Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/165



"Have we a style that is recognizably American?" If one accepts Buffon's identification of style with "the man himself," and if one then inquires whether an English street urchin can recognize an American at sight, the answer is, yes. The street urchin can recognize us, and by some power of the higher criticism not dependent, as I shall testify, on the cut of our jib, the sound of our klaxon, or any merely sartorial distinctions in which we may garb ourselves.

Some years ago, before the angularities and rotundities of our dispositions had much developed, one of my compatriots, since become an editorial luminary, and I, at the crowded hour in the Strand, were weaving our way through the fog and the London citizenry in what we thought was a complete national incognito. Enveloped in two-shilling cyclist's capes, with ten-shilling knickerbockers, and caps and stockings purchased in Edinburgh, and with an accent studied for a month in the Highlands and for a week in Oxford, we were just flattering ourselves that we walked with national characteristics invisible, nube cava amicti, when a newsboy darted