re the cold humid airs have produced a race
with great limbs and great appetites, but compensated these gifts by a
certain unreadiness in the delicate encounter of wits and graces. To
these impassive natures all displays of the personality are distasteful,
and the lighter social arts, seeming both insignificant and histrionic,
are learned with difficulty and practised with repugnance. An
awkwardness of address, in the uneducated almost bovine, becomes in the
cultivated a painful reserve and self-consciousness, reflecting in open
physical distress the uneasiness of the man's whole being.

And among the northern nations which are thus afflicted England has
achieved an undesirable supremacy, having herself smoothed the path of
her eminence by a school system which withdraws her youth from female
influences during the years when the tendency to reserve may be combated
with a certain hope of success. It would ill become one who has never
recovered from the effects of such deprivation to assume on the ground
of his own narrow experience any wide dissemination of similar defects
among his countrymen; his testimony would be received with suspicion,
and he would be condemned as one who to justify himself would drag
others down to his own poor level. Let me therefore place myself on
surer ground by calling as a witness an impartial observer from another
country, one exceptionally trained in the analysis of national
temperament and conduct.

When M. Taine visited England towards the close of the nineteenth
century one of the first things to attract his notice was the
bashfulness which he encountered in unexpected places. He was surprised
to meet travelled and cultured men who were habitually embarrassed in
society, and so reserved that you might live with them six months before
you discovered half their excellent qualities. To unveil their true
nature there was needed the steady breeze of a serious interest or the
hurricane of perilous times; the faint airs of courtliness could not
stir the heavy folds that hung before their hearts. These strong men
could not join in delicate raillery, but shrank back afraid; as if a
tortoise, startled by a shower of blossoms, should withdraw into that
thick carapace which can bear the impact of a rock. There was one who
stammered pitifully in a drawing-room, but the next day sought the
suffrages of electors with an unembarrassed and fluent eloquence, so
proving that his failure came not of folly