The Hawaiian gazette. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu, Hawaii]) 1865-1918, 1904-01-22

Jules Huret, whose criticisms of
America and Americans are taking
their turn in the newspapers, speaks
of the amazing facility with which
our school children recite the history
of absolutely unknown generals and
of hitherto concealed events To the
foreigner, immersed in the ancient self
Importance of Europe, there is small!
charity for the juvenile self-importance
of America: and of course our annals,
of which the European knows little in
detail, can not inspire him with respect
for age. Besides, some of these an
nails are individually trivial and are, by
process of time being taken out of the
foreground of American history and put
into the place their relative Importance
merits.
Young nations are a good deal like
They project a sort of artificial halo
over their pasts and magnify their own
achievements beyond their worth. The
instinct of the individual parvenu is to
buy portrait gallery of ancestors, dig
nifying the worthy farmer as great
landed proprietor and the cobbler as 4
manufacturer and the constable as an
officer of State. Something of the same
spirit stirs the ambitious young nation
and it soon erects a Hall of Fame into
which the eyes of the foreigner look
with establishment, marveling at the
unknown names and faces. Fortunate
ly in our own national instance, Anglo
Saxon good sense is strong enough to
eventually make a fair distinction be-
tween our men of actual quality and
those whom. by comparison they
dwarf; and between events of but pass
ing Importance with those of an en-
during type. But meanwhile America
often seems as ridiculous in some of
it's historical claims, as Huret would
have his public believe it is in all.
We have often crowned m6uiocrity
1t was hurt to our pride long ago that
We had no literature, so when Feni-
more Cooper wrote his tedious and
stilted novels we hailed him as IL
master of English prose. Heaven
knows he was prosy enough. In war
we needed heroes, so we put Scott on
pedestal hewn for giants. The Amer
lean drama needed to be made illus
trious and we bowed ourselves at the
feet of the elder Booth who ranted on
the stage as no American had ever
ranted before off the stump. To match
the keen wits of the later Georgian and
earlier Victorian period we brought
Artemus Ward to the center of the
stage and crowned him with home
made bays. Sculpture was cultivated
as witness the older effigies in Wash
IA We, ,.ly u'A h.. hiph
uses of architecture we summoned the
lathe and scroll-saw. When war came
some trifling little affair like that of
1912 or 1916, We proceeded to convince
each other that Alexander and Napo-
leon would have paled before such con-
tiicts and that their laurels had been
snatched away.
There is something of this spirit left,
The nation is still young. But after
all 1t is beginning to have something
in it's history at which even Europeans
would look at with respect If they We're
not so busy admiring monuments OF
their own past. If We have no great
literature, we have at least raised CO.
lossal tabulations of wealth and trade;
II our poetry does not sound the depths
of human experience our inventions
reach far into the domain OF human
ingenuity; and II our bugles have not
blown in Napoleonic conquests, our
energies are redeeming a continent and
girdling the world with the lines of
telegraph and cable which we made
possible. In material greatness Amer
lea is equal to it's boasts; but the
trouble is that il boasts so much of
things that are trivial in its past that
il draws the eye of the world away
from much that is mighty in its
present.