THE     FIGHTING    FIFTIES	14!
cabin in which to undress. It was a wooden construction on
wheels placed at the water's edge with its steps half-submerged.
He committed himself to the waves. When he was ready to
return a fearful thing happened. Three la'dies, a mother with
her daughters, settled themselves on camp stools in his direct
line of approach. They seemed very respectable females, and
the girls, he noted, were both pretty. There was no possibility
of reaching his cabin without passing in front of them. They
each held a prayer book and watched him swimming about with
serene unconcern. The Frenchman's feelings can be imagined.
To give them a hint without offending their modesty he advanced
cautiously on all fours, raising himself by degrees as much as
decency permitted.^1
English notions of propriety were always hard for a foreigner
to appreciate, for strict as they were, they seemed founded on
no principle and were often a matter of words. A Frenchman
noted that the more respectable islanders would sooner die than
mention the human posterior by name, yet in mixed company
would roar with laughter at the story of the lady who said she
had plenty to sit on but nowhere to put it. Mr. Roget in his
famous Thesaurus of English words and phrases, published in
1852, classified all concept and matter except the human body,
which was discreetly scattered about the book, the stomach
concealed under the general title of "receptacle," the genitals
under that of production. Yet physical rough and tumble,
often of the crudest kind, was the essence of the national humour.
For unlike the older territorial aristocracy to which in its
power and wealth it was already beginning to give tone, the new
English middle class was only half civilised, and its advance in
manners, rapid as it was, could not keep pace with its fortunes.
The moment it relaxed its puritanical decorum, the rude native
Adam, so full of rustic nature and vitality, emerged. In its
pleasures, urban England still smacked of the earth. When it
went on the spree, it left its prudery at home. It sat top-hatted,
eating devilled kidneys, drinking aqua vitae and joining in the
roaring choruses of the smoky Cider Cellar in Maiden Lane:
it kicked up its flounces and heels and stamped them on
the ground in the rhythmic surge of the polka. All the
vulgarity and vitality of the nation burst out in such annual
institutions as the Christmas pantomime, when even the family
Kd Frenchman sees England in the fifties, 296,