THE AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT.
NO character is quite so interesting to thoughtful Englishmen as that of the Americans ; it is so like our own yet so unlike, so complex and yet so simple, so intelligible and yet so full of unexpected turns. They are as difficult to depict as Englishmen seem to foreigners, and if we try to do it, it is with a full consciousness that after our best efforts many facets of the stone will still remain undescribed. But for two peculiarities which are universal• and deep enough profoundly to modify character, we should say that the Americans, as a nation, more closely resembled the English in Ireland than any other people in the world.
The long- contest with enemies, with Nature, with circum- stances, has bred in them the inner hardness and incapacity of yielding to opposition which that peculiar caste derives from its long habit of keeping down superior numbers and exacting from them tribute. There is dourness somewhere in every American, a "hard pan," as they say themselves, to which if you get down there is no further progress to be made. You must crush it to powder or retreat, and nine times out of ten retreat is found to be the easier course. The American character rests, in fact, on a granite substratum, which has been the origin of their success, and will give them the mastery of the Western Hemisphere. It is not merely the English doggedness, though it doubtless had its root in it; it is a quality which enables its possessor to go on whatever happens, to charge, as it were, instead of merely standing to receive the assault. It is, in fact, if we are to be minute, dogged- ness made fiery by an infusion of hope, of a sanguineness which
you would never expect from an American's face—that, owing
to some climatic peculiarity, is usually careworn, especially in the East—but which colours his very blood. We never met an American in our lives who did not believe that he should "worry through" any trouble on hand, and reach at last the point desired, however distant it might seem to be. Like the Anglo-Irishman also, the American has a quick sense of the incongruous ; he perceives the comicality alike of things and persons, and he has a habit of pointing that out with a reserved shrewdness which has always the effect of, and sometimes really is, mordant humour. (The humour of exaggeration, which all Englishmen attribute to all Americans, is, we fancy, accidental,—that is, is attributable to humourists with a Celtdrish trace in them who have caught the popular ear.) Like the Anglo-Irish, too, the American bas a strong sense of personal dignity; he cannot bear to be belittled, and is, if anything, over-sensitive on the score of his individual claims to respect. His pride is not the glacial pride of the Englishman, who at heart holds the man who offends him to be a boor for doing it, and would as soon quarrel with a cabman as with him, but is a glowing pride, quick, perhaps over-quick, to resent insult and to imagine wrong. Add to these traits an almost infinite depth of inner kindli- ness so long as there is no provocation and no resistance from inferiors, and you have the Anglo-Irish character on its strong sides, and that is also the American, about as efficient a character as the world presents to our view. He can fight or be can bargain, he can build or he can diplomatise; and when doing any of these things, he generally contrives to come out at top, with perhaps just a glance around to see that the high place out of which he emerges with unmoved countenance has been noticed by the world around. We should add, for it is characteristic, though perhaps it is of little importance, that the manner of a well-bred American is usually, and allowing for individual idiosyncrasies, almost exactly, that of a well-bred Anglo-Irishman, courteous and kindly, with a touch of intended grace, and with a certain patience, as of one accustomed to other men's folly, which is not English at all. The Englishman's patience offends—that is the testimony of all mankind, to the Englishman's great perplexity—but the American's patience and that of the Anglo-Irishman leave a sensation, not always fully justified, of friendliness. There are a hundred Lord Dufferins in America.
The American has, however, as we said, two peculiarities which differentiate him from all mankind. We should not call him a happy man exactly, but he is an incurably cheer- ful one. The weight of the dozen atmospheres which press down the Englishman is off the American's spirit. He does not expect to find anywhere persons superior to himself ; he thinks he can make, instead of obeying, etiquettes; he sees no reason, unless, indeed, he is a candidate for his municipality or for Congress, for professing to be anything but what he is. He is quite contented as to his past, and quite satisfied that the future will go his way. He lives mainly in the present, but as the past was good and the future will be better, the present will do very well for the time being. If no one has affronted him he has no quarrel with any one, but is disposed to look on all men with an apprecia- tive smile, as being all equally creatures of Allah, poor creatures some of them, no doubt, but still creatures. He takes life as it comes, in fact, with little concern whether any- _ body takes it differently, and with a complete admission, not only from the lips, but from the heart, that it takes a good many sorts of men to make up a world. The conviction of equality with all men has taken the social fidget out of him, and given him an inner sense of ease and tranquillity, never quite absent even when his external manner seems awkward or constrained. It follows that he Vis always ready to try anything, and that the English idea of living in a groove seems to him confined and small, a waste of the faculties that God has given. And it follows, also, that being inwardly content with himself, and having a whole continent to work in, he is seldom so thorough as the English- man, is satisfied with knowing many things less completely than the Englishman knows one, and has for intellectual temptation, always provided that the task before him is not machinemaking, a certain shallowness. The kind of man who is least like an American is the kind of man about the British Museum, who knows upon some one subject nearly all there is to know, and can tell you almost to a foot where all that remains to be known will ultimately be found. We doubt if the American is fuller of resource than the Englishman, who generally when Chat Moss has to be filled has his plan at last ; but he is much quicker in bringing his wits to bear, and much less disposed to let any habitude of mind stand for a moment in his way. In fact, though the American, like every other of the sons of Eve, is clothed in habits, he wears them with singular lightness, and if his sense of propriety would permit, would on the smallest provocation cast them all away. There are only two exceptions to that with an American, his religion and the Constitution of the United States. Those two are not habits at all in the Carlylean sense, but outer and inner skins.
There remains the strongest and strangest peculiarity of all, which already differentiates the American completely from the Englishman, and a hundred years hence will make of him an entirely separate being. The American is a nervous man in the sense in which doctors who study con• stitution use that word. He is not neurotic, no man less so, and is probably as brave as any man alive, but his nerves respond more quickly to his brain than those of any other human being. He feels strongly and he feels everything. All news comes to him with a sharp, cutting impact. He works mentally under pressure, he does in a day what other men do in a week, he almost realises the schoolboy's joke when taunted with too much desire for sleep, that "there are people who can sleep fast." Excitement maddens him a little. He is like Douglas Jerrold's hero who had almost infinite wealth, but whenever he wanted to pay for anything had to give a bit of himself to do it, till, though each bit was only a heavy bank-note, he was worn literally to skin and bone. The result is that the American when very successful or much defeated has a tendency to die of nervous prostration, to an extent which makes nervous disease a specialty of the greatest American physicians. They think, we believe, that the tendency is a result of "imperfect acclimatisation," and no doubt a course of Europe has often a wonderfully invigorating effect, but we are not quite convinced that climate is the only cause. At least if it is, it is curious that the aborigines should not be possessed of more throbbing nerves, and that the Western farmer, who has a better climate than the New Yorker, should be so much more excitable than his rival in the East. We are inclined to suspect that the condition of so many Americans resembles the condition of over- trained men or horses, and that activity of brain con- tinued for generations is injurious in a dry climate to bodily health. Be the cause what it may, the American is liable to be excited, and his excitement, which sometimes shows itself in bursts of tremendous energy, sometimes in fits of gaiety, and sometimes in almost incurable melancholia, constantly wears him out. It is the greatest distinction between him and the more stolid Englishman, or rather between him and the oldest of English colonists, the Anglo- Irishman, whom in all else the American so closely resembles, and who, though he has not succeeded in governing Ireland, pours into the British services a. constant succession of men whom the Empire could not spare.
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