“America wants to turn us into Good Fellows, all provided with the very best automobiles—and no private place to which we can go in them. When I think of America I always remember a man who made me go out to a golf club and undress in a locker room, where quite uninvited men came up and made little funny jokes about Germany and about my being a professor! And Russia wants to turn us into a machine for the shaving off of all the eccentricities which do not belong to the lowest common denominator. And Asia and Africa do not t’ink that human life and the sweetness of human life matter. But Europe, she believes that a Voltaire, a Beethoven, a Wagner, a Keats, a Leuwenhoeck, a Flaubert, give drama and meaning to life, and that they are worth preserving—they and the people who understand and admire them! Europe! The last refuge, in this Fordized world, of personal dignity. And we believe that is worth fighting for! We are menaced by the whole world. Yet perhaps we shall endure … perhaps!
“Some of us think that perhaps we shall prevail even against Americanization—which I may venture to define as a theological belief that it is more important to have your purchases tidily rung up on a cash-register than to purchase what you want. (And mind you—I am not so anti-American as I seem—I quite understand that the mystic process of ‘Americanization’ is being carried on as much by German industrialists and French exporters and English advertising-men as it is by born Yankees!) I think the echt Europe may be able to endure. For I remember always of Greece and Rome. Rome was the America of ancient history; Greece the perhaps over-cultured Continental Europe. Vi et armis, Rome conquered. Yet it was Greek architecture, Greek philosophy, and its gracefulness of body which revivified Europe in the Renaissance, more than Roman law.
“So! I deliver a lecture. Hässlich! Yet I must finish. To be clear, when I speak of the European you must understand that I speak of a very small, select, special class, which is far nearer to other members of that class in foreign nations than it is to most of its own countrymen. The beer-sodden peasant in a Gastzimmer at a country inn, or here in Berlin dancing in masses at Die Neue Welt, is not a European in that special sense. Neither is the bustling young business man on the Friedrichstrasse, or on the Rue de Rivoli, who is trying to sell vulgar porcelain or shoddy silk so fast as he can. Both of them would gladly emigrate to America and change leisure for automobiles. And also there are a few people born in America who do belong to what I call ‘Europeans’—your author Mrs. Edith Wharton, I imagine, must be so. But wherever they were born, there is this definite class, standing for a definite aristocratic culture—and most Americans who think they have ‘seen Europe’ go home without any idea at all of its existence and what it stands for, and they perceive of Europe just loud-tongued guides, and passengers in trains looking unfriendly and reading Uhu or Le Rire. They have missed only everything that makes Europe!”
Sam was surprised to find himself answering:
“Yes, that’s about true. America thinks of the Europeans as a bunch of restaurant cashiers trying to do us on exchange—thinks of Europe as dead—nothing but pictures by men that lived three hundred years ago. We forget your Freud and Einstein—yes, and European aeroplane constructors, and this Youth movement in Germany, and the French tennis players that beat us. But you have just as untrue an idea of America. All over Berlin, in the bookstores, I see books about America; titles like ‘The Dollar Land.’ Well, I’ll bet the French peasant that sticks the centimes away in the sock, and the German farmer, love the dollar ten times as much as the average American. We love to make money, but we love to spend it. We’re all like sailors on a spree. We have to have every parrot that’s on sale on the waterfront. And—
“Why do you suppose so many hundreds of thousands of Americans come to Europe? Not more than one out of a hundred Europeans who do go to America ever goes there to learn, to see what we have. And after all, a Woolworth Building or a Chicago Tribune Building or a Ford plant or a Grand Canyon or a Sharon, Connecticut—and incidentally a mass of 110,000,000 people—might be worth studying. You of all people, Professor, know that most Europeans go to America just to make money. But why are the Americans here? Oh, a few of ’em to get social credit for it, back home, or to sell machinery, but most of ’em, bless ’em, come here as meekly as schoolboys, to admire, to learn!
“What most Europeans think of America! Because we were a pioneer nation, mostly busy with farming and cod-fishing and chewing tobacco, a hundred years ago, Europe thinks we still are. The pictures of Americans in your comic papers indicate to me that Europe sees all Americans as either moneylenders who lie awake nights thinking of how they can cheat Europe, or farmers who want to spit tobacco on the Cathedral of St. Mark, or gunmen murdering Chicagoans in their beds. My guess is that it all comes from the tradition that Europeans started a hundred years ago. Here a few weeks back, when we were in Vienna, I picked up Martin Chuzzlewit and waded through it. Funny, mind you, his picture of America a hundred years ago. But he shows a bunch of people along the Ohio River and in New York who were too lazy to scratch, who—”
“Sam!” warned Fran, but he strode on unregarding.
“—were ignorant as Hottentots and killed each other
