AMERICAN TYPES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 13, 16 January 1929, Page 6

AMERICAN TYPES.

Sometimes I see a man or a woman here who seems to me to be unmistakably English (writes Mr. St. John Ervine from New York in the "Observer"). I discover that he or she belongs to a family which has lived in the United States for nearly two centuries. An American, whose people have lived in and around New York for several generations, lately told me that he mot a man whose methods of business and speech he had trouble in understanding. At last, exasperated by the fellow, he said: "What nationality are you?" and was informed, "I vas an American. Vat vas you?" The suppressed fury with which my friend told this story to me was the clearest proof I could have rece'ved of the bitter resentment felt by many Americans against the people who, after a year or two in New York, take out naturalisation papers and begin to speak with indignation about the way "the English" treated "us" at the battle of Bunker's Hill. It is pathetic to see little groups of Americans vainly endeavouring to maintain themselves above the mobs of immigrants who are pouring over this continent. I spent a week-end in a village on the Hudson among a colony of such people. They reminded me of the characters in Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," not because they were footling people, as Chekhov's people are, but because thev were sinking. You will find their sort, too, in Mr. Lennox Robinson's tragi -comedy of Irish life, "The Big House." Very elaborately they have withdrawn themselves from contact with the new multitude which is becoming America. Their attention is devoted to personal culture, to the polite pursuit of art, or to the practice of some expensive hobby. Some of them occasionally attempt to impose their authority upon the swarms of bright-eyed Jews and Latins and Poles and Lithuanians who are climbing up to claim equality with them, but the attempts are impotent and excite only derision.

Gradually one sees the population dividing itself into two groups; one, the resentful, sulking Nordics, certain of their racial superiority, but bewildered by the mocking laughter of the Latins and the Jews, who insist that the Nordics are incurably stupid: the other, a vast shallow-pated mob of Smart Alecs, determined at all costs to be Bright, and convinced that they are profound and instructed when they are merely repeating like parrots cant-phrases stolen from reviews o*f pretentious books. Several years ago an American novelist came to see me in London, bringing a letter of introduction from my American pub" Ushers. Hβ and his forefathers had lived in an American town for two centuries. "Suddenly," he said to me, "I realised that I was living in a foreign city. My house was surrounded by thousands of people who were not of my blood or even of my country. They had recently taken out papers. I began to feel myself isolated in my own city, suspected by my own townspeople because of my English origin, and I made up my mind that I would repatriate my family in England. That's what I've come here to do!" And so he had brought his wife and his children to the small town in Kent from which his ancestors two hundred years before had emigrated, and there he had tried to make a home for himself. The experiment was, I suspect, a failure, for although I have not seen him since he told me his story, I know that he is again living in America. Some day someone will make a plav out of that story. The great pioneering people who made America, who subdued the prairie and broke the forest and fought and defeated the Indian are themselves being subdued and broken and fought and defeated by ewarms from Middle Europe who have come to enjoy what they won