**** ROTATE **** **** ROTATE **** **** ROTATE **** **** ROTATE ****

Find this Story

Print, a form you can hold

Wireless download to your Amazon Kindle

Look for a summary or analysis of this Story.

Enjoy this? Share it!

PAGE 2

The Unimpassioned English
by [?]

Men of the Latin races are far more wise in this respect. If you tied the hands of a Frenchman, or an Italian, or even a Spaniard, up behind his back, the odds are he would be struck dumb! But we Englishmen–we only seem able to become eloquent when, as it were, we have voluntarily placed our own hands into the handcuffs of our own trouser pockets. Even Englishwomen are singularly un-self-revealing with anything except their tongues. You have only to watch an Englishwoman singing to realise how extremely limited are her powers of expression. She places both hands over her heart to represent “Love,” and opens them wide to illustrate every other emotion.

And this self-restriction–especially when you can’t hear what she is singing about, which is not seldom–leads more quickly to the wrinkles of perplexity than even does the problem of how to circumvent the culinary soarings of Mrs. Beaton, and yet obtain the same results . . . with eggs at the price they are! If some producing genius had not conceived the idea of ending off nearly every musical-comedy song with a dance, and yet another genius of equally enviable parts had not created the beauty chorus, I don’t know how many a prima donna of the lighter stage would ever be able to get through her own numbers. For, to dance at the end of her little ditty, and to have the chorus girls relieve her of further action at the end of the first verse, brings as great a relief to her as well as to the audience, as do his trouser pockets to the young man who makes-believe to love her for ever and for ever . . . and then some, on the stage.

And, because we have taken the well-dressed “poker” as our ideal of masculine “good form” in society, English men and women always seem to exude an atmosphere of “slouching” indifference to everything except their God–and football. It has such a very chilling effect upon exuberant foreigners when they run up against it. Emotionally, I am sure we are as developed as any other nation . . . look at our poetry, for example! But we have so long denied the right to express it, that we have forgotten how it should be done.

I shall love you on and on . . . throughout life; after death; until the end of eternity . . . !” declares the impassioned Englishman, the while he carelessly shakes the dead-end off his cigarette on to somebody else’s carpet.

And for you, Egbert, the world will be only too well lost. I will willingly die with you . . . at any time most convenient to yourself,” answers his equally-impassioned mistress, gently replacing an errant kiss-curl behind her left ear.

Well, I suppose it does take another Englishman to realise that these two are preparing for a crime passionel. But a simple foreigner, more used to the violence of the “movies” in everyday life than we are, might be excused if he merely believed them to be protesting a preference for prawns in aspic over prawns without.

Not, however, that it really matters . . . so long as the lovers, like Maisie, “get right there” at the finish. For, after all, does not passion mostly end in the same kind of old “tripe” . . . either here in England or . . . well, let us say . . . the tropics?