* * * * *

When I first went to the United States I carried with me a commission from certain highly reputable English papers to incorporate my "impressions" in occasional letters. Among the earliest facts of any moment which I was enabled to communicate to English readers was that the middle classes in America (I was careful to explain what the "middle classes" were in a country where none existed)—that the middle classes, I say, lived almost entirely on parsnips. I had not arrived at this important ethnological fact with any undue haste. I had already lived in the United States for some three months, half of which time had been spent in New York hotels and boarding houses and half in Northern New York and rural New England, where, staying at farms or at the houses of families in the smaller towns to which I bore letters of introduction, I flattered myself that I had probed deep—Oh, ever so deep!—below the surface and had come to understand the people as they lived in their own homes. And my ripened judgment was that the bulk of the well-to-do people of the country supported life chiefly by consumption of parsnips.

Some fifteen years later I was at supper at the Century Club in New York and the small party at our table as we discussed the scalloped oysters (which are one of the pillars of the Century) included a well-known American author and journalist and an even better known and much-loved artist. But why should I not mention their names? They were Montgomery Schuyler and John La Farge. Both had been to Europe that year—La Farge to pay his first visit to Italy, while Schuyler, whether with or without La Farge I forget, had made a somewhat extensive trip through rural England in, I think, a dog-cart. The conversation ran chiefly on their experiences and suddenly Schuyler turned to me with: "Here, you Englishman, why do the middle classes of England live chiefly on parsnips?"

The thing is incredible—except that it happened. Schuyler, no less than I fifteen years before, spoke in the fulness of conviction arising from what he, no less than I, believed to have been wide and adequate experience. The memory of that experience has made me tolerant of the cocksure generalisations with which the Englishman who has visited America, or the American who has been in England, for a few months delights to regale his compatriots on his return. Quite recently a charming American woman who is good enough to count me among her friends, was in London for the first time in her life. She is perhaps as typical a representative of Western American womanhood—distinctively Western—as could be found; very good to look upon, warm-hearted, fearless and earnest in her truth-loving, straightforward life. But in voice, in manner, and in frankness of speech she is peculiarly and essentially Western. She loved England and English people, so she told me at the Carlton on the eve of her return to America,—just loved them, but English women (and I can see her wrinkling her eyebrows at me to give emphasis to what she said) were so dreadfully outspoken: they did say such awful things! I thought I knew the one Englishwoman from whose conversation she had derived this idea and remembering my own parsnips, I forgave her. She has, since her return, I doubt not, dwelt often to her friends on this amazing frankness of speech in Englishwomen. And if she only knew what twenty Englishwomen thought of her outspokenness!

Not long ago I heard an eminent member of the medical profession in London, who had just returned from a trip to Canada and the United States with representatives of the British Medical Association, telling a ring of interested listeners all about the politics, geography, manners, and customs of the people of America. Among other things he explained that in America there was no such thing known as a table d' hote; all your meals at hotels and restaurants had to be ordered a la carte. "I should have thought," he said, "that a good table d' hote at an hotel in New York and other towns would pay. It would be a novelty." It may be well to explain to English readers who do not know America, that fifteen years ago a meal a la carte was, and over a large part of the country still is, practically unknown in the United States. The system of buying one's board and lodging in installments is known in America as "the European plan."

If it would not be too long a digression, I would explain how this is a cardinal principle of the American business mind. The disposition of every American is to take over a whole contract en bloc, which in England, where every man is a specialist, would be split into twenty different transactions. The American thinks in round numbers: "What will the whole thing come to?" he asks; while the Englishman wants to know the items. This habit permeates American life in every department. It is labour-saving. Few things amuse or irritate the American visitor to England more than the having to pay individually for a number of small conveniences which at home he is accustomed to have "thrown in"; and the first time when he is presented with an English hotel bill (I am not speaking of the modern semi-American hotels in London) with its infinite list of items, is an experience that he never forgets.

All of which is only to explain that the distinguished physician, when he spoke of the absence of tables d'hote in America, was talking parsnips. His experience had been limited to a few hotels and restaurants in New York and one or two other large towns.

If only it were possible to catch in some great "receiver" or "coherer," or some similar instrument, all the things that were said in London in the course of twenty-four hours about the United States by people who had been there, and all the things that were said in New York in the same period about England by people of equal experience, and set them down side by side, it would make entertaining reading. The wonder is, not that we misunderstand each other as much as we do, but that somehow we escape a vast mutual, international contempt.

Several times in the course of my residence in the United States I have had said to me: "What! Are you an Englishman? But you don't drop your H's!"

Which is ridiculous, is it not, English reader? But before you smile at it, permit me to explain that it is no whit worse than when you say:—"What! Are you an American? But you don't speak with an accent!" Or possibly you call it a "twang" or you say "speak through your nose."

You may be dining, English reader, at, let us say, the Carlton or Savoy when a party of Americans comes into the room—Americans of the kind that every one knows for Americans as soon as he sees or hears them. The women are admirably dressed—perhaps a shade too admirably—and the costumes of the men irreproachable. But there is that something of manner, of walk, of voice which draws all eyes to them as they advance to their table, and the room is hushed as they arrange their seats. "Those horrid Americans!" says one of your party and no one protests. But at the next table to you there is seated another party of delightful people—low-voiced, well-mannered, excellently bred in every tone and movement. You wonder dimly if you have not met them somewhere. At all events you would very much like to meet them. They are infinitely more distressed than you at the behaviour of the American party which has just come in—because they are Americans also. And I may add that they will not be in the least flattered, if you should be lucky enough to meet them, by your telling them that you "never would have thought it."

Perhaps, English reader, you have lived long enough in some other country than England to have learned what a loathsome thing the travelling Englishman often appears. Possibly you have been privileged to hear the frank and unofficial opinion of some native of that country—an opinion not intended for your ears, but addressed to a compatriot of the speaker—of English people in general, based upon his experience of those whom he has seen. Such an experience is quite illuminating. I know few things more offensive than the behaviour of a certain class of German when he is in Paris. The noisy, nasal American at the Carlton or Savoy is no more representative of America than the loud-voiced, check-suited Englishman at Delmonico's or the Waldorf-Astoria is the man by whom you wish your nation to be judged. It may be a purposeful provision of a higher Power that the people of all countries should appear unprepossessing when they are abroad, for the fostering in each nation of the spirit of patriotism; for why should any of us be patriots if all the foreigners who came to our shores were as inoffensive as ourselves? The truth is that those who are inoffensive pass unnoticed. It is the occasional caricature—the parody—of the national type that catches our eye; and on him we too often base our judgment of a whole people.

Those Englishmen who only England know are inclined to think that the check-suited fellow countryman is a creation of the French and German comic press. Those who have lived outside of England for some considerable number of years have learned better. The late Senator Hoar in his Autobiography of Seventy Years has some very shrewd remarks about Matthew Arnold. The Senator had a cordial regard for Matthew Arnold—"a huge liking" he calls his feeling,—and he has this delightful sentence in regard to him: "I do not mean to say that his three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest literary work of our time. But I think, on the whole, that I should rather have the pair of intellectual eyes which can see Homer as he saw him, than any other mental quality I can think of." "But"—and mark this—"Mr. Arnold has never seemed to me fortunate in his judgment about Americans . . . The trouble with Mr. Arnold is that he never travelled in the United States when on this side of the Atlantic. . . . He visited a great City or two, but never made himself acquainted with the American people. He never knew the sources of our power or the spirit of our people."

Senator Hoar, with a generous nature made thrice generous by the mellowness of years, speaking of the man he hugely liked, tempered the truth to a more than paternal mildness. But it is the truth. Matthew Arnold, to put it bluntly, was wrong-headed in his judgment of America and Americans to a degree which one living long in the United States only comes slowly and reluctantly to understand. And if he so erred, how shall all the lesser teachers from whom England gets its knowledge of America keep straight?

But what the American people really objected to in Matthew Arnold was not any blundering things that he said of them, but the fact that he wore on inappropriate occasions in New York a brown checked suit.

* * * * *

And across all the gulf of more than twenty years there looms up in my memory—"looms like some Homer-rock or Troy-tree"—the figure of the Hon. S——y B——l flaunting his mustard coloured suit, gridironed with a four-inch check, across three thousand miles of continent, to the delight of cities, filling prairies with wonder and moving the Rocky Mountains to undisguised mirth. And how could we others explain that he, with his undeniably John-Bull-like breadth of shoulder and ruddy face, was not a fair sample of the British aristocrat? Was he not an Honourable and the son of a Baron and the "real thing" in every way? I have no doubt that there still live in the prairie towns of North Dakota and in the recesses of the mountains of Montana hundreds of men and women, grown old now, who through all the mists of the years still remember that lamentable figure; and to them, though they may have seen and barely noticed ten thousand Englishmen since, the typical Britisher still remains the Hon. S——y B——l.

It is not possible to say how far the influence of one man may extend. I verily believe that twenty years ago those clothes of Matthew Arnold stood for more in America's estimate of England than the Alabama incident. Ex-President Cleveland, as we have seen, speaks of the "sublime patriotism and devotion to their nation's honour" of the "plain people of the land" who backed him up when war with Great Britain seemed to be so near. But I wonder in how many breasts the desire for war was inspired not by patriotism but by memory of the Hon. S——y B——l. And when the Englishman thinks of the possibility of war with the United States, with whom is it that he pictures himself as fighting? Some one individual American, whom he has seen in London, drunk perhaps, certainly noisy and offensive. Such a one stands in the mind of many an Englishman who has not travelled as the type of the whole people of the United States.

If it were possible for the two peoples to come to know each other as they really are—if one half of the population of each country could for a season change places with one half of the other, so that all the individuals of both nations would be acquainted with the ways and thoughts of the other, not as the comic artists draw them, nor as they are when they are abroad, but as they live their daily lives at home—then indeed would all thought of difference between the two disappear, and war between them be as impossible as war between Surrey and Kent.



CHAPTER V

THE AMERICAN ATTITUDE TOWARDS WOMEN

The Isolation of the United States—American Ignorance of the World—Sensitiveness to Criticism—Exaggeration of their Own Virtues—The Myth of American Chivalrousness—Whence it Originated—The Climatic Myth—International Marriages— English Manners and American—The View of Womanhood in Youth—Co-education of the Sexes—Conjugal Morality—The Artistic Sense in American Women—Two Stenographers—An Incident of Camp-Life—"Molly-be-damned"—A Nice Way of Travelling—How do they do it?—Women in Public Life—The Conditions which Co-operate—The Anglo-Saxon Spirit again.

It will be roughly true to say that the Englishman's misunderstanding of America is generally the result of misinformation—of "parsnips"—of having had reported to him things which are superficial and untrue; whereas the American's misunderstanding of England is chiefly the result of his absorption in his own affairs and lack of a standard of comparison. The Americans as a people have been until recently, and still are in only a moderately less degree, peculiarly ignorant of other peoples and of the ways of the world.

This has been unfortunate, so far as their judgment of England is concerned, in two ways,—first, as has already been said, because they have had no opportunity of measuring Great Britain against other nations, so that one and all are equally foreign, and second and more positively, in the general misconception in the American mind as to the character and aims of the British Empire and the temper of British rule. From the same authorities, the popular histories and school manuals, as supplied the American people for so long with their ideas of the conduct of the British troops in the Revolutionary War, they also learned of India and the British; and the one fact which every American, twenty years ago, knew about British India was that the English blew Sepoys from the mouths of cannon. Every American youth saw in his school history a picture of the thing being done. It helped to point the moral of British brutalities in the War of Independence and it was beaten into the plastic young minds until an impression was made which was never effaced. Of late years not a few Americans have arisen to tell the people something of the truth about British rule in India—of its uprightness, its beneficence, its tolerance,—but it will be a generation yet before the people as a whole has any approximate conception of the facts.

It was in no way to the discredit of the American people—and enormously to their advantage—that they were for so long ignorant of the world. How should they have been otherwise when separated from that world by three thousand miles of ocean? They had, moreover, in the problems connected with the establishment of their own government, and the expansion of that government across the continent, enough to occupy their thoughts and energies. For a century the people lived self-concentrated, introspective, their minds filled only with thoughts of themselves. If foreign affairs were discussed at all it was in curiously childlike and impracticable terms. The nation grew up a nation of provincials (there is no other word for it), with a provincialism which was somewhat modified, but still provincial, in the cities of the Atlantic coast, and which, after all, had a dignity of its own from the mere fact that it was continent-wide.

The Spanish-American War brought the people suddenly into contact with the things of Europe and widened their horizon. The war itself was only an accident; for the growth of American commerce, the increase of wealth, the uncontainable expansive force of their industrial energy, must have compelled a departure from the old isolation under any circumstances. The quarrel with Spain did but furnish, as it were, a definite taking-off place for the leap which had to be made.[113:1] Since then, foreign politics and foreign affairs have acquired a new interest for Americans. They are no longer topics entirely alien from their every-day life and thoughts. It would still be absurd to pretend that the affairs of Europe (or for that matter of Asia) have anything like the interest for Americans that they have for Europeans, or that the educated American is not as a rule still seriously uninformed on many matters (all except the bare bones of facts and dates) of geography, of ethnology, of world-politics which are elementary matters to the Englishman of corresponding education;[113:2] but with their debut as a World-Power—above all with the acquisition of their colonial dependencies—Americans have become (I use the phrase in all courtesy) immensely more intelligent in their outlook on the affairs of the world. With a longer experience of the difficulties of colonial government, they will also come to appreciate more nearly at its true value the work which Great Britain has done for humanity.

Americans may retort that their knowledge of Europe was at least no scantier than the Englishman's knowledge of America, and the mistakes of travelling Englishmen in regard to the size, the character, and the constitution of the country have been a fruitful source of American witticism. But why should Englishmen know anything of the United States? The affairs of the United States were, after all, however big, the affairs of the United States and not of any other part of the rest of the world; while the affairs of Europe were the affairs of all the world outside of the United States. Undoubtedly the American could fairly offset the Englishman's ignorance of America against the American's ignorance of England; but what has never failed to strike an Englishman is the American's ignorance of other parts of the world, which might be regarded as common to both. They were not common to both; for, as has been said, since the beginning of her history, which has stretched over some centuries, England has been constantly mixed up with the affairs, not only of Europe, but of the remoter parts of the earth, while the United States for the single century of her history has lived insulated and almost solely intent on her own affairs. So though the American has no adequate retort against the Englishman for his ignorance, he need not defend it. It has been an accident of his geographical situation and needs no more apology than the Rocky Mountains. But, like the Rocky Mountains, it is a fact which has had a distinct influence on his character. It is probably unavoidable that a people—as an individual—which lives a segregated life, with its thoughts turned almost wholly on itself, should come to exaggerate, perhaps its own weaknesses, but certainly its virtues.

The boy who lives secluded from companionship, when he goes out into the world, will find not merely that he is diffident and sensitive about his own defects, real or imaginary, but that he is different from other people. It may take him all his life to learn—perhaps he will never learn—that his emotional and intellectual experiences are no prodigies of sentiment and phoenixes of thought, but the common experiences of half his fellows. It has been such a life of seclusion that the American people lived—though they hardly know it (and perhaps some American readers will resent the statement), because the mere fact of their seclusion has prevented them from seeing how secluded, as compared with other peoples, they have been. It is true that individual Americans of the well-to-do classes travel more (and more intelligently) than any other people except the English; but this, as leavening the nation, is a small off-set against the daily lack of mental contact with foreign affairs at home.

But if this sheltered boy be further occasionally subjected to the inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world—a candid and outspoken elderly relative—he is likely to become, on the one hand, morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame, and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride in whatever is awarded praise.

Both these tendencies have been acutely developed in the American character—an extraordinary sensitiveness to criticism by outsiders of certain national foibles, and a no less conspicuous belief in the heroic proportions of their good qualities. For surely no people has ever been blessed in its seclusion with such an abundance of criticism of singular candour. The frank brutality with which the travelling Englishman has made his opinions known on any peculiar trait or unusual institution which he has been pleased to think that he has noticed in the United States has been vastly more ill-mannered than anything in the manners of the Americans themselves on which he has animadverted so freely. The thing most comparable to it—most nearly as ill-mannered—is, perhaps, the frank brutality with which the travelling American expresses himself—and herself—in regard to things in Europe. In it, in fact, we see again another aspect of the same fundamentally English trait,—the insistence on the sovereignty of the individual—and Americans come by it legitimately. Every time that they display it they do but make confession of their original Anglo-Saxon descent and essentially English nature. The Englishman in America has, however, had some excuse for his readiness to criticise, in the interest, the anxiety, with which, at least until recent years, the Americans have invited his opinions. But if that has gone some way to justify his expression of those opinions, it has furnished no sort of excuse for the lack of tact and breeding which he has shown in the process. The American does not commonly wait for the invitation.

"My! But isn't that quaint! Now in America we . . ." etc. So speaks an uncultivated American on seeing something that strikes him—or her—as novel in London, not unkindly critical, but anxious to give information about his country—and uninvited. But whereas the Englishman is so accustomed to the abuse and criticism of other peoples that the harmless chatter of the American ripples more or less unheeded by him, the American, less case-hardened in his isolation, hears the Englishman's bluntly worded expression of contempt, and it hurts. It does not hurt nearly as much now as it did twenty years ago; but the harm has largely been done.

The harm would not be so serious but for the American sensitiveness bred of his seclusion,—if that is (at the risk of seeming to repeat myself I must again say) he knew enough of the world to know that he himself has precisely the same critical inclination as the Englishman and that it is a trait inherited from common ancestors. The Anglo-Saxon race acquired early in its life the conviction that it was a trifle better than any other section of the human kind. And it is justified. We—Americans and Englishmen alike—hold that we are better than any other people. That the root-trait has developed somewhat differently in the two portions of the family is an accident.

The Englishman—who, when at home, has himself lived, not entirely secluded, but in a measure shut off from contact with other peoples—by continual going abroad and never-ceasing friction with his neighbours, by perpetual disheartenment with the perplexities of his colonial empire, has become less of a critic than a grumbler; and to do him justice he is, in speech, infinitely more contemptuous of his own government than he is of the American or any other. The American on the contrary remains cheerfully, light-heartedly, garrulously critical. He comes out in the world and gazes on it young-eyed, and he prattles: "My father is bigger than your father, and my sister has longer hair than yours, and my money box is larger than yours." It is neither unkindly meant nor, by Englishmen, very unkindly taken. It is less offensive than the mature, corrosive sullenness of the Englishman; but it is the same thing. "The French foot-guards are dressed in blue and all the marching regiments in white; which has a very foolish appearance. And as for blue regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the Artillery," says the footman in Moore's Zeluco.

Similarly, when he has been praised, the lad has plumed himself unduly on the thing that found approval. He would not do it now; for the American people of to-day is, as it were, grown up; but, again, the harm has been done. Americans rarely make the mistake of underestimating the excellence of their virtues. Nor is it their fault, but that of their critics.

The American people labours under delusions about its own character and qualities in several notable particulars. It exaggerates its own energy and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is good for a nation; but it believes that it possesses them to the exclusion of the rest of mankind. And that is unfortunate; for it makes the individual American assume the lack of these qualities in the English and thereby decreases his estimate of the English character. I am not endeavouring to reduce the American's good opinion of himself—only to make him think better of the Englishman by assuring him that in each of these particulars there is remarkably little to choose between them. And what excellence he has in each he owes to the fact that he is in the main English in origin.

That Americans should think that they have a higher respect for womanhood than any other people is not surprising; for every other people thinks precisely the same thing. They would be unique among peoples if they thought otherwise. Frenchman, German, Italian, Spaniard, Greek—each and every one who has not had his eyes opened by travel and knowledge of the world believes, with no less sincerity of conviction than the American, that to him alone of all peoples has it been vouchsafed to know how duly to reverence the divine feminine. To the Englishman it seems that the German not seldom treats his wife much as if she were a cow; and he is sometimes distressed at the way in which, for all the pretty things he says to her, the Frenchman, not of the labouring classes only, will allow his wife to work for and wait on him. While the language which an Italian can, on occasions, use towards the partner of his joys is, to English ears, appalling. But each goes on serenely satisfied of his own superiority. You others, you may pay lip-service, yes; but deep down, in the heart of hearts—we know. The American has as good a right to this same foible as any other; but what is to be noted is that whereas Englishmen laugh at the pretensions of Continental peoples, they have been willing to accept the chivalry of the American at his own valuation: the fact being that the valuation is not originally American, but was made by the travelling Englishmen of the past who communicated their appraisement to the people at home as well as to the American whom they complimented. Englishmen of the present day have accepted the belief as an inheritance and without question; for it was at least a generation and a half ago that the myth first obtained vogue, and the two facts most commonly adduced in its support by the English visitors who spread it were, first, that women could walk about the streets of New York or any other American city, unattended and at such hours as pleased them, without being insulted; and, second (absurdly enough), the provision of special "ladies' entrances" to hotels, which seem to have enormously impressed several English visitors to the United States who afterwards wrote their "impressions."

For the first of these, it is a mere matter of local custom and police regulation. When it is understood that in certain streets of certain cities, at certain hours of the day, no women walk unattended except such as desire to be insulted, it is probable that other women, who go there in ignorance, will suffer inconvenience. Nor has the difference in local custom any bearing whatever on the respective morality of different localities. These things are arranged differently in different countries; that is all. Moreover, in this particular a great change has come over American cities in late years, nor are all American cities or all English by any means alike.

A similar change has come in the matter of "ladies' entrances" to hotels. If the provision of the separate doors was a sign of peculiar chivalry, are we then to conclude that their disappearance shows that chivalry is decaying? By no means. It only means that the hotels are improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side, came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women should frequent that common entrance. Had a hotel constructed and managed on the same principles been set down in any English town, women would have declined to use it at all, nor would Englishmen have expected their womenfolk to do so. Americans avoided the difficulty by creating the "ladies' entrance." But it was no evidence of superior chivalry on the part of the people that, having devised a place not fit for woman's occupancy and more unpleasant than was to be found in any other part of the world, they provided (albeit rather inadequate) means by which women could avoid visiting it.

Once I saw two young English girls—sweet girls, tall and graceful, with English roses blooming in their cheeks—come down-stairs in the evening, after dinner, as they might have done in any hotel to which they had been accustomed in Europe, to the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. It was a time of some political excitement and there are enough men living now who remember what the Fifth Avenue Hotel used to be at such seasons twenty years ago. The girls—it was probably their first night on American soil and they could not stand being cooped up in their room upstairs all the evening—made their way to the nearest seat and sat down clinging each to the other's hand. Around them surged perhaps a hundred men, chewing, spitting, smoking, slapping each other on the backs, and laughing coarsely. The girls gazed in wonder and with visibly increasing embarrassment for perhaps five minutes, before they slipped away, the roses in their cheeks doubly carmine and still clinging each to the other's hand.

For the benefit of my companion (whose appearance indicated an Englishman) an American on an adjoining seat held forth to his friends on what he called the "indecency" of the conduct of the girls in coming down to the public hall and the "effrontery" of Englishwomen in general.

In hotels of the modern type there is no need for women to use a separate entrance or to draw their skirts aside and hurry through the public passages. But it is sad if we must conclude that the building of such hotels is an evidence of dying national chivalry.

Every American firmly believes that he individually, as well as each of his countrymen, has by heritage a truer respect for womanhood than the peoples of less happy countries are able to appreciate. But many Americans also believe that every Englishman is rough and brutal to his wife, who does daily all manner of menial offices for him, a belief which is probably akin to the climatic fiction and of Continental origin. In the old days, when there was no United States of America, the peoples of the sunny countries of Southern Europe jibed at the English climate; and with ample justification. English writers have never denied that justification—in comparison with Southern Europe; and volumes could be compiled of extracts from English literature, from Shakespeare downwards, in abuse of British fog and mist and rain. But because Nice and Naples are entitled to give themselves airs, under what patent do Chicago and Pittsburgh claim the same right? Why should Englishmen submit uncomplainingly when Milwaukee and Duluth arrogate to themselves the privilege of sneering at them which was conceded originally and willingly enough to Cannes? Riverside in California, Columbia in South Carolina, Colorado Springs or Old Point Comfort—these, and such as they, may boast, and no one has ground for protest; but it is time to "call for credentials" when Buffalo, New Haven, and St. Paul and the rest propose to come in in the same company. If, in the beginning of things, English writers had had to compare the British climate not with that of Europe but with the northern part of the United States, the references to it in English literature would constitute a hymn of thanksgiving.

As the case stands, however, the people of all parts of the United States alike, in many of which mere existence is a hardship for some months in the year, are firmly convinced that the inhabitants of the British Isles are in comparison with themselves profoundly to be pitied for their deplorable climate; and it is probable that the prevailing idea as to the Englishman's habitual treatment of his wife has much the same origin. It is an inheritance of the Continental belief that John Bull sold his womenfolk at Smithfield. The frequency of international marriages and the continued stream of travel across the Atlantic is, of course, beginning to correct the popular American point of view, but there are still millions of honest and intelligent people in the United States who, when they read that an American girl is going to be married to an Englishman, pity her from their hearts in the belief that, for the sake of a coronet or some such bauble, she is selling herself to become a sort of domestic drudge.

Occasionally also even international marriages turn out unhappily; and whenever that is the case the American people hear of it in luxuriant detail. But of the thousands of happy unions nothing is said. Not many years ago there was a conspicuous case, wherein an American woman, whom the people of the United States loved much as Englishmen loved the Empress Frederick or the Princess Alice, failed to find happiness with an English husband. Of the rights and wrongs of that case, neither I nor the American people in the mass know anything, but it is the generally accepted belief in the United States that the lady's husband was some degrees worse than Bluebeard. I would not venture to hazard a guess at the number of times that I have heard a conversation on this subject clinched with the argument: "Well, now, look at N—— G——!" Against that one instance the stories of a thousand American women who are living happy lives in Europe would not weigh. If they do not confess their unhappiness, indeed, "it is probably only because they are proud, as a free-born American girl should be, and would die rather than to let others know the humiliations to which they are subjected."

"Oh, yes, you Englishmen!" an American woman will say, "your manners are better than our American men's and you are politer to us in little things. But you despise us in your hearts!" It is an argument which, in anything less than a lifetime, there is no way of disproving. American men also, of course, habitually comfort themselves with the same assurance, viz.,—that with less outward show of courtesy, they cherish in their hearts a higher ideal of womanhood than an Englishman can attain to. Precisely at what point this possession of a higher ideal begins to manifest itself in externals does not appear. After twenty years of intimacy in American homes I have failed to find any trace of it.

Let me not be misunderstood! I know scores of beautiful homes in the United States, in many widely sundered cities, where the men are as courteous, as chivalrous, as devoted to their wives—and where the women are as sweet and tender to, and as wholly wrapped up in, their husbands—as in any homes on earth. As I write, the faces of men and women rise before me, from many thousand miles away, whom I admire and love as much as one can admire and love one's fellow-beings. There are these homes I hope and believe—there are noble men and beautiful women finding and making for themselves and each other the highest happiness of which our nature is capable—in every country. But we are not now speaking of the few or of the best individuals, but of averages; and after twenty years of opportunity for observing I have entirely failed to find justification for believing that there is any peculiar inward grace in the American which belies the difference in his outward manner.

This is, of course, only an individual opinion,[126:1] which is necessarily subject to correction by any one who may have had superior opportunities for forming a trustworthy judgment. I contend, however, not as a matter of opinion, but as what seems to me to be a certainty, that whatever may be the inward feeling in regard to the other sex on the part of the men of either nation after they have arrived at mature years, the young Englishman, as he comes to manhood, possesses a much higher ideal of womanhood than is possessed by the young American of corresponding age. And I hold to this positively in spite of the fact that many Americans possessing a large knowledge of transatlantic conditions may very possibly not admit it.

I rejoice to believe that to the majority of English youths of decent bringing up at the age at which they commonly leave the public school to go to the university, womanhood still is a very white and sacred thing, in presence of which a mere man or boy can but be bashful and awkward from very reverence and consciousness of inferiority, even as it surely was a quarter of a century ago and as, at the same time, it as surely was not to the youth of the United States. Again, of course, in both countries there are differences between individuals, differences between sets and cliques; but I am not mistaken about the tone of the English youth of my own day nor am I mistaken about the tone of the American youths, of the corresponding class, with whom I have come in intimate contact in the United States. Their language about, their whole mental attitude towards, woman was during my first years in America an amazement and a shock to me. It has never ceased to be other than repellent.

The greater freedom of contact allowed to the youth of both sexes in the United States, and above all the co-educational institutions (especially those of a higher grade), must of course have some effect, whether for good or ill. It may be that the early-acquired knowledge of the American youth is in the long run salutary; that his image of womanhood is, as is claimed, more "practical," and likely to form a better basis for happiness in life, than the dream and illusion of the English boy; but here we get into a quagmire of mere speculation in which no individual opinion has any virtue whatsoever.

I am well aware also of the serious offence that will be given to innumerable good and earnest people in the United States by what I now say. This is no place to discuss the question of co-education. I am speaking only of one aspect of it, and even if it were to be granted that in that one aspect its results are evil, that evil may very possibly be outweighed many times over by the good which flows from it in other directions. Even in expressing the opinion that there is this one evil result, I am conscious that I shall call down upon myself much indignation and some contempt. It will be said that I have not studied the subject scientifically (which may be true) and that I am not acquainted with what the statistics show (which is less true), and that my observation has been prejudiced and superficial. Let me say however that I have been brought to the conclusions to which I have been forced not by prejudice but against prejudice and when I would have much preferred to feel otherwise. Let me also say that my condemnation is not directed against the elementary public schools so much as against that more select class of co-educational establishments for pupils of less juvenile years. It would, I think, be interesting to know what percentage of the girls at present at a given number of such establishments are the daughters of parents—fathers especially—who were at those same institutions in their youth. It is a subject which—so amazed was I, coming with an English-trained mind, at certain things which were said in incidental conversation—I sought a good many opportunities of enquiring into; with the result that I know that there are some parents who, though they had fifty daughters, would never allow one to go to the institutions at which they themselves spent some years. And this condemnation covers, to my present memory, five separate institutions scattered from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River.

* * * * *

"If you marry an American girl," says Life—I quote from memory,—"you may be sure that you will not be the first man she has kissed. If you marry an English one, you may be certain you will not be the last."

Whether this is true, viz., that, granting that the American girl is, before marriage, exposed to more temptation than her English sister, the latter more than makes up for it in the freedom of married life, is another quagmire. No statistics, whether of marriage, of divorce, or of the ratio of increase in population, are of any use as a guide. Each man or woman, who has had any opportunity of judging, will be guided solely by the narrow circle of his or her personal experience; and I know that the man whose opinion on the subject I would most regard holds exactly opposite views to myself—and what my own may be I trust I may be excused from stating. But while on the subject of the relative conjugal morality of the two peoples opinions will differ widely with individual experience, I have never met a shadow of disagreement in competent opinion in regard to the facts about the youth of the two countries. It may be, as I have heard a clever woman say, that the way for a member of her sex to get the greatest enjoyment out of life is to be brought up in America and married in England. If so let us rejoice that so many charming women choose the way which opens to them the possibility of the greatest felicity.

There is, of course, a widespread impression in England that American women as a rule are not womanly. The average American girl acquires when young a self-possession and an ability to converse in company which Englishwomen only, and then not always, acquire much later in life. Therefore the American girl appears, to English eyes, to be "forward," and she is assumed to possess all the vices which go with "forwardness" in an English maiden. Which is entirely unjust. Let us remember that there is hardly a girl growing up in England to-day who would not have been considered forward and ill-mannered to an almost intolerable degree by her great-grandmother. But that the girls of to-day are any the less womanly, in all that is sweet and essential in womanliness, than any generation of their ancestors, I for one do not believe. Nor do I believe that in another generation, when they will perhaps, as a matter of course, possess all the social precocity (as it seems to us) of the American girl of to-day, they will thereby be any the less true and tender women than their mothers.

In particular, are American girls supposed to be so commercially case-hardened that their artistic sensibilities have been destroyed. A notorious American "revivalist" some years ago returned from a much-advertised trip to England and told his American congregations of the sinfulness which he had seen in the Old World. Among other things he had seen, so he said, more tipsy men and women in the streets of London in (I think) a month than he had seen in the streets of his native town of Topeka, Kansas, in some—no matter what—large number of years. Very possibly he was right. But he omitted to say that he had also seen several million more sober ones. A population of 6,000,000 frequently contains more drunkards than one of 30,000. It also contains more metaphysicians. On the same principle it is entirely likely that the American girl, who talks so much, says many more foolish things than the English one who, if she can help it, never talks at all. The American girl is only a girl after all, and because she has acquired a conversational fluency which the Englishwoman will only arrive at twenty years later, it is not just to suppose that she must also have acquired an additional twenty years' maturity of mind.

Most English readers are familiar with the picture of the American girl who flits through Europe seeing nothing in the Parthenon or in Whitehall beyond an inferiority in size and splendour to the last new insurance company's building in New York. She has been a favourite character in fiction, and the name of the artist who first imagined her has long been lost. Perhaps she was Daisy Miller's grandmother. In reality, in spite of that lack of reverence which is undoubtedly a national American characteristic, the average American woman has an almost passionate love for those glories of antiquity which her own country necessarily lacks, such as few Englishwomen are capable of feeling.

"How in our hearts we envy you the mere names of your streets!" said an American woman to me once. It is not easy for an English man or woman to conceive what romance and wonder cluster round the names of Fleet Street and the Mall to the minds of many educated Americans. We, if we are away from them for half a dozen years, long for them in our exile and rejoice in them on our return. The American of sensibility feels that he—and more especially she—has been cut off from them for as many generations and adores them with an ardour proportionately magnified. But he (or she) would not exchange Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Euclid Avenue or the Lake Shore Drive, as the case may be, for all London.

It was once my fortune to show over Westminster Abbey an American woman whose name, by reason of her works—sound practical common-sense works,—has come to be known throughout the United States, and I heard "the wings of the dead centuries beat about her ears." I took her to Poet's Corner. She turned herself slowly about and looked at the names carved on either side of her, and then looked down and saw the names that lay graven beneath her feet; and she dropped sobbing on her knees upon the pavement. Johnson was not kind to the American colonies in his life. Those tears which fell upon his name, where it is cut into the slab of paving, were part of America's revenge.

We all remember Kipling's "type-writer girl" in San Francisco,—"the young lady who in England would be a Person,"—who suddenly quoted at him Theophile Gautier. It is an incident which many Englishmen have read with incredulity, but which has nothing curious in it to the American mind. A stenographer in my own offices subsequently, I have heard, married a rich owner of race-horses and her dinners I understand are delightful. She was an excellent stenographer.

In all frontier communities, where women are few and the primitive instincts have freer play than in more artificial societies, there blossoms a certain rough and ready chivalrousness which sets respect of womanhood above all laws and makes every man a self-constituted champion of the sex. This may be seen in a thousand communities scattered over the farther West; but it is no outgrowth of the American character, for it flourishes in all new societies in all parts of the world, no matter to what nationality the men of those societies belong.

In a certain mining camp, late at night, a man—a man of some means, the son of a banker in a neighbouring town—was walking with a woman. Neither was sober and the woman fell to the ground. The man kicked her and told her to get up. As she did not comply he cursed her and kicked her again. Then chanced to come along one Ferguson, a gambler and a notoriously "bad man," who bade the other stop abusing the woman, whereupon he was promptly told to go to —— and mind his own business. Ferguson replied that if the other touched the woman again he would shoot him. It was at this point that the altercation brought me out of my cabin, for the thing was happening almost where my doorstep (had I had a doorstep) ought to have been. The banker's son paid no heed to the warning, and once more proceeded to kick the woman. Thereupon Ferguson shot him. And, with the weapon which Ferguson carried and his ability as a marksman, when he shot, it might be safely regarded as final.

No attempt was made to punish Ferguson. The deputy sheriff, arriving on the scene, heard his story and mine and those of one or two others who had heard or seen more or less of what passed; and Ferguson was a free man. Nor was there any shadow of a suggestion in camp that justice should take any other course. The fact was established that the dead man had been abusing a woman. Ferguson had only done what any other man in camp must have done under the same circumstances.

And while the banker's son was a person of some standing, there was certainly nothing in her whom he had maltreated, beyond her mere womanhood, to constitute a claim on one grain of respect.

I trust that I am not reflecting on the chivalry of the camp when I record the fact that the name by which the lady was universally known was "Molly-be-damned." The camp, to a man, idolised her.

* * * * *

One of my earliest revelations of the capacity of the American woman was vouchsafed to me in this way:

A party of us, perhaps fifteen in all, had travelled a distance of some two thousand miles to assist at the opening of a new line of railway in the remote Northwest. We duly arrived at the little mountain town at which the junction was to be made between the line running up from the south and that running down from the north, over which we had come. The ceremony of driving the last spike was conducted with due solemnity, after which a "banquet" was given to us by the Mayor and citizens of the small community. After the banquet—which was really a luncheon—we again boarded our train to complete the run to the southern end of the line, a number of the citizens of the town with their wives accompanying us on the jaunt. It chanced to be my privilege to escort to the car, and for the remainder of the journey to sit beside, the wife of the editor of the local paper. She was pretty, charming, and admirably dressed. We talked of many things,—of America and England, of the red Indians, and of books,—when in a pause in the conversation she remarked:

"I think this is such a nice way of travelling, don't you?"

It puzzled me. What did she mean? Was she referring to the fact that we were on a special train composed of private cars, or what? The truth did not at first occur to me—that she was referring to railway travelling as a whole, it being the first time that she had ever been on or seen a train. Explanations followed. She had been brought by her parents, soon after the close of the Civil War, when two or three years old, across the plains in a prairie schooner (the high-topped waggon in which the pioneers used to make their westward pilgrimage), taking some four months for the trip from the old home in, I think, Kentucky. At all events she was a Southerner. Since then during her whole life she had known no surroundings but those of the little mining settlement huddled in among the mountains, her longest trips from home having been for a distance of thirty or forty miles on horseback or on a buckboard. She had lived all her life in log cabins and never known what it meant to have a servant. She read French and Italian, but could not take any interest in German. She sketched and painted, and was incomparably better informed on matters of art than I, though she knew the Masters only, of course, through the medium of prints and engravings. What she most dearly longed to do in all the world was to see a theatre—Irving for choice—and to hear some one of the Italian operas, with the libretti of which, as well as the music, so far as her piano would interpret for her, she was already familiar.

Now at last the railway had come and she was, from that day forward, within some six days' travelling of New York; and her husband had faithfully promised that they should go East together for at least three or four weeks that winter. And as she sat and talked in her soft Southern voice, there in the heart of the wilds which had been all the world to her, she might, so far as a mere man's eyes could judge, have been dropped down in any country house in England to be a conspicuously charming member of any charming house-party.

Familiarity with similar instances, though I think with none more striking, has robbed the miracle, so far as its mere outward manifestation is concerned, of something of its wonder; but the inward marvel of it remains as inexplicable as ever. By what power or instinct do they do it? With nothing of inheritance, so far as can be judged, to justify any aspirations towards the good or beautiful, among the poorest and hardest of surroundings, with none but the most meagre of educational facilities, by what inherent quality is it that the American woman, not now and again only, but in her tens of thousands, rises to such an instinctive comprehension of what is good and worth while in life, that she becomes, not through any external influence, but by mere process of her own development, the equal of those who have spent their lives amid all that is most beautifying and elevating of what the world has to afford? When she takes her place, graciously and composedly, as the mistress of some historic home or amid the surroundings of a Court, we say that it is her "adaptability." But adaptability can do no more than raise one to the level of one's surroundings—not above them. Is it ambition? But whence derived? And by what so tutored and guided that it reaches only for what is good? How is it tempered that she remains all pure womanly at the last?

It may be that the extent to which, especially in the Western States, American women of wealth and position are called upon to bear their share in public work—in the management of art societies, the building of art buildings and public libraries, the endowment and conduct of hospitals, and in educational work of all kinds—gives them such an opportunity of showing the qualities which are in them, as is denied to their English sisters of similar position but who live in older established communities. And there are, of course, women in England who lead lives as beautiful and as beneficent as are lived anywhere upon earth. The miracle is that the American woman—and, again I say, not now and again but in her tens of thousands—becomes what she is out of the environment in which her youth has so often been lived.

It will be necessary later to refer to the larger part played by American women, as compared with English, in the intellectual life of the country,—a matter which itself has, as will be noticed, no little bearing on the question of the merits and demerits of the co-education of the sexes. The best intellectual work, the best literary work, the best artistic work, is still probably done by the men in the United States; but an immensely larger part of that work is done by women than in England, and in ordinary society (outside of the professional literary and artistic circles) it is the women who are generally best informed, as will be seen, on literature and art. To which is to be added the fact that they take a much livelier and more intelligent interest than do the majority of Englishwomen in public affairs, and assume a more considerable share of the work of a public or quasi-public character in educational and similar matters. It might be supposed that this greater prominence of women in the national life of the country was in itself a proof that men deferred more to them and placed them on a higher level; but when analysed it will be found far from being any such proof. Rather is woman's position an evidence of, and a result of, man's neglect. By which it is not intended to imply any discourteous or inconsiderate neglect; but merely that American men have been, and still are, of necessity more busy than Englishmen, more absorbed in their own work, whereby women have been left to live their own lives and thrown on their own resources much more than in England. The mere pre-occupation of the men, moreover, necessarily leaves much work undone which, for the good of society, must be done; and women have seized the opportunity of doing it. They have been especially ready to do so, inasmuch as the spirit of work and of pushfulness is in the atmosphere about them, and they have been educated at the same schools as the men. The contempt of men for idleness, in a stage of society when there was more than enough work for all men to do, necessarily extended to the women. It is not good, in the United States, for any one, woman hardly more than man, to be idle.

Women being compelled to organise their own lives for themselves, they carried into that organisation the spirit of energy and enthusiasm which filled the air of the young and growing communities. Finding work to their hands to do, they have done it—taking, and in the process fitting themselves to take, a much more prominent part in the communal life than is borne by their sisters in England or than those sisters are to-day, in the mass, qualified to assume. Precisely so (as often in English history) do women, in some beleaguered city or desperately pressed outpost, turn soldiers. No share in, or credit for, the result is to be assigned to any peculiar forethought, deference, or chivalrousness on the part of the men, their fellows in the fight. It is to the women that credit belongs.

And while we are thus comparing the position of women in America with their position in England, it is to be noted that so excellent an authority among Frenchmen as M. Paul Cambon, in speaking of the position of women in England, uses precisely the same terms as an Englishman must use when speaking of the conditions in America. Americans have gone a step farther—are a shade more "Feminist"—than the English, impelled, as has been seen, by the peculiar conditions of their growing communities in a new land. But it is only a step and accidental.

Englishmen looking at America are prone to see only that step, whereas what Frenchmen or other Continental Europeans see is that both Englishmen and Americans together have travelled far, and are still travelling fast, on a path quite other than that which is followed by the rest of the peoples. In their view, the single step is insignificant. What is obvious is that in both is working the same Anglo-Saxon trait—the tendency to insist upon the independence of the individual. Feminism—the spirit of feminine progress—is repugnant to the Roman Catholic Church; and we would not look to see it developing strongly in Roman Catholic countries. But, what is more important, it is repugnant to all peoples which set the community or the state or the government before the individual, that is to say to all peoples except the Anglo-Saxon.

We see here again, as we shall see in many things, how powerless have been all other racial elements in the United States to modify the English character of the people. The weight of all those elements must be, and, so far as they have any weight, is directly against the American tendency to feminine predominance. All the Germans, all the Irish, all the Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or other foreigners who are in the United States to-day or have ever come to the United States have not, as Germans, or Irish, or Frenchmen, contributed among them one particle, one smallest impulse, to the position which women hold in the life of the country to-day; rather has it been achieved in defiance of the instincts and ideas of each of those by the English spirit which works irrepressibly in the people. There could hardly be stronger testimony to the dominating quality of that spirit. One may approve of the conditions as they have been evolved; or one may not. One may be Feminist or anti-Feminist. But whether it be for good or evil, the position which women hold in the United States to-day they hold by virtue of the fact that the American people is Anglais—an English or Anglo-Saxon people.

* * * * *

And in spite of all the precautions that I have taken to make myself clear and to avoid offence, I feel that some word of explanation, lest I be misunderstood, is still needed. It is not here said that American men do not place woman on a higher plane than any Continental European people. I earnestly believe that both branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock do hold to a higher ideal of womanhood than some (and for all I know to the contrary, than all) of the peoples of Europe. What I am denying is that Americans have any greater reverence for women, any higher chivalrousness, than Englishmen. And this denial I make not with any desire to belittle the chivalry of American men but only in the endeavour to correct the popular American impression about Englishmen, which does not contribute to the promotion of that good-will which ought to exist between the peoples. I am not suggesting that Americans should think less of themselves, only that, with wider knowledge, they would think better of Englishmen.

And, on the subject of co-education, it seems that yet another word is needed, for since this chapter was put into type, it has had the advantage of being read by an American friend whose opinion on any subject must be valuable, and who has given especial attention to educational matters. He thinks it would be judicious that I should make it clearer than I have done that, in what I have said, I am not criticising the American co-educational system in any aspect save one. He writes:

"The essential purpose of the system of co-education which had been adopted, not only in the State universities supported by public funds, but in certain colleges of earlier date, such as Oberlin, in Ohio, and in comparatively recent institutions like Cornell University, of New York, is to secure for the women facilities for training and for intellectual development not less adequate than those provided for the men.

"It was contended that if any provision for higher education for women was to be made, it was only equitable, and in fact essential, that such provision should be of the best. It was not practicable with the resources available in new communities, to double up the machinery for college education, and if the women were not to be put off with instructors of a cheaper and poorer grade and with inadequate collections and laboratories, they must be admitted to a share of the service of the instructors, and in the use of the collections, of the great institutions.

"It is further contended by well-informed people that what they call a natural relation between the sexes, such as comes up in the competitive work of university life, so far from furthering, has the result of lessening the risk of immature sentiment and of undesirable flirtations. By the use of the college system, the advantages of these larger facilities can be secured to women, and have in fact been secured without any sacrifice of the separate life of the women students.

"In Columbia University, for instance (in New York City), the women students belong to Barnard College. This college is one of the seven colleges that constitute Columbia University: but it possesses a separate foundation and a faculty of its own. The women students have the advantage of the university collections and of a large number of the university lectures. The relation between the college and the university is in certain respects similar to that of Newnham and Girton with the University of Cambridge, with the essential difference that Barnard College constitutes, as stated, an integral part of the university, and that the Barnard students are entitled to secure their university degrees from A.B. to Ph.D."

From the above it is by no means certain that on the one point on which I have dwelt, his opinion coincides with mine; and the best explanation thereof that I can offer is that while he knows certain parts of the country and some institutions better than I, I know certain parts of the country and some institutions better than he. And we will "let it go at that."

As for the rest, for the general economic advantages of the co-educational system to the community, I think I am prepared to go as far as almost anyone. I am even inclined to follow Miss M. Carey Thomas, the President of Bryn Mawr College, who attributes the industrial progress of the United States largely to the fact that the men of the country have such well-educated mothers. It seems to me a not unreasonable or extravagant suggestion. I am certainly of the opinion that the conversational fluency and mental alertness of the American woman, as well as in large measure her capacity for bearing her share in the civic labour, are largely the result of the fact that she has in most cases had precisely the same education as her brothers.

At present I believe that something more than one-half (56 per cent.) of the pupils in all the elementary and secondary schools, whether public or private, in the United States are girls; and that the system is permanently established cannot be questioned. What are known as the State universities, that is to say universities which are supported entirely, or almost entirely, by State grants, or by annual taxes ordered through State legislation, have from their first foundation been available for women students as well as for men. The citizens, who, as taxpayers, were contributing the funds required for the foundation and the maintenance of these institutions, took the ground, very naturally, that all who contributed should have the same rights in the educational advantages to be secured. It was impossible from the American point of view to deny to a man whose family circle included only daughters the university education, given at public expense, which was available for the family of sons.

Co-education had its beginning in most parts of the United States in the fact that in the frontier communities there were often not enough boy pupils to support a school nor was there enough money to maintain a separate school for girls; but what began experimentally and as a matter of necessity has long become an integral part of the American social system. So far from losing ground it is continually (and never more rapidly than in recent years) gaining in the Universities as well as in the schools, in private as well as public institutions.

But, as I said in first approaching the subject, the merits or demerits of co-education are not a topic which comes within the scope of this book. It was necessary to refer to it only as it impinged on the general question of the relation of the sexes.

FOOTNOTES:

[113:1] The English reader will find this explained at length in Mr. A. R. Colquhoun's work, Greater America.

[113:2] That Americans may understand more clearly what I mean and, so understanding, see that I speak without intention to offend, I quote from the list of "arrangements" in London for the forthcoming week, as given in to-day's London Times, those items which have a peculiarly cosmopolitan or extra-British character:

Friday—Pilgrims' Club, dinner to Lord Curzon of Kedleston, ex-Viceroy of India.

Saturday—Lyceum Club, dinner in honour of France to meet the French Ambassador and members of the Embassy, etc.

Sunday—Te Deum for Greek Independence, Greek Church, Moscow Road.

Monday—Royal Geographical Society, Sir Henry MacMahon on "Recent Exploration and Survey in Seistan."

Tuesday—Royal Colonial Institute, dinner and meeting. Royal Asiatic Society, Major Vost on "Kapilavastu." China Association, dinner to Prince Tsai-tse and his colleagues, Mr. R. S. Grundy, C. B., presiding.

Wednesday—Central Asian Society, Mr. A. Hamilton on "The Oxus River." Japan Society, Professor J. Takakusu on "Buddhism as we Find it in Japan."

This, it should be explained, is not a good week, because it is "out of the season," but the list will, I fancy, as it stands suffice to give American readers an idea of the extent to which London is in touch with the interests of all the world—an idea of how, by comparison, it is impossible to speak of New York (and still more of America as a whole) as being other than non-cosmopolitan, or in a not offensive sense, provincial.

[126:1] It is worth remarking that Dr. Emil Reich (whose opinion I quote not because I attach any value to it personally, but in deference to the judgment of those who do) prophesies that the "silent war" between men and women in the United States "will soon become so acute that it will cease to be silent." It is to be borne in mind, of course, that the Doctor's experience in the United States has as yet been but inconsiderable.



CHAPTER VI

ENGLISH HUMOUR AND AMERICAN ART

American Insularity—A Conkling Story—English Humour and American Critics—American Literature and English Critics—The American Novel in England—And American Art—Wanted, an American Exhibition—The Revolution in the American Point of View—"Raining in London"—Domestic and Imported Goods.

It is no uncommon thing to hear an American speak of British insularity—the Englishman's "insular prejudices" or his "insular conceit." On one occasion I took the opportunity of interrupting a man who, I was sure, did not know what "insular" might mean, to ask for an explanation.

"Insular?" he said. "It's the same as insolent—only more so."

* * * * *

Flings at Britain's "insularity" were (like the climatic myth) originally of Continental European origin; and from the Continental European point of view, the phrase, both in fact and metaphor, was justified. England is an island. So far as the Continent of Europe is concerned, it is the island. And undoubtedly the fact of their insular position, with the isolation which it entailed, has had a marked influence on the national temperament of Englishmen. Ringed about with the silver sea, they had an opportunity to meditate at leisure on their superiority to other peoples, an opportunity which, if not denied, was at least restricted in the case of peoples only separated from neighbours of a different race by an invisible frontier line, a well bridged stream, or a mountain range pierced by abundant passes. Their insularity bred in the English a disposition different from the dispositions of the Continental peoples just as undeniably as it kept them aloof from those peoples geographically.

Vastly more than Great Britain, has the United States been isolated since her birth. England has been cut off from other civilisations by twenty miles of sea; America by three thousand. As a physical fact, the "insularity" of America is immensely more obvious and more nearly complete than that of Britain; and it is no less so as a moral fact. It is true that America's island is a continent; but this superiority in size has only resulted in producing more kinds of insularity than in England. The American character is, in all the moral connotation of the word, pronouncedly more insular than the British.

Like the English, except that they were much more effectively staked off from the rest of the world, the Americans have found the marvel of their own superiority to all mankind a fit and pleasing subject for contemplation. Perhaps there was a time when Englishmen used to go about the world talking of it; but for some generations back, having settled the fact of their greatness entirely to their satisfaction, they have ceased to put it into words, merely accepting it as the mainspring of their conduct in all relations with other peoples, and without, it is to be feared, much regard for those other peoples' feelings. Americans are still in the boasting stage. Mr. Howells has said that every American when he goes abroad goes not as an individual citizen but as an envoy. He walks wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It is only the insularity of the Britisher magnified many times.

It is as if there were gathered in a room a dozen or so of well-bred persons, talking such small talk as will pass the time and hurt no susceptibilities. It may be that the Englishman in his small talk is unduly dogmatic, but in the main he complies with the usages of the circle and helps the game along. To them enters a newcomer who will hear nothing of what the others have to say—will take no share in the discussion of topics of common interest—but insists on telling the company of his personal achievements. It may be all true; though the others will not believe it. But the accomplishments of the members of the present company are not at the moment the subject of conversation; nor is it a theme under any circumstances which it is good manners to introduce. This is what not a few American people are doing daily up and down through the length and breadth of Europe; and they must pardon Europe if, occasionally, it yawns, or if at times it expresses its opinions of American manners in terms not soothing to American ears.

"The American contribution to the qualities of nations is hurry," says the author of The Champagne Standard, and this has enough truth to let it pass as an epigram; but many Americans have a notion that their contribution is neither more nor less than All Progress. With their eyes turned chiefly upon themselves, they have seen beyond a doubt what a splendid, energetic, pushful people they are, and they have talked it all over one with another. Moreover, have not many visitors, though finding much to criticise, complimented them always on their rapidity of thought and action? So they have come to believe that they monopolise those happy attributes and, going abroad, whenever they see—it may be in England, or in Germany—an evidence of energy and force, they say: "Truly the world is becoming Americanised!" Bless their insular hearts! America did not invent the cosmic forces.

When the first suspension bridge was thrown over Niagara, there was a great and tumultuous opening ceremony, such as the Americans love, and many of the great ones of the United States assembled to do honour to the occasion, and among them was Roscoe Conkling. Conkling was one of the most brilliant public men whom America has produced: a man of commanding, even beautiful, presence and of, perhaps, unparalleled vanity. He had been called (by an opponent) a human peacock. After the ceremonies attending the opening of the bridge had been concluded, Conkling, with many others, was at the railway station waiting to depart; but, though others were there, he did not mingle with them, but strutted and plumed himself for their benefit, posing that they might get the full effect of all his majesty.

One of the station porters was so impressed that, stepping up to another who was hurrying by trundling a load of luggage, he jerked his thumb in Conkling's direction and:

"Who's that feller?" he asked. "Is he the man as built the bridge?"

The other studied the great man a moment.

"Thunder! No," said he. "He's the man as made the Falls."

It is curious that with their sense of humour Americans should so persistently force Europeans into the frame of mind of that railway porter. The Englishman, in his assurance of his own greatness, has come to depreciate the magnitude of whatever work he does; nor is it altogether a pose or an affectation. He sees the vastness of the British Empire and the amazing strides which have been made in the last two generations, and wonders how it all came about. He knows how proverbially blundering are British diplomacy and British administration, so he puts it all down to the luck of the nation and goes grumbling contentedly on his way. There is no country in which policies have been so haphazard and unstable, or ways of administration so crude and so empirical, as in the United States. "Go forth, my son," said Oxenstiern, "go forth and see with how little wisdom the world is governed"; and on such a quest, it is doubtful if any civilised country has offered a more promising field for consideration than did the United States from, say, the close of the Civil War to less than a decade ago. All thinking Americans recognise this fact to the full; but whereas the Englishman sees only the blunders that he has made and marvels at the luck that pulled him through, the American generally ignores the luck and is more likely to believe that whatever has been achieved is the result of his peculiar virtues.

I never heard an American ascribe the success of any national undertaking to the national luck. The Englishman on the other hand is for ever speaking of the "luck of the British Army," and the "luck that pulls England through."

And there is one point which I have never seen stated but which is worth the consideration of Americans. It has already been said that it would be of great benefit if the American people knew more of the British Empire as a whole. They have had an advantage in appreciating the magnitude of their own accomplishments in the fact that their work has all to be done at home. They have had the outward signs of their progress constantly before their eyes. It is true that the United States is a large country; but it is continuous. No oceans intervene between New York and Illinois, or between Illinois and Colorado; and the people as a whole is kept well informed of what the people is doing.

The American comes to London and he sees things which he regards with contemptuous amusement much as the Englishman might regard some peculiar old-world institution in a sleepy Dutch community. The great work which is always being done in London is not easy to see; there is so much of Old London (not only in a material sense) that the new does not always leap to the eye. The man who estimates the effective energy of the British people by what he sees in London, makes an analogous mistake to that of the Englishman who judges the sentiments of America by what is told him by his charming friends in New York. The American who would get any notion of British enterprise or British energy must go afield—to the Upper Nile and Equatorial Africa, to divers parts of Asia and Australia. He cannot see the Assouan dam, the Cape to Cairo Railway, the Indian irrigation works, from the Carlton Hotel, any more than a foreigner can measure the destiny of the American people by dining at the Waldorf-Astoria.

This is a point which will bear insisting on. Not long ago an American stood with me and gazed on the work which was being done in the Strand Improvement undertaking, and he said that it was a big thing. "But," he added thoughtfully, "it does not come up to what we have on hand in the Panama Canal." I pointed out that the Panama Canal was not being cut through the heart of New York City and apparently the suggestion was new to him. The American rarely understands that the British Isles are no more—rather less—than the thirteen original states. Canada and India are the British Illinois and Florida, Australia and New Zealand represent the West from Texas to Montana, while South Africa is the British Pacific Slope; just as Egypt may stand for Cuba, and Burma and what-not-else set against Alaska and the Philippines. Many times I have known Americans in England to make jest of the British railways, comparing them in mileage with the transcontinental lines of their own country. But the British Transcontinental lines are thrown from Cairo to the Cape, from Quebec to Vancouver, from Brisbane to Adelaide and Peshawar to Madras. The people of the United States take legitimate pride in the growth of the great institutions of learning which have sprung up all over the West; but there are points of interest of which they take less account, in similar institutions in, say, Sydney and Allahabad.

It is not necessary to say that I do not underestimate the energy of the American character. I have seen too much of the people, am familiar with too many sections of the country, and have watched it all growing before my eyes too fast to do that. But I think that the American exaggerates those qualities in himself at the expense of other peoples, and he would acquire a new kind of respect for Englishmen—the respect which one good workman necessarily feels for another—if he knew more of the British Empire.

A precisely similar exaggeration of his own quality has been bred by similar causes in the American mind in his estimate of his national sense of humour. I am not denying the excellence of American humour, for I have in my library a certain shelf to which I go whenever I feel dull, and for the books on which I can never be sufficiently grateful. The American's exaggeration of his own funniness is not positive but comparative. Just as he is tempted to regard himself as the original patentee of human progress, and the first apostle of efficiency, so he is very ready to believe that he has been given something like a monopoly among peoples of the sense of humour. With a little more humour, he would undoubtedly have been saved from this particular error. Especially are the Americans convinced that there is no humour in Englishmen. Germans and Frenchmen may possess humour of an inferior sort, but not Englishmen. It is my belief that in the American clubs where I find copies of Fliegende Blaetter and the Journal Amusant, these papers are much more read than Punch, and in not a few cases, I fear, by men who have but slight understanding of the languages in which they are printed. Indeed, Punch is a permanent, hebdomadally-recurrent proof to American readers that Englishmen do not know the meaning of a joke.[153:1] Americans, of course, do not understand more than a small proportion of the pages of Punch any more than they would understand those pages if they were printed in Chinese; but because Punch is printed in English they think that they do understand it, and because they cannot see the jokes, they conclude that the jokes are not there.

A certain proportion of American witticisms are recondite to English readers for precisely similar reasons, but the American belief is that when an Englishman fails to understand an American joke, it is because he has no sense of humour; when an American cannot understand an English one, it is because the joke is not funny. It is a view of the situation eminently gratifying to Americans; but it is curious that their sense of humour does not save them from it.

Whatever American humour may be, it is not subtle. It has a pushfulness—a certain flamboyant self-assertiveness—which it shares with some other things in the United States; and, however fine the quality of mind required to produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any foreigner fails to catch the point of an American joke or story, that it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability.

What I take to be (with apologies to Mr. Dunne) the greatest individual achievement in humorous writing that has been produced in America in recent years, the Wolfville series of books of Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis, is practically incomprehensible to English readers, not from any lack of capacity on their part, but from the difficulties of the dialect and still more from the strangeness of the atmosphere. In the same way the Tablets of the scribe Azit Tigleth Miphansi must indeed be but ancient Egyptian to Americans. But it would not occur to an Englishman to say, because Americans have not within their reach the necessary data for a comprehension of Mr. Reed, that, therefore, they do not understand a joke. Still less because he himself falls away baffled from the Old Cattleman does the Englishman conclude that the Wolfville books are not funny. He merely deplores his inability to get on terms with his author. The English public indeed is curiously ready to accept whatever is said to be funny and comes from America as being in truth humorous even if largely unintelligible; but few Americans would give credit for the existence of humour in those parts of an English book outside their ken. Yet I think, if it were possible to get the opinion of an impartial jury on the subject, their verdict would be that the number of humorous writers of approximately the first or second class is materially greater in England than in the United States to-day. I am sure that the sense of humour in the average of educated Englishmen is keener, subtler, and eminently more catholic than it is in men of the corresponding class in the United States. The Atlantic Ocean, if the Americans would but believe it, washes pebbles up on the beaches of its eastern shores no less than upon the western.[155:1]

American humour [distinctively American humour, for there are humorous writers in America whose genius shows nothing characteristically American; but among those who are distinctively American I should class nearly all the writers who are best known to-day, Mr. Clemens (Mark Twain), Mr. Dunne, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Lorimer, Mr. Ade]—this distinctively American humour, then, stands in something the same relation to other forms of spirituellisme as the work of the poster artist occupies to other forms of pictorial art. Poster designing may demand a very high quality of art, and the American workmen are the Cherets, Grassets, Muchas, of their craft. Few of them do ordinary painting, whether in oil or water colour. Fewer still use the etcher's needle. None that I am aware of attempts miniatures—except Mr. Henry James, who, if Americans may be believed, is not an American, and he has invented a department of art for himself more microscopic in detail than that of any miniaturist. The real American humourist, however small his canvas, strives for the same broad effects.

It is not the quality of posters to be elusive. Their appeal is to the multitude, and it must be instantaneous. It is easily conceivable that a person of an educated artistic sense might stand before a poster and find himself entirely unable to comprehend it, because the thing portrayed might be something altogether outside his experience. His failure would be no indictment either of his perceptivity or of the merit of the work of art.

It is a pity that Americans as a rule do not consider this, for I know few things that would so much increase American respect for Englishmen in the mass as the discovery that the latter were not the ponderous persons they supposed, but even keener-witted than themselves. At the time of the Venezuelan incident, it is probable that more than all the laborious protests of good men on both sides of the ocean, more than all the petitions and the interchange of assurances of good-will between societies in either country, the thing that did most to allay American resentment and bring the American people to its senses was that delightful message sent (was it not?) by the London Stock Exchange to their confreres in New York, begging the latter to see that when the British fleet arrived in New York harbour there should be no crowding by excursion steamers. Like Mr. Anstey's dear German professor, who had once laboriously constructed a joke and purposed, when he had ample leisure, to go about to aedificate a second, will Americans please believe that Englishmen too, if given time, can certainly make others?