The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was
either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most
struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity.
Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with
close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for
sake of the eccentricity itself.
The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or
dinner-table was that So-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence
to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and
when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by
epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to
become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of English
society as well as its chief terror.
The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but
Thackeray quite justly maintained that he was not a satirist at
all, and that his pictures of English society were exact and
good-natured. The American, who could not believe it, fell back
on Dickens, who, at all events, had the vice of exaggeration to
extravagance, but Dickens's English audience thought the
exaggeration rather in manner or style, than in types. Mr.
Gladstone himself went to see Sothern act Dundreary, and laughed
till his face was distorted -- not because Dundreary was
exaggerated, but because he was ridiculously like the types that
Gladstone had seen -- or might have seen -- in any club in Pall
Mall.
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