第44章

The British Snob is long, long past scepticism, and can afford to laugh quite good-humouredly at those conceited Yankees, or besotted little Frenchmen, who set up as models of mankind.THEY forsooth!

I have been led into these remarks by listening to an old fellow at the Hotel du Nord, at Boulogne, and who is evidently of the Slasher sort.He came down and seated himself at the breakfast-table, with a surly scowl on his salmon-coloured bloodshot face, strangling in a tight, cross-barred cravat; his linen and his appointments so perfectly stiff and spotless that everybody at once recognized him as a dear countryman.Only our port-wine and other admirable institutions could have produced a figure so insolent, so stupid, so gentleman-like.After a while our attention was called to him by his roaring out, in a voice of plethoric fury, 'O!'

Everybody turned round at the 'O,' conceiving the Colonel to be, as his countenance denoted him, in intense pain;but the waiters knew better, and instead of being alarmed, brought the Colonel the kettle.'O,' it appears, is the French for hot-water.The Colonel (though he despises it heartily) thinks he speaks the language remarkably well.Whilst he was inhausting his smoking tea, which went rolling and gurgling down his throat, and hissing over the 'hot coppers' of that respectable veteran, a friend joined him, with a wizened face and very black wig, evidently a Colonel too.

The two warriors, waggling their old heads at each other, presently joined breakfast, and fell into conversation, and we had the advantage of hearing about the old war, and some pleasant conjectures as to the next, which they considered imminent.They psha'd the French fleet; they pooh-pooh'd the French commercial marine; they showed how, in a war, there would be a cordon ('a cordong, by---') of steamers along our coast, and 'by ---,' ready at a minute to land anywhere on the other shore, to give the French as good a thrashing as they got in the last war, 'by ---'.In fact, a rumbling cannonade of oaths was fired by the two veterans during the whole of their conversation.

There was a Frenchman in the room, but as he had not been above ten years in London, of course he did not speak the language, and lost the benefit of the conversation.

'But, O my country!' said I to myself, it's no wonder that you are so beloved! If I were a Frenchman, how Iwould hate you!'

That brutal, ignorant, peevish bully of an Englishman is showing himself in every city of Europe.One of the dullest creatures under heaven, he goes travelling Europe under foot, shouldering his way into galleries and cathedrals, and bustling into palaces with his buck-ram uniform.At church or theatre, gala or picture-gallery, HIS face never varies.A thousand delightful sights pass before his bloodshot eyes, and don't affect him.

Countless brilliant scenes of life and manners are shown him, but never move him.He goes to church, and calls the practices there degrading and superstitious: as if HIS altar was the only one that was acceptable.He goes to picture-galleries, and is more ignorant about Art than a French shoeblack.Art, Nature pass, and there is no dot of admiration in his stupid eyes: nothing moves him, except when a very great man comes his way, and then the rigid, proud, self-confident, inflexible British Snob can be as humble as a flunkey and as supple as a harlequin.