With England the case is different. No one knows just how hard Britain has been hit, but she is managing to put a good face on her wounds. No relief organization from the big sister has landed its khaki-clad apostles of hygiene and its grey-cloaked sisters of mercy on English shores. The façade is intact, the old masters in possession. With a few shifts and changes in political labelling that are a matter of domestic concern, those who steered the big concern into the bankruptcy of war are still entrusted with its extrication. No great subversion stands as a witness of a change of national faith. The destinies, the foreign relations, the aspects that attract or antagonize remain in the hands of men who secured a fresh lease of power by a clever political trick. The skeleton at the feast of racial reunion is not Ireland, nor Mesopotamia, nor Yap, nor the control of the seas. It is the emergence into political power, sooner or later, but inevitably from the very nature of British political institutions, of the British proletariat.
Frankly I do not see, when this moment arrives, who is going to put the gospel of American civilization into terms that will be, I shall not say acceptable, but even significant, to the emancipated British worker. Ruling classes in the older country who rely on a steadying force from across the Atlantic in possible political upheavals must have strange misgivings when they take account of their own stewardship. It will be an ungrateful task to preach the doctrine of salvation through work to a people that has tried it out so logically and completely that the century which has seen the commercial supremacy of their country has witnessed the progressive impoverishment and proletarization of its people. Homilies on discipline will sound strangely in the ears of those who, while America was enjoying her brief carnival of spacious and fruitful endeavour in a virgin land, went under an industrial yoke that has galled their necks and stunted their physical growth. Appeals to pride of race will have little meaning coming from a stock that has ceased through self-indulgence or economic upward pressure to resist ethnologically and whose characteristics are disappearing in the general amalgam.
The salient fact that stands out from all history is that inordinateness of any sort has never failed to act upon the English character as a challenge. His successes, whatever his libellists may seek to believe, have seldom been against the small or weak. It has been his destiny, in one recurrent crisis after another, to find himself face to face with some claimant to world power, some “cock of the walk.” To use a homely phrase, it has always been “up to him.” And the vision of his adversary which has nerved his arm has always been an excess in some quality easily understandable by the average man. Bigotry is not the monopoly of the Spaniard, nor commercial greed of the Hollander, nor vanity of the Frenchman, nor pomposity of the German. It would be an easy task to convict the Englishman of some share in each vice. Nevertheless history in the main has justified his instinct for proportion, his dislike for “slopping over.” In something far beyond the accepted phrase, the English struggle has been a struggle for the “balance of power.”
Henry L. Stuart
II. AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT
The application of the term “shirt-sleeve” to American diplomacy is perhaps the most concise expression of the conception we have formed in Europe of life in the United States. We imagine that it is only necessary to cross the Atlantic Ocean to find a people young and vigorous in its emancipation from ancient forms and obsolete ceremonies. The average visitor returns, after a brief tour through the more urbane centres of European imitation, and tries to startle us with a narrative in which a few picturesque crudities are supposed to indicate the democratic ease of American civilization. His mind is filled with an incoherent jumble of skyscrapers, express elevators, ice water, chewing-gum, and elevated railroads, so that his inevitable contribution to the literature relating to America becomes the mere chronicle of a tourist’s experiences. Every deviation from European practice is emphasized, and in proportion to the writer’s consequent personal discomfort, he will conjure up a hideous picture of uncouthness, whose effect is to confirm us in our estimate of American progress ... or barbarism, as the case may be. If the critical stranger happens to be a well-known poet or dramatist, he will probably succeed in passing lightly over those minor inconveniences, which the generosity of wealthy admirers has prevented him from experiencing at first hand.
The consequence is that there is no subject more hopelessly involved in a cloud of voluminous complaint and banal laudation than American life as seen by the foreigner. Neither the enthusiasts nor the fault-finders have contributed much of any assistance either to Europeans or to the Americans themselves. The former accept America at its own valuation, the latter complain of precisely those things upon which the average citizen prides himself. It is not easy to decide which class of critics has helped most effectively to perpetuate the legend of American freedom; the minor commentators who hold democracy to be the cause of every offence, or the higher critics, like Viscount Bryce, who, finding no American commonwealth, proceeded to invent one. The objectors are dismissed as witnesses to the incapacity of the servile European to appreciate true liberty and equality; the well-disposed are gratefully received as evangelists of a gospel to which Americans subscribe without excessive introspection. There is something touching in the gratitude felt towards the author of “The American Commonwealth.” Who would have believed that a foreigner, and a Britisher at that, could make a monument of such imposing brick with the straws of political oratory in the United States?
On one point all observers have involuntarily agreed. Whether with approval or disapproval, they have depicted for us a society which presents such marked divergencies from our own manners and customs that there is not one of us but comes to America believing that his best or worst hopes will be confirmed. It is, therefore, somewhat disconcerting to confess that neither presentment has been realized. To have passed from Continental Europe to New York, via London, is to deprive oneself of that social and intellectual shock which is responsible for the uniformly profound impression which transatlantic conditions make upon the European mind. So many continentals enjoy in the United States their first direct contact with Anglo-Saxon institutions and modes of thought that the revelation cannot fail to stimulate them. Their writings frequently testify to a naïve ignorance of the prior existence in England of what excites their dismay or admiration in America. If it be asked why, then, have Englishmen similarly reacted to the same stimuli, if acquaintance with England blunts the fine edge of perception, the reply must be: the quality of their emotion is different. The impression made upon a mind formed by purely Latin traditions necessarily differs from that received by a mind previously subjected to Anglo-Saxon influences. Consequently, the student of American life who has neither the motive of what might be called family jealousy, in the Englishman, nor the mentality, wholly innocent of alien culture, of the Latin, would seem well equipped to view the subject from another angle.
To the good European the most striking characteristic of the United States is a widespread intellectual anæmia. So far from exhibiting those traits of freedom and progress which harrow the souls of sensitive aristocrats in Europe, the American people alarm the outsider in search of stimulating ideas by their devotion to conventions and formulæ. As soon as one has learnt to discount those lesser manifestations of independence, whose perilous proximity to discourtesy gives them an exaggerated importance in the eyes of superficial critics, the conventionality of the American becomes increasingly evident. So many foreigners have been misled—mainly because of an apparent rudeness—by this show of equality, this ungraciousness in matters of service, that one hesitates at first to dismiss the unconventional American as a myth closely related to that of the “immoral Frenchman.” It is only when prolonged association has revealed the timid respectability beneath this veneer of informality that it becomes possible to understand the true position of America. From questioning individuals one proceeds to an examination of the public utterances of prominent men, and the transition from the press to literature is easily made. At length comes the discovery that mentally the United States is a generation or two behind Western Europe. The rude and vigorous young democracy, cited by its admirers in extenuation of æsthetic sins of omission and commission, suddenly stands forth attired in the garment of ideas which clothed early Victorian England.
This condition is largely due to the absence of an educated class accustomed to leisure. To the American work for work’s sake has a dignity unknown in Europe, where it is rare to find anybody working for mere wages if he has any means of independent subsistence, however small. In America the contrary is the case, and people who could afford to cultivate their own personalities prefer to waste their energies upon some definite business. Almost all the best that has come out of Europe has been developed in that peculiar class which sacrificed money-making for the privilege of leisure and relative independence. The only corresponding class in the United States is that of the college professors, who are an omnipresent menace to the free interplay of ideas. Terrorized by economic fears and intellectual inhibitions, they have no independence. They are despised by the plain people because of their failure to make money; and to them are relegated all matters which are considered of slight moment, namely, learning and the arts. In these fields the pedants rule unchallenged, save when some irate railroad presidents discover in their teachings the heresy of radicalism. Æsthetics is a science as incomprehensible to them as beauty, and they prefer to substitute the more homely Christian ethics. Moral preoccupations are their sole test of excellence. The views of these gentlemen and their favourite pupils fill the bookshelves and the news-stands.