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Mr. William Dean Howells, who is one of the leaders of that small band of American authors who have a right to literary consideration in England, has lately published an entertaining romance which he calls “Through the Eye of the Needle.” With Mr. Howells’s story as a story I have nothing to do. In the process of relating it Mr. Howells offers us some candid criticisms of his countrymen which will serve to illustrate the real opinion of the cultivated American as to himself, and all that to him appertains.
“My hero,” writes Mr. Howells, “visited this country when it was on the verge of great economic depression extending from 1894 to 1898, but, after the Spanish War, Providence marked the Divine approval of our victory in that contest by renewing in unexampled measure the prosperity of the Republic. With the downfall of the Trusts, and the release of our industrial and commercial forces to unrestricted activity, the condition of every form of Labour has been immeasurably improved, andit is now united with Capital in bonds of the closest affection.”
Mr. Howells does not mean this passage satirically. He is really of opinion that Providence marked the Divine approval of America’s victory over Spain “by renewing in unexampled measure the prosperity of the Republic.” He believes, good easy man, that the Trusts have been humbled, and that “Labour is now united with Capital in bonds of the closest affection.” Isn’t it delicious? Mr. Howells further informs us that the servant problem in America has been “solved once for all by humanity,” and that New York is no longer a city of violent and unthinkable noises.
“The flattened wheel of the trolley,” he says, “banging the track day and night, and tormenting the waking and sleeping ear, was, oddly enough, the inspiration of Reforms which have made our city the quietest in the world. The trolleys now pass unheard; the elevated train glides by overhead with only a modulated murmur, the subway is a retreat fit for meditation and prayer, where the passenger can possess his soul in a peace to be found nowhere else; the automobile whirrs softly through the most crowded thoroughfare, far below the speed limit, with a sigh ofgentle satisfaction in its own harmlessness, and, ‘like the sweet South, taking and giving odor.’” It is beside the mark to note that Shakespeare did not write “taking” but “stealing,” and he certainly did not spell odour Mr. Howells’s way.
Our author proceeds to assure us that American men are not now the intellectual inferiors of American women, “or at least not so much the inferiors”; that American men have made “a vast advance in the knowledge and love of literature,” and that “with the multitude of our periodicals, and the swarm of our fictions selling from a hundred thousand to half a million each, even our business men cannot wholly escape culture, and they have become more and more cultured, so that now you frequently hear them asking what this or that book is all about.”
Later he says of the New Yorkers: “They are purely commercial, and the thing that cannot be bought and sold has logically no place in their life. They applaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the amount given, rather than by the love which goes with the giving. The widow’s mite has little credit with them, but the rich man’s million has an acclaim that reverberates through their newspaperslong after his gift is made. It is only the poor in America who do charity—by giving help where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if they are at all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more money they give, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From time to time some man with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them away, usually to a public institution of some sort, where it will have no effect with the people who are under-paid for their work, or cannot get work; and then his deed is famed throughout the Country as a thing really beyond praise. Yet anyone who thinks about it must know that he never earned the millions he kept, or the millions he gave, but somehow made them from the labours of others; that with all the wealth left him he cannot miss the fortune that he lavishes, any more than if the check (English, cheque) which conveyed it were a withered leaf, and not in any wise so much as an ordinary working man might feel the bestowal of a postage stamp.”
We have here, as I have said, views on America not by a shouting American bluffer or dealer in hyperbole, but by a man of recognised literary parts and judgment. Furthermore, Mr. Howells is plainly not one of those Americans whoaffect a contempt for their country. When he speaks of American success he attributes it to the favour of Providence; he can perceive a “vast advance” in the American’s knowledge and love of literature, and while he reproves the American millionaire, he does so more in sorrow than in anger. So that on the whole his testimony cannot fairly be traversed.
And reading between the lines of it, the intelligent observer will not be slow to discern that it amounts practically to a pretty severe indictment of the Americans. A man who has no place in his life for a thing that cannot be bought and sold, is not, after all, the kind of man one can be expected to admire, even though Providence may appear to smile upon him. Neither can I express myself violently taken with the man who is “not so much the intellectual inferior of our women”—and such women—even if you do frequently hear him asking what this or that book is all about. And Mr. Howells’s opinion of millionaires and their charity coincides pretty well with the opinion of Europe.
Mr. Howells, of course, is a well bred, well mannered and entirely discreet author; he sets down naught in malice, his tendency being rather in the direction of a little gentle extenuation. Irony,sarcasm, reproach, and, least of all, flouts and jeers are not among his literary weapons.
It goes without saying, however, that America has been written about in much harsher tones than those of Mr. Howells. From an American book published pseudonymously two or three years back, a book that does not appear to have received anything like its due share of recognition either in England or America, I cull the following picturesque details:—
“From the moment he takes his seat in his office, until he goes home, an American’s business consists of a succession of swindles. He either picks the pocket of each man he interviews, or the men pick his.”
“From the moment he takes his seat in his office, until he goes home, an American’s business consists of a succession of swindles. He either picks the pocket of each man he interviews, or the men pick his.”
“The American gloats over his ability as a liar. He prides himself upon the fact that his lie is a plausible one and likely to deceive. If it does not come up to the specifications he regards it and himself as failures, and a shadow is cast upon his life.”
“The American gloats over his ability as a liar. He prides himself upon the fact that his lie is a plausible one and likely to deceive. If it does not come up to the specifications he regards it and himself as failures, and a shadow is cast upon his life.”
“The American who has just borrowed a dollar immediately rushes into the nearest bar room and announces that he has raised 500,000 dollars from a prominent millionaire who has become his partner, and will back him to any amount in any enterprise, sane or insane, in which he mayagree to embark. Then for the succeeding three hours he talks about himself so loudly that the entire neighbourhood throngs around him to join in the debate.”
“The American who has just borrowed a dollar immediately rushes into the nearest bar room and announces that he has raised 500,000 dollars from a prominent millionaire who has become his partner, and will back him to any amount in any enterprise, sane or insane, in which he mayagree to embark. Then for the succeeding three hours he talks about himself so loudly that the entire neighbourhood throngs around him to join in the debate.”
“The American trader in Europe has created the same feeling that prevails among a party of honest cardplayers when the card-sharper appears at the table.”
“The American trader in Europe has created the same feeling that prevails among a party of honest cardplayers when the card-sharper appears at the table.”
“The American politician never speaks but always ‘orates.’ If the matter under discussion in the legislative body is a question whether five cents shall be expended on pencils, or whether Mrs. Bridget O’Neill, or Mrs. Patrick O’Reilly shall be appointed scrubwoman of the Senate House, he considers it beneath his dignity to say anything that will not recall the diction of Cicero or Demosthenes. If the ceiling is to be cleaned and a three-and-elevenpenny contract is to be given out, he takes the floor and with a loud preliminary bellow announces that he is an American citizen, and anyone who says that he is not is a confirmed and hereditary liar.”
“The American politician never speaks but always ‘orates.’ If the matter under discussion in the legislative body is a question whether five cents shall be expended on pencils, or whether Mrs. Bridget O’Neill, or Mrs. Patrick O’Reilly shall be appointed scrubwoman of the Senate House, he considers it beneath his dignity to say anything that will not recall the diction of Cicero or Demosthenes. If the ceiling is to be cleaned and a three-and-elevenpenny contract is to be given out, he takes the floor and with a loud preliminary bellow announces that he is an American citizen, and anyone who says that he is not is a confirmed and hereditary liar.”
“If an American learns that a man has been bribed he does not hate him—he envies him.”
“If an American learns that a man has been bribed he does not hate him—he envies him.”
“In New York society no man is ever referred to as ‘Mr. Jones’ or ‘Mr. Smith.’ He is always referred to as ‘Mr. Jones, who is worth two million dollars,’ or ‘Mr. Smith, who is worth four million dollars and stole every cent of it.’”
“In New York society no man is ever referred to as ‘Mr. Jones’ or ‘Mr. Smith.’ He is always referred to as ‘Mr. Jones, who is worth two million dollars,’ or ‘Mr. Smith, who is worth four million dollars and stole every cent of it.’”
“The average Chicagoan has not the faintest conception of the true meaning of right and wrong. Right is the method that succeeds in getting money. Wrong is the method that does not.”
“The average Chicagoan has not the faintest conception of the true meaning of right and wrong. Right is the method that succeeds in getting money. Wrong is the method that does not.”
I shall beg the reader to observe particularly that I do not myself make these stinging assertions. In the words of the late Sir William Harcourt, “I merely quote them.” In a sense, perhaps, they may be most correctly described as exaggerations. But they are exaggerations of a kind which have more than a substratum of truth in them. I commend them to the swaggering rubber-jawed American for what they are worth.
Did the scope of this book allow, it would be possible to cite numerous other animadversions upon American manners and customs by other pens.
No British author of standing has visited the United States and come back in love with the American people. Dickens loathed them, Thackeray could not put up with them, Mathew Arnold despised them, and Browning laughed at them, while as for Tennyson he absolutely refused to go near them. Even the sensational litterateurs of our own generation, such as Hall Caine or Bernard Shaw, have failed to find much or anything to shriek about. TheBishop of London and Father Vaughan are not authors but diplomats. Rudyard Kipling has been in America more than once, and remains dumb as to the whole concern. Mr. Zangwill is equally travelled and equally silent. Mr. Wells, who went out for the purpose, has written his book and said practically nothing. All of them, and others who might be named, recognise that what ought to be said would be better unsaid—unpleasant for the Americans, and consequently likely to provoke bad feeling. It is gentlest to the Americans to write of them without paying a preliminary visit to their native air. What would happen if a person who wields a plain blunt pen were to make a call upon them and set forth his impressions in good cold type and without fear or pity, no man may tell. Probably the Americans would shoot him.
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It is said that killing a man will not prevent him from going to Chicago, and you may be certain that nothing will prevent an American from getting himself elected President of the United States if he can possibly manage it.
The United States Presidency is believed by the patriotic American to be the very finest position that mortal man could possibly desire to occupy, outshining in glory and honour, if not exactly in importance, all “the effete thrones of Yurrup” rolled into one paroxysm of purple. Tremendous and almighty as the United States Presidency may be, however, its real lustre and attraction for the American imagination lies in the fact that it is within the possible attainment of any and every United States citizen who does not happen to be a nigger. Of course, your United States President has sometimes been a very different affair from the United States Presidency. But that is neither here nor there; because a man who can write “President U.S.” after his name is, on the face of it, clearlyentitled to think that he casts a large shadow. And he does.
Though the history books will tell you otherwise, astute people—which phrase includes a fair handful of Americans—are of opinion that the Republic of the United States has had only a matter of three Presidents. The first of them was George Washington, who, let it be said, set the fashion of not relishing the job; the second of them was Abraham Lincoln, rail splitter, lawyer, statesman and martyr; and the third American President—one blushes with pride to name him—is none other than Theodore Roosevelt, now more or less happily reigning.
I am no great hand at either history or biography, so that the reader of these pages will be spared the usual entertaining biographical details. I am not even aware if Mr. Roosevelt arrived at the White House by way of the traditional Log Cabin, or whether he took a pleasanter, less stony and less circuitous route. It is sufficient for me to have reasonable hearsay evidence that he is there, and that he has filled up frantically every hour of his time since he got there.
For the ruler of a great state Mr. Roosevelt is, to say the least, an appealing and exciting figure. He may besaid fairly to out-rival anything of the kind that has hitherto been offered us this side of the Atlantic—with one diverting and rhetorical Teutonic exception.
In Mr. Roosevelt you have the following popular and captivating elements:
He is:—
Probably it has never been possible to compile such an inventory in favour of any other example of the human species, and when one looks down its massive proportions one is at no loss to understand why the American people consider themselves to be the very finest people on earth and entirely denuded of flies.
In a comparatively short if variegated career President Roosevelt has accomplished so much that is extraordinary that one never knows where he is likely to break out afresh. Before his term of office is out he may conceivably become many other things besides those I have listed. It would not surprise me if he turned Vegetarian or King. Nothing is too high for him, nothing too humble, nothing too exceptional or unconventional, nothing too imperial. And withal there is a rugged and stern and solid dignity about him. He wields the big stick throughout his vast dominions, and spanks down evildoers as a housewife spanks down wasps. At homehe stands no nonsense; abroad he wants peace, perfect peace, but equally stands no foolery. People of all nations admire him and wave banners over his head and cheer him to the echo. He is a sort of quick-firer, strong in the arm and lively in the head, and built by heaven to rule over the people of the United States.
In many respects President Roosevelt appears to be a sort of republican replica of no less a personage than Wilhelm II. of Germany. The parallel between the two potentates is interesting and diverting and to some extent disconcerting. That they are friends, that they think together on certain big subjects, that they have exchanged telegrams, that they love each other, and that they have both been a trifle flighty at times cannot be doubted.
The really interesting point about Mr. Roosevelt is that he may be reckoned to stand for the finest expression and exemplar of the American people. A nation that can manufacture such a President must be possessed of national characteristics altogether out of the common. He is the absolute personification of the United States. He is absolutely fearless, he is absolutely honest, he is absolutely magnificent. Someday he may be absolutely absolute.
You may be sure that President Roosevelt will go down to posterity as the beau ideal of American Presidents. In the eye of the Americans he has made few if any mistakes, and though there is a party in the States that can be very bitter about him and very rude to him, their bark is considerably worse than their bite, and secretly they glory in him. By dint of a good deal of adroitness he has succeeded in keeping his diplomatic end up in Europe and particularly in England, and nobody between Tipperary and the Great Wall of China has hard words for him. The world recognises in him a great genius—unparalleled in modern times.
If ever an American had sound reason to look back with satisfaction on a well-spent life, Mr. Roosevelt is the man. And if ever republic had just cause to thank Providence for its luck in the matter of a President, the United States is that Republic.
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“The man who would in business rise must either bust or advertise” is the American’s article of faith. In civilised countries advertising is confined to its proper limits, that is to say, it is part of the business of a tradesman. In America everybody advertises, and advertises through a megaphone.
The United States appears to have been created for the pure purpose of advertising itself and everything that occurs in it. In England of late we have been a little overtroubled with the persistent and flamboyant advertiser. His flaring posters, his disconcerting circulars, and particularly his promises of fabulous prizes if one will but buy his soap or his half-penny paper or his gaspipe bicycles have jarred upon most of us. The London hoardings blaze with all sorts of invitations to drink cocoa, swallow pills, go to the theatre, and demand bottled trouble of one label or another.
The plague is upon England, and probably we shall not get rid of it for a couple of generations or so. In the meantime, however, we may console ourselves withthe knowledge that gaudy and excruciating as London advertising may be, it is a mere tea-party compared to the orgie of announcement that is always in progress in every bright American city. Furthermore, while the English advertiser has admittedly done his best to destroy for us the mild delights of a railway journey by erecting in every second meadow funereal signs with the names of liver pills and cattle foods upon them he has not yet attained to the audacities of his American confrère who, in his delirium of publicity, paints the names of nostrums on the sides of innocuous cows and adorns the scenery with purple and yellow posters that are positively zoo-like in their noise.
The rocks and hills of America are daubed over with wild entreaties to the passer-by to fix up his liver with some newly invented mixture, or to sow someone’s invaluable hair seed on his bald head. Each country barn is decorated with huge signs bearing disinterested advice as to what sort of medicine a wayfarer should use in the spring. In no part of any State can one escape the huge advertisement. If you penetrate into the recesses of the highest mountain and find there the hut of a bewhiskered hermit, the chances are that when you approach him he will give you somehandbills containing details of the marvellous cures effected by So-and-So’s sarsaparilla. The sails of yachts are adorned with statements as to medicines. Landscapes serve but to promulgate the claims of the quack. If a man plants a bed of geraniums the chances are that the flowers are arranged in such a way that they immortalise the fame of somebody’s ipecachuana. The gardener is induced to do this by a present of free seeds.
In the trolley cars of New York one is always in danger of finding a seat under some such notice as, “The gentleman sitting beneath this sign is wearing a pair of our inimitable three dollar pants. They fit him beautifully. Don’t you think they do?” Or, “The gentleman sitting below has a very yellow complexion this morning. He looks as if he had drunk too much last night. If he had had proper advice he would have taken a dose of Green Jackdaw Effervescent before breakfast, then he would feel very much better than he does now.”
Pills, potions, pick-me-ups, blood purifiers, liver mixtures, lung tonics, corn cures, and preparations for tender feet appear to be the only articles of commerce that half the population of the United States trade in and manufacture. Youcannot move in America without having these nostrums cast violently into your teeth and shoved down your throat by every species of reminder that printers’ ink and the ingenuity of the devil are capable of compassing.
With a view to the maintenance and upkeep of this extraordinary jumble of publicity the country is patrolled year in and year out by thousands of advertising vans, each accompanied by a considerable staff of “old hands.” American papers commonly contain paragraphs like the following: “Advertising car No 2 of Pawnee Bill’s Wild West has the following people: Al Osborn, manager; Doc Ingram, boss billposter; A. Clarkson, lithographer; J. Dees, banners; N. C. Murray, J. Judge and twelve other billposters; B. Balke, paste-maker; and R. Richardson, chef.” That the boss billposter should rank after the manager and the chef after the paste-maker is a choice American touch.
When you turn to the question of newspaper advertising you encounter pretty much the same characteristics, supplemented by a great deal of top-speed bellowing. In a high-class paper that lies before me as I write, a gentleman in the wholesale way announces in indecently tall black type that he is the “only live hardware man on earth,” and that hehas “figured out a way to boost the business of his customers as well as build a good foundation.” Another dweller in the land of brotherly love—an artiste this time, if you please—announces himself as “The Death Defying Daredevil King of the High Wire” and assures us not only that he has been “the Feature Attraction for Three Seasons in Succession at Luna Park, Coney Island,” but that his “Reputation Talks for Itself.”
The tone of these announcements is typical. Every American advertiser insists that he is the greatest man of business alive, and that the article he is so anxious to get rid of is the only fine thing in the world. You note, too, with a certain restrained joy, that every second advertisement appearing in an American paper or magazine starts off with the magical words: “It Will Pay You.” Thus if we are to believe the veracious publicity-monger it will pay you to wear So and So’s Collegian clothes which “are the only garments made in this entire country with real dash to them”; it will pay you to buy Thingamy Suspenders because they will make your boy “comfortable and good-natured”; it will pay you to go about in Thingamy Shoes because when you pay three dollars for the Thingamy Shoe “you can know that all of yourmoney goes to the purchase of protection for your feet”; and it will pay you “to keep step with nature and tempt the fussy appetite with ‘Ten Liberal Breakfasts for Ten Cents.’” The authors of these touching suggestions evidently understand the public with whom they have to deal. They have learnt the sublime lesson that the American has but a single inducement in his nightmare of a life, namely—the inducement of money or noise.
I shall now consider the advertising feats of that class of American persons who advertise not for financial gain, but for the sweet sake of notoriety. A great lady of American birth is said to have advised her sons that if they were to succeed in life they must make a point of getting their names into the papers at least once a day. The sons of the lady appear to have taken the hint, with the result that they have made themselves fairly snug out of very small beginnings.
In the United States the bare getting of one’s name into the papers is a comparatively easy matter. Pretty well any American reporter will arrange that much for you in return for a ten cent drink, while for two such drinks he will run to a photo-block and a description of yourself as “a prominent society and club man who made his pile in Wall Street.”
You must always remember, however, that the accomplished American private advertiser has a soul vastly above the mere elements of the game. Usually he is rich and often his life has contained episodes which an ingenious press can work up into scandals with half a column of sensational headlines—pin new and piping hot—on the shortest notice. Most wealthy advertising Americans, and indeed many of those who do not advertise, have been treated to this beautiful brand of publicity.
As a matter of fact it is an ancient and over-worn fetich, and as the newspaper-reading American is no longer to be excited by it, there is little or nothing in it for anybody. Consequently the American who is thirsty for advertisement is compelled to have resource to what are called “stunts.” So far as one is able to make out you are considered by American society to achieve a “stunt” when you do something that nobody but a lunatic could possibly have thought of doing. For example, if you give a dinner party at a big New York hotel and let it be known that the guests were all of them chimpanzees you have done a “stunt.” And the reporters of every paper in the city will rush to you as one man to find out the facts. They will describe you as a multi-millionaire and ahigh-life club man whose existence is a sort of perennial grand slam. They will assert that your notion of bringing together a company of chimpanzees for dinner is wildly and unprecedentedly clever. They will go on to explain that the number of chimpanzees present was 47, that they turned up in the very smartest evening dress, that they ate and drank off plate of solid gold and that the champagne bottles were studded with rubies. And they will wind up by announcing that one of the most distinguished of the chimpanzees, who made his entrance to the dinner party out of a balloon made of fifty dollar bills, has just found a $500,000,000 gold-brick mine in a remote district of Omaha, where he was “raised,” and is as a consequence about to be elected President of the National Bank.
Result: your dinner becomes the talk of America for at least a few hours, and you consider yourself a fortunate and public man. That is, if you are an ambitious American. Of course, this sort of advertising requires a good deal of coin to keep up the pace. And while there is not an hotel keeper in the Union who cannot supply you with a steady succession of idiotic freak ideas, the cost is a trifle heavy, and you soon find yourself growing rather tired.
But the American is nothing if notclever. For a change, perhaps, he acquires an affinity or elopes with another man’s wife in a series of gorgeous motor cars and specially reserved steamships. He writes letters to his own wife explaining in ecstatic language what he has done; and she, good soul, serves them out to the reporters like so many doughnuts. Again, he gets his boosting—his roaring, rolling advertisement. Two months later the whole affair may turn out to have been a merry little “plant”; but your bright American has had his glad columns in the papers, and nothing in the world can take them from him.
Of course, the “stunts” I have here indicated are really of a rather out-of-the-way sort. The common or garden “stunt” usually takes the shape of an appendicitis dinner, pies with girls in them, fountains running champagne, or Adam and Eve suppers.
American women’s “stunts” are generally giddier still. One lady compassed social distinction by having her sunshade heavily embroidered with diamonds, another has tiny musical boxes fitted into the heels of her shoes that play when ever she puts her feet up—which is often—and a third wears a live newt in her hair, and has a boudoir full of snakes and lucky bears.
But the soul and essence of it all isadvertisement. “Be singular and you will get talked about; get talked about and you will be happy” is America’s golden rule.
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I am in the happy position of never having gazed upon a pea-nut in my life. Therefore my notions of what the pea-nut may be are of the haziest.
But I gather as the result of some research that it is a species of provender, and that it is purchased and consumed by the American masses in pretty much the same spirit and on pretty well the same occasions that the common Cockney of our own happy British Islands purchases and devours barcelonas and whelks. In other words, a pea-nut is an inevitable concomitant of a lower-class American holiday. It is always with them. It is the one article that you may depend upon obtaining not only at every American dry goods store, but at every street-fair, park, beach, and entertainment ground throughout the country. It is a comestible beloved of old and young alike, and when the American boy or girl’s mouth is not at work on chewing gum it is working overtime on pea-nuts.
When a working-class American wants a holiday—and sometimes when he would rather stay at home—he sets outwith his wife and family for the nearest park. In England, of course, a park means, for the working classes at any rate, a somewhat decorous and over-laid-out open space where there is a band-stand, a range of concrete promenades, a Swiss châlet where bad tea is provided, a policeman, and a number of hard seats. In America, however, the park is an entirely different affair. It is always a place in which you can buy pea-nuts. Not only so; it is a place in which the benevolent American entrepreneurs throw together aggregations of “attractions” such as are to be seen nowhere else on sea or land. I find, for example, that for Cream City Park, Lyons, Ill., the following amusement devices are to be provided during this present summer:—
“Old Mill, Merry-Go-Rounds, Penny Arcade, Circular Swing, Cave of the Winds, Billiard and Pool Parlours, Jap Ping-Pong Parlour, Cane Rack, Baby Rack, Illusion Shows, Baby Incubator, Pony Track, Razzle-Dazzle, and ‘other novelties.’ There are also to be Japanese Tea Gardens, Ice Cream Stands, Soft Drink Stands, Candy and Pop Corn Stands, and facilities for the sale of pea-nuts.”
Another of these parks at Aldoc Beach, near Buffalo, is described as“running seven days a week” and as possessing “the most magnificent Pine Grove and Great Lake,” together with “a $100,000 Summer Hotel, a $15,000 Figure Eight, a $5,000 Rustic Vaudeville Theatre, and a $5,000 Dance Pavilion,” in addition to a Blinding Array of Restaurants, Chubbuck Wheels, Houses of Mirth, Box-Ball Alleys, Shooting Galleries, Circle Swings, and Stands for the sale of Soft Drinks, Tobaccos, Sandwiches, Ice Creams, Frankfurters—and pea-nuts.
There are literally thousands of these parks scattered throughout the United States, and at all and each of them roaring provision is made for the people’s enjoyment. Compared with our English parks, with their sad, uncertain County Council bands, they fire the imagination. Practically they represent the old English fair—which the drab English authorities have so ruthlessly stamped out—very much modernised, Americanised, and “notionised.” Here the pea-nut reigns supreme. You chew it on the Razzle-Dazzle and in the Baby Rack and the Old Mill and the House of Mirth and the Chubbuck Wheel, and even in the $15,000 Figure Eight and the $5,000 Rustic Vaudeville. It is pea-nuts, pea-nuts, pea-nuts all the time, and nobody hopes, and nobodyhas the least desire to get away from them—from pea-nuts.
Now, as the parks are open throughout the year and run seven days a week, and are all situated within easy distance of large centres of population, it follows that the consumption of pea-nuts in America is something enormous. If the yearly supply were to be put into trucks and looped up into a procession, it would probably take that procession 368 days to pass a given point.
The big fact that I wish to bring out is that the Americans are a pea-nut-fed nation. With this simple statement it is possible to account for a great deal that is otherwise inexplicable in the American genius and character.
Nut-chewing is a habit which has been in vogue on the earth for an incredible period. Originally developed by the Simian races, it was at one time the only known dietetic habit that did not involve bloodshed. It fell into neglect in Europe with the coming of the white man, and throughout the dark ages which ensued nobody appears to have given it a thought. It remained for the genius of America to revive it, and there can be no doubt that the renascence has been brought about in a thoroughly adequate and successful manner.
For, as I have shown, all Americanow chews pea-nuts. As the result, they are a square-jawed, massy-faced race, martyrs to dyspepsia, fussy in the matter of appetite, and indiscriminate in the general selection of viands, their staples under this head consisting of fat pork and beans, corn mush and jungle-canned beef. Moreover, by dint of the assiduous and long-continued absorption of pea-nuts, they have acquired what may be reasonably termed a pea-nut mind.
If you can imagine the vast hordes of the original nut-chewers of antiquity suddenly set down in the midst of the machinery and advantages of twentieth-century civilisation, and imagine what they would proceed to do in the circumstances, you have gone a great way towards a true conception of the American people as they really are. Their habits and manners and aspirations and desires appear in effect to be based entirely on nut-chewing, which, as every naturalist is aware, tends to render the chewer acquisitive, cute, tricksome, not given to reflection, tough and nimble of body, and reasonably devoid of soul. The habit carries with it, also, an innate love of what is noisy and showy, and a vanity which passes ordinary human understanding. It is all based on the desire to dazzle.
So long as America has parks, so longwill she chew pea-nuts, and so long as she chews pea-nuts, so long will she continue to remain as artlessly, amazingly and convincingly American as she is at the present moment. To take a few pertinent instances, you will find that all American oratory is simply and solely pea-nut oratory. I append an extract from a speech delivered at the New York Board of Aldermen by a representative from the Borough of Brooklyn, as reported in an American paper:—
“I demand this ordinance to your attention fer the sake of humanity and fer the cause of freedom. Has introduced two ordinances on this subject before, and now I am submittin’ this Bill instead of them two. Maybe I don’t know nuthin’ about how things is over here on this side of the bridge, but I know just how it is in Brooklyn. An’ I wanter tell you that them motormen over in Brooklyn is grinded under the heels of their masters just as the slaves was drove in the olden times by his masters, an’ it’s time fer us to interfere in this here matter now.“Now you may want to know why them motormen don’t come over here and speak up to you for their rights. If the is suffering such outrages as this, you asks, why don’t they come here and tell us that they is sufferin’ and ast us to life the yoke from offen them?“I’ll tell yer why they don’t come. They dasn’t. That’s why.“They’re afraid, because they’re slaves and dasn’t speak up fer themselves. If they was to come over here and say to this committee, ‘We want you to protect us in our rights for the reason that we’re sufferin’ and frozing in the winter,’ what would happen?“Why, before them men got through speakin’ their names would be taken and telegraphed to their masters, and when they got back to their cars them masters would tell them they hadn’t no more use for ’em no more furever.”
“I demand this ordinance to your attention fer the sake of humanity and fer the cause of freedom. Has introduced two ordinances on this subject before, and now I am submittin’ this Bill instead of them two. Maybe I don’t know nuthin’ about how things is over here on this side of the bridge, but I know just how it is in Brooklyn. An’ I wanter tell you that them motormen over in Brooklyn is grinded under the heels of their masters just as the slaves was drove in the olden times by his masters, an’ it’s time fer us to interfere in this here matter now.
“Now you may want to know why them motormen don’t come over here and speak up to you for their rights. If the is suffering such outrages as this, you asks, why don’t they come here and tell us that they is sufferin’ and ast us to life the yoke from offen them?
“I’ll tell yer why they don’t come. They dasn’t. That’s why.
“They’re afraid, because they’re slaves and dasn’t speak up fer themselves. If they was to come over here and say to this committee, ‘We want you to protect us in our rights for the reason that we’re sufferin’ and frozing in the winter,’ what would happen?
“Why, before them men got through speakin’ their names would be taken and telegraphed to their masters, and when they got back to their cars them masters would tell them they hadn’t no more use for ’em no more furever.”
Herein surely one may trace the effects of pea-nuts as easily as white paint can be seen on a negro.
Now let us turn to a sample of English “as she is wrote” and apparently spoken by the American who can read:—
The story about that fisherman wasn’t so bad. He was an old guy, and so poor he had a hard time getting three squares a day, and he had a wife and three kids to support. For some reason too deep for your uncle, he had a rule to pitch his nets in the sea only four times a day. One morning he went out fishing before daylight, and the first drag he made, he copped out a dead donkey. That made him pretty sore. Dead donks were a frost, and he was out one throw. He win out a lot of mud, the next throw, and he was sick, and he makes a howl about fortune.“Here I am,” says he, “hustling all day long and every day in the week; I got no other graft but this; and yet as hard as I wrestle I can’t pay rent. A poor man has no chance. The smooth guys get all the tapioca, and the honest citizen nit.”Then he throws again, and finds another gold brick—stones, shells, and stuff. I guess he was pretty wild when he sees that. Three throws to the bad and nairy fish.When the sun came over the hill, he flopped down on his knees and prayed like all good Mussulmens, and after that gave the Lord another song.
The story about that fisherman wasn’t so bad. He was an old guy, and so poor he had a hard time getting three squares a day, and he had a wife and three kids to support. For some reason too deep for your uncle, he had a rule to pitch his nets in the sea only four times a day. One morning he went out fishing before daylight, and the first drag he made, he copped out a dead donkey. That made him pretty sore. Dead donks were a frost, and he was out one throw. He win out a lot of mud, the next throw, and he was sick, and he makes a howl about fortune.
“Here I am,” says he, “hustling all day long and every day in the week; I got no other graft but this; and yet as hard as I wrestle I can’t pay rent. A poor man has no chance. The smooth guys get all the tapioca, and the honest citizen nit.”
Then he throws again, and finds another gold brick—stones, shells, and stuff. I guess he was pretty wild when he sees that. Three throws to the bad and nairy fish.
When the sun came over the hill, he flopped down on his knees and prayed like all good Mussulmens, and after that gave the Lord another song.
English of this description runs very badly to pea-nut. It is distorted and degraded and entirely ungrammatical. Yet no one will deny that, if it is not commonly written, it is at least commonly spoken, even in such centres as New York and Boston. To American ears and eyes there is nothing about it that can be quarrelled with. Every American knows what is meant by “guys,” “tapioca,” “nit,” “gold-brick,” “nairy,” “squares,” “hot-air,” and so forth; and he uses these and similarly squalid words and phrases in his daily speech and conversation. If you were to tell him that such a sentence as “he win out a lot of mud, the next throw” was grammatically unsound and impossible, he would ask you please to beso kind “as not to pull his leg.” He is mentally incapable of distinguishing the kind of muss I have quoted from writing of a correct order, and when it creeps into his newspapers, and fictional publications, as it is continually doing, he never as much as suspects that there is anything wrong.
Such a pea-nutty view of language points its own moral. It is a view that is universal among Americans, and it can be proved to obtain even among the best of American authors, who habitually use some of the crudest Americanisms without knowing it.
I need scarcely add that the pea-nut flavour predominates in most American affairs. The advertising of the country is done wholly on pea-nut principles, its politics are run on pea-nut lines, and its professional men and financiers indulge in every species of pea-nut methods. No doubt one should be charitable enough to refrain from blaming them for it. They are to the manner born, and the pea-nut idiosyncracy is so firmly implanted in their natures that it would be impossible for them to shake it out, even if they tried. So that they go on pea-nutting and pea-nutting from generation to generation, and in spite of the extraordinary number of colleges, free schools, reading clubs, and generalfacilities for culture, they remain clear pea-nut right through.
As I do not happen to wish them any particular harm, I shall express the pious hope that they will long continue to pea-nut.
(decorative flower image)
The Americans are nothing if not fiercely and incorrigibly theatrical. It is true that they have only one pose, namely, the pose of being gloriously and unaffectedly American. Yet in all the large issues of life they display a strong sense of the stage, they revel in the more obvious situations, and they have an innate love of a good curtain.
These facts are strikingly illustrated in the American law courts, where all small matters are managed on the lines of comedy, and all large matters on the lines of hot and lurid melodrama. The recent Thaw trial may be taken as a typical case in point, so far as melodrama is concerned. The speeches of counsel on both sides might have been written specially for the Adelphi Theatre, and every gesture of the rival declaimers would seem to have been modelled on the style of the adipose itinerant actor who plays “Othello” in penny gaffs.
So far as the real stage is concerned, the Americans are to be credited with quite a number of startling innovations. They were the sole inventors of the Deadwood Dick kind of play, whichinvolves the tooling on to the stage of an ancient and battered mail coach, accompanied by feats of unthinkable skill with the shooting irons. I believe, too, that they were the only begetters of the drama that has for its central attraction a real set-to between bona-fide bruisers, who fight with the gloves off and punish one another for all they are worth under American rules.
Then, of course, I must not forget to mention the world-renowned “Tank Drama.” It appears that an American manager happened once upon a time to find himself in a second-hand galvanised iron store. Here he discovered an enormous iron tank which he found could be purchased for a song. In a fit of abstraction, and in pursuance of the American tendency to buy anything and everything that can be had dirt cheap, he purchased the tank. And having it on his hands and no particular use for it, he hired a dramatist to write a play around it. To this woolly genius a tank of course suggested water and high dives and swimmers, and before you could say hey, presto! Mr. Manager found himself in possession of a sensational, if somewhat humid, melodrama, the like of which had never before been seen on any road.
The Tank Drama toured the States for years on end, to the approval and delightof American audiences, and for anything I know to the contrary, it is still running, the tank itself having by this time, no doubt, grown a little leaky.
In England the public is familiar with melodramas in which the principal part is taken by steam-rollers, circular saws, fire-engines, and other pieces of mechanism. The Tank Drama, however, was the progenitor of them all. It was from the Americans, also, that we learnt to grace our melodramas with the presence on the stage of real live cows, racehorses, ducks and geese, faithful dogs, dancing bears, blue monkeys, and educated asses.
The American public prides itself upon the rapidity with which the national dramatists, from Clyde Fitch or Augustus Thomas to David Belasco or Theodore Kremer, can turn out almost any species of dramatic work to order. On the production of a five-act tragedy recently in New York, it was announced that the author had written “the whole contraption” in under the twenty-four hours. I can well believe it. The majority of American plays that come to us on this side bear unmistakable indications of having been written in haste, and with a single eye to getting through with the labour. This is no doubt due to the circumstance thatAmerican managers have a mania for producing new pieces, and that the average run of such pieces is exceedingly short. Authors do not feel it to be worth their while to take pains, particularly as the majority of them have to subsist by dressing up in dramatic guise some new and big mechanical invention or some cause célèbre or tragedy in real life or some stupid story, which happens to have caught on, but which they know cannot in the nature of things keep the stage for more than a few weeks.
Although one is continually hearing of the triumphs of this or that American actor or actress in Shakespearean parts, it is a solemn fact that the average of Shakespearean acting in America is very much below that of any other country in which Shakespeare is consistently played. I cannot, of course, forget that America produced the late Mr. Phelps and gave us Miss Mary Anderson, whom all the world admired. But these are the exceptions. The rule is that the American actor who plays Shakespeare is a bull-necked, unlettered mummer who has served his apprenticeship to the circus business or to the plumbing, and roars out Shakespeare’s lines with a nasal intonation and an absolute lack of understanding. Nine out of tenAmerican actors ought to carry a net with them.
I am aware that it may be contended that the foregoing aspects of the American drama are things of the past, and that in all essential respects the theatre in America is nowadays on an equal footing with the theatre in England. In a considerable measure, this may be so, due, no doubt, to the mixed beneficence of the blessed brotherhood: Frohman, Klaw and Erlanger.
Yet there can be no getting away from the fact that the American plays and American companies that are from time to time brought to London for our edification fail woefully to interest us.
In London, quite lately we have been presented with two plays of American extraction and rendered by American companies. One of them “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch” to wit, at Terry’s Theatre, appears to have been a success, from a monetary point of view, and nobody can witness it without entertainment. On the other hand, it suffers from that pea-nutty exuberance and thinness of interest which are so characteristically American. The sentiment in it is of the floweriest and slobberiest sort, the comedy forced and jerky, and the setting squalid and depressing to a degree. It is said to be a transcriptof life among the American poorer classes, and herein conceivably it is instructive if not altogether uplifting; for it indicates only too plainly that the hackneyed American talk about “the full dinner-pail” and the general snugness and decency of the existence of the American poor has precious little foundation in fact. Of course, Mrs. Wiggs herself is made to exhibit singularly good qualities of heart, and a certain shrewd and humorous wisdom. But the rest of the characters—not even excluding the weepily-named Lovey-Mary and Mrs. Wiggs’s troops of wild-cat children—are the kind of people whom it sets one’s teeth on edge to meet. If, as I am told, America is full of Cabbage Patches, I can only say that America should hasten to the penitent form.
The other play of which London was adjured to expect great things was called “Strongheart.” It ran for a couple of weeks or more at the Aldwych Theatre, and was then taken off. “Strongheart” purported to give us some highly realistic glimpses of American college life. There was a great deal of American football in it, and a great deal of ra, ra, ra-ing about it. There were also unlimited quantities of ra, ra rant. But the plot exhibited the usualthinness, the construction was slack and loose, and the characterisation feeble and colourless. If the company which supported the handsome Robert Edeson in this particular piece is to be taken as a fair sample, I feel free to conclude that in the lump American actors and actresses are a reasonably poor crowd. Play as they would, the men failed to convince us that they were persons of any particular breeding, and the women said their lines as if they were in pain, and walked through their parts like so many uninspired clothes horses. Of course I know America has many gifted actors and actresses such as William Faversham, James K. Hackett, E. H. Sothern, Julia Merlowe, Olga Nethersole and Mery Mannering—but, as luck will have it, with the exception of the second-named, who is a Canadian, they’re all English. And so is even the inimitable Hap Ward. On the whole, I think America will have to make some very serious strides in the dramatic art before she can fairly hope to show England anything that is worth looking at.
When you turn to the music halls you find the American in equally sad case. There is no performer of note on the English music-hall stage whose training and experience have been American.From the other side we get a few trick bicyclists, wire-walkers, high divers, and comic speech makers whose pea-nutty witticisms are obviously culled from the comic papers. They help to fill up the programme, without in any sense helping to fill up the house.
It is in this connection that the Americans have made a practical avowal of their pathetic inferiority; for they are said to have made contracts with some of the leading English stars for appearances in America, on terms which plainly indicate that the American managers must be singularly hard up for talent and quite incapable of finding it in their own country.
The fact is, that in this as in a variety of other matters, the American’s cock-sureness and unblushing faith in his personal beauty and powers have led him considerably astray. The American really possesses scarcely any talent. All he can do is to boast and shout and advertise. And having little or nothing behind him to boast and shout and advertise about, he is bound in the long run to find himself at a disadvantage. Half the actresses and female music-hall artists of America are successful not because they can do anything, but because they have been “boosted” into fame by the pushful, blatantmanager. The sole accomplishment of many of them is that they can undress prettily in full view of their audiences.
For the rest they bolster up their position by extraneous escapades rather than by art. They are harum-scarum, feather-brained young women who for the most part would find it exceedingly difficult to get a living by the exercise of their alleged smartness before an English public. And as for American actors and music-hall men, the best that can be said of them is that when they are not vulgar they are deadly dull, and the worst that their real sphere of life is the American circus. I wish they would all take to the Tank.
The average American theatrical man, invariably strikes me as being a born circus-man, intended by nature to go around in a gaudy procession by day and to fill up his nights showing off wild beasts and freaks and Deadwood coaches. Unconsciously he does all his business and manages all his affairs on circus principles. He is for ever beating the drum and inviting the crowd to walk up and see the finest show on earth. The ideal man of his private bosom is the late P. T. Barnum, who was the father of advertisement and the originator of the fine art of “boosting.”It was P. T. Barnum who said, or who got somebody to say for him, “When you have anything good, keep on letting on about it, and you will get rich.”
The American business man has always considered that saying to be the extreme height of philosophy.