enough of the free shooting of Hannibal Chollop; from not understanding
enough that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood.
The prosperous Englishman will not admit this; but then the prosperous
Englishman will not admit that he has suffered from anything. That is
what he is suffering from. Until lately at least he refused to realise
that many of his modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of them
being contentment. For all the real virtue in contentment evaporates,
when the contentment is only satisfaction and the satisfaction is only
self-satisfaction. Now it is perfectly true that America and not England
has seen the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty.
But it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious flouting of
such official nonsense, far more obvious than any similar evasions in
England. And nobody who knows the subconscious violence of the American
character would ever be surprised if the weapons of Chollop began to be
used in that most lawful lawlessness. It is perfectly true that the
libation of freedom must sometimes be drunk in blood, and never more
(one would think) than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk in
beer. But America, as compared with England, is the country where one
can still fancy men obtaining the libation of beer by the libation of
blood. Vulgar plutocracy is almost omnipotent in both countries; but I
think there is now more kick of reaction against it in America than in
England. The Americans may go mad when they make laws; but they recover
their reason when they disobey them. I wish I could believe that there
was as much of that destructive repentance in England; as indeed there
certainly was when Cobbett wrote. It faded gradually like a dying fire
through the Victorian era; and it was one of the very few realities that
Dickens did not understand. But any one who does understand it will know
that the days of Cobbett saw the last lost fight for English democracy;
and that if he had stood at that turning of the historic road, he would
have wished a better fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the
first machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires.
Anyhow, what is wanted is a new Martin Chuzzlewit, told by a wiser Mark
Tapley. It is typical of something sombre and occasionally stale in the
mood of Dickens when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not
really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow of Sam Weller. But
if Dickens had written it in a happier mood, there might have been a
truer meaning in Mark Tapley's happiness. For it is true that this
illogical good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of the real
virtues of the English people. It is the real advantage they have in
that adventure all over the world, which they were recently and
reluctantly induced to call an Empire. That receptive ridicule remains
with them as a secret pleasure when they are colonists--or convicts.
Dickens might have written another version of the great romance, and one
in which America was really seen gaily by Mark instead of gloomily by
Martin. Mark Tapley might really have made the best of America. Then
America would have lived and danced before us like Pickwick's England, a
fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters, and we might still
have sympathised as much with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as with
the rhetoric of Wilkins Micawber, or with the violence of Chollop as
with the violence of Boythorn. That new Martin Chuzzlewit will never be
written; and the loss of it is more tragic than the loss of _Edwin
Drood_. But every man who has travelled in America has seen glimpses and
episodes in that untold tale; and far away on the Red-Indian frontiers
or in the hamlets in the hills of Pennsylvania, there are people whom I
met for a few hours or for a few moments, whom I none the less sincerely
like and respect because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But the
converse is also true; they have probably forgotten me; but if they
remember they laugh.
_The Spirit of America_
I suggest that diplomatists of the internationalist school should spend
some of their money on staging farces and comedies of cross-purposes,
founded on the curious and prevalent idea that England and America have
the same language. I know, of course, that we both inherit the glorious
tongue of Shakespeare, not to mention the tune of the musical glasses;
but there have been moments when I thought that if we spoke Greek and
they spoke Latin we might understand each other better. For Greek and
Latin are at least fixed, while American at least is still very fluid. I
do not know the American language, and therefore I do not claim to
distinguish between the American language and the American slang. But I
know that highly theatrical developments might follow on taking the
words as part of the English slang or the English language. I have
already given the example of calling a person 'a regular guy,' which in
the States is a graceful expression of respect and esteem, but which on
the stage, properly handled, might surely lead the way towards a divorce
or duel or something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clinches a
mistake, as it so often clinches a misprint. Every proof-reader knows
that the worst misprint is not that which makes nonsense but that which
makes sense; not that which is obviously wrong but that which is
hideously right. He who has essayed to write 'he got the book,' and has
found it rendered mysteriously as 'he got the boob' is pensively
resigned. It is when it is rendered quite lucidly as 'he got the boot'
that he is moved to a more passionate mood of regret. I have had
conversations in which this sort of accident would have wholly misled
me, if another accident had not come to the rescue. An American friend
of mine was telling me of his adventures as a cinema-producer down in
the south-west where real Red Indians were procurable. He said that
certain Indians were 'very bad actors.' It passed for me as a very
ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural deficiency. It would
hardly seem a crushing criticism to say that some wild Arab chieftain
was not very good at imitating a farmyard; or that the Grand Llama of
Thibet was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the remark might be
natural in a man travelling in paper boats, or touring with an invisible
farmyard for his menagerie. As my friend was a cinema-producer, I
supposed he meant that the Indians were bad cinema actors. But the
phrase has really a high and austere moral meaning, which my levity had
wholly missed. A bad actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally
reprehensible. So that I might have embraced a Red Indian who was
dripping with gore, or covered with atrocious crimes, imagining there
was nothing the matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of the
theatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, not
to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might find
herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish
'Little Blue Bison,' merely through her mistaken sympathy with his
financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me glimpses of all
sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres;
but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed.
There is one example, however, of this complication of language actually
used in contrary senses, about which the same figure can be used to
illustrate a more serious fact.
Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an English girl and an
American girl are talking about the fiancé of the former, who is coming
to call. The English girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the
stage), the American girl will of course have short hair and skirts and
will be cynical; Americans being more completely free from cynicism than
any people in the world. It is the great glory of Americans that they
are not cynical; for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever
haughty; they understand the game much better than that. But on the
stage, anyhow, the American girl may say, referring to her friend's
fiancé, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, 'I suppose he's bound to
come and see you.' And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres will
boil over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at the
suggestion that her lover only comes to see her because he is forced to
do so. A staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will go
from bad to worse; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk both
English and American. He stands between the two ladies waving two pocket
dictionaries, and explains the error on which the quarrel turns. It is
very simple; like the seed of all tragedies. In English 'he is bound to
come and see you' means that he is obliged or constrained to come and
see you. In American it does not. In American it means that he is bent
on coming to see you, that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will
surmount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will then embrace
as the curtain falls.
Now when I was lecturing in America I was often told, in a radiant and
congratulatory manner, that such and such a person was bound to come and
hear me lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of conscription, and I
could not understand what authority could have made it compulsory. In
the course of discovering my error, however, I thought I began to
understand certain American ideas and instincts that lie behind this
American idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often urge again,
the road to international friendship is through really understanding
jokes. It is in a sense through taking jokes seriously. It is quite
legitimate to laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white
hats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar; but after all
the man has _some_ reason for what he does; and until we know the reason
we do not understand the story, or even understand the joke. So the
outlander will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but serious
relations depend on our getting beyond the fact of difference to the
things wherein it differs. A good symbolical figure for all this may be
found among the people who say, perhaps with a self-revealing
simplicity, that they are bound to go to a lecture.
If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summing up the whole of
what seems eccentric and interesting about America to an Englishman, I
should be satisfied to select that one lady who complained of Mrs.
Asquith's lecture and wanted her money back. I do not mean that she was
typically American in complaining; far from it. I, for one, have a great
and guilty knowledge of all that amiable American audiences will endure
without complaint. I do not mean that she was typically American in
wanting her money; quite the contrary. That sort of American spends
money rather than hoards it; and when we convict them of vulgarity we
acquit them of avarice. Where she was typically American, summing up a
truth individual and indescribable in any other way, is that she used
these words: 'I've risen from a sick-bed to come and hear her, and I
want my money back.'
The element in that which really amuses an Englishman is precisely the
element which, properly analysed, ought to make him admire an American.
But my point is that only by going through the amusement can he reach
the admiration. The amusement is in the vision of a tragic sacrifice for
what is avowedly a rather trivial object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid lady
of considerable humour; and I feel sure she does not regard the
experience of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for which the
sick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also is English; and had no other
claim but to amuse Americans and possibly to be amused by them. This
being so, it is rather as if somebody said, 'I have risked my life in
fire and pestilence to find my way to the music hall,' or, 'I have
fasted forty days in the wilderness sustained by the hope of seeing
Totty Toddles do her new dance.' And there is something rather more
subtle involved here. There is something in an Englishman which would
make him feel faintly ashamed of saying that he had fasted to hear
Totty Toddles, or risen from a sick-bed to hear Mrs. Asquith. He would
feel that it was undignified to confess that he had wanted mere
amusement so much; and perhaps that he had wanted anything so much. He
would not like, so to speak, to be seen rushing down the street after
Totty Toddles, or after Mrs. Asquith, or perhaps after anybody. But
there is something in it distinct from a mere embarrassment at admitting
enthusiasm. He might admit the enthusiasm if the object seemed to
justify it; he might perfectly well be serious about a serious thing.
But he cannot understand a person being proud of serious sacrifices for
what is not a serious thing. He does not like to admit that a little
thing can excite him; that he can lose his breath in running, or lose
his balance in reaching, after something that might be called silly.
Now that is where the American is fundamentally different. To him the
enthusiasm itself is meritorious. To him the excitement itself is
dignified. He counts it a part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise
from a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. His
ideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open, but a 'live
wire' that anything can touch or anybody can use. In a word, there is a
difference in the very definition of virility and therefore of virtue. A
live wire is not only active, it is also sensitive. Thus sensibility
becomes actually a part of virility. Something more is involved than the
vulgar simplification of the American as the irresistible force and the
Englishman as the immovable post. As a fact, those who speak of such
things nowadays generally mean by something irresistible something
simply immovable, or at least something unalterable, motionless even in
motion, like a cannon ball; for a cannon ball is as dead as a cannon.
Prussian militarism was praised in that way--until it met a French force
of about half its size on the banks of the Marne. But that is not what
an American means by energy; that sort of Prussian energy is only
monotony without repose. American energy is not a soulless machine; for
it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is a very small
box for so big a thing; but it is not an empty box. But the point is
that he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement.
He is not ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in his
manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel of his machine breaks
four billion butterflies an hour.
That is the point about American sport; that it is not in the least
sportive. It is because it is not very sportive that we sometimes say it
is not very sporting. It has the vices of a religion. It has all the
paradox of original sin in the service of aboriginal faith. It is
sometimes untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treacherous
because it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they lied for their
lords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for their chieftains in a
Highland feud. We may say that the vassal readily committed treason; but
it is equally true that he readily endured torture. So does the American
athlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacrifice but the solemnity of
the American athlete is like that of the American Indian. The athletes
in the States have the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the
great historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer an
ascetic régime not to be matched in any monasticism and hardly in any
militarism. If any tradition of these things remains in a saner age,
they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order of
fakirs or dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted in honour
of Hercules or Castor and Pollux. And that is really the spiritual
atmosphere though the gods have vanished; and the religion is
subconscious and therefore irrational. For the problem of the modern
world is that it has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be
rational. Americans really would starve to win a cocoa-nut shy. They
would fast or bleed to win a race of paper boats on a pond. They would
rise from a sick-bed to listen to Mrs. Asquith.
But it is the real reason that interests me here. It is certainly not
that Americans are so stupid as not to know that cocoa-nuts are only
cocoa-nuts and paper boats only made of paper. Americans are, on an
average, rather more intelligent than Englishmen; and they are well
aware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith is something of a
mythologist. It is not that they do not know that the object is small in
itself; it is that they do really believe that the enthusiasm is great
in itself. They admire people for being impressionable. They admire
people for being excited. An American so struggling for some
disproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures) really feels in a
mystical way that he is right, because it is his whole morality to be
keen. So long as he wants something very much, whatever it is, he feels
he has his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of society
behind him, and God and the whole universe behind him. Wedged on one leg
in a hot crowd at a trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignity
is at rest. That is what he means when he says he is bound to come to
the lecture.
Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks. But these things are not
larks; nor are they occasional. It is the essential of the Englishman's
lark that he should think it a lark; that he should laugh at it even
when he does it. Being English myself, I like it; but being English
myself, I know it is connected with weaknesses as well as merits. In its
irony there is condescension and therefore embarrassment. This patronage
is allied to the patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic
tradition of society. The larks are a variant of laziness because of
leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacy
of the gentleman. When an undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundred
windows he is well aware that the incident is merely a trifle. He can be
trusted to explain to his parents and guardians that it was merely a
trifle. He does not say, even in the American sense, that he was bound
to smash the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a sick-bed
to smash the windows. He does not especially think he has risen at all;
he knows he has descended (though with delight, like one diving or
sliding down the banisters) to something flat and farcical and full of
the English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into something
entirely commonplace; though the owners of the windows may possibly not
think so. This rather indescribable element runs through a hundred
English things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound of
proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns for
somebody named Sally rather than Salome, and for a place called Wapping
rather than a place called Westermain. Even in the relapse into
rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There is also what is
so large a part of comfort; carelessness. The undergraduate breaks
windows because he does not care about windows, not because he does care
about more fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a German
poet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred windows because they
come between him and the voice of Mrs. Asquith. But least of all does he
do it because he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from its
aim, and on the will-power that carries it through. He is not 'bound' to
smash the windows, even in the sense of being bent upon it. He is not
bound at all but rather relaxed; and his violence is not only a
relaxation but a laxity. Finally, this is shown in the fact that he only
smashes windows when he is in the mood to smash windows; when some
fortunate conjunction of stars and all the tints and nuances of nature
whisper to him that it would be well to smash windows. But the American
is always ready, at any moment, to waste his energies on the wilder and
more suicidal course of going to lectures. And this is because to him
such excitement is not a mood but a moral ideal. As I note in another
connection, much of the English mystery would be clear to Americans if
they understood the word 'mood.' Englishmen are very moody, especially
when they smash windows. But I doubt if many Americans understand
exactly what we mean by the mood; especially the passive mood.
It is only by trying to get some notion of all this that an Englishman
can enjoy the final crown and fruit of all international friendship;
which is really liking an American to be American. If we only think that
parts of him are excellent because parts of him are English, it would be
far more sensible to stop at home and possibly enjoy the society of a
whole complete Englishman. But anybody who does understand this can take
the same pleasure in an American being American that he does in a
thunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive. He can see that
a vivid sensibility and vigilance really radiate outwards through all
the ramifications of machinery and even of materialism. He can see that
the American uses his great practical powers upon very small
provocation; but he can also see that there is a kind of sense of
honour, like that of a duellist, in his readiness to be provoked.
Indeed, there is some parallel between the American man of action,
however vulgar his aims, and the old feudal idea of the gentleman with a
sword at his side. The gentleman may have been proud of being strong or
sturdy; he may too often have been proud of being thick-headed; but he
was not proud of being thick-skinned. On the contrary, he was proud of
being thin-skinned. He also seriously thought that sensitiveness was a
part of masculinity. It may be very absurd to read of two Irish
gentlemen trying to kill each other for trifles, or of two
Irish-American millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. But the
very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose illustrates the same
conception; which may be called the virtue of excitability. And it is
really this, and not any rubbish about iron will-power and masterful
mentality, that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and its
industrial ideals. Being a live wire does not mean that the nerves
should be like wires; but rather that the very wires should be like
nerves.
Another approximation to the truth would be to say that an American is
really not ashamed of curiosity. It is not so simple as it looks. Men
will carry off curiosity with various kinds of laughter and bravado,
just as they will carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. But very few
people are really proud of lying on a door-step, and very few people are
really proud of longing to look through a key-hole. I do not speak of
looking through it, which involves questions of honour and self-control;
but few people feel that even the desire is dignified. Now I fancy the
American, at least by comparison with the Englishman, does feel that his
curiosity is consistent with his dignity, because dignity is consistent
with vivacity. He feels it is not merely the curiosity of Paul Pry, but
the curiosity of Christopher Columbus. He is not a spy but an explorer;
and he feels his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back, as
a traveller might feel taller and taller as he neared the source of the
Nile or the North-West Passage. Many an Englishman has had that feeling
about discoveries in dark continents; but he does not often have it
about discoveries in daily life. The one type does believe in the
indignity and the other in the dignity of the detective. It has nothing
to do with ethics in the merely external sense. It involves no
particular comparison in practical morals and manners. It is something
in the whole poise and posture of the self; of the way a man carries
himself. For men are not only affected by what they are; but still more,
when they are fools, by what they think they are; and when they are
wise, by what they wish to be.
There are truths that have almost become untrue by becoming untruthful.
There are statements so often stale and insincere that one hesitates to
use them, even when they stand for something more subtle. This point
about curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the American
interviewer. It is not the ordinary joke against the American child. And
in the same way I feel the danger of it being identified with the cant
about 'a young nation' if I say that it has some of the attractions, not
of American childhood, but of real childhood. There is some truth in the
tradition that the children of wealthy Americans tend to be too
precocious and luxurious. But there is a sense in which we can really
say that if the children are like adults, the adults are like children.
And that sense is in the very best sense of childhood. It is something
which the modern world does not understand. It is something that modern
Americans do not understand, even when they possess it; but I think they
do possess it.