The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

XX. Is it true that the English are deeply branded with the vice of hypocrisy? The accusation, of course, dates from the time of the Round- heads; before that, nothing in the national character could have suggested it. The England of Chaucer, the England of Shakespeare, assuredly was not hypocrite. The change wrought by Puritanism introduced into the life of the people that new element which ever since, more or less notably, has suggested to the observer a habit of double-dealing in morality and religion. The scorn of the Cavalier is easily understood; it created a traditional Cromwell, who, till Carlyle arose, figured before the world as our arch-dissembler. With the decline of genuine Puritanism came that peculiarly English manifestation of piety and virtue which is represented by Mr. Pecksniff--a being so utterly different from Tartufe, and perhaps impossible to be understood save by Englishmen themselves. But it is in our own time that the familiar reproach has been persistently levelled at us. It often sounds upon the lips of our emancipated youth; it is stereotyped for daily impression in the offices of Continental newspapers. And for the reason one has not far to look. When Napoleon called us a "nation of shop-keepers," we were nothing of the kind; since his day we have become so, in the strictest sense of the word; and consider the spectacle of a flourishing tradesman, anything but scrupulous in his methods of business, who loses no opportunity of bidding all mankind to regard him as a religious and moral exemplar. This is the actual show of things with us; this is the England seen by our bitterest censors. There is an excuse for those who charge us with "hypocrisy."