HOME THOUGHTS FROM
ABROAD
HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD
I
After some months at “home” in America and a couple spent in rambling
over Italy and France, I returned recently once more to London. The
first thing that struck me, happily, was that its perennial and
inexhaustible charm was as fresh and unchanged as ever. It is true
that changes in detail, mainly architectural, are to be observed as
plentiful enough by one who has long known it and who has now been
an annual visitor for some years. Devonshire House, never a thing of
beauty, but nevertheless of a certain antique dignity, has given place
to a glaringly white palace of smart flats and shops. The yet newer
but equally glaring hotel in Park Lane is regarded with many shakings
of heads as a possible portent for what may be in store for the entire
length of that aristocratic street. Dorchester House, most beautiful of
all the great houses in town, has been sold in spite of efforts to save
it from the auctioneer’s hammer and probable destruction. Burlington
Arcade, beloved of all shopping tourists, has also changed hands and
its fate is unknown. The Adelphi, with its dignified houses above and
its gloomy and mysterious “arches” below, is about to be disposed of.
The dark passageways, lit at midday by flaring gas lamps, and housing,
besides memories of David Copperfield, the largest and perhaps choicest
collections of wines in the world, are probably doomed. I hesitate to
say too much about it for American readers, but there are estimated to
be between three and four hundred thousand dozen of priceless vintages
stored in the vaults which will soon have to be moved. At least,
although the fate of the buildings still hangs in the balance, Bernard
Shaw, who has lived there for thirty years, has taken, with Celtic
impatience, a flat elsewhere, and Sir James Barrie, another tenant,
is, with more British calm, “waiting,” as he says, “to see.” As for
the complete transformation of lower Regent Street, in progress for
several years, the alterations are now practically completed and the
new buildings will require many months of damp and soot to mellow into
harmonious tone with their surroundings.
Yes, in some external features London is undoubtedly changing, and
changing rapidly. But then, it always has been changing since it was
founded by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago. Here and there we
may lament some particular manifestation of the law of life and growth,
but as a whole one finds the life of the town singularly unaltered,
and London still seems to me in most ways the most civilized, as it is
unquestionably the greatest, of the cities of men.
Coming from the Continent, a “citizen of the world” feels at once that
he has come from the backwaters into a great centre of human interest.
London is not only in sheer extent and population the largest city in
the world, so that Paris, and even New York in the restricted limits of
its only interesting portions, seem quickly exhaustible in comparison,
but it is the centre as yet of the greatest and most widely scattered
empire the world has ever seen. The dweller in it feels that he is at
the crossroads of all the world’s chief highways. One can survey the
world from here as from no other one centre. France, it is true, has
a scattered empire also, but the average Frenchman has, for the most
part, as little interest in the world at large as has the American
of the Middle West. Italy’s empire and interests are almost wholly
confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, to say nothing of the iron
censorship of speech and press. Except for international sport and the
spectacular, the average city in America is as unconscious of what is
being said and done in other countries as is a man of the radio waves
carried on the ether. By “listening in” he may at once pick up a whole
world of sound and thought of which he is otherwise unconscious. In the
same way a man at home may “listen in” to the international world by
using special apparatus in the way of foreign journals or by personal
relations, but these opportunities are limited to comparatively small
groups.
Here, on the other hand, that world is, so to say, in the air and not
the ether, and one does not have to make a special effort or acquire
exceptional apparatus to share in it. There are certain types of the
stay-at-home smaller business Englishman who are as hopelessly narrow
and provincial as Babbitt. But, even if one is not a Joshua to fell
the walls of high society or the higher political circles, one is more
apt here to meet all the time people who have just come from China or
the Cape, or almost any part of the world, than one is at home to meet
strayers from Dayton or Houston or Los Angeles. Moreover, if one picks
up a dozen English magazines on the news stand and contrasts them with
a dozen American ones, the wider range of interests at once becomes
apparent. Of course, there are reasons for this. The main business of
England, both in merchandising and banking, is international. The
larger business man has a direct interest in almost all quarters of
the globe. Again, speaking broadly, there is scarcely a family of the
better-magazine-reading classes which has not a member of it living in
some remote corner of the Empire or of the world outside. Cape Town,
Calcutta, and Peking are not merely far-off foreign cities which creep
into the news occasionally as centres of political disturbance, but
places where “Tom” or “Dick” or “Harry” is stationed.
But another and perhaps one of the chief charms of London is that, if
it is the greatest of all great cities, it is also the most homelike
and, one might almost say, rural. The low sky line, and the fact that
the architectural unit for most of the town yet remains the small
house as contrasted with the vast “apartment houses” and skyscrapers
of American cities, account for part of this “homey” atmosphere for a
generation which still feels that a home means a house and not a slice
of some costly communal barracks. Then there are the parks everywhere,
affording not only the welcome relief of lawns and trees, but
opportunities for cricket and golf and tennis within walking distance
of one’s house almost wherever it may be. Apart from the innumerable
larger parks there are the endless “squares” and “gardens,” so that one
may walk in almost any direction not more than a few minutes without
the eye’s encountering the restful green of trees and shrubs. Cheek by
jowl with the busiest thoroughfares there are village-seeming streets
or quiet nooks which are as retired and peace-bringing as any cathedral
close. One steps out of Piccadilly to find one’s self surrounded by
the flowers and country atmosphere of the Albany, or one passes from
the confusion of High Holborn under an archway to rest in the charming
old-world garden of Staple Inn, where the lilacs and iris bloom and
a fountain plashes with the cool serenity of the garden sanctuary of
some country house. Again, one may pass from the Strand, busiest of
the streets of men, under another archway to the perfect sylvan peace
of the Temple, where lawns stretch to the river and boys and girls
are playing tennis and one feels a brooding calm under the shade of
almost immemorial trees. One of the loveliest rural views in England
is looking up the water in St. James Park, only three minutes from
what, with the Abbey and Parliament Buildings, may be called the very
centre of Empire. Starting there, one may walk for miles over grass and
under the trees, keeping all the time in the heart of London. I know in
America no country club to compare in sheer rural beauty with Ranelagh,
with its superb gardens, its flowers, water views, tennis courts, golf
course, and polo grounds, yet this, like Hurlingham, is not an hour or
so out of town by train, but on one of the busiest arteries of traffic
within the city itself.
All these open spaces, all this green and the scent of flowers, give
one the impression that everywhere the country is overflowing into the
city. One hears the syrinx rather than the riveter, and Pan and Flora
yet hold the field against Midas and Vulcan. Nowhere in London, with
the exception of the Mall and perhaps one or two other instances, do we
find any such planned architectural vistas as so delight the French.
London, vast as a primeval forest, has just naturally grown without
elaborate city planning, but unlike New York and the larger American
cities it has managed to keep itself green and homelike and beautiful.
Nature has not been banished, but welcomed in a thousand nooks and
corners prepared for her to enter. The difference seems to depend on
national taste and a different scale of values. In America the sole
“value” of a piece of city real estate is considered to be what it
will yield when built upon, and every inch is made to produce as much
as possible by building on it. Here—although, Heaven knows, London
land is costly enough—open spaces, irises and daffodils, hawthorns
and lawns, have their values also for the human life of the town. The
Bank of England is at present erecting a huge new building for its
needs, but it is being so constructed as to preserve the small patch
of shaded green where daffodils bloom in gay disregard of the swirling
traffic a few feet away in one of the most congested centers of the
world. Imagine a great bank in Wall Street having a garden! Anyone who
suggested it would be thought mad, but in London it is this sense of
human values, in private properties as well as public parks, maintained
in spite of the need and lure of money in the world’s most densely
populated city, which again gives one a sense of its civilized attitude
toward life.
Yet another element in its civilization is the almost perfect quiet
that reigns in it. As contrasted with the insane tooting of horns day
and night in Paris and New York, one rarely hears a motor, and although
these warm days the parks are filled with children and older persons
of all grades of society, walking about or playing games, one never
hears any such “catcalling,” yelling, and general racket as one would
in American city parks with such masses of people. Civilization is of
necessity a colossal compromise between impulses of self-expression in
an individual and his strength of will in controlling such impulses as,
indulged in by many others, would make life less possible or agreeable
for all. When one motorist, dashing through a street at night, gives
vent to his self-expression by a shriek of his horn which awakens with
a start perhaps a hundred people, he is a being who has not learned
the very rudiments of civilization—that is, of harmonizing his own
instincts with the good of all.
Perhaps the highest test of whether a city or a people is civilized
is just this one of how far it has gone in learning what things can
and cannot be done in order to attain to the most perfect balance
between expression and restraint. This, of course, is most obviously
manifested in the nature and character of the laws, in the speed and
impartiality with which they are enforced, and in the attitude of the
people at large to them. One feels here that, whether by centuries of
training or by some political instinct, this people can govern itself
as no other can. There are comparatively few laws interfering with the
liberty of the individual to do as he likes, but they are enforced
with a swiftness, an impartiality, and a completeness that leave an
American green with envy. To note merely two examples since my arrival:
About three weeks ago a woman’s body was found in a trunk which had
been checked at Charing Cross Station. There was no apparent clue to
the mystery. At the end of a week the newspapers were much perturbed
by what they called the “unique” and most disturbing fact that after
seven days the police had not yet caught the unknown murderer. A few
days later, however, he had been run down, had confessed, and is now
in jail. Shortly after this a most outrageous blackmailing scheme
was brought to the attention of the police. Within a fortnight the
ringleaders had been caught, tried, convicted, and sent to prison for
terms ranging up to life.
It may be said that good enforcement of the law might also be had under
an autocracy, but what strikes one here as a test of civilization is
not merely the enforcement of law by the authorities, but the attitude
of the people themselves toward it in a democracy. Take the case of
the regulation of the liquor traffic. We tried it ourselves at home
for years; but, on the one hand, the authorities proved themselves
too incompetent and venal to enforce any laws regulating the saloon,
and, on the other, the people as a whole were too lawless to make the
problem a small one. From this we went on to Prohibition, with the
resulting farcical but no less disgraceful mess we are in to-day. Over
here, ever since the war, the traffic has been regulated by permitting
sales only at certain hours of the day, and it is illuminating to see
how the law is everywhere enforced by the people themselves. The hours
vary slightly in different towns so that not infrequently in the past
five years I have found myself asking for a drink in a public house
or hotel a few minutes ahead of the particular opening time in that
locality. In all these years I have never yet witnessed a single case
in which the law has been infringed by the fraction of a second on my
behalf or that of anyone else. As a result, the law has been entirely
successful. The possibility of prohibition, with all its evils, has
been put off indefinitely, and on the other hand drunkenness has
ceased, as far as my observation has gone. I have seen only one case of
even semi-intoxication, that of a man who had that afternoon received
a decree of divorce and was either drowning his sorrows or celebrating
his luck, I never knew which. Over the Whitsuntide holiday, I might
add, some two hundred and fifty thousand persons went to Blackpool, and
there was not a single instance of drunkenness or disorderly conduct.
II
Certainly if we judge the degree of civilization by the completeness
with which a people governs itself, combined with the completeness with
which it retains all possible liberty of individual action, I know no
other leading country of European civilization which can compete with
England. As for liberty of speech, thought, and action in America, it
is notorious that in many ways they are being maintained only by a
direct disobeying of or winking at innumerable laws.
To some extent we may attribute some of our difficulties of this sort
to the extremely heterogeneous population we now have, but that is due
to the “native” American’s dislike of physical work and his desire to
get rich as quickly as possible by exploiting with the greatest speed
and with alien labor the resources of the continent. At home there is
no use blinking the fact any longer that we are not an Anglo-Saxon
country. Our language may be English, the framework of our government
may be mainly derived from English precedents, and the old stock
may still give the leaders, for the most part, in culture, but the
population figures tell another story. In New York City alone there
are two million foreign born and two hundred thousand negroes, to say
nothing of foreigners of the second generation. In all England there
are only three hundred thousand aliens, and this racial solidarity
gives one a sense of being at home and among one’s own kind.
The figures in _Who’s Who_ are suggestive. That volume is supposed
to list some twenty-six thousand Americans who have achieved enough
distinction to win a place there. Of those twenty-six thousand, as
I recall it, ten per cent were foreign born, but of that ten per
cent one-half came to us from the British Empire, leaving only five
per cent, or some thirteen hundred persons in all America, who have
achieved distinction from among the millions of all other races who
have been immigrants in the last generation. For the most part, we get
the lowest and not the best from foreign countries, and, apart from a
few notable individuals, their purely cultural contribution to American
life has been small. The types of civilization evolved by various
races all have their good and bad points, but each has been fitted to
racial idiosyncrasies. The world would be poorer without either the
Anglo-Saxon or the Latin; but, to mention only one point, when we study
what the Latins have everywhere made of parliamentary government of
the English type it is evident that it is utterly unsuited to them. It
is not one of the least satisfactions of living in England that one
is surrounded by English people. In America one is also surrounded
by “Americans,” but “American” has utterly ceased to have any racial
connotation. In the colonial days, in spite of a considerable admixture
of Germans, Dutch, Scotch, and Irish, the social fabric was still
English, and it is not surprising if an American of English descent
whose family had been in America for many generations before the
separation took place should still prefer an English attitude and
outlook on life to that of the Semites or Slavs or Armenians, however
interesting he may find certain aspects of their self-expression in
literature or art.
I have mentioned the charm of the flowers in London, but the children,
dainty and flowerlike, are no less charming, and these warm days the
parks and squares and streets are full of them. As great numbers of
the boys of the better classes are away at school, the girls are most
in evidence, with their skirts so short as to be mere flounces on the
bottom of abbreviated waists. One can study childish legs from ankle
to hip here by the thousand, and one comes to the conclusion that they
are among the most beautiful things the world has to offer. These
youngsters, arrayed in a way to make Main Street gasp, have also a
gentleness, a modesty, and a quietness of demeanor that are equally
beyond the ken of that thoroughfare.
One could continue to write indefinitely of the charms of London,
but already many readers have undoubtedly been giving vent to that
characteristic remark whenever one praises foreign lands or suggests
anything lacking in “God’s Country”: “Why don’t you go there to live if
you think it’s so much better?”—with an inflection of annoyance that
makes the sentence much more of an imperative than an interrogative.
Over here, year after year, as one’s life passes so easily and
humanely, one asks one’s self that question, especially as one reads
that marvelously fascinating last page of the morning _Times_ with
its illustrated advertisements, veritable “magic casements,” of
country houses for sale at fabulously low prices according to American
standards. Also one knows one can be sure of a cook. Why not stay here
and live? And yet one doesn’t—or, at least, one has not yet.
As for the mere matter of changing one’s residence, American opinion
has always been irrational. Americans think it laudable that a citizen
of any other nation should come to America to better his condition,
but shameful that an American should emigrate to Europe for the same
purpose. Let an Astor or a Henry James or an Edwin Abbey transfer
himself to England and, in the American vernacular, “a howl goes
up” as though he had been a Benedict Arnold. But life after all is
not rational, and one hesitates. The advantages of this country are
all rational. The reasons for not packing up forthwith are largely
irrational and usually they win, though they are not easy to describe.
There is at bottom that largely modern and perhaps hardest of all
passions to analyze, the love of one’s country, even in America where
in many neighborhoods one’s neighbors have ceased to be of one’s
own race or even, perhaps, capable of speaking one’s own tongue. As
one looks at the beautiful English landscape, more beautiful in its
well-tended charm and utter peacefulness than any other I know in
the whole world, a sudden nostalgia will come over one for a rough,
neglected bit of some Vermont hillside or the familiar ugliness of some
fishing village on the shore. One murmurs to one’s self, “Beautiful,
beautiful,” in Devon or Warwickshire, and then may unaccountably be
seized with a sudden desire to “muss it all up.” All Englishmen have
to some extent this love of the wild and the unfinished, and perhaps
those of us whose families have been in America for centuries—and mine,
counting South as well as North America, was here for two generations
before even the Mayflower sailed—have “gone native” a bit, have become
a little more uncivilized, a little savage. Something revolts in us at
living too continuously too perfect, too orderly, too civilized a life.
Perhaps the scale has something to do with it. Mere bigness, so much
worshiped at home, has no value in itself Many a tiny insect is more
beautiful than an elephant. But there is a sense in which size when
translated into scale has a legitimate influence. A miniature, an easel
painting, and a mural decoration differ in something more than mere
size. So far as I know, no attempt has been made to study the effect of
the size of a man’s habitation upon him, though as the average man’s
grows smaller and smaller it is a subject not without interest. What
are all the psychological effects of living in two rooms and a bath as
compared with the old roomy house of two generations ago? Over here
one feels at times that sense of being “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d.”
One recalls the picture in _Punch_ of an American motorist driving
his car at seventy miles an hour while a man by the roadside calls
out, “Remember this is an island!” Even if one has lived only on the
Atlantic seaboard, he has felt that there were three thousand miles
of open sea in front of him and three thousand miles of his own land
behind him, and it has done something, very lasting but very hard to
define, to him.
But perhaps most of all there is the feeling that at home one is
watching one of the greatest experiments in history, an experiment that
is somehow partly one’s own responsibility as an American. If one loses
one’s way in the subway because the conductor can talk only Hungarian,
if some negroes are burned at the stake as though it were the year 800,
if a bricklayer gets twenty dollars a day and a professor of economics
gets ten, if a town can find no better way to express its enthusiasm
for a native son than by running the fire engines up and down the main
street, if twenty thousand school children are assembled to see which
has the most freckles, if any one of the hundred unaccountable and
fantastic things in the American press come true daily, one wonders
what it all signifies and where it is all going to end. But that is
just it. One wonders and one wants to wait just a little longer and
see. Perhaps the small boy has never lost his love for the circus.
III
In speaking with American friends at home I find that there is a
widespread opinion that the English do not like us and that a tourist
or resident here is acutely made aware of the fact. I have spent part
of each of the last six years in England and have found very little of
this alleged hostility to ourselves.
There is no other human relationship more apt to breed bad blood and
misunderstanding than that between debtor and creditor, as the entire
history of our country proves in the relations between East and West.
The trouble is apt to be greatly emphasized when such a relation is
suddenly reversed and the formerly rich creditor finds himself in turn
in the rôle of poor debtor. The debt of the now comparatively poor
England to the enormously prosperous America might well have been
expected to have bred ill feeling of the deepest sort, but it has not
done so to anything like the degree which it has on the continent of
Europe. In the first place, there has been the long-ingrained respect
in England for business ethics. She has been called a nation of
shopkeepers, but the very conditions that have called forth that name
have bred in her a sense of commercial honor that is notably lacking
in certain other countries. The war debt has therefore been regarded
here much more than in any other debtor country in the same light in
which the business man in America has regarded it—that is, as a purely
financial transaction the terms of which should be complied with as far
as possible. Also the English are good sports and believe in “playing
cricket.”
It is true that England would have been glad to see all debts canceled
for the good of all, and in this she was not as selfish as has been
claimed, for the debts owing her by other nations are much more
than she owes and she would have lost heavily on balance by such an
all-round cancellation. This balance she has, as a matter of fact,
relinquished by canceling all debts due her except enough to pay us,
provided she can collect it, which is not by any means yet certain.
English business, including manufactures, commerce, and banking, has
always been international, whereas American has been almost wholly
domestic. The average American has little or nothing to do with the
complicated problems of foreign exchange, and the English can see far
more clearly the future difficulties involved for the entire business
of the world in these enormous annual payments by Europe to a country
which already has half the world’s gold supply. The task of paying
international debts raises problems which are entirely different from
the mere transfer of domestic credits, and the securing of funds to
be transferred annually to America is far from being solely a matter
of taxation, however staggering. When, in addition to insisting that
the debts be paid to the uttermost farthing possible, according to our
standard of the debtors’ “capacity to pay,” we raise a tariff wall
which prohibits the sale of foreign goods to us, an almost impossible
situation is created. We already have the gold, so they cannot pay us
in that. We refuse to let them pay us in goods. We prohibit the import
of wool, for example, one of England’s chief exports, by raising the
duty to sixty per cent. As a personal experience, last year on the dock
I found the duty on my suits to be the figure just named, on embroidery
seventy-five per cent, on jewelry eighty per cent, and on lace ninety
per cent. In the old days we used to imprison debtors who could not
pay. We gradually learned that shutting a man in jail and depriving him
of the means of making a livelihood was a foolish way to expect him
to pay his debt. By our tariff wall we are imprisoning our European
debtors in much the same way. This phase of the problem is resented to
some extent here because the situation is much better understood than
at home, where most business men have had experience only with domestic
debts, with no training in international finance.
On the whole, however, one hears comparatively little here now about
the debt. In responsible quarters there is a great desire to let the
matter rest and to continue to make the annual payments without further
comment unless the ultimate impossibility of the situation may become
clearly apparent on both sides of the water. It does hurt and annoy
them here when Mr. Mellon tells the American people that the debt is
not costing England anything and is not hurting her. If Englishmen
are not given either to whimpering or to welshing, they do believe in
fair play. They may or may not eventually receive from other nations
what they are already paying us. They have not received it yet, and
may never do so. They are engaged in delicate negotiations with France
about the matter now. Meanwhile they have signed the note to us and are
paying it in cash. Therefore, when they are bleeding themselves white
in their private and corporate incomes to pay their own taxes (the
lowest income-tax rate is twenty per cent), and are paying the debt to
us on a scale which we have not exacted from any other debtor, they
feel it is unfair to say they are not going into their own pockets at
all. But even so, there was much criticism here of Churchill’s note as
tending to start afresh a controversy which Englishmen feel is settled
and which it is beneath their dignity to reopen of themselves.
Among people of all classes I would say that there is far less feeling
against the United States here than there is against England even now
at home, with all the improvement that there has been in sentiment
there. Perhaps the most absurd opinion which many people in the smaller
communities in America hold is that England hates us because she has
never forgotten the Revolution. As for the loss of a major part of her
earlier empire, several points must be remembered which Americans are
apt to forget. One is that for many decades in the nineteenth century
public opinion in England was not imperialistic at all, and, so far
from regretting the loss of the United States, the country was in favor
of divesting itself as soon as possible of the rest of its imperial
possessions. The imperialism of to-day is of comparatively recent
growth, with a long interval of anti-imperial feeling between the loss
of the old empire and the present day. Again, England has no grievance
or rankling soreness from being defeated by Americans. There is a
simple reason for this, usually ignored at home. It is that she never
was so defeated. She was beaten not by her colonies, but by a coalition
of European Powers that came to their aid. Washington admitted that
the game was lost and that the only salvation was to have France, at
least, enter the fight. Not only did France do so, but Spain also,
and England was fighting all over the world as well as in America, and
continued to do so a year and more after Cornwallis surrendered. She
was beaten only by the combined power of nearly half the civilized
world.
As a matter of fact, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Revolution, and all the
rest of our history, so familiar either in fact or legend to American
children, are to a great extent not known at all here. It was only
about four years ago that the first chair of American history in any
English university was founded. The cultural contributions of America
to civilization had been comparatively slight, and until we became a
world power, owing to our wealth and numbers, there was little more
reason for Europe’s being interested in our history than there is for
us to study the local historical details of South Africa or Australia.
The situation is well illustrated by a story which I heard Lord Lee
of Fareham, who has an American wife, tell the other day. She thought
she would make a pious pilgrimage to Plymouth to see the place from
which her ancestors had sailed. Trying to find the dock,—where, by
the way, there is a commemorative tablet,—she asked a man if he could
tell her where the Pilgrims had sailed from. He looked puzzled and
finally replied: “I really do not recall them, madam. Did they sail
recently?” The Standard Life Assurance Company is at present running
a series of advertisements in one of the best-known English weeklies
using “historical incidents” as texts. Last week they inserted one on
the sailing of the Mayflower. Explaining briefly for English readers
who the Pilgrim Fathers were, the notice says that “after a short stay
in Holland they sailed for America, where they founded a colony at
New Plymouth in 1621” [_sic_]. This is evidently all new and requiring
explanation to English people, although any American child could point
out the several errors of fact in that one sentence.
Far from discovering any feeling of antagonism here on the score of
history, an American is constantly amazed to find how the greater men
on either side of the ocean are considered to belong to one common
race. It would be a delicate if not an impossible matter to set up the
statue of an English king in America, though Alfred and Edward and all
the others down to George the Third are as much figures in our history
as in England’s. It would also be difficult to erect the statue of any
great Englishman of recent days. But here one is becoming surrounded
with Americans. If one goes into the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral one
finds a bust of Washington gazing at the tomb of Nelson, and there are
many tablets there commemorating American artists. I was surprised by
finding one there to my own American cousin, Edwin A. Abbey, which is
more than I ever did in his native land. In Westminster Abbey Americans
abound. Not only are there the bust of Longfellow, the window to
Lowell, the tablet to Page, but many lesser men are represented and
honored. When one steps outside the door one is confronted with the
statue of Lincoln. In front of the National Gallery is a statue of
Washington. At St. Saviour’s is a bust of John Harvard, an Englishman,
but honored thus for his services to America. In the Bodleian Library
at Oxford yesterday I found busts of Washington and Franklin.
Incidentally, in a number of English histories which I have just been
reading, all for English readers and some for English children, the
Revolution is treated with such a spirit of fairness and with so
little hostility as to raise the question whether the authors have made
out as good a case for their ancestors as they well might.
IV
There are some aspects of the personal contact of the two races which,
it must be confessed, have unfortunate consequences. As for the
appraisal of Americans by the English, the fact that we both speak
the same language has its drawbacks. The tongue of every Frenchman,
whether gentleman or boor, proclaims his nationality. The best as well
as the worst are known for what they are—French. But there is nothing
to proclaim so obviously the wellbred, cultivated, quiet-mannered
American as American. Unless that fact transpires in some other way,
he naturally is considered to be English. On the other hand, there is
no mistaking the noisy, underbred American, and, it must be confessed,
a most appalling number turn up over here. Nor is it always those
without money or apparently any social background who give the English
cause to wonder at us as uncultured barbarians. In the quiet English
hotel where I always stay in London one is never disturbed by having
to overhear the conversation of any English group either in the dining
room or in the drawing-rooms. But in every case this winter when an
American family has arrived the place has been thrown into a turmoil at
once. To cite a specific instance or two: The other day an evidently
well-to-do family appeared—father, mother, and son of about fifteen. At
dinner the boy came into the dining room ahead of his parents, stood
in the middle, and from that vantage point shouted out a conversation
to his father, still in the drawing-room, to the consternation of
the English diners. A few nights afterward another family, evidently
of considerable wealth and speaking with an excellent accent, took
possession of the drawing-room. The rest of us, quite uninterested,
were informed in loud tones of what a new camp in the Adirondacks was
like, where the son had been big-game hunting on two continents, and
many other personal details, until in despair of being able to read or
talk quietly one group of English after another got up and left the
room to my fellow citizens. It is evident that this sort of thing does
not endear us to the hearts of the quiet and privacy-loving British.
On the other hand, many American tourists, accustomed to the freedom
of the Pullman smokers at home and the general atmosphere of Rotarian
“glad hand” in America, go back with rankling spirits because the
English do not talk to them in railway carriages or hotel lobbies. They
do not realize, first, that most Englishmen are shy, and, secondly,
that the Englishman, prizing quiet and privacy himself above all else,
feels that he has no right to intrude upon others and that, unless
obviously called for, it is bad form for him to do so. If, however, he
feels justified, or if he thinks he can really be of use to a stranger,
not even an American is more ready to make himself agreeable. The other
day my wife and I were lost for the moment in some of the winding
streets in Chelsea and were studying the map. An Englishwoman at once
came up, asked if she could guide us, and walked several blocks to do
so. The same thing occurred at Lincoln a few days later.
There is, however, a real fear and dislike of America on the part
of some thoughtful people—a reasonable fear and dislike, I think,
based on something far deeper, more subtle, and more important than a
war of a hundred and fifty years ago, the precise terms of the debt
settlement, or the abominable manners of many American tourists. It is
the fear of the Americanization of Europe. For there are many changes
going on here and they are not all due to the European situation in
itself. What these people fear is not that they are facing years of
comparative poverty, of the rise of the new rich, and of the painful
reëstablishment of a bad economic situation, but the loss of the ideals
and values of what has hitherto constituted their civilization. This
the thoughtful traveler also broods over as he sees the changes that
have come and the portents of more.
Mass-production in America, the use of advertising to standardize the
desires and taste of the public and so standardize production, the
consequent lowering of production costs and the increase in wages, have
all created a stupendous rise in the scale of American living from
the purely material standpoint. With a population of over a hundred
millions, undivided by tariff barriers, with most of the raw materials
produced at home, with a people singularly lacking in individuality,
more than willing to live and have everything exactly like everyone
else, the leaders of industry have been able to achieve their ideal of
standardized production. But the achievement of this result has brought
about the surrender of certain values that the European still thinks of
vital importance. What the cultured European desires above all else is
to be an individual, to be able to express his own unique personality
in work and play. The dreary sameness of American life throughout an
entire and vast continent appalls him. Of what use to travel three
thousand miles from New York to San Francisco if for the most part
one sees only the same sort of people, reads the same comic strips and
syndicated news columns, talks the same “shop”, and sees the same city
architecture?
In Devonshire the other day I was looking from my window at a bit of
new garden wall, already beginning to weather and take on beauty in
the damp climate. Most skillfully, and without any sense of patchwork,
various materials had been put together in it—some gray stone, some of
the red Devon sandstone, concrete, and different sorts of brick, with
the effect of variety and interest. An American might have done if
more “efficiently” of one material, but then no one would have cared
to give it a second glance. The old cottages also gain much of their
charm from the variety of materials employed—brick, old oak, stucco,
shingles, and clapboards. That evening I happened to read that the
American Department of Commerce, coöperating with manufacturers in the
interests of “efficiency,” had reduced the varieties of bricks to be
produced from sixty-six to seven, two hundred and ten different shapes
of bottles to twenty, and so on, and that the suggestions had been
received “with enthusiasm.” Nothing could better display the difference
in the ideals of the two countries. After all, if we are all to have
more and more things, but only on the condition that they shall be
exactly like everyone else’s, what becomes of the joy of individual
living, of expressing your own personality—provided you have one—in
work and play? Is it worth while to gain the whole material world and
lose your own soul?
America, overwhelmed like a child on Christmas morning with all its new
toys, does not yet seem to give a thought as to where it is all going
to end. The average business man resents as almost impious, certainly
“unpatriotic,” any suggestion that all is not for the best, so long as
his profits pile up annually. If anyone tries to discuss soberly the
possible pitfalls of present tendencies, he is apt to have thrown at
him, even by university men at home, some such remark as “Get over your
grouch” or “America has no place for kickers,” for the average business
man, though he takes himself most seriously, is incredibly naive and
immature. The average American, so far from resenting the fact that
Big Business is out to limit his choice of things more and more while
increasing their number, that it is utilizing all the resources of
science in psychological advertising to train him to submerge his
individuality in order to simplify business for the manufacturer, to
make him a mere “consumer” and not a man, seems to welcome it. In
itself that is a sign of immaturity. The schoolboy above all else
dreads being “different.” It is only as one grows to maturity that he
insists on being himself and expressing himself in his own way.
Europe is mature if it is poor. It has come to know that there are
better values in life than a host of material conveniences and
possessions. But it _is_ poor. It owes to America the greatest money
debt that the world has ever dreamed of. America, with its vast
resources, its boiling prosperity, half of the world’s gold, is sucking
Europe into the maelstrom of its own whirling industrial life. Europe
feels itself slipping against its will, and clings desperately to the
shore. It is possible that the present economic régime in America
cannot last forever. When overproduction gluts the home market, when
manufacturers have to enter into foreign competition for new markets,
the story may be different, though the time may be far off. But in the
mean time what may happen to the older and the more civilized ideals
of the value of individuality and craftsmanship and artistic products?
Even now we have to go to Europe for such things as require individual
talent. We still have brains and skill at the top, but are killing
them off at the bottom. During the war we had to get Austrians to make
our maps because there were no skilled American draftsmen for the
work. In one of the finest churches in America the architect designed
the carved stone—though in the Middle Ages the workmen would do that
themselves—and then had to import workmen from Italy to execute it.
Meanwhile Europe owes the debts and we insist they must be paid. The
masses heavily taxed look toward American prosperity and methods. Here
and there mass production is being tried, although Europe, with its
limited and highly differentiated markets, can never fully compete. It
is not, as many Americans think, merely a matter of national jealousies
or tariff barriers, but of an individualism that makes the world more
interesting and richer.
If Europe is sucked into the whirlpool, if her form of civilization
gives way to the American, and if we are at last world-standardized to
one bottle and one brick and one dress and one bath and one car and one
book and one idea, it may be that we shall regret the day when every
Englishman could pride himself on being singular and “a little mad.”
And so one wonders as one walks about this old city of London—where
tulips and irises dot lawns of inestimable “real estate” value, where
one feels a complete liberty to express one’s individuality, where one
is not limited to one brick in seven or one bottle in twenty, where
one feels complete personal liberty within a framework of reasonable
and observed law—how long it will last; and, if from poverty and the
pressure of American gold it all falls to the low level of American
efficiency, mass production, and controlled and standardized lives,
what one will do for ideas and ideals and all the possible varied
interest and charm of human life. It is not impossible that the world
of men may eventually be infinitely poorer because of our colossal and
unthinking prosperity.