Europe Revised — 37 - Ch. XVII: Britain in Twenty Minutes, pt. 3

It befalls, therefore, as I was told on most excellent authority, that when the editor of a live London daily finds the local grist to be dull and uninteresting reading he straightway cables to his American correspondent or his Paris correspondent--these two being his main standbys for sensations--asking, if his choice falls on the man in America, for a snappy dispatch, say, about an American train smash-up, or a Nature freak, or a scandal in high society with a rich man mixed up in it.

He wires for it, and in reply he gets it.

I have been in my time a country correspondent for city papers, and I know that what Mr. Editor wants Mr. Editor gets.

As a result America, to the provincial Englishman's understanding, is a land where a hunter is always being nibbled to death by sheep; or a prospective mother is being so badly frightened by a chameleon that her child is born with a complexion changeable at will and an ungovernable appetite for flies; or a billionaire is giving a monkey dinner or poisoning his wife, or something.

Also, he gets the idea that a through train in this country is so called because it invariably runs through the train ahead of it; and that when a man in Connecticut is expecting a friend on the fast express from Boston, and wants something to remember him by, he goes down to the station at train time with a bucket.

Under the headlining system of the English newspapers the derailment of a work-train in Arizona, wherein several Mexican tracklayers get mussed up, becomes Another Frightful American Railway Disaster!

But a head-on collision, attended by fatalities, in the suburbs of Liverpool or Manchester is a Distressing Suburban Incident.

Yet the official Blue Book, issued by the British Board of Trade, showed that in the three months ending March 31, 1913, 284 persons were killed and 2,457 were injured on railway lines in the United Kingdom.

Just as an English gentleman is the most modest person imaginable, and the most backward about offering lip-service in praise of his own achievements or his country's achievements, so, in the same superlative degree, some of his newspapers are the most blatant of boasters.

About the time we were leaving England the job of remodeling and beautifying the front elevation of Buckingham Palace reached its conclusion, and a dinner was given to the workingmen who for some months had been engaged on the contract.

It had been expected that the occasion would be graced by the presence of Their Majesties; but the king, as I recall, was pasting stamps in the new album the Czar of Russia sent him on his birthday, and the queen was looking through the files of Godey's Lady's Book for the year 1874, picking out suitable costumes for the ladies of her court to wear.

At any rate they could not attend.

Otherwise, though, the dinner must have been a success.

Reading the account of it as published next morning in a London paper, I learned that some of the guests, "with rare British pluck," wore their caps and corduroys; that others, "with true British independence," smoked their pipes after dinner; that there was "real British beef" and "genuine British plum pudding" on the menu; and that repeatedly those present uttered "hearty British cheers."

From top to bottom the column was studded thick with British thises and British thats.

Yet the editorial writers of that very paper are given to frequent and sneering attacks on the alleged yellowness and the boasting proclivities of the jingo Yankee sheets; also, they are prone to spasmodic attacks on the laxity of our marriage laws.

Perhaps what they say of us is true;

but for unadulterated nastiness I never saw anything in print to equal the front page of a so-called sporting weekly that circulates freely in London, and I know of nothing to compare with the brazen exhibition of a certain form of vice that is to be witnessed nightly in the balconies of two of London's largest music halls.

It was upon the program of another London theater that I came across the advertisement of a lady styling herself "London's Woman Detective" and stating, in so many words, that her specialties were "Divorce Shadowings" and "Secret Inquiries."

Maybe it is a fact that in certain of our states marriage is not so much a contract as a ninety-day option, but the lady detective who does divorce shadowing and advertises her qualifications publicly has not opened up her shop among us.

In the campaign to give the stay-at-home Englishman a strange conception of his American kinsman the press is ably assisted by the stage.

In London I went to see a comedy written by a deservedly successful dramatist, and staged, I think, under his personal direction.

The English characters in the play were whimsical and, as nearly as I might judge, true to the classes they purported to represent.

There was an American character in this piece too--a multimillionaire, of course, and a collector of pictures--presumably a dramatically fair and realistic drawing of a wealthy, successful, art-loving American.

I have forgotten now whether he was supposed to be one of our meaty Chicago millionaires, or one of our oily Cleveland millionaires, or one of our steely Pittsburgh millionaires, or just a plain millionaire from the country at large; and I doubt whether the man who wrote the lines had any conception when he did write them of the fashion in which they were afterward read.

Be that as it may, the actor who essayed to play the American used an inflection, or an accent, or a dialect, or a jargon--or whatever you might choose to call it--which was partly of the oldtime drawly Wild Western school of expression and partly of the oldtime nasal Down East school.

I had thought--and had hoped--that both these actor-created lingoes were happily obsolete; but in their full flower of perfection I now heard them here in London.

Also, the actor who played the part interpreted the physical angles of the character in a manner to suggest a pleasing combination of Uncle Joshua Whitcomb, Mike the Bite, Jefferson Brick and Coal-Oil Johnny, with a suggestion of Jesse James interspersed here and there.

True, he spat not on the carpet loudly, and he refrained from saying I vum!

and Great Snakes!

--quaint conceits that, I am told, every English actor who respected his art formally employed when wishful to type a stage American for an English audience; but he bragged loudly and emphatically of his money and of how he got it and of what he would do with it.

I do not perceive why it is the English, who themselves so dearly love the dollar after it is translated into terms of pounds, shillings and pence, should insist on regarding us as a nation of dollar-grabbers, when they only see us in the act of freely dispensing the aforesaid dollar.

They do so regard us, though; and, with true British setness, I suppose they always will.

Even so I think that, though they may dislike us as a nation, they like us as individuals; and it is certainly true that they seem to value us more highly than they value Colonials, as they call them--particularly Canadian Colonials.

It would appear that your true Briton can never excuse another British subject for the shockingly poor taste he displayed in being born away from home.

And, though in time he may forgive us for refusing to be licked by him, he can never forgive the Colonials for saving him from being licked in South Africa.

When I started in to write this chapter, I meant to conclude it with an apology for my audacity in undertaking--in any wise--to sum up the local characteristics of a country where I had tarried for so short a time, but I have changed my mind about that.

I have merely borrowed a page from the book of rules of the British essayists and novelists who come over here to write us up.

Why, bless your soul, I gave nearly eight weeks of time to the task of seeing Europe thoroughly, and, of those eight weeks, I spent upward of three weeks in and about London--indeed, a most unreasonably long time when measured by the standards of the Englishman of letters who does a book about us.

He has his itinerary all mapped out in advance.

He will squander a whole week on us.

We are scarcely worth it, but, such as we are, we shall have a week of his company!

Landing on Monday morning, he will spend Monday in New York, Tuesday in San Francisco, and Wednesday in New Orleans.

Thursday he will divide between Boston and Chicago, devoting the forenoon to one and the afternoon to the other.

Friday morning he will range through the Rocky Mountains, and after luncheon, if he is not too fatigued, he will take a carriage and pop in on Yosemite Valley for an hour or so.

But Saturday--all of it--will be given over to the Far Southland.

He is going 'way down South--to sunny South Dakota, in fact, to see the genuine native American darkies, the real Yankee blackamoors.

Most interesting beings, the blackamoors!

They live exclusively on poultry--fowls, you know--and all their women folk are named Honey Gal.

He will observe them in their hours of leisure, when, attired in their national costume, consisting of white duck breeches, banjos, and striped shirts with high collars, they gather beneath the rays of the silvery Southern moon to sing their tribal melodies on the melon-lined shores of the old Oswego; and by day he will study them at their customary employment as they climb from limb to limb of the cottonwood trees, picking cotton.

On Sunday he will arrange and revise his notes, and on Monday morning he will sail for home.

Such is the program of Solomon Grundy, Esquire, the distinguished writing Englishman; but on his arrival he finds the country to be somewhat larger than he expected--larger actually than the Midlands.

So he compromises by spending five days at a private hotel in New York, run by a very worthy and deserving Englishwoman of the middle classes, where one may get Yorkshire puddings every day; and two days more at a wealthy tufthunter's million-dollar cottage at Newport, studying the habits and idiosyncrasies of the common people.

And then he rushes back to England and hurriedly embalms his impressions of us in a large volume, stating it to be his deliberate opinion that, though we mean well enough, we won't do--really.

He necessarily has to hurry, because, you see, he has a contract to write a novel or a play--or both a novel and a play--with Lord Northcliffe as the central figure.

In these days practically all English novels and most English comedies play up Lord Northcliffe as the central figure.

Almost invariably the young English writer chooses him for the axis about which his plot shall revolve.

English journalists who have been discharged from one of Northcliffe's publications make him their villian, and English journalists who hope to secure jobs on one of his publications make him their hero.

The literature of a land is in perilous case when it depends on the personality of one man.

One shudders to think what the future of English fiction would be should anything happen to his Lordship!

Business of shuddering!

Chapter XVIII