英文解釈教室の出典を探る(9)

Chapter 2 目的補語

2.2 例題(1)

イギリス人の国民性：寛大さと抜け目のなさの奇妙なコンビネーション

   The average Englishman cannot rise to any great effort or sacrifice unless he can persuade himself that he is serving some moral purpose, or else in the extreme case when he is at last convinced that he is in real danger. He is naturally generous towards those who are suffering from unexpected misfortune, or indeed to any "under dog" - to use an expression which is as common in England as another one about helping lame dogs over stiles. Both of them reveal something about the Englishman's love for animals, as well as his pity for any one who has had a piece of bad luck. This pity finds expression, not only in individual cases which come under his notice, but in wider cases which concern people whom he has never seen. Thus he is very charitable at home, and he is easily touched by the plight of those suffering from disaster abroad - as witness the invariable and immediate response in London to appeals for funds to help the victims of such disasters. He is also generous to the vanquished - foolishly generous sometimes, but not always, as was proved by the success, to the amazement of the world, of the policy of almost immediately granting self-government to the Boers after the South African War.

　But the Englishman also has a keen eye to business. Napoleon contemptuously called us a nation of shopkeepers, and what he then intended as an insult remains true today, when it is so little of an insult that the people of every nation would like to be shopkeepers also. No Englishman can readily bring himself to let an opportunity for doing business pass him by and he will seize those opportunities, even when they occur in the course of an adventure which he has undertaken from generous motives. It is natural enough that he should be accused of seeking the adventure in order to make the business opportunities, and the long line of heroic missionaries who have set out from England to carry Christianity into savage lands have often been called hypocrites; but they were not.

出典：Carr, Philip, The English are Like that, 1941
（伊藤和夫著『英文解釈教室』第2章 2.2 例題(1)に加筆・修正）

（参考）