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.
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