England is a mellow country, and the English people are a mellow
people. They have hung on the tree of nations a long time, and will, no
doubt, hang as much longer; for windfalls, I reckon, are not the order
in this island. We are pitched several degrees higher in this country.
By contrast, things here are loud, sharp, and garish. Our geography is
loud; the manners of the people are loud; our climate is loud, very
loud, so dry and sharp, and full of violent changes and contrasts; and
our goings-out and comings-in as a nation are anything but silent. Do
we not occasionally give the door an extra slam just for effect?
In England everything is on a lower key, slower, steadier, gentler.
Life is, no doubt, as full, or fuller, in its material forms and
measures, but less violent and aggressive. The buffers the English have
between their cars to break the shock are typical of much one sees
there.
All sounds are softer in England; the surface of things is less hard.
The eye of day and the face of Nature are less bright. Everything has a
mellow, subdued cast. There is no abruptness in the landscape, no sharp
and violent contrasts, no brilliant and striking tints in the foliage.
A soft, pale yellow is all one sees in the way of tints along the
borders of the autumn woods. English apples (very small and inferior,
by the way) are not so highly colored as ours. The blackberries, just
ripening in October, are less pungent and acid; and the garden
vegetables, such as cabbage, celery, cauliflower, beet, and other root
crops, are less rank and fibrous; and I am very sure that the meats
also are tenderer and sweeter. There can be no doubt about the
superiority of English mutton; and the tender and succulent grass, and
the moist and agreeable climate, must tell upon the beef also.
English coal is all soft coal, and the stone is soft stone. The
foundations of the hills are chalk instead of granite. The stone with
which most of the old churches and cathedrals are built would not
endure in our climate half a century; but in Britain the tooth of Time
is much blunter, and the hunger of the old man less ravenous, and the
ancient architecture stands half a millennium, or until it is slowly
worn away by the gentle attrition of the wind and rain.
At Chester, the old Roman wall that surrounds the town, built in the
first century and repaired in the ninth, is still standing without a
break or a swerve, though in some places the outer face of the wall is
worn through. The Cathedral, and St. John's Church, in the same town,
present to the beholder outlines as jagged and broken as rocks and
cliffs; and yet it is only chip by chip, or grain by grain, that ruin
approaches. The timber also lasts an incredibly long time. Beneath one
of the arched ways, in the Chester wall above referred to, I saw
timbers that must have been in place five or six hundred years. The
beams in the old houses, also fully exposed to the weather, seem
incapable of decay; those dating from Shakespeare's time being
apparently as firm as ever.
I noticed that the characteristic aspect of the clouds in England was
different from ours,--soft, fleecy, vapory, indistinguishable,--never
the firm, compact, sharply, defined, deeply dyed masses and fragments
so common in our own sky. It rains easily but slowly. The average
rainfall of London is less than that of New York, and yet it doubtless
rains ten days in the former to one in the latter. Storms accompanied
with thunder are rare; while the crashing, wrenching, explosive
thunder-gusts so common with us, deluging the earth and convulsing the
heavens, are seldom known.
In keeping with this elemental control and moderation, I found the
character and manners of the people gentler and sweeter than I had been
led to believe they were. No loudness, brazenness, impertinence; no
oaths, no swaggering, no leering at women, no irreverence, no
flippancy, no bullying, no insolence of porters or clerks or
conductors, no importunity of bootblacks or newsboys, no
omnivorousness, of hackmen,--at least, comparatively none,--all of
which an American is apt to notice, and, I hope, appreciate. In London
the bootblack salutes you with a respectful bow and touches his cap,
and would no more think of pursuing you or answering your refusal than
he would of jumping into the Thames. The same is true of the newsboys.
If they were to scream and bellow in London as they do in New York or
Washington, they would be suppressed by the police, as they ought to
be. The vender of papers stands at the comer of the street, with his
goods in his arms, and a large placard spread out at his feet, giving
in big letters the principal news-headings.
Street-cries of all kinds are less noticeable, less aggressive, than in
this country, and the manners of the shopmen make you feel you are
conferring a benefit instead of receiving one. Even their locomotives
are less noisy than ours, having a shrill, infantile whistle that
contrasts strongly with the loud, demoniac yell that makes a residence
near a railway or a depot, in this country, so unbearable. The trains
themselves move with wonderful smoothness and celerity, making a mere
fraction of the racket made by our flying palaces as they go swaying
and jolting over our hasty, ill-ballasted roads.
It is characteristic of the English prudence and plain dealing, that
they put so little on the cars and so much on the road, while the
reverse process is equally characteristic of American enterprise. Our
railway system no doubt has certain advantages, or rather conveniences,
over the English, but, for my part, I had rather ride smoothly,
swiftly, and safely in a luggage van than be jerked and jolted to
destruction in the velvet and veneering of our palace cars. Upholster
the road first, and let us ride on bare boards until a cushion can be
afforded; not till after the bridges are of granite and iron, and the
rails of steel, do we want this more than aristocratic splendor and
luxury of palace and drawingroom cars. To me there is no more marked
sign of essential vulgarity of the national manners than these princely
cars and beggarly, clap-trap roads. It is like a man wearing a ruffled
and jeweled shirtfront, but too poor to afford a shirt itself.
I have said the English are a sweet and mellow people. There is,
indeed, a charm about these ancestral races that goes to the heart. And
herein was one of the profoundest surprises of my visit, namely, that,
in coming from the New World to the Old, from a people the most
recently out of the woods of any, to one of the ripest and venerablest
of the European nationalities, I should find a race more simple,
youthful, and less sophisticated than the one I had left behind me. Yet
this was my impression. We have lost immensely in some things, and what
we have gained is not yet so obvious or so definable. We have lost in
reverence, in homeliness, in heart and conscience,--in virtue, using
the word in its proper sense. To some, the difference which I note may
appear a difference in favor of the great cuteness, wideawakeness, and
enterprise of the American, but it is simply a difference expressive of
our greater forwardness. We are a forward people, and the god we
worship is Smartness. In one of the worst tendencies of the age,
namely, an impudent, superficial, journalistic intellectuality and
glibness, America, in her polite and literary circles, no doubt leads
all other nations. English books and newspapers show more homely
veracity, more singleness of purpose, in short more character, than
ours. The great charm of such a man as Darwin, for instance, is his
simple manliness and transparent good faith, and the absence in him of
that finical, self-complacent smartness which is the bane of our
literature.
The poet Clough thought the New England man more simple than the man of
Old England. Hawthorne, on the other hand, seemed reluctant to admit
that the English were a "franker and simpler people, from peer to
peasant," than we are; and that they had not yet wandered so far from
that "healthful and primitive simplicity in which man was created" as
have their descendants in America. My own impression accords with
Hawthorne's. We are a more alert and curious people, but not so
simple,--not so easily angered, nor so easily amused. We have partaken
more largely of the fruit of the forbidden tree. The English have more
of the stay-at-home virtues, which, on the other hand, they no doubt
pay pretty well for by their more insular tendencies.
The youths and maidens seemed more simple, with their softer and less
intellectual faces. When I returned from Paris, the only person in the
second-class compartment of the car with me, for a long distance, was
an English youth eighteen or twenty years old, returning home to London
after an absence of nearly a year, which he had spent as waiter in a
Parisian hotel. He was born in London and had spent nearly his whole
life there, where his mother, a widow, then lived. He talked very
freely with me, and told me his troubles, and plans, and hopes, as if
we had long known each other. What especially struck me in the youth
was a kind of sweetness and innocence--perhaps what some would call
"greenness"--that at home I had associated only with country boys, and
not even with them latterly. The smartness and knowingness and a
certain hardness or keenness of our city youths,--there was no trace of
it at all in this young Cockney. But he liked American travelers better
than those from his own country. They were more friendly and
communicative,--were not so afraid to speak to "a fellow," and at the
hotel were more easily pleased.
The American is certainly not the grumbler the Englishman is; he is
more cosmopolitan and conciliatory. The Englishman will not adapt
himself to his surroundings; he is not the least bit an imitative
animal; he will be nothing but an Englishman, and is out of place--an
anomaly--in any country but his own. To understand him, you must see
him at home in the British island where he grew, where he belongs,
where he has expressed himself and justified himself, and where his
interior, unconscious characteristics are revealed. There he is quite a
different creature from what he is abroad. There he is "sweet," but he
sours the moment he steps off the island. In this country he is too
generally arrogant, fault-finding, and supercilious. The very traits of
loudness, sharpness, and unleavenedness, which I complain of in our
national manners, he very frequently exemplifies in an exaggerated
form.
The Scotch or German element no doubt fuses and mixes with ours much
more readily than the purely British.
The traveler feels the past in England as of course he cannot feel it
here; and, along with impressions of the present, one gets the flavor
and influence of earlier, simpler times, which, no doubt, is a potent
charm, and one source of the "rose-color" which some readers have found
in my sketches, as the absence of it is one cause of the raw, acrid,
unlovely character of much that there is in this country. If the
English are the old wine, we are the new. We are not yet thoroughly
leavened as a people, nor have we more than begun to transmute and
humanize our surroundings; and as the digestive and assimilative powers
of the American are clearly less than those of the Englishman, to say
nothing of our harsher, more violent climate, I have no idea that ours
can ever become the mellow land that Britain is.
As for the charge of brutality that is often brought against the
English, and which is so successfully depicted by Dickens and
Thackeray, there is doubtless good ground for it, though I actually saw
very little of it during five weeks' residence in London, and I poked
about into all the dens and comers I could find, and perambulated the
streets at nearly all hours of the night and day. Yet I am persuaded
there is a kind of brutality among the lower orders in England that
does not exist in the same measure in this country,--an ignorant animal
coarseness, an insensibility, which gives rise to wife-beating and
kindred offenses. But the brutality of ignorance and stolidity is not
the worst form of the evil. It is good material to make something
better of. It is an excess and not a perversion. It is not man fallen,
but man undeveloped. Beware, rather, that refined, subsidized
brutality; that thin, depleted, moral consciousness; or that
contemptuous, cankerous, euphemistic brutality, of which, I believe, we
can show vastly more samples than Great Britain. Indeed, I believe, for
the most part, that the brutality of the English people is only the
excess and plethora of that healthful, muscular robustness and
full-bloodedness for which the nation has always been famous, and which
it should prize beyond almost anything else. But for our brutality, our
recklessness of life and property, the brazen ruffianism in our great
cities, the hellish greed and robbery and plunder in high places, I
should have to look a long time to find so plausible an excuse.
[But I notice with pleasure that English travelers are beginning to
find more to admire than to condemn in this country, and that they
accredit us with some virtues they do not find at home in the same
measure. They are charmed with the independence, the self-respect, the
good-nature, and the obliging dispositions shown by the mass of our
people; while American travelers seem to be more and more ready to
acknowledge the charm and the substantial qualities of the mother
country. It is a good omen. One principal source of the pleasure which
each takes in the other is no doubt to be found in the novelty of the
impressions. It is like a change of cookery. The flavor of the dish is
fresh and uncloying to each. The English probably tire of their own
snobbishness and flunkeyism, and we of our own smartness and puppyism.
After the American has got done bragging about his independence, and
his "free and equal" prerogatives, he begins to see how these things
run into impertinence and forwardness; and the Englishman, in visiting
us, escapes from his social bonds and prejudices, to see for a moment
how absurd they all are.]
A London crowd I thought the most normal and unsophisticated I had ever
seen, with the least admixture of rowdyism and ruffianism. No doubt it
is there, but this scum is not upon the surface, as with us. I went
about very freely in the hundred and one places of amusement where the
average working classes assemble, with their wives and daughters and
sweethearts, and smoke villainous cigars and drink ale and stout. There
was to me something notably fresh and canny about them, as if they had
only yesterday ceased to be shepherds and shepherdesses. They certainly
were less developed in certain directions, or shall I say less
depraved, than similar crowds in our great cities. They are easily
pleased, and laugh at the simple and childlike, but there is little
that hints of an impure taste, or of abnormal appetites. I often smiled
at the tameness and simplicity of the amusements, but my sense of
fitness, or proportion, or decency was never once outraged. They always
stop short of a certain point,--the point where wit degenerates into
mockery, and liberty into license: nature is never put to shame, and
will commonly bear much more. Especially to the American sense did
their humorous and comic strokes, their negro-minstrelsy and attempts
at Yankee comedy, seem in a minor key. There was not enough irreverence
and slang and coarse ribaldry, in the whole evening's entertainment, to
have seasoned one line of some of our most popular comic poetry. But
the music, and the gymnastic, acrobatic, and other feats, were of a
very high order. And I will say here that the characteristic flavor of
the humor and fun-making of the average English people, as it impressed
my sense, is what one gets in Sterne,--very human and stomachic, and
entirely free from the contempt and superciliousness of most current
writers. I did not get one whiff of Dickens anywhere. No doubt it is
there in some form or other, but it is not patent, or even appreciable,
to the sense of such an observer as I am.
I was not less pleased by the simple good-will and bonhomie that
pervaded the crowd. There is in all these gatherings an indiscriminate
mingling of the sexes, a mingling without jar or noise or rudeness of
any kind, and marked by a mutual respect on all sides that is novel and
refreshing. Indeed, so uniform is the courtesy, and so human and
considerate the interest, that I was often at a loss to discriminate
the wife or the sister from the mistress or the acquaintance of the
hour, and had many times to check my American curiosity and cold,
criticising stare. For it was curious to see young men and women from
the lowest social strata meet and mingle in a public hall without
lewdness or badinage, but even with gentleness and consideration. The
truth is, however, that the class of women known as victims of the
social evil do not sink within many degrees as low in Europe as they do
in this country, either in their own opinion or in that of the public;
and there can be but little doubt that gatherings of the kind referred
to, if permitted in our great cities, would be tenfold more scandalous
and disgraceful than they are in London or Paris. There is something so
reckless and desperate in the career of man or woman in this country,
when they begin to go down, that the only feeling they too often excite
is one of loathsomeness and disgust. The lowest depth must be reached,
and it is reached quickly. But in London the same characters seem to
keep a sweet side from corruption to the last, and you will see good
manners everywhere.
We boast of our deference to woman, but if the Old World made her a
tool, we are fast making her a toy; and the latter is the more hopeless
condition. But among the better classes in England I am convinced that
woman is regarded more as a sister and an equal than in this country,
and is less subject to insult, and to leering, brutal comment, there
than here. We are her slave or her tyrant; so seldom her brother and
friend. I thought it a significant fact that I found no place of
amusement set apart for the men; where one sex went the other went;
what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose; and the spirit
that prevailed was soft and human accordingly. The hotels had no
"ladies' entrance," but all passed in and out the same door, and met
and mingled commonly in the same room, and the place was as much for
one as for the other. It was no more a masculine monopoly than it was a
feminine. Indeed, in the country towns and villages the character of
the inns is unmistakably given by woman; hence the sweet, domestic
atmosphere that pervades and fills them is balm to the spirit. Even the
larger hotels of Liverpool and London have a private, cozy, home
character that is most delightful. On entering them, instead of finding
yourself in a sort of public thoroughfare or political caucus, amid
crowds of men talking and smoking and spitting, with stalls on either
side where cigars and tobacco and books and papers are sold, you
perceive you are in something like a larger hall of a private house,
with perhaps a parlor and coffee-room on one side, and the office, and
smoking-room, and stairway on the other. You may leave your coat and
hat on the rack in the hall, and stand your umbrella there also, with
full assurance that you will find them there when you want them, if it
be the next morning or the next week. Instead of that petty tyrant the
hotel clerk, a young woman sits in the office with her sewing or other
needlework, and quietly receives you. She gives you your number on a
card, rings for a chambermaid to show you to your room, and directs
your luggage to be sent up; and there is something in the look of
things, and the way they are done, that goes to the right spot at once.
At the hotel in London where I stayed, the daughters of the landlord,
three fresh, comely young women, did the duties of the office; and
their presence, so quiet and domestic, gave the prevailing hue and tone
to the whole house. I wonder how long a young woman could preserve her
self-respect and sensibility in such a position in New York or
Washington?
The English regard us as a wonderfully patient people, and there can be
no doubt that we put up with abuses unknown elsewhere. If we have no
big tyrant, we have ten thousand little ones, who tread upon our toes
at every turn. The tyranny of corporations, and of public servants of
one kind and another, as the ticket-man, the railroad conductor, or
even of the country stage-driver, seem to be features peculiar to
American democracy. In England the traveler is never snubbed, or made
to feel that it is by somebody's sufferance that he is allowed aboard
or to pass on his way.
If you get into an omnibus or a railroad or tramway carriage in London,
you are sure of a seat. Not another person can get aboard after the
seats are all full. Or, if you enter a public hall, you know you will
not be required to stand up unless you pay the standing-up price. There
is everywhere that system, and order, and fair dealing, which all men
love. The science of living has been reduced to a fine point. You pay a
sixpence and get a sixpence worth of whatever you buy. There are all
grades and prices, and the robbery and extortion so current at home
appear to be unknown.
I am not contending for the superiority of everything English, but
would not disguise from myself or my readers the fact of the greater
humanity and consideration that prevail in the mother country. Things
here are yet in the green, but I trust there is no good reason to doubt
that our fruit will mellow and ripen in time like the rest.