Americans often show a saving consciousness of their faults, and lash
themselves with biting satire. There are even Americans whose very
attitude is an apology--wholly unnecessary--for the Great Republic,
and who seem to despise any native product until it has received the
hall-mark of London or of Paris. In the new world that has produced
the new book, of the exquisite delicacy and insight of which Mr. Henry
James and Mr. Howells may be taken as typical exponents, it seems to
me that there are more than the usual proportion of critics who prefer
to it what Colonel Higginson has well called "the brutalities of
Haggard and the garlic-flavors of Kipling." While, perhaps, the
characteristic charm of the American girl is her thorough-going
individuality and the undaunted courage of her opinions, which leads
her to say frankly, if she think so, that Martin Tupper is a greater
poet than Shakespeare, yet I have, on the other hand, met a young
American matron who confessed to me with bated breath that she and her
sister, for the first time in their lives, had gone unescorted to a
concert the night before last, and, _mirabile dictu_, no harm had come
of it! It is in America that I have over and over again heard language
to which the calling a spade a spade would seem the most delicate
allusiveness; but it is also in America that I have summoned a blush
to the cheek of conscious sixty-six by an incautious though innocent
reference to the temperature of my morning tub. In that country I have
seen the devotion of Sir Walter Raleigh to his queen rivalled again
and again by the ordinary American man to the ordinary American woman
(if there be an _ordinary_ American woman), and in the same country I
have myself been scoffed at and made game of because I opened the
window of a railway carriage for a girl in whose delicate veins flowed
a few drops of coloured blood. In Washington I met Miss Susan B.
Anthony, and realised, to some extent at least, all she stands for. In
Boston and other places I find there is actually an organised
opposition on the part of the ladies themselves to the extension of
the franchise to women. I have hailed with delight the democratic
spirit displayed in the greeting of my friend and myself by the porter
of a hotel as "You fellows," and then had the cup of pleasure dashed
from my lips by being told by the same porter that "the other
_gentleman_ would attend to my baggage!" I have been parboiled with
salamanders