Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 853
So many things have gone to these makings — the fertility of the land, the pleasantness of the climate, the richness of its minerals, the spirit of security given to it by its encircling seas. For invaders of England have seemed to see in the land not only communities that they may sack, but a stronghold in which they may maintain themselves, their goods, and their sovereignties. And this dream of theirs seems, indeed, well warranted, since the Norman invaders held England but lost Normandy, the Angevins held England but lost Anjou, and even the Hanoverian Guelphs hold England still whilst Hanover has been wrested from their house by a formidable and predatory race. But it seems to me that almost more its position than its desirability has made England what it is. If in the eyes of the Englishman England be a home, in the eyes of the whole world England is almost more, a goodly inn, a harbourage upon a westward road. Just as you will find upon one of the shores from which birds of passage take their flight advanced islets, rocks, or shingle-banks, where for the moment swallows and finches will rest in their thousands, so you may see England a little island lying off the mainland. And upon it the hordes of European mankind have rested during their secular flights westward in search of the Islands of the Blest. If they have succeeded only in founding a “race” more mingled, more ungraspable, a race that is a sort of pluperfect English race, a race to whom no doubt the future belongs; if, instead of finding a classical ideal, they have only founded a very modern and very inscrutable problem, that fact must be regarded rather as a comment upon the proneness of humanity to fall short of its ideals than as a refutation of the convenient image that England is a road, a means to an end, not an end in itself.
For it is, I think, a fact that even the most hardened Anglo-morphist, the English schoolboy with the very largest race appetite, will not dare to regard the American people as in any sense English. The great northern half-continent cannot, even by a vast figure of speech, be regarded as a morsel too large to chew. It is simply a sphere so great that the most distended jaw cannot begin to bite upon it. Whatever we may think that Napoleon Buonaparte ought to have been, we do not even commence to imagine that General Grant was an Englishman. Perhaps Stonewall Jackson may have been.
The American in his turn well returns that compliment. There is no American Historic Theory to make the Duke of Wellington appear to be a “Yankee.” I doubt whether, much though American histories belaud him, Governor Spottiswoode can be regarded as an American. For, upon the whole, the spirit of the American Historic Theory is as exclusive as is that breathed in our island schools. But a certain parallel between these theories is observable. Thus, on the east of the Anglo-Saxon ocean history begins suddenly at 1066: on the west it begins with the shots fired at Bunker’s Hill. On the east, before the dawn there was a night in which there moved pale Anglo-Saxons: on the west there was a crepuscular period in which there lived the colonists. And just as, before the Anglo-Saxons there had been the Romans who were really English, so before the colonial days there had been a truly American race — the Pilgrim Fathers. But there, upon the whole, the parallel ceases.
For the English, having a distinguished history of their own, find it most agreeable to regard the history of the United States as a thing practically non-existent. The Englishman will tell you that he never really had much to do with “America”; the American, on the other hand, will tell you that he flogged the Englishman.
On the one hand, the United States have a singular kinship with England of the Spirit. Its peaceful invaders, coming in their millions to seek castles in Spain, become almost more violently American than naturalised English become English; but, on the other hand, they do not seem to acquire, once they are fused into the body of the people, the English faculty of considering themselves one with foreign nations! Upon the whole, the American is insular “all through”: the Englishman is insular only in regard to his clothes, his eatables, and his furniture. There is, of course, an excellent reason for this: the English people is very well aware that it is, along its own lines, as nearly perfect as a people can be; I mean that it breeds true to type. Thus there is, in a corner of Kent and Sussex, a certain stretch of marsh-land. Here all the sheep are Kent sheep; good, heavy, serviceable, not very fine-bred animals. Now, if you introduce upon this stretch of territory sheep of other breeds — Southdowns, Wensleydales, Blackfaces, or what you will — you may be certain that, as the years go on, in a few generations the progeny of these sheep will so assimilate themselves to the Kent sheep, that they will become Kent sheep. Thus the problem before the Kent and Sussex breeder is not to keep his flocks pure, but rather to attempt to modify them by the introduction of foreign blood.
Speaking psychologically, that problem is before the English people. It does not need, in its own view, to trouble its head to keep the race pure. The climate, the tradition, the school, will do that. The children of any Wallachian will become as English as the children of any Lincolnshire farmer, so that, at times, an uneasy wave passes across the English people. A few years ago, for instance, the whole country was crying out for the Prussianisation of our schools, our armies, our laboratories, because “we are a nation of amateurs.” But the problem before the United States, the problem present always in the consciousness of the American nation, is precisely that of producing a pure type. Without any secular traditions, without any homogeneity of climate, of soil, or of occupation, the American has not yet been able to strike any national average. Upon the whole, the Englishman of to-day is very much akin to the Englishman of early Victorian days; but the American, Consult Roosevelt, is almost a different animal from the American who sought, say, to impeach President Johnson; and certainly the American of to-day is unrecognisable as a descendant of those who were caricatured by Charles Dickens.
We seem to arrive here at two contradictory facts. It would appear that, on the one hand, the island upon the west of Europe existed solely as a half-way house towards the western continent. Yet, in face of this, it breeds, this island, a population whose sons come singularly true to type. But, contradictory as these facts may seem, it will appear, as soon as they are examined closely, that they are facts belonging to two different planes of thought — that, as it were, to say that the ball is round does not contradict the statement that the ball is white. And these seeming contradictions may be drawn in a hundred different and startling ways. Thus nowhere in the world, so much as in England, do you find the spirit of the home of ancient peace; nowhere in the occidental world will you find turf that so invites you to lie down and muse, sunshine so mellow and innocuous, shade so deep or rooks so tranquil in their voices. You will find nowhere a mise-en-scène so suggestive of the ancient and the enduring as in an English rose-garden, walled in and stone pathed, if it be not in an English cathedral close. Yet these very permanent manifestations of restfulness were founded by the restless units of European races, and these English rose-gardens and cathedral closes breed a race whose mission is, after all, to be the eternal frontiersmen of the world.
These paradoxes reconcile themselves immediately at the touch of one simile or another. We may, that is to say, reconcile ourselves to the dictum of the Chinese Commission that lately visited our shores: they stated that we had grown too slumbrous, too slow, too conservative, to be safely imitated by a renascent Oriental Empire. But, if we put it that these rose-gardens and cathedral closes are, as it were, the manifestations of the pleasantness and fulness that attend the digestion of a very sufficient meal, these dark places become plain. Assuredly, the various individuals who took these great dinners had huge appetites — and, equally assuredly, those huge appetites will remain to their descendants once the phase of digestion is over. The English nation, that is to say, cannot have been made up of all the “bad eggs” of Europe since the dark ages without retaining the bad-egg tendency in a degree more marked than is observable in any continental nation.
For, philosophically regarded, that is one of the two great lessons of English history. Like the Romans, the English are not a race: they are the populations descended from the rogues of a Sanctuary — of a Sanctuary that arose not so much because it was holy, as because it was safe or because it was conquerable. All through the ages it has attracted precisely the restless, the adventurous, or the outcast. The outcast were precisely those who did not get on well with their folk at home; the adventurous were those who were not satisfied with the chances offered to them at home; the restless were the men who could never settle down. The descendants of these last have, perhaps many of them, passed already further west. They may be the eternally unquiet gold-diggers of South America, the beach-combers of the South Seas, the hoboes of the United States, the Jameson raiders, or the mere casuals of our workhouses. But the children of the adventurous and the outcast remain with us: they are you, I, and our friends — young Carruthers, the parson’s son, who was no good at home and died, shot through the head, at Krugersdorp; or our other friend, Murray, who suddenly threw up his good post of land-steward to go out, heaven knows why! to Argentina. He will, they say now, die dictator of the whole South American Pacific railway system.
If we go impressionistically through the history of South Britain, we see how true, impressionistically speaking still, is this particular view. We might almost stretch the theory further, and say that England is the direct product of successive periods of unrest in the continental peoples. For want of a better terminology we may adopt the language of the Race Theorist, and say that we know practically nothing of the aboriginal inhabitants of Britain. We cannot nowadays trace in England any type corresponding to the Digger Indians of North America — corresponding to those unfortunate cave-dwelling, mud-eating beings who are said to have been driven into their holes and fastnesses by the triumphant Iroquois or their rival races. Interested observers — observers, that is, who are interested in race theories — will, however, tell you that in various parts of England, most notably in Wiltshire around Stonehenge, they find a dark-haired, dark-eyelashed, mysterious, romantic child, who, in their view, represents the new outcropping of a never extinct, aboriginal race. Now, they say, that at last the English race has become an admixture, comparatively stable, of the continentals, the aboriginal, non-continental race is about to assert its permanence; it will gradually increase by force of atavism until it have swallowed up all us descendants of blonde, red, dark or tawny peoples. But that is still very much stuff of dreams and visions; even yet we cannot say what visaged children of men made the great escarpments on the side of Whitesheet Hill. We cannot say what manner of men were our aborigines whom, by so many relays, we have displaced.
Even the original displacers, Gauls, Gaels, Goidels, Celts, or what you will, are legendary to us; we know neither whence they came, nor whither really they wended. In a vague way we know that a horde of barbarians, dominated more or less by a myth styled “Brennus,” issued, innumerable, wild, and desolating, from the gloomy forests of Central Europe. They sacked, doubtless, Rome; they passed perhaps into Spain; it is said that they overran Hellas and despoiled the temple of the Pythic oracle. They found a home, permanent enough, in the very east of the mainland, and other homes, permanent enough, in the western parts of our islands. But across England they were fated to go, if with delaying footsteps. They found, in fact, no home, but an hotel; and though we cannot any more tell what particular kind of unrest it was that drove them forth from their hiding-place, we may be very certain that it was some kind of psychological or material pressure that forced out from the Central European forests these, the adventurous, the outcast, or the restless of an immense people. It was, again, a national unrest that sent hither the first Cæsar and his troops. They in their day were the troublesome populations of a Rome that was in a state of ferment, constitutional and psychological. It is well not to drive a theory too far, so that we may refrain from taking the view that the governors that Rome sent to Britain during the stable Imperial era were men of unrest whom the Emperors wished to send to the ends of the earth. Indeed, we might well draw a contrary moral from the story of the Roman occupancy of these islands, for it was perhaps precisely because the Romans who held Britain were more or less conscripted soldiers, that the Roman period of dominance left so little trace upon the English peoples. But it remains a fact, observable enough to-day, that a colony administered by men who are sent, has very little chance of permanence in comparison with one founded by men who choose to go. In that fact we may perhaps see the secret of the British Empire: it is certainly the secret of “England.”
The Angles, in turn, were men of unrest and of adventure; the Danes, who harried them, were even so, and the Northmen, who finally conquered them, were the offscourings, the adventurous overmen of those very Scandinavians whose unrest had peopled the northern parts of France. And, roughly speaking, we may say as much of the Angevins, and the Stuarts with their hordes of Scots. It is, of course, less true of the Dutch that came with William III., or of the Hanoverian kings.
The tide of armed invasion did actually stop with the Angevins, and by the time of Shakespeare, England might well, to a poetic imagination, present the appearance of an island whose foot spurns back the ocean’s rolling tide that coops from other lands her islanders. At that date England had very victoriously passed through a phase of alarums and excursions; she might well boast of being throned inviolable in the west; she had survived all the projects for invasion of the reign of Henry VIII., projects founded in all Europe during fifty years, to culminate in the crowning defeat of the Armada. But that very period of the Elizabethans was in itself a time of Continental unrest that brought to English shores a new tide of invasion; it brought to us all those bad eggs who, beginning with the Anabaptists from Münster — the city from which my friend, the Professor of Literature, surveyed our race — culminated with the Huguenots, who have meant so much for England.
England, indeed, that seemed so stable a nest to the past of the race, was already beginning to assume more definitely the aspect of a hospice on the long road to a western Atalantis. And it is significant that, a few years after the writing of the phrase “coops from other lands her islanders,” England herself, approaching a period of unrest, exported to the other shores of the Sea of the British Empire, her first shiploads of “bad eggs.” For it was not a generation before the Pilgrim Fathers set sail.
From that time onwards England assumed more or less definitely her character of a road to the ultimate west. Thus, in any history of the United States, we may read that such and such a State was founded by the restless people of France, who, having tried Flanders for a home, tried England, and finding no home in England, sailed westward.
CHAPTER III. THE MELTING POT.
IN my two previous chapters I have drawn attention to two facts — or, let me put it more exactly, to two aspects that most have struck me in the corporate manifestations of the history of the population of England. Let me now add a third strand to the plait of theories that I offer to my reader. In my first chapter I put the proposition that the chief value of England to the world was that it had shown the nations how mankind, composed as it is of differing individualities, might, with a sort of rule-of-thumb agreeableness, live together in great congeries. And this indeed — if one may be pardoned for drawing morals from one’s own projections — is the moral that I should draw from my previous book, the first of this series. In my second chapter I have attempted to make plain a view of England as a resting-place of humanity in its road westward. And this, indeed, if I am allowed to draw a further moral from a further projection, is the one that I should draw from the second work of this series. For in that, if any generalisation stands out for me, it is: that the English field-labourer is throwing down his tools and abandoning his master’s acres. What has hitherto been regarded as the staple of the population, the stable units of all peoples, appears to me to be reverting once more to the order of restless people.
(I wish again, and very emphatically, to draw attention to the fact that these pages embody only my personal views, founded upon facts that have come under my personal acquaintanceship. This facet of the rural cramping, this phenomenon of depopulation of the country districts was, for instance, denied in toto by a writer in the “Academy,” who cited against me the fact that Major Poore’s small holdings at Winterslow were attracting many settlers.)
This, of course, is no very new cry, nor is it a very modern phenomenon. It was to be observed, for instance, in the time of Henry VIII., just before the disestablishment of the monasteries. Such a displacement of the population has always been attended by great changes in the psychology of the people; but for the moment it is not convenient to enter minutely into the question of whether the change in the psychology is caused by the movement of the population. Nor, for the moment, is it my purpose to attempt to settle, even in my own view, whether this change in the basis of population is for good or for evil in the future of the people. The general opinion is that it makes for what is called degeneration; but it behoves every thinking man to question the general opinion. In my book upon a Town I have pointed out that the one problem before the people is the evolution of a healthy town type. In the second book of this series I have laid stress upon the fact that the other problem of the people is the retaining, or the attracting, of a sufficient population upon the land. But in this thorny and difficult question it is as easy to find consolation as to grow depressed. It depends largely upon one’s temperamental or temporary obsessions.
