KEEP SMILING.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VII, Issue 1872, 13 February 1920, Page 8

KEEP SMILING.

THC REAL AMERICAN.

OPTIMISM AND THE MASS TEMPERAMENT. <The outstanding quality of America, [the strength, and sometimes the weakness, of the Republic is an abounding, inll embracing good nature, says a wellI known correspondent. ! First impressions are the pest of foreign intercourse. If they have any artistic value, it is usually in the direction of caricature, which should be forbidden to visitors, unless they have adjmitted genius. Suppress your reserves and prejudices. Forget Barnum and Buffalo IBill, Mrs Eddy and Dr Cook, until you :can understand how they were produced. Forget even Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt, until you can get them in true perspective with Penn and Franklin. Channing and Lincoln, Emer■son ami Whitman. i Shut your eyes to the imbecile riot of electric sky-signs as you cross Times jSquare; and get quickly out West, or !at least into some nearer countryside. i When you come back, you will be able | to appreciate the skyscrapers and to see I the nobility of Fifth Avenue. That Almigh/y Dollar. ' Wipe out of your mind all yon ever |hoard about the Almighty Dollar, the . Trusts, Tammany, Judge Lynch, the I Mormons, the Pussyfoot ProhibitionI ists, and the Senators who are silly enough to dislike England and the Peace League. Rub it. all out, and, most particularly, take off the yellow spectacles of Old World superiority. Breathe deej) of the dry, exhilarating air, which is all the intoxicant any healthy man can need, and get acquainted with the average American in his everyday life. He is prodigally generous, incurably kind, absurdly modest and gentle. We suspect his munificence, as lie suspects our League of Nations, from ignorance. Having no idea of his own gigantic strength—giants never have —he fears, for the inoincn©, that, with so much on j hand at home, a mandate for Constantinople and Armenia would be beyond his powers. Now that the Boche is beaten he conceives it his chief duty to go back to his old job of constituting a model houscI hold, free and healthy, out of the outI casts of Europe, Asia and Africa. But j Uncle Sam, a backbiter, a deserter? I Not on vour life!

Prodigious Optimist. The Old World had better understand that, by ami largo, it must cure its own diseases. America will help with unlimited credit, and in other ways; but Sam has too sensible a scorn of silly quarrels to care for the role of universal policeman, and is too modest to see himself ns saviour of a reluctant humanity. There are enough Russians, Foles, Czechoslovaks, Jugoslavs. Italians, Armenians, Hungarians and Germans, to say nothing of poor Jews and Irish, negroes and Asiatics, inside here, to satisfy the rashest philanthropist. Over there, in the altogether too clever councils and offices of Paris and London, he feels himself at a disadvantage. ITis regard for European brains in art, literature and government is pathetic. Here, the job is his own, and he can tackle it in his own way. America will always be separated from the old continents by its prodigious optimism. There is a perceptible shivering just now under the inevitable disillusionments of the War. But the springs of American optimism are apparently inexhaustible. It is the one orthodoxy you may not seriouslv challenge. Never, they say. did the Senate less represent the nation. They add. with a smile, "Don't Worry; it will all come right," meaning to comfort you; and you only feel like an impatient child rebuked. For Example. One day, while the War was a platform topic, and an Englishman could still display his native acerbity, T had a larsre audience at my mercy for a warm half-hour. There followed a New York lawyer, an old hand in the native art of afterdinner speech, a pawky fellow, shrewd and jolly; and in two minutes we were enveloped in a radiant cloud of general benevolence, a bubblcmcnt of humour that dissolved every outline I had sought to draw in caustic and left everyone completely happy. An hour passed, so catching is this cheerful mood, ere I recalled that T was right, and that the European mess really is dangerous. If I speak of this optimism as religiously cultivated, let no one suppose I mean flogging up an anaemic, give-Pro-j videnec-the-benefit-of-the-doubt piety, I such as Tennyson chanted to the young ] Queen Victoria and her middle-class adorers. Nothing of the kind. True, it is inenrrigiblv romantic and chronically sentimental. In that it recalls the mid-Victorian era; but it is I neither flabby nor hypocritical. From the starry Transcendentalism of Emerson to the earthy Church of Christ Scientist, with its hemicycles of evening dross and its daily newspaper, there have been many attempts to precipitate a working philosophy, a religion, from the native confidence, good will, and adventurousness of this people; and there will probably bo many more. Once in a while they may be redeemed bv the leadership of such a poet as Emerson was; generally, their chief interest is to display the mass-tempera-ment. Generally, they caricature the truth of individualism by exaggeration. But there is a truth, and America incarnates it in her swarming, genial vigour, at a time when the older races have committed themselves to very different paths.