NOTE TO EDITORS: This article must not be published before September 8, 1928.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25th, 1928.

UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS.

ARTICLE No. 9.

MAIN STREETS AND BABBITS OF BRITAIN.

By Sinclair Lewis.

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

This happened, and his words are literal.

The other day, when I was having tea in the lounge of an old inn at Salisbury -- a lounge constructed at some unknown date between 1300 and 1400 -- in straggled a party of three American clergymen, touring England for the first time. One of them looked about at the vast unspoiled beams, the wide fire-place, with a patch of bricks from the Roman building that once stood there, the casement windows with chintz curtains. He sighed to his companions:

"This place makes an American feel pretty infantile, doesn't it? Six hundred years old! What the English have behind them, to draw on! But we -- think of the way we stand around wondering at a New England house that's two hundred years old. And out in my town, in the Middlewest, we take strangers around to point out a house that's sixty years old! Must be kind of an inspiration to live here. And the cathedral -- well, personally, in one way it depresses me, because I believe in democracy in religion. And yet when I look down between those columns, I feel as though all history were marching past, and I believe that if I had that before me, day after day, it would keep me from fretting over my own little problems."

That is one sort of "typical American tourist." Oh, admittedly, there are plenty of the other, obnoxious sort: of

-1-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 9.

the loud-mouthed, bustling, cigar-chewing lads, so often por-
trayed in the comic prints, who, looking at Piccadilly, shout,
"That isn't one-two-three compared with Nicollet Avenue back
home in Minneapolis," and who complain at the Ritz in Paris or
the Sacher in Vienna, because they cannot have flapjacks and
maple syrup for breakfast. But because they are noisier, they
are more noticed than a score of quiet Americans to whom their
pilgrimage to Europe is one long ecstacy.

Comparatively few Britons understand the person who more
nearly than any one else is the "typical American tourist." He
is usually a she. And she is usually a school teacher. All
her life, although she is physically five thousand miles from
Britain, she has lived there. At ten she read Dickens, at
thirteen most of Thackeray, at fifteen most of Hardy and
Meredith. Since then she has known the novels of Wells,
Bennett, Conrad, Chesterton, Walpole, Rebecca West, A.S.M.
Hutchinson, Phillip Gibbs, May Sinclair, better than any American
authors; she has pondered more upon Charles I and Henry VIII
and the Duke of Wellington than upon Lee, Grant, and Washington.
Before she has ever seen them she knows what Mayfair is, what
Aldershot and the Derby are, how an E.E. cathedral window differs
from the sort delightfully called "perp". She looks forward,
then, to Britain, as her spiritual home; she is hungry for it
as a saint for paradise.

Out of her tiny salary she saves penny by penny -- denying
herself shoes, sweets, theaters, and after fifteen years of
this, she creeps out on her great adventure. She crosses the
Atlantic third class, awed by the pitiless round of sea, most
thrilled when, standing at the forward rail, looking toward
England, she appears most stupid.

When she first sees the green hills of England, they seem
to her to have a sacred gleam, an unearthly light, that makes
them not rocks and earth and sod but sacred shrines.

-2-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 9.

In London she lives in meager temperance hotels in Bloomsbury; in the provinces she looks for boarding houses. She travels third class, she becomes authoritative on 'busses and tram lines, and in three months of wandering she never once takes a taxi, and never once is heard in gold and scarlet Hotels de Luxe bellowing that Omaha puts it all over Oxford. You never notice her frail timidity in cathedrals, in the ruins of Kenilworth, in the Saxon chancel at St. Martin's, Canterbury, but every moment she feels the exaltation of finding here, visible and tangible and romantically sacred, her own past generations, the handiwork of her own re-discovered folk.

But -- there is a large and active but -- a greater mistake than not recognizing this eager pilgrim as the real "typical American tourist" is to imagine that they are all of her sort. Precisely the people who best understand that so many of us come to England as to our elder home suppose that therefore we come not as Americans but as Colonials, as Prodigal sons, and that because we love the English, therefore our warmest desire is to be in every respect like them, and that we are eager to take their instruction.

We are like children come home, at middle age, to our well-beloved father and mother, and to their quiet home. Yes, we honor them, we rejoice at quickening again our relation to them. But we have homes and families and businesses of our own, and these we must manage in our own way, without parental advice, nor can we be particularly apologetic if our wives differ from our mothers.

The wife of a celebrated British dramatic critic said to me, out of the blue, "Mr. Lewis, I know I can say this to you because you have lived abroad so much -- not like your horrid insular countrymen. Really, doesn't it distress you to belong to such a race of Shylocks as the Americans?"

And again; At a dinner party in London, a charming old

-3-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 9.

"doing England" very thoroughly, but very fast, and they were awfully miserable about it. I saw their chauffeur whirl them up to the glorious old priory at Christchurch. They climbed out reluctantly, and filtered into the church, dutiful but bored. They kept their eyes on the pavement while the verger was trying to interest them in such confusing mysteries as misericords, the reredos, Norman arches, and Decorated screen. They escaped gladly, and father sighed as he hastened to light a cigar the moment he reached the porch. They sped away -- after wasting a whole fifteen minutes on nothing but an old church. Later I found them in a particularly good hotel just outside of Bournemouth, and Daughter was complaining because she could not get American cigarettes. She had such a young, fresh face -- and such lines of discontent beside her pretty mouth.

I am sure that they were in Paris within a week, and much happier there.

At Wells I watched four young Americans -- at a guess they were Princeton seniors -- on a glorious jaunt, in a big car, by themselves, uninstructed and uncramped by uncle or father. As I entered town they had passed my hobbling caravan at fifty miles an hour; they looked like football heroes and bloods; they were portly with gold sticks and expensive bags.

"Ah," said I, "those young plutocrats won't spend more than ten minutes in Wells cathedral!"

When I left, after an hour in the cathedral, they were still there, sitting quietly in a chapel, absorbing it, seemingly happy, these splendid young warriors.

What -- so far as we can analyze it -- is the present British attitude toward America and toward Germany and Austria?

Britain seems to me at present the most pacifist nation I have ever encountered. It is not that there is any diminution of pride, any willingness to endure insult or injury, but that

-5-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 9.

there is a universal conviction that war is the stupidest, and
least efficacious as well as the most horrible way of accom-
plishing anything whatever.

This opinion about Britain I derive from talking to scores
of the most varied people: to explorers with blazing war records,
and to humble farmers who were too old to fight in 1914-18; to
young Oxford men and to shop assistants in tiny villages; to
journalists widely travelled and rather disillusioned, and to
old women who have never been twenty miles from home. I am told
that there is now arising a generation of youngsters eighteen
years old or younger who, being but eight years old or less at
the end of the war, have no notion of its abomination and who,
like generations before, conceive of it as a romantic and rather
desirable business. But their parents, I find, are resolute to
do everything possible to instruct them that peace is not dull,
but the very mother of civilization.

Regarding America I find a resentment, not only as regards
our profits in trading with the Allies during the war, but also
as regards the foreign markets -- in South America, for example --
which we were able to seize. But it is a resentment made
involved and curious by British realism and British courtesy.
For the realism, I have heard more than one British businessman
say, "Yes, you bagged our markets -- but then, we've done our
share of bagging markets from Germany, and France, and Spain,
and whether we like it or not -- and we don't -- still, we'd be
jolly illogical to complain!"

As for the courtesy part of it, in the hundreds of varying
encounters that a caravanner has along the way -- with shop-
keepers and garage helpers, with the farmers on whose land I
want to camp and the fellow motorist of whom I inquire the way
and the anonymous passer-by who helps me man-handle the caravan
about sharp corners-- I have never yet had a single instance of
being treated with anything save agreeable curiosity and cousin-

-6-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 9.

we revere in Britain -- so long as we can forget the busy
little humorists who keep on insisting that all of us chew
gum, wear Gargantuan spectacles, and frequently remark, "Say,
bo. I reckon to guess that this here joint ain't so blame'
much alongside of Gawd's own country."

Selah!

-8-

NOTE TO EDITORS: This article must not be published before
15th
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1st, 1928.

UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS.

Feature Syndicate, Inc.

ARTICLE No. 10.

MAIN STREETS AND BABBITS OF BRITAIN,

By Sinclair Lewis.

Feature Syndicate, Inc.
( World copyright by United Press Associations. All rights reserved. )

No more rosy cottages, cuddling under pent roofs or standing like peasant boys with their thatch hanging in their eyes. No more lush fields and colored counties, the cosiness and serenity, the opulence and leisure of the south of England. Our gypsy wagon has trundled us out of the green lands into the black, and brought us to the gates of Manchester. For ruins we contemplate no centuries old abbey, ivy-grown, but the grim, ruins of dead cotton mills.

On the beaches of Ramsgate and Branksome and Weymouth, neat little children attended by neater nursemaids dug decorously into the sand. In Blackpool three drunken charwomen, obscene as only old women who have had many children in crowded rooms can be, are trying, with much hoisting, cursing, jeering and laughing, to mount recalcitrant donkeys. The performance suggests the origin of the incomparable British music hall humor. And children are being dragged through noisy crowds into the circuses and side-shows. Given a few hot dog stands and Blackpool would more closely resemble Coney Island or Far Rockaway than it does any Devonshire resort.

Even the people look different -- indeed, coming from the south of England into the north, the foreigner feels as though he were passing from one land, one civilization, one economic organization into another, and this in a distance no farther than New York is from Buffalo. The Englishman of the south, slower

-1-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 10.

of speech and slower of wits, free from suspicion, reserved
yet hospitable, closer to earth and farther from his fellows,
worshipping in an ancient church according to ritual; the English-
man of the north, nippier, sharper-witted, shrewder, filed to
a keener edge by rubbing against his competitors, worshipping,
according to a harder faith, in jerry-built chapels of concrete or
corrugated iron. Less cultivated; more intellectual; living
in some of the ugliest cities of the civilized world. Manchester -
vast, treeless, smoke-blackened, less prepossessing than Essen
or Dortmund, black cities of Germany, far less prepossessing
than Detroit or leafy Minneapolis -- what beauties it has are
contained in a few fair new skyscrapers, built on American lines.
For the rest it is massive with ill-proportioned neo-renaissance
and neo-Gothic, and sooted over by the belchings of a hundred
thousand domestic chimneys. Living, I said, in some of the
ugliest cities under heaven -- but pouring into concerts and
picture galleries, compensating thus for the dreariness outside.

"This field," I said, in my first article, writing in a
Berkshire pasture, "is England ... this feeling, (produced by
a quiet village inn and its visiting rustics) that centuries have
gone before and centuries will come after; that there is no
need to fret --"

Yes, that was England. And this, too, is England.

Looking at this north land England, on the surface, one
would say that it had no more tradition than Pittsburg.
Surely its history is no older than the industrial era! And here,
at least, is there not grave need to fret?

Coming up, we passed through London, and as it was Sunday, we
paused in Hyde Park to listen to the orators who were advocating
Free Trade and Empire Protection, Philadelphianism and Roman
Catholicism and Atheism, Communism and the tenets of the Con-
servative Party. Among them was a boy, conspicuous for his

-2-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 10.

youth, the passionate earnestness of his face, and the queer
accent of his husky voice. He was pleading for the miners of
South Wales, to the casual audience of Sunday strollers.

"You just don't know anything about us, here in London .. you just can't imagine it. You don't believe me, because you can't see how things are there," he cried hopelessly.

Others said the same things to us, in the north of England.

"London is properous," said a Manchester business man. "New
luxury trades, catering to new fortunes, have absorbed the unem-
ployed. The visitor to the south of England must get, on the whole,
an extremely favorable picture. But the great basic industries,
operating for export -- the industries of the north -- they are
hard hit. One third of the Lancashire cotton industry has been
lost to us, taken over by the Japs and the new Indian industry,
and probably we shall never re-capture it.

"And coal -- we are losing out; our industry is not organised,
as, for instance, the German is: thoroughly trustified, rational-
ized, and controlled. There are innumerable tiny mines, owned
by one man, sometimes even operated by a single family -- the
Forest of Dean has many of them. It is difficult for our highly
individualized, haphazard organization to compete. We must
Americanize."

We saw smokeless chimneys enough to justify the complaint.

And this England -- is it then fretting? Does it then
think that its day is over? Does it join in the learned voices
who, preaching the Decay of Western Civilization, begin with
the thesis that the British Empire is dissolving, English markets
permanently lost, the center of financial power passed forever to
the United States?

It does not !

To the Spenglers and Keyserlings, to the prophetic writers
of dismal editorials, to the learned economists who produce

-3-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 10.

co-operation for more efficient mass production -- is going on all the time. But, also, there's no use in losing our heads, and rushing in, saying 'Everything that we've done in old ways must be done in new; everything must be Americanized, or Germanized, right away.' There's a certain strength in our individualistic sort of organization, as well as weakness. If it doesn't all function together, smoothly, in a super-mechanism, it doesn't all crack together, either. There are thousands of small industrialists in England, just managing to squeeze through, by sacrifice and by day-to-day adjustments, but getting by tiding over, against better times. And the Empire is big -- and still fairly empty."

In the dining car of a north-bound train -- we had turned the caravan over to a driver, to make a quick, long stretch jump -- a South American gentleman complained bitterly because the whisky-soda which he had ordered was delayed. The waiter, pale, and sweaty, apologized courteously, and added, "We are very rushed, sir, and many of us are extremely tired. I myself have worked for fifty-six days without one day off; they push us pretty hard, you know, since 'e strike. I am having to-morrow off, but on my own pay."

He was one of the victims of these hard times. Rebellious? Well, hardly pleased, but resigned. His spirit broken, the labor leaders would say, I suppose. But his resentment was modified perhaps by the sense of reality, the equability, which enables the Briton to adjust himself good-temperedly to most situations when he cannot do otherwise.

"I must say that the railroads are hard hit; not only because of the decrease of freightage, due to industrial depression, but because of the increased motorization," he explained. "All these charabancs -- they've taken a lot of trade from the railroads. People like to travel that way, and it's cheaper.

-5-