ally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are
so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to
consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have
arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And,
rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the
failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is
humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be
the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke.

The English and the American types of humour are in one way directly
contrary. The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination,
piling one house on another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper. The
most English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning to
the earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenly
on a butter-slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole.
American fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being
up a tree. The former is to be found in the cockney comic songs that
concern themselves with hanging out the washing or coming home with the
milk. The latter is to be found in those fantastic yarns about machines
that turn live pigs into pig-skin purses or burning cities that serve to
hatch an egg. But it will be inevitable, when the two come first into
contact, that the bathos will sound like vulgarity and the extravagance
will sound like boasting.

Suppose an American soldier said to an English soldier in the trenches,
'The Kaiser may want a place in the sun; I reckon he won't have a place
in the solar system when we begin to hustle.' The English soldier will
very probably form the impression that this is arrogance; an impression
based on the extraordinary assumption that the American means what he
says. The American has merely indulged in a little art for art's sake,
and abstract adventure of the imagination; he has told an American short
story. But the Englishman, not understanding this, will think the other
man is boasting, and reflecting on the insufficiency of the English
effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, 'Oh,
you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking
for a kipper with your tea.' And it is quite likely that the American
will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty
answered in so personal a fashion. Being an Ameri