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character as portrayed by English novelists like Thackeray, Dickens
and Samuel Butler, whose works he had read in his youth with
incredulity, supposing them to be "half fairy tales like Homer." He
found in London, as in these novels of a past era,
basic English qualities, with which, after nearly two hundred years,
Americans have to reckon again: the passion for social privilege,
the rapacious appetite for property, the egoism that damns one's
neighbour, the dependence on inherited advantages, and the
al–
most equally deep-fibred instinct, often not deliberate or conscious,
to make all these appear forms of virtue.
Twenty years later in the introduction to a new edition of his book,
he reports that the first edition was unfavorably received in England,
and he cites the similar experience of Hawthorne when he received
the English notices of
OUT Old Home.
Hawthorne reported that the
"monstrosity of the self-conceit" of the English was such that "any–
thing short of unlimited admiration impresses them as malicious
caricature."
From Hawthorne to Wilson 1966 probably completes a cycle,
for the ascendency of America is now so great that Americans no
longer need protecting against English wiles. The process which
began as Europeanization gone to America and returned to Europe as
Americanization
is
now complete. The English are more in need of
warning against America than Americans of warning against England,
but beyond this there are evils common to both cultures and the ques–
tion for today is whether the last problem to be solved by Americans
will
not be that of Americanization.
This question suggests itself because Americans include the most
anti-American people in the world, the harshest critics of their coun–
try.
The world today is flooded with Americans who set out to make
themselves the "opposites" of their idea of a stereotyped American.
The "good American" is conformist so they refuse to conform; he
is
patriotic so they attack everything about their own country; he
is
hygienic so they make a cult of dirt; he wants property so they abjure
it; he wants success so they seek failure; he
is
respectable and discreet
so
they are outrageous, obscene and exhibitionistically promiscuous.
It would be much too easy to dismiss this anti-Americanism as
just
another way of being American. On the other hand
it
has many
