On the other hand, many Americans (though less willing than the French) are willing to discuss creed, immortality, faith. There is nothing from which the Englishman more peremptorily recoils, although he hates well nigh as deeply all abstract discussion, or to be clever, or to have you be clever. An American friend of mine had grown tired of an Englishman who had been finding fault with one American thing after another. So he suddenly said:
“Will you tell me why you English when you enter your pews on Sunday always immediately smell your hats? “
The Englishman stiffened. “I refuse to discuss religious subjects with you,” he said.
To be ponderous over this anecdote grieves me—but you may not know that orthodox Englishmen usually don’t kneel, as we do, after reaching their pews; they stand for a moment, covering their faces with their well-brushed hats: with each nation the observance is the same, it is in the manner of the observing that we differ.
Much is said about our “common language,” and its being a reason for our understanding each other. Yes; but it is also almost as much a cause for our misunderstanding each other. It is both a help and a trap. If we Americans spoke something so wholly different from English as French is, comparisons couldn’t be made; and somebody has remarked that comparisons are odious.
“Why do you call your luggage baggage?” says the Englishman—or used to say.
“Why do you call your baggage luggage?” says the American—or used to say.
“Why don’t you say treacle?” inquires the Englishman.
“Because we call it molasses,” answers the American.
“How absurd to speak of a car when you mean a carriage!” exclaims the Englishman.
“We don’t mean a carriage, we mean a car,” retorts the American.
You, my reader, may have heard (or perhaps even held) foolish conversations like that; and you will readily perceive that if we didn’t say “car” when we spoke of the vehicle you get into when you board a train, but called it a voiture, or something else quite “foreign,” the Englishman would not feel that we had taken a sort of liberty with his mother-tongue. A deep point lies here: for most English the world is divided into three peoples, English, foreigners, and Americans; and for most of us likewise it is divided into Americans, foreigners, and English. Now a “foreigner” can call molasses whatever he pleases; we do not feel that he has taken any liberty with our mother-tongue; his tongue has a different mother; he can’t help that; he’s not to be criticized for that. But we and the English speak a tongue that has the same mother.
This identity in pedigree has led and still leads to countless family discords. I’ve not a doubt that divergences in vocabulary and in accent were the fount and origin of some swollen noses, some battered eyes, when our Yankees mixed with the Tommies. Each would be certain to think that the other couldn’t “talk straight”—and each would be certain to say so.
I shall not here spin out a list of different names for the same things now current in English and American usage: molasses and treacle will suffice for an example; you will be able easily to think of others, and there are many such that occur in everyday speech. Almost more tricky are those words which both peoples use alike, but with different meanings. I shall spin no list of these either; one example there is which I cannot name, of two words constantly used in both countries, each word quite proper in one country, while in the other it is more than improper.
Thirty years ago I explained this one evening to a young Englishman who was here for a while. Two or three days later, he thanked me fervently for the warning: it had saved him, during a game of tennis, from a frightful shock, when his partner, a charming girl, meaning to tell him to cheer up, had used the word that is so harmless with us and in England so far beyond the pale of polite society.
Quite as much as words, accent also leads to dissension. I have heard many an American speak of the English accent as “affected”; and our accent displeases the English. Now what Englishman, or what American, ever criticizes a Frenchman for not pronouncing our language as we do?
His tongue has a different mother!
I know not how in the course of the years all these divergences should have come about, and none of us need care. There they are. As a matter of fact, both England and America are mottled with varying accents literate and illiterate; equally true it is that each nation has its notion of the other’s way of speaking—we’re known by our shrill nasal twang, they by their broad vowels and hesitation; and quite as true is it that not all Americans and not all English do in their enunciation conform to these types.
One May afternoon in 1919 I stopped at Salisbury to see that beautiful cathedral and its serene and gracious close. “Star-scattered on the grass,” and beneath the noble trees, lay New Zealand soldiers, solitary or in little groups, gazing, drowsing, talking at ease. Later, at the inn I was shown to a small table, where sat already a young Englishman in evening dress, at his dinner. As I sat down opposite him, I bowed, and he returned it. Presently we were talking. When I said that I was stopping expressly to see the cathedral, and how like a trance it was to find a scene so utterly English full of New Zealanders lying all about, he looked puzzled. It was at this, or immediately after this, that I explained to him my nationality.
“I shouldn’t have known it,” he remarked, after an instant’s pause.
I pressed him for his reason, which he gave; somewhat reluctantly, I think, but with excellent good-will. Of course it was the same old mother-tongue!
“You mean,” I said, “that I haven’t happened to say ‘I guess,’ and that I don’t, perhaps, talk through my nose? But we don’t all do that. We do all sorts of things.”
He stuck to it. “You talk like us.”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t mean to talk like anybody!” I sighed.
This diverted him, and brought us closer.
“And see here,” I continued, “I knew you were English, although you’ve not dropped a single h.”
“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.