"I understand that London is the second greatest hop-consuming, the
fourth hog-killing, and the first egg-absorbing centre in the world."
But what I deplore still more, and I think with reason, is the total
omission of the familiar interrogation: "What is your impression of our
women?"
That's where the reporter over on our side hits the nail every time.
That is the point at which we always nudge him in the ribs and buy him
a cigar, and at which youth and age join in a sly jest together. Here
again the sub-heading comes in so nicely: THINKS YOUNGSTOWN WOMEN
CHARMING. And they are. They are, everywhere. But I hate to think that
I had to keep my impression of London women unused in my pocket while
a young man asked me whether I thought modern literature owed more to
observation and less to inspiration than some other kind of literature.
Now that's exactly the kind of question, the last one, that the London
reporters seem to harp on. They seemed hipped about literature; and
their questions are too difficult. One asked me whether the American
drama was structurally inferior to the French. I don't call that fair. I
told him I didn't know; that I used to know the answer to it when I was
at college, but that I had forgotten it, and that, anyway, I am too well
off now to need to remember it.
That question is only one of a long list that they asked me about art
and literature. I missed nearly all of them, except one as to whether I
thought Al Jolson or Frank Tinney was the higher artist, and even that
one was asked by an American who is wasting himself on the London Press.
I don't want to speak in anger. But I say it frankly, the atmosphere
of these young men is not healthy, and I felt that I didn't want to see
them any more.
Had there been a reporter of the kind we have at home in Montreal or
Toledo or Springfield, Illinois, I would have welcomed him at my hotel.
He could have taken me out in a Ford car and shown me a factory and told
me how many cubic feet of water go down the Thames in an hour. I should
have been glad of his society, and he and I would have together made up
the kind of copy that people of his class and mine read. But I felt that
if any young man came along to ask about the structure of the modern
drama, he had better go on to the British Museum.
Meantime as the reporters entirely failed to elicit the large fund of
information which I acquired, I reserve my impressions of London for a
chapter by themselves.