Chapter 8

Whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge the fact that our brutal frankness, our brusqueness, and our extreme fondness for calling a spade a spade are often extremely disagreeable to our American cousins, and make them (temporarily at any rate) feel themselves to be our superiors in the matter of gentle breeding. As Col. T.W. Higginson has phrased it, they think that "the English nation has truthfulness enough for a whole continent, and almost too much for an island." They think that a line might be drawn somewhere between dissembling our love and kicking them downstairs. They also object to our use of such terms as "beastly," "stinking," and "rot;" and we must admit that they do so with justice, while we cannot assoil them altogether of the opposite tendency of a prim prudishness in the avoidance of certain natural and necessary words. For myself I unfeignedly admire the delicacy which leads to a certain parsimony in the use of words like "perspiration," "cleaning one's self," and so on. And, however much we may laugh at the class that insists upon the name of "help" instead of "servant," we cannot but respect the class which yields to the demand and looks with horror on the English slang word "slavey."

On the other hand there are certain little personal habits, such as the public use of the toothpick, and what Mr. Morley Roberts calls the modern form of [Greek: kottabos], which I think often find themselves in better company in America than in England. Still I desire to speak here with all due diffidence. I remember when I pointed out to a Boston girl that an American actor in a piece before us, representing high life in London, was committing a gross solecism in moistening his pencil in his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card, she trumped my criticism at once by the information that a distinguished English journalist, with a handle to his name, who recently made a successful lecturing tour in the United States, openly and deliberately moistened his thumb in the same ingenuous fashion to aid him in turning over the leaves of his manuscript.

A feature of the average middle-class Englishman which the American cannot easily understand is his tacit recognition of the fact that somebody else (the aristocrat) is his superior. In fact, this is sometimes a fertile source of misunderstanding, and it is apt to beget in the American an entirely false idea of what he thinks the innate servility of the Englishman. He must remember that the aristocratic prestige is a growth of centuries, that it has come to form part of the atmosphere, that it is often accepted as unconsciously as the law of gravitation. This is a case where the same attitude in an American mind (and, alas, we occasionally see it in American residents in London) would betoken an infinitely lower moral and mental plane than it does in the Englishman. No true American could accept the proposition that "Lord Tom Noddy might do so-and-so, but it would be a very different thing for a man in my position;" and yet an Englishman (I regret to say) might speak thus and still be a very decent fellow, whom it would be unjust cruelty to call a snob. No doubt the English aristocracy (as I think Mr. Henry James has said) now occupies a heroic position without heroism; but the glamour of the past still shines on their faded escutcheons, and "the love of freedom itself is hardly stronger in England than the love of aristocracy."

Matthew Arnold has pointed out to us how the aristocracy acts like an incubus on the middle classes of Great Britain, and he has put it on record that he was struck with the buoyancy, enjoyment of life, and freedom of constraint of the corresponding classes in America. In England, he says, a man feels that it is the _upper class_ which represents him; in the United States he feels that it is the _State_, _i.e._, himself. In England it is the Barbarian alone that dares be indifferent to the opinion of his fellows; in America everyone expresses his opinion and "voices" his idiosyncrasies with perfect freedom. This position has, however, its seamy side. There is in America a certain anarchy in questions of taste and manners which the long possession of a leisured, a cultivated class tends to save us from in England. I never felt so kindly a feeling towards our so-called "upper class" as when travelling in the United States and noting some effects of its absence. This class has an accepted position in the social hierarchy; its dicta are taken as authoritative on points of etiquette, just as the clergy are looked on as the official guardians of religious and ecclesiastical standards. I do not here pretend to discuss the value of the moral example of our _jeunesse dorée_, filtering down through the successive strata of society; but their influence in setting the fashion on such points as scrupulous personal cleanliness, the avoidance of the _outré_ in costume, and the maintenance of an honourable and generous standard in their money dealings with each other, is distinctly on the side of the humanities. In America--at least, "Out West"--everyone practically is his own guide, and the _nouveau riche_ spends his money strictly in accordance with his own standard of taste. The result is often as appalling in its hideousness as it is startling in its costliness. On the other hand I am bound to state that I have known American men of great wealth whose simplicity of type could hardly be paralleled in England (except, perchance, within the Society of Friends). They do not feel any social pressure to imitate the establishment of My Lord or His Grace; and spend their money for what really interests them without reference to the demands of society.

It is rather interesting to observe the different forms which vulgarity is apt to take in the two countries. In England vulgarity is stolid; in America it is smart and aggressive. We are apt, I think, to overestimate the amount in the latter country because it is so much more in voluble evidence. An English vulgarian is often hushed into silence by the presence of his social superior; an American vulgarian either recognises none such or tries to prove himself as good as you by being unnecessarily _grob_. This has, at any rate, a manlier air than the vulgar obsequiousness of England towards the superior on the one hand or its cynical insolence to the inferior on the other. The feeling which made a French lady of fashion in the seventeenth century dress herself in the presence of a footman with as much unconcern as if he were a piece of furniture still finds its modified analogy in England, but scarcely in America. Almost the only field in which the Americans struck me as showing anything like servility was in their treatment of such mighty potentates as railway conductors, hotel clerks, and policemen. Whether, until a millenial golden mean is attained, this is better than our English bullying tone in the same sphere might be an interesting question for casuists.

Americans can rarely understand the amount of social recognition given by English duchesses to such American visitors as Col. William Cody, generally known as "Buffalo Bill." They do not reflect that it is just because the social gap between the two is so irretrievably vast and so universally recognised that the duchesses can afford to amuse themselves cursorily with any eccentricity that offers itself. As Pomona's husband put it, people in England are like types with letters at one end and can easily be sorted out of a state of "pi," while Americans are theoretically all alike, like carpet-tacks. Thus Americans of the best class often shun the free mixing that takes place in England, because they know that the process of redistribution will be neither easy nor popular. The intangible sieve thus placed between the best and the not-so-good is of a fine discrimination, beside which our conventional net-works seem coarse and ineffective.

Since returning from the United States I have occasionally been asked how the general tone of morality in that country compared with that in our own. To answer such a question with anything approaching to an air of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption. The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of contingent and accidental circumstances, and must so inevitably be tinged by one's personal experiences, that their validity can at best have but an approximate and tentative character. In making this comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining camps and other phases of life on the fringes of American civilisation, which can be fairly compared only with pioneer life on the extreme frontiers of the British Empire. From a similar cause we may omit from the comparison a great part of the Southern States, where we do not find a homogeneous mass of white civilisation, but a state of society inexpressibly complicated by the presence of an inferior race. To compare the Southerner with the Englishman we should need to observe the latter as he exists in, say, one of our African colonies. Speaking, then, with these reservations, I should feel inclined to say that in domestic and social morality the Americans are ahead of us, in commercial morality rather behind than before, and in political morality distinctly behind.

Thus, in the first of these fields we find the American more good-tempered and good-natured than the Englishman. Women, children, and animals are treated with considerably more kindness. The American translation of paterfamilias is not domestic tyrant. Horses are driven by the voice rather than by the whip. The superior does not thrust his superiority on his inferior so brutally as we are apt to do. There is a general intention to make things pleasant--at any rate so long as it does not involve the doer in loss. There is less _gratuitous_ insolence. Servility, with its attendant hypocrisy and deceit, is conspicuously absent; and the general spirit of independence, if sometimes needlessly boorish in its manifestations, is at least sturdy and manly. In England we are rude to those weaker than ourselves; in America the rudeness is apt to be directed against those whom we suspect to be in some way our superior. Man is regarded by man rather as an object of interest than as an object of suspicion. Charity is very widespread; and the idea of a fellow-creature actually suffering from want of food or shelter is, perhaps, more repugnant to the average American than to the average Englishman, and more apt to act immediately on his purse-strings. In that which popular language usually means when it speaks of immorality, all outward indications point to the greater purity of the American. The conversation of the smoking-room is a little less apt to be _risqué_; the possibility of masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American taste with French. The statistics of illegitimacy point in the same direction, though I admit that this is not necessarily a sign of unsophisticated morality. In a word, when an Englishman goes to France he feels that the moral tone in this respect is more lax than in England; when he goes to America he feels that it is more firm. And he will hardly find adequate the French explanation, _viz._, that there is not less vice but more hypocrisy in the Anglo-Saxon community.

There is another very important sphere of morality in which the general attitude of the United States seems to me very appreciably superior to that of England. It is that to which St. Paul refers when he says, "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat." American public sentiment is distinctly ahead of ours in recognising that a life of idleness is wrong in itself, and that the possibility of leading such a life acts most prejudicially on character. The American answer to the Englishman trying to define what he meant by "gentlemen of leisure" "Ah, we call them _tramps_ in America"--is not merely a jest, but enshrines a deep ethnical and ethical principle. Most Americans would, I think, agree strongly with Mr. Bosanquet's philosophical if somewhat cumbersomely worded definition of legitimate private property, "that things should not come miraculously and be unaffected by your dealings with them, but that you should be in contact with something which in the external world is the definite material representative of yourself" ("Aspects of the Social Problem," p. 313). The British gentleman, aware that his dinner does not agree with him unless he has put forth a certain amount of physical energy, reverts to one of the earliest and most primitive forms of work, _viz._, hunting. There is a small--a very small--class in the United States in the same predicament; but as a rule the worker there is not only more honoured, but also works more in accordance with the spirit of the age.

The general attitude of Americans towards militarism seems to me also superior to ours; and one of the keenest dreads of the best American citizens during a recent wave of jingoism was that of "the reflex influence of militarism upon the national character, the transformation of a peace-loving people into a nation of swaggerers ever ready to take offence, prone to create difficulties, eager to shed blood, and taking all sorts of occasions to bring the Christian religion to shame under pretence of vindicating the rights of humanity in some other country." The spectacle of a section in the United States apparently ready to step down from its pedestal of honourable neutrality, and run its head into the ignoble web of European complications, was indeed one to make both gods and mortals weep. But I do not believe it expressed the true attitude of the real American people. Perhaps the personal element enters too largely into my ascription of superior morality to the Americans in this matter, because I can never thoroughly enjoy a military pageant, no matter how brilliant, for thinking of the brutal, animal, inhuman element in our nature of which it is, after all, the expression: military pomp is to me merely the surface iridescence of a malarious pool, and the honour paid to our life destroyers would, from my point of view, be infinitely better bestowed on life preservers, such as the noble and intrepid corps of firemen. Sympathisers with this view seem much more numerous in the United States than in England.[11]

The judgment of an uncommercial traveller on commercial morality may well be held as a feather-weight in the balance. Such as mine is, it is gathered mainly from the tone of casual conversation, from which I should conclude that a considerable proportion of Americans read a well-known proverb as "All's fair in love or business." Men--I will not say of a high character and standing, but men of a standing and character who would not have done it in England--told me instances of their sharp practices in business, with an evident expectation of my admiration for their shrewdness, and with no apparent sense of the slightest moral delinquency. Possibly, when the "rules of the game" are universally understood, there is less moral obliquity in taking advantage of them than an outsider imagines. The prevalent belief that America is more sedulous in the worship of the Golden Calf than any other country arises largely, I believe, from the fact that the chances of acquiring wealth are more frequent and easy there than elsewhere. Opportunity makes the thief. Anyhow, the reproach comes with a bad grace from the natives of a country which has in its annals the outbreak of the South Sea Bubble, the railway mania of the Hudson era, and the revelations of Mr. Hooley.

Politics enter so slightly into the scope of this book that a very few words on the question of political morality must suffice. That political corruption exists more commonly in the United States than in Great Britain--especially in municipal government--may be taken as admitted by the most eminent American publicists themselves. A very limited degree of intercourse with "professional politicians" yields ample confirmatory evidence. Thus, to give but one instance, a wealthy citizen of one of the largest Eastern towns told me, with absolute ingenuousness, how he had "dished" the (say) Republican party in a municipal contest, not in the least because he had changed his political sympathies, but simply because the candidates had refused to accede to certain personal demands of his own. He spoke throughout the conversation as if it must be perfectly apparent to me, as to any intelligent person, that the only possible reason for working and voting for a political party must be personal interest. I confess this seemed to me a very significant straw. On the other hand the conclusions usually drawn by stay-at-home English people on these admissions is ludicrously in excess of what is warranted by the facts. "To imagine for a moment that 60,000,000 of people--better educated than any other nation in the world--are openly tolerating universal corruption in all Federal, State, and municipal government is simply assuming that these 60,000,000 are either criminals or fools." Now, "you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." A more competent judge[12] than the present writer estimates the morals of the American political "wire-puller" as about on a level with those of our company directors. And before my English readers make their final decision on the American political system let them study Chapter XLVI. of that very fascinating novel, "The Honorable Peter Stirling," by Paul Leicester Ford. It may give them some new light on the subject of "a government of the average," and show them what is meant by the saying, "The boss who does the most things that the people want can do the most things that the people don't want."

We must remember, too, that nothing is hidden from general knowledge in America: every job comes sooner or later into the merciless glare of publicity. And if our political sins are not the same as theirs, they are perhaps equally heinous. Was not the British landlord who voted against the repeal of the corn laws, so that land might continue to bring in a high rent at the expense of the poor man, really acting from just as corrupt a motive of self-interest as the American legislator who accepts a bribe? It does not do to be too superior on this question.

We may end this chapter by a typical instance of the way in which British opinion of America is apt to be formed that comes under my notice at the very moment I write these lines. The _Daily Chronicle_ of March 24, 1896, published a leading article on "Family Life in America," in which it quotes with approval Mme. Blanc's assertion that "the single woman in the United States is infinitely superior to her European sister." In the same issue of the paper is a letter from Mrs. Fawcett relating to a recent very deplorable occurrence in Washington, where the daughter of a well-known resident shot a coloured boy who was robbing her father's orchard. In the _Chronicle_ of March 25th appears a triumphant British letter from "Old-Fashioned," asking satirically whether the habit of using loaded revolvers is a proof of the "infinite superiority" of the American girl. Now this estimable gentleman is making the mistake that nine out of ten of his countrymen constantly make in swooping down on a single _outré_ instance as _characteristic_ of American life. If "Old-Fashioned" has not time to pay a visit to America or to read Mr. Bryce's book, let him at least accept my assurance that the above-mentioned incident seems to the full as extraordinary to the Bostonian as to the Londoner, and that it is just as typical of the habits of the American society girl as the action of Miss Madeleine Smith was of English girls.

"Of all the sarse thet I can call to mind, England doos make the most onpleasant kind. It's you're the sinner ollers, she's the saint; Whot's good's all English, all thet isn't, ain't. She is all thet's honest, honnable, an' fair. An' when the vartoos died they made her heir."

FOOTNOTES:

[9] See, _e.g._, "Ad Familiares," 5, 18.

[10] This was written just after President Cleveland's pronunciamento in regard to Venezuela, and thus long before the outbreak of the war with Spain.

[11] This paragraph was written before the outbreak of the Spanish-American war; but the events of that struggle do not seem to me to call for serious modification of the opinion expressed above.

[12] Sir George Campbell, in "Black and White in America."

VII

Sports and Amusements

In face of the immense sums of money spent on all kinds of sport, the size and wealth of the athletic associations, the swollen salaries of baseball players, the prominence afforded to sporting events in the newspapers, the number of "world's records" made in the United States, and the tremendous excitement over inter-university football matches and international yacht-races, it may seem wanton to assert that the love of sport is not by any means so genuine or so universal in the United States as in Great Britain; and yet I am not at all sure that such a statement would not be absolutely true. By true "love of sport" I understand the enjoyment that arises from either practising or seeing others practise some form of skill-demanding amusement for its own sake, without question of pecuniary profit; and the true sport lover is not satisfied unless the best man wins, whether he be friend or foe. Sport ceases to be sport as soon as it is carried on as if it were war, where "all" is proverbially "fair." The excitement of gambling does not seem to me to be fairly covered by the phrase "love of sport," and no more does the mere desire to see one's university, state, or nation triumph over someone else's university, state, or nation. There are thousands of people who rejoice over or bewail the result of the Derby without thereby proving their possession of any right to the title of sportsman; there is no difference of quality between the speculator in grain and the speculator in horseflesh and jockeys' nerves. So, too, there are many thousands who yell for Yale in a football match who have no real sporting instinct whatever. Sport, to be sport, must jealously shun all attempts to make it a business; the more there is of the spirit of professionalism in any game or athletic exercise the less it deserves to be called a sport. A sport in the true sense of the word must be practised for fun or glory, not for dollars and cents; and the desire to win must be very strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair play. The book-making spirit has undoubtedly entered far too largely into many of the most characteristic of British sports, and I have no desire to palliate or excuse our national shortcomings in this or other respects. But the hard commercial spirit to which I have alluded seems to me to pervade American sport much more universally than it does the sport of England, and to form almost always a much larger factor in the interest excited by any contest.