The Land of Contrasts Part 3

VI

International Misapprehensions and National Differences

Some years ago I was visiting the cyclorama of Niagara Falls in London and listening to the intelligent description of the scene given by the "lecturer." In the course of this he pointed out Goat Island, the wooded islet that parts the headlong waters of the Niagara like a coulter and shears them into the separate falls of the American and Canadian sh.o.r.es. Behind me stood an English lady who did not quite catch what the lecturer said, and turned to her husband in surprise.

"Rhode Island? Well, I knew Rhode Island was one of the smallest States, but I had no idea it was so small as that!" On another occasion an Englishman, invited to smile at the idea of a fellow-countryman that the Rocky Mountains flanked the west bank of the Hudson, exclaimed: "How absurd! The Rocky Mountains must be at least two hundred miles from the Hudson." Even so intelligent a traveller and so friendly a critic as Miss Florence Marryat (Mrs.

Francis Lean), in her desire to do justice to the amplitude of the American continent, gravely a.s.serts that "Pennsylvania covers a tract of land larger than England, France, Spain, and Germany all put together," the real fact being that even the smallest of the countries named is much larger than the State, while the combined area of the four is more than fourteen times as great. Texas, the largest State in the Union, is not so very much more extensive than either Germany or France.

An a.n.a.logous want of acquaintance with the mental geography of America was shown by the English lady whom Mr. Freeman heard explaining to a cultivated American friend who Sir Walter Scott was, and what were the t.i.tles of his chief works.

It is to such international ignorance as this that much, if not most, of the British want of appreciation of the United States may be traced; just as the acute critic may see in the complacent and persistent misspelling of English names by the leading journals of Paris an index of that French att.i.tude of indifference towards foreigners that involved the possibility of a Sedan. It is not, perhaps, easy to adduce exactly parallel instances of American ignorance of Great Britain, though Mr. Henry James, who probably knows his England better than nine out of ten Englishmen, describes Lord Lambeth, the eldest son of a duke, as himself a member of the House of Lords ("An International Episode"). It was amusing to find when _meine Wenigkeit_ was made the object of a lesson in a Ma.s.sachusetts school, that many of the children knew the name England only in connection with their own New England home. Nor, I fear, can it be denied that much of the historical teaching in the primary schools of the United States gives a somewhat one-sided view of the past relations between the mother country and her revolted daughter. The American child is not taught as much as he ought to be that the English people of to-day repudiate the att.i.tude of the aristocratic British government of 1770 as strongly as Americans themselves.

The American, however, must not plume himself too much on his superior knowledge. Shameful as the British ignorance of America often is, a corresponding American ignorance of Great Britain would be vastly more shameful. An American cannot understand himself unless he knows something of his origins beyond the seas; the geography and history of an American child must perforce include the history and geography of the British Isles. For a Briton, however, knowledge of America is rather one of the highly desirable things than one of the absolutely indispensable. It would certainly betoken a certain want of humanity in me if I failed to take any interest in the welfare of my sons and daughters who had emigrated to New Zealand; but it is evident that for the conduct of my own life a knowledge of their doings is not so essential for me as a knowledge of what my father was and did. The American of Anglo-Saxon stock visiting Westminster Abbey seems paralleled alone by the Greek of Syracuse or Magna Graecia visiting the Acropolis of Athens; and the experience of either is one that less favoured mortals may unfeignedly envy. But the American and the Syracusan alike would be wrong were he to feel either scorn or elation at the superiority of the guest's knowledge of the host over the host's knowledge of the guest.

However that may be, and whatever lat.i.tude we allow to the proverbial connection of familiarity and contempt, there seems little reason to doubt that closer knowledge of one another will but increase the mutual sympathy and esteem of the Briton and the American. The former will find that Brother Jonathan is not so exuberantly and perpetually starred-and-striped as the comic cartoonist would have us believe; and the American will find that John Bull does not always wear top-boots or invariably wield a whip. Things that from a distance seem preposterous and even revolting will often a.s.sume a very different guise when seen in their native environment and judged by their inevitable conditions. It is not always true that "_coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_" that is, if we allow ourselves to translate "_animum_" in its Ciceronian sense of "opinion."[9] To hold this view does not make any excessive demand on our optimism.

There seems absolutely no reason why in this particular case the line of cleavage between one's likes and one's dislikes should coincide with that of foreign and native birth. The very word "foreign" rings false in this connection. It is often easier to recognise a brother in a New Yorker than in a Yorkshireman, while, alas! it is only theoretically and in a mood of long-drawn-out aspiration that we can love our alien-tongued European neighbour as ourselves.

The man who wishes to form a sound judgment of another is bound to attain as great a measure as possible of accurate self-knowledge, not merely to understand the reaction of the foreign character when brought into relation with his own, but also to make allowance for fundamental differences of taste and temperament. The golden rule of judging others by ourselves can easily become a dull and leaden despotism if we insist that what _we_ should think and feel on a given occasion ought also to be the thoughts and actions of the Frenchman, the German, or the American. There are, perhaps, no more pregnant sentences in Mr. Bryce's valuable book than those in which he warns his British readers against the a.s.sumption that the same phenomena in two different countries must imply the same sort of causes. Thus, an equal amount of corruption among British politicians, or an equal amount of vulgarity in the British press, would argue a much greater degree of rottenness in the general social system than the same phenomena in the United States. So, too, some of the characteristic British vices are, so to say, of a spontaneous, involuntary, semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a grievous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent to do evil as the same tendencies would betoken in his own land. Neither Briton nor American can do full justice to the other unless each recognises that the other is fashioned of a somewhat different clay.

The strong reasons, material and otherwise, why Great Britain and the United States should be friends need not be enumerated here. In spite of some recent and highly unexpected shocks, the tendencies that make for amity seem to me to be steadily increasing in strength and volume.[10] It is the American in the making rather than the matured native product that, as a rule, is guilty of blatant denunciation of Great Britain; and it is usually the untravelled and preeminently insular Briton alone that is utterly devoid of sympathy for his American cousins. The American, as has often been pointed out, has become vastly more pleasant to deal with since his country has won an undeniable place among the foremost nations of the globe. The epidermis of Brother Jonathan has toughened as he has grown in stature, and now that he can look over the heads of most of his compeers he regards the sting of a gnat as little as the best of them.

Perhaps not _quite_ so little as John Bull, whose indifference to criticism and silent a.s.surance of superiority are possibly as far wrong in the one direction as a too irritable skin is in the other.

Of the books written about the United States in the last score of years by European writers of any weight, there are few which have not helped to dissipate the grotesquely one-sided view of America formerly held in the Old World. Preeminent among such books is, of course, the "American Commonwealth" of Mr. James Bryce; but such writers as Mr.

Freeman, M. Paul Bourget, Sir George Campbell, Mr. William Sanders, Miss Catherine Bates, Mme. Blanc, Miss Emily Faithful, M. Paul de Rousiers, Max O'Rell, and Mr. Stevens have all, in their several degrees and to their several audiences, worked to the same end. It may, however, be worth while mentioning one or two literary performances of a somewhat different character, merely to remind my British readers of the sort of thing we have done to exasperate our American cousins in quite recent times, and so help them to understand the why and wherefore of certain traces of resentment still lingering beyond the Atlantic. In 1884 Sir Lepel Griffin, a distinguished Indian official, published a record of his visit to the United States, under the t.i.tle of "The Great Republic." Perhaps this volume might have been left to the obscurity which has befallen it, were it not that Mr.

Matthew Arnold lent it a fict.i.tious importance by taking as the text for some of his own remarks on America Sir Lepel's a.s.sertion that he knew of no civilised country, Russia possibly excepted, where he should less like to live than the United States. To me it seems a book most admirably adapted to infuriate even a less sensitive folk than the Americans. I do not in the least desire to ascribe to Sir Lepel Griffin a deliberate design to be offensive; but it is just his calm, supercilious Philistinism, aggravated no doubt by his many years'

experience as a ruler of submissive Orientals, that makes it no less a pleasure than a duty for a free and intelligent republican to resent and defy his criticisms.

Can, for instance, anything more wantonly and pointlessly insulting be imagined than his a.s.sertion that an intelligent and well-informed American would probably name the pork-packing of Chicago as the thing _best worth seeing_ in the United States? After that it is not surprising that he considers American scenery singularly tame and unattractive, and that he finds female beauty (can his standard for this have been Orientalised?) very rare. He predicts that it would be impossible to maintain the Yellowstone National Park as such, and a.s.serts that it was only a characteristic spirit of swagger and braggadocio that prompted this attempt at an impossible ideal. He also seems to think lynching an any-day possibility in the streets of New York. The value of his forecasts may, however, be discounted by his prophecy in the same book that the London County Council would be merely a glorified vestry, utterly indifferent to the public interest, and unlikely to attract any candidates of distinction!

An almost equal display of Philistinism--perhaps greater in proportion to its length--is exhibited by an article ent.i.tled "Twelve Hours of New York," published by Count Gleichen in _Murray's Magazine_ (February, 1890). This energetic young man succeeded (in his own belief) in seeing all the sights of New York in the time indicated by the t.i.tle of his article, and apparently met nothing to his taste except the Hoffman House bar and the large rugs with which the cab-horses were swathed. He found his hotel a den of incivility and his dinner "a squashy, sloppy meal." He wishes he had spent the day in Canada instead. He is great in his scorn for the "glue kettle" helmets of the New York police, and for the ferry-boats in the harbour, to which he vastly prefers what he wittily and originally styles the "common or garden steamer." His feet, in his own elegant phrase, felt "like a jelly" after four hours of New York pavement. What are the Americans to think of us when they find one of our innermost and most aristocratic circle writing stuff like this under the aegis of, perhaps, the foremost of British publishers?

As a third instance of the ingratiating manner in which Englishmen write of Americans, we may take the following paragraph from "Travel and Talk," an interesting record of much journeying by that well-known London clergyman, the Rev. H.R. Haweis: "Among the numerous kind attentions I was favoured with and somewhat embarra.s.sed by was the a.s.siduous hospitality of another singular lady, _also since dead_. I allude to Mrs. Barnard, the wife of the venerable princ.i.p.al of Columbia College, a well-known and admirably appointed educational inst.i.tution in New York. This good lady was bent upon our staying at the college, and hunted us from house to house until we took up our abode with her, and, I confess, I found her rather amusing at first, and I am sure she meant most kindly. But there was an inconceivable fidgetiness about her, and an incapacity to let people alone, or even listen to anything they said in answer to her questions, which poured as from a quick-firing gun, that became at last intolerable." Comment on this pa.s.sage would be entirely superfluous; but I cannot help drawing attention to the supreme touch of gracefulness added by the three words I have italicised.

There is one English critic of American life whose opinion cannot be treated cavalierly--least of all by those who feel, as I do, how inestimable is our debt to him as a leader in the paths of sweetness and light. But even in the presence of Matthew Arnold I desire to preserve the att.i.tude of "_nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri_," and I cannot but believe that his estimate of America, while including much that is subtle, clear-sighted, and tonic, is in certain respects inadequate and misleading. He unfortunately committed the mistake of writing on the United States before visiting the country, and had made up his mind in advance that it was almost exclusively peopled by, and entirely run in the interests of, the British dissenting Philistine with a difference.

It is the more to be regretted that he adopted this att.i.tude of premature judgment of American characteristics because it is only too prevalent among his less distinguished fellow-countrymen. From this position of _parti pris_, maintained with all his own inimitable suavity and grace, it seems to me that he was never wholly able to advance (or retire), though he candidly admitted that he found the difference between the British and American Philistine vastly greater than he antic.i.p.ated. The members of his preconceived syllogism seem to be somewhat as follows: the money-making and comfort-loving cla.s.ses in England are essentially Philistine; the United States as a nation is given over to money-making; _ergo_, its inhabitants must all be Philistines. Furthermore, the British Philistines are to a very large extent dissenters: the United States has no established church; _ergo_, it must be the Paradise of the dissenter.

This line of argument ignores the fact that the stolid self-satisfaction in materialistic comfort, which he defines as the essence of Philistinism, is _not_ a predominant trait in the American cla.s.s in which our English experience would lead us to look for it.

The American man of business, with his restless discontent and nervous, over-strained pursuit of wealth, may not be a more inspiring object than his British brother, but he has little of the smugness which Mr. Arnold has taught us to a.s.sociate with the label of Philistinism. And his womankind is perhaps even less open to this particular reproach. Mr. Arnold ignores a whole far-reaching series of American social phenomena which have practically nothing in common with British nonconformity, and lets a similarity of nomenclature blind him too much to the differentiation of entirely novel conditions. The Methodist "Moonshiner" of Tennessee is hardly cast in the same mould as the deacon of a London Little Bethel; and even the most legitimate children of the Puritans have not descended from the common stock in parallel lines in England and America.

Mr. Arnold admitted that the political clothes of Brother Jonathan fitted him admirably, and allowed that he can and does think straighter (_c'est le bonheur des hommes quand ils pensent juste_) than we can in the maze of our unnatural and antiquated complications; he wholly admired the natural, unselfconscious manner of the American woman; he saw that the wage-earner lived more comfortably than in Europe; he noted that wealthy Americans were not dogged by envy in the same way as in England, partly because wealth was felt to be more within the range of all, and partly because it was much less often used for the gratification of vile and selfish appet.i.tes; he admitted that America was none the worse for the lack of a materialised aristocracy such as ours; he praises the spirit which levels false and conventional distinctions, and waives the use of such invidious discriminations as our "Mr." and "Esquire." Admissions such as these, coming from such a man as he, are of untold value in promoting the growth of a proper sentiment towards our transatlantic kinsmen. When he points out that the dangers of such a community as the United States include a tendency to rely too much on the machinery of inst.i.tutions; an absence of the discipline of respect; a p.r.o.neness to hardness, materialism, exaggeration, and boastfulness; a false smartness and a false audacity,--the wise American will do well to ponder his sayings, hard though they may sound. When, however, he goes on to point out the "prime necessity of civilisation being interesting," and to a.s.sert that American civilisation is lacking in interest, we may well doubt whether on the one hand the quality of interest is not too highly exalted, and, on the other, whether the denial of interest to American life does not indicate an almost insular narrowness in the conception of what is interesting. When he finds a want of soul and delicacy in the American as compared with John Bull, some of us must feel that if he is right the lat.i.tude of interpretation of these terms must indeed be oceanic. When he gravely cites the shrewd and ingenious Benjamin Franklin as the most considerable man whom America has yet produced, we must respectfully but firmly take exception to his standard of measurement. When he declares that Abraham Lincoln has no claim to distinction, we feel that the writer must have in mind distinction of a singularly conventional and superficial nature; and we are not rea.s.sured by the _quasi_ brutality of the remark in one of his letters, to the effect that Lincoln's a.s.sa.s.sination brought into American history a dash of the tragic and romantic in which it had hitherto been so sadly lacking ("_sic semper tyrannis_ is so unlike anything Yankee or English middle cla.s.s"). When he a.s.serts that from Maine to Florida and back again all America Hebraises, we reflect with some bewilderment that hitherto we had believed the New Orleans creole (_e.g._) to be as far removed from Hebraising as any type we knew of. It is strikingly characteristic of the weak side of Mr. Arnold's outlook on America that he went to stay with Mr. P.T. Barnum, the celebrated showman, without the least idea that his American friends might think the choice of hosts a peculiar one. To him, to a very large extent, Americans were all alike middle-cla.s.s, dissenting Philistines; and so far as appears on the surface, Mr. Barnum's desire to "belong to the minority" pleased him as much as any other sign of approval conferred upon him in America.

A native of the British Isles is sometimes apt to be a little nettled when he finds a native of the United States regarding him as a "foreigner" and talking of him accordingly. An Englishman never means the natives of the United States when he speaks of "foreigners;" he reserves that epithet for non-English-speaking races. In this respect it would seem as if the Briton, for once, took the wider, the more genial and human, point of view; as if he had the keener appreciation of the ties of race and language. It is as if he cherished continually a sub-dominant consciousness of the fact that the occupation of the North American continent by the Anglo-Saxons is one of the greatest events in English history--that America is peopled by Englishmen. When he thinks of the events of 1776 he feels, to use Mr. Hall Caine's ill.u.s.tration, like Dr. Johnson, who dreamed that he had been worsted in conversation, but reflected when he awoke that the conversation of his adversary must also have been his own. As opposed to this there may be a grain of self-a.s.sertion in the American use of the term as applied to the British; it is as if they would emphasise the fact that they are no mere offshoot of England, that the Colonial days have long since gone by, and that the United States is an independent nation with a right to have its own "foreigners." An American friend suggests that the different usage of the two lands may be partly owing to the fact that the cordial, frank demeanour of the American, coupled with his use of the same tongue, makes an Englishman absolutely forget that he is not a fellow-countryman, while the subtler American is keenly conscious of differences which escape the obtuser Englishman. Another partial explanation is that the first step across our frontier brings us to a land where an unknown tongue is spoken, and that we have consequently welded into one the two ideas of foreignhood and unintelligibility; while the American, on the other hand, identifies himself with his continent and regards all as foreigners who are not natives of it.

The point would hardly be worth dwelling upon, were it not that the different att.i.tude it denotes really leads in some instances to actual misunderstanding. The Englishman, with his somewhat unsensitive feelers, is apt, in all good faith and unconsciousness, to criticise American ways to the American with much more freedom than he would criticise French ways to a Frenchman. It is as if he should say, "You and I are brothers, or at least cousins; we are a much better sort than all those foreign Johnnies; and so there's no harm in my pointing out to you that you're wrong here and ought to change there." But, alas, who is quicker to resent our criticism than they of our own household? And so the American, overlooking the sort of clumsy compliment that is implied in the a.s.surance of kinship involved in the very frankness of our fault-finding criticism, resents most keenly the criticisms that are couched in his own language, and sees nothing but impertinent hostility in the att.i.tude of John Bull. And who is to convince him that it is, as in a Scottish wooing, because we love him that we tease him, and in so doing put him (in our eyes) on a vastly higher pedestal than the "blasted foreigner" whose case we consider past praying for? And who is to teach us that Brother Jonathan is able now to give us at least as many hints as we can give him, and that we must realise that the same sauce must be served with both birds? Thus each resiles from the encounter infinitely more pained than if the antagonist had been a German or a Frenchman. The very fact that we speak the same tongue often leads to false a.s.sumptions of mutual knowledge, and so to offences of unguarded ignorance.

One of the most conspicuous differences between the American and the Briton is that the former, take him for all in all, is distinctly the more articulate animal of the two. The Englishman seems to have learned, through countless generations, that he can express himself better and more surely in deeds than in words, and has come to distrust in others a fatal fluency of expressiveness which he feels would be exaggerated and even false in himself. A man often has to wait for his own death to find out what his English friend thinks of him; and

"Wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us,"

we might often be surprised to discover what a wealth of real affection and esteem lies hid under the glacier of Anglican indifference. The American poet who found his song in the heart of a friend could have done so, were the friend English, only by the aid of a post-mortem examination. The American, on the other hand, has the most open and genial way of expressing his interest in you; and when you have readjusted the scale of the moral thermometer so as to allow for the change of temperament, you will find this frankness most delightfully stimulating. It requires, however, an intimate knowledge of both countries to understand that when an Englishman congratulates you on a success by exclaiming, "Hallo, old chap, I didn't know you had it in you," he means just as much as your American friend, whose phrase is: "Bravo, Billy, I always _knew_ you could do something fine."

That the superior powers of articulation possessed by the American sometimes takes the form of profuse and even extreme volubility will hardly be denied by those conversant with the facts. The American may not be more profound than his English cousin or even more fertile in ideas, but as a rule he is much more ready and easy in the discussion of the moment; whatever the state of his "gold reserve" may be, he has no lack of the small counters of conversation. In its proper place this faculty is undoubtedly most agreeable; in the fleeting interviews which compose so much of social intercourse, he is distinctly at an advantage who has the power of coming to the front at once without wasting precious time in preliminaries and reconnaissances. Other things being equal, the chances of agreeable conversation at dinner, at the club, or in the pauses of the dance are better in the United States than in England. The "next man" of the new world is apt to talk better and to be wider in his sympathies than the "next man" of the old. On the other hand, it seems to me equally true that the Americans possess the defects of their qualities in this as in other respects; they are often apt to talk too much, they are afraid of a conversational lull, and do not sufficiently appreciate the charm of "flashes of brilliant silence." It seemed to me that they often carried a most unnecessary amount of volubility into their business life; and I sometimes wondered whether the greater energy and rush that they apparently put into their conduct of affairs were not due to the necessity of making up time lost in superfluous chatter. If an Englishman has a mile to go to an appointment he will take his leisurely twenty minutes to do the distance, and then settle his business in two or three dozen sentences; an American is much more likely to devour the ground in five minutes, and then spend an hour or more in lively conversation not wholly pertinent to the matter in hand. The American mind is discursive, open, wide in its interests, alive to suggestion, pliant, emotional, imaginative; the English mind is concentrated, substantial, indifferent to the merely relative, matter-of-fact, stiff, and inflexible.

The English have reduced to a fine art the practice of a stony impa.s.sivity, which on its highest plane is not devoid of a certain impressiveness. On ordinary occasions it is apt to excite either the ire or the amus.e.m.e.nt of the representatives of a more animated race. I suppose it is almost impossible for an untravelled Englishman to realise the ridiculous side of the Church Parade in Hyde Park--as it would appear, say, to a lively girl from Baltimore. The parade is a collection of human beings, presumably brought together for the sake of seeing and being seen. Yet the obvious aim of each English item in the crowd is to deprive his features of all expression, and to look as if he were absolutely unconscious that his own party were not the only one on the ground. Such vulgarity as the exhibition of the slightest interest in a being to whom he has not been introduced would be treason to his dearest traditions. In an American function of the same kind, the actors take an undisguised interest in each other, while a French or Italian a.s.sembly would be still more demonstrative. On the surface the English att.i.tude is distinctly inhuman; it reminds one that England is still the stronghold of the obsolescent inst.i.tution of caste, that it frankly and even brutally a.s.serts the essential inequality of man. Nowhere, perhaps, will you see a bigger and handsomer, healthier, better-groomed, more efficient set of human animals; but their straight-ahead, phlegmatic, expressionless gaze, the want of animated talk, the absence of any show of intelligence, emphasises our feeling that they are _animals_.

The Briton's indifference to criticism is at once his strength and his weakness. It makes him invincible in a cause which has dominated his conscience; it hinders him in the attainment of a luminous discrimination between cause and cause. His profound self-confidence, his sheer good sense, his dogged persistence, his bulldog courage, his essential honesty of purpose, bring him to the goal in spite of the unnecessary obstacles that have been heaped on his path by his own [Greek: hubris] and contempt of others. He chooses what is physically the shortest line in preference to the line of least resistance. He makes up for his want of light by his superiority in weight. Social adaptability is not his foible. He accepts the conventionality of his cla.s.s and wears it as an impenetrable armour. Out of his own cla.s.s he may sometimes appear less conventional than the American, simply because the latter is quick to adopt the manners of a new _milieu_, while John Bull clings doggedly or unconsciously to his old conventions.

If an American and an English shop-girl were simultaneously married to peers of the realm, the odds would be a hundred to one in favour of the former in the race for self-identification with her new environment.

The American facility of expression, if I do not err, springs largely from an amiable difference in temperament. The American is, on the whole, more genially disposed to all and sundry. I do not say that he is capable of truer friendships or of greater sacrifices for a friend than the Englishman; but the window through which he looks out on humanity at large has panes of a ruddier hue, he cultivates a mildness of tone, which a Briton is apt to despise as weakness. His desire to oblige sometimes impels him to uncharacteristic actions, which lead to fallacious generalisations on the part of his British critic. He shrinks from any a.s.sumption of superiority; he is apt to think twice of the feelings of his inferiors. The American tends to consider each stranger he meets--at any rate within his own social sphere--as a good fellow until he proves himself the contrary; with the Englishman the presumption is rather the other way. An Englishman usually excuses this national trait as really due to modesty and shyness; but I fear there is in it a very large element of sheer bad manners, and of a cowardly fear of compromising one's self with undesirable acquaintances. Englishmen are apt to take _omne ignotum pro horribile_, and their translation of the Latin phrase varies from the lifting of the aristocratic eyebrow over the unwarranted address of the casual companion at _table d'hote_ down to the "'ere's a stranger, let's 'eave 'arf a brick at 'im" of the Black Country. In England I am apt to feel painfully what a lame dog I am; in America I feel, well, if I am a lame dog I am being helped most delightfully over the conversational stile. An Englishman says, "Would you _mind_ doing so-and-so for me?" showing by the very form of the question that he thinks kindness likely to be troublesome. An American says, "Wouldn't you _like_ to do this for me?" a.s.suming the superior att.i.tude of one who feels that to give an opportunity to do a kindness is itself to confer a favour. The Continental European shares with the American the merit of having manners on the self-regarding pattern of _n.o.blesse oblige_, while the Englishman wants to know who _you_ are, so as to put on his best manners only if the _force majeure_ of your social standing compels him. No one wishes the Englishman to express more than he really feels or to increase the already overwhelming ma.s.s of conventional insincerity; but it might undoubtedly be well for him to consider whether it is not his positive duty to drop a little more of the oil of human kindness on the wheels of the social machinery, and to understand that it is perfectly possible for two strangers to speak with and look at each other pleasantly without thereby contracting the obligation of eternal friendship. Why should an English traveller deem it worthy of special record that when calling at a Boston club, he found his friend and host not yet arrived, other members of the club, unknown to him, had put themselves about to entertain him? An American gentleman would find this too natural to call for remark.

Whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge the fact that our brutal frankness, our brusqueness, and our extreme fondness for calling a spade a spade are often extremely disagreeable to our American cousins, and make them (temporarily at any rate) feel themselves to be our superiors in the matter of gentle breeding. As Col. T.W. Higginson has phrased it, they think that "the English nation has truthfulness enough for a whole continent, and almost too much for an island." They think that a line might be drawn somewhere between dissembling our love and kicking them downstairs. They also object to our use of such terms as "beastly," "stinking," and "rot;"

and we must admit that they do so with justice, while we cannot a.s.soil them altogether of the opposite tendency of a prim prudishness in the avoidance of certain natural and necessary words. For myself I unfeignedly admire the delicacy which leads to a certain parsimony in the use of words like "perspiration," "cleaning one's self," and so on. And, however much we may laugh at the cla.s.s that insists upon the name of "help" instead of "servant," we cannot but respect the cla.s.s which yields to the demand and looks with horror on the English slang word "slavey."

On the other hand there are certain little personal habits, such as the public use of the toothpick, and what Mr. Morley Roberts calls the modern form of [Greek: kottabos], which I think often find themselves in better company in America than in England. Still I desire to speak here with all due diffidence. I remember when I pointed out to a Boston girl that an American actor in a piece before us, representing high life in London, was committing a gross solecism in moistening his pencil in his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card, she trumped my criticism at once by the information that a distinguished English journalist, with a handle to his name, who recently made a successful lecturing tour in the United States, openly and deliberately moistened his thumb in the same ingenuous fashion to aid him in turning over the leaves of his ma.n.u.script.

A feature of the average middle-cla.s.s Englishman which the American cannot easily understand is his tacit recognition of the fact that somebody else (the aristocrat) is his superior. In fact, this is sometimes a fertile source of misunderstanding, and it is apt to beget in the American an entirely false idea of what he thinks the innate servility of the Englishman. He must remember that the aristocratic prestige is a growth of centuries, that it has come to form part of the atmosphere, that it is often accepted as unconsciously as the law of gravitation. This is a case where the same att.i.tude in an American mind (and, alas, we occasionally see it in American residents in London) would betoken an infinitely lower moral and mental plane than it does in the Englishman. No true American could accept the proposition that "Lord Tom Noddy might do so-and-so, but it would be a very different thing for a man in my position;" and yet an Englishman (I regret to say) might speak thus and still be a very decent fellow, whom it would be unjust cruelty to call a sn.o.b. No doubt the English aristocracy (as I think Mr. Henry James has said) now occupies a heroic position without heroism; but the glamour of the past still shines on their faded escutcheons, and "the love of freedom itself is hardly stronger in England than the love of aristocracy."

Matthew Arnold has pointed out to us how the aristocracy acts like an incubus on the middle cla.s.ses of Great Britain, and he has put it on record that he was struck with the buoyancy, enjoyment of life, and freedom of constraint of the corresponding cla.s.ses in America. In England, he says, a man feels that it is the _upper cla.s.s_ which represents him; in the United States he feels that it is the _State_, _i.e._, himself. In England it is the Barbarian alone that dares be indifferent to the opinion of his fellows; in America everyone expresses his opinion and "voices" his idiosyncrasies with perfect freedom. This position has, however, its seamy side. There is in America a certain anarchy in questions of taste and manners which the long possession of a leisured, a cultivated cla.s.s tends to save us from in England. I never felt so kindly a feeling towards our so-called "upper cla.s.s" as when travelling in the United States and noting some effects of its absence. This cla.s.s has an accepted position in the social hierarchy; its dicta are taken as authoritative on points of etiquette, just as the clergy are looked on as the official guardians of religious and ecclesiastical standards. I do not here pretend to discuss the value of the moral example of our _jeunesse doree_, filtering down through the successive strata of society; but their influence in setting the fashion on such points as scrupulous personal cleanliness, the avoidance of the _outre_ in costume, and the maintenance of an honourable and generous standard in their money dealings with each other, is distinctly on the side of the humanities. In America--at least, "Out West"--everyone practically is his own guide, and the _nouveau riche_ spends his money strictly in accordance with his own standard of taste. The result is often as appalling in its hideousness as it is startling in its costliness. On the other hand I am bound to state that I have known American men of great wealth whose simplicity of type could hardly be paralleled in England (except, perchance, within the Society of Friends). They do not feel any social pressure to imitate the establishment of My Lord or His Grace; and spend their money for what really interests them without reference to the demands of society.

It is rather interesting to observe the different forms which vulgarity is apt to take in the two countries. In England vulgarity is stolid; in America it is smart and aggressive. We are apt, I think, to overestimate the amount in the latter country because it is so much more in voluble evidence. An English vulgarian is often hushed into silence by the presence of his social superior; an American vulgarian either recognises none such or tries to prove himself as good as you by being unnecessarily _grob_. This has, at any rate, a manlier air than the vulgar obsequiousness of England towards the superior on the one hand or its cynical insolence to the inferior on the other. The feeling which made a French lady of fashion in the seventeenth century dress herself in the presence of a footman with as much unconcern as if he were a piece of furniture still finds its modified a.n.a.logy in England, but scarcely in America. Almost the only field in which the Americans struck me as showing anything like servility was in their treatment of such mighty potentates as railway conductors, hotel clerks, and policemen. Whether, until a millenial golden mean is attained, this is better than our English bullying tone in the same sphere might be an interesting question for casuists.

Americans can rarely understand the amount of social recognition given by English d.u.c.h.esses to such American visitors as Col. William Cody, generally known as "Buffalo Bill." They do not reflect that it is just because the social gap between the two is so irretrievably vast and so universally recognised that the d.u.c.h.esses can afford to amuse themselves cursorily with any eccentricity that offers itself. As Pomona's husband put it, people in England are like types with letters at one end and can easily be sorted out of a state of "pi," while Americans are theoretically all alike, like carpet-tacks. Thus Americans of the best cla.s.s often shun the free mixing that takes place in England, because they know that the process of redistribution will be neither easy nor popular. The intangible sieve thus placed between the best and the not-so-good is of a fine discrimination, beside which our conventional net-works seem coa.r.s.e and ineffective.

Since returning from the United States I have occasionally been asked how the general tone of morality in that country compared with that in our own. To answer such a question with anything approaching to an air of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption.

The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of contingent and accidental circ.u.mstances, and must so inevitably be tinged by one's personal experiences, that their validity can at best have but an approximate and tentative character. In making this comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining camps and other phases of life on the fringes of American civilisation, which can be fairly compared only with pioneer life on the extreme frontiers of the British Empire. From a similar cause we may omit from the comparison a great part of the Southern States, where we do not find a h.o.m.ogeneous ma.s.s of white civilisation, but a state of society inexpressibly complicated by the presence of an inferior race. To compare the Southerner with the Englishman we should need to observe the latter as he exists in, say, one of our African colonies. Speaking, then, with these reservations, I should feel inclined to say that in domestic and social morality the Americans are ahead of us, in commercial morality rather behind than before, and in political morality distinctly behind.

Thus, in the first of these fields we find the American more good-tempered and good-natured than the Englishman. Women, children, and animals are treated with considerably more kindness. The American translation of paterfamilias is not domestic tyrant. Horses are driven by the voice rather than by the whip. The superior does not thrust his superiority on his inferior so brutally as we are apt to do. There is a general intention to make things pleasant--at any rate so long as it does not involve the doer in loss. There is less _gratuitous_ insolence. Servility, with its attendant hypocrisy and deceit, is conspicuously absent; and the general spirit of independence, if sometimes needlessly boorish in its manifestations, is at least st.u.r.dy and manly. In England we are rude to those weaker than ourselves; in America the rudeness is apt to be directed against those whom we suspect to be in some way our superior. Man is regarded by man rather as an object of interest than as an object of suspicion. Charity is very widespread; and the idea of a fellow-creature actually suffering from want of food or shelter is, perhaps, more repugnant to the average American than to the average Englishman, and more apt to act immediately on his purse-strings. In that which popular language usually means when it speaks of immorality, all outward indications point to the greater purity of the American. The conversation of the smoking-room is a little less apt to be _risque_; the possibility of masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American taste with French. The statistics of illegitimacy point in the same direction, though I admit that this is not necessarily a sign of unsophisticated morality. In a word, when an Englishman goes to France he feels that the moral tone in this respect is more lax than in England; when he goes to America he feels that it is more firm. And he will hardly find adequate the French explanation, _viz._, that there is not less vice but more hypocrisy in the Anglo-Saxon community.

There is another very important sphere of morality in which the general att.i.tude of the United States seems to me very appreciably superior to that of England. It is that to which St. Paul refers when he says, "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat." American public sentiment is distinctly ahead of ours in recognising that a life of idleness is wrong in itself, and that the possibility of leading such a life acts most prejudicially on character. The American answer to the Englishman trying to define what he meant by "gentlemen of leisure" "Ah, we call them _tramps_ in America"--is not merely a jest, but enshrines a deep ethnical and ethical principle. Most Americans would, I think, agree strongly with Mr. Bosanquet's philosophical if somewhat c.u.mbersomely worded definition of legitimate private property, "that things should not come miraculously and be unaffected by your dealings with them, but that you should be in contact with something which in the external world is the definite material representative of yourself" ("Aspects of the Social Problem,"

p. 313). The British gentleman, aware that his dinner does not agree with him unless he has put forth a certain amount of physical energy, reverts to one of the earliest and most primitive forms of work, _viz._, hunting. There is a small--a very small--cla.s.s in the United States in the same predicament; but as a rule the worker there is not only more honoured, but also works more in accordance with the spirit of the age.

The general att.i.tude of Americans towards militarism seems to me also superior to ours; and one of the keenest dreads of the best American citizens during a recent wave of jingoism was that of "the reflex influence of militarism upon the national character, the transformation of a peace-loving people into a nation of swaggerers ever ready to take offence, p.r.o.ne to create difficulties, eager to shed blood, and taking all sorts of occasions to bring the Christian religion to shame under pretence of vindicating the rights of humanity in some other country." The spectacle of a section in the United States apparently ready to step down from its pedestal of honourable neutrality, and run its head into the ign.o.ble web of European complications, was indeed one to make both G.o.ds and mortals weep. But I do not believe it expressed the true att.i.tude of the real American people. Perhaps the personal element enters too largely into my ascription of superior morality to the Americans in this matter, because I can never thoroughly enjoy a military pageant, no matter how brilliant, for thinking of the brutal, animal, inhuman element in our nature of which it is, after all, the expression: military pomp is to me merely the surface iridescence of a malarious pool, and the honour paid to our life destroyers would, from my point of view, be infinitely better bestowed on life preservers, such as the n.o.ble and intrepid corps of firemen. Sympathisers with this view seem much more numerous in the United States than in England.[11]

The judgment of an uncommercial traveller on commercial morality may well be held as a feather-weight in the balance. Such as mine is, it is gathered mainly from the tone of casual conversation, from which I should conclude that a considerable proportion of Americans read a well-known proverb as "All's fair in love or business." Men--I will not say of a high character and standing, but men of a standing and character who would not have done it in England--told me instances of their sharp practices in business, with an evident expectation of my admiration for their shrewdness, and with no apparent sense of the slightest moral delinquency. Possibly, when the "rules of the game"

are universally understood, there is less moral obliquity in taking advantage of them than an outsider imagines. The prevalent belief that America is more sedulous in the worship of the Golden Calf than any other country arises largely, I believe, from the fact that the chances of acquiring wealth are more frequent and easy there than elsewhere. Opportunity makes the thief. Anyhow, the reproach comes with a bad grace from the natives of a country which has in its annals the outbreak of the South Sea Bubble, the railway mania of the Hudson era, and the revelations of Mr. Hooley.

Politics enter so slightly into the scope of this book that a very few words on the question of political morality must suffice. That political corruption exists more commonly in the United States than in Great Britain--especially in munic.i.p.al government--may be taken as admitted by the most eminent American publicists themselves. A very limited degree of intercourse with "professional politicians" yields ample confirmatory evidence. Thus, to give but one instance, a wealthy citizen of one of the largest Eastern towns told me, with absolute ingenuousness, how he had "dished" the (say) Republican party in a munic.i.p.al contest, not in the least because he had changed his political sympathies, but simply because the candidates had refused to accede to certain personal demands of his own. He spoke throughout the conversation as if it must be perfectly apparent to me, as to any intelligent person, that the only possible reason for working and voting for a political party must be personal interest. I confess this seemed to me a very significant straw. On the other hand the conclusions usually drawn by stay-at-home English people on these admissions is ludicrously in excess of what is warranted by the facts.

"To imagine for a moment that 60,000,000 of people--better educated than any other nation in the world--are openly tolerating universal corruption in all Federal, State, and munic.i.p.al government is simply a.s.suming that these 60,000,000 are either criminals or fools." Now, "you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." A more competent judge[12] than the present writer estimates the morals of the American political "wire-puller" as about on a level with those of our company directors. And before my English readers make their final decision on the American political system let them study Chapter XLVI. of that very fascinating novel, "The Honorable Peter Stirling," by Paul Leicester Ford. It may give them some new light on the subject of "a government of the average," and show them what is meant by the saying, "The boss who does the most things that the people want can do the most things that the people don't want."

We must remember, too, that nothing is hidden from general knowledge in America: every job comes sooner or later into the merciless glare of publicity. And if our political sins are not the same as theirs, they are perhaps equally heinous. Was not the British landlord who voted against the repeal of the corn laws, so that land might continue to bring in a high rent at the expense of the poor man, really acting from just as corrupt a motive of self-interest as the American legislator who accepts a bribe? It does not do to be too superior on this question.

We may end this chapter by a typical instance of the way in which British opinion of America is apt to be formed that comes under my notice at the very moment I write these lines. The _Daily Chronicle_ of March 24, 1896, published a leading article on "Family Life in America," in which it quotes with approval Mme. Blanc's a.s.sertion that "the single woman in the United States is infinitely superior to her European sister." In the same issue of the paper is a letter from Mrs.

Fawcett relating to a recent very deplorable occurrence in Washington, where the daughter of a well-known resident shot a coloured boy who was robbing her father's orchard. In the _Chronicle_ of March 25th appears a triumphant British letter from "Old-Fashioned," asking satirically whether the habit of using loaded revolvers is a proof of the "infinite superiority" of the American girl. Now this estimable gentleman is making the mistake that nine out of ten of his countrymen constantly make in swooping down on a single _outre_ instance as _characteristic_ of American life. If "Old-Fashioned" has not time to pay a visit to America or to read Mr. Bryce's book, let him at least accept my a.s.surance that the above-mentioned incident seems to the full as extraordinary to the Bostonian as to the Londoner, and that it is just as typical of the habits of the American society girl as the action of Miss Madeleine Smith was of English girls.

"Of all the sa.r.s.e thet I can call to mind, England doos make the most onpleasant kind.

It's you're the sinner ollers, she's the saint; Whot's good's all English, all thet isn't, ain't.

She is all thet's honest, honnable, an' fair.

An' when the vartoos died they made her heir."