Wolfe walked. about the room with a drawn sword calling himself Caesar and Hannibal, and went to death with poetry in his mouth.
Clive was a man of the same type as Cromwell or Bunyan, or, for the matter of that, Johnson--that is, he was a strong, sensible man with a kind of running spring of hysteria and melancholy in him.
Like Johnson, he was all the more healthy because he was morbid.
The tales of all the admirals and adventurers of that England are full of braggadocio, of sentimentality, of splendid affectation.
But it is scarcely necessary to multiply examples of the essentially romantic Englishman when one example towers above them all.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling has said complacently of the English, "We do not fall on the neck and kiss when we come together."It is true that this ancient and universal custom has vanished with the modern weakening of England. Sydney would have thought nothing of kissing Spenser. But I willingly concede that Mr. Broderick would not be likely to kiss Mr. Arnold-Foster, if that be any proof of the increased manliness and military greatness of England.
But the Englishman who does not show his feelings has not altogether given up the power of seeing something English in the great sea-hero of the Napoleonic war. You cannot break the legend of Nelson.
And across the sunset of that glory is written in flaming letters for ever the great English sentiment, "Kiss me, Hardy."This ideal of self-repression, then, is, whatever else it is, not English.
It is, perhaps, somewhat Oriental, it is slightly Prussian, but in the main it does not come, I think, from any racial or national source.
It is, as I have said, in some sense aristocratic; it comes not from a people, but from a class. Even aristocracy, I think, was not quite so stoical in the days when it was really strong.
But whether this unemotional ideal be the genuine tradition of the gentleman, or only one of the inventions of the modern gentleman (who may be called the decayed gentleman), it certainly has something to do with the unemotional quality in these society novels.
From representing aristocrats as people who suppressed their feelings, it has been an easy step to representing aristocrats as people who had no feelings to suppress. Thus the modern oligarchist has made a virtue for the oligarchy of the hardness as well as the brightness of the diamond.
Like a sonneteer addressing his lady in the seventeenth century, he seems to use the word "cold" almost as a eulogium, and the word "heartless" as a kind of compliment. Of course, in people so incurably kind-hearted and babyish as are the English gentry, it would be impossible to create anything that can be called positive cruelty;so in these books they exhibit a sort of negative cruelty.
They cannot be cruel in acts, but they can be so in words.
All this means one thing, and one thing only. It means that the living and invigorating ideal of England must be looked for in the masses;it must be looked for where Dickens found it--Dickens among whose glories it was to be a humorist, to be a sentimentalist, to be an optimist, to be a poor man, to be an Englishman, but the greatest of whose glories was that he saw all mankind in its amazing and tropical luxuriance, and did not even notice the aristocracy; Dickens, the greatest of whose glories was that he could not describe a gentleman.
