From these main premises, then, we come to what the Englishman really is.

When, after months of travel, one returns to England one can taste, smell, feel the difference in the atmosphere, physical and moral—­the curious, damp, blunt, good-humored, happy-go-lucky, old-established, slow-seeming formlessness of everything.  You hail a porter, you tell him you have plenty of time; he muddles your things amiably, with an air of “It’ll be all right,” till you have only just time.  But suppose you tell him you have no time; he will set himself to catch that train for you, and he will catch it faster than a porter of any other country.  Let no stranger, however, experiment to prove the truth of this, for that porter—­and a porter is very like any other Englishman—­is incapable of taking the foreigner seriously and, quite friendly but a little pitying, will lose him the train, assuring the unfortunate gentleman that he really doesn’t know what train he wants to catch—­how should he?

The Englishman must have a thing brought under his nose before he will act; bring it there and he will go on acting after everybody else has stopped.  He lives very much in the moment, because he is essentially a man of facts and not a man of imagination.  Want of imagination makes him, philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start, but once he has “got going,” as we say, it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina.  The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimizing the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy.  It is very difficult to come to the end of him.  Add to this unimaginative, practical, tenacious moderation an inherent spirit of competition—­not to say pugnacity—­so strong that it will often show through the coating of his “Live and let live,” half-surly, half-good-humored manner; add a peculiar, ironic, “don’t care” sort of humor; an underground but inveterate humaneness, and an ashamed idealism—­and you get some notion of the pudding of English character.  Its main feature is a kind of terrible coolness, a rather awful level-headedness.  The Englishman makes constant small blunders; but few, almost no, deep mistakes.  He is a slow starter, but there is no stronger finisher because he has by temperament and training the faculty of getting through any job that he gives his mind to with a minimum expenditure of vital energy; nothing is wasted in expression, style, spread-eagleism; everything is instinctively kept as near to the practical heart of the matter as possible.  He is—­to the eye of an artist—­distressingly matter-of-fact, a tempting mark for satire.  And yet he is in truth an idealist, though it is his nature to snub, disguise, and mock his own inherent optimism.  To admit enthusiasms is “bad form” if he is a “gentleman”; “swank” or mere waste of good heat if he is not a “gentleman.”