The inmost,
the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from
another, as tastes or colours differentiate things--_that_ a
nation hardly ever knows until it is pointed out to it by some foreigner
or by some observer from within. It cannot know it, because one cannot
tell the very atmosphere in which one lives. It is universal and
therefore unnoticed. Now, if this is true of any nation, it is
particularly true of England. And English people need to be told
morning, noon, and night, not indeed the particular national
characteristic which they have, since for this no particular name could
be found, but rather what its evidences are; as, for instance,
spontaneity in design, a passion for the mystical in poetry and the
arts; a power in water-colour, in which they are perhaps quite alone,
and certainly the first in Europe; and, above all, the chief, the master
thing of all, humour.
There is not nor ever will be anything like English humour. It is a
thing quite apart, and by it for now more than two hundred years you may
know England. It does not puzzle the foreigner (as the more blatant kind
of intellectual man is too fond of boasting that it does); he simply
admires it as a rule and wonders at it always; sometimes he actually
dislikes it, but by it he knows that the thing he is reading is English
and has the savour and taste of England.
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