My American Diary

CLARE SHERIDAN
CLARE SHERIDAN
(Photograph by Francis Bruguiere)
Copyright, 1922, By Boni and Liveright, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
To those I have met in this country who have not misunderstood me.
The publication of an American diary requires neither apology nor explanation, especially when it is more a record than a criticism. Besides, the “best people” seem to do it. I have upon my desk an old volume entitled: “Travels in the United States, etc., during 1849 and 1850,” by the Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortly. It is dedicated with some pomp “to the Countess of Chesterfield by her most affectionate cousin the authoress.” By a strange coincidence we seem to have trodden the same paths, and ofttimes our impressions are the same. Her experiences in 1850 traveling with her little girl are in many ways not dissimilar to mine in 1921 traveling with my little son. She describes her visits to New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, etc., and then she goes to Vera Cruz, Mexico City, Puebla, and many other places. She has the unconscious arrogance of a genteel aristocrat; she describes the people she meets and writes of them as “Ladies and Gentlemen” instead of as “men and women.” For her there is no Bohemianism and she has no perplexities about world movements. Nevertheless she expresses a deep interest in Russia and some of her comments are not without value even in this day.
I think I will allow Lady Emmeline to voice in her own mid-Victorian language some of my own opinions. Her condescension, her lack of humor and her naiveté have a charm that I cannot compete with.
Beginning with New York, she says, “I like the Americans more and more, either they have improved wonderfully lately or else the criticisms on them have been cruelly exaggerated. They are particularly courteous and obliging; and seem, I think, amiably anxious that foreigners should carry away a favorable impression of them. As for me—I am determined not to be prejudiced, but to judge of them exactly as I find them; and I shall most pertinaciously continue to praise them (if I see no good cause to alter my present humble opinion). I have witnessed but very few isolated cases, as yet, of the wonderful habits so usually ascribed to them—the superior classes here have almost always excellent manners, and a great deal of real and natural, as well as acquired, refinement, and are often besides (which perhaps will not be believed in fastidious England) extremely distinguishing looking.”