But this English self-consciousness is no mere fluffy gaucherie; it is our special form of what Germans would call “Kultur.” Behind every manifestation of thought or emotion, the Briton retains control of self, and is thinking: “That’s all I’ll let myself feel; at all events all I’ll let myself show.” This stoicism is good in its refusal to be foundered; bad in that it fosters a narrow outlook; starves emotion, spontaneity, and frank sympathy; destroys grace and what one may describe roughly as the lovable side of personality. The English hardly ever say just what comes into their heads. What we call “good form,” the unwritten law which governs certain classes of the Briton, savours of the dull and glacial; but there lurks within it a core of virtue. It has grown up like callous shell round two fine ideals――suppression of the ego lest it trample on the corns of other people; and exaltation of the maxim: ‘Deeds before words.’ Good form, like any other religion, starts well with some ethical truth, but in due time gets commonised, twisted, and petrified till at last we can hardly trace its origin, and watch with surprise its denial and contradiction of the root idea. Without doubt, before the war, good form had become a kind of disease in England. A French friend told me how he witnessed in a Swiss Hotel the meeting between an Englishwoman and her son, whom she had not seen for two years; she was greatly affected――by the fact that he had not brought a dinner-jacket. The best manners are no “manners,” or at all events no mannerisms; but many Britons who have even attained to this perfect purity are yet not free from the paralytic effects of “good form”; are still self-conscious in the depths of their souls, and never do or say a thing without trying not to show how much they are feeling. All this guarantees perhaps a certain decency in life; but in intimate intercourse with people of other nations who have not this particular cult of suppression, we English disappoint, and jar, and often irritate. Nations have their differing forms of snobbery. At one time, if we are to believe Thackeray, the English all wanted to be second cousins to the Earl of Leitrim, like that lady bland and passionate. Now-a-days it is not so simple. The Earl of Leitrim has become etherialised. We no longer care how a fellow is born, so long as he behaves as the Earl of Leitrim would have; never makes himself conspicuous or ridiculous, never shows too much what he’s really feeling, never talks of what he’s going to do, and always “plays the game.” The cult is centred in our Public Schools and Universities.