England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.

… It's funny about England," he continued thoughtfully. "Once you're outside London, you seem to meet all kinds of people you never expect to meet, people you can't imagine meeting just from reading about England in the papers or most of the books. Not only odd characters but people who seem to belong to other periods. You never imagine, when you live a long way off, that all the other Englands—Victorian and Edwardian, for instance—still survive in certain people.

England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.

Allow me to imagine, for a moment, a stranger from some distant country, who should arrive in England to examine our institutions.... He would have made himself acquainted with its fame in history, and above all, he would have been told, that the proudest boast of this celebrated country was its political freedom.... What then would be his surprise, if he were taken by his guide, whom he had asked to conduct him to one of the places of election, to a green mound and told, that this green mound sent two Members to Parliament—or, to be taken to a stone wall, with three niches in it, and told that these three niches sent two Members to Parliament—or, if he were shown a green park, with many signs of flourishing vegetable life, but none of human habitation, and told that this green park sent two Members to Parliament? But his surprise would increase to astonishment if he were carried into the North of England, where he would see large flourishing towns, full of trade and activity, containing vast magazines of wealth and manufactures, and were told that these places had no Representatives in the Assembly which was said to represent the people.

England and France, the two most civilized nations on earth, who are in contrast to each other because of their different characters, are, perhaps chiefly for that reason, in constant feud with one another. Also, England and France, because of their inborn characters, of which the acquired and artificial character is only the result, are probably the only nations who can be assumed to have a particular and, as long as both national characters are not blended by the force of war, unalterable characteristics. That French has become the universal language of conversation, especially in the feminine world, and that English is the most widely used language of commerce among tradesmen, probably reflects the difference in their continental and insular geographic situation.

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous; he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people, their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by Church - two clergy - the State, two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids.

The Englishmen in the Middle East divided into two classes. Class one, subtle and insinuating, caught the characteristics of the people about him, their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner. He directed men secretly, guiding them as he would. In such frictionless habit of influence his own nature lay hid, unnoticed.
Class two, the John Bull of the books, became the more rampantly English the longer he was away from England. He invented an Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues, so splendid in the distance that, on return, he often found reality a sad falling off and withdrew his muddle-headed self into fractious advocacy of the good old times. Abroad, through his armoured certainty, he was a rounded sample of our traits. He showed the complete Englishman. There was friction in his track, and his direction was less smooth than that of the intellectual type: yet his stout example cut wider swathe.
Both sorts took the same direction in example, one vociferously, the other by implication. Each assumed the Englishman a chosen being, inimitable, and the copying him blasphemous or impertinent. In this conceit they urged on people the next best thing. God had not given it them to be English; a duty remained to be good of their type. Consequently we admired native custom; studied the language; wrote books about its architecture, folklore, and dying industries. Then one day, we woke up to find this chthonic spirit turned political, and shook our heads with sorrow over its ungrateful nationalism - truly the fine flower of our innocent efforts.
The French, though they started with a similar doctrine of the Frenchman as the perfection of mankind (dogma amongst them, not secret instinct), went on, contrarily, to encourage their subjects to imitate them; since, even if they could never attain the true level, yet their virtue would be greater as they approached it. We looked upon imitation as a parody; they as a compliment.

The county election was raging. ... I was circulating in the mob as a volunteer (like all the other undergraduates) on the side of Norreys. I held forth to a working man, possibly a forty shilling freeholder, on the established text, reform was revolution. To corroborate my doctrine I said, “Why, look at the revolutions in foreign countries”, meaning of course France and Belgium. The man looked hard at me and said these very words: “Damn all foreign countries: what has old England to do with foreign countries?” This is not the only time when I have received an important lesson from a humble source.

By the time I came to England at the age of sixteen I'd seen a great variety of landscapes. I think the English landscape was the only landscape I'd come across which didn't mean anything, particularly the urban landscape. England seemed to be very dull, because I'd been brought up at a much lower latitude — the same latitude as the places which are my real spiritual home as I sometimes think: Los Angeles and Casablanca. I'm sure this is something one perceives — I mean the angle of light, density of light. I'm always much happier in the south — Spain, Greece — than I am anywhere else. The English one, oddly enough, didn't mean anything. I didn't like it, it seemed odd. England was a place that was totally exhausted.

England and Scotland were poles apart... In England population, trade, wealth had constantly increased. New industries had grown up and found new markets in a richer, more sophisticated lay society at home. The economic growth of England had been extraordinary and had created, however unequally, a new comfort and a new culture. But in Scotland there had been no such growth. There was little trade, little industry, no increase of population. Always poor and backward, it now seemed, by contrast, poorer and more backward still. That contrast is vividly illustrated by the comments of those who crossed the Tweed, in either direction. We read the accounts of English travellers in Scotland. Their inns, cries Sir William Brereton, are worse than a jakes; and he breaks into a sustained cry of incredulous disgust at that dismal, dirty, waste, and treeless land. Then we turn to the Scottish travellers in England. "Their inns", exclaims Robert Baillie, "are like palaces"; and Sir Alexander Brodie of Brodie, goggling at all the wicked fancies and earthly delights of London, reminds us of a bedouin of the desert blinking in the bazaar of Cairo or Damascus.

God was English, though – since God was not always kind – this did not mean that everything was always going well. But ill fortune did not affect the national conviction of the superiority of the English, a visible hallmark of the century. It is found, for instance, in Richard Morison's writings in the 1530s, perhaps the first sign of this kind of thing; it is fully ripe in John Foxe and in similar writers of the Elizabethan era. God has singled out the English for his own, as the true elect nation. Morison, for instance pointed out that the English ate beef while the French lived on broth and vegetables, a plain proof of English superiority. And this was the view of a man who, I ought to emphasise, had lived many years abroad. We are not taking about ignorant men; we are talking about men who, having seen both sides, were (and I do not know that they were necessarily wrong) content to believe that the country they had been born into was especially blessed. That conviction is very marked among the Elizabethans and Jacobeans... The convictions I speak of are found widely diffused in popular consciousness, among the aristocracy, the gentry and the people at large, whether travellers or stay-at-homes. They might dislike one another, trouble one another, and be discontented with one another, but relative to the foreigner, relative to the poor and depressed subjects of supposedly despotic powers, they knew themselves specially favoured... The English thought England was good and elsewhere was inferior.

[written when news was received that a vast French invasion fleet had appeared off the south coast of England ] MA CHERE AMIE, … I awake to fears of invasion, to noise, faction, drums, soldiers, and care:- the whole town has now but two employments- the learning of French, and the exercise of arms- which is highly political, in my poor opinion, for should the military fail of success, which is not impossible- why, the ladies must take the field, and scold them to their ships again.

Oh, the roast beef of England,
And old England's roast beef!

The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.