The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1904-01-22
SIDE LIGHTS ON AMERICA.


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 seh-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
mails 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
young families in their pretensions.
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 a portrait gallery of ancestors, dig
nffying the worthy farmer as great
landed proprietor and the cobb1er as a
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. marve1ing at the
unknown names and faces. Fortunate
" 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.
Z We have often crowned mediocrity,
1t was hurt to our pride long ago that
we had no literature, so when Feni-
more Cooper wrote his tedious and
stiIted novels we hailed him as a |
master of English prose. Heaven
knows he was prosy enough. In war |
we needed heroes, so we put Scott on |
a pedestal i1ewn 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
ington and Central park. To the high
uses of architecture we summoned the
lathe and scroll-saw. When war came,
some trif1ing little affair like that of
1872 or 1916, we proceeded to convince
each other that Alexander and Napo-
con would have pa1ed before such con-
diets and that their laurels had been
snatehed away.
There is something of this spirit left.
The nation is still young. But after
Ill it is beginning to have something
N it's history at which even Europeans
would look at with respect If they were
not so busy admiring monuments of
heir own past. If we have no great
literature, we have at least raised CO..
ossal tabulations of wealth and trade; |
f our poetry does not sound the depths
# human experience our inventions
each far into the domain of human
ingenuity; and if our bugles have not
,lown in Napoleonic conquests, our
are redeeming a continent and I
,irdling the world with the lines of S
and cable which we made '
ossible. In material greatness Amer I
ca is equal to its boasts; but the }
rouble is that it boasts so much of 1
Kings that are trivial in it's past that {
t draws the eye of the world away
rom much that is mighty in its
resent. Il
Il