onsistently the
great Christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and
stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, who study the
souls of strange peoples. That would be the true way to create a
friendship between England and America, or between England and anything
else; yes, even between England and Ireland. For this justice at least
has already been done to Ireland; and as an indignant patriot I demand a
more equal treatment for the two nations.

I have already noted the commonplace that in order to teach
internationalism we must talk nationalism. We must make the nations as
nations less odious or mysterious to each other. We do not make men love
each other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but by
describing the men as men, with their separate and even solitary
emotions. As this has a particular application to the emotions of the
Englishman, I will return to the topic once more. Now Americans have a
power that is the soul and success of democracy, the power of
spontaneous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane ideals
are really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions; we might
almost say in unofficial officialism. Nobody who has felt the presence
of all the leagues and guilds and college clubs will deny that Whitman
was national when he said he would build states and cities out of the
love of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm collides with the
Englishman, it too often seems literally to leave him cold. They say he
is reserved; they possibly think he is rude. And the Englishman, having
been taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take the
criticism as a compliment. He admits that he is reserved because he is
stern and strong; or even that he is rude because he is shrewd and
candid. But as a fact he is not rude and not especially reserved; at
least reserve is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real difference
lies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not only high
but level; that the hilarious American spirit is like a plateau, and the
humorous English spirit like a ragged mountain range.

The Englishman is moody; which does not in the least mean that the
Englishman is morose. Dickens, as we all feel in reading his books, was
boisterously English. Dickens was moody when he wrote _Oliver Twist_;
but he was also moody when he wrote _Pickwick_. That is, he was in
another and much healthier mood. The moo