himself to be speaking correct English), but he did not dare to go unprepared for disappointment. However unlikely he would be to confess it he is really proud of his errant child of energy. The American compliments him simply by being American. The American accent and intonation are intolerable to him; but the fund of life the American carries with him is exhilarating in England. He is like a boy coming back to the aged father and mother and brushing up the wits of the old people. The father believes that he forgets more nightly than the boy has ever known. But the freshness of his points of view, the depth and speed of his intuition, the engaging power of quaint suggestion, the inevitable alertness of mind, the buoyancy and enthusiasm of his average mood, all these characteristics and qualities are so unexpected, so fresh and helpful, that the father cannot but admire, although he may be a good deal shocked. The Doric Englishman has become in America both Ionic and Corinthian; and there is no evidence that Sparta ever failed to admire Athens or Corinth, however much she thought it her duty to disapprove of their gods. Wherever we finally turn to account for the fact, to the atmosphere or amalgamation of varied races, or in general to the total change in environment, the fact itself will go unquestioned. An American, or better, a New Englander -for New England, roughly speaking, is a more distinctive and original English colony than the Virginias-starting as an Englishman has become in two centuries and a half a variant species, a new being. He seems making, at his best, toward an ideal type, midway between the Frenchman and his own English forefathers. And now he comes back into the parent nest something of a cuckoo, who creates amusement and some menacing annoyance. The Englishman likes him a little bit," little bit," and he is devoted to the Englishman. What does it mean?

To an Englishman the world beyond the boundaries of his isle, save America and the Colonies, is inhabited by barbarians, just as Dacia or Italy or Persia was to the Greek. In Athens it is easy to please the Athenians. Plato proved it in an eloquent bit of satirical rhetoric entitled Menexenus, and I have heard it proved in America to Americans ad nauseam, in many a Fourth of July oration. England's Parliament

proves it nightly to the satisfaction of the readers of the Times. But the national pride of the United States, which has grown with the sense of achievement in the difficult process of working out its own salvation, differs widely in its character from the national pride of England, although both thrive on the glorious memories of portions of their past history. All the world, save the American and Colonial world, I have said, the Englishman thinks barbarian. America is not barbarian to him, for it is boyish, immature. An American might not be blamed for preferring the good company of the barbarians to the acceptance of the dubious distinction of the other classification. His sole comfort-I do not for one moment deny that this is enough-is in knowing that if he is a true American he is an Englishman scaled of a good many prejudices and longer-sighted. The natural language of the English national pride is "Leave England and you leave civilization behind you. Many a time have I heard it said. Whatever urbanity of manner England has has been taken on only because it was found necessary, for any sort of success in the carrying out of her own policy, to veil her two chief characteristics, brutality and directness, in an ingratiating air of manners. This is the wholesome result of England's contact with the great world. The Shaftesbury who was the author of the Characteristics, one of the most polished and cultivated of English gentlemen, and the best critic and one of the ablest writers of his time, has said: "All politeness is owing to liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by this amiable collision." manners of England, which are the social conventions of her own political organism, are admirably adapted to the island itself. But outside of England they serve little purpose, so that beyond the limits of his own shores the Englishman is always at Then his self-sufficiency, brutality, and directness come obtrusively to the fore.

sea.

The

But in directness and all the good qualities of honesty and courage and pluck and singleness of purpose and simplicity that flow from it or are akin to it, no other people can vie with him. In becoming cosmopolitan he has got manners, learned a craft not quite natural to him, and lost something of his directness and honesty. But, though the changes of the

last half century have been so great, he is still a Dorian-still he scorns deceit and meanness. He hates guilelessness, but equally detests the wily. Evasion and circumlocution are not his habit. Therefore he is not prepared for the often Jesuitical quality of French subtlety or the as frequent American characteristic of chicane. He does not like the uncanny_canniness of people who are too clever. Facts and plodding are his province, and no one manipulates facts so well. English ethical philosophy and what little metaphysics there is in England are sufficient to prove this. But it takes more facts to convince the English than any other nation, and the Englishman has never risen to the generalization that facts can lie. A Frenchman knows this, and always counts upon it. For French finesse the English have no weapons 80 delicate. And for those American characteristics, by reason of which Proteus should have altars erected to him in the American market-places, the American alertness, adaptability, buoyancy, or, in their exaggerated forms, bumptiousness and smartness, they have an envious appreciation, although they look at times so primly askance, an appreciation that passes into a positive craving for more matter equally amusing. So Americans they cultivate and flatter and entertain royally, if often in a manner patronizing. But they make little distinction between Americans; they are not careful respecters of persons. They run after Mr. Lowell and Buffalo Bill with equal interest, and receive both into Society. Both are flattered and come again. This is so different from the way the Athenians mobbed a philosopher of Megara, who was keenly interested in the great innovator, Socrates, and journeyed once all the way across the Thrasian Plain, and up over the mountains to the olivegroves of Attica, to violet-crowned Athens, just to visit him and learn from him. But that was at a time when Megara had no commercial market, and wished in vain for free-trade. It is the immense ennui of their routine lives that troubles the English, and makes them rejoice at the freshness of Americans. Americans to the English are a new sensation.

But it is this very habit of convention, and this undeviating routine against which at heart the English chafe, and by reason of which they are so willing to welcome

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any manifestation of freedom in others and evidence of absence of conventional restraint, when they are not asked to be pert nonconformists too, that makes England so fascinating and restful a country to the American. An American is like a cat in possessing nine lives and a clever habit of alighting in every fall upon his feet. The Englishman, not because he is too nice and delicate, but because he is not so easily adaptable, being used to one authoritative way of life prescribed by Church, Society, and State, is like glass or flowers, which, when moved, must always be moved right side up with care. American versatility and vivacity are contagious; and every one in the United States is a chameleon. The pitch of American life is at fever heat. In their clubs Americans drink more whiskies and brandies-andsodas, and more endless varieties of deleterious "cock-tail pick-me ups, as they call them, than any other nations. Busied in the struggle to live, it becomes a second nature to the American to live fast, and under the strain of the nervous tension be breaks utterly down in health before any of his European neighbors. His aim is not, as usually in England, to get money enough to live in such a way as to live well. He does not recognize that the only good of money is to buy leisure to be wise. But with eye fast fixed upon the coin itself, the dazed vision magnifies it into a good for its own sake. In America, on the whole, money is at present the chief condition of power. By money man is enabled there to crane himself above the dead level of uniformity. Hence, in general, America has not reached the point that England long ago attained, in which it can afford to cultivate other gods than Mammon. With such an ideal and such a cult arise everywhere sordidness of motive in the worshippers, and mediocrity if not actual vulgarity of aspiration; everywhere, that is, apart from the university centres of culture and the sections dominated by piety and the churches. But the piety of the churches, while sincere, is often sadly lacking in culture, whereas in England its hypocrisy has often æsthetic or patriotic sanction, while it is really more enlightened. Americans thank God that they have " Church without a bishop, and a State without a king.' So that certain temptations natural to England do not there en

a

tice. America has fewer social shackles and fewer superstitions than any country in the world, but what it has are more galling and oppressive than any in England. "We believe,' says its Declaration of Independence," that all men are created free and equal.' This assertion, as profoundly false as it is profoundly true, pervades all her institutions, and is dangerously caviare to the general. For not all Americans have by any means as yet recognized that only men that are equal are equal; that there are degrees of worth, and thus degrees of legitimate superiority, and consequently of social rank, but a rank of which brain ought to be the gauge. The truth in this utterance which they do appreciate is its insistence upon the inalienable right of every man to be himself, and to work out his own salvation, and its rejection of anything like the English notion, embalmed authoritatively in the Prayerbook, that the individual must content himself with smiling labor, however arduous, in the lot to which he is called and in which he is born.

But however strong may be the American's belief in man's inalienable right of liberty, the belief does not appear to have that general vitality we should have expected. The religious and social restrictions that exist in America, though infinitely fewer than those in England in the written statute books of the island and in the unwritten laws of the national goddess Respectability and her prophet, are not like English restrictions which are for the most part paper conventions, easily ignored in practice and thus prolific of hypocrisy, but arbitrarily tyrannical formulas of the strictest sort, most unfavorable to the development of individuality, and rendering a manly independent life all but impossible. This tyranny is not felt so much in the expression of one's political convictions. But it is shamefully exacting in social and religious life. In the rank and file of the churches in New England in tolerance is still grievously rife, so that the average Methodist for instance, or Baptist, could never, even in the covert silence of his own rash musings, logically wish a hateful Unitarian or Universalist in hell, because his profound belief is quite at one with his professed creed that they are already doomed, and his interest in the matter would be utterly superfluous, In England, where, if Englishmen practised

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in all sincerity what the Prayer-book preaches, intolerance should be far more general and savage, as a matter of fact it is far less frequent. Indeed, religious intolerance pure and simple may be said scarcely to exist at all, whatever distrust there is of the Nonconformist being distinctly a political affair. But the Prayerbook offers a most convenient code to fall back upon as a means for the wholesale instruction of children and the lower classes. In England surely it is decidedly in the interests of the upper classes and the public weal to be able authoritatively to enjoin upon servants the ordering of themselves "lowly and reverently" to all their betters; and the necessity of their 'doing their duty in that state of life into which it has pleased God to call them." This means in England that servants are born servants, and must die servants, and need not complain, for they are a different race, helots in the Spartan realm. In a land where no man is born a servant, or, if he is, hopes some day to be President of his country, it is obvious, and to the English traveller it will often be painfully, obnoxiously obvious, that there must frequently be a vast deal of prevalent vulgarity of self-assertion, and annoying friction, and loud-mouthed jarring of dissonant advisers. Such is indeed the case in the America of to-day. But the fact is of the highest significance. In America to-day there are more human beings with a growing sense of their own worth as men, more individuals with sense of self and personality, than have ever before been congregated in history. Almost all her deficiencies and disadvantages seem capable of being interpreted as necessary evils. So that at present America's undoubted lack of distinction is really its great distinction. The ideal aim of civilization is the fullest general development of personality in all the individuals composing the nation. But the process is painful in a high degree. And a nation in the stress and strain of personal development is not a pleasant place for people of delicate organism or too nice nerves. But the critic who, noting the application of this truth to America, stops at the fact without explaining it or determining the prophecy in it, is too lazy to think. It should be pointed out that the unrest, the absence of taste, the reaching after new ideas, the self-assertion, the youthful confidence

and bounce, are all inevitable characteristics sure to be outgrown, unless some cataclysm engulf the entire proud Korah's troop of the American people and nip them, like the fabled Atlantis, in the bud. America to-day marks a further general advance in civilization than has yet been attained. There is a more pervasive personal life there, a greater general power of the imagination, and a higher average mental and moral development than in any country in the world. But if this be true of the average, the highest quality is much rarer than in England. A small remnant is what we should have expected however. With more ideas as a nation than the English, if less than the French, the American is fortunate in having less fickleuess than the latter and more repose. He is more sympathetic and more appreciative than the Englishman. But a people waking to a knowledge of itself is not a tractable monster. Its millions of heads mean each a thinking brain liable to entangle its Briarean arms. Here is horror and anarchy in germ. The Zeit-Geist seems very foolhardy, it must be owned, to try so uncertain and strange a game.

England, therefore, to an American, is a fair land flowing with milk and honey, where he may rest his tired eyes and weary brain. Here, after all the uproar of his home, is dignity and strength and charm. All the relics of feudalism exercise upon the American their spell. All over the land he hears the whispering of immemorial elms. He walks in Druid groves or on the earthworks of Danish camps. It is not the Church alone that is established. Every English institution seems to stand upon a pyramid base that cannot be shaken. All the land is fair, as it rolls, and well-tilled to the horizon. But not only is it like a gentleman's park, but it is really such; the playground of grand feudal lords in the pay of Poseidon, who boast in their addresses to their retainers of England's dominion of the sea and of the glories of her world-encircling commerce, but neglect to mention that, in compensation for these splendid distinctions, England's fruit trees run a danger of being left to wither, and her fields of going unproductive. Fruit may be bad from the Channel Islands, grain from the United States, eggs, chickens, vegetables from the Continent. The individual English farmer seems doomed. If gentlemen

have money to buy products from abroad, their own fields they may polish into parks. Hare and deer, and grouse and pheasant, and wood-pigeon and partridges were all created for the glory of England. Adam, bless him, gave them English names. The American, however, who is a long time learning this, would be a fool to quarrel with this paradise in which he finds himself so comfortably at home, and so well treated when he arrives. For England is the prettiest country in the world. The misty air which hovers over it and on the slightest provocation touches it with softening blue, seems charged with opiates. England, summer England, is a Circe's garden, where the passing traveller never gets even a single revealing whiff from the stagnant pools of slime in the pig-pens so carefully hidden. The wind never blows from that quarter, for the air above the heads of moneyed England is never troubled; nor is there any circulation or current from below, -the cool, conventional, calm atmosphere of upper England seeming eternally satisfying, and nothing heated or mephitic ever rising to insult the too nice nerves of those who dwell above, or send sickening warning of any rottenness beneath. The towers of Westminster grow daily, as one gazes, more and more beautiful. The cabs continue to glide easily and cheaply over noiseless pavements. Your tailor calls you sir, and never asks for money, and the school-children courtesy as they pass. The moonlight lies with beauty rare upon the grand sweep of the Thames at Richmond, and sleeps upon the meadows by the stream. Windsor, serene, majestic, dominates her park with dignity of far-seen towers. The lanes of Devon wind and wind between their high hedges tangled with moss-rose in curves of sweetest and most suggestive charm. Still over Bolton Abbey climbs the ivy, while the river, wandering through the peaceful dale, murmurs memories of Wordsworth. Cathedral spires soar, and nightingales sing, and the gardens of Oxford bloom in sweet seclusion, and the live oak grows at Clovelly quite unto the iridescent sea. And who shall say that England is not fair? Against such let her church bells chime anathema! But occasionally there are hateful murmurs, as of rumbling earthquakes, of dock laborers on strike, and occasionally one is forced to listen to an

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anxious discussion upon Royal Grants; and occasionally one hears the theatre shake with the applause of the people, the English people, sanctioning vociferously the motive of a play teaching, as does the Middleman, the truth so rarely true for England, that the laborer is worthy of his hire. Then England takes another hue; and the critic has new light on Isaiah's fulminations, and the stern Thucydidean account of the Sicilian expedition. But meanwhile, till the air begins to circulate much more than at present, they who can afford the dolce far niente life will continue to bask in the English fields and let inconvenient suggestions alone. Thinking is so troublesome and stupid. But Americans, seeing the stress of the growing problem of England, namely, how, in the acceptance and assimilation of the democratic principle, she shall hasten without total collapse or serious and chronic disorder, the natural process of transformation, so as to accomplish in one year what should take, the physiologists tell us, seven, need not so speedily congratulate themselves upon their greater good-fortune. The American problem, which is even of higher in terest, is no whit less difficult. The responsibility of vindicating democracy will be upon the next half-century of American America thinks its raison d'être is proved. Vain beating of its eagle wings! The second historical era of the world, which began with the discovery of America, is passing into its crisis. And to the responsibility of it in America as well as in England, but most of all in America, there will not be men enough to rise, unless soon they cease clasping their hands below the purse-fold of their gowns and always looking about to spy whence they may get them gold. As it is, this age in America does not so much differ from the Alexandrian, of which Theocritus wrote that the very rust of the money was too precious to be rubbed off for a gift.

men.

England despises France, and dislikes it because she thinks it given over to bawds and feminine baubles. The healthy Englishman loathes baubles, and, if he allows himself to traffic with the former, makes

a bestial business of it, and not a pretty pleasure all redolent of musk. Englishmen judge the French from their knowledge of Paris, and Paris from its cancan. To a Frenchman's pre-eminent capacity for ideas, and his distinction in all departments of intellectual inquiry, England turns the deafest of insular ears. Because France flutters and is versatile, England damns it as unstable, undignified, and fickle. The generalizing tendency of the French, and their lightness of spirit and sympathy for variable moods, become to England indications of superficiality. Thus because she has not an atom of respect for France, French institutions, her democratic tendencies, her republicanism, do not appreciably menace England. This is an important point, that while socially France is such a power, politically she is nil. But in contrast with the political inefficiency of France is the strong influence of America. New England, America, has never ceased to react most powerfully upon the Mother Island. From the beginning, down through Franklin and Emerson to the present moment, while America seems to loom over the top of the sea, silently but resolutely and certainly as Fate, even as a python insinuates itself into the jungle and enfolds its prey, American ideas have permeated English life. I am not sure if the history of New England be not the greatest glory of England. It should surely be the greatest pride of New England that its history is the most characteristic and significant in English history. New England will grow to be content, nay, to rejoice, that, besides to the Lares of its own hearthstone, it is drawn more strongly still to this island beyond the Atlantic sacred as the home of the race; a sacred isle, more sacred than Delos or Delphi or Pisa to the Greek, a holy ground of relics and symbols and signs and superstitions, touched with the melancholy and charm of the evening light through the western windows of its grand cathedrals; the réμevos, the aλTIS, the sacred enclosure, of the inheritors of the tongue of Shakespeare, of Bacon, and of Milton, wherever they breathe under the sun. - Fortnightly Review.