The English Soul (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

Excerpt from The English Soul

Those who seek to know the intimate feelings of a strange people are in like case with my traveller. They realize no more than he with how much of their own personality they endow all they look at; and they give innocent utterance to not a few false hoods and even more absurdities.

It is startling - and often offensive - to hear the foreigner's candid opinion of one's countrymen. In a certain book by Sir A. Conan Doyle, the hero is plainly intended to portray the average Frenchman - a person who on every page shows himself idioti cally gallant and prodigiously maladroit. This singular being is just a Frenchman viewed from a distance by an Englishman in a hurry. True, Sir A. Conan Doyle is scarcely a universal mouthpiece of English opinion, and the book in question is not greatly important. Yet it, and its like, inevitably set up in one a futile desire to show that French courage is not so fantastic, nor French manners so bad, as they are painted. And when another English author cites once more the hoary legend of our sensuality and materialism, and proves it by asserting that we call a certain shrub laurel sauce, though as a matter of fact we always call it poets' laurel, the temptation is strong to retort, Pray tell a few stories on yourselves Sound advice that, which all of us have yearned to give the foolhardy stranger airing unasked his views on our domestic matters.

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