AMERICA TO-DAY
here to crowded and appreciative audiences. Moreover, an excellent German theatre permanently established in the city keeps the literary world well abreast of the dramatic movement in Germany. But the cosmopolitanism of the educated New Yorker merely means that he has everything in common with the educated Londoner—and a little over. His traditions are ours, his standards are ours, his ideals are ours. He is busied with the same problems of ethics, of æsthetics, of style, even of grammar. I had not been three days in New York when I found myself plunged in a hot discussion of the "split infinitive," in which I was ranged with two Americans against a recreant Briton who defended the collocation. "It is a mistake to regard it is an Americanism," said one of the Americans. "It is as old as the English language, or at least as old as Wickliff. But it is unnecessary, and the best modern practice discountenances it." I felt like falling on the neck of an ally of half an hour's standing, and swearing eternal friendship. What matters Alaska, or Venezuela, or Nicaragua, "or all the stones of stumbling in the world," so long as we have a common interest in (and some of us a common distaste for) the split infinitive?
To put the matter briefly, while the outlook of the New Yorker is wider than ours, his standpoint is the same. We gather from a well-known anecdote that some, at least, of the cultivated Americans of Thackeray's time were inclined to "think of
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