And need I say again that in each of the things that I have said, whether on the subject of American chivalry, American energy, or American humour, I am not decrying the American's qualities but only striving to increase his respect for Englishmen?

* * * * *

Now let us look at the other side of the picture. Just as undue flattery awoke in the American people an exaggerated notion of their chivalry and their sense of humour, so the reiteration of savage and contemptuous criticism made them depreciate their general literary ability. It goes farther back than the "Who ever reads an American book?" Three quarters of a century earlier the Edinburgh Review (I am indebted for the quotation to Mr. Sparks) asked: "Why should Americans write books when a six-weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats, gristmills are their natural objects for centuries to come."

Franklin's Autobiography and Thoreau's Walden are only just, within the last few years, beginning to find their way into English popular reprints of the "classics." Few Englishmen would listen with patience to an argument that the contribution to literature of the Concord school was of greater or more permanent value than, let us say, the work of the Lake Poets. So little thought have Englishmen given to the literature of the United States, that they commonly assume any author who wrote in English to be, as a matter of course, an Englishman. It is only the uneducated among the educated classes who do not know that Longfellow was an American—though I have met such,—but among the educated a small percentage only, I imagine, would remember, unless suggestion was made to them, that, for instance, Motley and Bancroft among historians, or Agassiz and Audubon among men of science (even though one was born in Switzerland) were Americans. To the vast majority, of course, such names are names and nothing more, which may not be particularly reprehensible. But while on the one hand a general indifference to American literature as a whole has carried with it a lack of acquaintance with individual writers, that lack of acquaintance with the individuals naturally reacted to confirm disbelief in the existence of any respectable body of American literature. And the chilling and century-long contempt of the English public and of English critics for all American writing produced its result in a national exaggeration in American minds of their own shortcomings. Only within the last ten years have Americans as a whole come to believe that the work of an American writer (excepting only a very small group) can be on a plane with that of Englishmen.

In England the situation has also changed. American novelists now enjoy a vogue in England that would have seemed almost incredible two decades ago. At that time the English public did not look to America for its fiction, while Americans did look to England; and each new book by a well-known English novelist was as certain of its reception in the United States as—perhaps more certain than it was—in England. That has changed. There are not more than half a dozen writers of fiction in England to-day of such authority that whatever they write is of necessity accepted by the American public. Americans turn now first to their own writers—a dozen or a score of them—and only then do they seek the English book, always provided that, no matter whose the name may be that it bears, it has won the approval of their own critics on its merits. They no longer take it for granted that the best work of their own authors is as a matter of course inferior to the work of a well-known Englishman. It may not be many years before the American public will be so much preoccupied with its own literary output—before that output will be so amply sufficient for all its needs—that it will become as contemptuously indifferent to English literature of the day as Englishmen have, in the past, shown themselves to the product of American writers. There is, perhaps, no other field in which the increase of the confidence of the nation in itself is more marked than in the honour which Americans now pay to their own writers.

It is worth noticing that the English appreciation of American literature as yet hardly extends beyond works of fiction. Specialists in various departments of historical research and the natural sciences know what admirable work is being done in the same fields by individual workers in the United States; but hardly yet has the specialist—still less has the general public—formed any adequate conception of the great mass of that work in those two fields, still less of its quality. Englishmen do not yet take seriously either American research or American scholarship. It would be absurd to count noses to prove that there were more competent historians writing—more scientific investigators searching into the mysteries—in America than in England or vice versa; but this I take to be an undoubted fact, namely, that men of science in more than one field in other countries are beginning to look rather to the United States than to Great Britain for sound and original work.

The English ignorance of American literature extends even more markedly to other departments of productive art.[159:1] The ordinary educated and art-loving Englishman would be sore put to it to name any single American painter or draughtsman, living or dead, except Mr. C. D. Gibson. Whistler and Sargent, of course, are not counted as Americans. There is not a single American sculptor whose name is known to one in a hundred of, again I say, educated and art-loving Englishmen, though I take it to be indisputable that the United States has produced more sculptors of individual genius in the last half-century than Great Britain. American architecture conveys to the educated and art-loving Englishman no other idea than that of twenty-storey "sky-scrapers" built of steel and glass. Richardson is not even a name to him. He knows nothing of all the beauty and virility of the work that has been done in the last thirty years. In the minor arts, he may have heard of Rookwood pottery and have a vague notion that the Americans turn out some quite original things in silver work; but of American stained glass—of Tiffany and La Farge—he has never heard. It would do England a world of good—it would do international relations a world of good—if a thoroughly representative exhibition of American painting and sculpture could be made in London. I commend the idea to some one competent to handle it; for it would, I think, be profitable to its promoters. It would certainly be a revelation to Englishmen.

The English indifference to—nay, disbelief in the existence of—American art is precisely on a par with the American incredulity in the matter of British humour; and the removal of each of the misconceptions would tend to the increase of international good-will. Americans believe the British Empire to be a sanguinary and ferocious thing. They believe themselves to be possessed of a sense of humour, a sense of chivalry, and an energy quite lacking in the Englishman; and each one of the illusions counts for a good deal in the American national lack of liking for Great Britain. Similarly, Englishmen believe Americans to be a money-loving people without respectable achievement in art or literature. I am not sure that it would make the Englishman like the American any the more if the point of view were corrected, but at least he would like him more intelligently, and it would prevent him from saying things—in themselves entirely good-humoured and quite unintentionally offensive—which hurt American feelings. We cannot correct an error without recognising frankly that it exists, and the first step towards making the American and the Englishman understand what the other really is must be to help each to see how mistaken he is in supposing the other to be what he is not.

That the American should hold the opinions that he does of England is no matter of reproach. Not only is it natural, but inevitable. Absorbed as he has been with his own affairs and his own history, and viewing Great Britain only in her occasional relations thereto, seeing nothing of her in her private life or of her position and policies in the world at large, how could the American have other than a distorted view of her—how could she assume right proportions or be posed in right perspective? Nor is the Englishman any more to be blamed. America has been beyond and below his horizon, and among the travellers' tales that have come to him of her people and her institutions has been much misinformation; and if he has not yet—as in the realms of literature and art—come to any realisation of America's true achievements, how should he have done so, when Americans themselves have only just shaken off the morbid sensitiveness and diffidence of their youth, and have so recently arrived at some partial comprehension of those achievements themselves?

Probably the most successful joke which Life ever achieved (Americans will please believe that it is not with any disrespect that I explain to English readers that Life is the Punch of New York), successful, that is, measured by the continent-wide hilarity which it provoked, had relation to the New York dandy who turned up the bottoms of his trousers because it was "raining in London." That was published—at a guess—some twenty years ago.

Some ten years later a Chicagoan (one James Norton—he died, alas! all too soon afterwards) leaped into something like national notoriety by a certain speech which he delivered at a semi-public dinner in New York. In introducing Mr. Norton as coming from Chicago the chairman had made playful reference to the supposed characteristic lack of modesty of Chicagoans and their pride in their city. Norton, in acknowledgment, confessed that there was justice in the accusation. Chicagoans, he said, were proud of their city. They had a right to be. They were as proud of Chicago as New Yorkers were of London! And the quip ran from mouth to mouth across the continent.

It would be too much to say that those jokes are meaningless to-day, but to the younger generation of Americans they have lost most of their point, for Anglomania has ceased to be the term of reproach that once it was—it has, at least, dropped from daily use—partly because the official relations of the country with Great Britain have so much improved, but much more because the United States has come to consider herself as Great Britain's equal and, in the new consciousness of her greatness, the idea of toadying to England has lost its sting. It is already difficult to throw one's mind back to the conditions of twenty years ago—to remember the deference which (in New York and the larger cities at least) was paid to English ideas, English manners, English styles in dress—the enthusiasm with which any literary man was received who had some pretension to an English reputation—the disrepute in which all "domestic" manufactured articles were held throughout the country in comparison with the "imported," which generally meant English. In all manufactured products this was so nearly universal that "domestic" was almost synonymous with inferior and "imported" with superior grades of goods. That an immense proportion of American manufactured articles were sold in the United States masquerading as "imported"—and therefore commanding a better price—goes without saying, and in some lines, in which the British reputation was too well established and well deserved to be easily shaken, the practice still survives; but in the great majority of things, the American now prefers his home-made article, not merely from motives of patriotism but because he believes that it is the better article. It is not within our present province to discuss how far this opinion is correct, or how far the policy of protection, by assisting manufacturers to obtain control of their own markets and so distract attention from imported goods, has helped to bring about the change. The point is that the change has taken place. And, so far as the ordinary commodities of commerce are concerned, the Englishman is in a measure aware of what has occurred. He could not be otherwise with the figures of his trade with the United States before him. Nor can he conceal from himself the fact that the change of opinion in America may have some justification when he sees how many things of American manufacture he himself uses daily and prefers—patriotism notwithstanding—to the British-made article.

But Englishmen have little conception as yet that the same revolution has taken place in regard to the less material—less easily exploited—commodities of art and literature. American novels and the drawings of Mr. Gibson have made their way in England in the wake of American boots and American sweetmeats; but Americans would be unwilling to believe that their creative ability ends with the production of Western romances and drawings of the American girl.

Until recent years, the volume as well as the quality of the literary and artistic output of Great Britain was vastly superior to that of the United States. The two were not comparable; but they are comparable to-day, though England is as yet unaware of it. In time, Englishmen will awake to a realisation of the fact; but what the relative standing of the two countries will be by that time it is impossible to say. Englishmen would, perhaps, not find it to their disadvantage, and it would certainly (if not done in too condescending a spirit) not be displeasing to the people of the United States, if they began, even now, to take a livelier interest in the work that the other is doing.

FOOTNOTES:

[153:1] At this point my American friend, to the value of whose criticisms I have already paid tribute, interjects marginally: "none the less Fliegende Blaetter presents more real humour in a week than is to be found in Punch in a month." To which I can but make the obvious reply that I have already said that Americans think so. He points out, however, further that, while the Munich paper is always to be found in the higher-class American clubs, it is comparatively infrequent in the clubs of Great Britain, which is undoubtedly true; and that is a subject (the relative breadth of outlook on the world-literature of the day in the two countries) which will necessarily receive attention later on.

[155:1] Lest any American readers should assume that some personal feeling is responsible for my point of view (which would entirely destroy any value in my argument) it seems necessary to explain that I have become calloused to being told that I am the only Englishman the speaker ever met with an American sense of humour. Sometimes I have taken it as a compliment.

[159:1] It is merely pathetic to find such a paper as the London Academy at this late day summing up the American aesthetic impulse as follows: "Their culture is now a borrowed thing animated by no life of its own. Their art is become a reflection of French art, their literature a reflection of English literature, their learning a reflection of German learning. A velleity of taste in their women of the richer class seems to be all that maintains in their country the semblance of a high, serious, and disinterested passion for the things of the mind."

It would be interesting to learn from the Academy what school of English writers it is that the American humourists "reflect," who among English novelists are the models for the present school of Western fiction, where in English historiography is to be found the prototype of the great histories of their country, collaborated or otherwise, which the Americans are now producing, which journals published in England are responsible for American newspapers, what English magazine is so happy as to be the father of the Century, Harper's, or Scribner's. The truth is that the writer in the Academy, like most Englishmen, knows nothing of American literature as a whole, or he would know that, whether good or bad, the one quality which it surely possesses is that it is individual and peculiar to the people. The Academy, it is only fair to say, has recently changed hands and I am not sure that under its present direction it would make the same mistake.



CHAPTER VII

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

The Rhodes Scholarships—"Pullulating Colleges"—Are American Universities Superior to Oxford or Cambridge?—Other Educational Forces—The Postal Laws—Ten-cent Magazines and Cheap Books— Pigs in Chicago—The Press of England and America Compared— Mixed Society—Educated Women—Generals as Booksellers—And as Farmhands—The Value of War to a People.

It may be presumed that when Cecil Rhodes conceived the idea of establishing the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, it did not occur to him that Americans might not care to come to Oxford—might think their own universities superior to the English. Nor is it likely that there will in the immediate future be any dearth of students anxious to take those scholarships, for the mere selection has a certain amount of kudos attaching to it and, at worst, the residence abroad should be of advantage to any young American not destined to plunge at once into a business life. If it were a mere question of the education to be received, it is much to be feared that the great majority of Americans, unless quite unable to attend one of their own universities, would politely decline to come to England. At the time when the terms of the will were made public, a good many unpleasant things were said in the American press; and it was only the admiration of Americans for Mr. Rhodes (who appealed to their imagination as no other Englishman, except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has appealed in the last fifty years), coupled with the fact that he was dead, that prevented the foundation of the scholarships from being greeted with resentment rather than gratitude.

There was a time, of course, when the name of Oxford sounded very large in American ears; and it will probably be a surprise to Englishmen to be told that to-day the great majority of Americans would place not only Harvard and Yale, but probably also several other American universities, ahead of either Oxford or Cambridge. Nor is this the opinion only of the ignorant. Trained educational authorities who come from the United States to Europe to study the methods of higher education in the various countries, seldom hesitate to say that the education to be obtained at many of the minor Western colleges in America is fully as good as that offered by either of the great English universities, while that of Harvard and Yale is far superior to it.[167:1] And it must be remembered that education itself, as an art, is incomparably more studied, and more systematically studied in America than in England.

Matthew Arnold spoke of the "pullulating colleges and universities" of America—"the multitude of institutions the promoters of which delude themselves by taking seriously, but which no serious man can so take"; and he would be surprised to see to what purpose some of those institutions have "pullulated" in the eighteen years that have passed since he wrote—to note into what lusty and umbrageous plants have grown such institutions as the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, though one of those is further west by some distance than he ever penetrated. That these or any other colleges have more students than either Oxford or Cambridge need not mean much; and they cannot of course acquire in twenty years the old, history-saturated atmosphere. Against that are to be set the facts that the students undoubtedly work, on the average, much harder than do English undergraduates and that the teaching staffs are possessed of an enthusiasm, an earnestness, a determination not merely to fill chairs but to get results, which would be almost "bad form" in some Common (or Combination) Rooms in England. Wealth, moreover, and magnificence of endowment can go a considerable way towards even the creation of an atmosphere—not the same atmosphere as that of Oxford or Cambridge, it is true; for no money can make another Addison's Walk out of Prairie Avenue, or convert the Mississippi by St. Anthony's Falls into new "Backs."

"We may build ourselves more gorgeous habitations, Fill our rooms with painting and with sculpture, We cannot buy with gold the old associations——."

But an atmosphere may be created wholly scholastic, and well calculated to excite emulation and inspire the ambition of youths.

Nor is it by any means certain that the American people would desire to create the atmosphere of an old-world university if they could. The atmosphere of Oxford produces, as none other could, certain qualities; but are they the qualities which, if England were starting to make her universities anew, she would set in the forefront of her endeavour?[169:1] Are they really the qualities most desirable even in an Englishman to-day? Are they approximately the qualities most likely to equip a man to play the noblest part in the life of modern America? The majority of American educators would answer unhesitatingly in the negative. There are things attaching to Oxford and Cambridge which they would dearly love to be able to transplant to their own country, but which, they recognise, nothing but the passage of the centuries can give. Those things are unattainable; and, frankly, if they could only be attained by transplanting with them many other attributes of English university life, they would rather forego them altogether.

What Englishmen most value in their universities is not any book-learning which is to be acquired thereat, so much as the manners and rules for the conduct of life which are supposed to be imparted in a university course,—manners and rules which are of an essentially aristocratic tendency. Without wishing to push a point too far, it is worth noting that that aristocratic tendency is purely Norman, quite out of harmony with the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon. It would never occur to an Anglo-Saxon, pure and simple, to make his university anything else than an institution for scholastic training, in which every individual should be taught as much, and as equally, as possible. The last thing that would occur to him would be to make it a weapon of aristocracy or an institution for perpetuating class distinctions. The aim and effect of the English universities in the past has been chiefly to keep the upper classes uppermost.

That there are too many "universities" in America no one—least of all an educated American—denies; but with the vast distances and immense population of the country there is room for, perhaps, more than Matthew Arnold eighteen years ago could have foreseen, and not a few of those establishments which in his day he would doubtless have unhesitatingly classed among those which could not be taken seriously, have more than justified their existence.

To the superiority of the American public school system over the English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general education of the masses of a people, and not for the production of any especially privileged or cultivated class, is generally ascribed the confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But the educational system of the country has been by no means the only factor in producing this result; and it may be worth while merely as a matter of record, and not without interest to American readers, to note what some of those other factors have been during the last twenty years—factors so temporary and so elusive that even now they are in danger of being forgotten.

First among these factors I would set the American postal laws, an essential feature of which is the extraordinarily low rates at which periodical literature may be transmitted. A magazine which may be sent to any place in the United States for from an eighth of a penny to a farthing, according to its weight, will cost for postage in England from two-pence-halfpenny to fourpence. It is not the mere difference in cost of the postage to the subscriber that counts, but the low American rate has permitted the adoption by the publishers of a system impossible to English magazine-makers, a system which has had the effect of making magazines, at least as good as the English sixpenny monthlies, the staple reading matter of whole classes of the population, the classes corresponding to which in England never read anything but a local weekly, or halfpenny daily, paper. It might be that the reading matter of a magazine would not be much superior to that of a small weekly paper. But at least it encourages somewhat more sustained reading and, what is the great fact, it accustoms the reader to handling something in the form of a book. That is the virtue. A people weaned from the broad-sheets by magazines readily takes next to book-reading.

Moreover, under the American plan, books themselves, if issued periodically, used to have the same postal advantages as the magazines.[171:1] A so-called "library" of the classical English, writers could be published at the rate of a book a month, call itself a periodical, and be sent through the post in precisely the same way. The works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, or anybody else could be published in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly parts. If in monthly parts at sixpence, the cost to the subscriber would be practically the same as that of a monthly magazine, only that the reader would accumulate at the rate of twelve volumes a year—and read at the rate of one a month—the works of Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Of course much worthless literature, fiction of the trashiest, has been circulated in the same way—much more perhaps than of the better class. But even so, the reading matter was superior to that previously accessible, and the vital fact still remains that the people acquired the habit of book-reading.

In America, the part thus played by some of the periodical libraries was of much importance, but it was probably not comparable to the influence of the ten-cent magazine. In the United States itself, the immense beneficence of that influence has hardly been appreciated. The magazines came into vogue, and the people accepted the fact as they accept the popularity of a new form of "breakfast food." The quickening of the national intelligence which resulted was no more immediate, no more readily traceable or conspicuous to the public eye, than would be the improvement in the national stamina which might result from the introduction of some new article of diet. A change which takes five or ten years to work itself out is lost sight of, becomes invisible, amid the jostling activities of a national life like the American. Moreover, several causes were contributing to the same end and, had any one stopped to endeavour to do it, it would not have been at any time easy to unravel the threads and show what proportion of the fabric was woven by each; but if it had been possible to affix an intellect-meter to the aggregate brain of the American people during the last twenty years, of such ingenious mechanism that it would have shown not only what the increase in total mental power had been but also what proportions of that increase were ascribable to the various contributing causes—education, colonial expansion, commercial growth, ten-cent magazines, and so forth—and if, further, the "readings" of that meter could be interpreted into terms of increase in national energy, national productiveness, national success, I do not think that Parliament would lose one unnecessary day in passing the legislation necessary to reform the English postal laws.

* * * * *

One other point is worth dwelling upon—equally trivial in seeming, equally important in its essence—which is the selling of books by the great department stores, the big general shops, in America. Taking all classes of the British population together and both sexes—artisans and their wives, peasants in country districts, slum residents in London and other large cities,—what proportion of the population of the British Isles do of set purpose go into a bookseller's shop once a year or once in their lives? Is it ten per cent.—or five per cent.—or two per cent.? The exact proportion is immaterial; but the number must be very small. In America some years ago, the owners of department stores and publishers found that there was considerable profit to be made in the handling of books—cheap reprints of good books in particular. The combined booksellers' and stationers' shops in the cities of the United States are in themselves more frequent and more attractive than in England: and I am going back to the days before the drug-store library which is as yet too recent an institution to have had an easily measurable influence. But incomparably more influential than these, in bringing the multitude in immediate contact with literature, have been the department stores, of almost every one of which the "book and stationery" department is a conspicuously attractive, and generally most profitable, feature. Here every man or woman who goes to do any shopping is brought immediately within range of the temptation to buy books—is involuntarily seduced into a bookshop where the wares are temptingly displayed and artfully pressed on the attention of customers. New books of all kinds are sold at the best possible discount; but what was of chief importance was the institution of the cheap libraries of the "Classics"—tables heaped with them in paper at fourpence, piles of them shoulder high in cloth at ninepence, shelves laden with them in glittering backs and by no means despicable in typography at one and sevenpence. Thus simultaneously with the inculcation of the book-reading habit by the magazines came the facility for book-buying, and, always remembering the difference in the scale of prices in the two countries, it was easy for the woman doing her household shopping to fall a victim to the importunities of the salesman and lavish an extra eighteen or thirty-eight cents on a copy of The Scarlet Letter or Ivanhoe, Irving's Alhambra, or Bleak House, to take home as a surprise. In this way, whole classes in America, the English counterparts of which rarely read anything more formidable than a penny paper, acquired the habit of book-buying and the ambition to form a small library. The benefit to the people cannot be computed.

Incidentally, as we know, not a little injustice was done to English authors by the pirating of their books, without recompense, while the copyright still lived. It was after I went to America, though I had heard Ruskin lecture at Oxford, that I first read Fors Clavigera and Sesame and Lilies in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and, about the same time, Tolstoi's War and Peace in the Franklin Square Library, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb and part of De Quincey, Don Quixote and Rasselas (those four for some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume—the price of two daily newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or one blacking of one's shoes. Much has, of course, been done of late years in England in popularising the "Classics" in the form of cheap libraries; but the facilities for buying the books—or rather the temptations to do so—are incomparably less, while the relative prices remain higher.

Even at fourpence halfpenny (supposing them to be purchasable at the price) Lamb's Essays still cost more in London than a drink of whiskey. In America, more than twenty years ago, the whiskey cost half as much again as the book.

All of which is in the nature of a digression, but it has not led us far from the main road, for the object that I am aiming at is to convey to the English reader some idea of what the forces are which are at work on the education of the American people. The Englishman generally knows that in the United States there is nothing analogous to the great public schools of England—Winchester, Westminster, Eton, and the rest—and that they have a host of more or less absurd universities in no way to be compared to Oxford or Cambridge. The American, as has been said, challenges the latter statement bluntly; while, as for the public schools, he maintains that it is not the American ideal (if he wished to fortify his position, he might say it was not an Anglo-Saxon ideal) to produce a limited privileged and cultivated class, but that the aim is to educate the whole nation to the highest level; that, barring such qualities as their mere selectness may enable the great English schools to give to their pupils, the national high schools of America do, as a matter of fact, prepare pupils just as efficiently for the university as do the English institutions, while the great system of common schools secures for the mass of the people a much better education than is given in England to the same classes. Added to which, various other causes co-operate with the avowedly educational instrumentalities to produce a higher level of intellectual alertness and a more general love of reading in the people.

And what is the result? Is the American people as well educated or as well informed or as well cultivated as the English? To endeavour to make a comparison between the two is to traverse a very morass, full of holes, swamps, sloughs, creeks, inlets, quicksands, and pitfalls of divers and terrifying natures. If it is to be threaded at all, it must be only with the greatest caution and, at times, indirectness.

* * * * *

The charming English writer, the author of Sinners and Saints, affected, on alighting from the train in the railway station at Chicago, to be immensely surprised by the fact that there was not a pig in sight. "I had thought," he said, "Chicago was all pigs." There are a good many English still of the same opinion.

The one institution in any country of which the foreigner sees most, and by which perhaps every people is, if unwittingly, most commonly judged by other peoples, is its press; and it is difficult for a superficial observer to believe that the nation which produces the newspapers of America is either an educated or a cultivated nation. Max O'Rell's comment on the American press is delightful: "Beyond the date, few statements are reliable." Matthew Arnold called the American newspapers "an awful symptom"—"the worst features in the life of the United States." Americans also—the best Americans—have a great dislike of the London papers.

The fact is that merely as newspapers (as gatherers of news) the American papers are probably the best in the world. What repels the Englishman is primarily the form in which the news is dressed—the loudness, the sensationalism but if he can overcome his repugnance to these things sufficiently to be able to judge the paper as a whole, he will find, apart from the amazing quantity of "news" which it contains, a large amount of literary matter of a high order. I am not for one moment claiming that the American paper (not the worst and loudest, which are contemptible, nor the best, which are almost as non-sensational as the best London papers, but the average American daily paper) is, or ought to be, as acceptable reading to a cultivated man—still less to a refined woman—as almost any one of the penny, or some halfpenny, London papers. But the point that I would make and which I would insist on very earnestly is that the two do not stand for the same thing in relation to the peoples which they respectively represent.

We have seen the same thing before in comparing the consular and diplomatic services of the two countries. Just as in the United States the consuls are plucked at random from the body of the people, whereas in England they are a carefully selected and thoroughly trained class by themselves, so the press of the United States represents the people in its entirety, whereas the English press represents only the educated class. The London papers (I am omitting consideration of certain halfpenny papers) are not talking for the people as a whole, nor to the people as a whole. Consciously or unconsciously they are addressing themselves always to the comparatively small circle of the educated class. When they speak of the peasant or the working man, even of the tradesman, they discuss him as a third person: it is not to him that they are talking. They use a language which is not his language; they assume in their reader information, sentiments, modes of thought, which belong not to him, but only to the educated class—that class which, whether each individual thereof has been to a public school and a university or not, is saturated with the public school and university traditions.

It was said before that the English people has a disposition to be guided by the voice of authority—to follow its leaders—as the American people has not. The English newspaper speaks to the educated class, trusting, not always with justification, that opinion once formulated in that class will be communicated downwards and accepted by the people. The American newspaper endeavours to speak to the people direct.

That English papers are immensely more democratic than once they were goes without saying. A man need not be much past middle age to be able to remember when the Daily Telegraph created, by appealing to, a whole new stratum of newspaper readers. The same thing has been done again more recently by the halfpenny papers, some of which come approximately near to being adapted to the intelligences, and representing the tastes, of the whole population, or at least the urban population, down to the lowest grade. But it is not by those papers that England would like to be judged. Yet when Englishmen draw inferences about the American people from the papers which they see, they are doing what is intrinsically as unjust. It would be no less unjust to take the first hundred men that one met with, on Broadway or State Street, and compare them—their intellectuality and culture—with one hundred members of the London university clubs.

Let us also remember here what was said of the Anglo-Saxon spirit—that spirit which is so essentially non-aristocratic, holding all men equal in their independence. We have seen how this spirit is more untrammelled and works faster in the United States than in England; but where, in any case, it has moved ahead among Americans the tendency in England generally is to follow in the same lines, not in imitation of America but by the impulse of the common genius of the peoples.

The American dailies, even the leading dailies, are made practically for those hundred men on Broadway; the London penny papers are addressed in the main to the university class. Judging from the present trend of events in England it may not be altogether chimerical to imagine a time when in London only two or three papers will hold to the class tradition and will still speak exclusively in the language of the upper classes (as a small number of papers in New York do to-day), while the great body of the English press will have followed the course of the American publishers; and when the English papers are frankly adapted to the tastes and intelligence of as large a proportion of the English people as are now catered for by the majority of the American papers, he would be a rash Englishman whose patriotism would persuade him to prophesy that the London papers would be any more scholarly, more refined, or more chastened in tone than are the papers of New York or Chicago.

And while the Englishman is generally ready to draw unfavourable inferences from the undeniably unpleasant features of the majority of American daily papers, he seldom stops to draw analogous inferences from a comparison of the American and English monthly magazines. Great Britain produces no magazines to compare with Harper's, The Century, or Scribner's. Those three magazines combined have, I believe, a number of readers in the United States equalling the aggregate circulation of the London penny dailies; which is a point that is worth consideration. When, moreover, the cheaper magazines became a possibility, how came it that such publications as McClure's and The Cosmopolitan arose? The illustrated magazines of the United States are indeed a fact of profound significance, for which the Englishman when he measures the taste and intellectuality of the American people by its press makes no allowance. Magazines of the same excellence cannot find the same support in England. At least two earnest attempts have been made in late years to establish English monthlies which would compare with any of the three first mentioned above, and both attempts have failed.

What has been said about the much more representative character of the American daily press—the fact that the same papers are read by a vastly larger proportion of the population—brings us face to face with a root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts of every class of man who is to be found in England—men as refined, men no less crass and brutal—some as vulgar and some as full of the pride of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American, democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the Wars of the Roses. I am sure that he sets more store by a direct and authentic descent from one of the company of the Mayflower than the Englishman does by an equally direct and authentic line back to the days of William the Conqueror. Incidentally it may be said that the American will talk more about it. But while in America all classes exist, they are not fenced apart, as in England, in fact any more than they are in theory. The American people (pace the leaders of the New York Four Hundred) "comes mixed"; dip in where you will and you bring up all sorts of fish. In England if you go into educated society, you are likely to meet almost exclusively educated people—or at least people with the stamp of educated manners. Sir Gorgius Midas is not of course inexorably barred from the society of duchesses. Her Grace of Pentonville must have met him frequently. But in America the duchesses have to rub shoulders with him every day. And—which is worth noting—their husbands also rub shoulders with his wife.

* * * * *

Which brings us to the second root-fact, which is almost as disturbing and confounding to casual observation as the first, namely, the much larger part in the intellectual life of the country played by women in America. Intellectuality or culture in its narrower sense—meaning a familiarity with art and letters—is not commonly regarded by Englishmen as an essential possession in a wife. The lack of it is certainly not considered by the American woman a cardinal offence in a husband. I know many American men who, on being consulted on any matter of literary or artistic taste, say at once: "I don't know. I leave all that to my wife."

An Englishman in an English house, looking at the family portraits, may ask his hostess who painted a certain picture.

"I don't know," she will say, "I must ask my husband. Will, who is the portrait of your grandfather by—the one over there in his robes?"

"Raeburn," says Will.

"Of course," says the wife. "I never can remember the artists' names; they are so confusing—especially the English ones."

The Englishman thinks no worse of her; but the American woman, listening, wishes that she had a portrait of her husband's grandfather by Raeburn and opines that she would know the artist's name.

The same Englishman goes to America and, being entertained, asks a similar question of his host.

"I don't know," says the man, "I must ask my wife. Mary, who painted that picture over there—the big tree and the blue sky?"

"Rousseau," says Mary.

"Of course," says the husband. "I never can remember the names of these fellows. They mix me all up—especially the French ones."

And the Englishman returning home tells his friends of the queer fellow with whom he dined over there—"an awfully good chap, you know"—who owned all sorts of jolly paintings—Rousseaux and things—and did not even know the names of the artists: "Had to ask his wife, by Jove!"

It is not for one moment claimed that there are not in England many women fully as cultured as the most cultured and fairest Americans; that there are not many Englishwomen much better informed, much more widely read, than their husbands. The phenomenon, however, is not nearly as common as in America, where, it has already been suggested, it is probably the result of the fact that the women have at the outset received precisely the same education as the men and, since leaving school or college, have had more leisure, being less engrossed in business and material things.

But this feminine predominance in matters of aesthetics in the United States does not as a rule increase the Englishman's opinion of the intellectuality or culture of the people as a whole. He still judges only by the men. Indeed, he is not entirely disposed to like so much intellectuality in women—such interest in politics, educational matters, art, and literature. Not having been accustomed to it he rather disapproves of it. Blue regimentals are only fit for the blue horse or the artillery.

The Englishman in an American house meets a man more rough and less polished than a man holding a similar position in society would be in England; and he thinks poorly of American society in consequence. He also meets that man's wife, who shows a familiarity with art, letters, and public affairs vastly more comprehensive than he would expect to find in a woman of similar position in England. But he does not therefore strike a balance and re-cast his estimate of American society, any more than in his estimate of the American press he makes allowance for the American magazines. He only thinks that the woman's knowledge is rather out of place and conjectures it to be probably superficial. Wherein he is no less one-sided in his prejudice than the American who will not believe in English humour because he cannot understand it.

Philistinism is undoubtedly more on the surface in educated society in the United States than in Great Britain; but in England outside that society it is nearly all Philistinism. Step down from a social class in England, and you come to a new and lower level of refinement and information. In America the people still "come mixed."

Twenty-five years ago in England, you did not expect a stock-broker, and to-day you do not expect a haberdasher (even though he may have been knighted), to know whether Botticelli is a wine or a cheese. In America, because the Englishman meets that stock-broker or that haberdasher in a society in which he would not be likely to meet him in England, he does expect him to know; and I suspect that if a census were taken there would be found more stock-brokers and haberdashers in America than in England who do know something of Botticelli. I am quite certain that more of their wives do. Matthew Arnold spoke not too pleasantly of the curious sensation that he experienced in addressing a bookseller in America as "General." The "bookseller" in question was a man widely respected in the United States, the head of a great house of publishers and booksellers, a conspicuously public-spirited citizen, and a bona fide General who saw stern service in the Civil War. To Englishmen, knowing nothing of the background, the mere fact as stated by Matthew Arnold is curious.

But if civil war were to break out in Great Britain—England and Wales against Scotland and Ireland—and the conflict assumed such titanic proportions that single armies of a million men took the field, then would Tennyson's "smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue" indeed have to "leap from his counter and till and strike, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home." The entire population of England that was not actually needed at home would be compelled to take the field, and in the slaughter (it is curious how little English men know of the terrific proportions of the conflict between the North and South) the demand for officers would be so great that there would not be enough men of previous training to fill the places. Men would rise from the ranks by merit and among those who rose to be generals there might well be a publisher or bookseller or two. On the termination of the war, the soldiers would turn from their soldiering to their old trades and it might be General Murray or General Macmillan or General Bumpus; and the thing would not then be strange to English ears.

An American story tells how, soon after the close of the Civil War, a stranger asked a farmer if he needed any labourers; and the farmer replied in the negative. He had just taken on three new ones, he said, all of them disbanded soldiers. One, he added, had been a private, one a captain, and one a full-blown colonel.

"And how do you find them?" asked the other.

"The private's a first-class workman," said the farmer, "and the captain he isn't bad."

"And the colonel?"

"Well, I don't want to say nothing agin a man as fit as a colonel in the war," said the farmer, "but I know I ain't hiring no brigadier-generals if they come this way."

They are growing old now, and fewer, the men who held commissions in the war that ended over forty years ago; but during those forty years there has been no community, no trade or profession or calling, in which they have not been to be found, indistinguishable from their civilian colleagues, except by the tiny button in the lapels of their coats. Until Mr. Roosevelt, (and he won his spurs in another war) there has been no man elected President of the United States, except Mr. Cleveland, the one Democrat, who had not a distinguished record as an officer in the Union armies—Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley were all soldiers. You may still see that little button in many pulpits. Farmers wear it, and cabinet ministers, millionaires, and mechanics.

The Anglo-Saxon is a fighting breed. The population of the British Isles sprang from the loins of successive waves of fighting men. It was not the weaklings of the Danes or Normans, Jutes, Saxons, or Angles who came to conquer Britain, but the bold, the hardy, the venturesome of each tribe or people. It was not the mere mixture of bloods that made the English character what it was, the race a race of empire builders; it was because of each blood there came to Britain only of the most adventurous. And through the centuries it has been the constant stress and training of the perpetual turmoil in which the people have lived that have kept the stock from degeneration. There has never been a time in English history, save when the people have been struggling in wars among themselves, when there has been an English family that has not at any given moment had sons or fathers, uncles or cousins out somewhere doing the work of the Empire.

And some are drowned in deep water, And some in sight of shore, And word goes back to the weary wife And ever she sends more.

For since that wife had gate or gear And hearth and garth and bield She willed her sons to the white Harvest, And that is a bitter yield.

. . . . . . .

The good wife's sons come home again With little into their hands, But the lore o' men that ha' dealt wi' men In the new and naked lands,

But the faith o' men that ha' brothered men By more than the easy breath, And the eyes o' men that ha' read wi' men In the open book of death.[188:1]

I have already explained how far Americans are from understanding the British Empire. It is a pity; they would understand Englishmen better and like them better. And what the building of the Empire and the keeping of it have done for Englishmen, the Civil War did in large measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's memory; but twenty-five years ago the echoes of the guns had hardly died away—the minds of the people were still inspired. It was an awful, and a splendid, experience for the nation. It is not necessary, with Emerson, "always to respect war hereafter"; but there have been times when it has seemed to me that I would rather be able to wear that little tri-colour button of the American Loyal Legion than any other decoration in the world.[189:1]

It is the great compensation of war that it does not breed in a people only a fighting spirit. All history shows that it is in the mental exhilaration and the moral uplift after a period of war successfully waged that a people puts forth the best that is in it, in the production of works of art and in its literature. It is an old legend—older than Omar—that the most beautiful flowers spring from the blood of heroes. And it is true. When the genius of a nation has been ploughed up with cannon-shot and bayonets and watered with blood—then it is that it breaks into the most nearly perfect blossom. It has been so through all history, back beyond the times of gun and bayonet, when spears and swords were the plough-shares, as far as we can see and doubtless farther. In America, the necessities of the case compelled the people to turn first to material works; it was to the civilising of their continent, the repairing of their shattered commercial and industrial structure (shattered when it was yet only half built), that their new inspiration had perforce to turn first. But there was impetus enough for that and to spare, and, after satisfying their mere physical needs, they swept on with a sort of inspired hunger for things to satisfy their minds and souls. Europeans are accustomed to think that the American desire for culture is something superficial—something put on for appearance's sake; and nothing could well be farther from the truth. It is an intense, deep-seated, national craving. War on the scale of the Civil War ploughs deep. It may be impossible for a nation to make itself cultivated—to grow century-old shrubberies and five-century-old turf—in ten years or forty; and when the Americans in their ravening famine reach out to grasp at once all that is good and beautiful in the world, it may be that at first they cannot assimilate all that they draw to them—they can grasp, but not absorb. To that extent there may be much that is superficial in American culture. But every year and every day they are sucking the nourishment deeper—the influences are penetrating, percolating, permeating the soil of their natures (yes, I know that I am running two metaphors abreast, but let them run)—and it is a mistake to conclude because in some places the culture lies only on the surface that there are not others where it has already sunk through and through. Above all is it a mistake to suppose that the emotion itself is shallow or that the yearning is not as deep as their—or any human—natures.

* * * * *

It is possible that some critics may be found cavilling enough to accuse me of inconsistency in thus celebrating the praise of War in a work which is avowedly intended for the promotion of Peace. Carlyle wisely, if somewhat brutally, pointed out that if an Oliver Cromwell be assassinated "it is certain you may get a cart-load of turnips from his carcase." But one does not therefore advocate regicide for the sake of the kitchen-gardens.

FOOTNOTES:

[167:1] What is said above—or at least what can be read between the lines—may throw some light on the fact, on which the English press happens as I write to be commenting in some perplexity, that whereas certain Australians among the Rhodes scholars have distinguished themselves conspicuously in the schools, the only honours that have fallen to Americans have been those of the athletic field. Those journals which have inferred therefrom a lack of aptitude for scholarship on the part of American youth in general may be amiss in their diagnosis.

[169:1] To avoid misapprehension, let me say that, as an Oxford man, I have all the Oxford prejudices as fully developed as any Englishman could wish. Rather a year of Oxford than five of Harvard or ten of Minnesota. How much of this is sentiment, and worthless, and how much reason, it would be hard to say and is immaterial. The personal prepossession need not blind one either to the greatness of the work which the other institutions do, nor to the defensibility of that point of view which sets other qualities, in an institution the professed object of which is to educate and to fit youths for life, above even those possessed by Oxford or Cambridge.

[171:1] In 1906, under a stricter definition of the term "periodical," the privilege of sending as second-class matter books issued at regular intervals was withdrawn.

[188:1] Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea Wife" (The Seven Seas).

[189:1] The Loyal Legion is the society of those who held commissions as officers on the side of the North. The Grand Army of the Republic is the society which includes all ranks.



CHAPTER VIII

A COMPARISON IN CULTURE

The Advantage of Youth—Japanese Eclecticism and American—The Craving for the Best—Cyrano de Bergerac—Verestschagin— Music and the Drama—Culture by Paroxysms—Mr. Gladstone and the Japanese—Anglo-Saxon Crichtons—Americans as Linguists— England's Past and America's Future—Americanisms in Speech— Why they are Disappearing in America—And Appearing in England—The Press and the Copyright Laws—A Look into the Future.

Ruskin, speaking of the United States, said that he could never bring himself to live in a country so unfortunate as to possess no castles. But, with its obvious disadvantages, youth in a nation has also compensations. Max O'Rell says that to be American is to be both fresh and mature, and I have certainly known many Americans who were fresh. The shoulders are too young for the head to be very old. But when a man—let us say an Englishman of sixty—full of worldly wisdom, having travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what seem to the other "new-fangled" things—telephones and typewriters and bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old man's youth,—talking of philosophies and theories and principles which were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old sound, simple ways were better. Yet it may be—is it not almost certain?—that the youth has had the training which will give him a wider outlook than his father ever had, and will make him a broader man.

In our grandfathers' days, a man of reasonable culture could come approximately near to knowing all that then was known and worth the knowing. The wisdom and science of the world could be included in the compass of a modest bookshelf. But the province of human knowledge has become so wide that, however much "general information" a man may have, he can truly know nothing unless he studies it as a specialist. It is, perhaps, largely as a reaction against the Jacksonian theory of universal competence that the avowed ideal of American education to-day is to cultivate the student's power of concentration—to give him a survey, elementary but sound, of as wide a field as possible, but above all to teach him so to use his mind that to whatever corner of that field he may turn for his walk in life, he will be able to focus all his intellect upon it—to concentrate and bring to bear all his energies on whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his fortune. When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual store of knowledge is superficial—a smattering of too many things—but superficiality is precisely the one quality which, in theory at least, his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business. They know that he throws the same earnestness into his sports. Is it not reasonable to suppose that he will be no less earnest in the study of Botticelli? And it is a great advantage (which the American nation shares with the American youth) to have the products, the literature, the art, the institutions of the whole world to choose from, with practically no traditions to hamper the choice.

When the Japanese determined to adopt Western ways, seeing that so only could they hold their own against the peoples of the West, they did not model their civilisation on that of any one European country. They sent the most intelligent of their young men abroad into every country, each with a mission to study certain things in that country; and so, gathering for comparison the ways of thought and the institutions of all peoples, they were able to pick and choose from each what seemed best to them and to reject all else. They did not propose to make themselves a nation of imitation Englishmen or Germans or Americans. "But," we can imagine them saying, "if we take whatever is best in each country we ought surely to be able to make ourselves into a nation better than any." They modelled their navy on the British, but not their army, nor their banking system, nor did they copy much from British commercial or industrial methods—nor did they take the British system of education.

The United States has been less free to choose. The Japanese had a new house, quite empty, and they could do their furnishing all at once. The American nation, though young, has, after all, a century of domestic life behind it, in the course of which it has accumulated a certain amount of furniture in the form of institutions, prejudices, and traditions, some of which are fixtures and could not be torn out of the structure if the nation wished it; others, though movable, possess associations for the sake of which it would not part with them if it could. Fortunately, however, the house has been much built on to of late years and what goods, or bads, are already amassed can all be stowed away in a single east wing. All the main building (the eastern wing used to be the main building, but it is not now), and particularly the western end and the annex to the north, are new and empty, to be decorated and furnished as the owner pleases. And while the owner, like a sensible man, intends to do all that he can to encourage home manufactures, he does not hesitate to go as far afield as he likes to fill a nook with something better than anything that can be turned out at home.

Nothing strikes an Englishman more, after he comes to know the people, than this eclectic habit, paradoxically combined as it is with an intense—an over-noisy—patriotism. "The best," the American is fond of saying, "is good enough for me"; and it never occurs to him that he has not entire right to the best wherever he may find it. In England it is only a small part of the population which considers itself entitled to the best of anything. The rest of the people may covet, but the best belongs to "their betters." The American knows no "betters." He comes to England and walks, as of right, into the best hotels, the best restaurants, the best seats at the theatres—and the best society. He buys, so far as his purse permits, and often his purse permits a great deal, the best works of art. The consequence is that the world brings him of its best. It may defraud him once in a while into buying an imitation or a second-class article patched up; but, on the whole, the American people has something like the best of the world to choose from. And what is true of the palpable and material things is equally true of the intangible and intellectual.

Englishmen have long been familiar with one aspect of this fact, in the honours which America has in the past been ready to shower on any visiting Englishman of distinction: in the extraordinary number of dollars that she has been willing to pay to hear him lecture. Of this particular commodity—the lecturing Englishman—the people has been fairly sated; but because Americans are no longer eager to lionise any English author or artist with some measure of a London reputation, it does not by any means imply that they are not still seeking for, and grappling, the best in art and letters wherever they can find it. They only doubt whether the Englishman who comes to lecture is, after all, the best.

A Frenchman has pronounced American society to be the wittiest in the world. A German has said that more people read Dante in Boston than in Berlin. I take it that many more read Shakespeare in the United States than in Great Britain—and they certainly try harder to understand him. Nor need it be denied that they have to try harder. Without any knowledge of actual sales, I have no doubt that the number of copies of the works of any continental European author, of anything like a first-class reputation, sold in America is vastly greater than the number sold in England. Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche—I give the names at random as they come—of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a "cult" in the United States than in England—a far larger proportion of the population makes some effort to master what is worth mastering in each. Rodin's works—his name at least and photographs of his masterpieces—are familiar to tens of thousands of Americans belonging to classes which in England never heard of him. Helleu's drawings were almost a commonplace of American illustrated literature six years before one educated Englishman in a hundred knew his name. Zoern's etchings are almost as well known in the United States as Whistler's. Englishmen remain curiously engrossed in English things.

It may be a very disputable judgment to say that the most nearly Shakespearian literary production of modern times—at least of those which have gained any measure of fame—is M. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Immediately on its publication it was greeted in America with hardly less enthusiasm than in Paris; and within a few weeks it became the chief topic of conversation at a thousand dinner tables. In a few months I had seen the play acted by three different companies—all admirable, scholarly productions, of which the most famous and most "authorised" was by no means the best—and soon thereafter I came to England, for a short visit, but with the determination to find time to make the trip to Paris to see M. Coquelin as "Cyrano." I found Englishmen—educated Englishmen, including not a few authors and critics to whom I spoke—practically unaware of the existence of such a play. Of those who had heard of it and read critiques, I met not one who had read the work itself. Some time after, Sir Charles Wyndham produced it in London and it was, I believe, not a success. To-day Cyrano de Bergerac (I am speaking of it not as an acting play but as literature) is practically unknown even to educated Englishmen, except such as make French literature their special study.

Cyrano may or may not be on a level with any but the greatest of Shakespeare's plays (it is evident from his other work that M. Rostand is not a Shakespeare) but that it was an immeasurably finer thing than ninety-nine per cent of the books of the year which English people were reading that winter on the advice of English critics is beyond question. The nation which was reading and discussing M. Rostand's work was conspicuously better engaged than the nation which was reading and discussing the English novels of the season.

Again when poor Vasili Verestschagin met his death so tragically off Port Arthur, his name meant little or nothing to the great majority of educated Englishmen, though there had been exhibitions of his work in London—the same exhibitions as were made throughout the larger cities of the United States. In America regret for him was wide-spread and personal, for he stood for something definite in American eyes—rather unfortunately, perhaps, in one way, because Verestschagin, too, had painted those miserable sepoys being eternally blown from British guns.

The general English misapprehension of the present condition of art and literature in America sometimes shows itself in unexpected places. I have a great love for Punch. Since the time when the beautifying of its front cover with gamboge and vermilion and emerald green constituted the chief solace of wet days in the nursery, I doubt if, in the course of forty years, I have missed reading one dozen copies of the London Charivari. After a period of exile in regions where current literature is unobtainable one of the chief delights of a return to civilisation is "catching up" with the back numbers of Punch; nor, in spite of gibes to the contrary, has the paper ever been more brilliant than under its present editorship. Yet Punch in this present week of September 11, 1907, represents an American woman, apparently an American woman of wealth and position (at all events she is at the time touring in Italy), as saying on hearing an air from Il Trovatore: "Say, these Italians ain't vurry original. Guess I've heard that tune on our street organs in New York ever since I was a gurl."

The weaknesses of the peoples of other nations are fair game; but it is the essence of just caricature that it should have some verisimilitude. Punch could not publish that drawing with the accompanying legend unless it was the belief of the editor or the staff that such a solecism was more or less likely to proceed from the mouth of such an American as is depicted; which is precisely the error of the Frenchman who believes that Englishmen sell their wives at Smithfield. Thirty years ago, the lampoon would have had some justification; but at the present time both the actual number and the percentage of women who are familiar with the Italian operas is, I believe, vastly greater in America than in England. This statement will undoubtedly be received with incredulity by the majority of Englishmen who know nothing about the United States; but no one who does know the people of the country will dispute it. In England, the opera is still, for all the changes that have occurred in the last quarter of a century, largely a pleasure of a limited class. It may be (and personally I believe) that in that class there is a larger number of true musicians who know the operas well and love them appreciatively than is to be found in the United States; but the number of people who have a reasonable acquaintance with the majority of operas, and are familiar with the best known airs from each and with the general characteristics of the various composers, is immensely larger in America. It is only the same fact that we have confronted so often before—the fact of the greater homogeneousness or uniformity of tastes and pursuits in the American people.

It must be clearly understood, here as elsewhere, that I am not comparing merely the people of New York with the people of London, but the people of the whole United States of all classes, urban and provincial, industrial and peasant, East and West, with the whole population of all classes in the British Isles; for a large percentage of the mistakes which Englishmen make about America arises from the fact that they insist on comparing the educated classes of London with such people as they may chance to have met in New York or one or two Eastern cities, under the impression that they are thereby drawing a comparison between the two peoples. Senator Hoar's opinion of Matthew Arnold has been already quoted; and the truth is that very few Englishmen who have written about America have lived in the country long enough to grasp how much of the United States lies on the other side of the North River. Not only does not New York alone, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington combined do not bear anything like the same relation to America as a whole as London bears to the British Isles. Englishmen take no account of, for they have not seen and no one has reported to them, the intense craving for and striving after culture and self-improvement which exists (and has existed for a generation) not only in such larger cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans, but in many hundreds of smaller communities scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific. One must have such a vision of the United States as a whole as will enable him to imagine all this endeavour, now dissipated over so vast a stretch of country, as all massed together into a territory no larger than the British Isles before he can arrive at an intelligent basis of comparison between the peoples. What is centralised in England in America is diffused over half a continent and much less easily measurable.

It happens that as I am correcting the proofs of the chapter the London newspapers of the day (January 25, 1908) contain announcements of the death in New York of Edward MacDowell. He was often spoken of as "the American Grieg"; but it was a phrase which irritated many good musical critics in America, for the reason that they considered their countryman the greater man of the two. They would have had Grieg spoken of as the Norwegian MacDowell. In that judgment they may have been right or they may have been wrong; but it is characteristic of the attitudes of the British and American peoples that, whereas the people of the United States know Grieg better than he is known in England (that is to say, that a larger proportion of the people, outside the classes which professedly account themselves musical, have more or less acquaintance with his music), just as they know the work of half a dozen English composers, MacDowell, though he had played his pianoforte concertos in London, remained almost unknown in England outside of strictly musical circles. It is certain that had MacDowell been an Englishman he would have been immensely better known in America than, being an American, he ever was in England.

In the kindred field of the drama the general English idea of the American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of "musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by the managers to be the sort of thing that England wants or which is likely to succeed in England, not because they are what America considers her best product. To attempt any comparison of the living playwrights or actors in the two countries would be a thorny and perilous undertaking; and if any comparison is to be made at all it must be done lightly and as far as possible examples must be drawn from those who are no longer actively on the boards. Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary Anderson) has deliberately put on record her opinion of Miss Clara Morris as "the greatest emotional actress I ever saw." It is not likely that when Madame de Navarro pronounced that estimate she was forgetting either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell—or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have read Miss Morris's wonderful book, Life on the Stage, will think the judgment in this case not incredible.

Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship, restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in sufficient numbers to make its presentation a success if it had been achieved in London.

It was said that in any effort to arrive at an estimate of American culture, or to state that culture in terms of English culture, we should have to find landmarks in trifles. All these things are such trifles. Let us concede that Cyrano is not the greatest literature, nor is Verestschagin's work the highest art; still neither the one nor the other is properly a negligible quantity in the sum-total of the creative work of the generation. There may be many American women who do not know their Verdi, and it may be that Madame de Navarro's estimate of Miss Morris, mine of Mr. Mansfield, and that of certain American critics of Edward MacDowell are equally at fault; but it still remains absurd to take ignorance of the Italian operas as characteristic of American women or to talk contemptuously, as many Englishmen do, of the American theatre, because they have no knowledge of it beyond what they have seen of the one class of production from The Belle of New York to The Prince of Pilsen, or of American music, because their acquaintance with it begins and ends with Sousa and the writers of "coon songs."

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It will be urged that successive "crazes" for individual artists or authors, for particular productions or even isolated schools, are no evidence of any general culture. Conceding this, it remains impossible to avoid the question: supposing a nation or an individual to spend each successive six months in a new enthusiasm—six months on Plato and Aristotelianism,—six months, taking the Light of Asia, Mr. Sinnett, and Kim as a starting point, on Buddhism and esoteric philosophy,—six months, inspired by Fitzgerald, on Omar, Persian literature and history and the various ramifications thereof,—six months on M. Rodin, his relation to the art of sculpture in general and particularly to the sculpture of the Greeks,—a similar six months devoted to Mr. Watt with like excursions into his environment, proximate and remote,—six months to Millet, Barbizon, and the history of French painting,—six months of Russian art with Verestschagin and six with Russian literature and politics working outwards from Count Tolstoi,—six months of philosophic speculation radiating from Haeckel,—six months absorbed in Japanese art,—six months burrowing in Egyptian excavations and Egyptian history—the question is, I say, supposing a nation or an individual to have passed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten, every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration, with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with something less of the aesthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end of the ten years of successive furores be the same intellectual condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is probable that, besides the accumulation of a great quantity of information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is conspicuously more culture.

When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual knowledge possessed compared with the potentiality of knowledge on any one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr. Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man," he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about everything in the world except Japan. He knows nothing at all about Japan."

The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the American character, this American desire to become a universal specialist—this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge—is an essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole. The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a la-la-la whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they could. And—perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief—although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too nearly complete.

Americans rather like to repeat that story of Mr. Gladstone, when the talk is of English culture.

The American as a rule is a better linguist than the Englishman,—he is quicker, that is, to pick up a modern language and likely to speak it with a better accent. "Never trust an Englishman who speaks French without an English accent," said Prince Bismarck; and the remark, however unjust it may be to an occasional individual, showed a shrewd insight into the English character. There is always to be recognised the fact that there are tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands of Englishmen who speak Hindustani, Pushtu, or the language of any one of a hundred remote peoples with whom the Empire has traffic, while the American has had no contact with other peoples which called for a knowledge of any tongue but his own, except that in a small way some Spanish has been useful. But so far as European languages go, the Englishman, in more or less constant and intimate relation with each of the peoples of Europe, has been so well satisfied of his own superiority to each that it has seemed vastly more fitting that they should learn his language than that he should trouble to learn theirs. Under any circumstances, is it not obviously easier for each one of the European peoples to learn to talk English than for the Englishman to learn eight European tongues with eighty miscellaneous dialects?

When an Englishman does learn a foreign language, it is most commonly for literary or scholastic purposes, rather than (with the exception of French in certain classes) for conversational use. The American on the other hand, having had no need of languages in the past, coming now in contact with the world, sees that there are three or four languages of Europe which it is most desirable that he should know, if only for commercial purposes; and a language learned for commercial purposes must be mastered colloquially and idiomatically. The American is not distracted by the need of Sanskrit or of any one of the numerous more or less primitive tongues which a certain proportion of the English people must acquire if the business of the Empire is to go on. Nor is his vision confused by seeing all the European tongues jumbled, as it were, together before him at too close range. He can distinguish which are the essential or desirable languages for his purposes; and the rising generation of Americans is learning those languages more generally, and in a more practical way, than is the rising generation of Englishmen.

* * * * *

And yet we have not crossed that morass;—nor perhaps, however superior in folly we may be to the angels, is it desirable that we should in plain daylight. We have at most found some slight vantage-ground: thrown up a mole-hill of a Pisgah from which we can attain a distant view of what lies beyond the swamp, even if perchance we have taken some mirages and ignes fatui for solid landscape and actual illuminations.

The ambitions and ideals of the two peoples are fundamentally alike; nor is there so great a difference as appears on the surface in their method of striving to attain those ideals and realise those ambitions, albeit the American uses certain tools (modern he calls them, the Englishman preferring to say new-fangled) to which the Englishman's hands have not taken kindly. It is natural that the English nation, having a so much larger past, should be more influenced by it than the American. It is natural that the American, conscious that his national character has but just shaped itself out of the void, with all the future before it, should look more to the present and the future than the Englishman.

The Englishman prefers to turn almost exclusively to the study of antiquity—the art and philosophies and letters of past ages—for the foundation of his work, and thence to push on between almost strictly British lines. The American seeks rather to absorb only so much of the wisdom and taste of antiquity as may serve for an intelligent comprehension of the world-art, the world-philosophies, the world-literature of to-day, and then, borrowing what he will from each department of those, to strive on that foundation to build something better than any. There are many scholars and students in America who would prefer to see the people less eager to push on. There are many thinkers and educators in England who hold that English scholarship and training dwell altogether too much in the past and that it were better if England would look more abroad and would give larger attention to the conditions of modern life—the conditions which her youth will have to meet in the coming generation.