Now the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except
in the sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything
good and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random
from the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of
their history, nay of their geography. It is an understatement to call
Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by
the sea till it nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands
can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile
inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and
narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy
is really national because it is natural; it has cohered out of hundreds
of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and
after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a
constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the
British Navy as Frederick II. copied the French Army: and this Japanese
or ant-like assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which
the Germans have and the English markedly have not. There are other German
superiorities which are very much superior.

The one or two really jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely
the things which the English haven't got: notably a real habit of popular
music and of the ancient songs of the people, not merely spreading from
the towns or caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather
resemble the Welsh; though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if
they do. But the difference between the Germans and the English goes
deeper than all these signs of it; they differ more than any other two
Europeans in the normal posture of the mind. Above all, they differ in
what is the most English of all English traits; that shame which the
French may be right in calling "the bad shame"; for it is certainly mixed
up with pride and suspicion, the upshot of which we called shyness. Even