AMERICANS ON THEMSELVES.*

THE two volumes before us will finally make Englishmen believe that a new epoch has dawned in America. Our readers may recall that Mr. Mencken (whose Prejudices, first and second series, we reviewed some time ago) is an American with characteristics which we have usually regarded as typically un-American. He is extremely, even passionately, critical of his country and all its ways. Now, either he or some sort of Zeitgeist by which he himself was inspired has begun to affect other American critics, and_ in. these two books taken together the Englishman will find a spirit of gloom and self-deprecation after his own heart. It has been a question whether American civilization was going to develop on Anglo-Saxon lines The matter has been in doubt, but if Mr. Meneken and the writers in Civilization in The • (1) Ciciliration in the United States. Youdon : Jonathan Cape. (25e. net.] (2) The American Langoage. By H. L. Nenrken. Same publisher. 130s. United States are typical of enlightened thought in their country we have no further need of witness. This is the authentic spirit of Mrs. Gummidge, our mother, a spirit which more than the

bitter sea has separated England from the other races of the Continent, who have in their puzzlement called us " The hypocritical English."

We are the only people who will understand the writers of

Civilization in. the United States, but we shall understand and rejoice and feel the cockles of our hearts warmed by the doleful

but familiar tale of a country going to the dogs. The book is an inquiry by thirty Americans into all sorts of aspects of American life—the city, politics, journalism, poetry, art, the theatre, medicine, nerves, sex, the family, the small town, humour, and so forth. Here are all splendid subjects, for— especially the artistic ones—they can all be more or less mourned over. But, true to the spirit of Mrs. Gummidge, there is not a word about architecture, which is unquestionably the principal and characteristic art form of America. It would never have done to have an article about that ! The compilers of this book would have had to admit that architecturally America leads the world. Modern German architecture is good, and we have our Sir Edwin Lutyens and are building up a good tradition, but America leads us in architecture just as we lead her in poetry. One of the most attractive articles and one which will surprise many English readers is that on the small town. We shall never understand the United States unless we are aware of the truths which it sets forth :-

" The civilization of America is predominantly the civilization of the small town. The few libertarians and cosmopolites who continue to profess to see a broader culture developing along the Atlantic seaboard resent this fact, though they scarcely deny it. They are too intelligent, too widened in vision to deny it. They cannot watch the tremendous growth and power and influence of secret societies, of chambers of commerce, of boosters' clubs, of the Ford car, of moving pictures, of talking-machines, of evangelists, of nerve tonics, of the Saturday Evening Post, of Browning societies, of circuses, or parades and pageants of every kind and description, of family reunions, of pioneer picnics, of county fairs, of firemen's conventions without secretly acknow- ledging it. And they know, if they have obtained a true per- spective of America, that there is no section of this vast political unit that does not possess—and even frequently boast—these unmistakably provincial signs and symbols. I do not mean to imply that such aspects make America an unfit place in which to live. On the contrary, America's very possession of them brings colour and rugged picturesqueness, if not a little pathos, to the individual with imagination sufficient to find them. Mr. Dreiser found them and shed a triumphant tear. ` Dear, crude America ' is to him a sweet and melancholy reality."

But this is a comparatively cheerful paragraph, and may give the reader a false impression of the book. If you have tears, prepare to shed them when you read Mr. Thorn Smith on .Adver- Using, or Mr. Mencken on Politics, or Mr. Pach on Art.

And how do these sons of Gummidge, these brothers of ours, express themselves ? In Mr. Mencken's book', an enlarged and rewritten edition of a book published three years ago, that is thoroughly, and we should think for the most part correctly, explained. We may have slight doubts as to the complete accuracy of some of Mr. Mencken's findings because of the undoubted inaccuracy of some of the colloquialisms which he attributes to the English. The book ranges so ambitiously among the intimate talk of so many different strata of society that one cannot be surprised at an occasional mistake. Mr. Mencken says that we cling to a fossil system of numerals, and in common speech the Englishman says " seven-and-forty " instead of forty-seven, which he holds to be a survival from the Anglo-Saxon ; actually this inversion is almost obsolete. It

is interesting to see that directly in America is going the way presently went long ago in English : " In English usage, with `to proceed,' the word directly is always used to signify imme- diately ; in American a contingency gets into it, and it may mean no more than soon." But in England quite does not really mean, as Mr. Mencken thinks, completely, entirely, wholly, altogether, but is more often used in the sense he calls " American "—i.e., " he sings quite well." The words jolly and fix are a source of international misunderstanding. In English colloquial usage jolly, he complains, means almost anything ; " it intensifies all other adjectives, even including miserable and homesick. . . . The Englishman is jolly bored, his dog is jolly keen, thinAs at the shop are jolly dear." But the Americans compete !—" Mary fixed her hair. The cook is fixing the gravy. The unjust judge was fixed. John is well fixed" (as we should say, is a warm man). We wish we had space to go into what Mr. Mencken says on

titles and honorifics in England. for we should like to cross swords with him in his dictum in several instances. For example, that " a dentist, a shopkeeper or a clerk can never be a gentle- man, except by courtesy." Mr. Mencken is twenty years behind the times ; to go no further, the present writer can think of acquaintance in each of these. positions whose " gentility"

is questioned by nobody. His list of American euphemisms is charming. " Undertaker : mortician. The barber's shop : tonsorial parlour. Shopwalker : aisle manager. Pawnshop : loan-.office, Underclothes : B.V.D.'s." " The heads of busi- nesses are called presidents (I know of one president whose staff consists of two typists)." Again: "I wandered into a uni- versity knowing nobody and casually asked for the Dean, and somebody asked, ' Which Dean ? "

" Perhaps I reached the extreme at a theatre in Boston, when I wanted something, I forget what, and was told that I must apply to the chief of the ushers. He was a mild little man, who had something to do- with peopla getting into their seats, rather a come-down from the pomp and circumstance of his title. Growing interested, I examined my program, with the following result : It is not a laitge theatre, but it has a. press-representative, a treasurer (box-office clerk), an assistant treasurer (box-office junior clerk), an advertising-agent, our old friend the chief of the ushers, a stage-manager, a head-e!ectrician, a master of properties (in England called props), a leader of the orchestra (pity this— why not president P), and a matron (occupation unknown)."

But, of course, the most marked characteristic of the American language is the way in which it wells out of the soil. " The American advertiser is an extraordinarily diligent manu- facturer of new terms." Some of them are so familiar to us in this country that we forget their origin—Soda-mint, dictograph, listerine, pianola, kodak, vaseline, mobiloil, thermos.

Mr. Mencken quotes a Horatian ode of unknown authorship made up of such words, and transcribes it " for the joy of connoisseurs.*

" Chipeco thermos dioxygen, temco sonora tuxedo Resinol fiat bacardi, camera ansco wheaten& ; Antiskid pebeco calox, oleo tyco barometer Postum nabisco !

Prestolite arco congoleum, karo aluminum kryptok, Crisco balopticon lysol, jello bellans, carborundum !

Ample° clysmic swoboda, pantasote necco britruntica Encyclopredia Y "

What a Frenchman or a German would make of the eight lines is beyond human power to imagine. Mr. Mencken thinks that it would be difficult to concoct a similar ode with trade-mark words invented in the British Isles. We have not " terms sufficiently artificial to bestow the exotic remoteness which is accountable for the aroma of the American ode." The render must not think from the somewhat frivolous extracts that we have made from Mr. Mencken's book that there is nothing in it for the scholar and the etymologist. It is, in fact, a book full of learning, the only one of its kind, and is obviously the fruit of years of research.