makes human beings so repellent to each other. It is one of the minor
martyrdoms of existence resulting in an antagonistic attitude, not so
much because one doubts the eligibility of the other, but rather that
one doubts one's self. The agony of self-consciousness that surrounds
one as with a thin coating of ice, out of which frosty prison one
breathes ice. Did the other but know what one suffers!
It is often very difficult to distinguish between shyness and reserve,
for one can be reserved without being shy, and one can be shy and in an
excess of shyness frightfully unreserved. Though the English are rightly
credited with having brought reserve and self-control--those
characteristics of the highest civilization as well as the lowest--to
the greatest mastery, yet some of their amazing silence and immobility I
believe to be shyness. It is a comfort to think so because, when one's
vivacious disposition occasionally hurls one against an icy obstacle, it
pains.
The English self-control--the result of generations of self-controlled
ancestors--makes heroes in the battlefield, but sometimes it also makes
of its bravest officers but foolhardy leaders of men. On the other hand,
the national pride to suppress emotion retaliates on nature in a
perfectly legitimate way; the emotion one suppresses, like all unused
functions, ends by weakening, then disappearing. Not that the English
are without emotion, but compared to other nationalities, the average
Englishman's emotions are not easily stirred. Self-control is a very
inspiring quality, but it is not so wonderful when the nature exercising
it is tuned to a low key. English supremacy is so great that English
self-control is the fashion, but while an Englishman's self-control is
the icy covering to a quiet, placid mountain; the control a Frenchman or
an Italian assumes is the ice veneering a volcano.
Human nature is, to a certain extent, everywhere the same, and its
simple and primal virtues are the same, only modified by race and
climate. A man may be panic-stricken in disaster, not through cowardice,
but because of uncontrolled imagination. No one will deny the
superlative bravery of the French, but it is equally impossible to deny
that in panics they sometimes lose their heads. In such circumstances
the Frenchman does not show to the same advantage as the Englishman, not
because of a lack of bravery, but because he possesses a fiery
imagination. A Frenchman sees not only the present disaster, but he sees
the results far into the dim future; the Englishman, with controlled
imagination, if any, applies himself to a hurried view of the situation,
and wastes no time on a thought of the future.
I knew an American of English descent who found himself in a burning
German theatre one night. In the instant there was a panic, and a
frantic woman clung to his arms and implored him to save her. He was
very near-sighted, and in the confusion his eyeglasses had fallen off.
"I certainly will," he said, reassuringly, "if you will just let me put
on my glasses." Then he climbed upon the seat, calmly gauged a possible
chance of escape, and rescued his companion and himself. Yet the
imagination which in certain circumstances results in disaster, under
others gives a man a charm which makes his companionship a delight.
We Americans are a composite race; we have the coolness of the English,
as well as the nervous tension of multiples of races, exaggerated by
that glowing air, which has been wittily called "free champagne." The
warring of these various elements promises results that cannot be
foreseen in a nation which boasts of being Anglo-Saxon, whatever that
may mean.
Years ago I remember the wrecking of a little pleasure boat near a
famous island on the coast of Maine, and with what heroism the young men
of the party saved themselves; that is where the foreign element brought
with it a too active imagination. Now the atmosphere and the foreign
element in our blood make us a nervous, high-strung people,
aggressively entertaining, and clamouring to be entertained.
In no way has the American invasion proved more triumphant than in the
subtle change it is producing in the new generation of English girls.
The English woman, like the clever antagonist she is, studies the
skilful weapons with which the other has established her captivating
supremacy, and is proceeding to use the same.
The new English girl has a charm and a vivacity, when she is not
hampered by tradition, which must make the American girl look to her
laurels. It will, of course, take her some time to let her spirit
sparkle behind those statuesque features; still, she is undoubtedly on
the road to vivacity. But the unbending and expressionless matron and
immovable and monosyllabic young girl are still to the fore. A wintry
smile on the matron's lips, enough to chill the most cordial guest, and
the strangled remarks of the young girl and her slow, cold eyes, are the
triumphant results of the nation of the self-controlled. Those cold eyes
and that slow smile that have in them not the ghost of humour. To get
behind the eyes and the smile, to discover some inward fire! Is there
any? One looks with envy at those faces which, from the lowest up,
possess that in common that it is impossible to penetrate into the real
self.
It must be confessed that what might be called the national manner is
not conducive to geniality of intercourse.
The power a hostess has to blight a crowd of people with her own frost!
There is the hostess who greets you as if she had never seen you before,
and accepts your hand as if it were a slice of cold fish; there is the
haughty hostess who shakes hands limply while she looks over your head
at a superior guest; there is the vague hostess who smiles liberally,
but sees you not; then there is the hostess with the surface geniality,
who, with a hurried glance at you, gushes inquiries across you at the
nearest man. There are as many varieties of hostesses as there are
women, and they one and all drop you, and you merge into the army of
starers, sometimes saved by an introduction to some other shipwrecked
mariner with whom you escape to the tea-room.
The American fashion of dispensing afternoon tea is very pretty, and
should be introduced here. Instead of leaving the serving of light
refreshments to the servants, the American hostess chooses several of
the prettiest girls she knows, and gives them the task of pouring out
the tea, coffee, and chocolate at a centre table decorated with flowers,
lighted candles, and all that coquettish art of which the American woman
is past-mistress. The table should accommodate four girls, who, in their
smartest party toilettes, are at once ornamental and useful, and the
centre of attraction. They take away something of the stiffness which is
inevitable among a crowd of people, many of whom are strangers to each
other. Having to ask for a cup of tea from a pretty girl instead of a
servant is pleasant, and generally leads to conversation, and it is
considered the greatest compliment a hostess can confer if she asks you
to "pour" for her. The more original the hostess, the more charming can
she make her "teas," and what is usually a rather dreary function may be
made entertaining and graceful.
The English hostess, ignoring her pretty chance, leaves the tea-table,
if there are many guests, to her servants. I once invited an English
girl to "pour" tea for me, and she discomfited me exceedingly by asking
why I did not get the servants to do it! And I had meant to pay her a
compliment!
What a social comfort a hat is! It gives one so much moral courage. It
is less terrible to encounter society in a hat; one can take refuge in
it from the coldest blast. But in the evening, garlanded with roses and
deserted, so to speak, by God and man, society is a trial.
There is no greater martyrdom for the middle-aged than baring their
shoulders to the bitter air and transporting them to an evening
function. To shiver for an instant in the smile of the hostess, and then
subside against the wall, while the young and ardent flirt about with
members of the other sex; or if they don't flirt, they appear to, which
is just as well. A very beautiful woman once confessed to me in a moment
of sincerity that she would be ashamed to be seen talking to another
woman at an evening party. "I would rather be with the most idiotic
man, and look as if I were flirting hard, than talk to the most
brilliant woman in the room. I always avoid women at parties."
It is not an age for conversation; our small-talk is soon exhausted, and
for a woman to talk at length, labels her as a rock to be avoided. How
can we have _salons_, we who cannot converse? We are the products of the
daily papers, and our conversation is like their familiar small-talk
column. So we have to have artificial aids to entertaining.
We are recited to, sung to, played to, and there being nothing so
"cussed" as human nature, no sooner are we played to and recited to than
our "cussedness" will out, and we are seized with a wild longing to
talk, and talk we do at the top of our voices. Universal resentment is
expressed towards the blameless arts that temporarily check our
interchange of what it would be flattery to call ideas, but, in my own
experience, when some stray man and I have stood together speechless, no
sooner did the piano break into our appalling silence than ideas seemed
to inundate us. The dumb man spoke as if by magic, and I, who hitherto
had nothing to say, couldn't talk fast enough.
The divine arts are too good to be wasted in a twentieth century
drawing-room! Such conversation as there is, is amply accompanied by the
pianola and the gramophone. These two awful inventions are to music what
the chromo is to painting. They make music as vulgar as machine-made
lace.
My first experience of the pianola was at the Universal Provider's. It
was Christmas time, and I was so tired and harassed that I stood quite
still in the surging crowd, oblivious of the sharp elbows of my shopping
sisters, oblivious of dust and microbes, only conscious that I was dizzy
with fatigue. Suddenly through the crowd I heard the familiar strains of
the great romantic polonaise of Chopin--the one introduced by the
exquisite _Andante Spianato_. It is a mediæval romance without words, of
chivalry, tournaments, gallant cavaliers, and beautiful women; all this
I heard in the piano department of the Universal Provider.
I couldn't understand it! What great artist could so far forget himself
as to play this divine work for a passing, heedless, irritable crowd. I
pushed my way past my sisters, and possibly used my elbows. As I came
nearer I grew confused by something exasperatingly perfect in the sound.
The humanity of a single false note was wanting. I reached the crowd
about the piano--well, everybody has seen a pianola! An imitation artist
(he had long fair hair) steered the music and pumped in the expression
at the proper place, while the indefatigable instrument ejected miles of
punctured paper.
Never did anything so get on my nerves! I nearly wept. It is, perhaps,
needless to say that the pianola and other instruments of its kind are
of American origin, and, like all American inventions, they are
labour-saving. You can be a Paderewski while you wait, but, thank
Heaven! no ingenious American has yet invented a mechanical Joachim!
The first modest invention, the grandparent of the pianola, was
exhibited in Boston (America) years and years ago, and was a modest
little box, with only a small appetite for punctured paper. One of the
judges of the musical instruments at the exhibition showed me this
curious music-box, to which, because of its ingenuity, they had decided
to give a prize. Now the instrument has waxed greater and greater, and
no one is safe from it, no, not if you go to the farthest desert or
highest mountain. It graces afternoon teas, while the guests refresh
themselves in stunned silence, or shriek at the top of their voices in
vain rivalry, until they melt into the street, where the turmoil of
cabs, carts, vans, and motors is soothing and peaceful by comparison.
For a stranger to penetrate into typical English social circles is often
a blighting experience. If the hostess is a woman of the world, she
comes to your assistance; but if she is the woman of an island, you find
yourself stranded, unintroduced, and surrounded by more or less handsome
and statuesque creatures, who would possibly be delighted to talk to you
if you were introduced--or possibly not.
Oh, the debatable question of introduction! One sometimes thinks that in
England people go into society just to avoid each other; at least so it
would appear from the ardent way in which they decline to be introduced.
Conventional smart English society does not introduce, and that sets the
fashion.
Society knows too many people, and refuses to know more; and its young
men, having at their command only two feet apiece, also refuse to be
introduced, for they cannot extend the field of their activities. The
young man's toil consists largely in duty dances, for the only way he
can pay a worried mother for a dinner-party is by dancing with her
daughter, who still hangs fire. So his path is not always strewn with
roses. Still his is easier than the "gal's," for he can decline to be
introduced to her, and he does this often with the little caprices and
insolence of a society belle.
"Do let me introduce you to my cousin," said a generous young soul to
her partner, "she is such a nice 'gal.'"
"Please don't; I should have to dance with her, and I am full up,"
replied the youth, and so it is. Not that all girls are so generous, far
from it. It is the exception when they overstep the bounds and
introduce an attractive girl to a young man. The result is that society
is made up of cliques, wheels within wheels, and the cliques keep
rigidly to themselves, and the loveliest young creatures outside
languish against the wall, and no one takes pity on them.
Many are the complicated stratagems to introduce the young girl into the
"smart set" of English society, and if the commander-in-chief ("mother")
is not blessed with the best steel-covered nerves, she had better not
undertake it. The commander-in-chief, of course a rich and great lady,
borrows a list of unknown young men from other hostesses and invites
them to her ball. Presumably grateful youths pay for this entertainment
by dancing with the "gal," but not always.
After all, smart society is alike all over the world; like hotel
cooking, it has no nationality. So America is ceasing to introduce, but
this repression is not universal yet. All do not yet languish under
self-inflicted boredom. A perfect American hostess makes her guests
known to each other if they are strangers, and though fashion may
protest, this is after all the only way to make a crowd of mutually
unknown people comfortable and not awkward. People, except those of
great ease of manner, will not speak to each other unless introduced,
and to talk to some one without the faint guide-post of a name is not
very interesting. You may be talking to a very dull stranger, and turn
away bored, when, had you but known that he was a great and shining
light, how interested you would have been, and how deftly you would have
turned the conversation into the one channel the great one always
loves--himself.
Possibly Americans overdo the introducing; they are rather apt to overdo
everything; it is the fault of a high-strung, nervous temperament; but
of two evils let me rather be torn away from an interesting conversation
every few minutes by a vivacious hostess, than be stranded in a corner
looking blankly at my fellow man, for all the world as if I had strayed
into a 'bus in a party gown. Blessed will the day be when the American
invasion will temper English society with its own possibly rather
effusive geniality.
The fundamental difference between the two nationalities is that
Americans love strangers, and the English hate them. The Englishman
looks with suspicion on any one he doesn't know, root and branch; the
American loves him until he hears of something to his disadvantage, or
until he gets tired of him--which happens.
The Englishman's aversion to strangers does not include the American,
curiously enough. He does not call him a foreigner, and he likes him. He
likes him partly because he really can't help it, and partly out of
policy, and he looks charitably at his curious and original ways just as
a big dog watches the gambols of a frolicsome puppy. He always remembers
that that puppy is his puppy, and that some day he will grow into a big
dog of his own breed, and--well, he respects the breed.
Not that the American man is in England as popular as the American
woman; he is not. The charming American woman is the product of
generations of hard-working fathers and husbands who have toiled for
her, and toil for her, and the result is that in cultivation and
attraction she has left her creator rather behind. When you add to this
his strenuous habits of business life, in which "devil take the
hindmost" is the motto, and a very confident belief in his own ability,
and his country's unmistakable destiny to "whip the universe," it
produces a rather aggressive personality. So he is not as popular as his
charming women, because, also, he represents a prophecy which is not
unlike a menace. Yet the big dog watches the gambols of the little dog
with tolerant good-nature.
Another factor in favour of the American woman is that she can be
charming on two continents--the Englishwoman still confines her efforts
to one--and she can be charming in the language of the two greatest
nations in the world. Is this not a magnificent opportunity for her
social genius? Descended, usually, from all sorts of races, America
makes her what she is, and then boastfully sends the perfected article
across the water to the old countries to ally herself with the best or
the worst of their aristocracy. That it is rarely the case of King
Cophetua and the beggar-maid one admits; but, after all, everything has
its price in this world, and coronets come dear, except, of course, to
that one privileged class--the ladies of the variety theatres.
In speaking of the American man's aggressiveness, one does not wish to
imply that the Englishman is not aggressive; far from it. There is no
one so aggressive as an Englishman, but the difference is that the
American is boastfully aggressive, and the Englishman quietly so, as one
so sure of himself and his belongings that boasting is superfluous;
which makes him all the more aggravating. The summit and climax of this
aggravation is that the Englishman does not know that he is aggressive,
and even resents it in his beloved Americans, and never suspects that
his own want of popularity may be due to that same cause.
Years ago it was the Englishman who was the spoilt darling of nations;
now he is making way for the American. But his early prestige was
immense--it is still great, but it is a tempered greatness.
In those days when he went to America to harvest dollars (he rarely went
for any other reason), he was received with a rapturous humility which
was pathetic. We grovelled before him, we suffered his peculiar
manners, which had they been our own we should sometimes have labelled
as bad, as the eccentricities of a superior being. We were flattered
when our resemblance to him was pointed out, and to increase it we
created that particularly obnoxious type, the Anglicised American; for,
like all imitations, it is the caricature of the most unpleasant
features of a resemblance.
In those days we took him to our hearts, to our homes, and to our clubs,
and when sometimes we came to London to enjoy his return civilities, we
had to be satisfied with very modest crumbs of entertainment indeed. But
perhaps the Englishman said, in the subtle French tongue, "_Je paye de
ma personne_." That explains it.
We spoiled the errant Englishman most abominably; our idol got bad
manners and a swelled head, and it always took him some time on his
return to a nation that, after all, consists of Englishmen, to find his
level again. The wife of a very distinguished man complained to me of
the demoralised condition in which her husband--who had gone to America
to lecture--had been sent back to her. "It will take me years to
unspoil him," she cried. "It's all the fault of your women, who flatter
them to death! And that is the reason," she added, with some bitterness,
"that Englishmen think they are so charming and clever."
Now that the Englishman has ceased to be so rare a bird in America, we
receive him with less tumultuous rejoicing, and yet we still spoil him
if he is distinguished or has a title. As for money, it is no object to
us as credentials--we leave that to the English. A title? Oh, yes, we
love a title! Why shouldn't we? Does not the Englishman, according to
Thackeray, love a lord? With all it represents of tradition, romance,
and history, is it a more ignoble passion for the snob than the worship
of dollars, or more fatal to republican principles?
The American money-kings are as surely creating a class apart as ever
did the English possessors of titles, and there is no greater nobility
in a duke, by the grace of a gamble on the stock exchange, than a duke
by the grace of tradition or history. Both may be represented by very
poor creatures, but the duke of history has, at all events, the
traditions of his ancestry to excuse the interest he still excites.
Occasionally one hears of an aspiring American, who, captivated by the
poetry of sound, buys himself a title, and ornaments his republican
breast with decorations--the fitting reward of dollars and cents; but
such a one has lost, if not his country, at least his sense of humour.
Still, it is not our republican money-dukes who will make or mar our
nation; its stability rests on something nobler. Nor will it turn a
great republic finally into a kingdom that we like titles as a child an
unaccustomed toy. Is it not dinned into our ears that we are rich, and
that the best is not too good for us? Is not the best in the world for
us?
"The finest jewels are kept for the American market," a famous jeweller
once told me. Are not the very best imitations of the old masters sold
to us? We are willing to pay, and money in this world can buy everything
except just one trifle--contentment. Apart from contentment, money buys
everything. It is a credential for virtue and a good name. A millionaire
must be good, or Divine Providence would not so have prospered him, and
for this all-sufficient reason London takes him to its innocent and
gushing heart. Of course sometimes the millionaire is not a real
millionaire, but no one knows until he is found out; but the next best
thing to being a real, honourable millionaire, is to have unlimited
credit. Blessed is the man who has credit, for some day he may promote a
company that will enable him to pay his bills.
Yes, America is being rewarded for all the entertainments she has
lavished on bygone Englishmen. She cannot these days complain of a lack
of English hospitality. Columbia has a "real good time," and she drops
the almighty dollar as she goes on her triumphant way, to the rapture of
the English shopkeeper.
She worships English history, English titles, and English cathedrals.
She gushes over all things great and good, and often she props up a
rickety aristocrat with the splendid strength of her great gold dollars,
and not the stiffest British matron dares sniff at her. She will
introduce and she will entertain, and she will be entertaining. She is
often beautiful, and generally clever,--even if frothily clever.
Of all the American invasion she is the most subtly dangerous. You may
keep off the American men with your fleets, and all the terrors of your
newest million pounders, but how defend yourself from the American girl,
who borrows a bow and arrow from a naughty little boy lightly dressed in
two wings and a blush, and shoots right into your--heart!
_Temporary Power_