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                           Eclectic Magazine

                                  OF

                 FOREIGN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

                          ————————————
     New Series.    }                        { Old Series complete
  Vol. XLI., No. 4. }      April, 1885.      { in 63 vols.
                          ————————————




                      A WORD MORE ABOUT AMERICA.

                          BY MATTHEW ARNOLD.

When I was at Chicago last year, I was asked whether Lord Coleridge
would not write a book about America. I ventured to answer confidently
for him that he would do nothing of the kind. Not at Chicago only, but
almost wherever I went, I was asked whether I myself did not intend
to write a book about America. For oneself one can answer yet more
confidently than for one’s friends, and I always replied that most
assuredly I had no such intention. To write a book about America, on
the strength of having made merely such a tour there as mine was,
and with no fuller equipment of preparatory studies and of local
observations than I possess, would seem to me an impertinence.

It is now a long while since I read M. de Tocqueville’s famous
work on Democracy in America. I have the highest respect for M. de
Tocqueville; but my remembrance of his book is that it deals too much
in abstractions for my taste, and that it is written, moreover, in a
style which many French writers adopt, but which I find trying—a style
cut into short paragraphs and wearing an air of rigorous scientific
deduction without the reality. Very likely, however, I do M. de
Tocqueville injustice. My debility in high speculation is well known,
and I mean to attempt his book on Democracy again when I have seen
America once more, and when years may have brought to me, perhaps, more
of the philosophic mind. Meanwhile, however, it will be evident how
serious a matter I think it to write a worthy book about the United
States, when I am not entirely satisfied with even M. de Tocqueville’s.

But before I went to America, and when I had no expectation of ever
going there, I published, under the title of “A Word about America,”
not indeed a book, but a few modest remarks on what I thought
civilisation in the United States might probably be like. I had before
me a Boston newspaper-article which said that if I ever visited America
I should find there such and such things; and taking this article for
my text I observed, that from all I had read and all I could judge,
I should for my part expect to find there rather such and such other
things, which I mentioned. I said that of aristocracy, as we know it
here, I should expect to find, of course, in the United States the
total absence; that our lower class I should expect to find absent in a
great degree, while my old familiar friend, the middle class, I should
expect to find in full possession of the land. And then betaking myself
to those playful phrases which a little relieve, perhaps, the tedium of
grave disquisitions of this sort, I said that I imagined one would just
have in America our Philistines, with our aristocracy quite left out
and our populace very nearly.

An acute and singularly candid American, whose name I will on no
account betray to his countrymen, read these observations of mine, and
he made a remark upon them to me which struck me a good deal. Yes, he
said, you are right, and your supposition is just. In general, what
you would find over there would be the Philistines, as you call them,
without your aristocracy and without your populace. Only this, too,
I say at the same time: you would find over there something besides,
something more, something which you do not bring out, which you cannot
know and bring out, perhaps, without actually visiting the United
States, but which you would recognise if you saw it.

My friend was a true prophet. When I saw the United States I recognised
that the general account which I had hazarded of them was, indeed, not
erroneous, but that it required to have something added to supplement
it. I should not like either my friends in America or my countrymen
here at home to think that my “Word about America” gave my full and
final thoughts respecting the people of the United States. The new and
modifying impressions brought by experience I shall communicate, as I
did my original expectations, with all good faith, and as simply and
plainly as possible. Perhaps when I have yet again visited America,
have seen the great West, and have had a second reading of M. de
Tocqueville’s classical work on Democracy, my mind may be enlarged and
my present impressions still further modified by new ideas. If so, I
promise to make my confession duly; not indeed to make it, even then,
in a book about America, but to make it in a brief “Last Word” on that
great subject—a word, like its predecessors, of open-hearted and free
conversation with the readers of this Review.

       *       *       *       *       *

I suppose I am not by nature disposed to think so much as most people
do of “