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Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America. 2 2 Browse Search
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Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America., II: a word about America. (search)
ple in the world. They strike foreigners in the same way. M. Renan says that the United States have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, and will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence. Another acute French critic speaks of a hard unintelligence as characteristic of the people of the United States--la dure inintelligence des Americains du Nord. Smart they are, as all the world knows; but then smartness is unhappily quite compatible with a hard unintelligence. The Quinionian humour of Mr. Mark Twain, so attractive to the Philistine of the more gay and light type both here and in America, another French critic fixes upon as literature exactly expressing a people of this type, and of no higher. In spite of all its primary education, he says, America is still, from an intellectual point of view, a very rude and primitive soil,
Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America., IV: civilization in the United States. (search)
ey deceive themselves totally. And by such self-deception they shut against themselves the door to improvement, and do their best to make the reign of das Gemeine eternal. In what concerns the solving of the political and social problem they see clear and think straight; in what concerns the higher civilization they live in a fools' paradise. This it is which makes a famous French critic speak of the hard unintelligence of the people of the United States --Ia dure inintelligence des Americains du Nord--of the Very people who in general pass for being specially intelligent; and so, within certain limits, they are. But they have been so plied with nonsense and boasting that outside those limits, and where it is a question of things in which their civilization is weak, they seem, very many of them, as if in such things they had no power of perception whatever, no idea of a proper scale, no sense of the difference between good and bad. And at this rate they can never, after solving the