It is four weeks to-day since I landed in New York, and, save for forty
hours in Philadelphia and four hours in Brooklyn, I have spent all that
time in Manhattan Island. Yet, to my shame be it spoken, I am not
prepared with any generalisation as to the American character. It has
been my good fortune to see a great deal of literary and artistic New
York, and, comparing it with literary and artistic London, I am inclined
to say "Pompey and Cæsar berry much alike--specially Pompey!" The New
Yorker is far more cosmopolitan than the Londoner; of that there is no
doubt. He knows all that we know about current English literature. He
knows all that we do _not_ know about current American literature. He is
much more interested in and influenced by French literature and art
than the average educated Englishman--so much so that the leading French
critics, such as M. Brunetière and M. Rod, lecture here to crowded and
appreciative audiences. Moreover an excellent German theatre permanently
established in the city keeps the literary world well abreast of
cosmopolitanism of the educated New Yorker the dramatic movement in
Germany. But the merely means that he has everything in common with the
educated Londoner--and a little over. His traditions are ours, his
standards are ours, his ideals are ours. He is busied with the same
problems of ethics, of æsthetics, of style, even of grammar. I had not
been three days in New York when I found myself plunged in a hot
discussion of the "split infinitive," in which I was ranged with two
Americans against a recreant Briton who defended the collocation. "It is
a mistake to regard it is an Americanism," said one of the Americans.
"It is as old as the English language, or at least as old as Wickliff.
But it is unnecessary, and the best modern practice discountenances it."
I felt like falling on the neck of an ally of half an hour's standing,
and swearing eternal friendship. What matters Alaska, or Venezuela, or
Nicaragua, "or all the stones of stumbling in the world," so long as we
have a common interest in (and some of us a common distaste for) the
split infinitive? To put the matter briefly, while the outlook of the
New Yorker is wider than ours, his standpoint is the same. We gather
from a well-known anecdote that some, at least, of the cultivated
Americans of Thackeray's time were inclined to "think of Tupper." To-day
they do not "think of Tupper" any more than we do--and by Tupper I mean,
of course, not the veritable Martin Farquhar, but the Tuppers of the
passing hour. In America as in England, no doubt, there is a huge
half-educated public, ravenous for doughnuts of romance served up with
syrup of sentiment. The enthusiasms of the American shopgirl, I take it,
are very much the same as those of her English sister. But the line of
demarkation between the educated and the half-educated is just as clear
in New York as in London. For the cultivated American of to-day, the
Boomster booms and the Sibyl sibyllates in vain. I find no
justification, in this city at any rate, for the old saying which
described America as the most common-schooled and least educated country
in the world. If we must draw distinctions, I should say that the effect
of the American system of university education was to raise the level
of general culture, while lowering the standard of special scholarship.
I believe that the general American tendency is to insist less than we
do on sheer mental discipline for its own sake, whether in classics or
mathematics, to allow the student a wider latitude of choice, and to
enable him to specialise at an earlier point in his curriculum upon the
studies he most affects, or which are most likely to be directly useful
to him in practical life. Thus the American universities, probably, do
not turn out many men who can "read Plato with their feet on the hob,"
but many who can, and do, read and understand him as Colonel Newcome
read Cæsar--"with a translation, sir, with a translation." The width of
outlook which I have noted as characteristic of literary New York is
deliberately aimed at in the university system, and most successfully
attained. The average young man of parts turned out by an American
university has a many-sided interest in, and comprehension of, European
literature and the intellectual movement of the world, which may go far
to compensate for his possible or even probable inexpertness in Greek
aorists and Latin elegiacs.
The academic and literary New Yorker, I am well aware, is not "the
American." But who is "the American?" I turn to Mr. G.W. Steevens, and
find that "the American is a highly electric Anglo-Saxon. His
temperament is of quicksilver. There is as much difference in vivacity
and emotion between him and an Englishman as there is between an
Englishman and an Italian." Well, Mr. Steevens is a keener observer than
I; when he wrote this, he had been two months in America to my one; and
he had travelled far and wide over the continent. I am not rash enough,
then, to contradict him; but I must own that I have not met this
"American," or anything like him, in the streets, clubs, theatres,
restaurants, or public conveyances of New York. On the contrary, as I
take my walks abroad between Union Square and Central Park, or hang on
to the straps of an Elevated train or cable car, I am all the time
occupied in trying--and failing--to find marked differences of
appearance and manners between the people I see here and the people I
should expect to see under similar circumstances in London. Differences
of dress and feature there are, of course--but how trifling! Difference
of manners there is none, unless it lie in the general good-nature and
unobtrusive politeness of the American crowd, upon which I have already
remarked. We all know that there is a distinctively American physical
type, recognisable especially in the sex which aims at self-development,
instead of self-suppression, in its attire. When one meets her in
Bloomsbury (where she abounds in the tourist season) one readily
distinguishes the American lady; but here specific distinctions are
obsorbed in generic identity, and the only difference between American
and English ladies of which I am habitually conscious lies in the added
touch of Parisian elegance which one notes in the costumes on Fifth
Avenue. The average of beauty is certainly very high in New York. I will
not say higher than in London, for there too it is remarkable; but this
I will say, that night after night I have looked round the audiences in
New York theatres, and found a clear majority of notably good-looking
women. There are few European cities where one could hope to make the
same observation. It is especially to be noted, I think, that the
American lady has the art of growing old with comely dignity. She loses
her complexion, indeed, but only to put on a new beauty in the contrast
between her olive skin and her silvering or silver hair. This contrast
may almost be called the characteristic feature of the specially
American type, which is much more clearly discernible in middle-aged and
old than in young women.
As for the men, what strikes one in New York is the total absence of the
traditional "Yankee" type. It must have a foundation in fact, since the
Americans themselves have accepted it in political caricature. No doubt
I shall find it in its original habitat--New England. It has certainly
not penetrated into New York. On close examination, the average
man-in-the-street is distinguishable from his fellow in London by
certain trifling differences in "the cut of his jib"--his fashion in
hats, in moustaches, in neckties. But the intense electricity that Mr.
Steevens discovers in him has totally eluded my observation. The fault
may be mine, but assuredly I have failed to "faire jaillir l'étincelle."
I have looked in vain for any symptom of the "temperament of
quicksilver." Mr. Steevens, it is true, made his observations during the
last Presidential election. Perhaps the quicksilver is generated in the
American citizen by political excitement, and when that is over "runs
out at the heels of his boots."
But, surely, it is a monstrous exaggeration to state in general terms
that the difference in "vivacity and emotion" between the average
American and the average Englishman is as great as the difference
between an Englishman and an Italian. By what inconceivable error, does
it happen, then, that the American of fiction and drama--English,
Continental, and American to boot--is always represented as outdoing
John Bull himself in Anglo-Saxon phlegm? In the courts of ethnology, I
shall be told, "what the caricaturist says is not evidence;" but no
caricature could ever have gained such world-wide acceptance without a
substratum of truth to support it. The probabilities of the case are
greatly against the development of any special "vivacity" of
temperament, for though there has no doubt been a large Keltic admixture
in the Anglo-Saxon stock, there has been a large Teutonic infusion
(German and Scandinavian) to counterbalance it. Simply as a matter of
observation, the differences between English and Italian manners hit you
in the eye, while the differences between American and English manners
are really microscopic; and manners, I take it, are the outward and
visible signs of temperament. A Scotchman by birth, a Londoner by habit,
I walk the streets of New York undetected, to the best of my belief,
until I begin to speak; in Rome, on the contrary, every one recognises
me at a glance as an "Inglese," unless they mistake me for an
"Americano." To me it is amazing how inessential is the change produced
by the Anglo-Saxon type and temperament by influences of climate and
admixture of foreign blood. There are great foreign cities in New
York--German, Italian, Yiddish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Chinese--but the
New York of the New Yorker is scarcely, to the Englishman, a foreign
city.
The other day I heard an Englishman, who has lived for twenty-five years
in America, maintaining very emphatically that the chief difference
between England and America lay in the greater laxity of the family bond
on this side of the Atlantic. He declared that, in the main, "home"
meant less to the American than to the Englishman, and especially that
the American boy between thirteen and twenty was habitually insurgent
against home influences. It would be ludicrous, of course, to set up the
observations of a month against the experience of a quarter of a
century; yet I cannot but feel that either I have been miraculously
fortunate in the glimpses I have obtained of American home life, or else
there is something amiss with my friend's generalisation. Perhaps he
brought away with him from England in the early seventies a conception
of the "patria potestas" which he would now find out of date there as
well as here. No doubt the migratory habit is stronger in America than
in England, and family life is not apt to flourish in hotels or
boarding-houses. The Saratoga trunk is not the best cornerstone for the
home: so much we may take for granted. But the American families who are
content to go through life without a threshold and hearthstone of their
own must, after all, be in a vanishing minority. They very naturally cut
a larger figure in fiction than in fact. It has been my privilege to see
something of the daily life of a good many families living under their
own roof-tree, and in every case without exception I have been struck
with the beauty and intimacy of the relation between parents and
children. When my friend laid down his theory of the intractable
American boy, I could not but think of a youth of twenty whom I had seen
only two days before, whose manner towards his father struck me as an
ideal blending of affectionate comradeship with old-fashioned
respect.[E] True, this was in Philadelphia, "the City of Homes," and
even there it may have been an exceptional case. I am not so illogical
as to pit a single observation against (presumably) a wide induction; I
merely offer for what it is worth one item of evidence.
Again, it has been my good fortune here in New York to spend an evening
in a household which suggested a chapter of Dickens in his tenderest and
most idyllic mood. It was the home of an actor and actress. Two
daughters, of about eighteen and twenty, respectively, are on the stage,
acting in their father's company; but the master of the house is a
bright little boy of seven or eight, known as "the Commodore." As it
happened, the mother of the family was away for the day; yet in the
hundred affectionate references made to her by the father and daughters,
not to me, but to each other, I read her character and influence more
clearly, perhaps, than if she had been present in the flesh. A more
simple, natural, unaffectedly beautiful "interior" no novelist could
conceive. If the family tie is seriously relaxed in America, it seems an
odd coincidence that I should in a single month have chanced upon two
households where it is seen in notable perfection, to say nothing of
many others in which it is at least as binding as in the average English
home.
POSTSCRIPT.--The American university system is a very large subject, to
which none but a specialist could do justice, and that in a volume, not
a postscript. Nevertheless I should like slightly to supplement the
above allusion to it. In the first place, let me quote from the
_Spectator_ (February 12, 1898) the following passage:--
"Some of the American Universities, in our judgment, come nearer to
the ideal of a true University than any of the other types.
Beginning on the old English collegiate system, they have broadened
out into vast and splendidly endowed institutions of universal
learning, have assimilated some German features, and have combined
successfully college routine and discipline with mature and
advanced work. Harvard and Princeton were originally English
colleges; now, without entirely abandoning the college system,
they are great semi-German seats of learning. Johns Hopkins at
Baltimore is purely of the German type, with no residence and only
a few plain lecture rooms, library, and museums. Columbia,
originally an old English college (its name was King's, changed to
Columbia at the Revolution), is now perhaps the first University in
America, magnificently endowed, with stately buildings, and with a
school of political and legal science second only to that of Paris.
Cornell, intended by its generous founder to be a sort of cheap
glorified technical institute, has grown into a great seat of
culture. The quadrangles and lawns of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
almost recall Oxford and Cambridge; their lecture-rooms,
laboratories, and post-graduate studies hint of Germany, where
nearly all American teachers of the present generation have been
educated."
Some authorities, however, deplore the Germanising of American
education. A Professor of Greek, himself trained in Germany, and
recognised as one of the foremost of American scholars, confessed to me
his deep dissatisfaction with the results achieved in his own teaching.
His students did good work on the scientific and philological side, but
their relation to Greek literature as literature was not at all what he
could desire. This bears out the remark which I heard another authority
make, to the effect that American scholarship was entirely absorbed in
the counting of accents, and the like mechanical details; while it seems
to run counter to the above suggestion that the university system tends
to raise the level of culture while lowering the standard of erudition.
At the same time there can be no doubt that the immense width of the
field covered by university teaching in America must, in some measure,
make for "superficial omniscience" rather than for concentration and
research. The truth probably is that the system cuts both ways. The
average student seeks and finds general culture in his university
course, while the born specialist is enabled to go straight to the study
he most affects and concentrate upon it.
To exemplify the latitude of choice offered to the American student, let
me give a list of the "course" in English and Literature at Columbia
University, New York, extracted from the Calendar for 1898-99: