American Taste.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13596, 16 May 1908, Page 1 (Supplement)

American Taste.

SOME MATRIMONIAL ORGIES. (By Anglo-American, in .the London " Daily, Chronicle.") The American are really having too good a time. Hardly have they married Miss Vanderbuilt to Count Szechenyi than they are absorbed in the romance of the Duke of the Abruzzi. There is something wrong in a dispensation that allows one nation such wild excitements as those and condemns another to the discussion of time-limits and Education Bills. On any, equitable system of distributing national happiness the Vanderbuilt wedding ought to have lasted the Americans for at least' a couple of years.

HUNTING A COUNT

It was a great occasion, and they made the most of it. The reporters picketed the Vanderbuilt mansion. , They formed a bodyguard of cameras and notebooks round the Count. They streamed behind the happy pair when they went out shopping or sightseeing. They pursued them in motor-cars. They interviewed all the Count's relatives, eveiy member of the Vanderbuilt connections down to the last degree of cousin-kind, and their maids and valets. Complete catalogues of the bride's trousseaux —complete, mind you—jostled with the amplest descriptions of the Count's Austrain estates and with columns of speculation as to whether the Countess would be received at the Austrian Court.

In short, the thing was done handsomely Nothing was omitted. The amount of the dowry was canvassed with the most satisfying particularity: The domestic, national, , and international aspects of the marriage were discussed with a fulness and brilliancy that absolutely covered the subject. The paper that was the first to publish a picture of the bridal suite became the envy of the profession. To crown all, the Count smote a photographer in the face, smashed his camera, and was arrested. Everything, in a word, went splendidly, with the quietness and dignity that always sharacterise such affairs in America. It ought, as I have said, to have satisfied the national hunger for at least a year or two. ' /NOW A ROYAL DUKE.

Yet only a few weeks have gone fay and all Aemrica is agog with a sensation even more alluring. This tithe it is no question of Counts and such like rubbish. Nothing less than a Royal Duke is now the sacrificial victim, the Duke of the Abruzzi, cousin of the King, of Italy, and a conceivable successor, as the American papers gleefully insist," to the throne itself. And the lady is Miss Elkins, the daughter of a well-known and very wealthy senator, not, perhaps, quite- so prominent as a Variderbuilt heiress, but still perfectly capable of playing the part expected of her. ■■ -

It has been a delirious time. You have only to pick up any American paper to discover how delirious. An unfeeling and essentially .unrepublican mystery has been, made of "the affair.. The American papers positively, do not know whether the Duke proposed to Miss Elkins* or riot, whether he was rejected or accepted, what the stumbling-block was in the first case, what' the dowry is to be in in the second. They have printed thousands of columns, not only chronicling every movement of the suspected couple, but /upholding every theory as to their present and future relations. They ought, of course, to be frankly informed how matters stand. They quite rightly feel it to be something of a slight Tipon their nation that the Duke should be v.cultivating this stiff monarchical reserve, and not taking the entire eighty millions of them into his own and Misa ElkinS's confidence. He actually sailed from New York on Saturday, leaving things still in an exasperating state, of suspense. ■■■;._. America, I have always thought, is never more American than when gorging * herself on the-details of an event of this L kind. - - Oii - matters she is: the most voluble, volatile, ingenuous and shameless 5 of nations. One recalls the inferno of publicity into which Miss Roosevelt was cast at the time of her marriage. One remembers the % convulsions of New York as it endeavoured to ascertain whether the widow of an American financer had or had not been married. One goes back to President Cleveland's wedding, and the pavillion erected by the reporters almost on the doorstep of the house in which the honeymoon was passed.

LOVE OF PUBLICITY. This is the sort of thing the American public loves. It cannot conceive a social condition in which it -would be deprived of the exquisiteness of these pleasures. Subjects that in London form the- topic of conversation in Bloomsbury boardinghouses, and in them alone, are caught up by all classes 6f New Yorkers and argued over in a nine days' frenzy of debate. The real trouble' with America is that it is all Bloomsbury—a Bloomsbury that recognises no limits or reserves and carries, every .obi-tacks by popular assault. Nor is it- only in the field of social gossip that America insists : upon and always .obtains the fullest publicity. The Government lives in a' glassVhouse, and all the electric lights turned on, the blinds tip,, and a reporter at each window, if not,at each keyhole. The pros and cons of every cause celebre are threshed out in the Press long before they are brought before the Courts. The most unpopular man I have ever encountered in America was an Englishman who had the audacity to-'" surround his "place" on the outskirts of Chicago with a high brick wall. High brick walls are bitterly resented as undemocratic. There are.no" hedges in 1 America, not because they, will not grow, but because they are an invasion on your neighbours' right to an uninterrupted view of whatever you may happen to be doing. In American cities all the houses are within a yard.of two of the pavement. In the country districts all the houses are as barren of surroundings, of anything that smacks of privacy, as a series of German toy-brick, dwellings upon a billiard table. The people, in short, are'nutured in publicity, and the passion for it pervades the whole of American life. The Duke of the Abruzzi is no more than the latest victim of an instinct that is operative throughout all departments of existence in the United States. I sometimes doubt whether that instinct can possibly be pushed to the' point of offending average American opinion. I honestly do not know whether there there in any which Americans would agree in regarding as a transgression against the privacy of the individual.

NEW YORK'S SOCIAL CODE; It is in New York that one sees this theory of society curried out in practice of the largest scale. There are moods when I can only think of the American metropolis as a gigantic.-• nursery, peopled __ by children -who are at once fundamentally artless and horribly knowing and precocious. You have there a Press to which nothing is sacred. You have a social code, which permits lawyers to divulge, the affairs of their clients, servants to spy iipon the households in which they are em- 1 ployed, club waiters to retail the ponversation of the smoking-room, and society women to purchase immunity from attack by disclosing the doings of their friends. You have furthermore a feverish, plea-sure-loving frankly pagan community; you have an "aristocracy" that is restrained by no traditions, that lives and moves in the glare of the footlights, and that finds itself involved in a competition of extravagance, display, and fantastic luxuries. And, having all this, you obtain, ias an inevitable consequence, the reign of an argus-eyed vulgarity based upon the assumption that the mob is everything and the individual nothing.