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.
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