This acknowledgment was complete, and perfectly friendly, and after that all went better than it had gone before.
The half anecdote is a part of this one, and happened a few weeks later at table—dinner this time.
Sitting next to the same American was an English lady whose conversation led him to repeat to her what he had said to his hostess at lunch: “Vulgar Americans seem to get on very well in London society.”
“They do,” said the lady, “and I will tell you why. We English—I mean that set of English—are blase. We see each other too much, we are all alike in our ways, and we are awfully tired of it. Therefore it refreshes us and amuses us to see something new and different.”
“Then,” said the American, “you accept these hideous people’s invitations, and go to their houses, and eat their food, and drink their champagne, and it’s just like going to see the monkeys at the Zoo?”
“It is,” returned the lady.
“But,” the American asked, “isn’t that awfully low down of you?” (He smiled as he said it.)
Immediately the English lady assented; and grew more cordial. When next day the party came to break up, she contrived in the manner of her farewell to make the American understand that because of their conversation she bore him not ill will but good will.
Once more, the scene of my anecdote is at table, a long table in a club, where men came to lunch. All were Englishmen, except a single stranger.
He was an American, who through the kindness of one beloved member of that club, no longer living now, had received a card to the club. The American, upon sitting down alone in this company, felt what I suppose that many of us feel in like circumstances: he wished there were somebody there who knew him and could nod to him. Nevertheless, he was spoken to, asked questions about various of his fellow countrymen, and made at home.
Presently, however, an elderly member who had been silent and whom I will designate as being of the Dr. Samuel Johnson type, said: “You seem to be having trouble in your packing houses over in America? “
We were.
“Very disgraceful, those exposures.”
They were. It was May, 1906.
“Your Government seems to be doing something about it. It’s certainly scandalous. Such abuses should never have been possible in the first place. It oughtn’t to require your Government to stop it. It shouldn’t have started.”
“I fancy the facts aren’t quite so bad as that sensational novel about Chicago makes them out,” said the American. “At least I have been told so.”
“It all sounds characteristic to me,” said the Sam Johnson. “It’s quite the sort of thing one expects to hear from the States.”
“It is characteristic,” said the American. “In spite of all the years that the sea has separated us, we’re still inveterately like you, a bullying, dishonest lot—though we’ve had nothing quite so bad yet as your opium trade with China.”
The Sam Johnson said no more.
At a ranch in Wyoming were a number of Americans and one Englishman, a man of note, bearing a celebrated name. He was telling the company what one could do in the way of amusement in the evening in London.
“And if there’s nothing at the theatres and everything else fails, you can always go to one of the restaurants and hear the Americans eat.”
There you have them, my anecdotes. They are chosen from many. I hope and believe that, between them all, they cover the ground; that, taken together as I want you to take them after you have taken them singly, they make my several points clear. As I see it, they reveal the chief whys and wherefores of friction between English and Americans. It is also my hope that I have been equally disagreeable to everybody. If I am to be banished from both countries, I shall try not to pass my exile in Switzerland, which is indeed a lovely place, but just now too full of celebrated Germans.
Beyond my two early points, the right to privacy and the mother-tongue, what are the generalizations to be drawn from my data? I should like to dodge spelling them out, I should immensely prefer to leave it here. Some readers know it already, knew it before I began; while for others, what has been said will be enough. These, if they have the will to friendship instead of the will to hate, will get rid of their anti-English complex, supposing that they had one, and understand better in future what has not been clear to them before. But I seem to feel that some readers there may be who will wish me to be more explicit.
First, then. England has a thousand years of greatness to her credit. Who would not be proud of that? Arrogance is the seamy side of pride. That is what has rubbed us Americans the wrong way. We are recent. Our thousand years of greatness are to come. Such is our passionate belief. Crudity is the seamy side of youth. Our crudity rubs the English the wrong way.
Compare the American who said we were going to buy England for a summer resort with the Englishman who said that when all other entertainment in London failed, you could always listen to the Americans eat. Crudity, “freshness” on our side, arrogance, toploftiness on theirs: such is one generalization I would have you disengage from my anecdotes.
Second. The English are blunter than we. They talk to us as they would talk to themselves. The way we take it reveals that we are too often thin-skinned. Recent people are apt to be thin-skinned and self-conscious and self-assertive, while those with a thousand years of tradition would have thicker hides and would never feel it necessary to assert themselves. Give an Englishman as good as he gives you, and you are certain to win his respect, and probably his regard. In this connection see my anecdote about the Tommies and Yankees who physically fought it out, and compare it with the Salisbury, the van Squibber, and the opium trade anecdotes. “Treat ‘em rough,” when they treat you rough: they like it. Only, be sure you do it in the right way.
Third. We differ because we are alike. That American who stood in the theatre complaining about the sixpence he didn’t have to pay at home is exactly like Englishmen I have seen complaining about the unexpected here. We share not only the same mother-tongue, we share every other fundamental thing upon which our welfare rests and our lives are carried on. We like the same things, we hate the same things. We have the same notions about justice, law, conduct; about what a man should be, about what a woman should be. It is like the mother-tongue we share, yet speak with a difference. Take the mother-tongue for a parable and symbol of all the rest. Just as the word “girl” is identical to our sight but not to our hearing, and means oh! quite the same thing throughout us all in all its meanings, so that identity of nature which we share comes often to the surface in different guise. Our loquacity estranges the Englishman, his silence estranges us. Behind that silence beats the English heart, warm, constant, and true; none other like it on earth, except our own at its best, beating behind our loquacity.
Thus far my anecdotes carry me. May they help some reader to a better understanding of what he has misunderstood heretofore!
No anecdotes that I can find (though I am sure that they are to be found) will illustrate one difference between the two peoples, very noticeable to-day. It is increasing. An Englishman not only sticks closer than a brother to his own rights, he respects the rights of his neighbor just as strictly. We Americans are losing our grip on this. It is the bottom of the whole thing. It is the moral keystone of democracy. Howsoever we may talk about our own rights to-day, we pay less and less respect to those of our neighbors. The result is that to-day there is more liberty in England than here. Liberty consists and depends upon respecting your neighbor’s rights every bit as fairly and squarely as your own.
On the other hand, I wonder if the English are as good losers as we are?
Hardly anything that they could do would rub us more the wrong way than to deny to us that fair play in sport which they accord each other. I shall not more than mention the match between our Benicia Boy and their Tom Sayers. Of this the English version is as defective as our school-book account of the Revolution. I shall also pass over various other international events that are somewhat well known, and I will illustrate the point with an anecdote known to but a few.