That phrase applies to many things in England besides offering a light to the Prince, or asking a fellow traveler what those buildings are; and I think that the Englishman’s notion of his right to privacy lies at the bottom of quite a number of these things. You may lay some of them to snobbishness, to caste, to shyness, they may have various secondary origins; but I prefer to cover them all with the broader term, the right to privacy, because it seems philosophically to account for them and explain them.
In May, 1915, an Oxford professor was in New York. A few years before this I had read a book of his which had delighted me. I met him at lunch, I had not known him before. Even as we shook hands, I blurted out to him my admiration for his book.
That was the whole of his reply. It made me laugh at myself, for I should have known better. I had often been in England and could have told anybody that you mustn’t too abruptly or obviously refer to what the other fellow does, still less to what you do yourself. “It isn’t done.” It’s a sort of indecent exposure. It’s one of the invasions of the right to privacy.
In America, not everywhere but in many places, a man upon entering a club and seeing a friend across the room, will not hesitate to call out to him, “Hullo, Jack!” or “Hullo, George!” or whatever. In England “it isn’t done.” The greeting would be conveyed by a short nod or a glance. To call out a man’s name across a room full of people, some of whom may be total strangers, invades his privacy and theirs. Have you noticed how, in our Pullman parlor cars, a party sitting together, generally young women, will shriek their conversation in a voice that bores like a gimlet through the whole place? That is an invasion of privacy. In England “it isn’t done.” We shouldn’t stand it in a theatre, but in parlor cars we do stand it. It is a good instance to show that the Englishman’s right to privacy is larger than ours, and thus that his liberty is larger than ours.
Before leaving this point, which to my thinking is the cause of many frictions and misunderstandings between ourselves and the English, I mustn’t omit to give instances of divergence, where an Englishman will speak of matters upon which we are silent, and is silent upon subjects of which we will speak.