Ingleside

“ Susan Has a Proposal of Marriage AN aeroplane was flying over Glen St. Mary, like a great bird poised against the western sky,—a sky so clear and of such a pale, silvery yellow, that it gave an impression of a vast, wind-freshened space of freedom. The little group on the Ingleside lawn looked up at it with fascinated eyes, although it was by no means an unusual thing to see an occasional hovering plane that summer. Susan was always intensely excited. ”

“ Carl sprang to his feet and bolted blindly. With a simultaneous shriek the girls followed him. Like mad creatures they tore up the hill, across the road and into the manse. They had left Aunt Martha sewing in the kitchen. She was not there. They rushed to the study. It was dark and tenantless. As with one impulse, they swung around and made for Ingleside—but not across Rainbow Valley. Down the hill and through the Glen street they flew on the wings of their wild terror, Carl in the lead, Una bringing up the rear. ”

“ Wild cherry trees, that in blossom time would be misty white, were scattered all over the valley, mingling with the dark spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran through it from the Glen village. The houses of the village were comfortably far away; only at the upper end of the valley was a little tumble-down, deserted cottage, referred to as "the old Bailey house." It had not been occupied for many years, but a grass-grown dyke surrounded it and inside was an ancient garden where the Ingleside children could find violets and daisies and June lilies still blooming in season. ”

“ There was no crowd at the Glen Station the next morning to see Walter off. It was becoming a commonplace for a khaki clad boy to board that early morning train after his last leave. Besides his own, only the manse folk were there, and Mary Vance. Mary had sent her Miller off the week before, with a determined grin, and now considered herself entitled to give expert opinion on how such partings should be conducted.
“The main thing is to smile and act as if nothing was happening,” she informed the Ingleside group. “The boys all hate the sob act like poison. ”

“ As it was amongst the Engle or Angles of Northumbria that literary culture first appeared, and as an Angle or Englisc dialect was the first to be used for vernacular literature, Englisc came eventually to be a general name for all forms of the vernacular as opposed to Latin, &c.; and even when the West-Saxon of Alfred became in its turn the literary or classical form of speech, it was still called Englisc or English. ”

“ An Englishman, representing as he does the insular Angles, and looking to the part that they have played in the world, may, with either pride or regret, as the case may be, say that on their native soil of Germany, the Angle history is next to a non-entity. It is like that of the Majiars of Asia. What our ancestors did at home before they became the Englishmen of Great Britain may have been of any amount of importance, or, [202] of any amount of insignificance. ”

“ One day an Englishman remarked to me, “You have a great many castes in India?” “Yes, I replied, about as many as you have in England.” He looked at me with a stare, as if he thought I was guying him, and then said, “I think you are about right.”
There is something so peculiar in that stare, a concentration of the negation of intellect and intelligence in appearance of an Englishman’s face, when listening; a dull, cold look, as expressionless as the countenance of a heathen stone idol, that freezes one, and makes him feel that he is saying something foolish or impudent. ”

“ What is more beautiful or meet to be taken to the bosom than the Englishman? Everybody loves him; his goings to and fro upon the earth are as the progresses of one who has done all men good. He drops fatness and blessings as he walks. He smiles benignity and graciousness and "I-am-glad-to-see-you-all-looking-so-well." And before him runs one in plush, crying, "Who is the most popular man of this footstool?" And all the people shall rejoice and say, "The Englishman—God bless him!" ”

“ The irresistible genius and propagation of the English race are fast Anglicizing the world, and thus centering it around the heart of civilization and commerce. Under the sceptre of England alone, there live, it is said, one hundred and forty million of human beings, embracing all races of men, dwelling between every two degrees of latitude and longitude around the globe. And there is the Anglo-American hemisphere of the English race, doubling its population every twenty-five years, and propelling its propagation through the Western World. ”

“ What a monster and a beast of many heads is the Englishman now become! To whom may he be compared worthily but to Æsop's crow, for as the crow decked herself with the feathers of all kinds of birds to make herself beautiful, even so doth the vain Englishman for the fond apparelling of himself borrow of every nation to set himself forth gallant in the eyes of the world. ”

“ The judgment of the Englishman by all other European peoples is that he is the most suspicious, the most reserved, the most unreceptive, the most unfriendly, the coldest hearted, and the most domineering of all Western peoples. Ask a Frenchman, an Italian, a German, a Spaniard, even an American, what he thinks about Englishmen; and every one of them will tell you the very same thing. This is precisely what the character of men would become who had lived for thousands of years in the conditions of Northern society. ”

“ And he had that air of infinite, yet unconscious, condescension which the English gentleman, alone of all the creatures of the world, is born with, and which, willy-nilly, he carries with him from the cradle to the grave.
They tell you in the different countries of the world that the Englishman is awkward, shy, ungraceful, seldom at his ease. May be; but not the English gentleman. He is the only man I have known who is always at his ease in every possible situation. ”

“ Let us take up together the work so magnificently performed by the United States and by England down to the commencement of this century. Once for all let prejudices be cast aside. Let us unite in a great English-speaking family. Let us be content to learn from each other. And when the curtain of the twenty-first century is raised, may the successful anglicisation of the world be revealed; may the real spirit of our institutions and laws prevail everywhere, and the English language have become the universal dialect of mankind. ”

“ You think because I see some spots on the sun of the English character, I don't love Englishmen. Why, how can any man who speaks the English tongue, and boasts one drop of English blood in his veins, not be proud of England? England, the mother of poets and thinkers; England, that gave us Newton, Darwin, Spencer; England, that holds in her lap Oxford, Salisbury, Durham; England of daisy and heather and pine-wood! Are we hewn out of granite, to be cold before England? ”

“ Always home has seemed so far away,—so hopelessly far away from this hideous welter of filth and blood. But tonight it is quite close to me—it seems to me I can almost see you—hear you speak. And I can see the moonlight shining white and still on the old hills of home. It has seemed to me ever since I came here that it was impossible that there could be calm gentle nights and unshattered moonlight anywhere in the world. But tonight somehow, all the beautiful things I have always loved seem to have become possible again—and this is good, and makes me feel a deep, certain, exquisite happiness. ”

“ Emotion shook Rilla from head to foot. Joy—happiness—sorrow—fear—every passion that had wrung her heart in those four long years seemed to surge up in her soul for a moment as the deep of being were stirred. ”

“ An Englishman at a play mounts upon a bench, and refuses to get down at the request of another, who threatens to call him to account the next day. ‘Yes,’ is the answer of the first, ‘if your master will let you!’ His abuse of liberty, he thinks, is justified by the other’s want of it. All an Englishman’s ideas are modifications of his will; which shows, in one way, that right is founded on will, since the English are at once the freest and most wilful of all people. If you meet another on the ridge of a precipice, are you to throw each other down? ”

“ While a popular French author sums up the elements of life in England as being la vie de famille, la politique, et les affaires,—'domestic life, politics, and business,'—he complacently infers that le fond du caractère Anglais, 'the basis of the English character,' is nothing more nor less than le manque de bonheur—'a want of anything like happiness.' An English thinker, on the other hand, finds in the very language of France the evidence of superficial emotion and unaspiring, irreverent intelligence. ”

“ An Englishman may write with the most brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word. But England cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself. It is England that is thin-skinned. It causeth me to smile when I read the modifications of my language which have been made in my English editions to fit them for the sensitive English palate. Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of offense that you'll not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands. ”

“ To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English have mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs. The average Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own concerns and monumentally ignorant about all other things. If an Englishman's business requires that he shall learn the habits and customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric, he goes and learns them—and learns them well. ”

“ A language enthusiast does not put it that way to himself; he says, rather, ‘If I can make the people talk Irish again they will be the less English’; but if you talk to him till you have hunted the words into their burrow you will find that the word ‘Ireland’ means to him a form of life delightful to his imagination, and that the word ‘England’ suggests to him a cold, joyless, irreligious and ugly life. ”

“ Through these Anglicized Celts, the English language has taken possession of North America, South Africa, and Australasia; not only is it swallowing up the French of Canada or Louisiana, the Spanish of California or New Mexico, and the Dutch of the Cape, but in the New World it has blotted out the African and Indian tongues, and is assimilating in the second generation the German, Scandinavian, Russian, and Italian immigrants. Your true New-Englander is not a prolific father, like the German or the Irishman ”

“ At the same time England has a class to which we have happily no parallel in our country—a class to which even English gentlemen liken the Sepoys, and who would, they admit, under like circumstances be guilty of like enormities. But the true Englishman shuts his eyes for a great part of the time to the steps in the social scale down which his race descends, and looks only at the upper walks. ”

“ THIS sketch of the social life of our forefathers throughout the ages that are past is dedicated to all English-speaking peoples, who are proud to look back to a common ancestry. The race has burst the bounds of its old island home. Far and wide, over the length and breadth of the world, England's children are scattered, but they never forget that the old country is the land of their fathers. Their distant homes are yet English homes—they themselves are yet Englishmen. ”

“ For instance, an Englishman knows how to imprint his individuality on all that surrounds him, animate as well as inanimate objects. The Englishman is a being whose manners are always solemn and systematic. He is so much the slave of his habits that he carries them with him wherever he may be. Imagine two Englishmen, one at Chimborazo, the other on the Himalayas, and except for the difference of time which results from the difference of longitude, you may be sure that they will both eat the same thing at the same hour. ”

“ When, then, after nearly four hundred years the Romans went away, the people of Britain were still British. But soon another people came. These were the Anglo-Saxons, the English, who came from over the sea. And little by little they took possession of Britain. They drove the old dwellers out until it was only in the north, in Wales and in Cornwall, that they were to be found. Then Britain became Angleland or England, and the language was no longer Celtic, but English. And although there are a few words in our language which can be traced to the old Celtic, these are very few. ”

“ Any man who would venture to use either a cane or a sword against another who had nothing to defend himself with but his hands, would run a risk of being torn to pieces by the apprentices of the neighbourhood and by the mob. . . . I am willing to believe that the English are prone to some faults, as all nations are; but I am satisfied, by several years’ experience, that the more that foreigners are acquainted with the English, the more they will esteem and love them. What brave men do I know in England! ”

“ What interest have you in defending an Englishman? It is only an Englishman!”
“I know, but he is, nevertheless, a man. He suffers as we do, even more than we French do, since the lot that you reserve for them is more painful than ours.” ”

“ But heap, God, thy, thigh, hang, shame, which are none of the seven spell’d by the Letters we intend should spell them: neither can any Englishman for his ears, eyes and wits, spell any of these words, and MILLIONS more like ’em, more by his 24 English Letters, make what shift he can, while Ingland is Ingland, and have both Universities, CAMBRIGE and Oxford to help him, and all the Universities beyond the Seas to help them. ”