The Briton's indifference to criticism is at once his strength and his weakness. It makes him invincible in a cause which has dominated his conscience; it hinders him in the attainment of a luminous discrimination between cause and cause. His profound self-confidence, his sheer good sense, his dogged persistence, his bulldog courage, his essential honesty of purpose, bring him to the goal in spite of the unnecessary obstacles that have been heaped on his path by his own [a]ὑβρις] and contempt of others. He chooses what is physically the shortest line in preference to the line of least resistance. He makes up for his want of light by his superiority in weight. Social adaptability is not his foible. He accepts the conventionality of his class and wears it as an impenetrable armour. Out of his own class he may sometimes appear less conventional than the American, simply because the latter is quick to adopt the manners of a new milieu, while John Bull clings doggedly or unconsciously to his old conventions. If an American and an English shop-girl were simultaneously married to peers of the realm, the odds would be a hundred to one in favour of the former in the race for self-identification with her new environment.
The American facility of expression, if I do not err, springs largely from an amiable difference in temperament. The American is, on the whole, more genially disposed to all and sundry. I do not say that he is capable of truer friendships or of greater sacrifices for a friend than the Englishman; but the window through which he looks out on humanity at large has panes of a ruddier hue, he cultivates a mildness of tone, which a Briton is apt to despise as weakness. His desire to oblige sometimes impels him to uncharacteristic actions, which lead to fallacious generalisations on the part of his British critic. He shrinks from any assumption of superiority; he is apt to think twice of the feelings of his inferiors. The American tends to consider each stranger he meets—at any rate within his own social sphere—as a good fellow until he proves himself the contrary; with the Englishman the presumption is rather the other way. An Englishman usually excuses this national trait as really due to modesty and shyness; but I fear there is in it a very large element of sheer bad manners, and of a cowardly fear of compromising one's self with undesirable acquaintances. Englishmen are apt to take omne ignotum pro horribile, and their translation of the Latin phrase varies from the lifting of the aristocratic eyebrow over the unwarranted address of the casual companion at table d'hôte down to the "'ere's a stranger, let's 'eave 'arf a brick at 'im" of the Black Country. In England I am apt to feel painfully what a lame dog I am; in America I feel, well, if I am a lame dog I am being helped most delightfully over the conversational stile. An Englishman says, "Would you mind doing so-and-so for me?" showing by the very form of the question that he thinks kindness likely to be troublesome. An American says, "Wouldn't you like to do this for me?" assuming the superior attitude of one who feels that to give an opportunity to do a kindness is itself to confer a favour. The Continental European shares with the American the merit of having manners on the self-regarding pattern of noblesse oblige, while the Englishman wants to know who you are, so as to put on his best manners only if the force majeure of your social standing compels him. No one wishes the Englishman to express more than he really feels or to increase the already overwhelming mass of conventional insincerity; but it might undoubtedly be well for him to consider whether it is not his positive duty to drop a little more of the oil of human kindness on the wheels of the social machinery, and to understand that it is perfectly possible for two strangers to speak with and look at each other pleasantly without thereby contracting the obligation of eternal friendship. Why should an English traveller deem it worthy of special record that when calling at a Boston club, he found his friend and host not yet arrived, other members of the club, unknown to him, had put themselves about to entertain him? An American gentleman would find this too natural to call for remark.
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 [a]κὁττβος], 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.