_March 29_.--I notice that in his _Year's Journey through France and Spain in 1795_, Thicknesse favourably contrasts the Frenchman, who only took wine at meals, with the Englishman, who, "earning disease and misery at his bottle, sits at it many hours after dinner and always after supper." The French have largely retained their ancient sober habit (save for the unhappy introduction of the afternoon "aperitif"), but the English have shown a tendency to abandon their intemperance of excess in favour of an opposed intemperance, and instead of drinking till they fall under the table have sometimes developed a passion for not drinking at all. Similarly in eating, the English of old were renowned for the enormous quantities of roast beef they ate; the French, who have been famous bread-makers for at least seven hundred years, ate much bread and only a moderate amount of meat; that remains their practice to-day, and though such skilful cooks of vegetables the French have never shown any tendency to live on them. When I was last at Versailles the latest guide-book mentioned a vegetarian restaurant; I sought it out, only to find that it had already disappeared. But the English have developed a passion for vegetarianism, here again reacting from one intemperance to the opposed intemperance. Just in the same way we have a national passion for bull-baiting and cock-fighting and pheasant-shooting and fox-hunting, and a no less violent passion for anti-vivisection and the protection of animals.
This characteristic really goes very deep into our English temper. The Englishman is termed eccentric, and eccentricity, in a precise and literal sense, is fundamental in the English character. We preserve our balance, in other words, by passing from one extreme to the opposite extreme, and keep in touch with our centre of gravity by rolling heavily from one side of it to the other side.
Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Norman character many centuries ago with much psychological acuteness, insisted on the excessiveness of that _gens effrenatissima_, the tendency to unite opposite impulses, the taste for contradictory extremes. Now of all their conquests the Normans only made one true and permanent Conquest, the Conquest of England. And as Freeman has pointed out, surely with true insight, the reason of the profound conquest of England by the Normans simply lay in the fact that the spirit of the Norman was already implanted in the English soil, scattered broadcast by a long series of extravagant Northmen who had daringly driven their prows into every attractive inlet. So on the spiritual side the Norman had really in England little conquest to make. The genius of Canute, one of the greatest of English kings and a Northman, had paved the road for William the Conqueror. It was open to William Blake, surely an indubitable Englishman, to establish the English national motto: "The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom." Certainly it is a motto that can only be borne triumphantly on the standard of a very well-tempered nation. On that road it is so easy to miss Wisdom and only encounter Dissolution. Doubtless, on the whole, the Greeks knew better.