HOW ENGLAND BAFFLES THE FOREIGNER

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 152, 29 June 1935, Page 25

HOW ENGLAND BAFFLES THE FOREIGNER

It is true that since 1930 the average American has somewhat revised the contemptuous merriment with which he was • wont formerly to regard us; Americans now feel—since they are above all a kindly and generous race— that we have an element of good sense in our character which they wish they possessed themselves (writes Harold Nicolson in an article in the "Listener" entitled "As Others See Us"). The Americans are beginning to wonder whether we are all of us quits so stupid as we look. The • French remain convinced that we are all of us far more stupid even than we appear. The Germans, in their pathetic inability to understand others, continue to believe that we are a race of brilliant and unscrupulous egoists.

Now, surely it is very strange that such misconceptions should arise. Most of you would, I think, agree that the German, French, and American pictures of the average Englishman are very unlike the original. Most of you would agree that we are modest, go6d-humoured, kindly, obstinate, unintellectual, decent people. How comes it that our neighbours regard us as arrogant, conceited, calculating, and hypocritical? The answer is, I think, that foreign observers have generally failed to notice two very curious constituents in our national character. They have failed, in the first place., to observe that

we are all extremely shy. The average Englishman is so . afraid, so rightly afraid, of displaying his emotions. In the second place, no foreigner understands how bad we are at thinking things out in advance. No decent Englishman really likes , malting longdistance plans. We thus proceed inch by inch and day by day, solely by the light of instinct; seeing that our instincts are aW/ays sound, our procedure, though wasteful and clumsy, is in the end successful; but we generally end up somewhere quite different from where we started. Now, no foreigner can credit us with this absolute lack of pre-arranged purpose. They insist on believing that we actually meant to go to the place where we arrived, and they, thus accuse us of having concealed our intentions and our destination in a most hypocritical manner. They will not believe that our actions and our ideas always proceed on different planes. Thus the French, who realise the idiocy of our ideas, think us fools; whereas the Germans, who are mainly impressed by the success of our actions,, regard us as diabolically cunning. Whereas each of them is convinced that we are the most self-righteous hypocrites in the whole history of civilisation. Yet you and I know that really we are not in the least like that. May it not be that we also have similar misconceptions regarding the average German, or Frenchman, or American?