The Inheritance of Humour


There are some truths which seem to get old almost as soon as they are
born, and that simply because they are so astonishingly true that people
soon get to feel as though they have known them all their lives; and
such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last
five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect
commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost,
the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from
another, as tastes or colours differentiate things--_that_ a
nation hardly ever knows until it is pointed out to it by some foreigner
or by some observer from within. It cannot know it, because one cannot
tell the very atmosphere in which one lives. It is universal and
therefore unnoticed. Now, if this is true of any nation, it is
particularly true of England. And English people need to be told
morning, noon, and night, not indeed the particular national
characteristic which they have, since for this no particular name could
be found, but rather what its evidences are; as, for instance,
spontaneity in design, a passion for the mystical in poetry and the
arts; a power in water-colour, in which they are perhaps quite alone,
and certainly the first in Europe; and, above all, the chief, the master
thing of all, humour.

There is not nor ever will be anything like English humour. It is a
thing quite apart, and by it for now more than two hundred years you may