towards America, which is none the less galling because it manifests
itself in the most trifling matters. A friend of my own returned a few
years ago from a short tour in the United States, declaring that he
heartily disliked the country, and would never go back again. Inquiry as
to the grounds of his dissatisfaction elicited no more definite or
damning charge than that "they" (a collective pronoun presumed to cover
the whole American people) hung up his trousers instead of folding
them--or _vice versâ_, for I am heathen enough not to remember which is
the orthodox process. Doubtless he had other, and possibly weightier,
causes of complaint; but this was the head and front of America's
offending. Another Englishman of education and position, being asked why
he had never crossed the Atlantic, gravely replied that he could not
endure to travel in a country where you had to black your own boots!
Such instances of ignorance and pettiness may seem absurdly trivial, but
they are quite sufficient to act as grits in the machinery of social
intercourse. Americans are very fond of citing as an example of English
manners the legend of a great lady who, at an American breakfast, saw
her husband declining a dish which was offered to him, and called across
the table, "Take some, my dear--it isn't half as nasty as it looks."
Three different people have vouched to me for the truth of this
anecdote, each naming the heroine, and each giving her a different name.
True or false, it is held in America to be typical; and it would
scarcely be so popular as it is unless people had suffered a good deal
from the tactlessness which it exemplifies. The same vice, in a more
insidious form, appears in a remark made to me the other day by an
Englishman of very high intelligence, who had just returned from a long
tour in America, and was, in the main, far from unsympathetic. "What I
felt," he said, "was the suburbanism of everything. It was all Clapham
or Camberwell on a gigantic scale." Some justice of observation may
possibly have lain behind this remark, though I certainly failed to