Two things destroy a man in America. One is the suggestion of personal eccentricity, Bohemianism, etc. The other is a disposition for criticism and controversy on their own subjects. The latter is the more dangerous of the two. It is a people devoured by the newspaper habit, like the Irish or the old Greeks of the Areopagus. They ask every few minutes "What is the news?" Thousands of smart young men are hustling about fifteen hours a day to answer that ceaseless question. If it occurs to any one of them anywhere to say: "Well, here is a cocky Englishman who is over here to make some money, but who is unable to resist the temptation to harangue us on our shortcomings"--just that minute you are damned--irrevocably damned. That one sniff of blood will suffice. The whole pack will be on your shoulders within twenty-four hours.
Yet, don't mistake me. These same newspaper men are nice fellows, kindly to a fault, if you avoid rubbing them the wrong way. Swear to yourself that you will be genial and affable with every human soul you meet, and that you will never be betrayed into an argument--on _any American subject_, mind--with any living being, from the bartender up. It is not so hard a rule, old man, and observing it vehemently day and night will make all the wide difference to you between miserable failure and a fine and substantial success.
You will meet two classes of men--scholarly men like my friends, who will take you to clubs where writers, thinkers, students, etc., congregate, and less scholarly but not less likeable ordinary newspaper men. Live your life as much as possible among these two classes. You will catch swiftly enough the shades of difference between the two. It is the difference between, say, the Athenaeum and the Savage. Only there is next to no caste spirit, and points of similarity or even community crop up there between the two which couldn't be here. The golden key to both is unvarying amiability.
You are better calculated than most men I know to charm and captivate them all. They will delight in your conversation and in you, and they will see to it that you have a perfect time and coin money--if only you lay yourself out to be uniformly nice to them, and watch carefully to see that you seem to be doing about as they do.