with the
habit of arising in decorous society and indelicately blowing his nose.

There is, of course, something of the same shrinking from the elemental
facts of life in England; it seems to run with the Anglo-Saxon. This
accounts for the shuddering attitude of the English to such
platitude-monging foreigners as George Bernard Shaw, the Scotsman
disguised as an Irishman, and G. K. Chesterton, who shows all the
physical and mental stigmata of a Bavarian. Shaw's plays, which once had
all England by the ears, were set down as compendiums of the
self-evident by the French, a realistic and plain-spoken people, and
were sniffed at in Germany by all save the middle classes, who
correspond to the _intelligentsia_ of Anglo-Saxondom. But in America,
even more than in England, they were viewed as genuinely satanic. We
shall never forget, indeed, the tremulous manner in which American
audiences first listened to the feeble rattling of the palpable in such
pieces as "Man and Superman" and "You Never Can Tell." It was precisely
the manner of an old maid devouring "What Every Girl of Forty-Five
Should Know" behind the door. As for Chesterton, his banal arguments in
favour of alcohol shocked the country so greatly that his previous high
services to religious superstition were forgotten, and today he is
seldom mentioned by respectable Americans.

V

It is necessary to repeat that we rehearse all these facts, not in
indignation, nor indeed in any spirit of carping whatever, but in
perfect serenity and simply as descriptive sociologists. This attitude
of mind is but little comprehended in America, where the emotions
dominate all human reactions, and even such dismal sciences as
paleontology, pathology and comparative philology are gaudily coloured
by patriotic and other passions. The typical American learned man
suffers horribly from the national disease; he is eternally afraid of
something. If it is not that some cheese-monger among his trustees will
have him cashiered for receiving a picture post-card from Prof. Dr.
Scott Nearing, it is that some sweating and scoundrelly German or
Frenchman will discover and denounce his cribs, and if it is not that
the foreigner will have at him, it is that he will be robbed of his step
from associate to full professor by some rival whose wife is more
amiable to the president of the university, or who is himself more
popular with the college athletes. Thus surrounded by fears, he
translates them