The boy who lives secluded from companionship, when he goes out into the world, will find not merely that he is diffident and sensitive about his own defects, real or imaginary, but that he is different from other people. It may take him all his life to learn—perhaps he will never learn—that his emotional and intellectual experiences are no prodigies of sentiment and phœnixes of thought, but the common experiences of half his fellows. It has been such a life of seclusion that the American people lived—though they hardly know it (and perhaps some American readers will resent the statement), because the mere fact of their seclusion has prevented them from seeing how secluded, as compared with other peoples, they have been. It is true that individual Americans of the well-to-do classes travel more (and more intelligently) than any other people except the English; but this, as leavening the nation, is a small off-set against the daily lack of mental contact with foreign affairs at home.
But if this sheltered boy be further occasionally subjected to the inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world—a candid and outspoken elderly relative—he is likely to become, on the one hand, morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame, and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride in whatever is awarded praise.
Both these tendencies have been acutely developed in the American character—an extraordinary sensitiveness to criticism by outsiders of certain national foibles, and a no less conspicuous belief in the heroic proportions of their good qualities. For surely no people has ever been blessed in its seclusion with such an abundance of criticism of singular candour. The frank brutality with which the travelling Englishman has made his opinions known on any peculiar trait or unusual institution which he has been pleased to think that he has noticed in the United States has been vastly more ill-mannered than anything in the manners of the Americans themselves on which he has animadverted so freely. The thing most comparable to it—most nearly as ill-mannered—is, perhaps, the frank brutality with which the travelling American expresses himself—and herself—in regard to things in Europe. In it, in fact, we see again another aspect of the same fundamentally English trait,—the insistence on the sovereignty of the individual—and Americans come by it legitimately. Every time that they display it they do but make confession of their original Anglo-Saxon descent and essentially English nature. The Englishman in America has, however, had some excuse for his readiness to criticise, in the interest, the anxiety, with which, at least until recent years, the Americans have invited his opinions. But if that has gone some way to justify his expression of those opinions, it has furnished no sort of excuse for the lack of tact and breeding which he has shown in the process. The American does not commonly wait for the invitation.
"My! But isn't that quaint! Now in America we . . ." etc. So speaks an uncultivated American on seeing something that strikes him—or her—as novel in London, not unkindly critical, but anxious to give information about his country—and uninvited. But whereas the Englishman is so accustomed to the abuse and criticism of other peoples that the harmless chatter of the American ripples more or less unheeded by him, the American, less case-hardened in his isolation, hears the Englishman's bluntly worded expression of contempt, and it hurts. It does not hurt nearly as much now as it did twenty years ago; but the harm has largely been done.
The harm would not be so serious but for the American sensitiveness bred of his seclusion,—if that is (at the risk of seeming to repeat myself I must again say) he knew enough of the world to know that he himself has precisely the same critical inclination as the Englishman and that it is a trait inherited from common ancestors. The Anglo-Saxon race acquired early in its life the conviction that it was a trifle better than any other section of the human kind. And it is justified. We—Americans and Englishmen alike—hold that we are better than any other people. That the root-trait has developed somewhat differently in the two portions of the family is an accident.
The Englishman—who, when at home, has himself lived, not entirely secluded, but in a measure shut off from contact with other peoples—by continual going abroad and never-ceasing friction with his neighbours, by perpetual disheartenment with the perplexities of his colonial empire, has become less of a critic than a grumbler; and to do him justice he is, in speech, infinitely more contemptuous of his own government than he is of the American or any other. The American on the contrary remains cheerfully, light-heartedly, garrulously critical. He comes out in the world and gazes on it young-eyed, and he prattles: "My father is bigger than your father, and my sister has longer hair than yours, and my money box is larger than yours." It is neither unkindly meant nor, by Englishmen, very unkindly taken. It is less offensive than the mature, corrosive sullenness of the Englishman; but it is the same thing. "The French foot-guards are dressed in blue and all the marching regiments in white; which has a very foolish appearance. And as for blue regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the Artillery," says the footman in Moore's Zeluco.
Similarly, when he has been praised, the lad has plumed himself unduly on the thing that found approval. He would not do it now; for the American people of to-day is, as it were, grown up; but, again, the harm has been done. Americans rarely make the mistake of underestimating the excellence of their virtues. Nor is it their fault, but that of their critics.
The American people labours under delusions about its own character and qualities in several notable particulars. It exaggerates its own energy and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is good for a nation; but it believes that it possesses them to the exclusion of the rest of mankind. And that is unfortunate; for it makes the individual American assume the lack of these qualities in the English and thereby decreases his estimate of the English character. I am not endeavouring to reduce the American's good opinion of himself—only to make him think better of the Englishman by assuring him that in each of these particulars there is remarkably little to choose between them. And what excellence he has in each he owes to the fact that he is in the main English in origin.
That Americans should think that they have a higher respect for womanhood than any other people is not surprising; for every other people thinks precisely the same thing. They would be unique among peoples if they thought otherwise. Frenchman, German, Italian, Spaniard, Greek—each and every one who has not had his eyes opened by travel and knowledge of the world believes, with no less sincerity of conviction than the American, that to him alone of all peoples has it been vouchsafed to know how duly to reverence the divine feminine. To the Englishman it seems that the German not seldom treats his wife much as if she were a cow; and he is sometimes distressed at the way in which, for all the pretty things he says to her, the Frenchman, not of the labouring classes only, will allow his wife to work for and wait on him. While the language which an Italian can, on occasions, use towards the partner of his joys is, to English ears, appalling. But each goes on serenely satisfied of his own superiority. You others, you may pay lip-service, yes; but deep down, in the heart of hearts—we know. The American has as good a right to this same foible as any other; but what is to be noted is that whereas Englishmen laugh at the pretensions of Continental peoples, they have been willing to accept the chivalry of the American at his own valuation: the fact being that the valuation is not originally American, but was made by the travelling Englishmen of the past who communicated their appraisement to the people at home as well as to the American whom they complimented. Englishmen of the present day have accepted the belief as an inheritance and without question; for it was at least a generation and a half ago that the myth first obtained vogue, and the two facts most commonly adduced in its support by the English visitors who spread it were, first, that women could walk about the streets of New York or any other American city, unattended and at such hours as pleased them, without being insulted; and, second (absurdly enough), the provision of special "ladies' entrances" to hotels, which seem to have enormously impressed several English visitors to the United States who afterwards wrote their "impressions."
For the first of these, it is a mere matter of local custom and police regulation. When it is understood that in certain streets of certain cities, at certain hours of the day, no women walk unattended except such as desire to be insulted, it is probable that other women, who go there in ignorance, will suffer inconvenience. Nor has the difference in local custom any bearing whatever on the respective morality of different localities. These things are arranged differently in different countries; that is all. Moreover, in this particular a great change has come over American cities in late years, nor are all American cities or all English by any means alike.