Louise Jordan Miln on “Ango-American and American-Anglo Marriages”
Mrs George Crichton Miln (Louise Jordan Miln), “Ango-American and American-Anglo Marriages,” in The Outlook (March 8, 1913) : 323-324 : link
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- Women’s unanimous love of titular adornment (love amounting to obsession among all femininity of republican birth and rearing) probably does less to cause the steady onflow of Anglo-American marriages than do quite a numer of other traits far more to the credit of American women — and of English men or than do several qualities of the English home-life and of English society. The grip of England upon the susceptible, responsive, plastic, selective nature of the American woman is sure, quick, and tenacious. Only one who has spent long formative years in less satisfactory countries can fully appreciate England, fully realise her claim, her appeal, her charm, her somewhat regal, somewhat gracious poise. “What should they know of England, who only England know?” is magnificently true in a wider and a less national sense than its author meant. Whatever the American woman is or is not, she is rarely dull — and a woman of gentle leanings and womanly tastes who, as a stranger given welcome within the British gates, did not instinctively, involuntarily (and perhaps often unconsciously) reach out with eager hands to catch and to hold for her own some intimate part of British social and home life would be a very dull woman indeed.
- To the American man the appeal of England is far less, and the reason is no distance at all to seek. As a rule he utterly lacks the wonderful (almost uncanny) adaptability of the molten American woman-an adaptability which enables her to slip and fit joyously and successfully into any groove that attracts her. Than the American woman, the American man is less of a success in England; he is somewhat of a failure, and an awkward one at that, and no man likes failure so little. Unless it be financial failure, no man bears it so ill.
- To the American man the English woman is often as attractive as the American woman is to the English man. But the American man does not attract the English woman as the English man attracts the American woman. But, even so, did as many young English girls sojourn in America as do American girls in England, there is no reasonable doubt that as many of them as chose would achieve American husbands — and that the majority would so choose, if they stayed there long, and many after but a short stay. That the result would as often be fortunate as it is this side Atlantic is inconceivable.
- The American man is obedient. He is not charming. He has vision but he lacks manners. He is assertive, but even more is he sensitive and resents and writhes under criticism where an Englishman either ignores or despises it.
- The English woman is not adaptable. Nor is she, out of her native environment, sympathetic. She is charitable; and charity often passes muster as sympathy. But charity is not sympathy. Charity covers a multitude of sins and is kind. Sympathy — a finer, higher quality — understands and becomes of kin. The English woman is not sympathetic out of England. She lives twenty years in Shanghai or in Bombay and never once gets into touch with anyone or with anything there outside of the sharply defined, thickly walled miniature England that she makes for herself and carries with her wherever she goes.
- The English officer of a native regiment in the Punjab grows to know and love his men, as they him. But that officer’s wife does not grow to know or to love the native women — who are, so to speak, “on the strength” — or to be known or loved by those most interesting, most lovable creatures. Perish the thought! Yet what must not that stiffly canonical, mulishly insular English lady accomplish for Empire and for humanity would only she allow (if she coud, which as a rule she could not) her milk of human kindness to flow through with a little less ignorant, a little less vulgar exclusiveness! But she is as her gods have made her, and it were as unjust as it is idle to blame her. If in truth Hannibal melted the rock with vinegar, what of it? Gibraltar is merely rock, and is not English woman.
- Individually the American woman amuses, and often entertains in a graver sense, the English woman, but rarely wins her deep liking — in England. In America the English woman to put it frankly — revolts from the American women en masse. And the English woman almost always (and more especially the patrician English woman) abhors the American milieu, the conditions and exhibitions of American life. And the longer she stays the less she likes. There is a something so excessive about the conditions and characteristics of American life that the most loyal American woman (whose loyalty is better than abortive, vain, and prejudiced) can but feel and respond to the refreshment of the more leisurely conditions, the worthier characteristics of English life. On the other hand a gently reared English woman (as deeply in love as you like with her American husband) is affected by the overplus and the undertone of American society (“smart” or ordinary) very much as one who has dined delicately but amply might be if confronted with a table groaning and reeking with a Gargantuan meal of boiled beef, carrots, cabbage, and jam tart.
- Unless transplanted in almost infancy the English woman is uncomfortable in America, and makes others almost as much so. The English woman stopping in the United States is even less apt, capable, to become spiritually acclimatised than she is when stopping in Constantinople or Teheran.
- And if the two great Anglo-Saxon peoples must and will in marriage mingle, it is devoutly to be hoped that of such marriages the wives may be Americans. Where it is the other way about may the cases be rare! The risk is very great, and may the husband rather than the wife be the migrant!
- To one fine type of American man, England and English life appeal even more strongly than they every do to the most cosmopolitan or the most Ruth-like of American women. Since the Day of Washington Irving’s lingerings here, the United States have sent us scholarly ambassadors, artists, and sailors, who were loath to leave England. And who, in England to-day, more English or to her more attached, than the foremost of America’s novelists? But that particular fine type of American man is, of all the American types, quite the rarest.
- The man more commonly typically American is wretchedly uncomfortable in England. He is not admired here, and admiration strong, thick, and articulate is tenfold more necessary to the American man than it is to the stay in America, he turns and runs, even into the sea. And American woman-and she, like all other women, thirdly (interesting, eloquent, and odd this) the child craves admiration. But she holds love dearer than American born and reared is almost always proud of having admiration. He prefers applause to affection. And in England he is neither applauded nor loved. And he knows brought up in England is almost always a little ashamed of it. Enormously assertive, he is still more sensitive than having an American mother, deeply ashamed of having an assertive. Pathetically resentful of English indifference and American father. The boy at Eton may laugh but fondly, disallowance, and awkward with the gruesome awkwardness -at his American mother. But (unless himself an Ameriand acute diffidence of gross and baseless vanity, he struts can merely sojourning in Bucks) he cringes at an American or sulks, employs noise to cover social diffidence, assumes a father. Not everything was lost at Bunker Hill! The shield of icy contempt to defend a social distaste, the taste of which he himself secretly doubts.
- The American woman in England does not employ noise to disguise social diffidence, because, unlike her masculine compatriot, she feels no diffidence social or spiritual or of any other sort. Nor does she defend social or personal distaste under a transparent mask of ice, for the sufficient reason that she feels no distaste. She "just loves" things, people and ways in England, from the good behaviour of its constables to the monocles of its peers. Granted that she has her faults! But the American woman abroad is not icy. She will chat happily and clearly in the hush of the British Museum Reading Room, she will confide the thrills and the disappointments of her day's itinerary to the shocked or stolid phalanx on the top of a No. 32 ’bus. No, she is not frigid. She is noisy sometimes, it must be owned, but not from diffidence. Bathed in the Gothic silences of really good English society-she grows to like them, to dip more and more into their cool; until she herself grows, if not exactly tongue-tied or statuesque, still comparatively quiet and reposed, and no longer more disturbant of the dignified and deliberate grey English social intercourse than is the soft but sibilant winging of a jewelled hummingbird disturbant of the blinking majesty of a colony of owls.
- The American woman (of the right type) learns her England and comes to adorn and lightly yeast it, almost as much, and about half as quickly, as she comes to love it.
- The American man (except one of the rare and most sparse types) never learns England and never ceases to smart, and to hiss or sulk, at the English utter incapacity to appreciate him, and at the English indifferent omission to pluck toe really good heart out of his crude, eccentric personal mystery.
- The American man is best at home. The American woman too, so far as journeyings few and brief are concerned. But she is at her very best, contradictory creature that she is, when she has accepted at the hands of some British husband his people, his country, and his temples, and has made them hers. But the American man transplants rather better than the English woman does. For she simply does not transplant at all — she carries her England with her : hours, servants, bills-of-fare — almost its very sod, as an Irishman (peasant but not undevisive) anxious to establish an alibi, but staunch to tell no lie, once carried a sod of Antrim shamrock into County Clare, took his stand upon it, and on the crucial day swore by his honour and by all the saints from Donegal to Bantry Bay!
- The American but England-dwelling husband of an English wife may acclimatise and be content.
- The American-dwelling but English wife of an American husband can scarcely hope to acclimatise or be content. Though even in that case great love and sound common sense have sometimes wrought their twin supermiracle, as love and common sense have always a fair chance to do, in Soho or New York.
- The Englishman, who marries in America and stays there, gets along infinitely better as a rule than does the English wife in the American home, and considerably better than does the American husband in the English home. This is so for these reasons among others: first, the Englishman who unalterably dislikes America does not like the American woman in America, however gaily he might lash himself to her chariot wheel in Europe. Secondly, he does not often stay in America, he turns and runs, even into the sea. And thirdly (interesting, eloquent, and odd this) the child American born and reared is almost always proud of having an English parent — of whichever sex. A child born and brought up in England is almost always a little ashamed of having an American mother, deeply ashamed of having an American father. The boy at Eton may laugh — but fondly — at his American mother. But (unless himself an American merely sojourning in Bucks) he cringes at an American father. Not everything was lost at Bunker Hill. The surrender at Yorktown was not entire.
the essay is taken up in a response (more a read-through, with commentary) in “Transatlantic Mating” by “Anglo-American,” with two illustrations by F. Strothman, Harper’s Weekly (May 17, 1913) : 8-9 : link
Penn State copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
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