But as to snobs. New York’s streets are of course often choked with them. A duke, an elephant, a base-ball pitcher on Fifth Avenue, may at any time be the center of a disproportionate and servile attention from both the American people and the press. Yet the cult of the egregious and the greatly advertised has never the deep devotion of sound snobbery. It is not for an upstart and volatile people to dispute the calm supremacy of British snobbery. Your true snob is not inquisitive at all. He has no sense of any social values not his own. It is among the tightly closed minds of the tight little island that he is seen at his best. What other nation could produce, in journalism, such inimitable snobs as the Lord Alfred Douglases and the Saturday Reviewers?
American snobbery is not a sturdy plant. There is too much social uncertainty at the root of it. What the British take for snobbery over here springs from quite alien qualities—curiosity, a vast social innocence, and a blessed inexperience of rank. To be sure, if King George comes to New York some one may clip his coat-tails for a keepsake; and it is quite probable that Mrs. Van Allendale, of Newport, if asked to meet him, will be all of a tremble whether to address him as “Sire” or “My God.” But what has this in common with the huge assurances of British snobbery—its enormous certainty of the Proper Thing, in clothes, people, religion, sports, manners, and races, and its indomitable determination not to guess again?
KING GEORGE IN NEW YORK
OUR TENDER LITERARY CELEBRITIES
ONE day, not so very long ago, a well-known American author was laughed at in a morning newspaper. It was apparently not meant for stinging satire. But the author felt it somewhere about him and complained to the editor of the pain. He wrote a letter for publication—long, earnest, very indignant. I am, said he, the victim of a “malignantly humorous attack.” By which process he turned a poor joke on himself into a good one, and incidentally exposed a too tender private temperament to the public gaze.
Sometimes it seems as if the whole body of recent American literature were not worth the damage sustained by character while consuming the fruits of success. There are signs of a bad schooling, of too steady a fare of sweets. For what doth it profit a man to run to a hundred thousand if he turn out a prig? The thing too often happens. His constitution may have been none too robust at the start, but it is awful to think what might become of any of us. Undermined by reciprocal endearments, we, too, might rage at the first word of criticism and swoon at the sound of laughter. Potatoes will sprout in a warm cellar, though some are worse than others. It is the effect of too much shelter in the great author’s life.
I condemn no man. I condemn the influences. Fortified against displeasure, barricaded against even chaff, there comes a time when the soul’s dark cottage needs ventilation. There should be more outside breezes in The Literary Life.
