Reflections and Comments 1865-1895Godkin, Edwin Lawrence
General
Reflections and Comments 1865-1895
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence
Essays
In a homogeneous society, like that of the United States, none of
this material is to be found. The New Englander, to be sure,
furnishes a type which differs from the Middle-States man or the
Southerner or Westerner, but none of them differs enough to make him
worth caricaturing. His speech, his dress, his modes of acting and
thinking so nearly resemble those of his neighbors in other parts of
the country that after the comic writer or draughtsman had done his
best or his worst upon him, it would remain still a little doubtful
where the joke came in. The Irishman, and especially the New York
Irish voter, and his sister Bridget, the cook, have during the past
ten years rendered more or less service as butts for caricaturists,
but they are rapidly wearing out. They are not many-sided persons at
best, and their characteristics have become associated in the
American mind with so much that is uncomfortable and repulsive in
domestic and political life, that it becomes increasingly difficult
to get a native to laugh at them. It must be confessed, too, that
the Irish in America have signally belied the poet's assertion,
"_Coelum non animam mutant qui trans mare currunt_." There is
nothing more striking in their condition than the almost complete
disappearance from their character, at least in its outward
manifestations, of the vivacity, politeness, kindliness, comical
blundering impetuosity, and double-sightedness, out of which the
Irishman of the stage and Jo Miller's Irishman who made all the
bulls were manufactured in the last century. Of the other
nationalities we need hardly speak, as the English-speaking public
knows little of them, although the German Jew is perhaps the most
durable material the comic writer has ever worked on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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