Chapter 71
National character: the distinctive temper, manners and genius of peoples and nations, and what forms them.
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National character is the idea that peoples, like persons, have a temper of their own: that the English, the French, the Athenians or the Germans differ in their manners, tastes and habits of mind, and that something forms these differences. It belongs among the great ideas of the Harvard Classics because so many of these books, without setting out to treat it, keep passing judgment on nations. Historians, travellers, critics, preachers and poets all speak of what the English or the Spaniards are by nature. Behind such judgments lie real questions. Is a nation a stock, a tradition or a political accident? Are the differences between peoples deep, or merely the prejudice of those who report them? If they are real, what makes them: blood, climate, laws, religion or trade?
The first question is what a nation is at all. Freeman answers most fully, and his answer is that no nation is of pure blood. Rome assimilated Gaul and Spain, and the modern French, Bulgarians and Russians descend in large part from conquered peoples1. Each nation has a dominant element that sets its standard, and adopted members are absorbed in speech, feeling and habit2. The French and British types are composites of Celtic blood, Latin speech and Teutonic polity3. Switzerland shows strong national feeling without any common language or blood4. Freeman takes language as the practical test of nationality, with adoption standing in for descent5, though political tradition can outweigh even language, as among the Norman islanders6. Machiavelli had already seen that peoples sharing language and customs are easily joined, while those differing in usages resist7. Jay presents Americans as fit for union because they share ancestry, language, religion and manners, and have been forged by a common war8. More imagines the extreme case, a whole people’s civility made by its founder9.
Against all this stands Hume’s insistence that human nature is uniform across nations and ages, so that Greeks and Romans can be understood from the French and English10. Yet even Hume grants that age and nation shape moral sentiment, as Homeric and Fénelonian ideals of the hero differ11. Browne rejects national antipathies and would judge peoples by their actions12. Burke refuses to blame a whole people for historic hostilities13. The sceptic’s suspicion is easy to understand, for much talk of national character is plainly partisan. Drayton’s Agincourt sets valiant English against proud and false French14. Macbeth sneers at English “epicures”15. Adam Smith traces commercial restrictions against France to national prejudice and animosity16,17. Voltaire finds even the Royal Society moved by national partiality over Newton and Descartes18. Rousseau notes that each people scorns the ways of the rest19. The ballads, by contrast, show pride joined to respect between Scottish and English foes20.
If the differences are real, what causes them? The oldest answer is descent. Tacitus holds the Germans to be indigenous and unmixed, uniform in their fierce look, impatient of heat and toil, and hardened to cold and hunger21,22. Taine makes race the primary spring: innate hereditary dispositions, Aryan, Semitic or Chinese, that persist through centuries23,24. But he joins race to climate, migration and conquest25, and treats national character as an accumulated past that acts on each new stage26,27. Emerson weighs race and admits other forces as well: civilization, religion, trades, liberty, food, island life and success28,29. Climate has its own advocates. Newman recalls the belief that Attica’s clear air and Boeotia’s heavy one matched the wit and dullness of their peoples30. Harrison ties the hearty English diet to a northern climate31. Smith finds wine countries sober and northern nations given to drink, but he credits cheapness of liquor as much as climate32,33. Dryden’s Romans damn Egypt’s soil for breeding baseness34.
A third line of explanation looks to government and social condition. Froissart explains the English commons’ rising by their ease and riches35. Bacon argues that light taxation and a sound yeomanry made the English good soldiers where French peasants were not36. Smith derives Swiss and Hamburg honesty in taxation from small republics that trust their magistrates37, and China’s stagnation from its laws38. Mill sets the East, sunk under the despotism of custom, against a progressive Europe that might yet lapse39, and he contrasts the American gift for improvising government with bureaucratic dependence40. Others look to commerce and speech. Harrison blames trade-bred prosperity for English excess and inconstancy41. Johnson holds that commerce corrupts manners and language alike42 and that a polished, learned people keeps innovating its speech43. Burke links the polished weakness of French to national character44, and Whitman takes the English tongue as the voice of a race never without the idea of liberty45.
The most sustained portrait in the collection is Emerson’s *English Traits*, and it shows these causes working together. The English are a composite of Celtic, German and Norse stocks46,47, fused into a type suited to their soil48. Island, sea and rivalry forged a rough, masculine and fiercely national race49. Emerson traces their brutality to Norse pirate ancestors, a nature civilization has not sweetened50, yet he finds courage blended with tenderness, manly rather than warlike51. Their genius is practical logic: fact-minded, impatient of speculation, tenacious and thorough52,53. It is a bias for utility stamped on the whole civilization54. They are reserved and insular55, sincere from a Teutonic heart56, and conceited across all classes57, though Emerson counts their brag a source of power58. They love custom and precedent59, defer to rank60, and treat loyalty as a sub-religion61. Their church fitted a toiling, serious people62. Then the portrait darkens. The modern English mind is mechanical and utilitarian63, and its poetry has grown prosaic and Birmingham-like64. Macaulay voices a governing class that equates good with commodity65, and the nation is marked by a fear of ideas66. Still Emerson finds two nations within England, the animal force and a retrieving minority of profound minds67. His English are good lovers and haters, grand in adversity68.
Other writers confirm parts of the portrait and dispute others. Froissart’s English rise calm and array in good order while the French fall into disorder69. Harrison’s Elizabethans are free, stout and haughty, abhorring torture70, yet nothing is more constant in England than inconstancy in dress71. Milton calls the English quick, acute and subtle72. Dryden, more modestly, says their genius is to improve an invention rather than invent73. Voltaire makes liberty natural to the Englishman74, says commerce bred English freedom75, and holds that free government makes the whole nation think76. He also judges English poetic genius strong but lacking taste, an untrimmed tree77,78. Burke’s English are coldly sluggish, resistant to innovation and reverent toward God, king and nobility79. They cherish prejudice and inherited wisdom80, hold their liberties as an entailed patrimony81, and are deeply religious82. Mill, a generation later, finds in English society a low moral tone that sneers at high feeling83 and a reserve and stunted feeling set against French sociability84. He sees the worst of the national character in the Sepoy rebellion85. Ruskin indicts a money-making mob that remains brave and loyal in affection86, and Carlyle a Respectability-ridden delicacy87. Burke’s steady oak-sheltered people, then, becomes in Mill and Ruskin a stagnant one. It is the same temper, praised and blamed.
The Continental nations usually appear in contrast to the English. Cellini finds the French irksome and calls a Frenchman’s rashness “true to his French nature”88; he says they trade in lawsuits against foreigners89. Dryden finds French verse light and nimble, English strong and weighty90, and says affected purity has unsinewed French poetry91. Voltaire calls French civil wars frivolous beside purposeful English rebellion92. Burke sees the Revolution as a chaos of levity and ferocity93, yet he calls the French a generous, gallant, loyal nation misled94 and praises the kindly manners of their nobles95,96. On the Italians Macaulay offers the subtlest causal account. Early town republics and an unbroken ancient civilization formed a people devoted to learning and arts97,98, whose moral taste forgave craft where Northerners forgave violence99,100. Theirs was an intellectual superiority amid political subjugation101. Tacitus’s Germans are indifferent to gold, reverent toward women and worshippers in groves102,103. Luther’s Germans are credulous and generous, exploited by Rome as fools104,105, and given to gluttony and drunkenness106. Goethe’s Netherlanders refuse to be “made like the Spaniards”107. Schiller’s Gessler sees the Swiss as proud and stubborn-necked108. Renan’s Celts are poetic, gentle and full of a living sense of nature, a union of strength and weakness109,110,111. Carlyle traces Scottish hardiness to Saxon stock and Knox’s Presbyterianism112.
The ancients judged peoples too, often in moral rather than causal terms. Plutarch’s Athenians are magnanimous, preferring Greek liberty to Persian gold113, generous to the deserving poor114, and fickle toward Alcibiades115. Early Rome’s word for virtue meant manly courage116. Pliny urges respect for the Greeks of Achaia as originators of learning and laws117. Aristophanes laments an Athens grown talkative and insubordinate118. Herodotus marks Egyptian religious zeal and an unwillingness to adopt foreign usages119,120. The Koran explains the destruction of ‘Ad and Thamud by their collective vices121,122 and portrays Israel as recurrently rebellious123. Here national character is moral desert, not natural history.
In the New World the question is turned toward self-definition. Franklin credits libraries with making Philadelphians unusually instructed124. Woolman warns that colonial luxury and covetousness invite calamity125, and Emerson finds Americans possessed of many virtues but no Faith or Hope126. Lowell’s Americans are democratic by instinct and habit127 and inherit the English distaste for innovation128, while Whitman locates the national genius in the common people’s freedom and lack of deference129. The voyagers apply the idea to others. Columbus finds the islanders timid and generous130. Drake’s chronicler praises the Barateve islanders as just and courteous131. Darwin revises the crew’s low opinion of the Tahitians132 and explains Valdivian austerity by their long victories over Spain133. Dana thinks Californian idleness an infection that turns English children Spanish134. On colonial conduct the English writers are unanimous and interested. Paré calls the Spaniard cruel to the Indians135. Raleigh contrasts Spanish tyranny with English justice136. Smith names the Spaniards’ “sacred thirst of gold”137.
Several questions remain open. Freeman’s assimilation and Taine’s persistent race give opposite accounts of how deep national traits run, and Emerson tries to hold both at once. Hume’s uniform human nature has never been refuted so much as ignored. Writers keep finding that the same nation looks different to admirer and critic, and different from one century to the next. Harrison’s fickle English become Burke’s immovable ones. That shift suggests that national character, whatever its reality, is also something a people makes and remakes through its institutions, its prosperity and its quarrels.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
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