Polly the Pagan: Her Lost Love Letters

Of the many subjects open to the novelist none is more fertile in interests than the international theme, and none more arresting in appeal. Clash of character being the starting point of drama we have it amplified in the international by both sympathy and dissonance. Mutual attraction between individuals will sometimes overleap racial differences in point of view; and yet racial differences in point of view will always be at war with mutual attraction between individuals. All contrasts, all complexities, are focussed on this single stage, while one gets as nowhere else the conflict which each new-born generation cannot but wage against the dictation of the ages. On this crowded scene bring in that American element to which the dictation of the ages means relatively nothing and the wealth of the dramatic field becomes obvious.

It is curious, therefore, that it has been so little touched. It has been entered, but not very far. The great Russian and French novelists, with their concentration on the life immediately round them, in the main ignore it. The English have worked it a little, but not often, and not with much insight. The truth seems to be that the European nations, with their strong lines of cleavage, have difficulty in understanding each other, while they understand America not at all. Steeped and dyed in their own national prepossessions they regard other national prepossessions with indifference, amazement, or hostility. There are exceptions to this statement, of course. I speak only of general tendencies. The trend of events since the war even more than the war itself brings home to us the fact that the European mind is tribal.

The American mind is more open, as it is natural that it should be. It has its national prepossessions; but it has them less exclusively. Moreover, it is endowed to an unusual degree with the impulse of curiosity. It likes to see, to know, to explore. Beyond any other type of mind it regards a foreigner as a man and a brother, and not as a foe. To the American a foreigner’s life, habits, prejudices, and outlooks are of interest. He often likes them. He generally finds them picturesque. He may think them foolish, but he never thinks them dull. Being so busily occupied in creating a life for himself he enjoys inspecting the lives other men have created for themselves, just as a man who is building a house will examine with care the experiments of a neighbor doing the same thing.

The international attracts the American, and yet even the American has no broad international strain in his literature. The theme crops out occasionally, but is never constant. Two or three writers have made it specially their own, but they have founded no line. When we have mentioned Hawthorne in one notable book, Henry James and Marion Crawford in not a few from each, we have almost exhausted the list of the great names of the past, while of the present there is practically no one to quote.

The explanation, if we wanted one, might be found in lack of authority. Though many writers travel in foreign countries few live in them with sufficient intimacy to see below the surface. Against outsiders continental European private life is guarded like a shrine. The Latin countries in particular know little of the easy throwing open of the home instinctive to the Anglo-Saxon, so that, as a rule, a stranger steps within the seclusion of a French or Italian family only by marriage or some unusual set of conditions.

And yet both marriage and the unusual set of conditions occur.

In the case of the former we who remain in America are not greatly benefited, since few of the American women who marry into continental Europe ever tell what they know for the information of compatriots. The power of absorption of a highly organized social life, like that of Italy, France, or Spain, is such that not many who enter it ever come out of it again. They are held by a thousand social and domestic tentacles, which have no counterpart in happy-go-lucky American relationships. Amid their surroundings they may always remain alien, and yet they are enclosed by them, as insects in amber.