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the exercise you need, if you walk five miles or more a day. Golf,
then, is really beneficial, and it costs you about $25.00 a week the
year round.
So much for our “five major sports.” We look on at four of them,
and if we can support the family, and pay taxes and insurance, on
$1250 a year less than we earn, we take part in the fifth.
The minor sports, as the editor will tell you, are tennis, boating,
polo, track athletics, trap-shooting, archery, hockey, soccer, and so
on. Not to mention games like poker, bridge, bowling, billiards, and
pool (now officially known as “pocket billiards” because the Ladies’
Guild thought “pool” must have something to do with betting), which
we may dismiss as being of doubtful physical benefit, since they are
all played indoors and in a fog of Camel smoke.
Of the outdoor “minors,” tennis is unquestionably the most
popular. And it is one whale of a game—if you can stand it. But what
percentage of grown-ups play it? I have no statistics at hand, and
must guess. The number of adult persons with whom I am
acquainted, intimately or casually, is possibly two thousand. I can
think of ten who play as many as five sets of tennis a year.
How many of the two thousand play polo or have ever played
polo? One. How many are trap-shooters? Two. How many have
boats? Six or seven. How many run footraces or jump? None. How
many are archers? None. How many play hockey, soccer, la crosse?
None.
If I felt like indulging in a game of cricket, which God forbid,
whom should I call up and invite to join me?
Now, how many of my two thousand acquaintances are
occasional or habitual spectators at baseball games, football games,
boxing matches, or horse races? All but three or four. The people I
know (I do not include ball-players, boxers, and wrestlers, who make
their living from sport) are average people; they are the people you
know. And the overwhelming majority of them don’t play.
Why not? If regular participation in a more or less interesting
outdoor game is going to lengthen our lives, why don’t we
participate? Is it because we haven’t time? It takes just as much time
to look on, and we do that. Is it because we can’t afford it? We can
play tennis for as little as it costs to go to the bail-game and infinitely
less than it costs to go to the races.
We don’t play because (1) we lack imagination, and because (2)
we are a nation of hero-worshippers.
When we were kids, the nurse and the minister taught us that, if
we weren’t good, our next stop would be hell. But, to us, there was
no chance of the train’s starting for seventy years. And we couldn’t
visualize an infernal excursion that far off. It was too vague to be
scary. We kept right on swiping the old man’s cigars and giggling in
the choir. If they had said that misdemeanours such as those would
spell death and eternal fire, not when we were old, but to-morrow,
most of us would have respected father’s property rights and sat
through the service with a sour pan. If the family doctor were to tell
us now that unless we got outdoors and exercised every afternoon
this week, we should die next Tuesday before lunch, you can bet we
should get outdoors and exercise every afternoon this week. But
when he tells us that, without healthful outdoor sport, we shall die in
1945 instead of 1949, why, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a chimera,
a myth, like the next war.
But hero-worship is the national disease that does most to keep
the grandstands full and the playgrounds empty. To hell with those
four extra years of life, if they are going to cut in on our afternoon at
the Polo Grounds, where, in blissful asininity, we may feast our eyes
on the swarthy Champion of Swat, shouting now and then in an
excess of anile idolatry, “Come on, you Babe. Come on, you Baby
Doll!” And if an hour of tennis is going to make us late at the Garden,
perhaps keep us out of our ringside seats, so close to Dempsey’s
corner that (O bounteous God!) a drop of the divine perspiration may
splash our undeserving snout—Hang up, liver! You’re on a busy
wire!
Ring W. Lardner
 HUMOUR
WITH the aid of a competent bibliographer for about five days I
believe I could supply the proof to any unreflecting person in need of
it that there is no such thing as an American gift of humorous
expression, that the sense of humour does not exist among our
upper classes, especially our upper literary class, that in many
respects almost every other civilized country in the world has more
of it, that quiet New England humour is exceedingly loud and does
not belong to New England, that British incomprehension of our
jokes is as a rule commendable, the sense of humour generally
beginning where our jokes leave off. And while you can prove
anything about a race or about all races with the aid of a
bibliographer for five days, as contemporary sociologists are now
showing, I believe these things are true. Belief in American humour
is a superstition that seldom outlasts youth in persons who have
been exposed to American practice, and hardly ever if they know
anything of the practice elsewhere. Of course I am not speaking of
the sad formalism of the usual thing as we see it in newspapers and
on movie screens or of the ritual of magazines wholly or in part
sanctified to our solemn god of fun. I mean the best of it.
In the books and passages collated by my bibliographer the
American gift of humour would be distributed over areas of time so
vast and among peoples so numerous, remote, or savage, that no
American would have the heart to press his claim. The quaintness,
dryness, ultra-solemnity with or without the wink, exaggeration,
surprise, contrast, assumption of common misunderstanding,
hyperbolical innocence, quiet chuckle, upsetting of dignity, éclat of
spontaneity with appeals to the everlasting, dislocation of elegance
or familiarity, imperturbability, and twinkle—whatever the qualities
may be as enumerated by the bacteriologists who alone have ever
written on the subject, the most American of them would be shown in
my bibliographer’s report to be to a far greater degree un-American.
Patriotic exultation in their ownership is like patriotic exultation in the
possession of the parts of speech. Humour is no more altered by
local reference than grammar is altered by being spoken through the
nose. And if the bibliography is an ideal one it will not only present
American humour at all times and places but will produce almost
verbatim long passages of American humorous text dated at any
time and place, and will show how by a few simple changes in local
terms they may be made wholly verbatim and American. It will show
that American humorous writing did in fact begin everywhere but
only at certain periods was permitted to continue and that these
periods were by no means the happiest in history. I have time to
mention here only the laborious section that it will probably devote to
Mark Twain in the Age of Pericles, though for the more active reader
the one on Mr. Cobb, Mr. Butler, and others around the walls of Troy
might be of greater contemporary interest.
Mark Twain, according to the citations in this section, would
seem actually to have begun all of his longer stories, including
“Pudd’nhead Wilson,” and most of the shorter ones, essays, and
other papers, at Athens or thereabouts during this period, but not to
have finished a single one, not even the briefest of them. He started,
gave a clear hint as to how the thing would naturally run, and then he
stopped. The reason for this was that owing to the trained
imagination of the people for whom he wrote, the beginning and the
hint were sufficient, and from that point on they could amuse
themselves along the line that Mark Twain indicated better than he
would have amused them, had he continued. Mark Twain finally saw
this and that is why he stopped, realizing that there was no need of
his keeping the ball rolling when to their imaginative intelligence the
ball would roll of itself. He did at first try to keep on, and being lively
and observant and voluble even for a Greek he held large crowds on
street-corners by the sheer repetition of a single gesture of the mind
throughout long narratives of varied circumstance. In good society
this was not tolerated even after supper, and there was never the
slightest chance of publication. But the streets of Athens were full of
the suppressed writings of Mark Twain.
 Every man of taste in Athens loved Mark Twain for the first push
of his fancy but none could endure the unmitigated constancy of his
pushing of it, and as Mark Twain went everywhere and was most
persistent, the compression of his narrative flow within the limits of
the good breeding of the period was an embarrassing problem to
hosts, unwilling to be downright rude to him. Finally he was snubbed
in public by his friends and a few of the more intimate explained to
him afterwards the reason why.
The gist of their explanation was evidently this: The hypothesis
of the best society in town nowadays is that the prolongation of a
single posture of the mind is intolerable, no matter how variegated
the substance in which the mind reposes. That sort of thing belongs
to an earlier day than ours, although, as you have found, it is still
much relished in the streets. If all the slaves were writers; if readers
bred like rabbits so that the pleasing of them assured great wealth; if
the banausic element in our life should absorb all the rest of it and if,
lost in the external labour process, with the mechanism of it running
in our minds, we turned only a sleepy eye to pleasure; then we might
need the single thought strung with adventures, passions, incidents
and need only that—infinitudes of detail easily guessed but
inexorably recounted; long lists of sentiments with human
countenances doing this and that; physiological acts in millions of
pages and unchanging phrase; volumes of imaginary events without
a thought among them; invented public documents equalling the
real; enormous anecdotes; and all in a strange reiterated gesture,
caught from machines, disposing the mind to nod itself to sleep
repeating the names of what it saw while awake. But the bedside
writer for the men in bed is not desired at the present moment in our
best society.
All these things are now carried in ellipsis to the reader’s head, if
the reader’s head desires them; they are implied in dots at ends of
sentences. We guess long narratives merely from a comma; we do
not write them out. In this space left free by us with deliberate
aposiopesis, a literature of countless simplicities may some day
arise. At present we do not feel the need of it. And in respect to
humour the rule of the present day is this: never do for another what
he can do for himself. A simple process of the fancy as in contrast,
incongruity, exaggeration, impossibility, must be confined in public to
one or two displays. Let us take the simplest of illustrations—a cow
in the dining-room, for example—and proceed with it as simply as we
can. If by a happy stroke of fancy a cow in the dining-room is made
pleasing to the mind, never argue that the pleasure is doubled by the
successive portrayal of two cows in two dining-rooms, assuming that
the stroke of fancy remains the same. Realize rather that it
diminishes, and that with the presentation of nine cows in nine
dining-rooms it has changed to pain. Now if for cows in dining-rooms
be substituted gods in tailor shops, tailors in the houses of gods,
cobblers at king’s courts, Thebans before masterpieces, one class
against another, one age against another, and so on through
incalculable details, however bizarre, all in simple combination, all
easily gathered, without a shift of thought or wider imagery, the fancy
mechanistically placing the objects side by side, picked from the
world as from a catalogue—even then the situation to our present
thinking is not improved.
“Distiktos,” said they, playfully turning the name of the humourist
into the argot of the street, “we find you charming just at the turn of
the tide, but when the flood comes in, ne Dia! you are certainly de
trop. And in your own private interest, Distiktos, unless you really
want to lead a life totally anexetastic and forlorn, how can you go on
in that manner?”
Frank Moore Colby
American Civilization from the
Foreign Point of View
I. ENGLISH
II. IRISH
III. ITALIAN
 I. AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT
A LITTLE less than two years ago—on the 14 July, 1919, to be
exact—it fell to my lot, as an officer attached to one of the many military
missions in Paris, to “assist,” from a reserved seat in a balcony of the
Hotel Astoria, at the défilé, or triumphal entry of the Allied troops into
Paris.
The march à Berlin not having eventuated owing to the upset in
schedule brought about by the entry of dispassionate allies at the
eleventh hour, it was felt that the French must be offered something in
exchange, and this took the happy form of a sort of community march
along the route once desecrated by Prussian hoof-beats—a vast
military corbeille of the allied contingents, with flags, drums, trumpets,
and all the rest of the paraphernalia that had been kept in cold storage
during four years of gas, shell, and barbed wire. Such a défilé, it was
calculated, would be something more than a frugal gratification to the
French army and people. It would offer to the world at large, through
the medium of a now unmuzzled press, a striking object lesson in allied
good feeling and similarity of aims.
My purpose in referring to the défilé is merely to record one
unrehearsed incident in it but I would say in passing that the affair, “for
an affair,” as the French say, was extraordinarily well stage-managed. A
particularly happy thought was the marshalling of the allied contingents
by alphabetical order. This not only obviated any international pique on
what we all wanted to be France’s day, but left the lead of the
procession where everybody, in the rapture of delivery, was well
content it should remain. Handled with a little tact, the alphabet had
once more justified itself as an impartial guide:
B is for Britain, Great.
A is for America, United States of.

* * * * *
 For impressiveness I frankly and freely allot the palm to what it was
the fashion then to term the American effort. Different contingents were
impressive in different ways. The Republican Guard, jack-booted, with
buckskin breeches, gleaming helmets, flowing crinières, and sabres au
clair, lent just the right subtle touch of the épopée of Austerlitz and
Jena to make us feel 1871 had been an evil dream; the Highlanders,
the voice of the hydra squalling and clanging from their immemorial
pipes, stirred all sorts of atavistic impulses and memories.
Nevertheless, had I been present that day in Paris as a newspaper
man instead of as the humblest and most obscure of soldiers, neither
one nor the other would have misled my journalistic instinct. I should
have put the lead of my “story” where alphabetical skill had put the lead
of the procession—in the American infantry.
In front the generalissimo, martial and urbane, on a bright coated
horse that pranced, curvetted, “passaged” from side to side under a
practised hand. At his back the band, its monster uncurved horns of
brass blaring out the Broadway air before which “over there” the walls
of pacifism had toppled into dust in a day. Behind them, platoon by
platoon, the clean shaved, physically perfect fighting youth of the great
republic. All six feet high—there was not one, it was whispered, but had
earned his place in the contingent by a rigorous physical selection:
moving with the alignment of pistons in some deadly machine—they
had been drilled, we were told, intensively for a month back. In spotless
khaki, varnished trench helmets, spick and span, scarcely touched by
the withering breath of war. Whenever the procession was checked,
platoon after platoon moved on to the regulation distance and marked
time. When it resumed, they opened out link by link with the same
almost inhuman precision, and resumed their portentous progress. How
others saw them you shall hear, but to me they were no mere thousand
fighting men; rather the head of a vast battering ram, the simple threat
of which, aimed at the over-taxed heart of the German Empire, had
ended war. A French planton of the Astoria staff, who had edged his
way into the ticketed group was at my back. “Les voilà qui les
attendaient,” he almost whispered. “Look what was waiting for them.”
The next balcony to mine had been reserved for the civil employés
of British missions, and here was gathered a little knot of average
English men and women—stenographers, typists, clerks, cogs of
commercialism pressed into the mechanical work of post-war
settlement. As the Americans moved on after one of the impressive
checks of which I have just spoken, something caught my ears that
made me turn my head quickly, even from a spectacle every lost
moment of which I grudged. It was, of all sounds that come from the
human heart, the lowest and the most ominous—the sound that makes
the unwary walker through tropical long grass look swiftly round his feet
and take a firmer grasp on the stick he has been wise enough to carry.
It is impossible—it is inconceivable—and it’s true. On this great day
of international congratulation, one of the two branches of the Anglo-
Saxon race was hissing the other.

* * * * *
I spoke about the matter later to a friend and former chief, whom I
liked but whose position and character were no guarantee of tact or
good judgment. I said I thought it rather an ominous incident, but he
refused to be “rattled.” With that British imperturbability which
Americans have noted and filed on the card index of their impressions
he dismissed the whole thing as of slight import.
“Very natural, I dare say. Fine show all the same. Perhaps your
friends on the other balcony thought they were slopping over in front.”
“‘Slopping over...?’”
“Well—going a little too far. Efficiency and all that. Bit out of step
with the rest of the procession.”
I have often wondered since whether this homely phrase, uttered
by a simple soldier man, did not come nearer to the root of the
divergence between British and American character than all the
mystifying and laborious estimates which nine out of ten of our great or
near-great writers seem to think is due at a certain period in their
popularity.
To achieve discord, you see, it is not necessary that two
instruments should play different tunes. It is quite sufficient that the
tempo of one should differ from the tempo of the other. All I want to
indicate in the brief space which the scope of this work, leaves at my
disposal are just a few of the conjunctures at which I think the beat of
the national heart, here and across the Atlantic, is likely to find itself out
of accord.

* * * * *
Englishmen do not emigrate to the United States in any large
numbers, and it is many years since their arrival contributed anything
but an insignificant racial element to the “melting pot.” They do not
come partly because their own Colonies offer a superior attraction, and
partly because British labour is now aware that the economic stress is
fiercer in the larger country and the material rewards proportionately no
greater. Those who still come, come as a rule prepared to take
executive positions, or as specialists in their several lines. Their
unwillingness to assume American citizenship is notorious, and I think
significant; but it is only within quite recent years that it has been made
any ground of accusation—and among the class with which their
activities bring them into closest contact it is, or was until a year or two
ago, tacitly and tactfully ignored. During a review of the “foreign
element” in Boston to which I was assigned two years before the war, I
found business men of British birth not only reluctant to yield “copy” but
resentful of the publicity to which the enterprise of my journal was
subjecting them.
There are many reasons why eminent English writers and publicists
are of little value in arriving at an estimate of “how Americans strike an
Englishman.” While not asserting anything so crude as that commercial
motives are felt as a restraining force when the temptation arises to
pass adverse judgment on the things they see and hear, it is evident
that the conditions under which they come—men of achievement in
their own country accredited to men of achievement here—keep them
isolated from much that is restless, unstable, but vitally significant in
American life. None of them, so far as I know, have had the courage or
the enterprise to come to America, unheralded and anonymous, and to
pay with a few months of economic struggle for an estimate that might
have real value.
To this lack of real contact between the masses in America and
Great Britain is due the intrinsic falsity of the language in which the
racial bond is celebrated on the occasions when some political crisis
calls for its reiteration. It is felt easier and safer to utter it in consecrated
clichés—to refer to the specific gravity of blood and water, or the
philological roots of the medium used by Milton and Arthur Brisbane.
The banality, the insincerity, of the public utterances at the time that
America’s entry into the European struggle first loomed as a possible
solution of the agony on the Western Front was almost unbelievable.
Any one who cares to turn up the files of the great dailies between
September, 1916, and March, 1918, may find them for himself.
To a mind not clouded by the will to believe, this constant
invocation of common aims, this perpetual tug at the bond to ensure
that it has not parted overnight, would be strong corroboration of a
suspicion that the two vessels were drifting apart, borne on currents
that flow in different directions. It is not upon the after-dinner banalities
of wealthy and class-conscious “pilgrims” nor the sonorous platitudes of
discredited laggards on the political scene, still less is it upon the
sporting proclivities of titled hoydens and hawbucks to whom American
sweat and dollars have arrived in a revivifying stream, that we shall
have to rely should the cable really part and the two great vessels of
State grope for one another on a dark and uncharted sea. It is upon the
sheer and unassisted fact of how American and Englishman like or
dislike one another.
It is a truism almost too stale to restate that we are standing to-day
on the threshold of great changes. What is not so well realized is that
many of these changes have already taken place. The passing of gold
in shipment after shipment from the Eastern to the Western side of the
Atlantic and the feverish hunt for new and untapped sources of
exploitation are only the outward signs of a profound European
impoverishment in which Britain for the first time in her history has been
called upon to bear her full share. The strikes and lock-outs that have
followed the peace in such rapid succession might possibly be written
off as inevitable sequelæ of a great war. The feeble response to the call
for production as a means of salvation, the general change in the
English temper faced with its heavy task are far more vital and
significant matters. They seem to mark a shift in moral values—a
change in the faith by which nations, each in the sphere that character
and circumstance allot, wax and flourish.
Confronted with inevitable competition by a nation more populous,
more cohesive, and richer than itself, it seems to me that there are
three courses which the older section of the English race may elect to
follow. One is war, before the forces grow too disparate, and on the day
that war is declared one phase of our civilization will end. It will really
not matter much, to the world at large, who wins an Anglo-American
world conflict. The second, which is being preached in and out of
season by our politicians and publicists, who seldom, however, dare to
speak their full thought, is a girding up of the national loins, a renewed
consecration to the gospel of effort, a curtailment, if necessary—though
this is up to now only vaguely hinted—of political liberties bestowed in
easier and less strenuous days. The third course may easily be
guessed. It is a persistence in proclivities, always latent as I believe in
the English temperament, but which have only revealed themselves
openly since the great war, a clearer questioning of values till now held
as unimpeachable, a readier ear to the muttering and murmuring of the
masses in Continental Europe, internationalism—revolution. No
thoughtful man in England to-day denies the danger. Even references
to that saving factor, the “common sense of the British workman,” no
longer allays the spectre of a problem the issues of which have only to
be stated to stand forth in all their hopeless irreconcilability. Years ago,
long before the shadow fell on the world, in a moment of depression or
inspiration, I wrote that cravings were stirring in the human heart on the
very eve of the day when the call would be to sacrifice. That is the
riddle, nakedly stated, to which workers and rulers alike are asked to
find an answer to-day.
In this choice that lies before the British worker a great deal may
depend upon how American experiments and American achievements
strike him. In England now there is no escaping from the big
transatlantic sister. Politicians use her example as a justification;
employers hold up her achievements as a reproach. A British premier
dare not face the House of Commons on an “Irish night” unequipped
with artful analogies culled from the history of the war of secession. The
number of bricks per hour America’s bricklayers will lay or the tons of
coal per week her stolid colliers will hew are the despair of the
contractor face to face with the loafing and pleasure-loving native born.
You will hear no more jokes to-day in high coalition places over her
political machine replacing regularly and without the litter and disorder
of a general election tweedledum Democrat by a tweedledee
Republican. She is recognized—and this, I think, is the final value
placed upon her by the entire ruling and possessing classes in my own
country—as better equipped in her institutions, her character, and her
population for the big economic struggle that is ahead of us.
This is the secret of the unceasing court paid to Washington by all
countries, but pre-eminently by Britain. It is not fear of her power, nor
hunger for her money bags and harvests, nor desire to be “on the
band-wagon,” as light-hearted cartoonists see it, that prompts the
nervous susceptibility and the instantaneous response to anything that
will offend those in high places on the banks of the Potomac. It is the
sense, among all men with a strong interest in maintaining the present
economic order, that the support in their own countries is crumbling
under their hands, and that that fresh support, stronger and surer, is to
be found in a new country with a simpler faith and a cleaner, or at any
rate a shorter, record. To fight proletarianism with democracy is a
method so obvious and safe that one only wonders its discovery had to
wait upon to-day. Its salient characteristic is a newly aroused interest
and enthusiasm in one country for the political forces that seem to
make stability their watchword in the other. The coalition has become
the hero of the New York Times and Tribune—the triumph of the
Republican party was hailed almost as a national victory in the London
Times and Birmingham Post. Intransigeance in foreign policies finds
ready forgiveness in London; in return, a blind eye is turned to schemes
of territorial aggrandisement at Washington.
If a flaw is to be discerned in what at first sight seems a perfectly
adjusted instrument for international comity, it is that this new Anglo-
American understanding seems to be founded on class rather than on
national sympathy. Even offhand some inherent inconsistency would
seem to be sensed from the fact that the appeal of the great republic
comes most home, in the parent country, to the class that is least
attached to democratic forms and the most fearful of change.
References to America arouse no enthusiasm at meetings of the labour
element in England, and it is still felt unwise to expose the Union Jack
to possible humiliation in parades on a large scale in New York or
Chicago. A sympathy that flowers into rhetoric at commercial banquets
or at meetings of the archæologically inclined may have its roots in the
soundest political wisdom. But to infer from such demonstrations of
class solidarity any national community of thought or aim is both
unwarranted and unsafe. This much is evident, that should a class
subversion, always possible in a country the political fluidity of which is
great, leave the destinies of Great Britain in the hands of the class that
is silent or hostile to-day when the name of America is mentioned, an
entire re-statement of Anglo-American unity would become necessary,
in terms palatable to the average Englishman.

* * * * *
This average Englishman is a highly complicated being. Through
the overlay which industrialism has imposed on him, he has preserved
to quite an extraordinary extent the asperities, the generosities, the
occasional eccentricities of the days when he was a free man in a free
land. No melting process has ever subdued the sharp bright hues of his
individuality into the universal, all-pervading drab that is the result of
blending primary colours. No man who has employed him to useful
purpose has ever succeeded in reducing his personality to the
proportions of a number on a brass tag. The pirate and rover who
looked upon Roman villadom and found it not good, the archer who
brought the steel-clad hierarchy of France toppling from their blooded
horses at Crécy and Agincourt, the churl who struck off the heads of
lawyers in Westminster Palace yard survive in him.
If I am stressing this kink in the British character it is because one
of its results has been to make the Englishman of all men the least
impressed by scale, and the one to whom appeals made on the size of
an experiment or the vastness of a vision will evoke the least response,
and especially because I think I perceive a tendency to approach him in
the interests of Anglo-American unity precisely from the angle that will
awake antagonism where co-operation is sought. The attachment of
the Englishman to little things and to hidden things, which no one
except Chesterton has had the insight to perceive, or at all events
which Chesterton was the first to place in its full relation to his
inconsistencies, explains his strangely detached attitude to that British
Empire of which his country is the core. Its discovery as an entity
calling for a special quality in thought and action dates no further back
than that strange interlude in history, when the personality of Roosevelt
and the vision of Kipling held the imagination of the world.
This refusal to be impressed by greatness, whether his own or
others’, has its disadvantages, but at least it has one saving element. It
leaves an Englishman quite capable of perceiving that it is possible for
a thing to be grandiose in scale and mean in quality. It leaves intact his
frank and childlike confidence that the little things of the world confound
the strong; his implicit conviction that David will always floor Goliath,
and that Jack’s is the destined sword to smite off the giant’s head. The
grotesqueness of the Kaiser’s upturned moustaches, the inadequacy of
a mythical “William the Weed” to achieve results that would count, were
his guiding lights to victory, the touchstones by which he tested in
advance the vast machine that finally cracked and broke under its own
weight. It was the “contemptible” little army of shopmen and colliers
which seized his imagination and held his affection throughout, not the
efficient mechanical naval machine that fought one great sea battle,
which was a revelation of the risks inherent in its own monstrousness
and complexity, and made its headquarters in Scapa Flow. I recall the
comments heard at the time of Jutland in the artillery camp where fate
had throwm me. They served to confirm a dawning conviction that the
navy, while it still awes and impresses, lost its hold on the British heart
the day wooden walls were exchanged for iron and steel. It is perhaps
the “silent service” to-day because its appeal awakes so little response.
It has been specialized and magnified out of the average Englishman’s
power to love it.
In America the contrary seems the case. The American heart
appears to go out to bulk, to scale, and to efficiency. The American has
neither the time nor the temperament to test and weigh. His affections,
even his loyalties, seem to be at the mercy of aspects that impose and
impress. I know no other country where the word “big” is used so
constantly as a token of affection. Every community has its “Big Tims,”
“Big Bills,” “Big Jacks,” great hearty fellows who gambol and spout on
public occasions with the abandonment of a school of whales.
Gargantuan “Babe Ruth,” mountainous Jack Dempsey are the idols of
its sport-loving crowds. “Mammoth in character,” the qualification which
on the lips of the late Mr. Morgan Richards stirred laughter throughout
England, is to the American no inconsequential or slipshod phrase. He
does perceive a character and justification in bigness. It was perhaps to
this trait in his mental make-up that the puzzling shift of allegiance to
the beginning of the great war was due. The scale and completeness of
the German effort laid hold of his imagination to an extent that only
those who spent the first few months of agonizing doubt in the West
and the Middle West can appreciate. Something that was obscurely
akin, something that transcended racial affinities and antipathies,
awoke in him at the steady ordered flow of the field-grey legions
Westward, so adequately pictured for him by Richard Harding Davis.
He is quite merciless to defeat.
Nothing conceived on such a scale can indulge complexities. Its
ideals must be ample, rugged, and primitive, adequate to the vast task.
Hence the velocity, the thoroughness, the apparent ruthlessness with
which American enterprises are put through. It is the fashion among a
certain school of thought to call America the country of inhibitions. But
there is little inhibition to be perceived on that side of his temperament,
which the American has chosen to cultivate, leaving all else to those
who find perverse attraction in weed and ruin. His language—and he is
amazingly vocal—is as simple and direct as his thought. The appeals
and admonitions of his leaders reverberate from vast and resonant
lungs. They are calculated rather to carry far than to penetrate deeply.
They are statements and re-statements rather than arguments. If their
verbiage often aims at and sometimes seems to attain the sublime, if
the American leader is forever dedicating, consecrating, inspiring
something, the altitude is like the elevation given a shell in order that it
may travel further. The nimble presentation of antithesis of a Lloyd
George, the dagger-play of sarcasm of an Asquith, are conspicuously
absent from the speeches of American leaders. There is something
arrogant and ominous, like the clenching of a fist before the arm is
raised, in this sonorous presentation of a faith already securely rooted
in the hearts of all its hearers.
This primitiveness and single-mindedness of the American seem to
intensify as his historical origins recede further and further into the past.
It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had the
development of his country remained normal and homogeneous, as, up
to the Civil War, it admittedly did. It is an even less grateful task to look
back on the literature of the Transcendental period and register all that
American thought seems to have lost since in subtlety and essential
catholicity. What is really important is to realize that not only the
language but the essence of Occidental civilization has called for
simplification, for sacrifice, year by year. It is hard to see what other
choice has lain before the American, as wave after wave of immigration
diluted his homogeneity, than to put his concepts into terms easily
understood and quickly grasped, with the philological economy of the
traveller’s pocket manual and the categorical precision of the drill book.
If in the very nature of things, this evangel is oftener pointed with a
threat than made palatable with the honey of reason and sympathy, the
task and not the taskmaster is to blame. On no other country has ever
been imposed similar drudgery on a similar scale. It is idle to talk about
the spiritual contribution of the foreigner when his first duty is to cast
that contribution into the discard. It is futile to appeal to his traditions
where the barrier of language rears itself in a few years between
parents who have never learnt the new tongue and children who are
unable or ashamed to speak the old.
But such a régime cannot endure for many years without a
profound influence, not only on those to whom it is prescribed, but on
those who administer it. The most heaven-born leader of men, put into
a receiving depot to which monthly and fortnightly contingents of
bemused recruits arrive, quickly deteriorates into something like a
glorified and commissioned drill sergeant. The schoolmaster is
notoriously a social failure in circles where intercourse must be held on
the level to which the elevation of his estrade has dishabituated him.
Exact values—visions, to use a word that misuse has made hateful—
disappear under a multiplicity of minor tasks. It is one of the revenges
taken by fate that those who must harass and drive become harassed
and sterile in turn.
No one yet, so far as I know, has sought to place this amazing
simplification in its true relation to the aridity of American life, an aridity
so marked that it creates a positive thirst for softer and milder
civilizations, not only in the foreigner who has tasted of them, but at a
certain moment in their life in almost every one of the native born
whose work lies outside the realm of material production. It is not that in
England, as in every community, entire classes do not exist who seek
material success by the limitation of interests and the retrenchment of
sympathies. But in so doing they sacrifice to a domestic, not a national
God; they follow personal not racial proclivities. There is no conscious
subscription to a national ideal in their abandonment of æsthetic
impulses. Side by side with them live other men whose apparent
contentment with insecure and unstable lives at once redresses their
pride and curtails their influence. They are conscious of the existence
around them of a whole alien world, the material returns from which are
negligible but in which other men somehow manage to achieve a
fullness of experience and maintain self-respect. This other world
reacts not only on employer but on employed. For the worker it abates
the fervour and stress of his task, lends meaning and justification to his
demand for leisure in the face of economic demands that threaten or
deny. No one in England has yet dared to erect into an evangel the
obvious truth that poor men must work. No compulsion sets the mental
attitude a man may choose when faced with his task. The speeder-up
and the efficiency expert is hateful and alien. “A fair day’s wage for a
fair day’s work” may seem a loose and questionable phrase, but its
implications go very deep. It sets a boundary mark on the frontier
between flesh and spirit by which encroachments are registered as
they occur.
In America no such frontier exists. Here the invasion seems to be
complete. The spirit that would disentangle material from immaterial
aims wanders baffled and perplexed through a maze of loftily
conceived phrases and exhortations each one of which holds the
promise of rescue from the drudgery of visionless life, yet each one of
which leads back to an altar where production is enthroned as God.
Manuals and primers, one had almost written psalters, pour out from
the printing presses in which such words as “inspiration,” “dedication,”
“consecration” urge American youth not to the renunciation of material
aims but to their intensive pursuit. This naïve and simple creed is quite
free of self-consciousness or hypocrisy. In its occasional abrupt
transitions from the language of prayer to such conscience-searching
questions as “Could you hold down a $100.00 a week job?” or “Would
you hire yourself?” no lapse from the sublime to the ridiculous, far less
to the squalid, is felt. It has the childlike gravity and reverence of all
religions that are held in the heart.
But its God is a jealous God. No faltering in his service, no divided
allegiance is permitted. His rewards are concrete and his punishments
can be overwhelming. For open rebellion, outlawry; for secret revolt,
contempt and misunderstanding are his inevitable visitations. For this
reason those who escape into heresy not unfrequently lose their
integrity and are gibbeted or pilloried for the edification of the faithful.
The man who will not serve because the service starves and stunts his
soul is all too likely to find himself dependent for company upon the
man who will not serve because his will is too weak or his habits too
dissipated.
That this service is a hard one, its most ardent advocates make no
attempt to conceal. Its very stringency is made the text of appeals for
ever and ever fresh efficiency, intensive training, specialization. “The
pace they must travel is so swift,” one advocate of strenuousness
warns his disciples, “competition has become so fierce that brains and
vision are not enough. One must have the punch to put things through.”
The impression grows that the American business man, new style, is a
sombre gladiator, equipped for his struggle by rigorous physical and
mental discipline. The impression is helped by a host of axioms, plain
and pictured, that feature a sort of new cant of virility. “Red-blooded
men,” “Two-fisted men,” “Men who do things,” “Get-there fellows,” are a
few headliners in this gospel of push and shove.
The service is made still more difficult by its uncertainty, since no
gospel of efficiency can greatly change the proportion of rewards,
though it can make the contest harder and the marking higher. Year in
year out, while competition intensifies and resources are fenced off,
insecurity of employment remains, an evil tradition from days when
opportunity was really boundless and competition could be escaped by
a move of a few score miles Westward. Continuity in one employment
still remains the exception rather than the rule, and when death or
retirement reveals an instance it is still thought worthy of space in local
journals. “Can you use me?” remains the customary gambit for the
seeker after employment. The contempt of a settled prospect, of routine
work, the conception of business as something to work up rather than
to work at is still latent in the imagination of atavistic and ambitious
young America. Of late years this restlessness, even though in so
worthy a cause as “getting on,” has been felt as a hindrance to full
efficiency, and the happy idea has been conceived of applying the
adventurous element of competition at home. Territorial or departmental
spheres are allotted within or without the “concern” to each employé;
the results attained by A, B, and C are then totalled, analyzed, charted,
and posted in conspicuous places where all may see, admire, and take
warning. In the majority of up-to-date houses “suggestions” for the
expansion or improvement of the business are not only welcomed but
expected, and the employé who does not produce them in reasonable
bulk and quality is slated for the “discard.” When inventiveness tires,