VIEWS OF DEAN INGE.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 5 February 1923, Page 1

VIEWS OF DEAN INGE.

j THE ENGLISH CHARACTER. Dean Inge lectured on “England and the English” at the Working Men’s Club in London recently. “Is there such a thing as a national character?” he asked. Races (he said) were always changing, as in the case of America. As a rule the successful race or the successful class tended to disappear. In biology nothing failed like success. On the whole we could trace some quite definite national characteristics in the case of our own country and other countries too. In our population the Nordic race greatly predominated, although it was less pure in our islands than it was in Norway and Sweden, especially in Sweden. It was a race rather distinguished' by tall stature, light colored hair and eyes, and having an active adventurous disposition. Sturdy independence was one of our national characteristics. The Englishman’s idea of tyranny was being forced to obey the law that was not made to fit his case; the English temper had always been one of vigorous independence, opinionated, free-spoken, yet sometimes suspicious. We were a people among whom every individual felt in himself the impulse to rule. Ours was also the temper of a people, always prepared in the face of danger to subordinate its native impulses. In the Great War every Englishman believed in. his heart that he could have organised a large army, as Kitchener did, and could have done it better. But there was the saving grace that the Englishman stood b ythe ship and obeyed orders in the hour of real peril. Condescension to foreigners had been charged against us. The Oxford man looked as if the world belonged to him, and the Cambridge man looked as if he did not care to whom it belonged. It was the Cambridge man rather than the Oxford type of man who had given offence to foreigners. What was the truth about the alleged English hypocrisy? He did not believe we were a really hypocritical people. What gave rise to the charge was our extraordinary success, which we had won without seeming to design it at all. So far as foreigners could see, we did no scheming, yet the plums seemed to fall in our mouths. We improvised and took the first course, and we had in the past been very lucky. People said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but they forgot that battles in the Boer War were lost on the same fields. We wanted a greater respect, for laborious effort of the brain. Games, and particularly cricket, were responsible for a lot of what was best in our character. To regard the English as a matter-of-fact, prosaic, shopkeeping, mercantile unidealist people was, Dean Inge protested, to do us a very great injustice. There had always been ai very strong vein of idealism and poetry in the English character. It was no accident that our philosophers had tended to be disciples of Plato. No one could understand the English character without giving due weight to that vein of idealism, side by side with the undoubtedly strong practical bias which belonged to ue too.