THE COMIC ENGLISHMAN

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3940, 25 March 1930, Page 2

THE COMIC ENGLISHMAN

My own strong impression is that, just as there are underlying national differences, a general continental way of life, a continental division of the day’s activities, a continental way of meeting one’s friends, a continental town planning, a continental tram system, a continental attitude to morals and religion, even a continental smell, which can be legitimately contrasted with their English counterparts, so there is a general continental mind to be contrasted with the English mind in its activity over ground common to both (writes Mr Orlo Williams, in the ‘ Cornhill Magazine ’). Not that every individual whom one meets on the Continent is necessarily a striking instance of this difference. A Continental friend of mine, dei scribing a rather unusual meeting of men of soul in some out-of-the-way cafe in an out-of-the-way town, remarked while enumerating those present: “And, of course, there was the usual comic Englishman.” Potentially every Englishman, whatever his class or profession, is that comic one; and we ipay be just as well proud of him as a little apologetic. He turns up in the most unlikely places, he astonishes the nations with his unawareness of his incongruity, he looks on at the most improbable scenes with-the least possible emotion, and he seems to understand so little of what is going on. Yet years afterwards, or it may only 7 be weeks, it will be revealed that, in his diary or in a letter or a book or an article, that, the comic Englishman Crabb Robinson, Borrow, Samuel Butler, and many others have lent him their names—will have given a penetrating account of the function which he seemed so little to understand, with a “ desinvolture ” of which none of his Continental friends would have been capable. [t is only in the mass that the English are unrcceptive. and they are usually judged in the mass. Individually there are no more receptive beings in the world, if only they do not lose their equipoise in unfamiliar circumstances. The comic Englishman, the world wanderer, the peripatetic insinuator of himself into the remotest and most private haunts of Europeanism, is only the other side of that stout, immovable John Bull who is apparently so unimpressionable by European suppleness.