The Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek was thirty-four
when he finally decided to accept a year-old offer from P.E.N.
to visit Britain in 1924. He was already well established as
a writer. He had collaborated with his older brother, the painter
and set designer Josef Capek, on The Insect Play (1921), a
political satire about totalitarianism; his novel The
Manufacture of the Absolute (1923) had been published to wide
acclaim; and such energetic and successful plays as R.U.R.
(1920)—which introduced the word “robot” (robota: Josef’s coinage) into
the language—and The Makropulos Affair (1923) were garnering
international attention. But if Capek was well-established, the
Independent Czechoslovak Republic was a fledgling enterprise.
Forged by the ceaseless efforts of the philosopher-politician T.
G. Masaryk (1850–1937), it was a mere half-dozen years old. Hope
had lately installed itself in the small, eager, inward-looking country.
The Great War was past; Hitler did not yet loom; peace, progress,
and prosperity bloomed everywhere. We know now how tragically
short-lived it was to be. Capek, always in delicate health, died
in 1938 just after Chamberlain betrayed Czechoslovakia to Hitler;
his brother, incarcerated in Dachau in 1939, perished at
Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

In 1924, such disaster was, or seemed, impossibly distant.
Capek arrived in Folkestone at the end of May. He was met by
Czech friends and instantly bundled into a train for London. His
English was far from perfect, but his cultural antennae bristled
with a voracious sensitivity. He registered the beauty,
absurdity, power, mobility, and sheer vast variousness of what
was then the greatest metropolis of the world’s most extensive
empire. He had come partly as an emissary to the British Empire
Exhibition for the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny, partly as an
independent cultural explorer. Over the course of two months he
scoured Britain for impressions. Besides London, the
self-described “pilgrim” visited Oxford, Cambridge, the Lake
District, Edinburgh, Dartmoor, and various port cities. He cast a
brief glance toward Ireland without actually going there. The
result of his pilgrimage was a satchel of nearly thirty
literary vignettes and some seventy amusing pen-and-ink
drawings and caricatures. The chronicle began to be serialized in
Lidové noviny while Capek was still in Britain and in an
English translation in The Manchester Guardian later that
summer.

When it was first published in book form, in 1925,
Letters from England elicited ecstatic reviews. Punch
declared it “the best book about our race since the Germania of
Tacitus.”
In his foreword to this handsome, newly translated edition of
Capek’s work, the philosopher Roger Scruton pitches it nearly as
strong: the Letters from England, he writes, are “not merely a
masterpiece of Czech prose; they are one of the seminal documents
of Central European Culture, and among the most influential books
of the twentieth century.”

Well, let us bracket Tacitus and the competition for influence
and agree that Letters from
England is what nearly every reviewer said it was: a “charming” and
“humane” work of travel literature by a man of wry, candid, and
cosmopolitan sensibility. Capek brings just the right mixture of
admiration and affectionate deprecation to bear on his subject;
he gives his curiosity free rein, but tempers both praise and
deflation with humor; he is as alive to human accomplishment as he is
to human folly, and it is rare that he discovers one unmodified
by the other.

Capek is a master of gentle amazement. How extraordinary that
things should so closely resemble their publicity! He
captures a feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has
traveled abroad:

It takes you aback to find that in Holland there really are
windmills and canals or that on the Strand in London there really
are so many people that it makes you feel unwell. There are two
absolutely fantastic impressions: to discover something
unexpected and to discover something very familiar.… I
was… amazed when I found the Houses of Parliament on the river
Thames, gentlemen in grey top hats in the streets, two-metre-tall
Bobbies at the crossroads, and so on. It was a surprise to
discover that England really is English.

The wonder extends to language. “Once I had set foot on land,”
Capek confesses, “I found to my surprise that I didn’t speak or
understand a single word of English.” Many travelers, I believe,
are secretly chagrined when they visit a foreign country and
discover that a language they do not know is, in fact, a language
that they do not know. Last year when I went to Budapest,
I found myself totally at sea with the language. You will point
out that this was hardly surprising, since I have not a
syllable of Hungarian. Yet that homely fact seemed like a supreme
impertinence: the world made sense, why not the ambient phrases
that declared it?

Capek was by turns enthralled and nonplussed by England; he
never abandoned that slight anxiety a continental dweller harbors
about islands:
“True, it is all built quite solidly enough, one might almost say
on rock, but to have a continent beneath one’s feet makes one
feel more secure.”
England, he found, was a land of curiosities: capacious, chilly,
overwhelming, preposterous. At Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park,

anyone who chooses can bring
a chair or platform or nothing at all and can begin to speak.
After a while, five or twenty or three-hundred people listen to
him, answer him, contradict, nod their head and sometimes sing
pious and secular hymns with the speaker. Sometimes an opponent
wins the people over to his side
and takes up the word himself.
Sometimes a crowd separates by simple fission or a coup, like the
lowest organisms and cell colonies.
…
The larger churches have small, mobile pulpits but most
speakers simply stand on the ground, suck at a wet cigarette and
preach about vegetarianism, the Lord God, education, reparations
or spiritualism. Never in my life have I seen anything like it.

Capek is very good at communicating the surfeit and fatigue that being an
indefatigable culture tourist involves.

“Have you been to the British Museum?”

“Have you seen the Wallace Collection?”

“Have you been to the Tate Gallery yet?”

“Have you had a look at the South Kensington Museum?”

“Have you been to the National Gallery?”

Yes, yes, yes; I have been everywhere.

Somehow, though, what made the deepest impression was the
natural masterpieces on
view, not the cultural artifacts.
Although he is “a tireless pilgrim of pictures and statues,”
Capek found that “the conches and crystals in the Natural
History Museum” gave him “the greatest delight.”
(“The trees,” he wrote, “are perhaps the most beautiful things in
England.”)

Capek visited a number of English clubs, the zoo, and Kew gardens.
(The clubs, he manages to suggest, were themselves a sort of
menagerie.) At Madame Tussaud’s he “stopped next to one
particularly effective figure in a top hat and looked in my
catalogue to see who it was. Suddenly the gentleman with the top
hat moved and left. It was ghastly. After a while two young
ladies looked in their catalogue to see whom I represented.”

Madame Tussaud’s also gave him a deep insight into the relevance
of physiognomy:

At first sight a seated gentleman with a goatee beard, No. 12,
fascinated me. In the catalogue I found “12: Thomas Neill Cream,
executed 1892. Poisoned Matilda Clover with strychnine. He was
also found guilty of the murders of three other women.” Truly,
his face was very suspicious. Number 13: Franz Müller, murdered Mr.
Briggs in a train; hmm. Number 20, a shaven gentleman looking
almost honourable: Arthur Devereux, executed 1905, the so-called
“trunk murderer” since he concealed the corpses of his victims
in trunks. Horrible. Number 21:—no, this venerable cleric can’t
be “Mrs. Deyer, the Reading infant murderess.” I find that I have
confused the catalogue’s pages and am forced to correct my
impressions:
the seated gentleman, No. 12, is only Bernard Shaw,
No. 13 is Louis Blériot and No. 20 is simply Guglielmo Marconi.

“Never again,” Capek concludes, “will I judge people by their
faces.”

Capek’s wonder and appetite for eccentricity is everywhere
inflected by a countermovement of—not skepticism, exactly: more
a current of protective ambivalence. Traveling in the English
countryside, Capek marvels at

the harmony and perfection of the
life with which the Englishman surrounds himself at home. The
English home is tennis and warm water, a gong summoning you to
lunch, books, meadows, comfort which is selected, fixed and
blessed by the centuries… a hospitality and formality as comfortable as a
dressing gown.

Nevertheless, there is imperfection woven into
this perfection. At the British Empire Exhibition, Capek was duly
impressed by a life-sized statue of the Prince of Wales made of
butter, but noted that it filled him with “regret that most of
London’s monuments aren’t also made of butter.” London
was the pinnacle of modern civilization, embodying its faults as well as
its achievements. “The only perfection which modern civilisation
achieves,” Capek complain, “is mechanical; machines are
magnificent and immaculate but the life which serves them or is
served by them isn’t magnificent or shiny or more perfect or more
comely.”

Letters From England falls off a bit when Capek leaves London,
and especially when he wends his way through the Scottish
countryside. It picks up again towards the end, especially in “A
Few Faces,” a chapter of character sketches of some British
luminaries. Capek provides amusing caricatures and descriptions
of John Galsworthy, G. K. Chesterton (“I have drawn him flying, in
the first place because I was only able to get a rather fleeting
impression of him and then because of his heavenly exuberance”),
H. G.
Wells, and George Bernard Shaw: “He is a vegetarian; I don’t
know whether from principle or from gourmandise. One never knows
whether people have principles on principle or whether for their
own personal satisfaction.”

There is a measure of envy mixed in with Capek’s assessments,
but it is quiet envy leavened by generous amounts of appreciation, not least
appreciation of the alternatives to London. “The Continent,” he
writes, “is noisier, less disciplined, dirtier, more rabid, craftier,
more passionate, more convivial, more amorous, hedonistic,
vivacious, coarse, garrulous, unruly and somehow less perfect.
Please, give me a ticket straight to the Continent.” We may doubt
whether Letters from England bears comparison with Tacitus; we
may even doubt whether it is “among the most influential books”
of the last century. But there can be no doubt about its
humanity, intelligence, and humor. Letters from England is a
delight to read, partly because of Capek’s conviction that
“all national peculiarities [are] a positive
enrichment of the world.” Although not at all didactic, the book
also contains a number of useful
lessons—above all, perhaps, the lesson that magnificence is not
the only noble national vocation. “I have seen greatness and
power, wealth, prosperity and incomparable development,” he writes
at the end of his book. “I was never sad that we are a small and
unfinished part of the world. To be small, unsettled and
uncompleted is a good and courageous mission.”