proviso and apology, at the very beginning of any attempt at a record of
any impressions of a foreign society. They serve merely to illustrate
the most important impression of all, the impression of how false all
impressions may be. I suspect that most of the very false impressions
have come from the careful record of very true facts. They have come
from the fatal power of observing the facts without being able to
observe the truth. They came from seeing the symbol with the most vivid
clarity and being blind to all that it symbolises. It is as if a man who
knew no Greek should imagine that he could read a Greek inscription
because he took the Greek R for an English P or the Greek long E for an
English H. I do not mention this merely as a criticism on other people's
impressions of America, but as a criticism on my own. I wish it to be
understood that I am well aware that all my views are subject to this
sort of potential criticism, and that even when I am certain of the
facts I do not profess to be certain of the deductions.
In this chapter I hope to point out how a misunderstanding of this kind
affects the common impression, not altogether unfounded, that the
Americans talk about dollars. But for the moment I am merely anxious to
avoid a similar misunderstanding when I talk about Americans. About the
dogmas of democracy, about the right of a people to its own symbols,
whether they be coins or customs, I am convinced, and no longer to be
shaken. But about the meaning of those symbols, in silver or other
substances, I am always open to correction. That error is the price we
pay for the great glory of nationality. And in this sense I am quite
ready, at the start, to warn my own readers against my own opinions.
The fact without the truth is futile; indeed the fact without the truth
is false. I have already noted that this is especially true touching our
observations of a strange country; and it is certainly true touching one
small fact which has swelled into a large fable. I mean the fable about
America commonly summed up in the phrase about the Almighty Dollar. I do
not think the dollar is almighty in America; I fancy many things are
mightier, including many ideals and some rather insane ideals. But I
think it might be maintained that the dollar has another of the
attributes of deity. If it is not omnipotent it is in a sense
omnipresent. Whatever Americans think about dollars, it is, I think,
relatively true that they talk about dollars. If a mere mechanical
record could be taken by the modern machinery of dictaphones and
stenography, I do not think it probable that the mere word 'dollars'
would occur more often in any given number of American conversations
than the mere word 'pounds' or 'shillings' in a similar number of
English conversations. And these statistics, like nearly all statistics,
would be utterly useless and even fundamentally false. It is as if we
should calculate that the word 'elephant' had been mentioned a certain
number of times in a particular London street, or so many times more
often than the word 'thunderbolt' had been used in Stoke Poges.
Doubtless there are statisticians capable of carefully collecting those
statistics also; and doubtless there are scientific social reformers
capable of legislating on the basis of them. They would probably argue
from the elephantine imagery of the London street that such and such a
percentage of the householders were megalomaniacs and required medical
care and police coercion. And doubtless their calculations, like nearly
all such calculations, would leave out the only important point; as that
the street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Zoo, or was yet
more happily situated under the benignant shadow of the Elephant and
Castle. And in the same way the mechanical calculation about the mention
of dollars is entirely useless unless we have some moral understanding
of why they are mentioned. It certainly does not mean merely a love of
money; and if it did, a love of money may mean a great many very
different and even contrary things. The love of money is very different
in a peasant or in a pirate, in a miser or in a gambler, in a great
financier or in a man doing some practical and productive work. Now this
difference in the conversation of American and English business men
arises, I think, from certain much deeper things in the American which
are generally not understood by the Englishman. It also arises from much
deeper things in the Englishman, of which the Englishman is even more
ignorant.
To begin with, I fancy that the American, quite apart from any love of
money, has a great love of measurement. He will mention the exact size
or weight of things, in a way which appears to us as irrelevant. It is
as if we were to say that a man came to see us carrying three feet of
walking stick and four inches of cigar. It is so in cases that have no
possible connection with any avarice or greed for gain. An American will
praise the prodigal generosity of some other man in giving up his own
estate for the good of the poor. But he will generally say that the
philanthropist gave them a 200-acre park, where an Englishman would
think it quite sufficient to say that he gave them a park. There is
something about this precision which seems suitable to the American
atmosphere; to the hard sunlight, and the cloudless skies, and the
glittering detail of the architecture and the landscape; just as the
vaguer English version is consonant to our mistier and more
impressionist scenery. It is also connected perhaps with something more
boyish about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the passionate
particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of
regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colours of tram tickets. It is
a certain godlike appetite for things, as distinct from thoughts.
But there is also, of course, a much deeper cause of the difference; and
it can easily be deduced by noting the real nature of the difference
itself. When two business men in a train are talking about dollars I am
not so foolish as to expect them to be talking about the philosophy of
St. Thomas Aquinas. But if they were two English business men I should
not expect them to be talking about business. Probably it would be about
some sport; and most probably some sport in which they themselves never
dreamed of indulging. The approximate difference is that the American
talks about his work and the Englishman about his holidays. His ideal is
not labour but leisure. Like every other national characteristic, this
is not primarily a point for praise or blame; in essence it involves
neither and in effect it involves both. It is certainly connected with
that snobbishness which is the great sin of English society. The
Englishman does love to conceive himself as a sort of country gentleman;
and his castles in the air are all castles in Scotland rather than in
Spain. For, as an ideal, a Scotch castle is as English as a Welsh
rarebit or an Irish stew. And if he talks less about money I fear it is
sometimes because in one sense he thinks more of it. Money is a mystery
in the old and literal sense of something too sacred for speech. Gold is
a god; and like the god of some agnostics has no name and is worshipped
only in his works. It is true in a sense that the English gentleman
wishes to have enough money to be able to forget it. But it may be
questioned whether he does entirely forget it. As against this weakness
the American has succeeded, at the price of a great deal of crudity and
clatter, in making general a very real respect for work. He has partly
disenchanted the dangerous glamour of the gentleman, and in that sense
has achieved some degree of democracy; which is the most difficult
achievement in the world.
On the other hand, there is a good side to the Englishman's day-dream of
leisure, and one which the American spirit tends to miss. It may be
expressed in the word 'holiday' or still better in the word 'hobby.' The
Englishman, in his character of Robin Hood, really has got two strings
to his bow. Indeed the Englishman really is well represented by Robin
Hood; for there is always something about him that may literally be
called outlawed, in the sense of being extra-legal or outside the rules.
A Frenchman said of Browning that his centre was not in the middle; and
it may be said of many an Englishman that his heart is not where his
treasure is. Browning expressed a very English sentiment when he said:--
I like to know a butcher paints,
A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
Candlestick-maker much acquaints
His soul with song, or haply mute
Blows out his brains upon the flute.
Stevenson touched on the same insular sentiment when he said that many
men he knew, who were meat-salesmen to the outward eye, might in the
life of contemplation sit with the saints. Now the extraordinary
achievement of the American meat-salesman is that his poetic enthusiasm
can really be for meat sales; not for money but for meat. An American
commercial traveller asked me, with a religious fire in his eyes,
whether I did not think that salesmanship could be an art. In England
there are many salesmen who are sincerely fond of art; but seldom of the
art of salesmanship. Art is with them a hobby; a thing of leisure and
liberty. That is why the English traveller talks, if not of art, then of
sport. That is why the two city men in the London train, if they are not
talking about golf, may be talking about gardening. If they are not
talking about dollars, or the equivalent of dollars, the reason lies
much deeper than any superficial praise or blame touching the desire for
wealth. In the English case, at least, it lies very deep in the English
spirit. Many of the greatest English things have had this lighter and
looser character of a hobby or a holiday experiment. Even a masterpiece
has often been a by-product. The works of Shakespeare come out so
casually that they can be attributed to the most improbable people; even
to Bacon. The sonnets of Shakespeare are picked up afterwards as if out
of a wastepaper basket. The immortality of Dr. Johnson does not rest on
the written leaves he collected, but entirely on the words he wasted,
the words he scattered to the winds. So great a thing as Pickwick is
almost a kind of accident; it began as something secondary and grew into
something primary and pre-eminent. It began with mere words written to
illustrate somebody else's pictures; and swelled like an epic expanded
from an epigram. It might almost be said that in the case of Pickwick
the author began as the servant of the artist. But, as in the same story
of Pickwick, the servant became greater than the master. This
incalculable and accidental quality, like all national qualities, has
its strength and weakness; but it does represent a certain reserve fund
of interests in the Englishman's life; and distinguishes him from the
other extreme type, of the millionaire who works till he drops, or who
drops because he stops working. It is the great achievement of American
civilisation that in that country it really is not cant to talk about
the dignity of labour. There is something that might almost be called
the sanctity of labour; but it is subject to the profound law that when
anything less than the highest becomes a sanctity, it tends also to
become a superstition. When the candlestick-maker does not blow out his
brains upon the flute there is always a danger that he may blow them out
somewhere else, owing to depressed conditions in the candlestick market.
Now certainly one of the first impressions of America, or at any rate
of New York, which is by no means the same thing as America, is that of
a sort of mob of business men, behaving in many ways in a fashion very
different from that of the swarms of London city men who go up every day
to the city. They sit about in groups with Red-Indian gravity, as if
passing the pipe of peace; though, in fact, most of them are smoking
cigars and some of them are eating cigars. The latter strikes me as one
of the most peculiar of transatlantic tastes, more peculiar than that of
chewing gum. A man will sit for hours consuming a cigar as if it were a
sugar-stick; but I should imagine it to be a very disagreeable
sugar-stick. Why he attempts to enjoy a cigar without lighting it I do
not know; whether it is a more economical way of carrying a mere symbol
of commercial conversation; or whether something of the same queer
outlandish morality that draws such a distinction between beer and
ginger beer draws an equally ethical distinction between touching
tobacco and lighting it. For the rest, it would be easy to make a merely
external sketch full of things equally strange; for this can always be
done in a strange country. I allow for the fact of all foreigners
looking alike; but I fancy that all those hard-featured faces, with
spectacles and shaven jaws, do look rather alike, because they all like
to make their faces hard. And with the mention of their mental attitude
we realise the futility of any such external sketch. Unless we can see
that these are something more than men smoking cigars and talking about
dollars we had much better not see them at all.
It is customary to condemn the American as a materialist because of his
worship of success. But indeed this very worship, like any worship,
even devil-worship, proves him rather a mystic than a materialist. The
Frenchman who retires from business when he has money enough to drink
his wine and eat his omelette in peace might much more plausibly be
called a materialist by those who do not prefer to call him a man of
sense. But Americans do worship success in the abstract, as a sort of
ideal vision. They follow success rather than money; they follow money
rather than meat and drink. If their national life in one sense is a
perpetual game of poker, they are playing excitedly for chips or
counters as well as for coins. And by the ultimate test of material
enjoyment, like the enjoyment of an omelette, even a coin is itself a
counter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as the Frenchman can eat chipped
potatoes; but neither can he swallow red cents as the Frenchman swallows
red wine. Thus when people say of a Yankee that he worships the dollar,
they pay a compliment to his fine spirituality more true and delicate
than they imagine. The dollar is an idol because it is an image; but it
is an image of success and not of enjoyment.
That this romance is also a religion is shown in the fact that there is
a queer sort of morality attached to it. The nearest parallel to it is
something like the sense of honour in the old duelling days. There is
not a material but a distinctly moral savour about the implied
obligation to collect dollars or to collect chips. We hear too much in
England of the phrase about 'making good'; for no sensible Englishman
favours the needless interlarding of English with scraps of foreign
languages. But though it means nothing in English, it means something
very particular in American. There is a fine shade of distinction
between succeeding and making good, precisely because there must always
be a sort of ethical echo in the word good. America does vaguely feel a
man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man
doing good. It is connected with his serious self-respect and his sense
of being worthy of those he loves. Nor is this curious crude idealism
wholly insincere even when it drives him to what some of us would call
stealing; any more than the duellist's honour was insincere when it
drove him to what some would call murder. A very clever American play
which I once saw acted contained a complete working model of this
morality. A girl was loyal to, but distressed by, her engagement to a
young man on whom there was a sort of cloud of humiliation. The
atmosphere was exactly what it would have been in England if he had been
accused of cowardice or card-sharping. And there was nothing whatever
the matter with the poor young man except that some rotten mine or other
in Arizona had not 'made good.' Now in England we should either be below
or above that ideal of good. If we were snobs, we should be content to
know that he was a gentleman of good connections, perhaps too much
accustomed to private means to be expected to be businesslike. If we
were somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he might be as
wise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard and yet be unfitted, perhaps
one should say therefore be unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gambling
of modern commerce. But whether we were snobbish enough to admire him
for being an idler, or chivalrous enough to admire him for being an
outlaw, in neither case should we ever really and in our hearts despise
him for being a failure. For it is this inner verdict of instinctive
idealism that is the point at issue. Of course there is nothing new, or
peculiar to the new world, about a man's engagement practically failing
through his financial failure. An English girl might easily drop a man
because he was poor, or she might stick to him faithfully and defiantly
although he was poor. The point is that this girl was faithful but she
was not defiant; that is, she was not proud. The whole psychology of the
situation was that she shared the weird worldly idealism of her family,
and it was wounded as her patriotism would have been wounded if he had
betrayed his country. To do them justice, there was nothing to show that
they would have had any real respect for a royal duke who had inherited
millions; what the simple barbarians wanted was a man who could 'make
good.' That the process of making good would probably drag him through
the mire of everything bad, that he would make good by bluffing, lying,
swindling, and grinding the faces of the poor, did not seem to trouble
them in the least. Against this fanaticism there is this shadow of truth
even in the fiction of aristocracy; that a gentleman may at least be
allowed to be good without being bothered to make it.
Another objection to the phrase about the almighty dollar is that it is
an almighty phrase, and therefore an almighty nuisance. I mean that it
is made to explain everything, and to explain everything much too well;
that is, much too easily. It does not really help people to understand a
foreign country; but it gives them the fatal illusion that they do
understand it. Dollars stood for America as frogs stood for France;
because it was necessary to connect particular foreigners with
something, or it would be so easy to confuse a Moor with a Montenegrin
or a Russian with a Red Indian. The only cure for this sort of satisfied
familiarity is the shock of something really unfamiliar. When people can
see nothing at all in American democracy except a Yankee running after a
dollar, then the only thing to do is to trip them up as they run after
the Yankee, or run away with their notion of the Yankee, by the obstacle
of certain odd and obstinate facts that have no relation to that notion.
And, as a matter of fact, there are a number of such obstacles to any
such generalisation; a number of notable facts that have to be
reconciled somehow to our previous notions. It does not matter for this
purpose whether the facts are favourable or unfavourable, or whether the
qualities are merits or defects; especially as we do not even understand
them sufficiently to say which they are. The point is that we are
brought to a pause, and compelled to attempt to understand them rather
better than we do. We have found the one thing that we did not expect;
and therefore the one thing that we cannot explain. And we are moved to
an effort, probably an unsuccessful effort, to explain it.
For instance, Americans are very unpunctual. That is the last thing that
a critic expects who comes to condemn them for hustling and haggling and
vulgar ambition. But it is almost the first fact that strikes the
spectator on the spot. The chief difference between the humdrum English
business man and the hustling American business man is that the hustling
American business man is always late. Of course there is a great deal of
difference between coming late and coming too late. But I noticed the
fashion first in connection with my own lectures; touching which I
could heartily recommend the habit of coming too late. I could easily
understand a crowd of commercial Americans not coming to my lectures at
all; but there was something odd about their coming in a crowd, and the
crowd being expected to turn up some time after the appointed hour. The
managers of these lectures (I continue to call them lectures out of
courtesy to myself) often explained to me that it was quite useless to
begin properly until about half an hour after time. Often people were
still coming in three-quarters of an hour or even an hour after time.
Not that I objected to that, as some lecturers are said to do; it seemed
to me an agreeable break in the monotony; but as a characteristic of a
people mostly engaged in practical business, it struck me as curious and
interesting. I have grown accustomed to being the most unbusinesslike
person in any given company; and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation
to find I was not the most unpunctual person in that company. I was
afterwards told by many Americans that my impression was quite correct;
that American unpunctuality was really very prevalent, and extended to
much more important things. But at least I was not content to lump this
along with all sorts of contrary things that I did not happen to like,
and call it America. I am not sure of what it really means, but I rather
fancy that though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it has
the same origin as the hustling. The American is not punctual because he
is not punctilious. He is impulsive, and has an impulse to stay as well
as an impulse to go. For, after all, punctuality belongs to the same
order of ideas as punctuation; and there is no punctuation in
telegrams. The order of clocks and set hours which English business has
always observed is a good thing in its own way; indeed I think that in a
larger sense it is better than the other way. But it is better because
it is a protection against hustling, not a promotion of it. In other
words, it is better because it is more civilised; as a great Venetian
merchant prince clad in cloth of gold was more civilised; or an old
English merchant drinking port in an oak-panelled room was more
civilised; or a little French shopkeeper shutting up his shop to play
dominoes is more civilised. And the reason is that the American has the
romance of business and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has the
romance of life and is sane. But the romance of business really is a
romance, and the Americans are really romantic about it. And that
romance, though it revolves round pork or petrol, is really like a
love-affair in this; that it involves not only rushing but also
lingering.