ABSTRACT
Katherine used sometimes to call Murry ‘very English’. His reaction to America certainly was. A fortnight’s impromptu lecturing in New York, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Albana, St Louis and Iowa City was sufficient to convince him that England was far in advance politically. By the end of a further six weeks in Chicago, Cleveland and Buffalo, he was sure that the same applied socially. Aboard the Majestic, on March 2, 1935, he summed up his impressions as follows:
I see, by comparison with the other great English-speaking democracy, how wonderful is our instinctive political wisdom, our elasticity, our capacity to ‘muddle through’ i.e. to retain as much as we possibly can of what is valuable in the old while yielding to the new. I think the U.S.A. is a great and (in spite of all) a lovable country, with an incalculable future. I think the kind-heartedness of the Middle Westerner is really beautiful: restorative of one’s faith in simple human nature. It’s certainly not by be-littling the U.S.A. that I came to have this renewed confidence in my own country: it’s simply that I see how precious are those capacities which hitherto I have taken for granted, or even been inclined to regard as vices: e.g. (1) ‘muddling through’ is a very poor name for the capacity it conceals; and (2) ‘hypocrisy’ is a very poor name for the social conscience which will not tolerate such an exhibition as the ‘strip act’ I saw in the 14th St. Burlesque. 1
