My Discovery of England | Page 9

than
the London method of asking questions about literature and art and
difficult things of that sort. I am sure that there must be soap works and
perhaps a pail factory somewhere in London. But during my entire time
of residence there no one ever offered to take me to them. As for the
sewerage--oh, well, I suppose we are more hospitable in America. Let
it go at that.
I had my answer all written and ready, saying:
"I understand that London is the second greatest hop-consuming, the
fourth hog-killing, and the first egg-absorbing centre in the world."
But what I deplore still more, and I think with reason, is the total
omission of the familiar interrogation: "What is your impression of our
women?"
That's where the reporter over on our side hits the nail every time. That
is the point at which we always nudge him in the ribs and buy him a
cigar, and at which youth and age join in a sly jest together. Here again
the sub-heading comes in so nicely: THINKS YOUNGSTOWN
WOMEN CHARMING. And they are. They are, everywhere. But I
hate to think that I had to keep my impression of London women
unused in my pocket while a young man asked me whether I thought
modern literature owed more to observation and less to inspiration than
some other kind of literature.
Now that's exactly the kind of question, the last one, that the London
reporters seem to harp on. They seemed hipped about literature; and
their questions are too difficult. One asked me whether the American

drama was structurally inferior to the French. I don't call that fair. I told
him I didn't know; that I used to know the answer to it when I was at
college, but that I had forgotten it, and that, anyway, I am too well off
now to need to remember it.
That question is only one of a long list that they asked me about art and
literature. I missed nearly all of them, except one as to whether I
thought Al Jolson or Frank Tinney was the higher artist, and even that
one was asked by an American who is wasting himself on the London
Press.
I don't want to speak in anger. But I say it frankly, the atmosphere of
these young men is not healthy, and I felt that I didn't want to see them
any more.
Had there been a reporter of the kind we have at home in Montreal or
Toledo or Springfield, Illinois, I would have welcomed him at my hotel.
He could have taken me out in a Ford car and shown me a factory and
told me how many cubic feet of water go down the Thames in an hour.
I should have been glad of his society, and he and I would have
together made up the kind of copy that people of his class and mine
read. But I felt that if any young man came along to ask about the
structure of the modern drama, he had better go on to the British
Museum.
Meantime as the reporters entirely failed to elicit the large fund of
information which I acquired, I reserve my impressions of London for a
chapter by themselves.

III. - Impressions of London
BEFORE setting down my impressions of the great English metropolis;
a phrase which I have thought out as a designation for London; I think
it proper to offer an initial apology. I find that I receive impressions
with great difficulty and have nothing of that easy facility in picking
them up which is shown by British writers on Ameriea. I remember
Hugh Walpole telling me that he could hardly walk down Broadway
without getting at least three dollars' worth and on Fifth Avenue five
dollars' worth; and I recollect that St. John Ervine came up to my house
in Montreal, drank a cup of tea, borrowed some tobacco, and got away
with sixty dollars' worth of impressions of Canadian life and character.
For this kind of thing I have only a despairing admiration. I can get an

impression if I am given time and can think about it beforehand. But it
requires thought. This fact was all the more distressing to me in as
much as one of the leading editors of America had made me a proposal,
as honourable to him as it was Iucrative to me, that immediately on my
arrival in London;--or just before it,--I should send him a thousand
words on the genius of the English, and five hundred words on the
spirit of London, and two hundred words of personal chat with Lord
Northcliffe. This contract I was unable to fulfil except the personal chat
with Lord Northcliffe, which proved an easy matter as