After this, there is nothing more to be said. Questions of course might be asked as to how the “Yorkshire ham” not being “Scrooby” now, ever started from “Scrooby” in the past, only it is not worth while. It never is worth while to try and certify an American Bounder’s claim to being sprung from a dead and gone family of English gentlemen. Regard for the dead and gone English gentlemen should save them from this affront to their honourable dust.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the American Bounder after his free and easy familiarities with “Bertie” (the King) “Alex.” (the Queen) and “Georgie and May” (the Prince and Princess of Wales) is his overweening, self-satisfied, complacent and arrogant ignorance. The most blatant little local tradesman who, through well-meaning Parliamentary short-sightedness in educational schemes, becomes a “governor” of a Technical School in the provinces, is never so blatantly ignorant as he. He talks of everything and knows nothing. He assumes to have the last word in science, art and literature. He will tell you he is “great chums” with Marconi and Edison, and that these famous discoverers and inventors always lay their heads on his bosom and tell him their dearest confidences. He knows just what is going to be done by everybody with everything. He is friends with the Drama too. Beerbohm Tree rings him up on the telephone at all manner of strange hours, thirsting for his advice on certain “scenes” and “effects.” He is—to use his own words—“doing a great thing” for Tree! Sarah Bernhardt is his very dearest of dear ones! She has fallen into his arms, coming off the stage at the side wings, exhausted, and exclaiming—“Toi, mon cher! Enfin! Maintenant, je respire!” Madame Réjane is always at home to him. In fact all Paris hails him with a joy too deep for tears. He would not be a true “Amurrican” if he did not love Paris, and if Paris did not love him.
But though he is completely “at one,” according to his own statement, with most of the celebrated personages of the day, if not all, he cannot tell you the most commonly known facts about them to save his life. And though—again according to his own statement—he has read every book ever published, visited every picture gallery, “salon” and theatre in Europe, he cannot pronounce the name of one single foreign author or artist correctly. His English is bad enough, but his French is worse. He seldom makes excursions into the Italian language—“Igh—talian” as he calls it, but it is quite enough for the merest beginner in the Tuscan tongue to hear him say “gondòla” to take the measure of his capacity. “Gòndola” is a word so easily learned and so often used in Italian, that one might think any child could master its pronunciation from twice hearing it—but the American Bounder makes the whole tour of Italy without losing a scrap of his own special nasal lingo, and returns in triumph to talk of the “gondòla” and the “bella ràgg-azza” (instead of ragàzza) till one’s ears almost ache with the hideous infliction of his abominable accent. In Switzerland he is always alluding to “Mount Blank”—the “Cantone Gry-son”—“Noo-shatell”—and the “Mountain Vert”—and in Great Britain he has been heard to speak of Loche Kay-trine and Ben Neevis, as well as of Conisston and Cornwàll. But it is quite “correct” he will tell you—it is only the English people who do not know how to talk English. The actual, true, pure pronunciation of the English language went over to the States with the Scroobys of Scrooby, and he their descendant and Bounder, has preserved it intact. Even Shakespeare’s river Avon becomes metamorphosed under the roll of his atrocious tongue. He will not pronounce it with the English A, as in the word “bay,”—he calls it A’von, as the “a” is sounded in the word avarice—so that the soft poetic name of the classic stream appears to have been bitten off by him and swallowed like a pop-corn. But it would be of no use to argue with him on this or on any other point, because he is always right. No real American Bounder was ever wrong.
One cannot but observe what a close acquaintance the Bounder has with Debrett and various “County” Directories. His study of these volumes is almost as profound as that of Mr. Balfour must have been when writing “The Foundations of Belief.” Between Debrett and Baedeker he manages to elicit a certain useful stock of surface information which he imparts in a kind of cheap toy-cracker fashion to various persons, who, politely listening, wonder why he appears to think that they are not aware of facts familiar to them from their childhood. His modes of appearing “to know, you know!” are exceedingly simple. For example, suppose him to be asked to join a “house-party” in Suffolk. He straightway studies the “County Directory” of that quarter of England, and looks up the principal persons mentioned therein in various other books of handy reference. When, in due course, he arrives at the house to which he has been invited, he manages to faintly surprise uninitiated persons by his (apparently) familiar acquaintance with the pedigree and history of this or that “county” magnate, and his (apparently) intimate knowledge of such and such celebrated paintings and “objets d’art” as adorn the various historical mansions in the district—knowledge for which he is merely indebted to Baedeker. He is as loquacious as a village washerwoman. He will relate any number of scandalous stories in connection with the several families of whose ways and doings he pretends to have such close and particular information—and should any listener interrupt him with a mild “Pardon me!—but, having resided in this neighbourhood all my life I venture to think you must be mistaken”;—he merely smiles blandly at such a display of “native” ignorance. “Lived here all your life and not know that!” he exclaims—“My word! It takes an Amurrican to teach you what’s going on in your own country!”
Offensive as is this more or less ordinary type of American Bounder who makes his “home in Yew-rope” on fourth floors of fashionable hotels, a still worse and more offensive specimen is found in the Starred-and-Striped Bounding Millionaire. This individual—who has frequently attained to a plethora of cash through one of two reprehensible ways—either by “sweating” labour, or by fooling shareholders in “trust” companies,—comes to Great Britain with the fixed impression that everything in the “darned old place” can be bought for money. Unfortunately he is often right. The British—originally and by nature proud, reserved, and almost savagely tenacious of their freedom and independence—have been bitten by the Transatlantic madness of mere Greed, and their blood has been temporarily poisoned by infection. But one may hope and believe that it is only a passing malady, and that the old healthy life will re-invest the veins of the nation all the more strongly for partial sickness and relapse. In the meantime it occasionally happens that the “free” Briton bows his head like a whipped mongrel cur to the bulging Bank-Account of the American Millionaire-Bounder. And the American Millionaire-Bounder plants his flat foot on the so foolishly bent pate and walks over it with a commercial chuckle. “You talk of your ‘Noblesse oblige,’ your honour, your old historic tradition and aristocratic Order!” he says, sneeringly—“Why there isn’t a man alive in Britain that I couldn’t buy, principles and all, for fifty thousand pounds!”
This kind of vaunt at Britain’s expense is common to the American Millionaire-Bounder—and whether it arises out of his conscious experience of the British, or his braggart conceit, must be left to others to query or determine. Certain it is that he does buy a good deal, and that the owners of such things as he wants seem always ready to sell. Famous estates are knocked down to him—manuscripts and pictures which should be the preciously guarded property of the nation, are easily purchased by him,—and, laughing in his sleeve at the purblind apathy of the British Government, which calmly looks on while he pockets such relics of national greatness as unborn generations will vainly and indignantly ask for,—he congratulates himself on possessing, as he says, “the only few things the old country has got left worth having.” One can but look gloomily through the “Calendar of Shakespearean Rarities,” collected by Halliwell Phillips, which were offered to the wealthy city of Birmingham for £7,000, and reflect that this same wealthy city disgraced itself by refusing to purchase the collection and by allowing everything to be bought and carried away from England by “an American” in 1897. We do not say this American was a “Bounder”—nevertheless, if he had been a real lover of Shakespeare’s memory, rather than of himself, he would have bought these relics for Shakespeare’s native country and presented them for Shakespeare’s sake to Shakespeare’s native people, who are not, as a People, to blame for the parsimony of their Governments. They pay taxes enough in all conscience, and at least they deserve that what few relics remain of their Greatest Man should be saved and ensured to them.
But perhaps the American Millionaire-Bounder is at his best when he has bought an English newspaper and is running it in London. Then he feels as if he were running the Imperial Government itself—nay, almost the Monarchy. He imagines that he has his finger on the very pulse of Time. He hugs himself in the consciousness that the British people,—that large majority of them who are not behind the scenes—buy his paper, believing it to be a British paper, not a journal of “Amurrican” opinion, that is, opinion as ordered and paid for by one “Amurrican.” He knows pretty well in his own mind that if they understood that such was the actual arrangement, they would save their pence. Unfortunately the great drawback of the “man in the street” who buys newspapers, is that he has no time to enquire as to the way in which the journals he confides in are “run.” If he knew that the particular view taken of the political situation in a certain journal, was merely the political view ordered to be taken by one “Amurrican”—naturally he would not pin his simple faith upon it. Perhaps the Man in the Street will some day wake up to the realization that in many cases, (though not all) with respect to journalism, he only exists to be “gulled.”
Like all good and bad things, the American Bounder, whether millionaire or only shabby-genteel, has a certain height beyond which he can no further go—a point where he culminates in a blaze of ultra Bounder-ism. This brilliant apotheosis is triumphantly reached in the Female of his species. The American Female Bounder is the quintessence of vulgarity, and in every way makes herself so objectionable even to her own people and country that Americans themselves view her departure for “Yew-rope” with perfect equanimity, and hope she will never come back. Once in what she calls “the old country” she talks all day long through her quivering nose of “Lady This” and “Countess That.” One of this class I recall now as I write, who spoke openly of a “Mrs. Countess So-and-So”—and utterly declined to be instructed in any other form of address. She was not content to trace her lineage to such humble folk as the “Scroobys of Scrooby”—no indeed, not she! Kings were her ancestors; her “family tree” sprouted from Richard the Lion-Heart, according to her own bombastic assertion, and she, with her loud twanging voice, odious manners and insufferable impertinence, was “genuine stock” of royallest origin. Of course it is quite possible that, as in horticulture, a once nobly cultivated human plant may, if left without wholesome or fostering influences, degenerate into a weed—but that so rank a weed as the American Female Bounder should be the dire result of the Conqueror’s blood is open to honest doubt. She generally has a “mission” to reform something or somebody,—she is very often a “Christian science” woman, or a theosophist. Sometimes she “takes up” Art as though it were a dustpan, and sweeps into it under her “patronage” certain dusty and doubtful literary and musical aspirants who want a “hearing” for their efforts. Fortunately for the world, a “hearing” under the gracious auspices of the American Female Bounder means a silence everywhere else. She is fond of “frocks and frills”—and wears an enormous quantity of jewels, “stones” as she calls them. She “pushes” herself in every possible social direction, and wherever she sees she is not wanted, there, more particularly than elsewhere, she contrives to force an entry. She embraces the game of “Bridge” with passionate eagerness because she sees that by keeping open house, with card-tables always ready, she can attract the loafing “great ones of the earth,” and possibly persuade a “Mrs. Countess” to befriend her. If she is fairly wealthy, she can generally manage to do this. All Mrs. Countesses have not “that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.” Some of them find the American Female Bounder useful—and precisely in the manner she offers herself, even so they take her. And thus it often happens that one frequently meets her where she has no business to be. One is not surprised to find her at Court, or in the Royal enclosure at Ascot, because so many of her British sisters in the Bounder line are in these places, ready to give her a helping hand—but one is occasionally startled and in a manner sorry to discover her making herself at home among certain “exclusive” people who are chiefly distinguished for their good-breeding, culture and refinement. In one thing, however, we can take much comfort, and this is, that whatever the American Bounder, Male or Female, may purchase or otherwise insidiously obtain in the Old World, neither he nor she can ever secure respect. Driven to bay as the Britisher may be by consummate and pertinacious lying, he can and does withhold from the liars his honest esteem. He may sell a valuable manuscript or picture to a “bounding” Yankee, out of sheer necessitous circumstance, but he will never be “friends” with the purchaser. He will call him “bounder” to the crack of doom, and Doomsday itself will not alter that impression of him.
It may be, and it is I think, taken for granted that America itself is very glad to get rid of its “bounders.” It regards them with as much shame and distress as we feel when we see certain specimens of “travelling English” disporting themselves upon the Continent in the ’Arry and Jemima way. We always fervently hope that our Continental neighbours will not take these extraordinary roughs as bona-fide examples of the British people, and in the same way America trusts all the nations of Europe not to accept their “Bounders” as examples of the real pith and power of the United States. The American People are too great, too broad-minded, sane, and thorough, not to wish to shake off these aphides on their rose of life. They watch them “clearing out” for “Yew-rope” with perfect satisfaction. Said a charming American woman to me the other day—“What a pity it is that English people will keep on receiving Americans here who would not be tolerated for a moment in New York or Boston society! It surprises us very greatly. Sometimes indeed we cannot help laughing to see the names of women figuring among your ‘haute noblesse’ who would never get inside a decent house anywhere in the States. But more often we are sorry that your social ‘leaders’ are so easily taken in!”
Here indeed is the sum total of the matter. If Great Britain—and other countries in Europe—but Great Britain especially—did not “receive” and encourage the American Bounder and Bounderess, these objectionable creatures would never be known or heard of. Therefore it is our fault that they exist. Were it not for our short-sighted foolishness, and our proneness to believe that every “Amurrican” with money must be worth knowing, we should be better able to sort the sheep from the goats. We should add to the pleasures of our social life and intercourse an agreeable knowledge of the real American ladies, the real American gentlemen; and though these are seldom seen over here, for the very good reason that they are valued and wanted in their own country, they could at least be certain, when they did come, of being received at their proper valuation, and not set to herd with the “Bounders” of their country, whom their country rejects. For one may presume that there is some cogent reason why an American citizen of the Greatest Republic in the world, should elect to desert his native land and “settle down” under “rotten old monarchies.” People do not leave the home of their birth for ever unless they find it impossible to live there for causes best known to themselves. The poor are often compelled to emigrate, we know, in the hope to find employment and food in other countries—but when the rich “slope off” from the very centres where they have made their capital, one may be permitted to doubt the purity of their intentions. Anyway, surrounded as we are to-day socially by American Bounders of every description,—American Bounders who think themselves as good as any one else “and a darned sight better”—American Bounders who declare that they are the “real old British race renewed,”—American Bounders who “run” British journals of “literary opinion” and so forth,—American Bounders who thrust themselves into the company of unhappy kings and queens,—those crowned slaves who in such earthquaking days as these have to be more than common careful “not to offend,”—American Bounders who themselves claim kinship with the blood royal,—the one straight and simple fact remains—namely, that all the best Americans still live in America!