Americans are very fond of citing as an example of English
manners the legend of a great lady who, at an American breakfast, saw
her husband declining a dish which was offered to him, and called across
the table, "Take some, my dear--it isn't half as nasty as it looks."
Three different people have vouched to me for the truth of this
anecdote, each naming the heroine, and each giving her a different name.
True or false, it is held in America to be typical; and it would
scarcely be so popular as it is unless people had suffered a good deal
from the tactlessness which it exemplifies. The same vice, in a more
insidious form, appears in a remark made to me the other day by an
Englishman of very high intelligence, who had just returned from a long
tour in America, and was, in the main, far from unsympathetic. "What I
felt," he said, "was the suburbanism of everything. It was all Clapham
or Camberwell on a gigantic scale." Some justice of observation may
possibly have lain behind this remark, though I certainly failed to
recognise it. But in the form of its expression it exemplified that
illusion of metropolitanism which is to my mind the veriest cockneyism
in disguise, and which cannot but strike Americans as either ridiculous
or offensive.
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