All general curiosity is, to my mind, righteousness, and I so count it
to the American. Not that I think that American curiosity is always the
highest form of curiosity, or that it is not limited. With its apparent
omnivorousness it is often superficial and too easily satisfied--particularly
by mere words. Very seldom is it profound. It is apt to browse agreeably
on externals. The American, like Anglo-Saxons generally, rarely shows a
passionate and yet honest curiosity about himself or his country, which
is curiosity at its finest. He will divide things into pleasant and
unpleasant, and his curiosity is trained to stop at the frontier of the
latter--an Anglo-Saxon device for being comfortable in your mind! He
likes to know what others think of him and his country, but he is not
very keen on knowing what he really thinks on these subjects himself.
The highest form of curiosity is apt to be painful sometimes. (And yet
who that has practised it would give it up?) It also demands
intellectual honesty--a quality which has been denied by Heaven to all
Anglo-Saxon races, but which nevertheless a proper education ought in
the end to achieve. Were I asked whether I saw in America any
improvement upon Britain in the supreme matter of intellectual honesty,
I should reply, No. I seemed to see in America precisely the same
tendency as in Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, that
things are not what they are, the same timid but determined dislike of
the whole truth, the same capacity to be shocked by notorious and
universal phenomena, the same delusion that a refusal to look at these
phenomena is equivalent to the destruction of these phenomena, the same
flaccid sentimentality which vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art.
And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in the
streets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of
Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is
widely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talking
is not mistaken for cynicism.