little more to say than to warn the British visitor to suspend his
judgment until he has been some time in the country. I certainly was
not prejudiced in favour of this chilly draught when I started for the
United States, but I soon came to find it natural and even necessary,
and as much so from the dry hot air of the stove-heated room in winter
as from the natural ambition of the mercury in summer. The habit so
easily formed was as easily unlearned when I returned to civilisation.
On the whole, it may be philosophic to conclude that a universal habit
in any country has some solid if cryptic reason for its existence, and
to surmise that the drinking of ice-water is not so deadly in the
States as it might be elsewhere. It certainly is universal enough.
When you ring a bell or look at a waiter, ice-water is immediately
brought to you. Each meal is started with a full tumbler of that
fluid, and the observant darkey rarely allows the tide to ebb until
the meal is concluded. Ice-water is provided gratuitously and
copiously on trains, in waiting-rooms, even sometimes in the public
fountains. If, finally, I were asked to name the characteristic sound
of the United States, which would tell you of your whereabouts if
transported to America in an instant of time, it would be the musical
tinkle of the ice in the small white pitchers that the bell-boys in
hotels seem perennially carrying along all the corridors, day and
night, year in and year out.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] Lady Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, in her
book, "A Round Trip in North America," bears the same testimony: "Over
eleven thousand miles of railway travelling and miles untold of
driving besides, without an accident or a semblance of one. No
_contretemps_ of any kind, except the little delay at Hope from the
'washout,' which did not matter the least; lovely weather, and
universal kindness and courtesy from man, woman, and child."
[31]
"Had you seen but those roads before they were made,
You would hold up your hands and bless General Wade."
[32] This epithet must not confirm the usual erroneous belief that
Florida means "the flowery State." It is so called because discovered
on Easter Day (Spanish _Pascua Florida_).
XIII
The American Note
Those who have done me the honour to read through the earlier pages of
this volume will probably find nothing in the present chapter that has
not already been implied in them, if not expressed. Indeed, I should
not consider these pages written to any purpose if they did not give
some indication of what I believe to be the dominant trend of American
civilisation. A certain amount of condensed explication and
recapitulation may not, however, be out of place.
In spite of the heterogeneous elements of which American civilisation
consists, and in spite of the ever-ready pitfalls of spurious
generalisation, it seems to me that there is very distinctly an
American note, different in pitch and tone from any note in the
European concert. The scale to which it belongs is not, indeed, one
out of all relation to that of the older hemisphere, in the way, for
example, in which the laws governing Chinese music seem to stand apart
from all relations to those on which the Sonata Appassionata is
constructed. "The American," as Emerson said, "is only the
continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less
propitious;" and the American note, as I understand it, is, with
allowance for modifications by other nationalities, after all merely
the New World incarnation of a British potentiality.
To sum it up in one word is hardly practicable; even a Carlylean
epithet could scarcely focus the content of this idea. It includes a
sense of illimitable expansion and possibility; an almost childlike
confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the present and
the future; a wider realisation of human brotherhood than has yet
existed; a greater theoretical willingness to judge by the individual
rather than by the class; a breezy indifference to authority and a
positive predilection for innovation; a marked alertness of mind and a
manifold variety of interest; above all, an inextinguishable
hopefulness and courage. It is easy to lay one's finger in America
upon almost every one of the great defects of civilisation--even those
defects which are specially characteristic of the civilisation of the
Old World. The United States cannot claim to be exempt from
manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor,
of exploitation of the weak, of unfair distribution of wealth, of
unjust monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial
chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public
corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of
vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery, of class prejudice, of
respect of persons, of a preference of the material over the
spiritual. In a word, America has not attained, or nearly attained,
perfection. But below and behind and beyond all its weaknesses and
evils, there is the grand fact of a noble national theory, founded on
reason and conscience. Those may scoff who will at the idea of
anything so intangible being allowed to count seriously in the
estimation of a nation's or an individual's happiness but the man of
any imagination can surely conceive the stimulus of the constantly
abiding sense of a fine national ideal. The vagaries of the Congress
at Washington may sometimes cause a man more personal inconvenience
than the doings of the Parliament at Westminster, but they cannot
wound his self-respect or insult his reason in the same way as the
idea of being ruled by a group of individuals who have merely taken
the trouble to be born. The hauteur and insolence of those "above" us
are always unpleasant, but they are much easier to bear when we feel
that they are entirely at variance with the theory of the society in
which they appear, and are at worst merely sporadic manifestations.
Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared to the tyranny of
landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and (it is
hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while the
other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence. It is the
old story of freedom and hardship being preferable to chains and
luxury. The material environment of the American may often be far less
interesting and suggestive than that of the European, but his mind is
freer, his mental attitude more elastic. Every American carries a
marshal's baton in his knapsack in a way that has hardly ever been
true in Europe. It may not assume a more tangible shape than a feeling
of self-respect that has never been wounded by the thought of personal
inferiority for merely conventional reasons; but he must be a
materialist indeed who undervalues this priceless possession. It is
something for a country to have reached the stage of passing
"resolutions," even if their conversion into "acts" lags a little; it
is bootless to sneer at a real "land of promise" because it is not at
once and in every way a "land of performance."
There is something wonderfully rare and delicate in the finest
blossoms of American civilisation--something that can hardly be
paralleled in Europe. The mind that has been brought up in an
atmosphere theoretically free from all false standards and
conventional distinctions acquires a singularly unbiassed, detached,
absolute, purely human way of viewing life. In Matthew Arnold's
phrase, "it sees life steadily and sees it whole." Just this attitude
seems unattainable in England; neither in my reading nor my personal
experience have I encountered what I mean elsewhere than in America.
We may feel ourselves, for example, the equal of a marquis, but does
he? And even if he does, do A, and B, and C? No profoundness of belief
in our own superiority or the superiority of a humble friend to the
aristocrat can make us ignore the circumambient feeling on the subject
in the same way that the man brought up in the American vacuum does.
The true-born American is absolutely incapable of comprehending the
sense of difference between a lord and a plebeian that is forced on
the most philosophical among ourselves by the mere pressure of the
social atmosphere. It is for him a fourth dimension of space; it may
be talked about, but practically it has no existence. It is entirely
within the bounds of possibility for an American to attempt graciously
to put royalty at its ease, and to try politely to make it forget its
anomalous position. The British radical philosopher may attain the
height of saying, "With a great sum obtained I this 'freedom';" the
American may honestly reply, "But I was free-born."
It is necessary to take long views of American civilisation; not to
fix our gaze upon small evils in the foreground, not to mistake an
attack of moral measles for a scorbutic taint. It is quite conceivable
that a philosophic observer of a century ago might almost have
predicted the moral and social course of events in the United States,
if he had only been informed of the coming material conditions, such
as the overwhelmingly rapid growth of the country in wealth and
population, coupled with a democratic form of government. Even if
assured that the ultimate state of the nation would be satisfactory,
he would still have foreseen the difficulties hemming its progress
toward the ideal: the inevitable delays, disappointments, and
set-backs; the struggle between the gross and the spiritual; the
troubles arising from the constant accession of new raw material
before the old was welded into shape. There is nothing in the present
evils of America to lead us to despair of the Republic, if only we let
a legitimate imagination place us on a view-point sufficiently distant
and sufficiently high to enable us to look backwards and forwards over
long stretches of time, and lose the effect of small roughnesses in
the foreground. Even M. de Tocqueville exaggerated the evils existing
when he wrote his famous work, and forecast catastrophes that have
never arisen and seem daily less and less likely ever to arise. Let it
be enough for the present that America has worked out "a rough average
happiness for the million," that the great masses of the people have
attained a by no means despicable amount of independence and comfort.
Those who are apt to think that the comfort of the crowd must mean the
_ennui_ of the cultured may safely be reminded of Obermann's saying,
that no individual life can (or ought to) be happy _passée au milieu
des génerations qui souffrent_. _This_ source of unhappiness, at any
rate, is less potent in the United States than elsewhere. It is only
natural that material prosperity should come more quickly than
emancipation from ignorance, as Professor Norton has noted in a
masterly, though perhaps characteristically pessimistic, article in
the _Forum_ for February, 1896. It may, too, be true, as the same
writer remarks, that the common school system of America does little
"to quicken the imagination, to refine and elevate the moral
intelligence;" and the remark is valuable as a note of warning. But it
may well be asked whether the American school system is in this
respect unfavourably distinguished from that of any other country; and
it must not be forgotten that even instruction in ordinary topics
stimulates the soil for more valuable growths. The methods of the
Salvation Army do not appeal to the dilettante; but it is more than
possible that the grandchildren of the man whose imagination has been
touched, if ever so slightly, by the crude appeal of trombones out of
tune and the sight of poke-bonnets and backward-striding maidens, will
be more intelligent and susceptible human beings than the
grandchildren of the chawbacon whose mental horizon has been bounded
by the bottom of his pewter mug.
Those who think for themselves will naturally make more mistakes than
those who carefully follow the dictates of a competent authority; but
there are other counterbalancing advantages which bring the
enterprising mistake-maker more speedily to the goal than his
impeccable rival. The poet might almost have sung "'Tis better to have
erred and learned than never to have erred at all." The _intellectual_
monopoly of England is, perhaps, even more dangerous than the
material. The monastic societies of Oxford and Cambridge are too apt
to insist on certain _forms_ of knowledge, and to think that real
wisdom is the prerogative of the few. And we undoubtedly owe many of
the healthy breezes of rebellion and scepticism in such matters to the
example of America. The keen-eyed Yankees distinguish more clearly
than we do between the essential conditions of existence and the
"stupid and vulgar accidents of human contrivance," and are
consequently readier to lay irreverent hands on time-honoured abuses.
If a balance could be struck between the influence of Europe on
America and that of America on Europe, it is not by any means clear
that the scale would descend in favour of the older world.
There is a long list of influential witnesses in favour of the theory
that the development of the democratic spirit is bound inevitably to
hamper individuality and encourage mediocrity. De Tocqueville,
Scherer, Renan, Maine, Bourget, Matthew Arnold, all lend the weight of
their names to this conclusion. It does not seem to me that this
theory is supported by the social facts of the United States. When we
have made allowance for the absence of a number of picturesque
phenomena which are due to temporal and physical conditions, and would
be equally lacking if the country were an autocracy or oligarchy,
there remains in the United States greater room for the development
of idiosyncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has been
paradoxically argued by an English writer that individualism could not
reach its highest point except in a socialistic community; _i.e._,
that the unbridled competition of the present day drives square pegs
into round holes and thus forces the individual, for the sake of bread
and butter, to do that which is foreign to his nature; whereas in an
ideal socialism each individual would be encouraged to follow his own
bent and develop his own special talent for the good of the community.
To a certain extent this seems true of the United States. The career
there is more open to the talents; the world is an oyster which the
individual can open with many kinds of knives; what the Germans call
"_umsatteln_", or changing one's profession as one changes one's
horse, is much more feasible in the New World than in the Old. The
freedom and largeness of opportunity is a stimulus to all strong
minds. Lincoln, as Professor Dowden remarks, would in the Middle Ages
have probably continued to split rails all his life.
The fact is that if the predominant power of a few great minds is
diminished in a democracy, it is because, together with such
minds, a thousand others are at work contributing to the total
result.... It is surely for the advantage of the most eminent
minds that they should be surrounded by men of energy and
intellect, who belong neither to the class of hero-worshippers
nor to the class of _valets de chambre_.
The truth seems to be that with an increased population and the
multiplicity of interests and influences at play on men, we may
expect a greater diversity of mental types in the future than
could be found at any period in the past. The supposed uniformity
of society in a democratic age is apparent, not real; artificial
distinctions are replaced by natural differences; and within the
one great community exists a vast number of smaller communities,
each having its special intellectual and moral characteristics.
In the few essentials of social order the majority rightly has
its way, but within certain broad bounds, which are fixed, there
remains ample scope for the action of a multitude of various
minorities.--_"New Studies in Literature," by Prof. E. Dowden._
The so-called uniformity and monotony of American life struck me as
existing in appearance much more than in reality. If all my ten
neighbours have pretty much the same income and enjoy pretty much the
same comforts, their little social circle is certainly in a sense much
more uniform than if their incomes ranged down from £10,000 to £300
and their household state from several powdered footmen to a little
maid-of-all-work; but surely in all that really matters--in thoughts,
ideas, personal habits and tastes, internal storms and calms, the
elements of tragedy and comedy, talents and ambitions, loves and
fears--the former circle might be infinitely more varied than the
latter. Many critics of American life seem to have been led away by
merely external similarities, and to have jumped at once to the
conclusion that one Philadelphian must be as much like another as each
little red-brick, white-stooped house of the Quaker City is like its
neighbours. A single glance at the enormous number of _intelligent_
faces one sees in American society, or even in an American street, is
enough to dissipate the idea that this can be a country of greater
monotony than, say, England, where expressionless faces are by no
means uncommon, even in the best circles. America is more monotonous
than England, if a more equitable distribution of material comforts be
monotony; it is not so, if the question be of originality of character
and susceptibility to ideas.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Land of Contrasts, by James Fullarton Muirhead