ENGLISH HUMOUR AND AMERICAN ART
American Insularity--A Conkling Story--English Humour and
American Critics--American Literature and English Critics--The
American Novel in England--And American Art--Wanted, an
American Exhibition--The Revolution in the American Point of
View--"Raining in London"--Domestic and Imported Goods.
It is no uncommon thing to hear an American speak of British
insularity--the Englishman's "insular prejudices" or his "insular
conceit." On one occasion I took the opportunity of interrupting a man
who, I was sure, did not know what "insular" might mean, to ask for an
explanation.
"Insular?" he said. "It's the same as insolent--only more so."
* * * * *
Flings at Britain's "insularity" were (like the climatic myth)
originally of Continental European origin; and from the Continental
European point of view, the phrase, both in fact and metaphor, was
justified. England _is_ an island. So far as the Continent of Europe is
concerned, it is _the_ island. And undoubtedly the fact of their insular
position, with the isolation which it entailed, has had a marked
influence on the national temperament of Englishmen. Ringed about with
the silver sea, they had an opportunity to meditate at leisure on their
superiority to other peoples, an opportunity which, if not denied, was
at least restricted in the case of peoples only separated from
neighbours of a different race by an invisible frontier line, a well
bridged stream, or a mountain range pierced by abundant passes. Their
insularity bred in the English a disposition different from the
dispositions of the Continental peoples just as undeniably as it kept
them aloof from those peoples geographically.
Vastly more than Great Britain, has the United States been isolated
since her birth. England has been cut off from other civilisations by
twenty miles of sea; America by three thousand. As a physical fact, the
"insularity" of America is immensely more obvious and more nearly
complete than that of Britain; and it is no less so as a moral fact. It
is true that America's island is a continent; but this superiority in
size has only resulted in producing more kinds of insularity than in
England. The American character is, in all the moral connotation of the
word, pronouncedly more insular than the British.
Like the English, except that they were much more effectively staked off
from the rest of the world, the Americans have found the marvel of their
own superiority to all mankind a fit and pleasing subject for
contemplation. Perhaps there was a time when Englishmen used to go about
the world talking of it; but for some generations back, having settled
the fact of their greatness entirely to their satisfaction, they have
ceased to put it into words, merely accepting it as the mainspring of
their conduct in all relations with other peoples, and without, it is to
be feared, much regard for those other peoples' feelings. Americans are
still in the boasting stage. Mr. Howells has said that every American
when he goes abroad goes not as an individual citizen but as an envoy.
He walks wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It is only the insularity of
the Britisher magnified many times.
It is as if there were gathered in a room a dozen or so of well-bred
persons, talking such small talk as will pass the time and hurt no
susceptibilities. It may be that the Englishman in his small talk is
unduly dogmatic, but in the main he complies with the usages of the
circle and helps the game along. To them enters a newcomer who will hear
nothing of what the others have to say--will take no share in the
discussion of topics of common interest--but insists on telling the
company of his personal achievements. It may be all true; though the
others will not believe it. But the accomplishments of the members of
the present company are not at the moment the subject of conversation;
nor is it a theme under any circumstances which it is good manners to
introduce. This is what not a few American people are doing daily up and
down through the length and breadth of Europe; and they must pardon
Europe if, occasionally, it yawns, or if at times it expresses its
opinions of American manners in terms not soothing to American ears.
"The American contribution to the qualities of nations is hurry," says
the author of _The Champagne Standard_, and this has enough truth to let
it pass as an epigram; but many Americans have a notion that their
contribution is neither more nor less than All Progress. With their eyes
turned chiefly upon themselves, they have seen beyond a doubt what a
splendid, energetic, pushful people they are, and they have talked it
all over one with another. Moreover, have not many visitors, though
finding much to criticise, complimented them always on their rapidity of
thought and action? So they have come to believe that they monopolise
those happy attributes and, going abroad, whenever they see--it may be
in England, or in Germany--an evidence of energy and force, they say:
"Truly the world is becoming Americanised!" Bless their insular hearts!
America did not invent the cosmic forces.
When the first suspension bridge was thrown over Niagara, there was a
great and tumultuous opening ceremony, such as the Americans love, and
many of the great ones of the United States assembled to do honour to
the occasion, and among them was Roscoe Conkling. Conkling was one of
the most brilliant public men whom America has produced: a man of
commanding, even beautiful, presence and of, perhaps, unparalleled
vanity. He had been called (by an opponent) a human peacock. After the
ceremonies attending the opening of the bridge had been concluded,
Conkling, with many others, was at the railway station waiting to
depart; but, though others were there, he did not mingle with them, but
strutted and plumed himself for their benefit, posing that they might
get the full effect of all his majesty.
One of the station porters was so impressed that, stepping up to another
who was hurrying by trundling a load of luggage, he jerked his thumb in
Conkling's direction and:
"Who's that feller?" he asked. "Is he the man as built the bridge?"
The other studied the great man a moment.
"Thunder! No," said he. "He's the man as made the Falls."
It is curious that with their sense of humour Americans should so
persistently force Europeans into the frame of mind of that railway
porter. The Englishman, in his assurance of his own greatness, has come
to depreciate the magnitude of whatever work he does; nor is it
altogether a pose or an affectation. He sees the vastness of the British
Empire and the amazing strides which have been made in the last two
generations, and wonders how it all came about. He knows how
proverbially blundering are British diplomacy and British
administration, so he puts it all down to the luck of the nation and
goes grumbling contentedly on his way. There is no country in which
policies have been so haphazard and unstable, or ways of administration
so crude and so empirical, as in the United States. "Go forth, my son,"
said Oxenstiern, "go forth and see with how little wisdom the world is
governed"; and on such a quest, it is doubtful if any civilised country
has offered a more promising field for consideration than did the United
States from, say, the close of the Civil War to less than a decade ago.
All thinking Americans recognise this fact to the full; but whereas the
Englishman sees only the blunders that he has made and marvels at the
luck that pulled him through, the American generally ignores the luck
and is more likely to believe that whatever has been achieved is the
result of his peculiar virtues.
I never heard an American ascribe the success of any national
undertaking to the national luck. The Englishman on the other hand is
for ever speaking of the "luck of the British Army," and the "luck that
pulls England through."
And there is one point which I have never seen stated but which is worth
the consideration of Americans. It has already been said that it would
be of great benefit if the American people knew more of the British
Empire as a whole. They have had an advantage in appreciating the
magnitude of their own accomplishments in the fact that their work has
all to be done at home. They have had the outward signs of their
progress constantly before their eyes. It is true that the United States
is a large country; but it is continuous. No oceans intervene between
New York and Illinois, or between Illinois and Colorado; and the people
as a whole is kept well informed of what the people is doing.
The American comes to London and he sees things which he regards with
contemptuous amusement much as the Englishman might regard some peculiar
old-world institution in a sleepy Dutch community. The great work which
is always being done in London is not easy to see; there is so much of
Old London (not only in a material sense) that the new does not always
leap to the eye. The man who estimates the effective energy of the
British people by what he sees in London, makes an analogous mistake to
that of the Englishman who judges the sentiments of America by what is
told him by his charming friends in New York. The American who would get
any notion of British enterprise or British energy must go afield--to
the Upper Nile and Equatorial Africa, to divers parts of Asia and
Australia. He cannot see the Assouan dam, the Cape to Cairo Railway, the
Indian irrigation works, from the Carlton Hotel, any more than a
foreigner can measure the destiny of the American people by dining at
the Waldorf-Astoria.
This is a point which will bear insisting on. Not long ago an American
stood with me and gazed on the work which was being done in the Strand
Improvement undertaking, and he said that it was a big thing. "But," he
added thoughtfully, "it does not come up to what we have on hand in the
Panama Canal." I pointed out that the Panama Canal was not being cut
through the heart of New York City and apparently the suggestion was new
to him. The American rarely understands that the British Isles are no
more--rather less--than the thirteen original states. Canada and India
are the British Illinois and Florida, Australia and New Zealand
represent the West from Texas to Montana, while South Africa is the
British Pacific Slope; just as Egypt may stand for Cuba, and Burma and
what-not-else set against Alaska and the Philippines. Many times I have
known Americans in England to make jest of the British railways,
comparing them in mileage with the transcontinental lines of their own
country. But the British Transcontinental lines are thrown from Cairo to
the Cape, from Quebec to Vancouver, from Brisbane to Adelaide and
Peshawar to Madras. The people of the United States take legitimate
pride in the growth of the great institutions of learning which have
sprung up all over the West; but there are points of interest of which
they take less account, in similar institutions in, say, Sydney and
Allahabad.
It is not necessary to say that I do not underestimate the energy of the
American character. I have seen too much of the people, am familiar
with too many sections of the country, and have watched it all growing
before my eyes too fast to do that. But I think that the American
exaggerates those qualities in himself at the expense of other peoples,
and he would acquire a new kind of respect for Englishmen--the respect
which one good workman necessarily feels for another--if he knew more of
the British Empire.
A precisely similar exaggeration of his own quality has been bred by
similar causes in the American mind in his estimate of his national
sense of humour. I am not denying the excellence of American humour, for
I have in my library a certain shelf to which I go whenever I feel dull,
and for the books on which I can never be sufficiently grateful. The
American's exaggeration of his own funniness is not positive but
comparative. Just as he is tempted to regard himself as the original
patentee of human progress, and the first apostle of efficiency, so he
is very ready to believe that he has been given something like a
monopoly among peoples of the sense of humour. With a little more
humour, he would undoubtedly have been saved from this particular error.
Especially are the Americans convinced that there is no humour in
Englishmen. Germans and Frenchmen may possess humour of an inferior
sort, but not Englishmen. It is my belief that in the American clubs
where I find copies of _Fliegende Blaetter_ and the _Journal Amusant_,
these papers are much more read than _Punch_, and in not a few cases, I
fear, by men who have but slight understanding of the languages in which
they are printed. Indeed, _Punch_ is a permanent, hebdomadally-recurrent
proof to American readers that Englishmen do not know the meaning of a
joke.[153:1] Americans, of course, do not understand more than a small
proportion of the pages of _Punch_ any more than they would understand
those pages if they were printed in Chinese; but because _Punch_ is
printed in English they think that they do understand it, and because
they cannot see the jokes, they conclude that the jokes are not there.
A certain proportion of American witticisms are recondite to English
readers for precisely similar reasons, but the American belief is that
when an Englishman fails to understand an American joke, it is because
he has no sense of humour; when an American cannot understand an English
one, it is because the joke is not funny. It is a view of the situation
eminently gratifying to Americans; but it is curious that their sense of
humour does not save them from it.
Whatever American humour may be, it is not subtle. It has a
pushfulness--a certain flamboyant self-assertiveness--which it shares
with some other things in the United States; and, however fine the
quality of mind required to produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense
will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any
foreigner fails to catch the point of an American joke or story, that
it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability.
What I take to be (with apologies to Mr. Dunne) the greatest individual
achievement in humorous writing that has been produced in America in
recent years, the Wolfville series of books of Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis,
is practically incomprehensible to English readers, not from any lack of
capacity on their part, but from the difficulties of the dialect and
still more from the strangeness of the atmosphere. In the same way the
Tablets of the scribe Azit Tigleth Miphansi must indeed be but ancient
Egyptian to Americans. But it would not occur to an Englishman to say,
because Americans have not within their reach the necessary data for a
comprehension of Mr. Reed, that, therefore, they do not understand a
joke. Still less because he himself falls away baffled from the Old
Cattleman does the Englishman conclude that the Wolfville books are not
funny. He merely deplores his inability to get on terms with his author.
The English public indeed is curiously ready to accept whatever is said
to be funny and comes from America as being in truth humorous even if
largely unintelligible; but few Americans would give credit for the
existence of humour in those parts of an English book outside their ken.
Yet I think, if it were possible to get the opinion of an impartial jury
on the subject, their verdict would be that the number of humorous
writers of approximately the first or second class is materially greater
in England than in the United States to-day. I am sure that the sense of
humour in the average of educated Englishmen is keener, subtler, and
eminently more catholic than it is in men of the corresponding class in
the United States. The Atlantic Ocean, if the Americans would but
believe it, washes pebbles up on the beaches of its eastern shores no
less than upon the western.[155:1]
American humour [distinctively American humour, for there are humorous
writers in America whose genius shows nothing characteristically
American; but among those who are distinctively American I should class
nearly all the writers who are best known to-day, Mr. Clemens (Mark
Twain), Mr. Dunne, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Lorimer, Mr. Ade]--this distinctively
American humour, then, stands in something the same relation to other
forms of _spirituellisme_ as the work of the poster artist occupies to
other forms of pictorial art. Poster designing may demand a very high
quality of art, and the American workmen are the Cherets, Grassets,
Muchas, of their craft. Few of them do ordinary painting, whether in oil
or water colour. Fewer still use the etcher's needle. None that I am
aware of attempts miniatures--except Mr. Henry James, who, if Americans
may be believed, is not an American, and he has invented a department of
art for himself more microscopic in detail than that of any miniaturist.
The real American humourist, however small his canvas, strives for the
same broad effects.
It is not the quality of posters to be elusive. Their appeal is to the
multitude, and it must be instantaneous. It is easily conceivable that a
person of an educated artistic sense might stand before a poster and
find himself entirely unable to comprehend it, because the thing
portrayed might be something altogether outside his experience. His
failure would be no indictment either of his perceptivity or of the
merit of the work of art.
It is a pity that Americans as a rule do not consider this, for I know
few things that would so much increase American respect for Englishmen
in the mass as the discovery that the latter were not the ponderous
persons they supposed, but even keener-witted than themselves. At the
time of the Venezuelan incident, it is probable that more than all the
laborious protests of good men on both sides of the ocean, more than all
the petitions and the interchange of assurances of good-will between
societies in either country, the thing that did most to allay American
resentment and bring the American people to its senses was that
delightful message sent (was it not?) by the London Stock Exchange to
their _confreres_ in New York, begging the latter to see that when the
British fleet arrived in New York harbour there should be no crowding by
excursion steamers. Like Mr. Anstey's dear German professor, who had
once laboriously constructed a joke and purposed, when he had ample
leisure, to go about to aedificate a second, will Americans please
believe that Englishmen too, if given time, can certainly make others?
And need I say again that in each of the things that I have said,
whether on the subject of American chivalry, American energy, or
American humour, I am not decrying the American's qualities but only
striving to increase his respect for Englishmen?
* * * * *
Now let us look at the other side of the picture. Just as undue
flattery awoke in the American people an exaggerated notion of their
chivalry and their sense of humour, so the reiteration of savage and
contemptuous criticism made them depreciate their general literary
ability. It goes farther back than the "Who ever reads an American
book?" Three quarters of a century earlier the _Edinburgh Review_ (I am
indebted for the quotation to Mr. Sparks) asked: "Why should Americans
write books when a six-weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue
our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads? Prairies,
steamboats, gristmills are their natural objects for centuries to come."
Franklin's _Autobiography_ and Thoreau's _Walden_ are only just, within
the last few years, beginning to find their way into English popular
reprints of the "classics." Few Englishmen would listen with patience to
an argument that the contribution to literature of the Concord school
was of greater or more permanent value than, let us say, the work of the
Lake Poets. So little thought have Englishmen given to the literature of
the United States, that they commonly assume any author who wrote in
English to be, as a matter of course, an Englishman. It is only the
uneducated among the educated classes who do not know that Longfellow
was an American--though I have met such,--but among the educated a small
percentage only, I imagine, would remember, unless suggestion was made
to them, that, for instance, Motley and Bancroft among historians, or
Agassiz and Audubon among men of science (even though one was born in
Switzerland) were Americans. To the vast majority, of course, such names
are names and nothing more, which may not be particularly reprehensible.
But while on the one hand a general indifference to American literature
as a whole has carried with it a lack of acquaintance with individual
writers, that lack of acquaintance with the individuals naturally
reacted to confirm disbelief in the existence of any respectable body of
American literature. And the chilling and century-long contempt of the
English public and of English critics for all American writing produced
its result in a national exaggeration in American minds of their own
shortcomings. Only within the last ten years have Americans as a whole
come to believe that the work of an American writer (excepting only a
very small group) can be on a plane with that of Englishmen.
In England the situation has also changed. American novelists now enjoy
a vogue in England that would have seemed almost incredible two decades
ago. At that time the English public did not look to America for its
fiction, while Americans did look to England; and each new book by a
well-known English novelist was as certain of its reception in the
United States as--perhaps more certain than it was--in England. That has
changed. There are not more than half a dozen writers of fiction in
England to-day of such authority that whatever they write is of
necessity accepted by the American public. Americans turn now first to
their own writers--a dozen or a score of them--and only then do they
seek the English book, always provided that, no matter whose the name
may be that it bears, it has won the approval of their own critics on
its merits. They no longer take it for granted that the best work of
their own authors is as a matter of course inferior to the work of a
well-known Englishman. It may not be many years before the American
public will be so much preoccupied with its own literary output--before
that output will be so amply sufficient for all its needs--that it will
become as contemptuously indifferent to English literature of the day as
Englishmen have, in the past, shown themselves to the product of
American writers. There is, perhaps, no other field in which the
increase of the confidence of the nation in itself is more marked than
in the honour which Americans now pay to their own writers.
It is worth noticing that the English appreciation of American
literature as yet hardly extends beyond works of fiction. Specialists in
various departments of historical research and the natural sciences know
what admirable work is being done in the same fields by individual
workers in the United States; but hardly yet has the specialist--still
less has the general public--formed any adequate conception of the great
mass of that work in those two fields, still less of its quality.
Englishmen do not yet take seriously either American research or
American scholarship. It would be absurd to count noses to prove that
there were more competent historians writing--more scientific
investigators searching into the mysteries--in America than in England
or vice versa; but this I take to be an undoubted fact, namely, that men
of science in more than one field in other countries are beginning to
look rather to the United States than to Great Britain for sound and
original work.
The English ignorance of American literature extends even more markedly
to other departments of productive art.[159:1] The ordinary educated and
art-loving Englishman would be sore put to it to name any single
American painter or draughtsman, living or dead, except Mr. C. D.
Gibson. Whistler and Sargent, of course, are not counted as Americans.
There is not a single American sculptor whose name is known to one in a
hundred of, again I say, educated and art-loving Englishmen, though I
take it to be indisputable that the United States has produced more
sculptors of individual genius in the last half-century than Great
Britain. American architecture conveys to the educated and art-loving
Englishman no other idea than that of twenty-storey "sky-scrapers" built
of steel and glass. Richardson is not even a name to him. He knows
nothing of all the beauty and virility of the work that has been done
in the last thirty years. In the minor arts, he may have heard of
Rookwood pottery and have a vague notion that the Americans turn out
some quite original things in silver work; but of American stained
glass--of Tiffany and La Farge--he has never heard. It would do England
a world of good--it would do international relations a world of good--if
a thoroughly representative exhibition of American painting and
sculpture could be made in London. I commend the idea to some one
competent to handle it; for it would, I think, be profitable to its
promoters. It would certainly be a revelation to Englishmen.
The English indifference to--nay, disbelief in the existence
of--American art is precisely on a par with the American incredulity in
the matter of British humour; and the removal of each of the
misconceptions would tend to the increase of international good-will.
Americans believe the British Empire to be a sanguinary and ferocious
thing. They believe themselves to be possessed of a sense of humour, a
sense of chivalry, and an energy quite lacking in the Englishman; and
each one of the illusions counts for a good deal in the American
national lack of liking for Great Britain. Similarly, Englishmen believe
Americans to be a money-loving people without respectable achievement in
art or literature. I am not sure that it would make the Englishman like
the American any the more if the point of view were corrected, but at
least he would like him more intelligently, and it would prevent him
from saying things--in themselves entirely good-humoured and quite
unintentionally offensive--which hurt American feelings. We cannot
correct an error without recognising frankly that it exists, and the
first step towards making the American and the Englishman understand
what the other really is must be to help each to see how mistaken he is
in supposing the other to be what he is not.
That the American should hold the opinions that he does of England is no
matter of reproach. Not only is it natural, but inevitable. Absorbed as
he has been with his own affairs and his own history, and viewing Great
Britain only in her occasional relations thereto, seeing nothing of her
in her private life or of her position and policies in the world at
large, how could the American have other than a distorted view of
her--how could she assume right proportions or be posed in right
perspective? Nor is the Englishman any more to be blamed. America has
been beyond and below his horizon, and among the travellers' tales that
have come to him of her people and her institutions has been much
misinformation; and if he has not yet--as in the realms of literature
and art--come to any realisation of America's true achievements, how
should he have done so, when Americans themselves have only just shaken
off the morbid sensitiveness and diffidence of their youth, and have so
recently arrived at some partial comprehension of those achievements
themselves?
Probably the most successful joke which _Life_ ever achieved (Americans
will please believe that it is not with any disrespect that I explain to
English readers that _Life_ is the _Punch_ of New York), successful,
that is, measured by the continent-wide hilarity which it provoked, had
relation to the New York dandy who turned up the bottoms of his trousers
because it was "raining in London." That was published--at a
guess--some twenty years ago.
Some ten years later a Chicagoan (one James Norton--he died, alas! all
too soon afterwards) leaped into something like national notoriety by a
certain speech which he delivered at a semi-public dinner in New York.
In introducing Mr. Norton as coming from Chicago the chairman had made
playful reference to the supposed characteristic lack of modesty of
Chicagoans and their pride in their city. Norton, in acknowledgment,
confessed that there was justice in the accusation. Chicagoans, he said,
were proud of their city. They had a right to be. They were as proud of
Chicago as New Yorkers were of London! And the quip ran from mouth to
mouth across the continent.
It would be too much to say that those jokes are meaningless to-day, but
to the younger generation of Americans they have lost most of their
point, for Anglomania has ceased to be the term of reproach that once it
was--it has, at least, dropped from daily use--partly because the
official relations of the country with Great Britain have so much
improved, but much more because the United States has come to consider
herself as Great Britain's equal and, in the new consciousness of her
greatness, the idea of toadying to England has lost its sting. It is
already difficult to throw one's mind back to the conditions of twenty
years ago--to remember the deference which (in New York and the larger
cities at least) was paid to English ideas, English manners, English
styles in dress--the enthusiasm with which any literary man was received
who had some pretension to an English reputation--the disrepute in which
all "domestic" manufactured articles were held throughout the country
in comparison with the "imported," which generally meant English. In all
manufactured products this was so nearly universal that "domestic" was
almost synonymous with inferior and "imported" with superior grades of
goods. That an immense proportion of American manufactured articles were
sold in the United States masquerading as "imported"--and therefore
commanding a better price--goes without saying, and in some lines, in
which the British reputation was too well established and well deserved
to be easily shaken, the practice still survives; but in the great
majority of things, the American now prefers his home-made article, not
merely from motives of patriotism but because he believes that it is the
better article. It is not within our present province to discuss how far
this opinion is correct, or how far the policy of protection, by
assisting manufacturers to obtain control of their own markets and so
distract attention from imported goods, has helped to bring about the
change. The point is that the change has taken place. And, so far as the
ordinary commodities of commerce are concerned, the Englishman is in a
measure aware of what has occurred. He could not be otherwise with the
figures of his trade with the United States before him. Nor can he
conceal from himself the fact that the change of opinion in America may
have some justification when he sees how many things of American
manufacture he himself uses daily and prefers--patriotism
notwithstanding--to the British-made article.
But Englishmen have little conception as yet that the same revolution
has taken place in regard to the less material--less easily
exploited--commodities of art and literature. American novels and the
drawings of Mr. Gibson have made their way in England in the wake of
American boots and American sweetmeats; but Americans would be unwilling
to believe that their creative ability ends with the production of
Western romances and drawings of the American girl.
Until recent years, the volume as well as the quality of the literary
and artistic output of Great Britain was vastly superior to that of the
United States. The two were not comparable; but they are comparable
to-day, though England is as yet unaware of it. In time, Englishmen will
awake to a realisation of the fact; but what the relative standing of
the two countries will be by that time it is impossible to say.
Englishmen would, perhaps, not find it to their disadvantage, and it
would certainly (if not done in too condescending a spirit) not be
displeasing to the people of the United States, if they began, even now,
to take a livelier interest in the work that the other is doing.
FOOTNOTES:
[153:1] At this point my American friend, to the value of whose
criticisms I have already paid tribute, interjects marginally: "none the
less _Fliegende Blaetter_ presents more real humour in a week than is to
be found in _Punch_ in a month." To which I can but make the obvious
reply that I have already said that Americans think so. He points out,
however, further that, while the Munich paper is always to be found in
the higher-class American clubs, it is comparatively infrequent in the
clubs of Great Britain, which is undoubtedly true; and that is a subject
(the relative breadth of outlook on the world-literature of the day in
the two countries) which will necessarily receive attention later on.
[155:1] Lest any American readers should assume that some personal
feeling is responsible for my point of view (which would entirely
destroy any value in my argument) it seems necessary to explain that I
have become calloused to being told that I am the only Englishman the
speaker ever met with an American sense of humour. Sometimes I have
taken it as a compliment.
[159:1] It is merely pathetic to find such a paper as the London
_Academy_ at this late day summing up the American aesthetic impulse as
follows: "Their culture is now a borrowed thing animated by no life of
its own. Their art is become a reflection of French art, their
literature a reflection of English literature, their learning a
reflection of German learning. A velleity of taste in their women of the
richer class seems to be all that maintains in their country the
semblance of a high, serious, and disinterested passion for the things
of the mind."
It would be interesting to learn from the _Academy_ what school of
English writers it is that the American humourists "reflect," who among
English novelists are the models for the present school of Western
fiction, where in English historiography is to be found the prototype of
the great histories of their country, collaborated or otherwise, which
the Americans are now producing, which journals published in England are
responsible for American newspapers, what English magazine is so happy
as to be the father of the _Century_, _Harper's_, or _Scribner's_. The
truth is that the writer in the Academy, like most Englishmen, knows
nothing of American literature as a whole, or he would know that,
whether good or bad, the one quality which it surely possesses is that
it is individual and peculiar to the people. The _Academy_, it is only
fair to say, has recently changed hands and I am not sure that under its
present direction it would make the same mistake.