A Straight Deal or the Ancient Grudge

by Owen Wister

  “Oh, but,” he said, “dropping h’s—that’s—that’s not—”

  “I know it isn’t,” I said. “Neither is talking through your nose. And we don’t all say ‘Amurrican.’”

  But he stuck to it. “All the same there is an American voice. The train yesterday was full of it. Officers. Unmistakable.” And he shook his head.

  After this we got on better than ever; and as he went his way, he gave me some advice about the hotel. I should do well to avoid the reading room.

  The hotel went in rather too much for being old-fashioned. Ran it into the ground. Tiresome. Good-night.

  Presently I shall disclose more plainly to you the moral of my Salisbury anecdote.

  Is it their discretion, do you think, that closes the lips of the French when they visit our shores? Not from the French do you hear prompt aspersions as to our differences from them. They observe that proverb about being in Rome: they may not be able to do as Rome does, but they do not inquire why Rome isn’t like Paris. If you ask them how they like our hotels or our trains, they may possibly reply that they prefer their own, but they will hardly volunteer this opinion. But the American in England and the Englishman in America go about volunteering opinions. Are the French more discreet? I believe that they are; but I wonder if there is not also something else at the bottom of it. You and I will say things about our cousins to our aunt. Our aunt would not allow outsiders to say those things. Is it this, the-members-of-the-family principle, which makes us less discreet than the French? Is it this, too, which leads us by a seeming paradox to resent criticism more when it comes from England?

  I know not how it may be with you; but with me, when I pick up the paper and read that the Germans are calling us pig-dogs again, I am merely amused. When I read French or Italian abuse of us, I am sorry, to be sure; but when some English paper jumps on us, I hate it, even when I know that what it says isn’t true. So here, if I am right in my members-of-the-family hypothesis, you have the English and ourselves feeling free to be disagreeable to each other because we are relations, and yet feeling especially resentful because it’s a relation who is being disagreeable. I merely put the point to you, I lay no dogma down concerning members of the family; but I am perfectly sure that discretion is a quality more common to the French than to ourselves or our relations: I mean something a little more than discretion, I mean esprit de conduits, for which it is hard to find a translation.

  Upon my first two points, the right to privacy and the mother-tongue, I have lingered long, feeling these to be not only of prime importance and wide application, but also to be quite beyond my power to make lucid in short compass. I trust that they have been made lucid. I must now get on to further anecdotes, illustrating other and less subtle causes of misunderstanding; and I feel somewhat like the author of Don Juan when he exclaims that he almost wishes he had ne’er begun that very remarkable poem. I renounce all pretense to the French virtue of discretion.

  Evening dress has been the source of many irritations. Englishmen did not appear to think that they need wear it at American dinner parties. There was a good deal of this at one time. During that period an Englishman, who had brought letters to a gentleman in Boston and in consequence had been asked to dinner, entered the house of his host in a tweed suit. His host, in evening dress of course, met him in the hall.

  “Oh, I see,” said the Bostonian, “that you haven’t your dress suit with you. The man will take you upstairs and one of mine will fit you well enough. We’ll wait.”

  In England, a cricketer from Philadelphia, after the match at Lord’s, had been invited to dine at a great house with the rest of his eleven. They were to go there on a coach. The American discovered after arrival that he alone of the eleven had not brought a dress suit with him. He asked his host what he was to do.

  “I advise you to go home,” said the host.

  The moral here is not that all hosts in England would have treated a guest so, or that all American hosts would have met the situation so well as that Boston gentleman: but too many English used to be socially brutal—quite as much so to each other as to us, or any one. One should bear that in mind. I know of nothing more English in its way than what Eton answered to Beaumont (I think) when Beaumont sent a challenge to play cricket: “Harrow we know, and Rugby we have heard of. But who are you?”

  That sort of thing belongs rather to the Palmerston days than to these; belongs to days that were nearer in spirit to the Waterloo of 1815, which a haughty England won, than to the Waterloo of 1914-18, which a humbler England so nearly lost.

  Turn we next the other way for a look at ourselves. An American lady who had brought a letter of introduction to an Englishman in London was in consequence asked to lunch. He naturally and hospitably gathered to meet her various distinguished guests. Afterwards she wrote him that she wished him to invite her to lunch again, as she had matters of importance to tell him. Why, then, didn’t she ask him to lunch with her? Can you see? I think I do.

  An American lady was at a house party in Scotland at which she met a gentleman of old and famous Scotch blood. He was wearing the kilt of his clan. While she talked with him she stared, and finally burst out laughing. “I declare,” she said, “that’s positively the most ridiculous thing I ever saw a man dressed in.”

  At the Savoy hotel in August, 1914, when England declared war upon Germany, many American women made scenes of confusion and vociferation.

  About England and the blast of Fate which had struck her they had nothing to say, but crowded and wailed of their own discomforts, meals, rooms, every paltry personal inconvenience to which they were subjected, or feared that they were going to be subjected. Under the unprecedented stress this was, perhaps, not unnatural; but it would have seemed less displeasing had they also occasionally showed concern for England’s plight and peril.

  An American, this time a man (our crudities are not limited to the sex) stood up in a theatre, disputing the sixpence which you always have to pay for your program in the London theatres. He disputed so long that many people had to stand waiting to be shown their seats.

  During deals at a game of bridge on a Cunard steamer, the talk had turned upon a certain historic house in an English county. The talk was friendly, everything had been friendly each day.

  “Well,” said a very rich American to his English partner in the game, “those big estates will all be ours pretty soon. We’re going to buy them up and turn your island into our summer resort.” No doubt this millionaire intended to be playfully humorous.

  At a table where several British and one American—an officer—sat during another ocean voyage between Liverpool and Halifax in June, 1919, the officer expressed satisfaction to be getting home again. He had gone over, he said, to “clean up the mess the British had made.”

  To a company of Americans who had never heard it before, was told the well-known exploit of an American girl in Europe. In an ancient church she was shown the tomb of a soldier who had been killed in battle three centuries ago. In his honor and memory, because he lost his life bravely in a great cause, his family had kept a little glimmering lamp alight ever since. It hung there, beside the tomb.

  “And that’s never gone out in all this time?” asked the American girl.

  “Never,” she was told.

  “Well, it’s out now, anyway,” and she blew it out.

  All the Americans who heard this were shocked all but one, who said: “Well, I think she was right.”

  There you are! There you have us at our very worst! And with this plump specimen of the American in Europe at his very worst, I turn back to the English: only, pray do not fail to give those other Americans who were shocked by the outrage of the lamp their due. How wide of the mark would you be if you judged us all by the one who approved of that horrible vandal girl’s act! It cannot be too often repeated that we must never condemn a whole people for what some of the people do.

  In the two-and-a-half anecdotes which follow, you must watch out f
or something which lies beneath their very obvious surface.

  An American sat at lunch with a great English lady in her country-house.

  Although she had seen him but once before, she began a conversation like this:

  Did the American know the van Squibbers?

  He did not.

  Well, the van Squibbers, his hostess explained, were Americans who lived in London and went everywhere. One certainly did see them everywhere.

  They were almost too extraordinary.

  Now the American knew quite all about these van Squibbers. He knew also that in New York, and Boston, and Philadelphia, and in many other places where existed a society with still some ragged remnants of decency and decorum left, one would not meet this highly star-spangled family “everywhere.”

  The hostess kept it up. Did the American know the Butteredbuns? No? Well, one met the Butteredbuns everywhere too. They were rather more extraordinary than the van Squibbers. And then there were the Cakewalks, and the Smith-Trapezes’ Mrs. Smith-Trapeze wasn’t as extraordinary as her daughter—the one that put the live frog in Lord Meldon’s soup—and of course neither of them were “talked about” in the same way that the eldest Cakewalk girl was talked about. Everybody went to them, of course, because one really never knew what one might miss if one didn’t go.

  At length the American said:

  “You must correct me if I am wrong in an impression I have received.

  Vulgar Americans seem to me to get on very well in London.”

  The hostess paused for a moment, and then she said: “That is perfectly true.”

  This acknowledgment was complete, and perfectly friendly, and after that all went better than it had gone before.

  The half anecdote is a part of this one, and happened a few weeks later at table—dinner this time.

  Sitting next to the same American was an English lady whose conversation led him to repeat to her what he had said to his hostess at lunch: “Vulgar Americans seem to get on very well in London society.”

  “They do,” said the lady, “and I will tell you why. We English—I mean that set of English—are blase. We see each other too much, we are all alike in our ways, and we are awfully tired of it. Therefore it refreshes us and amuses us to see something new and different.”

  “Then,” said the American, “you accept these hideous people’s invitations, and go to their houses, and eat their food, and drink their champagne, and it’s just like going to see the monkeys at the Zoo?”

  “It is,” returned the lady.

  “But,” the American asked, “isn’t that awfully low down of you?” (He smiled as he said it.)

  Immediately the English lady assented; and grew more cordial. When next day the party came to break up, she contrived in the manner of her farewell to make the American understand that because of their conversation she bore him not ill will but good will.

  Once more, the scene of my anecdote is at table, a long table in a club, where men came to lunch. All were Englishmen, except a single stranger.

  He was an American, who through the kindness of one beloved member of that club, no longer living now, had received a card to the club. The American, upon sitting down alone in this company, felt what I suppose that many of us feel in like circumstances: he wished there were somebody there who knew him and could nod to him. Nevertheless, he was spoken to, asked questions about various of his fellow countrymen, and made at home.

  Presently, however, an elderly member who had been silent and whom I will designate as being of the Dr. Samuel Johnson type, said: “You seem to be having trouble in your packing houses over in America? “

  We were.

  “Very disgraceful, those exposures.”

  They were. It was May, 1906.

  “Your Government seems to be doing something about it. It’s certainly scandalous. Such abuses should never have been possible in the first place. It oughtn’t to require your Government to stop it. It shouldn’t have started.”

  “I fancy the facts aren’t quite so bad as that sensational novel about Chicago makes them out,” said the American. “At least I have been told so.”

  “It all sounds characteristic to me,” said the Sam Johnson. “It’s quite the sort of thing one expects to hear from the States.”

  “It is characteristic,” said the American. “In spite of all the years that the sea has separated us, we’re still inveterately like you, a bullying, dishonest lot—though we’ve had nothing quite so bad yet as your opium trade with China.”

  The Sam Johnson said no more.

  At a ranch in Wyoming were a number of Americans and one Englishman, a man of note, bearing a celebrated name. He was telling the company what one could do in the way of amusement in the evening in London.

  “And if there’s nothing at the theatres and everything else fails, you can always go to one of the restaurants and hear the Americans eat.”

  There you have them, my anecdotes. They are chosen from many. I hope and believe that, between them all, they cover the ground; that, taken together as I want you to take them after you have taken them singly, they make my several points clear. As I see it, they reveal the chief whys and wherefores of friction between English and Americans. It is also my hope that I have been equally disagreeable to everybody. If I am to be banished from both countries, I shall try not to pass my exile in Switzerland, which is indeed a lovely place, but just now too full of celebrated Germans.

  Beyond my two early points, the right to privacy and the mother-tongue, what are the generalizations to be drawn from my data? I should like to dodge spelling them out, I should immensely prefer to leave it here. Some readers know it already, knew it before I began; while for others, what has been said will be enough. These, if they have the will to friendship instead of the will to hate, will get rid of their anti-English complex, supposing that they had one, and understand better in future what has not been clear to them before. But I seem to feel that some readers there may be who will wish me to be more explicit.

  First, then. England has a thousand years of greatness to her credit. Who would not be proud of that? Arrogance is the seamy side of pride. That is what has rubbed us Americans the wrong way. We are recent. Our thousand years of greatness are to come. Such is our passionate belief. Crudity is the seamy side of youth. Our crudity rubs the English the wrong way.

  Compare the American who said we were going to buy England for a summer resort with the Englishman who said that when all other entertainment in London failed, you could always listen to the Americans eat. Crudity, “freshness” on our side, arrogance, toploftiness on theirs: such is one generalization I would have you disengage from my anecdotes.

  Second. The English are blunter than we. They talk to us as they would talk to themselves. The way we take it reveals that we are too often thin-skinned. Recent people are apt to be thin-skinned and self-conscious and self-assertive, while those with a thousand years of tradition would have thicker hides and would never feel it necessary to assert themselves. Give an Englishman as good as he gives you, and you are certain to win his respect, and probably his regard. In this connection see my anecdote about the Tommies and Yankees who physically fought it out, and compare it with the Salisbury, the van Squibber, and the opium trade anecdotes. “Treat ‘em rough,” when they treat you rough: they like it. Only, be sure you do it in the right way.

  Third. We differ because we are alike. That American who stood in the theatre complaining about the sixpence he didn’t have to pay at home is exactly like Englishmen I have seen complaining about the unexpected here. We share not only the same mother-tongue, we share every other fundamental thing upon which our welfare rests and our lives are carried on. We like the same things, we hate the same things. We have the same notions about justice, law, conduct; about what a man should be, about what a woman should be. It is like the mother-tongue we share, yet speak with a difference. Take the mother-tongue for a parable and symbol of all the rest. Just as the word “gi
rl” is identical to our sight but not to our hearing, and means oh! quite the same thing throughout us all in all its meanings, so that identity of nature which we share comes often to the surface in different guise. Our loquacity estranges the Englishman, his silence estranges us. Behind that silence beats the English heart, warm, constant, and true; none other like it on earth, except our own at its best, beating behind our loquacity.

  Thus far my anecdotes carry me. May they help some reader to a better understanding of what he has misunderstood heretofore!

  No anecdotes that I can find (though I am sure that they are to be found) will illustrate one difference between the two peoples, very noticeable to-day. It is increasing. An Englishman not only sticks closer than a brother to his own rights, he respects the rights of his neighbor just as strictly. We Americans are losing our grip on this. It is the bottom of the whole thing. It is the moral keystone of democracy. Howsoever we may talk about our own rights to-day, we pay less and less respect to those of our neighbors. The result is that to-day there is more liberty in England than here. Liberty consists and depends upon respecting your neighbor’s rights every bit as fairly and squarely as your own.

  On the other hand, I wonder if the English are as good losers as we are?

  Hardly anything that they could do would rub us more the wrong way than to deny to us that fair play in sport which they accord each other. I shall not more than mention the match between our Benicia Boy and their Tom Sayers. Of this the English version is as defective as our school-book account of the Revolution. I shall also pass over various other international events that are somewhat well known, and I will illustrate the point with an anecdote known to but a few.

  Crossing the ocean were some young English and Americans, who got up an international tug-of-war. A friend of mine was anchor of our team. We happened to win. They didn’t take it very well. One of them said to the anchor:

  “Do you know why you pulled us over the line? “

  “No.”

  “Because you had all the blackguards on your side of the line.”