Harry Perry Robinson

American Insularity—A Conkling Story—English Humour and American Critics—American Literature and English Critics—The American Novel in England—And American Art—Wanted, an American Exhibition—The Revolution in the American Point of View—"Raining in London"—Domestic and Imported Goods.

It is no uncommon thing to hear an American speak of British insularity—the Englishman's "insular prejudices" or his "insular conceit." On one occasion I took the opportunity of interrupting a man who, I was sure, did not know what "insular" might mean, to ask for an explanation.

"Insular?" he said. "It's the same as insolent—only more so."

Flings at Britain's "insularity" were (like the climatic myth) originally of Continental European origin; and from the Continental European point of view, the phrase, both in fact and metaphor, was justified. England is an island. So far as the Continent of Europe is concerned, it is the island. And undoubtedly the fact of their insular position, with the isolation which it entailed, has had a marked influence on the national temperament of Englishmen. Ringed about with the silver sea, they had an opportunity to meditate at leisure on their superiority to other peoples, an opportunity which, if not denied, was at least restricted in the case of peoples only separated from neighbours of a different race by an invisible frontier line, a well bridged stream, or a mountain range pierced by abundant passes. Their insularity bred in the English a disposition different from the dispositions of the Continental peoples just as undeniably as it kept them aloof from those peoples geographically.

Vastly more than Great Britain, has the United States been isolated since her birth. England has been cut off from other civilisations by twenty miles of sea; America by three thousand. As a physical fact, the "insularity" of America is immensely more obvious and more nearly complete than that of Britain; and it is no less so as a moral fact. It is true that America's island is a continent; but this superiority in size has only resulted in producing more kinds of insularity than in England. The American character is, in all the moral connotation of the word, pronouncedly more insular than the British.

Like the English, except that they were much more effectively staked off from the rest of the world, the Americans have found the marvel of their own superiority to all mankind a fit and pleasing subject for contemplation. Perhaps there was a time when Englishmen used to go about the world talking of it; but for some generations back, having settled the fact of their greatness entirely to their satisfaction, they have ceased to put it into words, merely accepting it as the mainspring of their conduct in all relations with other peoples, and without, it is to be feared, much regard for those other peoples' feelings. Americans are still in the boasting stage. Mr. Howells has said that every American when he goes abroad goes not as an individual citizen but as an envoy. He walks wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It is only the insularity of the Britisher magnified many times.

It is as if there were gathered in a room a dozen or so of well-bred persons, talking such small talk as will pass the time and hurt no susceptibilities. It may be that the Englishman in his small talk is unduly dogmatic, but in the main he complies with the usages of the circle and helps the game along. To them enters a newcomer who will hear nothing of what the others have to say—will take no share in the discussion of topics of common interest—but insists on telling the company of his personal achievements. It may be all true; though the others will not believe it. But the accomplishments of the members of the present company are not at the moment the subject of conversation; nor is it a theme under any circumstances which it is good manners to introduce. This is what not a few American people are doing daily up and down through the length and breadth of Europe; and they must pardon Europe if, occasionally, it yawns, or if at times it expresses its opinions of American manners in terms not soothing to American ears.

"The American contribution to the qualities of nations is hurry," says the author of The Champagne Standard, and this has enough truth to let it pass as an epigram; but many Americans have a notion that their contribution is neither more nor less than All Progress. With their eyes turned chiefly upon themselves, they have seen beyond a doubt what a splendid, energetic, pushful people they are, and they have talked it all over one with another. Moreover, have not many visitors, though finding much to criticise, complimented them always on their rapidity of thought and action? So they have come to believe that they monopolise those happy attributes and, going abroad, whenever they see—it may be in England, or in Germany—an evidence of energy and force, they say: "Truly the world is becoming Americanised!" Bless their insular hearts! America did not invent the cosmic forces.

When the first suspension bridge was thrown over Niagara, there was a great and tumultuous opening ceremony, such as the Americans love, and many of the great ones of the United States assembled to do honour to the occasion, and among them was Roscoe Conkling. Conkling was one of the most brilliant public men whom America has produced: a man of commanding, even beautiful, presence and of, perhaps, unparalleled vanity. He had been called (by an opponent) a human peacock. After the ceremonies attending the opening of the bridge had been concluded, Conkling, with many others, was at the railway station waiting to depart; but, though others were there, he did not mingle with them, but strutted and plumed himself for their benefit, posing that they might get the full effect of all his majesty.

One of the station porters was so impressed that, stepping up to another who was hurrying by trundling a load of luggage, he jerked his thumb in Conkling's direction and:

"Who's that feller?" he asked. "Is he the man as built the bridge?"

The other studied the great man a moment.

"Thunder! No," said he. "He's the man as made the Falls."

It is curious that with their sense of humour Americans should so persistently force Europeans into the frame of mind of that railway porter. The Englishman, in his assurance of his own greatness, has come to depreciate the magnitude of whatever work he does; nor is it altogether a pose or an affectation. He sees the vastness of the British Empire and the amazing strides which have been made in the last two generations, and wonders how it all came about. He knows how proverbially blundering are British diplomacy and British administration, so he puts it all down to the luck of the nation and goes grumbling contentedly on his way. There is no country in which policies have been so haphazard and unstable, or ways of administration so crude and so empirical, as in the United States. "Go forth, my son," said Oxenstiern, "go forth and see with how little wisdom the world is governed"; and on such a quest, it is doubtful if any civilised country has offered a more promising field for consideration than did the United States from, say, the close of the Civil War to less than a decade ago. All thinking Americans recognise this fact to the full; but whereas the Englishman sees only the blunders that he has made and marvels at the luck that pulled him through, the American generally ignores the luck and is more likely to believe that whatever has been achieved is the result of his peculiar virtues.

I never heard an American ascribe the success of any national undertaking to the national luck. The Englishman on the other hand is for ever speaking of the "luck of the British Army," and the "luck that pulls England through."

And there is one point which I have never seen stated but which is worth the consideration of Americans. It has already been said that it would be of great benefit if the American people knew more of the British Empire as a whole. They have had an advantage in appreciating the magnitude of their own accomplishments in the fact that their work has all to be done at home. They have had the outward signs of their progress constantly before their eyes. It is true that the United States is a large country; but it is continuous. No oceans intervene between New York and Illinois, or between Illinois and Colorado; and the people as a whole is kept well informed of what the people is doing.

The American comes to London and he sees things which he regards with contemptuous amusement much as the Englishman might regard some peculiar old-world institution in a sleepy Dutch community. The great work which is always being done in London is not easy to see; there is so much of Old London (not only in a material sense) that the new does not always leap to the eye. The man who estimates the effective energy of the British people by what he sees in London, makes an analogous mistake to that of the Englishman who judges the sentiments of America by what is told him by his charming friends in New York. The American who would get any notion of British enterprise or British energy must go afield—to the Upper Nile and Equatorial Africa, to divers parts of Asia and Australia. He cannot see the Assouan dam, the Cape to Cairo Railway, the Indian irrigation works, from the Carlton Hotel, any more than a foreigner can measure the destiny of the American people by dining at the Waldorf-Astoria.

This is a point which will bear insisting on. Not long ago an American stood with me and gazed on the work which was being done in the Strand Improvement undertaking, and he said that it was a big thing. "But," he added thoughtfully, "it does not come up to what we have on hand in the Panama Canal." I pointed out that the Panama Canal was not being cut through the heart of New York City and apparently the suggestion was new to him. The American rarely understands that the British Isles are no more—rather less—than the thirteen original states. Canada and India are the British Illinois and Florida, Australia and New Zealand represent the West from Texas to Montana, while South Africa is the British Pacific Slope; just as Egypt may stand for Cuba, and Burma and what-not-else set against Alaska and the Philippines. Many times I have known Americans in England to make jest of the British railways, comparing them in mileage with the transcontinental lines of their own country. But the British Transcontinental lines are thrown from Cairo to the Cape, from Quebec to Vancouver, from Brisbane to Adelaide and Peshawar to Madras. The people of the United States take legitimate pride in the growth of the great institutions of learning which have sprung up all over the West; but there are points of interest of which they take less account, in similar institutions in, say, Sydney and Allahabad.

It is not necessary to say that I do not underestimate the energy of the American character. I have seen too much of the people, am familiar with too many sections of the country, and have watched it all growing before my eyes too fast to do that. But I think that the American exaggerates those qualities in himself at the expense of other peoples, and he would acquire a new kind of respect for Englishmen—the respect which one good workman necessarily feels for another—if he knew more of the British Empire.

A precisely similar exaggeration of his own quality has been bred by similar causes in the American mind in his estimate of his national sense of humour. I am not denying the excellence of American humour, for I have in my library a certain shelf to which I go whenever I feel dull, and for the books on which I can never be sufficiently grateful. The American's exaggeration of his own funniness is not positive but comparative. Just as he is tempted to regard himself as the original patentee of human progress, and the first apostle of efficiency, so he is very ready to believe that he has been given something like a monopoly among peoples of the sense of humour. With a little more humour, he would undoubtedly have been saved from this particular error. Especially are the Americans convinced that there is no humour in Englishmen. Germans and Frenchmen may possess humour of an inferior sort, but not Englishmen. It is my belief that in the American clubs where I find copies of Fliegende BlÄtter and the Journal Amusant, these papers are much more read than Punch, and in not a few cases, I fear, by men who have but slight understanding of the languages in which they are printed. Indeed, Punch is a permanent, hebdomadally-recurrent proof to American readers that Englishmen do not know the meaning of a joke.[153:1] Americans, of course, do not understand more than a small proportion of the pages of Punch any more than they would understand those pages if they were printed in Chinese; but because Punch is printed in English they think that they do understand it, and because they cannot see the jokes, they conclude that the jokes are not there.

A certain proportion of American witticisms are recondite to English readers for precisely similar reasons, but the American belief is that when an Englishman fails to understand an American joke, it is because he has no sense of humour; when an American cannot understand an English one, it is because the joke is not funny. It is a view of the situation eminently gratifying to Americans; but it is curious that their sense of humour does not save them from it.

Whatever American humour may be, it is not subtle. It has a pushfulness—a certain flamboyant self-assertiveness—which it shares with some other things in the United States; and, however fine the quality of mind required to produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any foreigner fails to catch the point of an American joke or story, that it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability.

What I take to be (with apologies to Mr. Dunne) the greatest individual achievement in humorous writing that has been produced in America in recent years, the Wolfville series of books of Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis, is practically incomprehensible to English readers, not from any lack of capacity on their part, but from the difficulties of the dialect and still more from the strangeness of the atmosphere. In the same way the Tablets of the scribe Azit Tigleth Miphansi must indeed be but ancient Egyptian to Americans. But it would not occur to an Englishman to say, because Americans have not within their reach the necessary data for a comprehension of Mr. Reed, that, therefore, they do not understand a joke. Still less because he himself falls away baffled from the Old Cattleman does the Englishman conclude that the Wolfville books are not funny. He merely deplores his inability to get on terms with his author. The English public indeed is curiously ready to accept whatever is said to be funny and comes from America as being in truth humorous even if largely unintelligible; but few Americans would give credit for the existence of humour in those parts of an English book outside their ken. Yet I think, if it were possible to get the opinion of an impartial jury on the subject, their verdict would be that the number of humorous writers of approximately the first or second class is materially greater in England than in the United States to-day. I am sure that the sense of humour in the average of educated Englishmen is keener, subtler, and eminently more catholic than it is in men of the corresponding class in the United States. The Atlantic Ocean, if the Americans would but believe it, washes pebbles up on the beaches of its eastern shores no less than upon the western.[155:1]

American humour [distinctively American humour, for there are humorous writers in America whose genius shows nothing characteristically American; but among those who are distinctively American I should class nearly all the writers who are best known to-day, Mr. Clemens (Mark Twain), Mr. Dunne, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Lorimer, Mr. Ade]—this distinctively American humour, then, stands in something the same relation to other forms of spirituellisme as the work of the poster artist occupies to other forms of pictorial art. Poster designing may demand a very high quality of art, and the American workmen are the Cherets, Grassets, Muchas, of their craft. Few of them do ordinary painting, whether in oil or water colour. Fewer still use the etcher's needle. None that I am aware of attempts miniatures—except Mr. Henry James, who, if Americans may be believed, is not an American, and he has invented a department of art for himself more microscopic in detail than that of any miniaturist. The real American humourist, however small his canvas, strives for the same broad effects.

It is not the quality of posters to be elusive. Their appeal is to the multitude, and it must be instantaneous. It is easily conceivable that a person of an educated artistic sense might stand before a poster and find himself entirely unable to comprehend it, because the thing portrayed might be something altogether outside his experience. His failure would be no indictment either of his perceptivity or of the merit of the work of art.

It is a pity that Americans as a rule do not consider this, for I know few things that would so much increase American respect for Englishmen in the mass as the discovery that the latter were not the ponderous persons they supposed, but even keener-witted than themselves. At the time of the Venezuelan incident, it is probable that more than all the laborious protests of good men on both sides of the ocean, more than all the petitions and the interchange of assurances of good-will between societies in either country, the thing that did most to allay American resentment and bring the American people to its senses was that delightful message sent (was it not?) by the London Stock Exchange to their confrÈres in New York, begging the latter to see that when the British fleet arrived in New York harbour there should be no crowding by excursion steamers. Like Mr. Anstey's dear German professor, who had once laboriously constructed a joke and purposed, when he had ample leisure, to go about to Ædificate a second, will Americans please believe that Englishmen too, if given time, can certainly make others?

And need I say again that in each of the things that I have said, whether on the subject of American chivalry, American energy, or American humour, I am not decrying the American's qualities but only striving to increase his respect for Englishmen?

Now let us look at the other side of the picture. Just as undue flattery awoke in the American people an exaggerated notion of their chivalry and their sense of humour, so the reiteration of savage and contemptuous criticism made them depreciate their general literary ability. It goes farther back than the "Who ever reads an American book?" Three quarters of a century earlier the Edinburgh Review (I am indebted for the quotation to Mr. Sparks) asked: "Why should Americans write books when a six-weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats, gristmills are their natural objects for centuries to come."

Franklin's Autobiography and Thoreau's Walden are only just, within the last few years, beginning to find their way into English popular reprints of the "classics." Few Englishmen would listen with patience to an argument that the contribution to literature of the Concord school was of greater or more permanent value than, let us say, the work of the Lake Poets. So little thought have Englishmen given to the literature of the United States, that they commonly assume any author who wrote in English to be, as a matter of course, an Englishman. It is only the uneducated among the educated classes who do not know that Longfellow was an American—though I have met such,—but among the educated a small percentage only, I imagine, would remember, unless suggestion was made to them, that, for instance, Motley and Bancroft among historians, or Agassiz and Audubon among men of science (even though one was born in Switzerland) were Americans. To the vast majority, of course, such names are names and nothing more, which may not be particularly reprehensible. But while on the one hand a general indifference to American literature as a whole has carried with it a lack of acquaintance with individual writers, that lack of acquaintance with the individuals naturally reacted to confirm disbelief in the existence of any respectable body of American literature. And the chilling and century-long contempt of the English public and of English critics for all American writing produced its result in a national exaggeration in American minds of their own shortcomings. Only within the last ten years have Americans as a whole come to believe that the work of an American writer (excepting only a very small group) can be on a plane with that of Englishmen.

In England the situation has also changed. American novelists now enjoy a vogue in England that would have seemed almost incredible two decades ago. At that time the English public did not look to America for its fiction, while Americans did look to England; and each new book by a well-known English novelist was as certain of its reception in the United States as—perhaps more certain than it was—in England. That has changed. There are not more than half a dozen writers of fiction in England to-day of such authority that whatever they write is of necessity accepted by the American public. Americans turn now first to their own writers—a dozen or a score of them—and only then do they seek the English book, always provided that, no matter whose the name may be that it bears, it has won the approval of their own critics on its merits. They no longer take it for granted that the best work of their own authors is as a matter of course inferior to the work of a well-known Englishman. It may not be many years before the American public will be so much preoccupied with its own literary output—before that output will be so amply sufficient for all its needs—that it will become as contemptuously indifferent to English literature of the day as Englishmen have, in the past, shown themselves to the product of American writers. There is, perhaps, no other field in which the increase of the confidence of the nation in itself is more marked than in the honour which Americans now pay to their own writers.

It is worth noticing that the English appreciation of American literature as yet hardly extends beyond works of fiction. Specialists in various departments of historical research and the natural sciences know what admirable work is being done in the same fields by individual workers in the United States; but hardly yet has the specialist—still less has the general public—formed any adequate conception of the great mass of that work in those two fields, still less of its quality. Englishmen do not yet take seriously either American research or American scholarship. It would be absurd to count noses to prove that there were more competent historians writing—more scientific investigators searching into the mysteries—in America than in England or vice versa; but this I take to be an undoubted fact, namely, that men of science in more than one field in other countries are beginning to look rather to the United States than to Great Britain for sound and original work.

The English ignorance of American literature extends even more markedly to other departments of productive art.[159:1] The ordinary educated and art-loving Englishman would be sore put to it to name any single American painter or draughtsman, living or dead, except Mr. C. D. Gibson. Whistler and Sargent, of course, are not counted as Americans. There is not a single American sculptor whose name is known to one in a hundred of, again I say, educated and art-loving Englishmen, though I take it to be indisputable that the United States has produced more sculptors of individual genius in the last half-century than Great Britain. American architecture conveys to the educated and art-loving Englishman no other idea than that of twenty-storey "sky-scrapers" built of steel and glass. Richardson is not even a name to him. He knows nothing of all the beauty and virility of the work that has been done in the last thirty years. In the minor arts, he may have heard of Rookwood pottery and have a vague notion that the Americans turn out some quite original things in silver work; but of American stained glass—of Tiffany and La Farge—he has never heard. It would do England a world of good—it would do international relations a world of good—if a thoroughly representative exhibition of American painting and sculpture could be made in London. I commend the idea to some one competent to handle it; for it would, I think, be profitable to its promoters. It would certainly be a revelation to Englishmen.

The English indifference to—nay, disbelief in the existence of—American art is precisely on a par with the American incredulity in the matter of British humour; and the removal of each of the misconceptions would tend to the increase of international good-will. Americans believe the British Empire to be a sanguinary and ferocious thing. They believe themselves to be possessed of a sense of humour, a sense of chivalry, and an energy quite lacking in the Englishman; and each one of the illusions counts for a good deal in the American national lack of liking for Great Britain. Similarly, Englishmen believe Americans to be a money-loving people without respectable achievement in art or literature. I am not sure that it would make the Englishman like the American any the more if the point of view were corrected, but at least he would like him more intelligently, and it would prevent him from saying things—in themselves entirely good-humoured and quite unintentionally offensive—which hurt American feelings. We cannot correct an error without recognising frankly that it exists, and the first step towards making the American and the Englishman understand what the other really is must be to help each to see how mistaken he is in supposing the other to be what he is not.

That the American should hold the opinions that he does of England is no matter of reproach. Not only is it natural, but inevitable. Absorbed as he has been with his own affairs and his own history, and viewing Great Britain only in her occasional relations thereto, seeing nothing of her in her private life or of her position and policies in the world at large, how could the American have other than a distorted view of her—how could she assume right proportions or be posed in right perspective? Nor is the Englishman any more to be blamed. America has been beyond and below his horizon, and among the travellers' tales that have come to him of her people and her institutions has been much misinformation; and if he has not yet—as in the realms of literature and art—come to any realisation of America's true achievements, how should he have done so, when Americans themselves have only just shaken off the morbid sensitiveness and diffidence of their youth, and have so recently arrived at some partial comprehension of those achievements themselves?

Probably the most successful joke which Life ever achieved (Americans will please believe that it is not with any disrespect that I explain to English readers that Life is the Punch of New York), successful, that is, measured by the continent-wide hilarity which it provoked, had relation to the New York dandy who turned up the bottoms of his trousers because it was "raining in London." That was published—at a guess—some twenty years ago.

Some ten years later a Chicagoan (one James Norton—he died, alas! all too soon afterwards) leaped into something like national notoriety by a certain speech which he delivered at a semi-public dinner in New York. In introducing Mr. Norton as coming from Chicago the chairman had made playful reference to the supposed characteristic lack of modesty of Chicagoans and their pride in their city. Norton, in acknowledgment, confessed that there was justice in the accusation. Chicagoans, he said, were proud of their city. They had a right to be. They were as proud of Chicago as New Yorkers were of London! And the quip ran from mouth to mouth across the continent.

It would be too much to say that those jokes are meaningless to-day, but to the younger generation of Americans they have lost most of their point, for Anglomania has ceased to be the term of reproach that once it was—it has, at least, dropped from daily use—partly because the official relations of the country with Great Britain have so much improved, but much more because the United States has come to consider herself as Great Britain's equal and, in the new consciousness of her greatness, the idea of toadying to England has lost its sting. It is already difficult to throw one's mind back to the conditions of twenty years ago—to remember the deference which (in New York and the larger cities at least) was paid to English ideas, English manners, English styles in dress—the enthusiasm with which any literary man was received who had some pretension to an English reputation—the disrepute in which all "domestic" manufactured articles were held throughout the country in comparison with the "imported," which generally meant English. In all manufactured products this was so nearly universal that "domestic" was almost synonymous with inferior and "imported" with superior grades of goods. That an immense proportion of American manufactured articles were sold in the United States masquerading as "imported"—and therefore commanding a better price—goes without saying, and in some lines, in which the British reputation was too well established and well deserved to be easily shaken, the practice still survives; but in the great majority of things, the American now prefers his home-made article, not merely from motives of patriotism but because he believes that it is the better article. It is not within our present province to discuss how far this opinion is correct, or how far the policy of protection, by assisting manufacturers to obtain control of their own markets and so distract attention from imported goods, has helped to bring about the change. The point is that the change has taken place. And, so far as the ordinary commodities of commerce are concerned, the Englishman is in a measure aware of what has occurred. He could not be otherwise with the figures of his trade with the United States before him. Nor can he conceal from himself the fact that the change of opinion in America may have some justification when he sees how many things of American manufacture he himself uses daily and prefers—patriotism notwithstanding—to the British-made article.

But Englishmen have little conception as yet that the same revolution has taken place in regard to the less material—less easily exploited—commodities of art and literature. American novels and the drawings of Mr. Gibson have made their way in England in the wake of American boots and American sweetmeats; but Americans would be unwilling to believe that their creative ability ends with the production of Western romances and drawings of the American girl.

Until recent years, the volume as well as the quality of the literary and artistic output of Great Britain was vastly superior to that of the United States. The two were not comparable; but they are comparable to-day, though England is as yet unaware of it. In time, Englishmen will awake to a realisation of the fact; but what the relative standing of the two countries will be by that time it is impossible to say. Englishmen would, perhaps, not find it to their disadvantage, and it would certainly (if not done in too condescending a spirit) not be displeasing to the people of the United States, if they began, even now, to take a livelier interest in the work that the other is doing.

FOOTNOTES:

[153:1] At this point my American friend, to the value of whose criticisms I have already paid tribute, interjects marginally: "none the less Fliegende BlÄtter presents more real humour in a week than is to be found in Punch in a month." To which I can but make the obvious reply that I have already said that Americans think so. He points out, however, further that, while the Munich paper is always to be found in the higher-class American clubs, it is comparatively infrequent in the clubs of Great Britain, which is undoubtedly true; and that is a subject (the relative breadth of outlook on the world-literature of the day in the two countries) which will necessarily receive attention later on.