RUDYARD KIPLING ON THINGS AMERICAN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 43, 25 October 1890, Page 3

RUDYARD KIPLING ON THINGS AMERICAN.

The American girls are pretty—very much so—with a piquancy, all of their own, impossible to describe as to resist. Sweet ami comely are the maidens of Devonshire ; delicate and of precious seeming those who live in the pleasantest place of London ; fascinating the damsels of France, clinging closely to their mothers and with large eyes wondering at the wicked world. Excellent in her own place ami to those w‘io understand her is the Anglo-Indian ‘ spin’ in her second season ; but the girls of America are above and bevond them all. They are clever ; they can talk : yea, it is said, they can think. Certainly they nave an appearance of so doing, which is delightfully deceptive. They are original, ami regard you with unabashed eyes, as a sister might look at her brother. They possess, moreover, a life among themselves independent of any masculine associates. .They have societies and clubs and unlimited tea fights, where all the guests are girls. They are self-possessed, without parting with any tenderness that is their sex right. They understand. They can take care of themselves. They are superbly independent. When you ask them what makes them so charming they say, * it is be cause we are better educated than your girls and we are more sensible in regard to men. We have good times all around, but are not taught to regard every man as a jiossible husband, nor is he expected to marry the first girl he calls on.’ The young men of America rejoice in the days of their youth. They gamble, race with yachts, enjoy prize tights amt cock fights, the one openly, the other in secret ; they establish luxurious clubs ; they break themselves over horse flesh and other tilings and they are instant in quarrel. At twenty they are experienced in the business; embark in vast enterprises; take partners as experienced as themselves, and go to pieces with as much splendour as their neighbours. Incidentally I may mention that nine American youths out of ten are heavily handicapped by the abnormal weakness of their heads. Phlegmatic ami spiritual, however, they manage to get flushed, affable and drunk on astonishingly small quantities of liquor. The American nation gets drunk by easy stages. A man takes a nip here and a nip there in the morning until by luncheon time, while not really drunk, he is in a condition that no really business man ought to lie in until after dinner. I don’t object to almost continuous beer-drinking as we see it in America. A man will die of dropsy rather than drunkenness if he drinks too much beer. But the American habit of taking mixed drinks at all hours of the day is a very bad one. In your climate a man can keep it up for a long time, till he suddenly drops oil'. Mr Kipling then spoke in a most disrespectful way of Chautauqua, and dubbed it a sort of lawn-tennis academy of arts and sciences. ‘ I remember that during a short visit there I nearly got into trouble by remarking to a friend that the women’s voices gave me the impression that they should be shut up and fed on oil for a year. I had a good opportunity to study the average American woman out of doors, and I found myself wondering whether it was true, as the East taught me, that women have no souls. The motions of their minds were like unto the jumpings of grasshoppers in a bait-box. They managed to invest everything they touched or talked about with a distressed air of unreality—these persons with ideas, whose names were in the newspapers. Ido not think much, as yon say in America, of Chautauqua. People do not get an education that way. They must dig for it, and sit up at night for it, and when they have got it they must call it by another name or the struggle is of no avail. Mr Kipling’s impressions after a four-months’ visit toChicago are :— ‘ I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the sewers and its air is dirt. Also it says that it is the boss town of America. Ido not believe that it has anything to do with this country. I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through miles of those terrible streets and jostling some few hundred thousand of those terrible people who talked through their noses.’