Reflections and Comments 1865-1895Godkin, Edwin Lawrence
General
Reflections and Comments 1865-1895
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence
Essays
The London _Daily News_, in the course of an article on what it
calls "International Reproaches," refers to the fact that there is
much that is "traditional" in them. It thinks that, both in America
and in France, the qualities and peculiarities attributed to English
people are derived, to a great extent, less from experience than
from inherited tradition. "We hear that Englishmen are rude to ladies;
that they fail to yield them precedence at the ticket-offices of
steamboats and railway stations; that they complain of everything
that is given them as food; that they occupy more than their share of
public conveyances with multitudinous wraps, sticks, and umbrellas.
They assert themselves, it would seem, when they have placed 3,000
miles between themselves and their old home. There is, however,
in all these complaints the ring of old coin." In the same way it
says that the Parisian of the boulevards still believes the English
man to be a creature who wears long red whiskers of the mutton-chop
species, and wears a plaid--although, as a matter of fact,
the typical Englishman of to-day does not look like this at all.
Anyone interested in the matter might make a very queer collection
of types which, having disappeared from actual life, survive in the
popular imagination, and by surviving keep alive international
prejudice, hostility, suspicion, or distrust, and which go on doing
duty in this way for years and years, until suddenly some fine day
it is discovered that they are out of date and must in future be
dispensed with. There is, for instance, our old friend, the stage
Irishman. How often have our hearts been touched by the qualities of
gratitude, devotion to sentiment, faithful friendship, and heroism
of this noble creature. No doubt, there must have been a time when
he was as common in Ireland as he has been in our day in melodrama.
But the Irishman, as he exists in New York, and as he is described
by those who have seen him at home, is strangely unlike the type. He
is a decidedly practical, hard-headed man, with a keen eye to the
main chance, a considerable fondness for fighting, and a disposition
which we should call the reverse of sentimental. Harrigan and Hart
represent the actual Irishman in America capitally at their little
theatre in Broadway, yet the stage Irishman is to multitudes of
Americans a more real creature than the actual Irishman, and we
suppose there is hardly a Democratic statesman from one end of the
country to the other who has not constantly before his mind an image
of him, by the contemplation of which he solves many of the
knottiest problems of contemporary politics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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