into the argot of the street, “we find you charming just at the turn of
the tide, but when the flood comes in, _ne Dia!_ you are certainly _de
trop_. And in your own private interest, Distiktos, unless you really
want to lead a life totally anexetastic and forlorn, how can you go on
in that manner?”
FRANK MOORE COLBY
_American Civilization from the Foreign Point of View_
I. ENGLISH
II. IRISH
III. ITALIAN
I. AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT
A little less than two years ago--on the 14 July, 1919, to be exact--it
fell to my lot, as an officer attached to one of the many military
missions in Paris, to “assist,” from a reserved seat in a balcony of
the Hotel Astoria, at the _défilé_, or triumphal entry of the Allied
troops into Paris.
The march _à Berlin_ not having eventuated owing to the upset in
schedule brought about by the entry of dispassionate allies at the
eleventh hour, it was felt that the French must be offered something
in exchange, and this took the happy form of a sort of community march
along the route once desecrated by Prussian hoof-beats--a vast military
_corbeille_ of the allied contingents, with flags, drums, trumpets, and
all the rest of the paraphernalia that had been kept in cold storage
during four years of gas, shell, and barbed wire. Such a _défilé_, it
was calculated, would be something more than a frugal gratification
to the French army and people. It would offer to the world at large,
through the medium of a now unmuzzled press, a striking object lesson
in allied good feeling and similarity of aims.
My purpose in referring to the _défilé_ is merely to record one
unrehearsed incident in it but I would say in passing that the
affair, “for an affair,” as the French say, was extraordinarily well
stage-managed. A particularly happy thought was the marshalling of the
allied contingents by alphabetical order. This not only obviated any
international pique on what we all wanted to be France’s day, but left
the lead of the procession where everybody, in the rapture of delivery,
was well content it should remain. Handled with a little tact, the
alphabet had once more justified itself as an impartial guide:
B is for Britain, Great.
A is for America, United States of.
* * * * *
For impressiveness I frankly and freely allot the palm to what it was
the fashion then to term the American effort. Different contingents
were impressive in different ways. The Republican Guard, jack-booted,
with buckskin breeches, gleaming helmets, flowing _crinières_, and
sabres _au clair_, lent just the right subtle touch of the _épopée_ of
Austerlitz and Jena to make us feel 1871 had been an evil dream; the
Highlanders, the voice of the hydra squalling and clanging from their
immemorial pipes, stirred all sorts of atavistic impulses and memories.
Nevertheless, had I been present that day in Paris as a newspaper man
instead of as the humblest and most obscure of soldiers, neither one
nor the other would have misled my journalistic instinct. I should have
put the lead of my “story” where alphabetical skill had put the lead of
the procession--in the American infantry.
In front the generalissimo, martial and urbane, on a bright coated
horse that pranced, curvetted, “passaged” from side to side under
a practised hand. At his back the band, its monster uncurved horns
of brass blaring out the Broadway air before which “over there”
the walls of pacifism had toppled into dust in a day. Behind them,
platoon by platoon, the clean shaved, physically perfect fighting
youth of the great republic. All six feet high--there was not one,
it was whispered, but had earned his place in the contingent by a
rigorous physical selection: moving with the alignment of pistons in
some deadly machine--they had been drilled, we were told, intensively
for a month back. In spotless khaki, varnished trench helmets, spick
and span, scarcely touched by the withering breath of war. Whenever
the procession was checked, platoon after platoon moved on to the
regulation distance and marked time. When it resumed, they opened out
link by link with the same almost inhuman precision, and resumed their
portentous progress. How others saw them you shall hear, but to me they
were no mere thousand fighting men; rather the head of a vast battering
ram, the simple threat of which, aimed at the over-taxed heart of the
German Empire, had ended war. A French _planton_ of the Astoria staff,
who had edged his way into the ticketed group was at my back. “Les
voilà qui les attendaient,” he almost whispered. “Look what was waiting
for _them_.”
The next balcony to mine had been reserved for the civil employés
of British missions, and here was gathered a little knot of average
English men and women--stenographers, typists, clerks, cogs of
commercialism pressed into the mechanical work of post-war settlement.
As the Americans moved on after one of the impressive checks of which
I have just spoken, something caught my ears that made me turn my head
quickly, even from a spectacle every lost moment of which I grudged. It
was, of all sounds that come from the human heart, the lowest and the
most ominous--the sound that makes the unwary walker through tropical
long grass look swiftly round his feet and take a firmer grasp on the
stick he has been wise enough to carry.
It is impossible--it is inconceivable--and it’s true. On this great
day of international congratulation, one of the two branches of the
Anglo-Saxon race was hissing the other.
* * * * *
I spoke about the matter later to a friend and former chief, whom I
liked but whose position and character were no guarantee of tact or
good judgment. I said I thought it rather an ominous incident, but
he refused to be “rattled.” With that British imperturbability which
Americans have noted and filed on the card index of their impressions
he dismissed the whole thing as of slight import.
“Very natural, I dare say. Fine show all the same. Perhaps your friends
on the other balcony thought they were slopping over in front.”
“‘Slopping over...?’”
“Well--going a little too far. Efficiency and all that. Bit out of step
with the rest of the procession.”
I have often wondered since whether this homely phrase, uttered by a
simple soldier man, did not come nearer to the root of the divergence
between British and American character than all the mystifying and
laborious estimates which nine out of ten of our great or near-great
writers seem to think is due at a certain period in their popularity.
To achieve discord, you see, it is not necessary that two instruments
should play different tunes. It is quite sufficient that the tempo of
one should differ from the tempo of the other. All I want to indicate
in the brief space which the scope of this work, leaves at my disposal
are just a few of the conjunctures at which I think the beat of the
national heart, here and across the Atlantic, is likely to find itself
out of accord.
* * * * *
Englishmen do not emigrate to the United States in any large numbers,
and it is many years since their arrival contributed anything but an
insignificant racial element to the “melting pot.” They do not come
partly because their own Colonies offer a superior attraction, and
partly because British labour is now aware that the economic stress is
fiercer in the larger country and the material rewards proportionately
no greater. Those who still come, come as a rule prepared to take
executive positions, or as specialists in their several lines. Their
unwillingness to assume American citizenship is notorious, and I think
significant; but it is only within quite recent years that it has been
made any ground of accusation--and among the class with which their
activities bring them into closest contact it is, or was until a year
or two ago, tacitly and tactfully ignored. During a review of the
“foreign element” in Boston to which I was assigned two years before
the war, I found business men of British birth not only reluctant to
yield “copy” but resentful of the publicity to which the enterprise of
my journal was subjecting them.
There are many reasons why eminent English writers and publicists are
of little value in arriving at an estimate of “how Americans strike an
Englishman.” While not asserting anything so crude as that commercial
motives are felt as a restraining force when the temptation arises to
pass adverse judgment on the things they see and hear, it is evident
that the conditions under which they come--men of achievement in their
own country accredited to men of achievement here--keep them isolated
from much that is restless, unstable, but vitally significant in
American life. None of them, so far as I know, have had the courage or
the enterprise to come to America, unheralded and anonymous, and to pay
with a few months of economic struggle for an estimate that might have
real value.
To this lack of real contact between the masses in America and Great
Britain is due the intrinsic falsity of the language in which the
racial bond is celebrated on the occasions when some political crisis
calls for its reiteration. It is felt easier and safer to utter it
in consecrated _clichés_--to refer to the specific gravity of blood
and water, or the philological roots of the medium used by Milton
and Arthur Brisbane. The banality, the insincerity, of the public
utterances at the time that America’s entry into the European struggle
first loomed as a possible solution of the agony on the Western Front
was almost unbelievable. Any one who cares to turn up the files of the
great dailies between September, 1916, and March, 1918, may find them
for himself.
To a mind not clouded by the will to believe, this constant invocation
of common aims, this perpetual tug at the bond to ensure that it has
not parted overnight, would be strong corroboration of a suspicion
that the two vessels were drifting apart, borne on currents that flow
in different directions. It is not upon the after-dinner banalities of
wealthy and class-conscious “pilgrims” nor the sonorous platitudes of
discredited laggards on the political scene, still less is it upon the
sporting proclivities of titled hoydens and hawbucks to whom American
sweat and dollars have arrived in a revivifying stream, that we shall
have to rely should the cable really part and the two great vessels of
State grope for one another on a dark and uncharted sea. It is upon
the sheer and unassisted fact of how American and Englishman like or
dislike one another.
It is a truism almost too stale to restate that we are standing to-day
on the threshold of great changes. What is not so well realized is
that many of these changes have already taken place. The passing of
gold in shipment after shipment from the Eastern to the Western side
of the Atlantic and the feverish hunt for new and untapped sources
of exploitation are only the outward signs of a profound European
impoverishment in which Britain for the first time in her history has
been called upon to bear her full share. The strikes and lock-outs that
have followed the peace in such rapid succession might possibly be
written off as inevitable _sequelæ_ of a great war. The feeble response
to the call for production as a means of salvation, the general change
in the English temper faced with its heavy task are far more vital and
significant matters. They seem to mark a shift in moral values--a
change in the faith by which nations, each in the sphere that character
and circumstance allot, wax and flourish.
Confronted with inevitable competition by a nation more populous,
more cohesive, and richer than itself, it seems to me that there are
three courses which the older section of the English race may elect
to follow. One is war, before the forces grow too disparate, and on
the day that war is declared one phase of our civilization will end.
It will really not matter much, to the world at large, who wins an
Anglo-American world conflict. The second, which is being preached
in and out of season by our politicians and publicists, who seldom,
however, dare to speak their full thought, is a girding up of the
national loins, a renewed consecration to the gospel of effort, a
curtailment, if necessary--though this is up to now only vaguely
hinted--of political liberties bestowed in easier and less strenuous
days. The third course may easily be guessed. It is a persistence in
proclivities, always latent as I believe in the English temperament,
but which have only revealed themselves openly since the great war,
a clearer questioning of values till now held as unimpeachable, a
readier ear to the muttering and murmuring of the masses in Continental
Europe, internationalism--revolution. No thoughtful man in England
to-day denies the danger. Even references to that saving factor, the
“common sense of the British workman,” no longer allays the spectre of
a problem the issues of which have only to be stated to stand forth in
all their hopeless irreconcilability. Years ago, long before the shadow
fell on the world, in a moment of depression or inspiration, I wrote
that cravings were stirring in the human heart on the very eve of the
day when the call would be to sacrifice. That is the riddle, nakedly
stated, to which workers and rulers alike are asked to find an answer
to-day.
In this choice that lies before the British worker a great deal may
depend upon how American experiments and American achievements strike
him. In England now there is no escaping from the big transatlantic
sister. Politicians use her example as a justification; employers hold
up her achievements as a reproach. A British premier dare not face the
House of Commons on an “Irish night” unequipped with artful analogies
culled from the history of the war of secession. The number of bricks
per hour America’s bricklayers will lay or the tons of coal per week
her stolid colliers will hew are the despair of the contractor face
to face with the loafing and pleasure-loving native born. You will
hear no more jokes to-day in high coalition places over her political
machine replacing regularly and without the litter and disorder of a
general election tweedledum Democrat by a tweedledee Republican. She is
recognized--and this, I think, is the final value placed upon her by
the entire ruling and possessing classes in my own country--as better
equipped in her institutions, her character, and her population for the
big economic struggle that is ahead of us.
This is the secret of the unceasing court paid to Washington by all
countries, but pre-eminently by Britain. It is not fear of her power,
nor hunger for her money bags and harvests, nor desire to be “on the
band-wagon,” as light-hearted cartoonists see it, that prompts the
nervous susceptibility and the instantaneous response to anything that
will offend those in high places on the banks of the Potomac. It is the
sense, among all men with a strong interest in maintaining the present
economic order, that the support in their own countries is crumbling
under their hands, and that that fresh support, stronger and surer, is
to be found in a new country with a simpler faith and a cleaner, or
at any rate a shorter, record. To fight proletarianism with democracy
is a method so obvious and safe that one only wonders its discovery
had to wait upon to-day. Its salient characteristic is a newly aroused
interest and enthusiasm in one country for the political forces that
seem to make stability their watchword in the other. The coalition has
become the hero of the New York _Times_ and _Tribune_--the triumph
of the Republican party was hailed almost as a national victory in
the London _Times_ and Birmingham _Post_. Intransigeance in foreign
policies finds ready forgiveness in London; in return, a blind eye is
turned to schemes of territorial aggrandisement at Washington.
If a flaw is to be discerned in what at first sight seems a perfectly
adjusted instrument for international comity, it is that this new
Anglo-American understanding seems to be founded on class rather
than on national sympathy. Even offhand some inherent inconsistency
would seem to be sensed from the fact that the appeal of the great
republic comes most home, in the parent country, to the class that is
least attached to democratic forms and the most fearful of change.
References to America arouse no enthusiasm at meetings of the labour
element in England, and it is still felt unwise to expose the Union
Jack to possible humiliation in parades on a large scale in New York or
Chicago. A sympathy that flowers into rhetoric at commercial banquets
or at meetings of the archæologically inclined may have its roots in
the soundest political wisdom. But to infer from such demonstrations
of class solidarity any national community of thought or aim is both
unwarranted and unsafe. This much is evident, that should a class
subversion, always possible in a country the political fluidity of
which is great, leave the destinies of Great Britain in the hands of
the class that is silent or hostile to-day when the name of America is
mentioned, an entire re-statement of Anglo-American unity would become
necessary, in terms palatable to the average Englishman.
* * * * *
This average Englishman is a highly complicated being. Through the
overlay which industrialism has imposed on him, he has preserved to
quite an extraordinary extent the asperities, the generosities, the
occasional eccentricities of the days when he was a free man in a free
land. No melting process has ever subdued the sharp bright hues of
his individuality into the universal, all-pervading drab that is the
result of blending primary colours. No man who has employed him to
useful purpose has ever succeeded in reducing his personality to the
proportions of a number on a brass tag. The pirate and rover who looked
upon Roman villadom and found it not good, the archer who brought the
steel-clad hierarchy of France toppling from their blooded horses at
Crécy and Agincourt, the churl who struck off the heads of lawyers in
Westminster Palace yard survive in him.
If I am stressing this kink in the British character it is because one
of its results has been to make the Englishman of all men the least
impressed by scale, and the one to whom appeals made on the size of an
experiment or the vastness of a vision will evoke the least response,
and especially because I think I perceive a tendency to approach him
in the interests of Anglo-American unity precisely from the angle that
will awake antagonism where co-operation is sought. The attachment of
the Englishman to little things and to hidden things, which no one
except Chesterton has had the insight to perceive, or at all events
which Chesterton was the first to place in its full relation to his
inconsistencies, explains his strangely detached attitude to that
British Empire of which his country is the core. Its discovery as
an entity calling for a special quality in thought and action dates
no further back than that strange interlude in history, when the
personality of Roosevelt and the vision of Kipling held the imagination
of the world.
This refusal to be impressed by greatness, whether his own or others’,
has its disadvantages, but at least it has one saving element. It
leaves an Englishman quite capable of perceiving that it is possible
for a thing to be grandiose in scale and mean in quality. It leaves
intact his frank and childlike confidence that the little things of
the world confound the strong; his implicit conviction that David
will always floor Goliath, and that Jack’s is the destined sword to
smite off the giant’s head. The grotesqueness of the Kaiser’s upturned
moustaches, the inadequacy of a mythical “William the Weed” to achieve
results that would count, were his guiding lights to victory, the
touchstones by which he tested in advance the vast machine that finally
cracked and broke under its own weight. It was the “contemptible”
little army of shopmen and colliers which seized his imagination and
held his affection throughout, not the efficient mechanical naval
machine that fought one great sea battle, which was a revelation of
the risks inherent in its own monstrousness and complexity, and made
its headquarters in Scapa Flow. I recall the comments heard at the
time of Jutland in the artillery camp where fate had throwm me. They
served to confirm a dawning conviction that the navy, while it still
awes and impresses, lost its hold on the British heart the day wooden
walls were exchanged for iron and steel. It is perhaps the “silent
service” to-day because its appeal awakes so little response. It has
been specialized and magnified out of the average Englishman’s power to
love it.
In America the contrary seems the case. The American heart appears to
go out to bulk, to scale, and to efficiency. The American has neither
the time nor the temperament to test and weigh. His affections, even
his loyalties, seem to be at the mercy of aspects that impose and
impress. I know no other country where the word “big” is used so
constantly as a token of affection. Every community has its “Big Tims,”
“Big Bills,” “Big Jacks,” great hearty fellows who gambol and spout on
public occasions with the abandonment of a school of whales. Gargantuan
“Babe Ruth,” mountainous Jack Dempsey are the idols of its sport-loving
crowds. “Mammoth in character,” the qualification which on the lips of
the late Mr. Morgan Richards stirred laughter throughout England, is to
the American no inconsequential or slipshod phrase. He does perceive a
character and justification in bigness. It was perhaps to this trait
in his mental make-up that the puzzling shift of allegiance to the
beginning of the great war was due. The scale and completeness of the
German effort laid hold of his imagination to an extent that only
those who spent the first few months of agonizing doubt in the West
and the Middle West can appreciate. Something that was obscurely akin,
something that transcended racial affinities and antipathies, awoke
in him at the steady ordered flow of the field-grey legions Westward,
so adequately pictured for him by Richard Harding Davis. He is quite
merciless to defeat.
Nothing conceived on such a scale can indulge complexities. Its ideals
must be ample, rugged, and primitive, adequate to the vast task. Hence
the velocity, the thoroughness, the apparent ruthlessness with which
American enterprises are put through. It is the fashion among a certain
school of thought to call America the country of inhibitions. But there
is little inhibition to be perceived on that side of his temperament,
which the American has chosen to cultivate, leaving all else to those
who find perverse attraction in weed and ruin. His language--and he is
amazingly vocal--is as simple and direct as his thought. The appeals
and admonitions of his leaders reverberate from vast and resonant
lungs. They are calculated rather to carry far than to penetrate
deeply. They are statements and re-statements rather than arguments. If
their verbiage often aims at and sometimes seems to attain the sublime,
if the American leader is forever dedicating, consecrating, inspiring
something, the altitude is like the elevation given a shell in order
that it may travel further. The nimble presentation of antithesis
of a Lloyd George, the dagger-play of sarcasm of an Asquith, are
conspicuously absent from the speeches of American leaders. There is
something arrogant and ominous, like the clenching of a fist before
the arm is raised, in this sonorous presentation of a faith already
securely rooted in the hearts of all its hearers.