IS JOHN BULL SHY?

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 50, Issue 154, 11 April 1930, Page 3

IS JOHN BULL SHY?

WHY HE IS MISUNDERSTOOD. ( “It is certainly true that the English have the appearance, to foreigners, of being both unsociable and hypocritical,” writes Geoffrey Layman, in “Harper’s Monthly Magazine,” in explaining his countrymen to American readers.

“The apparent unsociability of the Englishmen arises, I believe, not from shyness nor (at. any rate as far as his unsociability toward his uwn fellowcountrymen is concerned) from any sense of superiority. It is simply that he is an individualist, and that he regards himself, his personality, as a possession which he is not prepared to share with anyone except his family and his intimate friends.

‘A conversational opening by a stranger in a railway carriage, and still more the somewhat intimate questions which he is liable to be asked by the New York reporter embarrass him not because lie is shy, but because he regards them as an intrusion upon his privacy and, therefore, almost, as it were, as an indecency. ‘Consider .the high walls and thickset hedges which we build round our gardens, and compare them with the wall-less and hedge-less gardens of the New York suburbs —there you have a good symbol of the difference which has grown up between our two peoples. “This insistence upon the security of his personal privacy is of a piece with the Englishmen’s insistence upon the security of his personal rights. He draws a sharp distinction between his public and his private life. His private life belongs to himself and to his family and intimate friends; and lie deeply resents any intrusion upon it either by the bureaucrat, or by his fellow-men. “In his public life, on the other hand, when he is acting in his capacity as a citizen as opposed to his capacity as an individual, he is prepared to recognise that the claims of the community must, if necessary, override his personal emotions and predilections —and that is why he makes such a good juryman, and turns out 85 per cent, strong to vote at a General • Election.

“As for the Englishman’s alleged hypocrisy, this, I think, is an illustration of the large part which the subconscious or instinctive plays in his mental make-up. Hypocrisy as I understand the word, means consciously making yourself out to be a better man than you are. Now the Englishman does not do that.

“He really, and truly believes himself to bo a much better man than anyone else I That belief is not based on any rational evidence —indeed there is much evidence to the contrary —but then in such matters as this he lias no use for evidence; logic is not one of his strong suits. Indeed, his belief in his own superiority is hardly a belief at all, inasmuch as it is not a conscious but a subconscious element in all his thoughts and actions.”