As Nearly As I Might Judge,
Anything True You Printed About An English Politician Would Be
Libelous, And Anything Libelous You Printed About Him Would Be True.
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 traintime 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 Iincident. 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.
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