only he says bluntly that one is "an ass * * * to have brains in a country where brains are a crime." This national stupidity and sentimentality are made impregnable by national complacency. Lytton remarks on the egotistic nature of British patriotism:[1]
"The vanity of the Frenchman consists (as I have somewhere
read) in belonging to so great a country; but the vanity of the
Englishman exults in the thought that so great a country belongs
to himself."
These criticisms are all from within. Disraeli is able to
contribute one from without. He describes the British
through his Jewish Besso:[2]
"There is not a race so proud, so wilful, so rash and so obstinate.
They live in a misty clime, on raw meats, and wines of
fire. They laugh at their fathers, and never say a prayer. They
pass their days in the chase, gaming, and all violent courses.
They have all the power of the State, and all its wealth; and
when they can wring no more from their peasants, they plunder
the kings of India."
Nevertheless they all, even the Hebrew within their parliamentary
halls, believed in the English character and the
civilization it was blunderingly working out. The most
incorrigible satirist of that civilization was Peacock (who
often, we suspect, gets carried away by his own eloquence),
and in his fervent summary of almost all our public failures,
he hints in the very phrasing, although ironically,
- ↑ England and the English, 21.
- ↑ Tancred, 242. It is a race also that "having little imagination, takes refuge in reason, and carefully locks the door when the steed is stolen." 379. Moreover, the Oriental says of the European what the latter applied in the course of time to the American,—he "talks of progress, because, by an ingenious application of some scientific acquirements, he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization." 227.
