OMPLACENCY is a gift of the gods. As an old man, I think, if I could go back and be present at my own christening and ask the attending fairies what gift I most desired, I should say that of being pleased with myself most of the time. A result of my observation in life is that a cheerful belief in oneself, neutralized by the kind of education one gets by mingling in the society of gentlewomen and gentlemen, is a good guard against most of the blows in the world that come from other people, and not from what we call circumstances. To be vain is not only a misfortune, but is a frightful rift in our mental armor; to be proud is very much worse, for the proud are always unduly sensitive, while vanity and sensitiveness seldom go together.

From the point of view of our fellowcreatures, a sense of the dramatic and a sense of humor make us very agreeable in our social relations; but it seems to me that the man with an acute sense of humor and the power of throwing himself directly into the point of view of another person does not do tremendous things in life. He

is not as a rule what is called in a phrase of to-day a "big man"; but the men who consider themselves "big" are tiresome in the eyes of those of us who think that life ought to be made as endurable and cheerful as possible. They are real obstacles to the comfort of society; besides, after all, the quali

ties that make men "big" in the modern sense are the qualities of mediocrity, which never include either a dramatic sense or a sense of humor. It would be unreasonable to say that my countrymen, whom I love both at home and abroad, are not self-complacent, and it is equally absurd to say that they have no sense of humor.

There are no people who are so capable of living humorously as the citizens of the United States of America. I mean those citizens who have been citizens long enough to have been saturated with the mental atmosphere of their country. But the fact that they are humorous does not at all neutralize their complacency, which is not as a rule accompanied by the dramatic sense; this lack enables them to carry into all parts of the world their own world.

Abroad, they do not, as a rule, strike us as being so provincial as the English. They are just as insular; therefore, when they learn the foreign point of view of their country and of themselves, they are astounded at the provincial and narrow opinion of foreigners. There is no doubt that the point of view of foreigners is local and sometimes provincial, but mostly it is national. And if they misconceive our traditions, our aspirations, and our culture, we ought to remember that there is hardly any creature on the face of the earth who misunderstands the foreign point of view more

than we do. To understand all may be to forgive all, but none of us has the perception or time to understand all.

I recall an old picture in "Punch," the delectable. A young bride has just returned from Paris; her really Evangelical aunt asks solicitously:

"What church did you and your husband attend in that wicked city?" The young wife, anxious to speak French with a pure accent, answers:

"Not' a damn church." The old lady registers as much horror as did the uncle of the Kenwigs' children when he discovered that foolish word in French for the water was "L'eau"!

The point of view of many foreigners who are steeped in their own traditions is generally wrong, but why should it irritate us? In many conversations which I have had about Colonel Repington's "First World War," which would have been much better if it were more like the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, I have heard the author accused of heartlessness, "nonmorality, and affectation. He is heartless," because he can go on dining and lunching at the Ritz and at the homes of his friends when the world is burning; he is not "moral, because he does not draw any moral conclusion from anything, and he seems as tolerant as an abbé of the time of Mme. de Pompadour"; he is affected, because he speaks of ladies by their Christian names in a printed book. For instance, Mrs. Murray Guthrie, evidently the most fascinating widow except Mrs. Duggan in English society, appears constantly as "Olive."

An American might easily understand why Christian names should be used habitually in a limited society,

but he would hesitate to print the intimate names of his women friends. His view is not the English point of view, except perhaps among the middle class. The English of Colonel Reppington's class are really less reticent than the American of traditions. Colonel Reppington does not imagine for a moment that any acquaintance introduced to Mrs. Murray Guthrie would instantly call her "Olive" because she appears to her friends as "Olive," as the Princess Cantacuzene would doubtless be horrified if the prince, her husband, was called "Mike" by the casual person who happens to be introduced to him, although the princess calls him "Mike" in her memoirs.

There is a group of persons in our country who are shocked and perhaps scandalized when anybody intimates that an English point of view of our customs and habits is a foreign point of view. But the truth is that there is perhaps less understanding of our social conditions on the part of the English than there is on the part of the French.

From our point of view it is difficult to understand the extreme frankness of these ladies and gentlemen. An example of this is his quotation of Lady Johnston's opinions and of intimate conversations at luncheons which involve no breaches of confidence, but which, to use the slang of the day before yesterday, shock the average American "stiff.”

It's a fortunate thing that the differences between the English point of view and the American's lack of understanding of this point of view have ceased to produce irritation. Most of us are either tolerant or puzzled. When the American soldiers openly

preferred "hot dogs" to pork pies, there was agitation in the upper circles of Cockaigne; but when it was discovered that the American visitors did not look on fried fish as a luxury and received saveloys with reluctance, it was concluded that the grip of hands across the sea could never be quite as real as it ought to be. Now, the English cockney, visiting the United States, may reject hot cakes and maple syrup as rather "messy," and even look on pork and beans as exotic, but he is not despised or blamed for this. He is looked upon as a person of queer tastes, but his attitude does not imply a defect in character. With the mass of English our defections from their received tastes generally imply a defect in character. We must accept this as reasonably as we can, for there seems no hope of changing it. We at heart are too complacent to be taught by them and too sure of their density to teach them anything.

The great mass of Americans are amazed at the prevalence in England of the afternoon tea habit. When you come down to discussing this amiable peculiarity, you are told by your compatriots that it is both un-American and aristocratic, for the rooted opinion with most Americans is that everything they call American is democratic, which is certainly a great mistake from both the English point of view and the point of view of nearly all foreigners. How can the afternoon tea habit be aristocratic, when the keeper of the smallest shop in London gives himself up to this delirious diversion at the same hour every day? The English, when they think about it at all, consider it as much a necessity as breathing. The absence of

e afternoon tea habit in our country

is justly considered by them as an example of that breathless haste, that disregard of the benefits of leisure, which is supposed to be among our most barbarous characteristics.

There is no doubt that the English have become more friendly and less ceremonious in foreign countries than they were before the war; and, curiously enough, this change is looked on by conservatives as one of the most baneful consequences of frequent intercourse with Americans. The American, on the other hand, who has a certain sense of reticence in the presence of women, thinks, when he goes into the society in England which Colonel Repington depicts, that no social set in his country could be quite so free and easy in conversation as the most fashionable society in London.

Yet this freedom of speech is not a new thing for what is called English smart society. At least one of the passages in Colonel Repington's book that gave some offense on this side, because he used a Ben Jonsonian word in the presence of ladies and boys, does not shock the English at all; that is, the English of the highest class. The middle classes might be shocked; but, then, if one may judge of the evidence of English writers, the middle classes are entirely negligible. They do not count, if they exist at all. What is called a hale and hearty grossness of expression in the English music halls is looked on as a national trait. It is rather Shaksperian, and when the American woman in London shows that she rather objects to very plain speaking, she is regarded as a prude.

Personally, I think there are no people in the world so interesting, so amusing, so stupid, so thoroughly charming, and so provincial as the

English upper classes. They are as loyal as they are frank, and as kind as they are fixed in their opinions and instincts; but no power on earth can make them believe in their hearts that an American can be anything but an outsider, often a beloved and respected outsider, but always an outsider. And ́our expatriated Americans might just as well put this in their pipes and smoke it. It does not always follow that when a well bred Englishman regards an American as an outsider he condescends to him or ceases to have the highest regard for him. He does not He does not want him to be different. When he becomes different he ceases to be interesting.

82

In some of the most agreeable groups of society on the Continent American husbands are much admired, though not greatly respected.

"Everybody in Europe of a good class," recently said a matron returned from Biarritz, "thinks that the American man is most unusual and most admirable and that the American woman is idolized by him. I have traveled six months in Europe with my two daughters, and I must say that we never received so much attention in our lives."

An Italian officer who was standing by whispered softly, "Intention." The lady mistook "intention" for "attention," and this was unfortunately true. She did not know, despite her belief in the fixity of her social position and her respectability, that a comparatively young woman, floating through Europe for months without her husband, was looked on as a lady in search of adventures.

asked. "She seemed rich, of course; all American women who travel with pretty daughters are rich. The group of ladies were too well dressed not to be mondaine. They were certainly not demi-mondaine; that was evident. Exactly."

But the fashionable matron would have been horrified if she had known the point of view of the people she met at hotels and of the society into which she was introduced. "Had she come to Europe to get a divorce from the absent father and husband, or was there any absent father and husband?" Parties were offered to the visiting ladies of a rather Bohemian character; the girls were as gay as they could safely be at home. The extent of their fortunes was not known, but there was much speculation on this momentous question. When dear Baron Gaston or the cheerful Count Orsino asked the young American women to parties where there were no chaperons, without mama, she was pleased. She wrote home that her daughters were extremely popular in the best society.

Not being mistress of any language except her own, she did not understand that by those who believed that she had a husband at home she was regarded with a certain doubt, because the foreign women around her said: "These American husbands are adorable; they let their wives do as they please. If we remained six months away from our husbands and traveled about this way with our daughters, there would be a frightful family row, and we would be compelled to drop out of decent society."

When it became known that there really was a husband, he having run

dowagers shrugged their shoulders and said, "Those girls will certainly be rich when the father dies; but as Americans have no dot, there is great risk in waiting for that; and if our dear Fernand or Aymar married one of them, she might turn out like her mother."

Now, the point of view of this eminently respectable American woman, clever in her way, was that social Europe was like social America. She carried her own world about with her, and her daughters, though more sophisticated, lived in that world themselves. If the Servian colonel or the Sardinian count or the attaché of the Persian legation seemed a little too familiar when he came home after a party alone with one of the young women, it was put down to foreign "freshness" or the irrepressible gaiety of young men not accustomed to the seriousness of business. As this group traveled, like the lady in "Comus,' they certainly had "a good time." A legend gradually grew that the mother was staying away in order to obtain a divorce, and that the young women had already been divorced and had resumed their maiden names.

In the hands of the novelist this rather frequent occurrence would be made into a tragedy; as a rule, it is not a tragedy at all. It is a comedy of misunderstanding which does not always end in such enlightenment as to give the heroines of it any pain. They are clothed with complacency, and they interpret the people of another world from their knowledge of their own.

The old impression among us that the boulevards of Paris are France exists no longer, and the picture of French family life, in which there was always a mistress or two in the offing, done by brilliant French novelists,

mostly for foreign consumption, is not taken as infallibly. Our conception of life in France is clearer than it used to be. But the point of view of the French in regard to us is not much clearer than it was before the war. We still puzzle them. It is a curious fact that although the war has brought us together, the French are puzzled by the seeming contradictions of our civilization, and the influx of American soldiers into the cities of the provinces has not improved matters. Many honest soldiers, for example, were delighted by the ease with which young French women accepted honorable proposals. As a rule, they attributed this amiability to personal qualities that were expressed intensely because they could not be expressed linguistically.

The truth was that the respectable French girl, noting that the American soldier seemed to be frank and somewhat guileless, was dazzled by the marvel that she could actually secure a husband without a dot! The American soldier never dreamed of inquiring of her "old man" how many cows he had or what rentes might be settled on his fiancée; and his fiancée was so gay, so sympathetic, so capable, and so amused by all the peculiarities which she did not understand, that she seemed to be a very suitable wife. On her part was the conviction that after she had spent a certain time in the great country of America, rich, mais un peu sauvage, she might induce her husband to return triumphantly to live in her dear France; for is it not an accepted fact that in America all husbands obey their wives?

§ 3

This point of view has had a great deal to do to make many of these