THE SENIOR WRANGLERSNOBBERY—AMERICA VS. ENGLAND
SNOBBERY—AMERICA VS. ENGLAND
“HOWthe Americansdolove a Duke!” is a frequent comment of the British journals, and they then proceed to the sober generalization that “the United States is a nation of flunkies and of snobs.” Whoever will be at the pains to follow British weekly journalism will find this sentiment repeated every little while. Good old British Podsnap! No half-way course for him. He is not the man to shilly-shally with a nation, and he will speak the plain truth to any hemisphere, no matter how it hurts the hemisphere’s feelings. Vulgarity is a matter of geography. It is reckoned from Pall Mall as time is from Greenwich.
But as to snobs. New York’s streets are of course often choked with them. A duke, an elephant, a base-ball pitcher on Fifth Avenue, may at any time be the center of a disproportionate and servile attention from both the American people and the press. Yet the cult of the egregious and the greatly advertised has never the deep devotion of sound snobbery. It is not for an upstart and volatile people to dispute the calm supremacy of British snobbery. Your true snob is not inquisitive at all. He has no sense of any social values not his own. It is among the tightly closed minds of the tight little island that he is seen at his best. What other nation could produce, in journalism, such inimitable snobs as the Lord Alfred Douglases and the Saturday Reviewers?
American snobbery is not a sturdy plant. There is too much social uncertainty at the root of it. What the British take for snobbery over here springs from quite alien qualities—curiosity, a vast social innocence, and a blessed inexperience of rank. To be sure, if King George comes to New York some one may clip his coat-tails for a keepsake; and it is quite probable that Mrs. Van Allendale, of Newport, if asked to meet him, will be all of a tremble whether to address him as “Sire” or “My God.” But what has this in common with the huge assurances of British snobbery—its enormous certainty of the Proper Thing, in clothes, people, religion, sports, manners, and races, and its indomitable determination not to guess again?
KING GEORGE IN NEW YORK
KING GEORGE IN NEW YORK