NOTE TO EDITORS: This article must not be published before

SATURDAY, AUGUST 18th, 1928.

UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS.

ARTICLE No. 8.

MAIN STREETS AND BABBITS OF BRITAIN.

By Sinclair Lewis.

(World copyright by United Press Associations. All rights reserved.)

The rarest treasure which I have found on this expedition has not been Corfe Castle, with its memory of the dramatic death of Edward the Martyr; not the maker of individual pottery who was a regular army officer till he was crooked in the war and who invited us to tea and treated us like old friends; not the cliffs of Dorset, unchanged since the days of skin-clad Iberians, with wild yet exhilarating gusts of fog driving across them; not the green and gold fields above Bere Regis; not the history-scarred church at Winchelsea nor Elizabeth's room in the Old House at Sandwich; not the grim nonconformist streets of Portland, a stone town for stony men; not the mediaeval High Street of Winchester nor the towers of Oxford in the sunset; not even the coast of North Devon between llfracombe and Lynton, with wooded hill and grassy upland and purple cliffs above the sea, magnificent as the coast of California.

Any one of these would justify pitching across the North Atlantic, but they are all nothing beside a spiritual and literary and sociological gem which I discovered in a popular English weekly periodical of the date of June 23, 1928.

This periodical combines political comment, revelation of the wickedness of the rich, and humor. I take it that this particular gem is humor. It is a conversation between certain English persons and an American tourist on an English train. And

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the American is made (not in the days of Martin Chuzzlewit but in
the era of Thornton Wilder and James Branch Cabell and Ezra Pound)
to speak after this fashion:

"Say, bo, that's some baby. Let him spill the beans. It's
all hunky-dink with me. I'll tell the world I'm used to question-
naires.... Buddy, don't you savvy English?.... Say, mister, you
ain't neglectin' the kid's education, I hope? It gives me the
willies when a kid ain't wise to the good old mother-tongue.....
Yale was my college, mister, and if we don't larn English thar,
pure and undefiled, you can dog my cats..... You've slobbered a
bibful, mister. I'll tell the wold Wrigley's is the cat's
pyjamas -- the parrot's crackers. .... Put it thar! England and
the States will fight side by side in the next war, you bet."

 Eh? I shouldn't think so, not if the humorist thus quoted
 obtains any very wide audience and gives to the world his singular
opinion of American manners.

Please call us Shylocks. Please point out that our gangs
murder on an average 11.6 per cent. of our population annually.
Please remind us, by means of visiting British lecturers (who
themselves lecture entirely for love, and acidly refuse all fees)
that we are all soulless dollar-chasers. But if you care at all
for our friendship, don't present us as speaking like this American
on the train and expect us to find it very amusing.

The Yale College in which this Typical American Tourist
learned his remarkable Babu English is a recent frontier institu-
tion only 225 years old -- and in tradition, since its founders and
its first dons were themselves English university men, quite as old
as Oxford. Among its professors are A.S. Cook, one of the half-
dozen authorities on Old English in the world, and Chauncey
Brewster Tinker, whose books about Samuel Johnson and his circle
are as much read in England as in America. Taft, between his term
as President of the United States and his appointment as Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court of America, was well content to serve

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 8.

as a professor of law in Yale. And it was thar, under such rough frontiersmen, that our hero larned his extraordinary dialect.

But, you suggest, the thing was meant as humor.

Then there is still less excuse, for if it is not very valuable as reporting, as humor it is deplorable.

Suppose that in these articles I were to present a graduate of Oxford as saying, "Ow, blimy, so I ayn't heddicated, ayn't I? Ow, not 'arf! And me as tuk honners in Hoxford and as plys cricket better than wot Jack 'Obbs do!"

Would you regard it as uncommonly funny? Or would you hint that though I am a kind husband and an admirable motorist, as a humorist I was not so happily cast? And then, if I added to my Oxonian's extraordinary remarks a few words of Wessex dialect stolen out of Hardy, and made him say, in a combination of what I thought was Cockney and what I thought was Wessex, "W'en I 'ears you sye that, it mykes us poor folks plim like blowed blathers" -- wouldn't you regard my humor as a true museum piece?

Yet the Yale man, as quoted, combines "woild," which is contemporary New York East Side Jewish, with "thar" and "larn," which are fictional frontierese of 1820, and "hunky-dink" which is a delightful phrase that I have, unfortunately, never encountered before.

These articles are to appear in various lands, but this one I am addressing particularly to British readers, to Fleet Street and Downing Street and High Street, to suggest the folly of having any ambassador at Washington, of receiving any American ambassador at St. James's, so long as little busy journalists, equally your jaunty humorous paragraphers in London and ours in New York or Chicago, can with a few lines of what they regard as humor undo years of diplomacy.

I have said that Britain was quite as blessed with Babbitts as my own favored land. And such journalistic humor is the very essence of Babbittry. Nothing so marks the Babbitt -- American or British or German or Tierra del Fuegan -- as his dual habit of

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 8.

thrusting everything with which he is unfamiliar into pigeon-holes,
and then of being funny about it. To the Babbitt, all Frenchmen
breakfast on snails, all Italians play grind-organs -- barrel
organs, all Jews are rich, all poets wear long hair and starve in
attics.

To the American Babbitt, unless he had been long abroad, all
Englishmen drop their H's; and to the British Babbitt -- whether
he deal in cotton or in words -- all Americans speak like the comic
films.

But the strange thing is that publications far above the
Babbitt class present the American abroad not much more accurately.
I am afraid their contributors have been reading the works of
Mr. Sinclair Lewis, and have caught the tune -- without quite
catching the words.

Punch is, I suppose, the most literate as well as the clever-
est of all humorous weeklies, yet in a Punch of this summer I find
an American, in the dining-room of a stuffy English inn, thus
addressing his son, when son has complained about the food:

"Say, Junior, cut that out. RE-member you're in ancient
England, and prabably ASS-isting at a mediaeval cere-MONY!"

Now here Father Punch sympathizes with the American, even
makes him mildly witty, yet in doing so causes him to accent his
words as never was on land or sea. The American might, perhaps,
say "Re-MEM-burr," but he could not say "RE-member" without
turning a somersault. He would say "As-SIST-ing." He would
either pronounce "Ceremony" precisely as it is given in the
dictionary, or drag it out and make it "CERRR-uh-mony."

I admire accuracy, even in humor. In America, I resent the
presentation of Britishers as effeminate literary gents, or as
crooked propagandists. In England, I get equally into trouble by--
well, *vide sup.*! I believe that if Britain and America are ever
to attain a real partnership, it must be based on reality. We

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 8.

The American like myself, who lives for much of his life in England and who loves it as a second Motherland, has two choices. He can, like plenty of expatriates whom I know, become popular with certain sets in London by abusing his own country rather more than does any foreigner. Or he can insist on speaking honestly of his country's great and romantic virtues as well as of its faults, he can remember Harvard and Yale, the Metropolitan Art Institute and the Congressional Library, along with the chewing gum, and then he will be marvelously unpopular with the more earnest anti-Americans of London. But unpopular or no, if these articles are to have any value as an exploration of Britain -- of the British mind as well as British ruins and cathedrals and pubs -- then they must be honest, and I insist again that the supercilious patronage of America by the little journalists does more to injure the chance for world peace than any diplomat can ever repair.

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