NATIONAL "STEADINESS."
IDNGLISHAIEINT always say they are indifferent to foreign- 124 opinion, and when foreign opinion is hostile, their indifference is probably real. If they are educated men, they see that foreigners do not comprehend all the facts of the case, and ignorance of facts, however small, seems to them to disqualify judges ; and if they they are uneducated, they only wrap themselves in their insu- larity and ask, as a labourer recently asked about a barometer in which his employer believed, "How can things like them know?" We are not quite sure, however, that they are equally indifferent to praise. If a foreigner is known to like England, he is usually/ set down, without much more consideration, as an exceptionally intelligent man. The high eulogy passed by the late Duke de Broglie on English Infantry is still quoted with pleasure, and . one of the claims of the Emperor William to English worship is that he caused a narrative of the loss of the Birkenhead,' and of the heroic discipline of the troops on board, to be read at the head of every Prussian regiment. Garibaldi's recent praise of the English for steadiness has been quoted everywhere with a plea- sure unaffected either by the usual English distrust of the General's judgment, or by a certain doubt as to the exact quality which he intended to praise. He is generally understood to have referred to the English persistence, and he did so ; but it was, as is evident from the rest of his speech, persistence of a- somewhat special kind. His remark that the English, when pursuing an enterprise, were never " troubled " about anything, and his illustrative story of the Romans who, with Hannibal at their gates, sent out an army in another direction, alike show that he was thinking of a quality which, what- ever its value, seems to belong in a special degree to men of English blood, a quality for which he found the nearest English word, but of which no word is perfectly descriptive. There exists in Englishmen and Americans, and as far as we know, in no other people, unless it be the Chinese, a power of persisting in tranquillity, of overlooking rather than over- coming obstacles, and going on without setting the teeth, which strikes an observer accustomed to Frenchmen of the South, Italians, Spaniards, and Spanish Americans, as the most separate of capacities. Persistence by itself is an attri- bute of many nations, and possibly of all, when they have once gained a certain height of civilisation. The French, whom we - think so volatile, have adhered to a definite foreign policy, a definite theory of administration—not of government—and a definite social ideal for ages ; and they carry their persistency into the ordinary business of life. A Frenchman with an idea in his head cannot get rid of it ; he is often the most obstinate, not to say impracticable, of business men, and he can carry out a plan—as witness the completion of the Suez Canal—with a dogged determination Englishmen might envy. M. de Lesseps puffs and. fanfaronnades and promises and threatens in a way English- men do not like, but Stephenson never stuck to Chat Alois as Lesseps stuck to the Suez Canal. The difference is that the typical Englishman laughed, and supposed there must be bottom somewhere, and went on " copping " his cartloads of earth into the morass, as if that operation were an end instead of a means ; while the Frenchman, though just as persevering, would/ have gesticulated and sworn and ground his teeth; and generally shown himself " troubled " by the obstinacy of the soil. The-
Italian, as Metternich, in a famous paper of instructions to a Viceroy of Lombardy and Venice, once explained, never gives up anything upon which his heart is set, and is most determined ,when he seems most pliant ; but the Italian, when too much opposed, is apt to mistake his " pazienza " for an active force, and to wait, with good-humour sometimes, for the gods and circum- stance to do his work. The Englishman does not do that. He must keep on "pegging away," or he would forget his object altogether, or lose his steadiness in rage, and he therefore keeps on, even if pretty sure of loss. "One must do business," he says, if he is a merchant, and does not think the speculation promising; and "One must hurt the enemy," he says, if he is a Premier sanc- tioning a 1Valcheren expedition. "The German," says Heine, who was a hybrid, with Jew blood, French intellect, and Teutonic patience, "is the most persistent of mankind," and certainly his steadiness in battle, in business, and in literary investigation is of the most perfect kind; but there is a weakness in the German somewhere, a trace of lymph in his mental com- position, which tolerates an inordinate expenditure of time. He can halt to consider too contentedly. Englishmen think he is the slave of habit, but that is not the case. No man in the world adapts himself so readily to an entirely new life, or as emigrant or settler submits so docilely or with such good-humour to the ways of a new world. We rather fancy his unsteadiness or habit of delay, of which Heine com- plained so much, is due to his strong mental realisation of his ideal, be it the unity of Germany, or a substitute for Christianity, or only a fortune. It is there ; he possesses it when he is smoking ; it is real, it is perfect, and the time to be lost in making it con- crete does not seriously matter. The Englishman will not give too much time. If a great deal must be given, he forgets his purpose, and as to advancing towards it through generations, that amount of steadiness is quite beyond him. We scarcely know a case in which our persistent countrymen have consciously gone on with a purpose through the ages, the very few apparent excep- tions being due rather to conservative feeling than to any de- termination to make a persistent advance. Very long jobs are very difficult to us, and our " steadiness " neither helps us to kill the National Debt, which, in our position, Frenchmen would have extinguished long since, nor to arrive in America or India at a self-acting and rigid system of forest laws. What we do possess is the power of steadiness in tran- quillity•which Garibaldi recommended to the Romans, —of going on, doing bit by bit, without faltering, and without particularly caring whether there are obstacles or not. "It is all in the day's work" is a specially English sentence, and one the full force of which it is extremely difficult to render in any other tongue.
The quality is most valuable, as every quality is which conduces to efficiency, but we doubt whether if Englishmen ever analysed themselves they would be quite as pleased with its source, which is, we fear, no virtue, and no capacity, and no faculty, but just a form of stupidity, and nothing better. It is to want of imagination that we owe our special steadiness ; and so, we sus- pect, did Garibaldi's Romans, who did not realise to themselves what Ilannibal's victory would mean, and sent out an army by the other gate because it came in the regular day's work to send another army. The sentries at the Horse Guards would be re- lieved regularly if London were on fire, and would stand there, probably, if the flames were round them, till their horses began to shriek. It is not from firmness, or foresight, or intellectual grasp that an Englishman does not shrink from obstacles, but because he does not see them as other races do before they are visible, and then sees only one at once, and grapples with that with the good- humoured audacity of a man who is more than a match for that one difficulty at all events. He has not the power to exaggerate the obstacle, or to suppose it will be endless, or to frame a plan which would simply overburden his brain, but he sees the thing as it is, and goes at it just as a Chinaman does at the next bit of carving, without caring or, as it were, knowing that he must repeat his next bit twenty thousand times. There is the day, and the day's wage, and the work to do, and he does it, and failure or success weighs on him comparatively little. Lincoln was a typical Englishman in his way, as Western men often are, and not seeing his way to a grand scheme, as a Frenchman would have tried to do ; and not being sure of the ultimate end, as a German could possibly have felt ; and not being able, like an Italian, to perceive energy in mere waiting, he kept on pegging away with his armies, just as Stephenson did with his cart-loads of earth at Chat Moss, till at last the work so long invisible revealed itself to the world as done. Engineers said Stephenson was pig-headed, and so he was, for he had no more theoretical right to believe that the Moss would be filled within the compass of his means than the first man who sowed grain had to believe that it would die and come up again twenty-fold, but he went on trying, as a more thoughtful man of science might never have done. Politicians said Lincoln was so unintellectual, and it was true. No "intellectual" man in that sense could have gone on as he did with- out more immediate and, so to speak, more dramatic result. The difficulties, and the losses, and the horrors, and the chances against his method of operation would have been too patent to him, and he would have despaired, or have risked too much upon a single ex- haustive effort. In the limitation of his intellect resided the strength of his character, and so it is with Englishmen as a nation. If they had to drain the territory round Rome and too little money to do it with, they would form no grand plan, but many plans for many bits, and go on doing them with steadiness, with no more " trouble " on them than the workmen felt who at last succeeded in draining the Bedford Level. They did not try to drain Cambridge- shire too, they never thought of a universal plan, but went on doing what they could manage, and what they thought would pay That is practical wisdom, say most Englishmen. Well, we don't know. It would not be wisdom at all if our countrymen could frame a far-sighted plan without losing any of their present qualities, and is only wisdom because, granted a people whose strength is limitation, breaking down limits may prove an en- feebling process. Englishmen when trying to look very far ahead often lose something of their energy, both in speculation and practice. They tried to do that about the Suez Canal, and got with Lord Palmerston a typical Englishman at their head, into such a fog of prophecies, all of which turned out wrong, that they would have nothing to do with the undertaking. When the Canal was cut and speculation ended, they were again within their limits, and went on building steamers and shipping goods till they reaped most of the advan- tage of the work, and M. de Lesseps was ready to tear his hair at that annoying development of Engliah "steadiness," that habit of doing the work to be done without looking before and around. Mr. Kinglake makes us all thrill, in spite of his endless de- tail, with his story of Inkermann, and no doubt the Eng- lish " steadiness " deserves all the emotion to which his account of it gives rise. But nevertheless the fact remains, that if the English soldier had not been the stupidest 'fighting- creature under the sun, he would under the circumstances have distrusted himself and the fog and the possible result, would have conceived that the Russians must be decently led, and would have retired inglorious. There is no courage in the world like that of a ferret. The little brute, so low in the scale that, as has just been decided, it cannot be made the subject of theft, will go, if encouraged, at an elephant's foot, and deserves all the praise now lavished upon the bull-dog. All the same, the chief reason for its courage is that it can see only the foot, and not being imaginative, does not see the trunk above or realise its strangling power.
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