The weaknesses of the peoples of other nations are fair game; but it is the essence of just caricature that it should have some verisimilitude. Punch could not publish that drawing with the accompanying legend unless it was the belief of the editor or the staff that such a solecism was more or less likely to proceed from the mouth of such an American as is depicted; which is precisely the error of the Frenchman who believes that Englishmen sell their wives at Smithfield. Thirty years ago, the lampoon would have had some justification; but at the present time both the actual number and the percentage of women who are familiar with the Italian operas is, I believe, vastly greater in America than in England. This statement will undoubtedly be received with incredulity by the majority of Englishmen who know nothing about the United States; but no one who does know the people of the country will dispute it. In England, the opera is still, for all the changes that have occurred in the last quarter of a century, largely a pleasure of a limited class. It may be (and personally I believe) that in that class there is a larger number of true musicians who know the operas well and love them appreciatively than is to be found in the United States; but the number of people who have a reasonable acquaintance with the majority of operas, and are familiar with the best known airs from each and with the general characteristics of the various composers, is immensely larger in America. It is only the same fact that we have confronted so often before—the fact of the greater homogeneousness or uniformity of tastes and pursuits in the American people.
It must be clearly understood, here as elsewhere, that I am not comparing merely the people of New York with the people of London, but the people of the whole United States of all classes, urban and provincial, industrial and peasant, East and West, with the whole population of all classes in the British Isles; for a large percentage of the mistakes which Englishmen make about America arises from the fact that they insist on comparing the educated classes of London with such people as they may chance to have met in New York or one or two Eastern cities, under the impression that they are thereby drawing a comparison between the two peoples. Senator Hoar's opinion of Matthew Arnold has been already quoted; and the truth is that very few Englishmen who have written about America have lived in the country long enough to grasp how much of the United States lies on the other side of the North River. Not only does not New York alone, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington combined do not bear anything like the same relation to America as a whole as London bears to the British Isles. Englishmen take no account of, for they have not seen and no one has reported to them, the intense craving for and striving after culture and self-improvement which exists (and has existed for a generation) not only in such larger cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans, but in many hundreds of smaller communities scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific. One must have such a vision of the United States as a whole as will enable him to imagine all this endeavour, now dissipated over so vast a stretch of country, as all massed together into a territory no larger than the British Isles before he can arrive at an intelligent basis of comparison between the peoples. What is centralised in England in America is diffused over half a continent and much less easily measurable.
It happens that as I am correcting the proofs of the chapter the London newspapers of the day (January 25, 1908) contain announcements of the death in New York of Edward MacDowell. He was often spoken of as "the American Grieg"; but it was a phrase which irritated many good musical critics in America, for the reason that they considered their countryman the greater man of the two. They would have had Grieg spoken of as the Norwegian MacDowell. In that judgment they may have been right or they may have been wrong; but it is characteristic of the attitudes of the British and American peoples that, whereas the people of the United States know Grieg better than he is known in England (that is to say, that a larger proportion of the people, outside the classes which professedly account themselves musical, have more or less acquaintance with his music), just as they know the work of half a dozen English composers, MacDowell, though he had played his pianoforte concertos in London, remained almost unknown in England outside of strictly musical circles. It is certain that had MacDowell been an Englishman he would have been immensely better known in America than, being an American, he ever was in England.
In the kindred field of the drama the general English idea of the American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of "musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by the managers to be the sort of thing that England wants or which is likely to succeed in England, not because they are what America considers her best product. To attempt any comparison of the living playwrights or actors in the two countries would be a thorny and perilous undertaking; and if any comparison is to be made at all it must be done lightly and as far as possible examples must be drawn from those who are no longer actively on the boards. Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary Anderson) has deliberately put on record her opinion of Miss Clara Morris as "the greatest emotional actress I ever saw." It is not likely that when Madame de Navarro pronounced that estimate she was forgetting either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell—or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have read Miss Morris's wonderful book, Life on the Stage, will think the judgment in this case not incredible.
Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship, restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in sufficient numbers to make its presentation a success if it had been achieved in London.
It was said that in any effort to arrive at an estimate of American culture, or to state that culture in terms of English culture, we should have to find landmarks in trifles. All these things are such trifles. Let us concede that Cyrano is not the greatest literature, nor is Verestschagin's work the highest art; still neither the one nor the other is properly a negligible quantity in the sum-total of the creative work of the generation. There may be many American women who do not know their Verdi, and it may be that Madame de Navarro's estimate of Miss Morris, mine of Mr. Mansfield, and that of certain American critics of Edward MacDowell are equally at fault; but it still remains absurd to take ignorance of the Italian operas as characteristic of American women or to talk contemptuously, as many Englishmen do, of the American theatre, because they have no knowledge of it beyond what they have seen of the one class of production from The Belle of New York to The Prince of Pilsen, or of American music, because their acquaintance with it begins and ends with Sousa and the writers of "coon songs."
It will be urged that successive "crazes" for individual artists or authors, for particular productions or even isolated schools, are no evidence of any general culture. Conceding this, it remains impossible to avoid the question: supposing a nation or an individual to spend each successive six months in a new enthusiasm—six months on Plato and Aristotelianism,—six months, taking the Light of Asia, Mr. Sinnett, and Kim as a starting point, on Buddhism and esoteric philosophy,—six months, inspired by Fitzgerald, on Omar, Persian literature and history and the various ramifications thereof,—six months on M. Rodin, his relation to the art of sculpture in general and particularly to the sculpture of the Greeks,—a similar six months devoted to Mr. Watt with like excursions into his environment, proximate and remote,—six months to Millet, Barbizon, and the history of French painting,—six months of Russian art with Verestschagin and six with Russian literature and politics working outwards from Count Tolstoi,—six months of philosophic speculation radiating from Haeckel,—six months absorbed in Japanese art,—six months burrowing in Egyptian excavations and Egyptian history—the question is, I say, supposing a nation or an individual to have passed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten, every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration, with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with something less of the æsthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end of the ten years of successive furores be the same intellectual condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is probable that, besides the accumulation of a great quantity of information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is conspicuously more culture.
When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual knowledge possessed compared with the potentiality of knowledge on any one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr. Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man," he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about everything in the world except Japan. He knows nothing at all about Japan."
The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the American character, this American desire to become a universal specialist—this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge—is an essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole. The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a la-la-la whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they could. And—perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief—although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too nearly complete.
