a separate character. The usual conception of him may be wrong, probably is wrong, for the time has been insufficient ; but a conception is growing up of a very definite kind. The novelist or the dramatist who brought forward an Australian hero, he himself not knowing Australia, would depict him as an American, but with a trace in him of the joyousness, and breeziness, and freedom from the pressure of neighbours' opinions which the American is apt to lack. The Australian would display the tolerance in judgment and the largeness in design which distinguish his rival, but he would have neither the strength nor the strict limitations which the New Englander derives from his Puritan ancestry, would be a grower and drinker of wine, and would try most questions by a standard other than a painful con- scientiousness. The Australian is more ready to spend than the American, though not more ready to give, and regards the possession of money more as a means to an end, and with less of the disposition to look upon "a pile" as a barometric test of success. Neither descendant has the English freedom from sensitiveness to criticism ; but where the Americangrows angry, not to say savage, the Australian is apt to develop a certain humorous scorn, as of one who is affronted, but is also too full of belief in his country to care much for verbal depreciation. Both " blow " tremendously, but the Australian has a vision of a happy, full-fed, and slightly careless population, when the American is thinking of a mighty community which no man may seriously oppose, but which is in no way free from "life's endless toil and endeavour," but is rather proud that it continues, and that life is nevertheless endurable. The best American does not repel the Englishman at all, is rather to him a subject of admiring study ; but the worst Australian attracts him somewhat, a difference curiously marked in the judgment passed on the American and the Australian criminal of the violent sort. Nobody in the world is worse than the Australian bushranger, usually a convict of the most evil type conceivable ; but the British public has not the feeling about him it has about the European or American brigand. It
recognises something about him with which it quite involun- tarily sympathises, some quality which entitles him to be shot in a skirmish instead of being hanged. Half-a-century hence, the Australian will be as thoroughly completed a figure in the popular imagination as the " Yankee " now is, and will be caricatured in Punch under as well defined a pictorial formula, which we venture to say will not strike Australians as dis- pleasing.
The Canadian, too, is becoming a definite figure to the British imagination, a little less real, we think, and lifelike than the Australian, but still distinct. Influenced by an instinct difficult to explain, the homestaying Briton, though he likes the French Canadian, taking him to be a simple, hard-working, feckless kind of being, given to cheerfulness and Catholicism, and wonderfully free from the American spirit of innovation, still insists on overlooking the French share in the Dominion, and pictures the Canadian to himself as a sort of frost-bitten Scotchman, intelligent, sober, good-humoured, but without the Yankee energy in going ahead. All novelists, so far as we know, draw the typical Canadian as fair—which he is not any more than the Englishman is—pleasant, and in his nature good, but reserved, cautions, and the least thing depressed, the latter, we feel sure, a traditional belief derived from Judge Haliburton's descriptions, once so universally known, and now suddenly and entirely forgotten. Canadians will write to us, we fear, entirely ridiculing this conception, and will probably have reason on their side; but it is the popular conception none the less, and one which has a definite influence on emigration. Our people expect kindliness in Canadians, and a kind of slow- footed judgment, and if they saw one on the stage, would look for him among the good people of the piece. A bad Canadian would seem to them somehow unnatural and unreasonable,—a fancy due, we believe, to the intense and, so far as our ex- perience teaches us, the well-founded impression that Arctic voyagers are exceptionally free from vice. The notion that Canada is a vast country, with ice for its chief product, is by no means extinct yet, and the qualities of Arctic voyagers are read into Canadians. The people have caught the truth that Canadians are a reasonable nation, free in the main from Southern defects, and have given them what would be, we suspect, their trite character if they were precisely what they wish themselves to be, and if they were not, as a people, so sharply and unmistakably divided.
No one, however, even thinks yet of the South African English as a nation. No national character is assigned to them even in fiction, and the draughtsmen of Punch would not attempt to draw one of them without adding explanatory description, either literary or pictorial. We doubt if the idea that there is "a South African" has penetrated the popular mind, or that it expects of such a man any defined character at all. That particular colonist and his locality are not correlated, and there are few men who even recollect that such a person as an Englishman born and bred in South Africa may exist. The Boer is known, and in a way under- stood—the grand mistake about him being an entire forget- fulness that he may be Huguenot by blood and not necessarily Dutch—and is disliked to a quite extraordinary degree, as a cruel person who despises Englishmen for kindness to coloured men ; but the idea of the English " Africander," as he ought to be called, has never fully presented itself to the general British mind. He is not a separate individuality, much less a well-known one needing no description. Yet it would be no matter of wonder if a hundred years hence there were a nationality in South Africa, and if, of all the nationalities which by that time will trace their lineage to this island, it were the most distinctive. Gold, diamonds, broad farms, easy communication, and a curious kind of interest which in its origin is literary, are drawing Englishmen fast to South Africa; and those who stay there tend to develop as separate a type in character as in physical appearance. The parchment colour of the Yankee, the greyness of the Australian, the frosty purple of the Canadian, the wind-blown redness of the New Zealander of fifty, are replaced in the South African by an even drabness or brownness, which is often perfectly unmistakable. He has lived in a dry atmosphere under a fierce sun, and yet has worked energetically : that is the tale his face usually tells, and the character is as separate. Its note is that of a man who has been forced to make an unpleasant decision, and has made it. There is no trace of the Australian
gladness in the Englishman of South Africa, or of the American tolerance. He has had a harder life, and a more strenuous contest with a less conquerable Nature, has come in contact with more disagreeable circumstances, has had to endure a more trying climate, has been surrounded by peoples he disliked more, and has been altogether more sharply annealed by his destiny. He has had, as it were, to drive oxen instead of horses, and has felt the resulting necessity for severity and patience to the centre of him. The English South African is altogether a harder man than any other colonist, has less pity for himself or any one else, and is, in the way of steady, persistent endurance, perhaps a stronger one. His very courage, which is splendid, is differentiated by the presence of an extra quantity of determination, of resolve to contend with something which he admits to be almost too strong for him. He has very little cheeriness, but also very little disposition to give way. Take his view of his country. The English South African does not " blow " like the Australian, and has not the sensitive pride of the Ameri- can; but he has, all the same, an intense feeling about "Africa," and looks forward to planting there a powerful nationality. He talks less of the future than most colonists, and is more disposed to see the gloomy side ; yet he will probably be the first, in a spirit rather of dourness than of hope, to de- cline further British protection, and set up for himself. He catches rather readily the Dutch dislike for the Britisher at home, and has a contempt for his ignorance of African affairs, not qualified by any perception of his other capacities Allowing for a brighter intelligence and a constitutional freedom from pitilessness, the Englishman in South Africa tends to become a Boer, that is a Teuton made hard and per- sistent, and energetic in endurance, if you can understand that description of his variety of energy, by pressing and unpleasant circumstances which he never for a moment forgets. Twenty millions of such people will make a very formidable nation, and one which will, we think, be distinguished among the English nations, by hardness, decisiveness, and want of attrac- tive sympathy. It may be, probably will be, a great people, equal to that marvellous destiny which should lie before it in the sway of all Africa up to the Equator, but it will hardly be an agreeable one.
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