English of this description runs very badly to pea-nut. It is distorted and degraded and entirely ungrammatical. Yet no one will deny that, if it is not commonly written, it is at least commonly spoken, even in such centres as New York and Boston. To American ears and eyes there is nothing about it that can be quarrelled with. Every American knows what is meant by “guys,” “tapioca,” “nit,” “gold-brick,” “nairy,” “squares,” “hot-air,” and so forth; and he uses these and similarly squalid words and phrases in his daily speech and conversation. If you were to tell him that such a sentence as “he win out a lot of mud, the next throw” was grammatically unsound and impossible, he would ask you please to be so kind “as not to pull his leg.” He is mentally incapable of distinguishing the kind of muss I have quoted from writing of a correct order, and when it creeps into his newspapers, and fictional publications, as it is continually doing, he never as much as suspects that there is anything wrong.
Such a pea-nutty view of language points its own moral. It is a view that is universal among Americans, and it can be proved to obtain even among the best of American authors, who habitually use some of the crudest Americanisms without knowing it.
I need scarcely add that the pea-nut flavour predominates in most American affairs. The advertising of the country is done wholly on pea-nut principles, its politics are run on pea-nut lines, and its professional men and financiers indulge in every species of pea-nut methods. No doubt one should be charitable enough to refrain from blaming them for it. They are to the manner born, and the pea-nut idiosyncracy is so firmly implanted in their natures that it would be impossible for them to shake it out, even if they tried. So that they go on pea-nutting and pea-nutting from generation to generation, and in spite of the extraordinary number of colleges, free schools, reading clubs, and general facilities for culture, they remain clear pea-nut right through.
As I do not happen to wish them any particular harm, I shall express the pious hope that they will long continue to pea-nut.
CHAPTER IX
The Drama
The Americans are nothing if not fiercely and incorrigibly theatrical. It is true that they have only one pose, namely, the pose of being gloriously and unaffectedly American. Yet in all the large issues of life they display a strong sense of the stage, they revel in the more obvious situations, and they have an innate love of a good curtain.
These facts are strikingly illustrated in the American law courts, where all small matters are managed on the lines of comedy, and all large matters on the lines of hot and lurid melodrama. The recent Thaw trial may be taken as a typical case in point, so far as melodrama is concerned. The speeches of counsel on both sides might have been written specially for the Adelphi Theatre, and every gesture of the rival declaimers would seem to have been modelled on the style of the adipose itinerant actor who plays “Othello” in penny gaffs.