The Twentieth Century American Part 11

In our grandfathers' days, a man of reasonable culture could come approximately near to knowing all that then was known and worth the knowing. The wisdom and science of the world could be included in the compa.s.s of a modest bookshelf. But the province of human knowledge has become so wide that, however much "general information" a man may have, he can truly know nothing unless he studies it as a specialist. It is, perhaps, largely as a reaction against the Jacksonian theory of universal competence that the avowed ideal of American education to-day is to cultivate the student's power of concentration--to give him a survey, elementary but sound, of as wide a field as possible, but above all to teach him so to use his mind that to whatever corner of that field he may turn for his walk in life, he will be able to focus all his intellect upon it--to concentrate and bring to bear all his energies on whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his fortune. When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual store of knowledge is superficial--a smattering of too many things--but superficiality is precisely the one quality which, in theory at least, his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business.

They know that he throws the same earnestness into his sports. Is it not reasonable to suppose that he will be no less earnest in the study of Botticelli? And it is a great advantage (which the American nation shares with the American youth) to have the products, the literature, the art, the inst.i.tutions of the whole world to choose from, with practically no traditions to hamper the choice.

When the j.a.panese determined to adopt Western ways, seeing that so only could they hold their own against the peoples of the West, they did not model their civilisation on that of any one European country. They sent the most intelligent of their young men abroad into every country, each with a mission to study certain things in that country; and so, gathering for comparison the ways of thought and the inst.i.tutions of all peoples, they were able to pick and choose from each what seemed best to them and to reject all else. They did not propose to make themselves a nation of imitation Englishmen or Germans or Americans. "But," we can imagine them saying, "if we take whatever is best in each country we ought surely to be able to make ourselves into a nation better than any." They modelled their navy on the British, but not their army, nor their banking system, nor did they copy much from British commercial or industrial methods--nor did they take the British system of education.

The United States has been less free to choose. The j.a.panese had a new house, quite empty, and they could do their furnis.h.i.+ng all at once. The American nation, though young, has, after all, a century of domestic life behind it, in the course of which it has acc.u.mulated a certain amount of furniture in the form of inst.i.tutions, prejudices, and traditions, some of which are fixtures and could not be torn out of the structure if the nation wished it; others, though movable, possess a.s.sociations for the sake of which it would not part with them if it could. Fortunately, however, the house has been much built on to of late years and what goods, or bads, are already ama.s.sed can all be stowed away in a single east wing. All the main building (the eastern wing used to be the main building, but it is not now), and particularly the western end and the annex to the north, are new and empty, to be decorated and furnished as the owner pleases. And while the owner, like a sensible man, intends to do all that he can to encourage home manufactures, he does not hesitate to go as far afield as he likes to fill a nook with something better than anything that can be turned out at home.

Nothing strikes an Englishman more, after he comes to know the people, than this eclectic habit, paradoxically combined as it is with an intense--an over-noisy--patriotism. "The best," the American is fond of saying, "is good enough for me"; and it never occurs to him that he has not entire right to the best wherever he may find it. In England it is only a small part of the population which considers itself ent.i.tled to the best of anything. The rest of the people may covet, but the best belongs to "their betters." The American knows no "betters." He comes to England and walks, as of right, into the best hotels, the best restaurants, the best seats at the theatres--and the best society. He buys, so far as his purse permits, and often his purse permits a great deal, the best works of art. The consequence is that the world brings him of its best. It may defraud him once in a while into buying an imitation or a second-cla.s.s article patched up; but, on the whole, the American people has something like the best of the world to choose from.

And what is true of the palpable and material things is equally true of the intangible and intellectual.

Englishmen have long been familiar with one aspect of this fact, in the honours which America has in the past been ready to shower on any visiting Englishman of distinction: in the extraordinary number of dollars that she has been willing to pay to hear him lecture. Of this particular commodity--the lecturing Englishman--the people has been fairly sated; but because Americans are no longer eager to lionise any English author or artist with some measure of a London reputation, it does not by any means imply that they are not still seeking for, and grappling, the best in art and letters wherever they can find it. They only doubt whether the Englishman who comes to lecture is, after all, the best.

A Frenchman has p.r.o.nounced American society to be the wittiest in the world. A German has said that more people read Dante in Boston than in Berlin. I take it that many more read Shakespeare in the United States than in Great Britain--and they certainly try harder to understand him.

Nor need it be denied that they have to try harder. Without any knowledge of actual sales, I have no doubt that the number of copies of the works of any continental European author, of anything like a first-cla.s.s reputation, sold in America is vastly greater than the number sold in England. Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche--I give the names at random as they come--of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a "cult" in the United States than in England--a far larger proportion of the population makes some effort to master what is worth mastering in each. Rodin's works--his name at least and photographs of his masterpieces--are familiar to tens of thousands of Americans belonging to cla.s.ses which in England never heard of him. h.e.l.leu's drawings were almost a commonplace of American ill.u.s.trated literature six years before one educated Englishman in a hundred knew his name. Zorn's etchings are almost as well known in the United States as Whistler's. Englishmen remain curiously engrossed in English things.

It may be a very disputable judgment to say that the most nearly Shakespearian literary production of modern times--at least of those which have gained any measure of fame--is M. Rostand's _Cyrano de Bergerac_. Immediately on its publication it was greeted in America with hardly less enthusiasm than in Paris; and within a few weeks it became the chief topic of conversation at a thousand dinner tables. In a few months I had seen the play acted by three different companies--all admirable, scholarly productions, of which the most famous and most "authorised" was by no means the best--and soon thereafter I came to England, for a short visit, but with the determination to find time to make the trip to Paris to see M. Coquelin as "Cyrano." I found Englishmen--educated Englishmen, including not a few authors and critics to whom I spoke--practically unaware of the existence of such a play. Of those who had heard of it and read _critiques_, I met not one who had read the work itself. Some time after, Sir Charles Wyndham produced it in London and it was, I believe, not a success. To-day _Cyrano de Bergerac_ (I am speaking of it not as an acting play but as literature) is practically unknown even to educated Englishmen, except such as make French literature their special study.

_Cyrano_ may or may not be on a level with any but the greatest of Shakespeare's plays (it is evident from his other work that M. Rostand is not a Shakespeare) but that it was an immeasurably finer thing than ninety-nine per cent of the books of the year which English people were reading that winter on the advice of English critics is beyond question.

The nation which was reading and discussing M. Rostand's work was conspicuously better engaged than the nation which was reading and discussing the English novels of the season.

Again when poor Vasili Verestschagin met his death so tragically off Port Arthur, his name meant little or nothing to the great majority of educated Englishmen, though there had been exhibitions of his work in London--the same exhibitions as were made throughout the larger cities of the United States. In America regret for him was wide-spread and personal, for he stood for something definite in American eyes--rather unfortunately, perhaps, in one way, because Verestschagin, too, had painted those miserable sepoys being eternally blown from British guns.

The general English misapprehension of the present condition of art and literature in America sometimes shows itself in unexpected places. I have a great love for _Punch_. Since the time when the beautifying of its front cover with gamboge and vermilion and emerald green const.i.tuted the chief solace of wet days in the nursery, I doubt if, in the course of forty years, I have missed reading one dozen copies of the London _Charivari_. After a period of exile in regions where current literature is un.o.btainable one of the chief delights of a return to civilisation is "catching up" with the back numbers of _Punch_; nor, in spite of gibes to the contrary, has the paper ever been more brilliant than under its present editors.h.i.+p. Yet _Punch_ in this present week of September 11, 1907, represents an American woman, apparently an American woman of wealth and position (at all events she is at the time touring in Italy), as saying on hearing an air from _Il Trovatore_: "Say, these Italians ain't vurry original. Guess I've heard that tune on our street organs in New York ever since I was a gurl."

The weaknesses of the peoples of other nations are fair game; but it is the essence of just caricature that it should have some verisimilitude.

_Punch_ could not publish that drawing with the accompanying legend unless it was the belief of the editor or the staff that such a solecism was more or less likely to proceed from the mouth of such an American as is depicted; which is precisely the error of the Frenchman who believes that Englishmen sell their wives at Smithfield. Thirty years ago, the lampoon would have had some justification; but at the present time both the actual number and the percentage of women who are familiar with the Italian operas is, I believe, vastly greater in America than in England. This statement will undoubtedly be received with incredulity by the majority of Englishmen who know nothing about the United States; but no one who does know the people of the country will dispute it. In England, the opera is still, for all the changes that have occurred in the last quarter of a century, largely a pleasure of a limited cla.s.s. It may be (and personally I believe) that in that cla.s.s there is a larger number of true musicians who know the operas well and love them appreciatively than is to be found in the United States; but the number of people who have a reasonable acquaintance with the majority of operas, and are familiar with the best known airs from each and with the general characteristics of the various composers, is immensely larger in America. It is only the same fact that we have confronted so often before--the fact of the greater h.o.m.ogeneousness or uniformity of tastes and pursuits in the American people.

It must be clearly understood, here as elsewhere, that I am not comparing merely the people of New York with the people of London, but the people of the whole United States of all cla.s.ses, urban and provincial, industrial and peasant, East and West, with the whole population of all cla.s.ses in the British Isles; for a large percentage of the mistakes which Englishmen make about America arises from the fact that they insist on comparing the educated cla.s.ses of London with such people as they may chance to have met in New York or one or two Eastern cities, under the impression that they are thereby drawing a comparison between the two peoples. Senator h.o.a.r's opinion of Matthew Arnold has been already quoted; and the truth is that very few Englishmen who have written about America have lived in the country long enough to grasp how much of the United States lies on the other side of the North River. Not only does not New York alone, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Was.h.i.+ngton combined do not bear anything like the same relation to America as a whole as London bears to the British Isles. Englishmen take no account of, for they have not seen and no one has reported to them, the intense craving for and striving after culture and self-improvement which exists (and has existed for a generation) not only in such larger cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans, but in many hundreds of smaller communities scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific. One must have such a vision of the United States as a whole as will enable him to imagine all this endeavour, now dissipated over so vast a stretch of country, as all ma.s.sed together into a territory no larger than the British Isles before he can arrive at an intelligent basis of comparison between the peoples. What is centralised in England in America is diffused over half a continent and much less easily measurable.

It happens that as I am correcting the proofs of the chapter the London newspapers of the day (January 25, 1908) contain announcements of the death in New York of Edward MacDowell. He was often spoken of as "the American Grieg"; but it was a phrase which irritated many good musical critics in America, for the reason that they considered their countryman the greater man of the two. They would have had Grieg spoken of as the Norwegian MacDowell. In that judgment they may have been right or they may have been wrong; but it is characteristic of the att.i.tudes of the British and American peoples that, whereas the people of the United States know Grieg better than he is known in England (that is to say, that a larger proportion of the people, outside the cla.s.ses which professedly account themselves musical, have more or less acquaintance with his music), just as they know the work of half a dozen English composers, MacDowell, though he had played his pianoforte concertos in London, remained almost unknown in England outside of strictly musical circles. It is certain that had MacDowell been an Englishman he would have been immensely better known in America than, being an American, he ever was in England.

In the kindred field of the drama the general English idea of the American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of "musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by the managers to be the sort of thing that England wants or which is likely to succeed in England, not because they are what America considers her best product. To attempt any comparison of the living playwrights or actors in the two countries would be a th.o.r.n.y and perilous undertaking; and if any comparison is to be made at all it must be done lightly and as far as possible examples must be drawn from those who are no longer actively on the boards. Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary Anderson) has deliberately put on record her opinion of Miss Clara Morris as "the greatest emotional actress I ever saw." It is not likely that when Madame de Navarro p.r.o.nounced that estimate she was forgetting either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell--or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have read Miss Morris's wonderful book, _Life on the Stage_, will think the judgment in this case not incredible.

Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholars.h.i.+p, restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is in his cla.s.s. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in sufficient numbers to make its presentation a success if it had been achieved in London.

It was said that in any effort to arrive at an estimate of American culture, or to state that culture in terms of English culture, we should have to find landmarks in trifles. All these things are such trifles.

Let us concede that _Cyrano_ is not the greatest literature, nor is Verestschagin's work the highest art; still neither the one nor the other is properly a negligible quant.i.ty in the sum-total of the creative work of the generation. There may be many American women who do not know their Verdi, and it may be that Madame de Navarro's estimate of Miss Morris, mine of Mr. Mansfield, and that of certain American critics of Edward MacDowell are equally at fault; but it still remains absurd to take ignorance of the Italian operas as characteristic of American women or to talk contemptuously, as many Englishmen do, of the American theatre, because they have no knowledge of it beyond what they have seen of the one cla.s.s of production from _The Belle of New York_ to _The Prince of Pilsen_, or of American music, because their acquaintance with it begins and ends with Sousa and the writers of "c.o.o.n songs."

It will be urged that successive "crazes" for individual artists or authors, for particular productions or even isolated schools, are no evidence of any general culture. Conceding this, it remains impossible to avoid the question: supposing a nation or an individual to spend each successive six months in a new enthusiasm--six months on Plato and Aristotelianism,--six months, taking the _Light of Asia_, Mr. Sinnett, and _Kim_ as a starting point, on Buddhism and esoteric philosophy,--six months, inspired by Fitzgerald, on Omar, Persian literature and history and the various ramifications thereof,--six months on M. Rodin, his relation to the art of sculpture in general and particularly to the sculpture of the Greeks,--a similar six months devoted to Mr. Watt with like excursions into his environment, proximate and remote,--six months to Millet, Barbizon, and the history of French painting,--six months of Russian art with Verestschagin and six with Russian literature and politics working outwards from Count Tolstoi,--six months of philosophic speculation radiating from Haeckel,--six months absorbed in j.a.panese art,--six months burrowing in Egyptian excavations and Egyptian history--the question is, I say, supposing a nation or an individual to have pa.s.sed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten, every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration, with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with something less of the aesthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end of the ten years of successive _furores_ be the same intellectual condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is probable that, besides the acc.u.mulation of a great quant.i.ty of information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is conspicuously more culture.

When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual knowledge possessed compared with the potentiality of knowledge on any one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr.

Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where among the guests was a distinguished j.a.panese; and, as not seldom happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which j.a.pan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man,"

he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about everything in the world except j.a.pan. He knows nothing at all about j.a.pan."

The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the American character, this American desire to become a universal specialist--this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge--is an essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole.

The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a _la-la-la_ whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they could. And--perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief--although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too nearly complete.

Americans rather like to repeat that story of Mr. Gladstone, when the talk is of English culture.

The American as a rule is a better linguist than the Englishman,--he is quicker, that is, to pick up a modern language and likely to speak it with a better accent. "Never trust an Englishman who speaks French without an English accent," said Prince Bismarck; and the remark, however unjust it may be to an occasional individual, showed a shrewd insight into the English character. There is always to be recognised the fact that there are tens--perhaps hundreds--of thousands of Englishmen who speak Hindustani, Pushtu, or the language of any one of a hundred remote peoples with whom the Empire has traffic, while the American has had no contact with other peoples which called for a knowledge of any tongue but his own, except that in a small way some Spanish has been useful. But so far as European languages go, the Englishman, in more or less constant and intimate relation with each of the peoples of Europe, has been so well satisfied of his own superiority to each that it has seemed vastly more fitting that they should learn his language than that he should trouble to learn theirs. Under any circ.u.mstances, is it not obviously easier for each one of the European peoples to learn to talk English than for the Englishman to learn eight European tongues with eighty miscellaneous dialects?

When an Englishman does learn a foreign language, it is most commonly for literary or scholastic purposes, rather than (with the exception of French in certain cla.s.ses) for conversational use. The American on the other hand, having had no need of languages in the past, coming now in contact with the world, sees that there are three or four languages of Europe which it is most desirable that he should know, if only for commercial purposes; and a language learned for commercial purposes must be mastered colloquially and idiomatically. The American is not distracted by the need of Sanskrit or of any one of the numerous more or less primitive tongues which a certain proportion of the English people must acquire if the business of the Empire is to go on. Nor is his vision confused by seeing all the European tongues jumbled, as it were, together before him at too close range. He can distinguish which are the essential or desirable languages for his purposes; and the rising generation of Americans is learning those languages more generally, and in a more practical way, than is the rising generation of Englishmen.

And yet we have not crossed that mora.s.s;--nor perhaps, however superior in folly we may be to the angels, is it desirable that we should in plain daylight. We have at most found some slight vantage-ground: thrown up a mole-hill of a Pisgah from which we can attain a distant view of what lies beyond the swamp, even if perchance we have taken some mirages and _ignes fatui_ for solid landscape and actual illuminations.

The ambitions and ideals of the two peoples are fundamentally alike; nor is there so great a difference as appears on the surface in their method of striving to attain those ideals and realise those ambitions, albeit the American uses certain tools (modern he calls them, the Englishman preferring to say new-fangled) to which the Englishman's hands have not taken kindly. It is natural that the English nation, having a so much larger past, should be more influenced by it than the American. It is natural that the American, conscious that his national character has but just shaped itself out of the void, with all the future before it, should look more to the present and the future than the Englishman.

The Englishman prefers to turn almost exclusively to the study of antiquity--the art and philosophies and letters of past ages--for the foundation of his work, and thence to push on between almost strictly British lines. The American seeks rather to absorb only so much of the wisdom and taste of antiquity as may serve for an intelligent comprehension of the world-art, the world-philosophies, the world-literature of to-day, and then, borrowing what he will from each department of those, to strive on that foundation to build something better than any. There are many scholars and students in America who would prefer to see the people less eager to push on. There are many thinkers and educators in England who hold that English scholars.h.i.+p and training dwell altogether too much in the past and that it were better if England would look more abroad and would give larger attention to the conditions of modern life--the conditions which her youth will have to meet in the coming generation.

If an American were asked which of the two peoples was the more cultivated, the more widely informed, he would probably say: "You fellows have been longer at the game than we have. You've had more experience in the business; but we believe we've got every bit as good raw material as you and a blamed sight better machinery. Also we are more in earnest and work that machinery harder than you. Maybe we are not turning out as good goods yet--and maybe we are. But it's a dead sure thing that if we aren't yet, we're going to."

A common index to the degree of cultivation in any people is found in their everyday language--their spoken speech; but here again in considering America from the British standpoint we have to be careful or we may be entrapped into the same fallacy as threatens us when we propose to judge the United States by its newspapers. In the first place the right of any people to invent new forms of verbal currency to meet the requirements of its colloquial exchange must be conceded. There was a time when an Americanism in speech was condemned in England because it was American. When so many of the Americanisms of ten years ago are incorporated in the daily speech even of educated Englishmen to-day, it would be affectation to put forward such a plea nowadays. Going deeper than this, we undoubtedly find that the educated Englishman to-day speaks with more precision than the educated American. The educated Englishman speaks the language of what I have already called the public school and university cla.s.s. But while the Englishman speaks the language of that cla.s.s, the American speaks the language of the whole people. That is not, of course, entirely true, for there are grades of speech in the United States, but it is relatively true--true for the purpose of a comparison with the conditions in Great Britain. The Englishman may be surprised at the number of solecisms committed in the course of an hour's talk by a well-to-do New Yorker whom he has met in the company of gentlemen in England. He would perhaps be more surprised to find a mechanic from the far West commit no more. The tongue of educated Englishmen is not the tongue of the ma.s.ses--nor is it a difference in accent only, but in form, in taste, in grammar, and in thought. If in England the well-to-do and gentle cla.s.ses had commercial transactions only among themselves, it is probable that a currency composed only of gold and silver would suffice for their needs; copper is introduced into the coinage to meet the requirements of the poor.

American speech has its elements of copper for the same reason--that all may be able to deal in it, to give and take change in its terms. It is the same fact as we have met before, of the greater h.o.m.ogeneousness of the American people--the levelling power (for want of a better phrase) of a democracy.

The Englishman may object, and with justice, that because an educated man must incorporate into his speech words and phrases and forms which are necessary for communication with the vulgar, there is no reason why he should not be able to reserve those forms and phrases for use with the vulgar only. A gentleman does not pay half-a-crown, lost at the card table to a friend, in coppers. Why cannot the educated American keep his speech silver and gold for educated ears? All of which is just. There are people in the United States who speak with a preciseness equal to that of the most exacting of English precisians, but they are not fenced off as in England within the limits of a specified cla.s.s; while the common speech of the American people, which is used by a majority of those who would in England come within the limits of that fenced area, is much more careless in form and phrase than the speech of educated Englishmen. It may be urged that it is much less careless, and better and vastly more uniform, than any one of the innumerable forms of speech employed by the various lower cla.s.ses in England; which is true. The level of speech is better in America; but the speech of the educated and well-to-do is generally much better in England. All this, however (which is mere commonplace) may be conceded, but, though educated Americans may use a more debased speech than educated Englishmen, the point is that it is not safe to argue therefrom to an inferiority in culture in America; because the American uses his speech for other and wider purposes than the Englishman. The different American cla.s.ses, just as they dress alike, read the same newspapers and magazines, and, within limits, eat the same food, so they speak the same language. It is unjust to compare that language with the language used in England only by the educated cla.s.ses.

But, what is an infinitely larger fact, the inferiority of the American speech to the English is daily and rapidly disappearing. Twenty years ago, practically all American speech fell provincially on educated English ears. That is far from being the case to-day; and what is most interesting is that the alteration has not come about as the result of a change in the diction of Americans only. The change has been in Englishmen also. To whatever extent American speech may have improved, it is certain also that English speech has become much less precise--much less uniform among the educated and "gentlemanly"

cla.s.ses--and English ears are consequently less exacting.

With the gradual elimination of cla.s.s distinctions in England, or rather with the blurring of the lines which separate one cla.s.s from another, a mult.i.tude of persons pa.s.s for "gentlemen" in England to-day who could not have dreamed--and whose fathers certainly did not dream--of being counted among the gentry thirty-five years ago. The fact may be for good or ill; but one consequence has been that the newcomers, thrusting up into the circles above them, have taken with them the speech of their former a.s.sociates, so that one hears now, in nominally polite circles, tones of voice, forms of speech, and the expression of points of view which would have been impossible in the youth of people who are now no more than middle-aged.

There was a time when the dress proclaimed the man of quality at once.

That distinction began to pa.s.s away with the disappearance of silk and ruffles and wigs from masculine costume. For a century longer, the s.h.i.+bboleths of voice and manner kept their force. But now those too are going; and the result is that the English speech of the educated cla.s.s has become less precise and less uniform. The same speech is now common to a larger proportion of the people. In the days when nearly all the members of educated society--we are speaking of the men only, for they only counted in those days--had been to one or other of the same "seven great public schools" (which not one public school man in a hundred can name correctly to-day) and to one or other of the same two universities, they kept for use among themselves all through their after life the forms of speech, the catchwords, the cla.s.sical references which pa.s.sed current in their school and undergraduate days. It was a free-masonry of speech on which the outsider could not intrude. To-day, when not a quarter of the members of the same circles have been to one of those same seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a quarter have been to no recognised cla.s.sical school at all, it is impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a hundred trite cla.s.sical quotations (no great evidence of scholars.h.i.+p, but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be a parlous experiment in small talk to-day. They have vanished from common conversation even more completely than they have disappeared from the debates of the House of Commons. And this is only a type of the change which has come over the educated speech of England, which we may regret or we may welcome. It may be sad that the English gentleman should speak in less literary form than he did thirty years ago, but the loss may be outweighed many times by the fact that so much larger a proportion of the people speak the same speech as he--not so refined as his used to be, but materially better than the majority of those who use it to-day could then have shaped their lips to frame. Few Englishmen at least would acquiesce in the opinion that it showed a decay of culture in England--that the people were more ignorant or less educated. It may not be safe to draw an a.n.a.logous conclusion in the case of the American people.

A story well-known to most Englishmen has to do with the man who, arriving at Waterloo station to take a train, went into the refreshment room for a cup of coffee. In his haste he spilled the coffee over his s.h.i.+rt front and thereupon fell to incontinent cursing of "this d----d London and South-Western Railway."

An American variant of, or pendant to, the same story tells of the Eastern man who approached Salt Lake City on foot and sat by the wayside to rest. By ill luck he sat upon an ants' nest. Shortly he rose anathematising the "l.u.s.tful Mormon city" and turned his face eastward once more, a Mormon-hater to the end of his days.

Not much less illogical is an Englishman I know who, having spent some three weeks in the United States, loathes the people and all the inst.i.tutions thereof, almost solely (though the noise of the elevated trains in New York has something to do with it) because he found that they applied the name of "robin" to what he calls "a cursed great thrush-beast." Nearly every English visitor to the United States has been irritated at first by discovering this, or some similar fact; but it is not necessary on that account to hate the American people, to express contempt for their art and literature, and to belittle their commercial greatness and all the splendours of their history.[214:1]

Rather ought Englishmen to like this application by the early colonists to the objects of their new environment of the cherished names of the well-known things of home. It shows that they carried with them into the wilderness in their hearts a love of English lane and hedgerow, and strove to soften the savagery of their new surroundings by finding in the common wild things the familiar birds and flowers which had grown dear to them in far-off peaceful English villages.

We will not now potter again over the well-trodden paths of the differences in phraseology in the two peoples which have been so fruitful a source of "impressions" in successive generations of English visitors to the United States, for the thing grows absurd when "car,"

and "store," and "sidewalk," and "elevator" are commonplaces on the lips of every London c.o.c.kney; nor is there any need here to thread again the mazes of the well-worn discussion as to how far the peculiarities of modern American speech are only good old English forms which have survived in the New World after disappearance from their original haunts.[215:1] The subject is worth referring to, however, for the very reason that its discussion _has_ become almost absurd,--because by a process which has been going on, as we have already said, on both sides of the ocean simultaneously, the differences themselves are disappearing, the tongues of the two peoples are coming together and coalescing once more. The two currents into which the stream divided which flowed from that original well of English are drawing together--are, indeed, already so close that it will be but a very short time when the word "Americanism" as applied to a peculiarity in language will have ceased to be used in England. The "Yankee tw.a.n.g" and the "strong English accent" will survive in the two countries respectively for some time yet; but the written and spoken language of the two nations will be--already almost is--the same, and English visitors to the United States will have lost one fruitful source of impressions.

The process has been going on in both countries, but in widely different forms. And this seems to me a peculiarly significant fact. In America the language of the people is constantly and steadily tending to improve; and this tendency is, Englishmen should note, the result of a deliberate and conscious effort at improvement on the part of the people. This can hardly be insisted upon too strongly.

The majority of "Americanisms" in speech were in their origin mere provincialisms--modes of expression and p.r.o.nunciation which had sprung up unchecked in the isolated communities of a scattered people. They grew with the growth of the communities, until they threatened to graft themselves permanently on the speech of the nation. The United States is no longer a country of isolated and scattered communities. After the Civil War, and partly as a result thereof, but still more as a result of the knitting together of the whole country by the building of the American railway system, with the consequent sudden increase in intimacy of communication between all parts, there developed in the people a new sense of national unity. England saw a revolution in her means of communication when railways superseded stage-coaches and when the penny post was established; but no revolution comparable to that which has taken place in the United States in the present generation.

Prior to 1880--really until 1883--Portland, Oregon, was hardly less removed from Portland, Maine, than Capetown is from Liverpool to-day, and the discomforts of travel from one to the other were incomparably greater. Now they are morally closer together than London and Aberdeen, in as much as nowhere between the Atlantic and Pacific is there any such consciousness of racial difference as separates the Scots from the English.

The work of federation begun by the original thirteen colonies is not yet completed, for the individuality of the several States is destined to go on being continuously more merged--until it will finally be almost obliterated--in the Federal whole; but it may be said that in the last twenty-five years, and not until then, has the American people become truly unified--an ent.i.ty conscious of its oneness and of its commercial greatness in that oneness, thinking common thoughts, co-operating in common ambitions, and speaking a common speech. Into that speech were at first absorbed, as has been said, the peculiarities, localisms, and provincialisms which had inevitably grown up in different sections in the days of non-communication. But precisely those same causes--the settlement of the country, the construction of the railways, the development of the natural resources--which contributed to the unification and laid the foundations of the greatness, produced, with wealth and leisure, new ambitions in the people. The desire for art and literature and, what we have called the all-culture, was no new growth, but an instinct inherited from the original English stock. Quickened it must have been by the moral uplifting of the people by the Civil War, but, as we have already seen, for some time after the close of that war the whole energies of the people were necessarily devoted to material things. Only with the completion of the repairing of the ravages of that war, and with the almost coincident settlement of the last great waste tracts of the country, were the people free to reach out after things immaterial and aesthetic; and only with the accession of wealth, which again these same causes produced, came the possibility of gratifying the craving for those things. And in the longing for self-improvement and self-culture, thus newly inspired and for the first time truly national, one of the things to which the people turned with characteristic earnestness was the improvement of the common speech. The nation has set itself purposefully and with determination to purify and prevent the further corruption of its language.

The movement towards "simplification" of the spelling may or may not be in the direction of purification, but it will be observed that the movement itself could not have come into being without the national desire for improvement. The American speech is now the speech of a solidified and great nation; and it cannot be permitted to retain the inelegancies and colloquialisms which were not intolerable, perhaps, in the dialect of a locality in the days when that locality had but restricted intercourse with other parts of the country. This effort to purify the common tongue is conscious, avowed, and sympathised with in all parts of the country alike.

When any point of literary or grammatical form is under discussion in a leading American newspaper to-day, the dominant note is that of a purism more strict than will appear in a similar discussion in England. In many American newspaper offices the rules of "style" forbid the use of certain words and phrases which are accepted without question in the best London journals. There have of course always been circles--as, notoriously, in and around Boston, and, less notoriously but no less truly, in Philadelphia and New York--wherein the speech, whether written or spoken, has been as scrupulous in form and grammar as in the most scholarly circles in Great Britain. These circles corresponded to what we have called the public-school and university cla.s.s of England, and, no more than it, did they speak the common speech of their country. Only now is the people as a whole consciously striving after an uplifting of such common speech.