The yellow press is the second rung on the cultural ladder of democracy. America is glad of it, glad also of the princess novelette, the pirate story, glad of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli; all these are, as it were, divining-rods for better things. The American says "Yes" to the novels of Florence Barclay, as indeed most sensible Britons would also. The Rosary was a most helpful book—so much more helpful to the unformed intellect and young intelligence of the mass of the people than, for instance, Tolstoy's dangerously overpraised Resurrection or Wells's New Machiavelli. America recognises the truth that the ugly has power to make those who look at it ugly like itself; but that the crude and elementary stuff, however poor it may be artistically, is nevertheless most useful to democracy if it speaks in language and sentiment which is common knowledge to the reader. How useful to America is such a book as Churchill's Inside of the Cup.
It is a very true dictum that "reading makes more reading"; and in a young, hopeful nation, striving to divine its own destiny and to visualise its future, "more reading" always means better reading.
Perhaps the cultured ladder of democracy may be seen allegorically as the ladder of Jacob's dream. Religion, which may be thought to have flown from the churches, is in evidence at the libraries. It is a librarian who is able to say in The Inside of the Cup that we are on the threshold of a greater religious era than the world has ever seen.
In America to-day we are confronted with two parties,—one the great multifarious, unformed mass of the people, and the other the strong, emancipated, cultured American nation, which is at work shaping the democracy. The aspect of the "rabble," the commercial heathen, and horde of unknowing, unknown immigrants, gives you the first but not the final impression of America. You remark first of all the slouching, blank-eyed, broad-browed immigrant, who indulges still his European vices and craves his European pleasures, flocking into saloons, debauching his body, or at best looking dirty and out of hand, a reproach to the American flag. You see the Jews leaping over one another's backs in the orgy of mean trade. You see the fat American, clever enough to bluff even the Jew—the strange emerging bourgeois type of what I call the "white nigger," low-browed, heavy-cheeked, thick-lipped, huge-bodied, but white; men who seem made of rubber so elastic they are; men who seem to get their thoughts from below upward. I've often watched one of these "white negroes" reflecting; he seems to sense his thoughts in his body first of all—you can watch his idea rise up to him from the earth, pass along his body and flicker at last in a true American smile across his lips—a transition type of man I should say. One wonders where these men, who are originally Jews or Anglo-Saxons or Dutch or Germans, got their negro souls. It would almost tempt one to think that there were negro souls floating about, and that they found homes in white babies.
Beside the fat American is the more familiar lean, hatchet-faced type, which is thought to correspond to the Red Indian in physiognomy. Perhaps too much importance is attached to the Darwinian idea that the climate of America is breeding a race of men with physique and types similar to the aborigines. The American is still a long way from the red-skin. Meanwhile, however, one may note with a smile the extraordinary passion of Americans for collecting autographs, curios, snippets of the clothes of famous men, Italian art, British castles,—which seems to be scalp-hunting in disguise. The Americans are great scalp-hunters.
On the whole, the dry, lean Americans are the most trustworthy and honourable among the masses of the people. In England we trust fat men, men "who sleep o' nights," but in America one prefers the lean man. Shakespeare would not have written of Cassius as he did if he had been an American of to-day. Of course too much stress might easily be laid on the unpleasantness of the "white-nigger" type. There are plenty of them who are true gentlemen.
The American populace has also its bad habits. There are those who chew "honest scrap," and those who chew "spearmint." It is astonishing to witness the service of the cuspidor in a hotel, the seven or eight obese, cow-like American men, all sitting round a cuspidor and chewing tobacco; almost equally astonishing to sit in a tramcar full of American girls, and see that every jaw is moving up and down in the mastication of sweet gum.
America suffers terribly from its own success, its vastness, its great resources, its commercial scoops, its wealth, vested en masse and so vulgarly in the person of lucky or astute business men. This has bred a tendency to chronic exaggeration in the language of the common people, it has brought on the jaunty airs and tall talk of the man who, however ignorant he may be, thinks that he knows all. But success has also brought kindness and an easy-going temperament. There are no people in the world less disposed to personal ill-temper than the Americans. They are very generous, and in friendship rampageously exuberant. They are not mean, and are disinclined to incur or to collect small debts. They would rather toss who pays for the drinks of a party than pay each his own score. They have even invented little gambling machines in cigar stores and saloons where you can put a nickel over a wheel and run a chance between having five cigars for five cents, or paying twenty-five cents for no cigars at all.
So stands on the one hand the "many-headed," sprung from every country in Europe, an uncouth nation doing what they ought not to do, and leaving undone what they ought to do, but at least having in their hearts, every one of them, the idea that America is a fine thing, a large thing, a wonderful promise. Opposite them stands what may be called the American intelligence, ministering as best it can to the wants of young America, and helping to fashion the great desideratum,—a homogeneous nation for the new world.
It seems perhaps a shame to question the significance of any of the phenomena of American life of to-day, to tie what may be likened to a tin can to the end of this chapter; but I feel that this is the most fitting place to put a few notes which I have made of tendencies which are apt to give trouble to the mind of Europeans otherwise very sympathetic to America and America's ideal. They are quite explicable phenomena, and in realising and understanding them for himself the reader will be enabled to get a truer idea of the atmosphere of America.