{0266}
I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or statement like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of social position is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether we spend more or not, I believe that the English live much nearer their incomes than Americans do. I think that we save more out of our earnings than they out of theirs, and that in this we are more like the Continental peoples, the French or the Italians. They spend vastly more on state than we do, because, for one thing, they have more state to spend on. A man may continue to make money in America, and not change his manner of living till he chooses, and he may never change it. Such a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as happened to the elderly American housewife who walked through the magnificent house which her husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed out at last, “Well, now I suppose I shall have to keep a girl!” The girl would have been kept from the beginning of her husband’s prosperity, and multiplied, till the house was full of servants. If you have the means of a gentleman in England, you must live like a gentleman, apparently; you cannot live plainly, and put by, and largely you must trust to your life-insurance as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It cannot be denied that the more generous expenditure of the English adds to the grace of life, and that they are more hospitable according to their means than we are; or than those Continental peoples who are not hospitable at all.
A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that, while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be as unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage. A person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance, or call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively upon our judge. But that is not fair and it is not wise; he does not mean to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his own house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If you ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell you frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind of helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to make it palatable.
An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was a good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France, was inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia which should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was always coming upon illustrations of the loyalty of sentiment with which of course one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom concerned us, except rather handsomely to include us. The French have ceased to be the hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their place in the popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower classes when I could, perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy way, and one evening in a grassy lane I made the acquaintance of a friendly man letting his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the livery-stable line, but he had been a soldier many years. Upon this episode he became freely autobiographical, especially concerning his service in India. He volunteered the declaration that he had had enough of war, but he added, thoughtfully, “I should like to go out for a couple of years if there was any trouble with Russia.”
The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes outnumber them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful minority at the memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere beside the natives. I liked their fondness for their own so much that I never could feel the fine scorn for “trippers” which I believe all persons of condition ought to assume. Even when the trippers did not seem very intelligently interested in what they saw, they were harmlessly employed, for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could not be desecrated by the courtships which are constantly going on all over England, especially at the holiday seasons.
The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age of putting their arms around one another’s waists. The many and many seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will pay for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year round for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds, repair to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They take the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable provisions, and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the sea, and at the pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots, who equally abound, make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no one would suspect from their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they go home at the end “high sorrowful and cloyed,” there is no forecast of it in their demeanor, which is as little troubled as it is animated. The young people are even openly gay, and the robustness of their flirtations adds sensibly to the interest of the spectator. Our own public lovers seem of a humbler sort, and they mostly content themselves with the passive embraces of which every seat in our parks affords an example; but in England such lovers add playful struggles. A favorite pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold something in the hand, and for the other to try prying it open. When it was the young man who kept his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost indefinitely. I suppose it led to many engagements and marriages.
When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at the volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it was all out of the circulating library. As there were often several young women to one man, most of the girls had to content themselves with the flirtations in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines were always prying the heroes’ hands open. On every seat one found them poring upon the glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume under the arm, and another clasped to the heart. At places where the hand played, and they were ostensibly listening to the music, they were bowed upon their books, and the flutter of the turning leaves almost silenced the blare of the horns. By what inspiration they knew whenGod Save the Kingwas coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common, I should not be able to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a story at the time the band came to that closing number, or perhaps they felt its imminence in their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the young girls, however. Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as many old girls as young girls reading novels, and mothers of families were apparently as much addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put by their books when they took tea, which is the other most noticeable dissipation in England. But I cannot enter upon that chapter; it is too large a theme; I will say, merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth Avenue, so the tearooms are in every part of the island.
{0272}
It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last I have a more cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the forenoon. Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower classes, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses, and the upper classes to the evening parade in the Park. As to the relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to be sure; but I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to be. Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on week-days. The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday. Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church as much as formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors. Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.
But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained at home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally conscienced, as those who came to America in the times of the successive Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The home-keeping English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the peoples who still acknowledged as their head “the Bishop of Rome.” Their greater morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than spiritual, and, leaving the church to look after religion much more than our Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists of New England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our ancestors were the children of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized, and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate handsomely. From our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able to imagine a life more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life from which theirs must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government kept, by assent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society so intimately and thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip makes its whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive misery never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn and ingrained that all things English seem righteous because English; with a willingness to share the general well-being quite to the verge, but never beyond the verge, of public control of the administration—with all this, the thing must strike the unbelieving observer as desperately perfect. “They have got it down cold,” he must say to himself, and confirm himself in his unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.
The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits, brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged him to say whether there really were any Americans with an American idea, and a theory of our future. “Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor of such as would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that I have never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet ... ‘tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of the view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman; that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, ‘Messieurs, je n’en vois pas la nécessité.’” In other words, Emerson laid before his great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be, of philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who, with all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to which their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form of Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the German Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in creed and life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth the English had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and fraternity as in the king-capped oligarchy they had before and have had ever since. We may be sure that they will never have such another commonwealth, or any resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself as an eminent example.
The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and to profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest are those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether the head of the state is born or elected, is called “King” or called “President,” since he will presently not be at all; who abhor war, and believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these only if they work for a living. They have already had their will with the existing English state, until now that state is far more the servant of the people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child labor in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies which govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is not silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower classes, and one consoles one’s self as one can by holding one’s head higher in better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be more openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory, and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of the world. There is no fear that in such company one’s national susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much admired for one’s money as at home. I do not say quite, because there are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly a very rich American would be considered in such English society, but certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich Englishman who was also a duke.
I cannot name a nobleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my rich countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and would look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight of the King’s creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost anything in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for scrofula, can add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose achievements merit it, but who with us would fail of anything like it. The English system is more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The English have seen from the beginning inequality and the rule of the few. We can hardly prove that we see, in the future, equality and the rule of the many. Yet our vision is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities our frequent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range there is room for the play of any misgiving short of denial; but the English cannot doubt the justice of what they have seen without forming an eccentric relation to the actual fact. The Englishman who refuses the formal recognition of his distinction by his prince is the anomaly, not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of the English system, as a true believer in the oligarchically administered monarchy, Gladstone was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.