ginative; the English mind
is concentrated, substantial, indifferent to the merely relative,
matter-of-fact, stiff, and inflexible.

The English have reduced to a fine art the practice of a stony
impassivity, which on its highest plane is not devoid of a certain
impressiveness. On ordinary occasions it is apt to excite either the
ire or the amusement of the representatives of a more animated race. I
suppose it is almost impossible for an untravelled Englishman to
realise the ridiculous side of the Church Parade in Hyde Park--as it
would appear, say, to a lively girl from Baltimore. The parade is a
collection of human beings, presumably brought together for the sake
of seeing and being seen. Yet the obvious aim of each English item in
the crowd is to deprive his features of all expression, and to look as
if he were absolutely unconscious that his own party were not the only
one on the ground. Such vulgarity as the exhibition of the slightest
interest in a being to whom he has not been introduced would be
treason to his dearest traditions. In an American function of the same
kind, the actors take an undisguised interest in each other, while a
French or Italian assembly would be still more demonstrative. On the
surface the English attitude is distinctly inhuman; it reminds one
that England is still the stronghold of the obsolescent institution of
caste, that it frankly and even brutally asserts the essential
inequality of man. Nowhere, perhaps, will you see a bigger and
handsomer, healthier, better-groomed, more efficient set of human
animals; but their straight-ahead, phlegmatic, expressionless gaze,
the want of animated talk, the absence of any show of intelligence,
emphasises our feeling that they are _animals_.

The Briton's indifference to criticism is at once his strength and his
weakness. It makes him invincible in a cause which has dominated his
conscience; it hinders him in the attainment of a luminous
discrimination between cause and cause. His profound self-confidence,
his sheer good sense, his dogged persistence, his bulldog courage, his
essential honesty of purpose, bring him to the goal in spite of the
unnecessary obstacles that have been heaped on his path by his own
[Greek: hubris] and contempt of others. He chooses what is physically
the shortest line in preference to the line of least resistance. He
makes up for his want of light by his superiority in weight. Social
adaptability is not his foible. He ac