fitted him admirably, and allowed that he can and does think
straighter (_c'est le bonheur des hommes quand ils pensent juste_)
than we can in the maze of our unnatural and antiquated complications;
he wholly admired the natural, unselfconscious manner of the American
woman; he saw that the wage-earner lived more comfortably than in
Europe; he noted that wealthy Americans were not dogged by envy in the
same way as in England, partly because wealth was felt to be more
within the range of all, and partly because it was much less often
used for the gratification of vile and selfish appetites; he admitted
that America was none the worse for the lack of a materialised
aristocracy such as ours; he praises the spirit which levels false and
conventional distinctions, and waives the use of such invidious
discriminations as our "Mr." and "Esquire." Admissions such as these,
coming from such a man as he, are of untold value in promoting the
growth of a proper sentiment towards our transatlantic kinsmen. When
he points out that the dangers of such a community as the United
States include a tendency to rely too much on the machinery of
institutions; an absence of the discipline of respect; a proneness to
hardness, materialism, exaggeration, and boastfulness; a false
smartness and a false audacity,--the wise American will do well to
ponder his sayings, hard though they may sound. When, however, he goes
on to point out the "prime necessity of civilisation being
interesting," and to assert that American civilisation is lacking in
interest, we may well doubt whether on the one hand the quality of
interest is not too highly exalted, and, on the other, whether the
denial of interest to American life does not indicate an almost
insular narrowness in the conception of what is interesting. When he
finds a want of soul and delicacy in the American as compared with
John Bull, some of us must feel that if he is right the latitude of
interpretation of these terms must indeed be oceanic. When he gravely
cites the shrewd and ingenious Benjamin Franklin as the most
considerable man whom America has yet produced, we must respectfully
but firmly take exception to his standard of measurement. When he
declares that Abraham Lincoln has no claim to distinction, we feel
that the writer must have in mind distinction of a singularly
conventional and superficial nature; and we are not reassured by the
_quasi_ brutality of the remark in one of his letters, to the effect
that Lincoln's assassination brought into American history a dash of
the tragic and romantic in which it had hitherto been so sadly lacking
("_sic semper tyrannis_ is so unlike anything Yankee or English middle
class"). When he asserts that from Maine to Florida and back again all
America Hebraises, we reflect with some bewilderment that hitherto we
had believed the New Orleans creole (_e.g._) to be as far removed from
Hebraising as any type we knew of. It is strikingly characteristic of
the weak side of Mr. Arnold's outlook on America that he went to stay
with Mr. P.T. Barnum, the celebrated showman, without the least idea
that his American friends might think the choice of hosts a peculiar
one. To him, to a very large extent, Americans were all alike
middle-class, dissenting Philistines; and so far as appears on the
surface, Mr. Barnum's desire to "belong to the minority" pleased him
as much as any other sign of approval conferred upon him in America.
A native of the British Isles is sometimes apt to be a little nettled
when he finds a native of the United States regarding him as a
"foreigner" and talking of him accordingly. An Englishman never means
the natives of the United States when he speaks of "foreigners;" he
reserves that epithet for non-English-speaking races. In this respect
it would seem as if the Briton, for once, took the wider, the more
genial and human, point of view; as if he had the keener appreciation
of the ties of race and language. It is as if he cherished continually
a sub-dominant consciousness of the fact that the occupation of the
North American continent by the Anglo-Saxons is one of the greatest
events in English history--that America is peopled by Englishmen. When
he thinks of the events of 1776 he feels, to use Mr. Hall Caine's
illustration, like Dr. Johnson, who dreamed that he had been worsted
in conversation, but reflected when he awoke that the conversation of
his adversary must also have been his own. As opposed to this there
may be a grain of self-assertion in the American use of the term as
applied to the British; it is as if they would emphasise the fact that
they are no mere offshoot of England, that the Colonial days have long
since gone by, and that the United States is an independent nation
with a right to have its own "foreigners." An American friend suggests
that the different usage of the two lands may be partly owing to the
fact that the cordial, frank demeanour of the American, coupled with
his use of the same tongue, makes an Englishman absolutely forget that
he is not a fellow-countryman, while the subtler American is keenly
conscious of differences which escape the obtuser Englishman. Another
partial explanation is that the first step across our frontier brings
us to a land where an unknown tongue is spoken, and that we have
consequently welded into one the two ideas of foreignhood and
unintelligibility; while the American, on the other hand, identifies
himself with his continent and regards all as foreigners who are not
natives of it.
The point would hardly be worth dwelling upon, were it not that the
different attitude it denotes really leads in some instances to actual
misunderstanding. The Englishman, with his somewhat unsensitive
feelers, is apt, in all good faith and unconsciousness, to criticise
American ways to the American with much more freedom than he would
criticise French ways to a Frenchman. It is as if he should say, "You
and I are brothers, or at least cousins; we are a much better sort
than all those foreign Johnnies; and so there's no harm in my pointing
out to you that you're wrong here and ought to change there." But,
alas, who is quicker to resent our criticism than they of our own
household? And so the American, overlooking the sort of clumsy
compliment that is implied in the assurance of kinship involved in the
very frankness of our fault-finding criticism, resents most keenly the
criticisms that are couched in his own language, and sees nothing but
impertinent hostility in the attitude of John Bull. And who is to
convince him that it is, as in a Scottish wooing, because we love him
that we tease him, and in so doing put him (in our eyes) on a vastly
higher pedestal than the "blasted foreigner" whose case we consider
past praying for? And who is to teach us that Brother Jonathan is able
now to give us at least as many hints as we can give him, and that we
must realise that the same sauce must be served with both birds? Thus
each resiles from the encounter infinitely more pained than if the
antagonist had been a German or a Frenchman. The very fact that we
speak the same tongue often leads to false assumptions of mutual
knowledge, and so to offences of unguarded ignorance.
One of the most conspicuous differences between the American and the
Briton is that the former, take him for all in all, is distinctly the
more articulate animal of the two. The Englishman seems to have
learned, through countless generations, that he can express himself
better and more surely in deeds than in words, and has come to
distrust in others a fatal fluency of expressiveness which he feels
would be exaggerated and even false in himself. A man often has to
wait for his own death to find out what his English friend thinks of
him; and
"Wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us,"
we might often be surprised to discover what a wealth of real
affection and esteem lies hid under the glacier of Anglican
indifference. The American poet who found his song in the heart of a
friend could have done so, were the friend English, only by the aid of
a post-mortem examination. The American, on the other hand, has the
most open and genial way of expressing his interest in you; and when
you have readjusted the scale of the moral thermometer so as to allow
for the change of temperament, you will find this frankness most
delightfully stimulating. It requires, however, an intimate knowledge
of both countries to understand that when an Englishman congratulates
you on a success by exclaiming, "Hallo, old chap, I didn't know you
had it in you," he means just as much as your American friend, whose
phrase is: "Bravo, Billy, I always _knew_ you could do something
fine."
That the superior powers of articulation possessed by the American
sometimes takes the form of profuse and even extreme volubility will
hardly be denied by those conversant with the facts. The American may
not be more profound than his English cousin or even more fertile in
ideas, but as a rule he is much more ready and easy in the discussion
of the moment; whatever the state of his "gold reserve" may be, he has
no lack of the small counters of conversation. In its proper place
this faculty is undoubtedly most agreeable; in the fleeting interviews
which compose so much of social intercourse, he is distinctly at an
advantage who has the power of coming to the front at once without
wasting precious time in preliminaries and reconnaissances. Other
things being equal, the chances of agreeable conversation at dinner,
at the club, or in the pauses of the dance are better in the United
States than in England. The "next man" of the new world is apt to talk
better and to be wider in his sympathies than the "next man" of the
old. On the other hand, it seems to me equally true that the Americans
possess the defects of their qualities in this as in other respects;
they are often apt to talk too much, they are afraid of a
conversational lull, and do not sufficiently appreciate the charm of
"flashes of brilliant silence." It seemed to me that they often
carried a most unnecessary amount of volubility into their business
life; and I sometimes wondered whether the greater energy and rush
that they apparently put into their conduct of affairs were not due to
the necessity of making up time lost in superfluous chatter. If an
Englishman has a mile to go to an appointment he will take his
leisurely twenty minutes to do the distance, and then settle his
business in two or three dozen sentences; an American is much more
likely to devour the ground in five minutes, and then spend an hour or
more in lively conversation not wholly pertinent to the matter in
hand. The American mind is discursive, open, wide in its interests,
alive to suggestion, pliant, emotional, imaginative; the English mind
is concentrated, substantial, indifferent to the merely relative,
matter-of-fact, stiff, and inflexible.
The English have reduced to a fine art the practice of a stony
impassivity, which on its highest plane is not devoid of a certain
impressiveness. On ordinary occasions it is apt to excite either the
ire or the amusement of the representatives of a more animated race. I
suppose it is almost impossible for an untravelled Englishman to
realise the ridiculous side of the Church Parade in Hyde Park--as it
would appear, say, to a lively girl from Baltimore. The parade is a
collection of human beings, presumably brought together for the sake
of seeing and being seen. Yet the obvious aim of each English item in
the crowd is to deprive his features of all expression, and to look as
if he were absolutely unconscious that his own party were not the only
one on the ground. Such vulgarity as the exhibition of the slightest
interest in a being to whom he has not been introduced would be
treason to his dearest traditions. In an American function of the same
kind, the actors take an undisguised interest in each other, while a
French or Italian assembly would be still more demonstrative. On the
surface the English attitude is distinctly inhuman; it reminds one
that England is still the stronghold of the obsolescent institution of
caste, that it frankly and even brutally asserts the essential
inequality of man. Nowhere, perhaps, will you see a bigger and
handsomer, healthier, better-groomed, more efficient set of human
animals; but their straight-ahead, phlegmatic, expressionless gaze,
the want of animated talk, the absence of any show of intelligence,
emphasises our feeling that they are _animals_.
The Briton's indifference to criticism is at once his strength and his
weakness. It makes him invincible in a cause which has dominated his
conscience; it hinders him in the attainment of a luminous
discrimination between cause and cause. His profound self-confidence,
his sheer good sense, his dogged persistence, his bulldog courage, his
essential honesty of purpose, bring him to the goal in spite of the
unnecessary obstacles that have been heaped on his path by his own
[Greek: hubris] and contempt of others. He chooses what is physically
the shortest line in preference to the line of least resistance. He
makes up for his want of light by his superiority in weight. Social
adaptability is not his foible. He accepts the conventionality of his
class and wears it as an impenetrable armour. Out of his own class he
may sometimes appear less conventional than the American, simply
because the latter is quick to adopt the manners of a new _milieu_,
while John Bull clings doggedly or unconsciously to his old conventions.
If an American and an English shop-girl were simultaneously married to
peers of the realm, the odds would be a hundred to one in favour of the
former in the race for self-identification with her new environment.
The American facility of expression, if I do not err, springs largely
from an amiable difference in temperament. The American is, on the
whole, more genially disposed to all and sundry. I do not say that he
is capable of truer friendships or of greater sacrifices for a friend
than the Englishman; but the window through which he looks out on
humanity at large has panes of a ruddier hue, he cultivates a mildness
of tone, which a Briton is apt to despise as weakness. His desire to
oblige sometimes impels him to uncharacteristic actions, which lead to
fallacious generalisations on the part of his British critic. He
shrinks from any assumption of superiority; he is apt to think twice
of the feelings of his inferiors. The American tends to consider each
stranger he meets--at any rate within his own social sphere--as a good
fellow until he proves himself the contrary; with the Englishman the
presumption is rather the other way. An Englishman usually excuses
this national trait as really due to modesty and shyness; but I fear
there is in it a very large element of sheer bad manners, and of a
cowardly fear of compromising one's self with undesirable
acquaintances. Englishmen are apt to take _omne ignotum pro
horribile_, and their translation of the Latin phrase varies from the
lifting of the aristocratic eyebrow over the unwarranted address of
the casual companion at _table d'hôte_ down to the "'ere's a stranger,
let's 'eave 'arf a brick at 'im" of the Black Country. In England I am
apt to feel painfully what a lame dog I am; in America I feel, well,
if I am a lame dog I am being helped most delightfully over the
conversational stile. An Englishman says, "Would you _mind_ doing
so-and-so for me?" showing by the very form of the question that he
thinks kindness likely to be troublesome. An American says, "Wouldn't
you _like_ to do this for me?" assuming the superior attitude of one
who feels that to give an opportunity to do a kindness is itself to
confer a favour. The Continental European shares with the American the
merit of having manners on the self-regarding pattern of _noblesse
oblige_, while the Englishman wants to know who _you_ are, so as to
put on his best manners only if the _force majeure_ of your social
standing compels him. No one wishes the Englishman to express more
than he really feels or to increase the already overwhelming mass of
conventional insincerity; but it might undoubtedly be well for him to
consider whether it is not his positive duty to drop a little more of
the oil of human kindness on the wheels of the social machinery, and
to understand that it is perfectly possible for two strangers to speak
with and look at each other pleasantly without thereby contracting the
obligation of eternal friendship. Why should an English traveller deem
it worthy of special record that when calling at a Boston club, he
found his friend and host not yet arrived, other members of the club,
unknown to him, had put themselves about to entertain him? An American
gentleman would find this too natural to call for remark.
Whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge the fact that our
brutal frankness, our brusqueness, and our extreme fondness for
calling a spade a spade are often extremely disagreeable to our
American cousins, and make them (temporarily at any rate) feel
themselves to be our superiors in the matter of gentle breeding. As
Col. T.W. Higginson has phrased it, they think that "the English
nation has truthfulness enough for a whole continent, and almost too
much for an island." They think that a line might be drawn somewhere
between dissembling our love and kicking them downstairs. They also
object to our use of such terms as "beastly," "stinking," and "rot;"
and we must admit that they do so with justice, while we cannot assoil
them altogether of the opposite tendency of a prim prudishness in the
avoidance of certain natural and necessary words. For myself I
unfeignedly admire the delicacy which leads to a certain parsimony in
the use of words like "perspiration," "cleaning one's self," and so
on. And, however much we may laugh at the class that insists upon the
name of "help" instead of "servant," we cannot but respect the class
which yields to the demand and looks with horror on the English slang
word "slavey."
On the other hand there are certain little personal habits, such as
the public use of the toothpick, and what Mr. Morley Roberts calls the
modern form of [Greek: kottabos], which I think often find themselves
in better company in America than in England. Still I desire to speak
here with all due diffidence. I remember when I pointed out to a
Boston girl that an American actor in a piece before us, representing
high life in London, was committing a gross solecism in moistening his
pencil in his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card,
she trumped my criticism at once by the information that a
distinguished English journalist, with a handle to his name, who
recently made a successful lecturing tour in the United States,
openly and deliberately moistened his thumb in the same ingenuous
fashion to aid him in turning over the leaves of his manuscript.
A feature of the average middle-class Englishman which the American
cannot easily understand is his tacit recognition of the fact that
somebody else (the aristocrat) is his superior. In fact, this is
sometimes a fertile source of misunderstanding, and it is apt to beget
in the American an entirely false idea of what he thinks the innate
servility of the Englishman. He must remember that the aristocratic
prestige is a growth of centuries, that it has come to form part of
the atmosphere, that it is often accepted as unconsciously as the law
of gravitation. This is a case where the same attitude in an American
mind (and, alas, we occasionally see it in American residents in
London) would betoken an infinitely lower moral and mental plane than
it does in the Englishman. No true American could accept the
proposition that "Lord Tom Noddy might do so-and-so, but it would be a
very different thing for a man in my position;" and yet an Englishman
(I regret to say) might speak thus and still be a very decent fellow,
whom it would be unjust cruelty to call a snob. No doubt the English
aristocracy (as I think Mr. Henry James has said) now occupies a
heroic position without heroism; but the glamour of the past still
shines on their faded escutcheons, and "the love of freedom itself is
hardly stronger in England than the love of aristocracy."
Matthew Arnold has pointed out to us how the aristocracy acts like an
incubus on the middle classes of Great Britain, and he has put it on
record that he was struck with the buoyancy, enjoyment of life, and
freedom of constraint of the corresponding classes in America. In
England, he says, a man feels that it is the _upper class_ which
represents him; in the United States he feels that it is the _State_,
_i.e._, himself. In England it is the Barbarian alone that dares be
indifferent to the opinion of his fellows; in America everyone
expresses his opinion and "voices" his idiosyncrasies with perfect
freedom. This position has, however, its seamy side. There is in
America a certain anarchy in questions of taste and manners which the
long possession of a leisured, a cultivated class tends to save us
from in England. I never felt so kindly a feeling towards our
so-called "upper class" as when travelling in the United States and
noting some effects of its absence. This class has an accepted
position in the social hierarchy; its dicta are taken as authoritative
on points of etiquette, just as the clergy are looked on as the
official guardians of religious and ecclesiastical standards. I do not
here pretend to discuss the value of the moral example of our
_jeunesse dorée_, filtering down through the successive strata of
society; but their influence in setting the fashion on such points as
scrupulous personal cleanliness, the avoidance of the _outré_ in
costume, and the maintenance of an honourable and generous standard in
their money dealings with each other, is distinctly on the side of the
humanities. In America--at least, "Out West"--everyone practically is
his own guide, and the _nouveau riche_ spends his money strictly in
accordance with his own standard of taste. The result is often as
appalling in its hideousness as it is startling in its costliness. On
the other hand I am bound to state that I have known American men of
great wealth whose simplicity of type could hardly be paralleled in
England (except, perchance, within the Society of Friends). They do
not feel any social pressure to imitate the establishment of My Lord
or His Grace; and spend their money for what really interests them
without reference to the demands of society.
It is rather interesting to observe the different forms which
vulgarity is apt to take in the two countries. In England vulgarity is
stolid; in America it is smart and aggressive. We are apt, I think, to
overestimate the amount in the latter country because it is so much
more in voluble evidence. An English vulgarian is often hushed into
silence by the presence of his social superior; an American vulgarian
either recognises none such or tries to prove himself as good as you
by being unnecessarily _grob_. This has, at any rate, a manlier air
than the vulgar obsequiousness of England towards the superior on the
one hand or its cynical insolence to the inferior on the other. The
feeling which made a French lady of fashion in the seventeenth century
dress herself in the presence of a footman with as much unconcern as
if he were a piece of furniture still finds its modified analogy in
England, but scarcely in America. Almost the only field in which the
Americans struck me as showing anything like servility was in their
treatment of such mighty potentates as railway conductors, hotel
clerks, and policemen. Whether, until a millenial golden mean is
attained, this is better than our English bullying tone in the same
sphere might be an interesting question for casuists.
Americans can rarely understand the amount of social recognition given
by English duchesses to such American visitors as Col. William Cody,
generally known as "Buffalo Bill." They do not reflect that it is
just because the social gap between the two is so irretrievably vast
and so universally recognised that the duchesses can afford to amuse
themselves cursorily with any eccentricity that offers itself. As
Pomona's husband put it, people in England are like types with letters
at one end and can easily be sorted out of a state of "pi," while
Americans are theoretically all alike, like carpet-tacks. Thus
Americans of the best class often shun the free mixing that takes
place in England, because they know that the process of redistribution
will be neither easy nor popular. The intangible sieve thus placed
between the best and the not-so-good is of a fine discrimination,
beside which our conventional net-works seem coarse and ineffective.
Since returning from the United States I have occasionally been asked
how the general tone of morality in that country compared with that in
our own. To answer such a question with anything approaching to an air
of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption.
The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of
contingent and accidental circumstances, and must so inevitably be
tinged by one's personal experiences, that their validity can at best
have but an approximate and tentative character. In making this
comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining
camps and other phases of life on the fringes of American
civilisation, which can be fairly compared only with pioneer life on
the extreme frontiers of the British Empire. From a similar cause we
may omit from the comparison a great part of the Southern States,
where we do not find a homogeneous mass of white civilisation, but a
state of society inexpressibly complicated by the presence of an
inferior race. To compare the Southerner with the Englishman we should
need to observe the latter as he exists in, say, one of our African
colonies. Speaking, then, with these reservations, I should feel
inclined to say that in domestic and social morality the Americans are
ahead of us, in commercial morality rather behind than before, and in
political morality distinctly behind.