THE TOURIST AND THE TUTOR
ners, customs, and opinions of every other nation; yet on their return to their own country, immediately assume foreign manners, and continue during the remainder of their lives to express the highest contempt for everything that is English."[1] Nor was this result altogether surprising. Trained from his earliest youth to regard everything English as best, the untraveled Englishman on going abroad found to his surprise people who counted their own ways as good as his, who ate palatable food unlike his own, and in dress, manners, customs, and ideals were of a different type. And in the end he was converted in spite of himself.
Fortunately, an occasional Englishman was sufficiently open-minded to confess that his countrymen were not entirely above criticism.[2] "English are generally the most extraordinary persons that we meet with, even out of England," writes Horace Walpole to Conway.[3] And years later, in a letter to Mann, he remarks, "What must Europe think of us from our travellers, and from our own accounts of ourselves?"[4] Lady Mary Montagu had lived enough abroad to judge her countrymen from the Continental point of view, and she regarded a good proportion of the English tourists as no great credit to their native land. Writing from Venice to Lady Pomfret,[5] she says that she is impatient to hear good sense pronounced in her native tongue; "having only heard my language out of the mouths of boys and governors for these five months. Here are inundations of them broke in upon us this carnival, and my apartment must be their refuge; the greater part of them having kept an inviolable fidelity to the languages their nurses taught them. Their whole business abroad (as far as I can perceive) being to buy new cloaths, in which they shine in some obscure coffee-house, where they are sure of meeting only one another; and after the important conquest of some waiting gentlewoman of an opera Queen, who perhaps they remember as long as they live, return to England excellent judges of men and manners. I find the spirit of patriotism so strong in me every time I see them, that I look on them as the greatest blockheads in nature;
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- ↑ View of Society and Manners in France, etc., p. 429.
- ↑ But note the English point of view in the following remarks by Dr. Thomas Arnold: "It will not do to contemplate ourselves only, or, contenting ourselves with saying that we are better than others, scorn to amend our institutions by comparing them with those of other nations. Our travellers and our exquisites imitate the outside of foreign customs without discrimination, just as in the absurd fashion of not eating fish with a knife,borrowed from the French, who do it because they have no knives fit for use. But monkeyish imitation will do no good." Stanley's Life of Dr. Arnold, ii, 343.
- ↑ Letters, iv, 402.
- ↑ Ibid., ix, 35.
- ↑ It is interesting to compare with the comments of Lady Mary those of Dr. Thomas Arnold, about a century later (July 17, 1830)."I was struck, too, with the total isolation of England from the European world. We are considered like the inhabitants of another planet, feared perhaps, and respected in many points, and in no respect understood or sympathized with. And how much is our state the same with regard to the Continent. How little do we seem to know, or to value their feelings, — how little do we appreciate or imitate their intellectual progress." Stanley's Life of Dr. Arnold, ii, 333, 334.
