is
much more interested in and influenced by French literature and art
than the average educated Englishman--so much so that the leading French
critics, such as M. Brunetiere and M. Rod, lecture here to crowded and
appreciative audiences. Moreover an excellent German theatre permanently
established in the city keeps the literary world well abreast of
cosmopolitanism of the educated New Yorker the dramatic movement in
Germany. But the merely means that he has everything in common with the
educated Londoner--and a little over. His traditions are ours, his
standards are ours, his ideals are ours. He is busied with the same
problems of ethics, of aesthetics, of style, even of grammar. I had not
been three days in New York when I found myself plunged in a hot
discussion of the "split infinitive," in which I was ranged with two
Americans against a recreant Briton who defended the collocation. "It is
a mistake to regard it is an Americanism," said one of the Americans.
"It is as old as the English language, or at least as old as Wickliff.
But it is unnecessary, and the best modern practice discountenances it."
I felt like falling on the neck of an ally of half an hour's standing,
and swearing eternal friendship. What matters Alaska, or Venezuela, or
Nicaragua, "or all the stones of stumbling in the world," so long as we
have a common interest in (and some of us a common distaste for) the
split infinitive? To put the matter briefly, while the outlook of the
New Yorker is wider than ours, his standpoint is the same. We gather
from a well-known anecdote that some, at least, of the cultivated
Americans of Thackeray's time were inclined to "think of Tupper." To-day
they do not "think of Tupper" any more than we do--and by Tupper I mean,
of course, not the veritable Martin Farquhar, but the Tuppers of the
passing hour. In America as in England, no doubt, there is a huge
half-educated public, ravenous for doughnuts of romance served up with
syrup of sentiment. The enthusiasms of the American shopgirl, I take it,
are very much the same as those of her English sister. But the line of
demarkation between the educated and the half-educated is just as clear
in New York as in London. For the cultivated American of to-day, the
Boomster booms and the Sibyl sibyllates in vain. I find no
justification, in this city at any rate, for the old saying which
described America as the most common-schooled and least educated country
in the world. If we