第 14 页

Before leaving this point, which to my thinking is the cause of many frictions and misunderstandings between ourselves and the English, I mustn't omit to give instances of divergence, where an Englishman will speak of matters upon which we are silent, and is silent upon subjects of which we will speak.

You may present a letter of introduction to an Englishman, and he wishes to be civil, to help you to have a good time. It is quite possible he may say something like this:

"I think you had better know my sister Sophy. You mayn't like her. But her dinners are rather amusing. Of course the food's ghastly because she's the stingiest woman in London."

On the other hand, many Americans (though less willing than the French) are willing to discuss creed, immortality, faith. There is nothing from which the Englishman more peremptorily recoils, although he hates well nigh as deeply all abstract discussion, or to be clever, or to have you be clever. An American friend of mine had grown tired of an Englishman who had been finding fault with one American thing after another. So he suddenly said:

"Will you tell me why you English when you enter your pews on Sunday always immediately smell your hats? "

The Englishman stiffened. "I refuse to discuss religious subjects with you," he said.

To be ponderous over this anecdote grieves me--but you may not know that orthodox Englishmen usually don't kneel, as we do, after reaching their pews; they stand for a moment, covering their faces with their well-brushed hats: with each nation the observance is the same, it is in the manner of the observing that we differ.

Much is said about our "common language," and its being a reason for our understanding each other. Yes; but it is also almost as much a cause for our misunderstanding each other. It is both a help and a trap. If we Americans spoke something so wholly different from English as French is, comparisons couldn't be made; and somebody has remarked that comparisons are odious.

"Why do you call your luggage baggage?" says the Englishman--or used to say.

"Why do you call your baggage luggage?" says the American--or used to say.

"Why don't you say treacle?" inquires the Englishman.

"Because we call it molasses," answers the American.

"How absurd to speak of a car when you mean a carriage!" exclaims the Englishman.

"We don't mean a carriage, we mean a car," retorts the American.

You, my reader, may have heard (or perhaps even held) foolish conversations like that; and you will readily perceive that if we didn't say "car" when we spoke of the vehicle you get into when you board a train, but called it a voiture, or something else quite "foreign," the Englishman would not feel that we had taken a sort of liberty with his mother-tongue. A deep point lies here: for most English the world is divided into three peoples, English, foreigners, and Americans; and for most of us likewise it is divided into Americans, foreigners, and Eng- lish. Now a "foreigner" can call molasses whatever he pleases; we do not feel that he has taken any liberty with our mother-tongue; his tongue has a different mother; he can't help that; he's not to be criticized for that. But we and the English speak a tongue that has the same mother. This identity in pedigree has led and still leads to countless family discords. I've not a doubt that divergences in vocabulary and in accent were the fount and origin of some swollen noses, some battered eyes, when our Yankees mixed with the Tommies. Each would be certain to think that the other couldn't "talk straight"--and each would be certain to say so. I shall not here spin out a list of different names for the same things now current in English and American usage: molasses and treacle will suffice for an example; you will be able easily to think of others, and there are many such that occur in everyday speech. Almost more tricky are those words which both peoples use alike, but with different meanings. I shall spin no list of these either; one example there is which I cannot name, of two words constantly used in both countries, each word quite proper in one country, while in the other it is more than improper. Thirty years ago I explained this one evening to a young Englishman who was here for a while. Two or three days later, he thanked me fervently for the warning: it had saved him, during a game of tennis, from a frightful shock, when his partner, a charming girl, meaning to tell him to cheer up, had used the word that is so harmless with us and in England so far beyond the pale of polite society.

Quite as much as words, accent also leads to dissension. I have heard many an American speak of the English accent as "affected"; and our accent displeases the English. Now what Englishman, or what American, ever criticizes a Frenchman for not pronouncing our language as we do? His tongue has a different mother!

I know not how in the course of the years all these divergences should have come about, and none of us need care. There they are. As a matter of fact, both England and America are mottled with varying accents literate and illiterate; equally true it is that each nation has its notion of the other's way of speaking--we're known by our shrill nasal twang, they by their broad vowels and hesitation; and quite as true is it that not all Americans and not all English do in their enunciation conform to these types.

One May afternoon in 1919 I stopped at Salisbury to see that beautiful cathedral and its serene and gracious close. "Star-scattered on the grass," and beneath the noble trees, lay New Zealand soldiers, solitary or in little groups, gazing, drowsing, talking at ease. Later, at the inn I was shown to a small table, where sat already a young Englishman in evening dress, at his dinner. As I sat down opposite him, I bowed, and he returned it. Presently we were talking. When I said that I was stopping expressly to see the cathedral, and how like a trance it was to find a scene so utterly English full of New Zealanders lying all about, he looked puzzled. It was at this, or immediately after this, that I explained to him my nationality.

"I shouldn't have known it," he remarked, after an instant's pause.

I pressed him for his reason, which he gave; somewhat reluctantly, I think, but with excellent good-will. Of course it was the same old mother-tongue!

"You mean," I said, "that I haven't happened to say 'I guess,' and that I don't, perhaps, talk through my nose? But we don't all do that. We do all sorts of things."

He stuck to it. "You talk like us."

"Well, I'm sure I don't mean to talk like anybody!" I sighed.

This diverted him, and brought us closer.

"And see here," I continued, "I knew you were English, although you've not dropped a single h."

"Oh, but," he said, "dropping h's--that's--that's not--"

"I know it isn't," I said. "Neither is talking through your nose. And we don't all say 'Amurrican.'"

But he stuck to it. "All the same there is an American voice. The train yesterday was full of it. Officers. Unmistakable." And he shook his head.

After this we got on better than ever; and as he went his way, he gave me some advice about the hotel. I should do well to avoid the reading room. The hotel went in rather too much for being old-fashioned. Ran it into the ground. Tiresome. Good-night.

Presently I shall disclose more plainly to you the moral of my Salisbury anecdote.

Is it their discretion, do you think, that closes the lips of the French when they visit our shores? Not from the French do you hear prompt aspersions as to our differences from them. They observe that proverb about being in Rome: they may not be able to do as Rome does, but they do not inquire why Rome isn't like Paris. If you ask them how they like our hotels or our trains, they may possibly reply that they prefer their own, but they will hardly volunteer this opinion. But the American in England and the Englishman in America go about volunteering opinions. Are the French more discreet? I believe that they are; but I wonder if there is not also something else at the bottom of it. You and I will say things about our cousins to our aunt. Our aunt would not allow outsiders to say those things. Is it this, the-members-of-the-family principle, which makes us less discreet than the French? Is it this, too, which leads us by a seeming paradox to resent criticism more when it comes from England? I know not how it may be with you; but with me, when I pick up the paper and read that the Germans are calling us pig-dogs again, I am merely amused. When I read French or Italian abuse of us, I am sorry, to be sure; but when some English paper jumps on us, I hate it, even when I know that what it says isn't true. So here, if I am right in my members-of-the-family hypothesis, you have the English and ourselves feeling free to be disagreeable to each other because we are relations, and yet feeling especially resentful because it's a relation who is being disagreeable. I merely put the point to you, I lay no dogma down concerning members of the family; but I am perfectly sure that discretion is a quality more common to the French than to ourselves or our relations: I mean something a little more than discretion, I mean esprit de conduits, for which it is hard to find a translation.

Upon my first two points, the right to privacy and the mother-tongue, I have lingered long, feeling these to be not only of prime importance and wide application, but also to be quite beyond my power to make lucid in short compass. I trust that they have been made lucid. I must now get on to further anecdotes, illustrating other and less subtle causes of misunderstanding; and I feel somewhat like the author of Don Juan when he exclaims that he almost wishes he had ne'er begun that very remarkable poem. I renounce all pretense to the French virtue of discretion.

Evening dress has been the source of many irritations. Englishmen did not appear to think that they need wear it at American dinner parties. There was a good deal of this at one time. During that period an Englishman, who had brought letters to a gentleman in Boston and in consequence had been asked to dinner, entered the house of his host in a tweed suit. His host, in evening dress of course, met him in the hall.

"Oh, I see," said the Bostonian, "that you haven't your dress suit with you. The man will take you upstairs and one of mine will fit you well enough. We'll wait."

In England, a cricketer from Philadelphia, after the match at Lord's, had been invited to dine at a great house with the rest of his eleven. They were to go there on a coach. The American discovered after arrival that he alone of the eleven had not brought a dress suit with him. He asked his host what he was to do.

"I advise you to go home," said the host.

The moral here is not that all hosts in England would have treated a guest so, or that all American hosts would have met the situation so well as that Boston gentleman: but too many English used to be socially brutal--quite as much so to each other as to us, or any one. One should bear that in mind. I know of nothing more English in its way than what Eton answered to Beaumont (I think) when Beaumont sent a challenge to play cricket: "Harrow we know, and Rugby we have heard of. But who are you?"

That sort of thing belongs rather to the Palmerston days than to these; belongs to days that were nearer in spirit to the Waterloo of 1815, which a haughty England won, than to the Waterloo of 1914-18, which a humbler England so nearly lost.

Turn we next the other way for a look at ourselves. An American lady who had brought a letter of introduction to an Englishman in London was in consequence asked to lunch. He naturally and hospitably gathered to meet her various distinguished guests. Afterwards she wrote him that she wished him to invite her to lunch again, as she had matters of importance to tell him. Why, then, didn't she ask him to lunch with her? Can you see? I think I do.

An American lady was at a house party in Scotland at which she met a gentleman of old and famous Scotch blood. He was wearing the kilt of his clan. While she talked with him she stared, and finally burst out laughing. "I declare," she said, "that's positively the most ridiculous thing I ever saw a man dressed in."

At the Savoy hotel in August, 1914, when England declared war upon Germany, many American women made scenes of confusion and vociferation. About England and the blast of Fate which had struck her they had nothing to say, but crowded and wailed of their own discomforts, meals, rooms, every paltry personal inconvenience to which they were subjected, or feared that they were going to be subjected. Under the unprecedented stress this was, perhaps, not unnatural; but it would have seemed less displeasing had they also occasionally showed concern for England's plight and peril.

An American, this time a man (our crudities are not limited to the sex) stood up in a theatre, disputing the sixpence which you always have to pay for your program in the London theatres. He disputed so long that many people had to stand waiting to be shown their seats.

During deals at a game of bridge on a Cunard steamer, the talk had turned upon a certain historic house in an English county. The talk was friendly, everything had been friendly each day.

"Well," said a very rich American to his English partner in the game, "those big estates will all be ours pretty soon. We're going to buy them up and turn your island into our summer resort." No doubt this millionaire intended to be playfully humorous.

At a table where several British and one American--an officer--sat during another ocean voyage between Liverpool and Halifax in June, 1919, the officer expressed satisfaction to be getting home again. He had gone over, he said, to "clean up the mess the British had made."

To a company of Americans who had never heard it before, was told the well-known exploit of an American girl in Europe. In an ancient church she was shown the tomb of a soldier who had been killed in battle three centuries ago. In his honor and memory, because he lost his life bravely in a great cause, his family had kept a little glimmering lamp alight ever since. It hung there, beside the tomb.

"And that's never gone out in all this time?" asked the American girl.

"Never," she was told.

"Well, it's out now, anyway," and she blew it out.

All the Americans who heard this were shocked all but one, who said: