A COMPARISON IN CULTURE
The Advantage of Youth--Japanese Eclecticism and American--The
Craving for the Best--_Cyrano de Bergerac_--Verestschagin--
Music and the Drama--Culture by Paroxysms--Mr. Gladstone and
the Japanese--Anglo-Saxon Crichtons--Americans as Linguists--
England's Past and America's Future--Americanisms in Speech--
Why they are Disappearing in America--And Appearing in
England--The Press and the Copyright Laws--A Look into the
Future.
Ruskin, speaking of the United States, said that he could never bring
himself to live in a country so unfortunate as to possess no castles.
But, with its obvious disadvantages, youth in a nation has also
compensations. Max O'Rell says that to be American is to be both fresh
and mature, and I have certainly known many Americans who were fresh.
The shoulders are too young for the head to be very old. But when a
man--let us say an Englishman of sixty--full of worldly wisdom, having
travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just
out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very
certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what
seem to the other "new-fangled" things--telephones and typewriters and
bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old
man's youth,--talking of philosophies and theories and principles which
were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the
elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude
and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up
of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old
sound, simple ways were better. Yet it may be--is it not almost
certain?--that the youth has had the training which will give him a
wider outlook than his father ever had, and will make him a broader man.
In our grandfathers' days, a man of reasonable culture could come
approximately near to knowing all that then was known and worth the
knowing. The wisdom and science of the world could be included in the
compass of a modest bookshelf. But the province of human knowledge has
become so wide that, however much "general information" a man may have,
he can truly know nothing unless he studies it as a specialist. It is,
perhaps, largely as a reaction against the Jacksonian theory of
universal competence that the avowed ideal of American education to-day
is to cultivate the student's power of concentration--to give him a
survey, elementary but sound, of as wide a field as possible, but above
all to teach him so to use his mind that to whatever corner of that
field he may turn for his walk in life, he will be able to focus all his
intellect upon it--to concentrate and bring to bear all his energies on
whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his
fortune. When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual
store of knowledge is superficial--a smattering of too many things--but
superficiality is precisely the one quality which, in theory at least,
his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that
the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business.
They know that he throws the same earnestness into his sports. Is it not
reasonable to suppose that he will be no less earnest in the study of
Botticelli? And it is a great advantage (which the American nation
shares with the American youth) to have the products, the literature,
the art, the institutions of the whole world to choose from, with
practically no traditions to hamper the choice.
When the Japanese determined to adopt Western ways, seeing that so only
could they hold their own against the peoples of the West, they did not
model their civilisation on that of any one European country. They sent
the most intelligent of their young men abroad into every country, each
with a mission to study certain things in that country; and so,
gathering for comparison the ways of thought and the institutions of all
peoples, they were able to pick and choose from each what seemed best to
them and to reject all else. They did not propose to make themselves a
nation of imitation Englishmen or Germans or Americans. "But," we can
imagine them saying, "if we take whatever is best in each country we
ought surely to be able to make ourselves into a nation better than
any." They modelled their navy on the British, but not their army, nor
their banking system, nor did they copy much from British commercial or
industrial methods--nor did they take the British system of education.
The United States has been less free to choose. The Japanese had a new
house, quite empty, and they could do their furnishing all at once. The
American nation, though young, has, after all, a century of domestic
life behind it, in the course of which it has accumulated a certain
amount of furniture in the form of institutions, prejudices, and
traditions, some of which are fixtures and could not be torn out of the
structure if the nation wished it; others, though movable, possess
associations for the sake of which it would not part with them if it
could. Fortunately, however, the house has been much built on to of late
years and what goods, or bads, are already amassed can all be stowed
away in a single east wing. All the main building (the eastern wing used
to be the main building, but it is not now), and particularly the
western end and the annex to the north, are new and empty, to be
decorated and furnished as the owner pleases. And while the owner, like
a sensible man, intends to do all that he can to encourage home
manufactures, he does not hesitate to go as far afield as he likes to
fill a nook with something better than anything that can be turned out
at home.
Nothing strikes an Englishman more, after he comes to know the people,
than this eclectic habit, paradoxically combined as it is with an
intense--an over-noisy--patriotism. "The best," the American is fond of
saying, "is good enough for me"; and it never occurs to him that he has
not entire right to the best wherever he may find it. In England it is
only a small part of the population which considers itself entitled to
the best of anything. The rest of the people may covet, but the best
belongs to "their betters." The American knows no "betters." He comes to
England and walks, as of right, into the best hotels, the best
restaurants, the best seats at the theatres--and the best society. He
buys, so far as his purse permits, and often his purse permits a great
deal, the best works of art. The consequence is that the world brings
him of its best. It may defraud him once in a while into buying an
imitation or a second-class article patched up; but, on the whole, the
American people has something like the best of the world to choose from.
And what is true of the palpable and material things is equally true of
the intangible and intellectual.
Englishmen have long been familiar with one aspect of this fact, in the
honours which America has in the past been ready to shower on any
visiting Englishman of distinction: in the extraordinary number of
dollars that she has been willing to pay to hear him lecture. Of this
particular commodity--the lecturing Englishman--the people has been
fairly sated; but because Americans are no longer eager to lionise any
English author or artist with some measure of a London reputation, it
does not by any means imply that they are not still seeking for, and
grappling, the best in art and letters wherever they can find it. They
only doubt whether the Englishman who comes to lecture is, after all,
the best.
A Frenchman has pronounced American society to be the wittiest in the
world. A German has said that more people read Dante in Boston than in
Berlin. I take it that many more read Shakespeare in the United States
than in Great Britain--and they certainly try harder to understand him.
Nor need it be denied that they have to try harder. Without any
knowledge of actual sales, I have no doubt that the number of copies of
the works of any continental European author, of anything like a
first-class reputation, sold in America is vastly greater than the
number sold in England. Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen,
Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche--I give the names at
random as they come--of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a
"cult" in the United States than in England--a far larger proportion of
the population makes some effort to master what is worth mastering in
each. Rodin's works--his name at least and photographs of his
masterpieces--are familiar to tens of thousands of Americans belonging
to classes which in England never heard of him. Helleu's drawings were
almost a commonplace of American illustrated literature six years before
one educated Englishman in a hundred knew his name. Zoern's etchings are
almost as well known in the United States as Whistler's. Englishmen
remain curiously engrossed in English things.
It may be a very disputable judgment to say that the most nearly
Shakespearian literary production of modern times--at least of those
which have gained any measure of fame--is M. Rostand's _Cyrano de
Bergerac_. Immediately on its publication it was greeted in America with
hardly less enthusiasm than in Paris; and within a few weeks it became
the chief topic of conversation at a thousand dinner tables. In a few
months I had seen the play acted by three different companies--all
admirable, scholarly productions, of which the most famous and most
"authorised" was by no means the best--and soon thereafter I came to
England, for a short visit, but with the determination to find time to
make the trip to Paris to see M. Coquelin as "Cyrano." I found
Englishmen--educated Englishmen, including not a few authors and
critics to whom I spoke--practically unaware of the existence of such a
play. Of those who had heard of it and read _critiques_, I met not one
who had read the work itself. Some time after, Sir Charles Wyndham
produced it in London and it was, I believe, not a success. To-day
_Cyrano de Bergerac_ (I am speaking of it not as an acting play but as
literature) is practically unknown even to educated Englishmen, except
such as make French literature their special study.
_Cyrano_ may or may not be on a level with any but the greatest of
Shakespeare's plays (it is evident from his other work that M. Rostand
is not a Shakespeare) but that it was an immeasurably finer thing than
ninety-nine per cent of the books of the year which English people were
reading that winter on the advice of English critics is beyond question.
The nation which was reading and discussing M. Rostand's work was
conspicuously better engaged than the nation which was reading and
discussing the English novels of the season.
Again when poor Vasili Verestschagin met his death so tragically off
Port Arthur, his name meant little or nothing to the great majority of
educated Englishmen, though there had been exhibitions of his work in
London--the same exhibitions as were made throughout the larger cities
of the United States. In America regret for him was wide-spread and
personal, for he stood for something definite in American eyes--rather
unfortunately, perhaps, in one way, because Verestschagin, too, had
painted those miserable sepoys being eternally blown from British guns.
The general English misapprehension of the present condition of art and
literature in America sometimes shows itself in unexpected places. I
have a great love for _Punch_. Since the time when the beautifying of
its front cover with gamboge and vermilion and emerald green constituted
the chief solace of wet days in the nursery, I doubt if, in the course
of forty years, I have missed reading one dozen copies of the London
_Charivari_. After a period of exile in regions where current literature
is unobtainable one of the chief delights of a return to civilisation is
"catching up" with the back numbers of _Punch_; nor, in spite of gibes
to the contrary, has the paper ever been more brilliant than under its
present editorship. Yet _Punch_ in this present week of September 11,
1907, represents an American woman, apparently an American woman of
wealth and position (at all events she is at the time touring in Italy),
as saying on hearing an air from _Il Trovatore_: "Say, these Italians
ain't vurry original. Guess I've heard that tune on our street organs in
New York ever since I was a gurl."
The weaknesses of the peoples of other nations are fair game; but it is
the essence of just caricature that it should have some verisimilitude.
_Punch_ could not publish that drawing with the accompanying legend
unless it was the belief of the editor or the staff that such a solecism
was more or less likely to proceed from the mouth of such an American as
is depicted; which is precisely the error of the Frenchman who believes
that Englishmen sell their wives at Smithfield. Thirty years ago, the
lampoon would have had some justification; but at the present time both
the actual number and the percentage of women who are familiar with the
Italian operas is, I believe, vastly greater in America than in
England. This statement will undoubtedly be received with incredulity by
the majority of Englishmen who know nothing about the United States; but
no one who does know the people of the country will dispute it. In
England, the opera is still, for all the changes that have occurred in
the last quarter of a century, largely a pleasure of a limited class. It
may be (and personally I believe) that in that class there is a larger
number of true musicians who know the operas well and love them
appreciatively than is to be found in the United States; but the number
of people who have a reasonable acquaintance with the majority of
operas, and are familiar with the best known airs from each and with the
general characteristics of the various composers, is immensely larger in
America. It is only the same fact that we have confronted so often
before--the fact of the greater homogeneousness or uniformity of tastes
and pursuits in the American people.
It must be clearly understood, here as elsewhere, that I am not
comparing merely the people of New York with the people of London, but
the people of the whole United States of all classes, urban and
provincial, industrial and peasant, East and West, with the whole
population of all classes in the British Isles; for a large percentage
of the mistakes which Englishmen make about America arises from the fact
that they insist on comparing the educated classes of London with such
people as they may chance to have met in New York or one or two Eastern
cities, under the impression that they are thereby drawing a comparison
between the two peoples. Senator Hoar's opinion of Matthew Arnold has
been already quoted; and the truth is that very few Englishmen who have
written about America have lived in the country long enough to grasp how
much of the United States lies on the other side of the North River. Not
only does not New York alone, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Washington combined do not bear anything like the same relation to
America as a whole as London bears to the British Isles. Englishmen take
no account of, for they have not seen and no one has reported to them,
the intense craving for and striving after culture and self-improvement
which exists (and has existed for a generation) not only in such larger
cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans,
but in many hundreds of smaller communities scattered from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. One must have such a vision of the United States as a
whole as will enable him to imagine all this endeavour, now dissipated
over so vast a stretch of country, as all massed together into a
territory no larger than the British Isles before he can arrive at an
intelligent basis of comparison between the peoples. What is centralised
in England in America is diffused over half a continent and much less
easily measurable.
It happens that as I am correcting the proofs of the chapter the London
newspapers of the day (January 25, 1908) contain announcements of the
death in New York of Edward MacDowell. He was often spoken of as "the
American Grieg"; but it was a phrase which irritated many good musical
critics in America, for the reason that they considered their countryman
the greater man of the two. They would have had Grieg spoken of as the
Norwegian MacDowell. In that judgment they may have been right or they
may have been wrong; but it is characteristic of the attitudes of the
British and American peoples that, whereas the people of the United
States know Grieg better than he is known in England (that is to say,
that a larger proportion of the people, outside the classes which
professedly account themselves musical, have more or less acquaintance
with his music), just as they know the work of half a dozen English
composers, MacDowell, though he had played his pianoforte concertos in
London, remained almost unknown in England outside of strictly musical
circles. It is certain that had MacDowell been an Englishman he would
have been immensely better known in America than, being an American, he
ever was in England.
In the kindred field of the drama the general English idea of the
American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of
"musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been
brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if
Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy
Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by
the managers to be the sort of thing that England wants or which is
likely to succeed in England, not because they are what America
considers her best product. To attempt any comparison of the living
playwrights or actors in the two countries would be a thorny and
perilous undertaking; and if any comparison is to be made at all it must
be done lightly and as far as possible examples must be drawn from those
who are no longer actively on the boards. Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary
Anderson) has deliberately put on record her opinion of Miss Clara
Morris as "the greatest emotional actress I ever saw." It is not likely
that when Madame de Navarro pronounced that estimate she was forgetting
either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell--or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or
Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have
read Miss Morris's wonderful book, _Life on the Stage_, will think the
judgment in this case not incredible.
Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has
just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship,
restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an
English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is
in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living
English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England
would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in
sufficient numbers to make its presentation a success if it had been
achieved in London.
It was said that in any effort to arrive at an estimate of American
culture, or to state that culture in terms of English culture, we should
have to find landmarks in trifles. All these things are such trifles.
Let us concede that _Cyrano_ is not the greatest literature, nor is
Verestschagin's work the highest art; still neither the one nor the
other is properly a negligible quantity in the sum-total of the creative
work of the generation. There may be many American women who do not know
their Verdi, and it may be that Madame de Navarro's estimate of Miss
Morris, mine of Mr. Mansfield, and that of certain American critics of
Edward MacDowell are equally at fault; but it still remains absurd to
take ignorance of the Italian operas as characteristic of American
women or to talk contemptuously, as many Englishmen do, of the American
theatre, because they have no knowledge of it beyond what they have seen
of the one class of production from _The Belle of New York_ to _The
Prince of Pilsen_, or of American music, because their acquaintance with
it begins and ends with Sousa and the writers of "coon songs."
* * * * *
It will be urged that successive "crazes" for individual artists or
authors, for particular productions or even isolated schools, are no
evidence of any general culture. Conceding this, it remains impossible
to avoid the question: supposing a nation or an individual to spend each
successive six months in a new enthusiasm--six months on Plato and
Aristotelianism,--six months, taking the _Light of Asia_, Mr. Sinnett,
and _Kim_ as a starting point, on Buddhism and esoteric philosophy,--six
months, inspired by Fitzgerald, on Omar, Persian literature and history
and the various ramifications thereof,--six months on M. Rodin, his
relation to the art of sculpture in general and particularly to the
sculpture of the Greeks,--a similar six months devoted to Mr. Watt with
like excursions into his environment, proximate and remote,--six months
to Millet, Barbizon, and the history of French painting,--six months of
Russian art with Verestschagin and six with Russian literature and
politics working outwards from Count Tolstoi,--six months of philosophic
speculation radiating from Haeckel,--six months absorbed in Japanese
art,--six months burrowing in Egyptian excavations and Egyptian
history--the question is, I say, supposing a nation or an individual to
have passed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten,
every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience
known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a
greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual
to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration,
with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that
individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching
culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with
something less of the aesthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or
disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman
who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the
university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the
intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end
of the ten years of successive _furores_ be the same intellectual
condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has
spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is
probable that, besides the accumulation of a great quantity of
information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards
of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth
remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has
declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is
conspicuously more culture.
When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American
woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he
dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual
knowledge possessed compared with the potentiality of knowledge on any
one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many
persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr.
Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he
was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where
among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom
happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with
fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which
Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was
asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man,"
he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about everything
in the world except Japan. He knows nothing at all about Japan."
The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the
information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is
worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the
American character, this American desire to become a universal
specialist--this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge--is an
essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be
content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole.
The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all
national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a
_la-la-la_ whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all
Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they
could. And--perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a
thief--although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is
equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too
nearly complete.
Americans rather like to repeat that story of Mr. Gladstone, when the
talk is of English culture.
The American as a rule is a better linguist than the Englishman,--he is
quicker, that is, to pick up a modern language and likely to speak it
with a better accent. "Never trust an Englishman who speaks French
without an English accent," said Prince Bismarck; and the remark,
however unjust it may be to an occasional individual, showed a shrewd
insight into the English character. There is always to be recognised the
fact that there are tens--perhaps hundreds--of thousands of Englishmen
who speak Hindustani, Pushtu, or the language of any one of a hundred
remote peoples with whom the Empire has traffic, while the American has
had no contact with other peoples which called for a knowledge of any
tongue but his own, except that in a small way some Spanish has been
useful. But so far as European languages go, the Englishman, in more or
less constant and intimate relation with each of the peoples of Europe,
has been so well satisfied of his own superiority to each that it has
seemed vastly more fitting that they should learn his language than that
he should trouble to learn theirs. Under any circumstances, is it not
obviously easier for each one of the European peoples to learn to talk
English than for the Englishman to learn eight European tongues with
eighty miscellaneous dialects?
When an Englishman does learn a foreign language, it is most commonly
for literary or scholastic purposes, rather than (with the exception of
French in certain classes) for conversational use. The American on the
other hand, having had no need of languages in the past, coming now in
contact with the world, sees that there are three or four languages of
Europe which it is most desirable that he should know, if only for
commercial purposes; and a language learned for commercial purposes must
be mastered colloquially and idiomatically. The American is not
distracted by the need of Sanskrit or of any one of the numerous more or
less primitive tongues which a certain proportion of the English people
must acquire if the business of the Empire is to go on. Nor is his
vision confused by seeing all the European tongues jumbled, as it were,
together before him at too close range. He can distinguish which are the
essential or desirable languages for his purposes; and the rising
generation of Americans is learning those languages more generally, and
in a more practical way, than is the rising generation of Englishmen.
* * * * *
And yet we have not crossed that morass;--nor perhaps, however superior
in folly we may be to the angels, is it desirable that we should in
plain daylight. We have at most found some slight vantage-ground: thrown
up a mole-hill of a Pisgah from which we can attain a distant view of
what lies beyond the swamp, even if perchance we have taken some mirages
and _ignes fatui_ for solid landscape and actual illuminations.
The ambitions and ideals of the two peoples are fundamentally alike; nor
is there so great a difference as appears on the surface in their method
of striving to attain those ideals and realise those ambitions, albeit
the American uses certain tools (modern he calls them, the Englishman
preferring to say new-fangled) to which the Englishman's hands have not
taken kindly. It is natural that the English nation, having a so much
larger past, should be more influenced by it than the American. It is
natural that the American, conscious that his national character has but
just shaped itself out of the void, with all the future before it,
should look more to the present and the future than the Englishman.
The Englishman prefers to turn almost exclusively to the study of
antiquity--the art and philosophies and letters of past ages--for the
foundation of his work, and thence to push on between almost strictly
British lines. The American seeks rather to absorb only so much of the
wisdom and taste of antiquity as may serve for an intelligent
comprehension of the world-art, the world-philosophies, the
world-literature of to-day, and then, borrowing what he will from each
department of those, to strive on that foundation to build something
better than any. There are many scholars and students in America who
would prefer to see the people less eager to push on. There are many
thinkers and educators in England who hold that English scholarship and
training dwell altogether too much in the past and that it were better
if England would look more abroad and would give larger attention to the
conditions of modern life--the conditions which her youth will have to
meet in the coming generation.
If an American were asked which of the two peoples was the more
cultivated, the more widely informed, he would probably say: "You
fellows have been longer at the game than we have. You've had more
experience in the business; but we believe we've got every bit as good
raw material as you and a blamed sight better machinery. Also we are
more in earnest and work that machinery harder than you. Maybe we are
not turning out as good goods yet--and maybe we are. But it's a dead
sure thing that if we aren't yet, we're going to."
A common index to the degree of cultivation in any people is found in
their everyday language--their spoken speech; but here again in
considering America from the British standpoint we have to be careful or
we may be entrapped into the same fallacy as threatens us when we
propose to judge the United States by its newspapers. In the first place
the right of any people to invent new forms of verbal currency to meet
the requirements of its colloquial exchange must be conceded. There was
a time when an Americanism in speech was condemned in England because it
was American. When so many of the Americanisms of ten years ago are
incorporated in the daily speech even of educated Englishmen to-day, it
would be affectation to put forward such a plea nowadays. Going deeper
than this, we undoubtedly find that the educated Englishman to-day
speaks with more precision than the educated American. The educated
Englishman speaks the language of what I have already called the public
school and university class. But while the Englishman speaks the
language of that class, the American speaks the language of the whole
people. That is not, of course, entirely true, for there are grades of
speech in the United States, but it is relatively true--true for the
purpose of a comparison with the conditions in Great Britain. The
Englishman may be surprised at the number of solecisms committed in the
course of an hour's talk by a well-to-do New Yorker whom he has met in
the company of gentlemen in England. He would perhaps be more surprised
to find a mechanic from the far West commit no more. The tongue of
educated Englishmen is not the tongue of the masses--nor is it a
difference in accent only, but in form, in taste, in grammar, and in
thought. If in England the well-to-do and gentle classes had commercial
transactions only among themselves, it is probable that a currency
composed only of gold and silver would suffice for their needs; copper
is introduced into the coinage to meet the requirements of the poor.
American speech has its elements of copper for the same reason--that all
may be able to deal in it, to give and take change in its terms. It is
the same fact as we have met before, of the greater homogeneousness of
the American people--the levelling power (for want of a better phrase)
of a democracy.
The Englishman may object, and with justice, that because an educated
man must incorporate into his speech words and phrases and forms which
are necessary for communication with the vulgar, there is no reason why
he should not be able to reserve those forms and phrases for use with
the vulgar only. A gentleman does not pay half-a-crown, lost at the card
table to a friend, in coppers. Why cannot the educated American keep his
speech silver and gold for educated ears? All of which is just. There
are people in the United States who speak with a preciseness equal to
that of the most exacting of English precisians, but they are not fenced
off as in England within the limits of a specified class; while the
common speech of the American people, which is used by a majority of
those who would in England come within the limits of that fenced area,
is much more careless in form and phrase than the speech of educated
Englishmen. It may be urged that it is much less careless, and better
and vastly more uniform, than any one of the innumerable forms of speech
employed by the various lower classes in England; which is true. The
level of speech is better in America; but the speech of the educated and
well-to-do is generally much better in England. All this, however (which
is mere commonplace) may be conceded, but, though educated Americans may
use a more debased speech than educated Englishmen, the point is that it
is not safe to argue therefrom to an inferiority in culture in America;
because the American uses his speech for other and wider purposes than
the Englishman. The different American classes, just as they dress
alike, read the same newspapers and magazines, and, within limits, eat
the same food, so they speak the same language. It is unjust to compare
that language with the language used in England only by the educated
classes.
But, what is an infinitely larger fact, the inferiority of the American
speech to the English is daily and rapidly disappearing. Twenty years
ago, practically all American speech fell provincially on educated
English ears. That is far from being the case to-day; and what is most
interesting is that the alteration has not come about as the result of a
change in the diction of Americans only. The change has been in
Englishmen also. To whatever extent American speech may have improved,
it is certain also that English speech has become much less
precise--much less uniform among the educated and "gentlemanly"
classes--and English ears are consequently less exacting.
With the gradual elimination of class distinctions in England, or rather
with the blurring of the lines which separate one class from another, a
multitude of persons pass for "gentlemen" in England to-day who could
not have dreamed--and whose fathers certainly did not dream--of being
counted among the gentry thirty-five years ago. The fact may be for good
or ill; but one consequence has been that the newcomers, thrusting up
into the circles above them, have taken with them the speech of their
former associates, so that one hears now, in nominally polite circles,
tones of voice, forms of speech, and the expression of points of view
which would have been impossible in the youth of people who are now no
more than middle-aged.
There was a time when the dress proclaimed the man of quality at once.
That distinction began to pass away with the disappearance of silk and
ruffles and wigs from masculine costume. For a century longer, the
shibboleths of voice and manner kept their force. But now those too are
going; and the result is that the English speech of the educated class
has become less precise and less uniform. The same speech is now common
to a larger proportion of the people. In the days when nearly all the
members of educated society--we are speaking of the men only, for they
only counted in those days--had been to one or other of the same "seven
great public schools" (which not one public school man in a hundred can
name correctly to-day) and to one or other of the same two universities,
they kept for use among themselves all through their after life the
forms of speech, the catchwords, the classical references which passed
current in their school and undergraduate days. It was a free-masonry of
speech on which the outsider could not intrude. To-day, when not a
quarter of the members of the same circles have been to one of those
same seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a
quarter have been to no recognised classical school at all, it is
impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a
hundred trite classical quotations (no great evidence of scholarship,
but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our
fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to
which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be
a parlous experiment in small talk to-day. They have vanished from
common conversation even more completely than they have disappeared from
the debates of the House of Commons. And this is only a type of the
change which has come over the educated speech of England, which we may
regret or we may welcome. It may be sad that the English gentleman
should speak in less literary form than he did thirty years ago, but the
loss may be outweighed many times by the fact that so much larger a
proportion of the people speak the same speech as he--not so refined as
his used to be, but materially better than the majority of those who use
it to-day could then have shaped their lips to frame. Few Englishmen at
least would acquiesce in the opinion that it showed a decay of culture
in England--that the people were more ignorant or less educated. It may
not be safe to draw an analogous conclusion in the case of the American
people.
A story well-known to most Englishmen has to do with the man who,
arriving at Waterloo station to take a train, went into the refreshment
room for a cup of coffee. In his haste he spilled the coffee over his
shirt front and thereupon fell to incontinent cursing of "this d----d
London and South-Western Railway."
An American variant of, or pendant to, the same story tells of the
Eastern man who approached Salt Lake City on foot and sat by the wayside
to rest. By ill luck he sat upon an ants' nest. Shortly he rose
anathematising the "lustful Mormon city" and turned his face eastward
once more, a Mormon-hater to the end of his days.
Not much less illogical is an Englishman I know who, having spent some
three weeks in the United States, loathes the people and all the
institutions thereof, almost solely (though the noise of the elevated
trains in New York has something to do with it) because he found that
they applied the name of "robin" to what he calls "a cursed great
thrush-beast." Nearly every English visitor to the United States has
been irritated at first by discovering this, or some similar fact; but
it is not necessary on that account to hate the American people, to
express contempt for their art and literature, and to belittle their
commercial greatness and all the splendours of their history.[214:1]
Rather ought Englishmen to like this application by the early colonists
to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the
well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the
wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and
strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in
the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown
dear to them in far-off peaceful English villages.
We will not now potter again over the well-trodden paths of the
differences in phraseology in the two peoples which have been so
fruitful a source of "impressions" in successive generations of English
visitors to the United States, for the thing grows absurd when "car,"
and "store," and "sidewalk," and "elevator" are commonplaces on the lips
of every London cockney; nor is there any need here to thread again the
mazes of the well-worn discussion as to how far the peculiarities of
modern American speech are only good old English forms which have
survived in the New World after disappearance from their original
haunts.[215:1] The subject is worth referring to, however, for the very
reason that its discussion _has_ become almost absurd,--because by a
process which has been going on, as we have already said, on both sides
of the ocean simultaneously, the differences themselves are
disappearing, the tongues of the two peoples are coming together and
coalescing once more. The two currents into which the stream divided
which flowed from that original well of English are drawing
together--are, indeed, already so close that it will be but a very short
time when the word "Americanism" as applied to a peculiarity in language
will have ceased to be used in England. The "Yankee twang" and the
"strong English accent" will survive in the two countries respectively
for some time yet; but the written and spoken language of the two
nations will be--already almost is--the same, and English visitors to
the United States will have lost one fruitful source of impressions.
The process has been going on in both countries, but in widely different
forms. And this seems to me a peculiarly significant fact. In America
the language of the people is constantly and steadily tending to
improve; and this tendency is, Englishmen should note, the result of a
deliberate and conscious effort at improvement on the part of the
people. This can hardly be insisted upon too strongly.
The majority of "Americanisms" in speech were in their origin mere
provincialisms--modes of expression and pronunciation which had sprung
up unchecked in the isolated communities of a scattered people. They
grew with the growth of the communities, until they threatened to graft
themselves permanently on the speech of the nation. The United States is
no longer a country of isolated and scattered communities. After the
Civil War, and partly as a result thereof, but still more as a result of
the knitting together of the whole country by the building of the
American railway system, with the consequent sudden increase in
intimacy of communication between all parts, there developed in the
people a new sense of national unity. England saw a revolution in her
means of communication when railways superseded stage-coaches and when
the penny post was established; but no revolution comparable to that
which has taken place in the United States in the present generation.
Prior to 1880--really until 1883--Portland, Oregon, was hardly less
removed from Portland, Maine, than Capetown is from Liverpool to-day,
and the discomforts of travel from one to the other were incomparably
greater. Now they are morally closer together than London and Aberdeen,
in as much as nowhere between the Atlantic and Pacific is there any such
consciousness of racial difference as separates the Scots from the
English.
The work of federation begun by the original thirteen colonies is not
yet completed, for the individuality of the several States is destined
to go on being continuously more merged--until it will finally be almost
obliterated--in the Federal whole; but it may be said that in the last
twenty-five years, and not until then, has the American people become
truly unified--an entity conscious of its oneness and of its commercial
greatness in that oneness, thinking common thoughts, co-operating in
common ambitions, and speaking a common speech. Into that speech were at
first absorbed, as has been said, the peculiarities, localisms, and
provincialisms which had inevitably grown up in different sections in
the days of non-communication. But precisely those same causes--the
settlement of the country, the construction of the railways, the
development of the natural resources--which contributed to the
unification and laid the foundations of the greatness, produced, with
wealth and leisure, new ambitions in the people. The desire for art and
literature and, what we have called the all-culture, was no new growth,
but an instinct inherited from the original English stock. Quickened it
must have been by the moral uplifting of the people by the Civil War,
but, as we have already seen, for some time after the close of that war
the whole energies of the people were necessarily devoted to material
things. Only with the completion of the repairing of the ravages of that
war, and with the almost coincident settlement of the last great waste
tracts of the country, were the people free to reach out after things
immaterial and aesthetic; and only with the accession of wealth, which
again these same causes produced, came the possibility of gratifying the
craving for those things. And in the longing for self-improvement and
self-culture, thus newly inspired and for the first time truly national,
one of the things to which the people turned with characteristic
earnestness was the improvement of the common speech. The nation has set
itself purposefully and with determination to purify and prevent the
further corruption of its language.
The movement towards "simplification" of the spelling may or may not be
in the direction of purification, but it will be observed that the
movement itself could not have come into being without the national
desire for improvement. The American speech is now the speech of a
solidified and great nation; and it cannot be permitted to retain the
inelegancies and colloquialisms which were not intolerable, perhaps, in
the dialect of a locality in the days when that locality had but
restricted intercourse with other parts of the country. This effort to
purify the common tongue is conscious, avowed, and sympathised with in
all parts of the country alike.
When any point of literary or grammatical form is under discussion in a
leading American newspaper to-day, the dominant note is that of a purism
more strict than will appear in a similar discussion in England. In many
American newspaper offices the rules of "style" forbid the use of
certain words and phrases which are accepted without question in the
best London journals. There have of course always been circles--as,
notoriously, in and around Boston, and, less notoriously but no less
truly, in Philadelphia and New York--wherein the speech, whether written
or spoken, has been as scrupulous in form and grammar as in the most
scholarly circles in Great Britain. These circles corresponded to what
we have called the public-school and university class of England, and,
no more than it, did they speak the common speech of their country. Only
now is the people as a whole consciously striving after an uplifting of
such common speech.
In England, on the other hand, the process that has been going on has
been quite involuntary and is as yet almost entirely unconscious.
We have spoken so far of only one factor in that process--namely, the
democratisation of the English people which is in progress and the
blurring of the lines between the classes. Co-operating with this are
other forces. Just as the most well-bred persons can afford on occasions
to be most careless of their manners--just as only an old-established
aristocracy can be truly reckless of the character of new associates
whom it may please to take up--so it may be that the well-educated man,
confident of his impeccability and altogether off his guard, more
readily absorbs into his daily speech cant phrases and even solecisms
than the half-educated who is ever watchful lest he slip. The American
has a way of writing, figuratively, with a dictionary at his elbow and a
grammar within reach. There are few educated Englishmen who do not
consider their own authority--the authority drawn from their school and
university training--superior to that of any dictionary or grammar,
especially of any American one.[220:1] So it has come about that, while
the tendency of the American people is constantly to become more exact
and more accurate in its written and spoken speech, the English tendency
is no less constantly towards a growing laxity; and while the American
has been sternly and conscientiously at work pruning the inelegancies
out of his language, the Briton has been lightheartedly taking these
same inelegancies to himself. It is obviously impossible that such a
twofold tendency can go on for long without the gulf between the quality
of the respective languages becoming appreciably narrower.
* * * * *
The American writers who now occupy places on the staffs of London
journals are thoroughly deserving of their places. They have earned
these and retain them on the ground of their capacity as news gatherers,
and through the brilliancy of their descriptive writing. They possess
what is described as "newspaper ability" as opposed to "literary
ability." It is, nevertheless, the fact that in the majority of the
newspaper offices, the "copy" of these writers is permitted to pass
through the press with an immunity from interference on the part either
of editor or proof-reader, which, a decade back, would not have been
possible in any London office. Thus the British public, unwarned and
unconscious, is daily absorbing at its breakfast table, and in the
morning and evening trains, American newspaper English, which is the
output of English newspaper offices. It is not now contended that this
English is any worse than the public would be likely to receive from the
same class of English writers, but the fact itself is to be noted. I am
not prepared to agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in holding the English writer
necessarily blameworthy who "in serious work introduces, needlessly,
into our tongue an American phrase." Such introductions, however
needless, may materially enrich the language, and I should, even with
the permission of Mr. Lang, extend the same latitude to the introduction
of Scotticisms.
A more important matter for consideration is the present condition of
the copyright laws of the two countries. English publishers understand
well enough why it is occasionally cheaper, or, taking all the
conditions together, more advantageous to have put into type in the
United States rather than in Great Britain the work of a standard
English novelist, and to bring the English edition into print from a
duplicate set of American plates. On the other hand, it is exceptional
for a novel, or for any book by an American writer, to be put into type
in England for publication in both countries. For the purpose of
bringing the text of such books into line with the requirements of
English readers, it is the practice of the leading American publishers
to have one division of their composing-rooms allotted to typesetting by
the English standard, with the use by the proof-readers of an English
dictionary. It occasionally happens, however, that the attention of
these proof-readers to the task of securing an English text limits
itself to a few typical examples, such as spelling "colour" with a "u"
and seeing that "centre" does not appear as "center," while all that
constitutes the essence of American style, as compared with the English
style, is passed unmolested and without change.
Such a result is, doubtless, inevitable in the case of a work by an
American writer who has his own idea of literary expression and his own
standard of what constitutes literary style, but the resulting text not
infrequently gives ground for criticism on the part of English
reviewers, and for some feeling of annoyance on the part of cultivated
English readers.
In the case of books by English authors which are put into type in
American printing-offices, there is, of course, no question of
modification of style or of form of expression, but with these, as
stated, the proof-readers are not always successful in eliminating
entirely the American forms of spelling.
The English publisher, even though he give a personal reading to the
book in the form in which it finally leaves his hands, (and, in the
majority of cases, having read it once in manuscript, he declines to go
over the pages a second time, but contents himself with a cursory
investigation of the detail of "colour," of "centre,") is not
infrequently dissatisfied, but it is too late for any changes in the
text, and he can only let the volume go out. In the case of books
printed in England from plates made in America, there is nothing at all
to warn the reader; while in the case of books bound in England from
sheets actually printed in the United States, there is nothing which the
reader is likely to notice; and in nine cases out of ten the Englishman
is unconscious that he is reading anything but an English book. The
critic may understand, and the man who has lived long in the United
States and who can recognise the characteristics of American diction,
assuredly will understand, but these form, of course, a very small class
in the community; and when the rest of the public is constantly reading
American writing without a thought that it is other than English
writing, it is hardly strange that American forms of speech creep daily
more and more largely into the English tongue. What is really strange is
that the educational authorities have been prepared to accept and to
utilise in English schools many American educational books carrying
American forms of speech and American spelling.
The morality or the wisdom of the English copyright laws is not at the
moment under discussion, but it is my own opinion (which I believe to be
the opinion of every Englishman who has given any attention to the
matter) that not on any ground of literary criticism, or because of any
canons of taste, but merely as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence
to England, and for the sake of securing additional employment for
British labour, the laws of copyright are in no less radical and urgent
need of amendment than the English postal laws. What we are here
concerned with, however, is the effect of the present condition of these
laws as one of the contributory factors which are co-operating to lessen
the difference, once so wide and now so narrow, between the American and
the English tongue.
Nor can there be any doubt of the result of this twofold process if it
be allowed to continue indefinitely, working in England towards a
democratisation and Americanisation of the speech, and in America
towards a higher standard of taste, based on earlier English literary
models. The two currents, once divergent, now so closely confluent, will
meet; but will they continue to flow on in one stream? Or will the same
tendencies persist, so that the currents will cross and again diverge,
occupying inverse positions?
In a hundred years from now, when, as a result of the apparently
inevitable growth of the United States in wealth, in power, and in
influence, its speech and all other of its institutions will come to be
held in the highest esteem, is it possible that Londoners may vehemently
put forward their claim to speak purer American than the Americans
themselves--just as many Americans assert to-day that their speech is
nearer to the speech of Elizabethan England than is the speech of modern
Englishmen? Is it possible that it will be only in the common language
of Englishmen that philologists will be able to find surviving the racy,
good old American words and phrases of the last decades of the
nineteenth century--a period which will be to American literature what
the Elizabethan Age is to English. It may, of course, be absurd, but
already there are certain individual Americanisms which have long been
_taboo_ in every reputable office in the United States, but are used
cheerfully and without comment in London dailies.
* * * * *
Once more it seems necessary to take precaution lest I be interpreted as
having said more than I really have said. It would be a mere
impertinence to affect to pronounce a general judgment on the level of
culture or of achievement of the two peoples in all fields of art and
effort; and the most that an individual can do is to take such isolated
examples drawn from one or from the other, as may serve in particular
matters as some sort of a standard of measurement. What I am striving to
convey to the average English reader is, of course, not an impression of
any inferiority in the English, but only the fact that the Englishman's
present estimate of the American is almost grotesquely inadequate.
FOOTNOTES:
[214:1] Mr. Archer, I find, has this delightful story: "A friend of mine
returned from a short tour in the United States, declaring that he
heartily disliked the country and would never go back again. Enquiry as
to the grounds of his dissatisfaction elicited no more definite or
damning charge than that 'they' (a collective pronoun presumed to cover
the whole American people) hung up his trousers instead of folding
them--or _vice versa_, for I am heathen enough not to remember which is
the orthodox process."
[215:1] But I cannot resist recording my astonishment at finding in Ben
Jonson the phrase "to have a good time" used in precisely the sense in
which the American girl employs it to-day, or at learning from Macaulay
that Bishop Cooper in the time of Queen Elizabeth spoke of a "platform"
in its exact modern American political meaning.
[220:1] Though it is worth noting that incomparably the best dictionary
of the English language yet completed is an American one.