Britain in Twenty Minutes
To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English have
mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs. The average
Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own concerns and
monumentally ignorant about all other things. If an Englishman's
business requires that he shall learn the habits and customs of the
Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race which, because it is not
British, he naturally regards as barbaric, he goes and learns them--and
learns them well. Otherwise your Britisher does not bother himself with
what the outlander may or may not do.
An Englishman cannot understand an American's instinctive desire to
know about things; we do not understand his lack of curiosity in
that direction. Both of us forget what I think must be the underlying
reasons--that we are a race which, until comparatively recently, lived
wide distances apart in sparsely settled lands, and were dependent on
the passing stranger for news of the rest of the world, where he belongs
to a people who all these centuries have been packed together in their
little island like oats in a bin. London itself is so crowded that the
noses of most of the lower classes turn up--there is not room for them
to point straight ahead without causing a great and bitter confusion of
noses; but whether it points upward or outward or downward the owner
of the nose pretty generally refrains from ramming it into other folks'
business. If he and all his fellows did not do this; if they had not
learned to keep their voices down and to muffle unnecessary noises;
if they had not built tight covers of reserve about themselves, as
the oyster builds a shell to protect his tender tissues from
irritation--they would long ago have become a race of nervous wrecks
instead of being what they are, the most stolid beings alive.
In London even royalty is mercifully vouchsafed a reasonable amount
of privacy from the intrusion of the gimlet eye and the chisel nose.
Royalty may ride in Rotten Row of a morning, promenade on the Mall at
noon, and shop in the Regent Street shops in the afternoon, and at all
times go unguarded and unbothered--I had almost said unnoticed. It may
be that long and constant familiarity with the institution of royalty
has bred indifference in the London mind to the physical presence of
dukes and princes and things; but I am inclined to think a good share
of it should be attributed to the inborn and ingrown British faculty for
letting other folks be.
One morning as I was walking at random through the aristocratic
district, of which St. James is the solar plexus and Park Lane the
spinal cord, I came to a big mansion where foot-guards stood sentry at
the wall gates. This house was further distinguished from its neighbors
by the presence of a policeman pacing alongside it, and a newspaper
photographer setting up his tripod and camera in the road, and a small
knot of passers-by lingering on the opposite side of the way, as though
waiting for somebody to come along or something to happen. I waited too.
In a minute a handsome old man and a well-set-up young man turned the
corner afoot. The younger man was leading a beautiful stag hound. The
photographer touched his hat and said something, and the younger man
smiling a good-natured smile, obligingly posed in the street for a
picture. At this precise moment a dirigible balloon came careening over
the chimneypots on a cross-London air jaunt; and at the sight of it the
little crowd left the young man and the photographer and set off at a
run to follow, as far as they might, the course of the balloon. Now in
America this could not have occurred, for the balloon man would not have
been aloft at such an hour. He would have been on the earth; moreover he
would have been outside the walls of that mansion house, along with half
a million, more or less, of his patriotic fellow countrymen, tearing
his own clothes off and their clothes off, trampling the weak and sickly
underfoot, bucking the doubled and tripled police lines in a mad, vain
effort to see the flagpole on the roof or a corner of the rear garden
wall. For that house was Clarence House, and the young man who posed so
accommodatingly for the photographer was none other than Prince Arthur
of Connaught, who was getting himself married the very next day.
The next day I beheld from a short distance the passing of the bridal
procession. Though there were crowds all along the route followed by
the wedding party, there was no scrouging, no shoving, no fighting, no
disorderly scramble, no unseemly congestion about the chapel where the
ceremony took place. It reminded me vividly of that which inevitably
happens when a millionaire's daughter is being married to a duke in a
fashionable Fifth Avenue church--it reminded me of that because it was
so different.
Fortunately for us we were so placed that we saw quite distinctly the
entrance of the wedding party into the chapel inclosure. Personally I
was most concerned with the members of the royal house. As I recollect,
they passed in the following order:
His Majesty, King George the Fifth. Her Majesty, Queen Mary, the Other
Four Fifths. Small fractional royalties to the number of a dozen or
more.
I got a clear view of the side face of the queen. As one looked on her
profile, which was what you might call firm, and saw the mild-looking
little king, who seemed quite eclipsed by her presence, one
understood--or anyway one thought one understood--why an English
assemblage, when standing to chant the national anthem these times,
always puts such fervor and meaning into the first line of it.
Only one untoward incident occurred: The inevitable militant lady broke
through the lines as the imperial carriage passed and threw a Votes for
Women handbill into His Majesty's lap. She was removed thence by the
police with the skill and dexterity of long practice. The police were
competently on the job. They always are--which brings me round to the
subject of the London bobby and leads me to venture the assertion
that individually and collectively, personally and officially, he is
a splendid piece of work. The finest thing in London is the London
policeman and the worst thing is the shamefully small and shabby pay he
gets. He is majestic because he represents the majesty of the English
law; he is humble and obliging because, as a servant, he serves the
people who make the law. And always he knows his business.
In Charing Cross, where all roads meet and snarl up in the bewildering
semblance of many fishing worms in a can, I ventured out into the
roadway to ask a policeman the best route for reaching a place in a
somewhat obscure quarter. He threw up his arm, semaphore fashion,
first to this point of the compass and then to that, and traffic halted
instantly. As far as the eye might reach it halted; and it stayed
halted, too, while he searched his mind and gave me carefully and
painstakingly the directions for which I sought. In that packed mass
of cabs and taxis and buses and carriages there were probably dukes
and archbishops--dukes and archbishops are always fussing about in
London--but they waited until he was through directing me. It flattered
me so that I went back to the hotel and put on a larger hat. I sincerely
hope there was at least one archbishop.
Another time we went to Paddington to take a train for somewhere.
Following the custom of the country we took along our trunks and traps
on top of the taxicab. At the moment of our arrival there were no
porters handy, so a policeman on post outside the station jumped forward
on the instant and helped our chauffeur to wrestle the luggage down on
the bricks. When I, rallying somewhat from the shock of this, thanked
him and slipped a coin into his palm, he said in effect that, though
he was obliged for the shilling, I must not feel that I had to give him
anything--that it was part of his duty to aid the public in these small
matters. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine a New York policeman doing
as much for an unknown alien; but the effort gave me a severe headache.
It gave me darting pains across the top of the skull--at about the spot
where he would probably have belted me with his club had I even dared to
ask him to bear a hand with my baggage.
I had a peep into the workings of the system of which the London bobby
is a spoke when I went to what is the very hub of the wheel of the
common law--a police court. I understood then what gave the policeman in
the street his authority and his dignity--and his humility--when I saw
how carefully the magistrate on the bench weighed each trifling cause
and each petty case; how surely he winnowed out the small grain of truth
from the gross and tare of surmise and fiction; how particular he was to
give of the abundant store of his patience to any whining ragpicker
or street beggar who faced him, whether as defendant at the bar, or
accuser, or witness.
It was the very body of the law, though, we saw a few days after this
when by invitation we witnessed the procession at the opening of the
high courts. Considered from the stand-points of picturesqueness and
impressiveness it made one's pulses tingle when those thirty or forty
men of the wig and ermine marched in single and double file down the
loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor in wig and robes of state
leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, knee-breeched and sword-belted, a pace or
two behind him; and then, in turn, the justices; and, going on ahead of
them and following on behind them, knight escorts and ushers and clerks
and all the other human cogs of the great machine. What struck into me
deepest, however, was the look of nearly every one of the judges. Had
they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for
possessors of the judicial temperament--men born to hold the balances
and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. So many
eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped,
long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are
prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship--the
Clay-Calhoun-Benton-Webster period.
Just watching these men pass helped me to know better than any reading I
had ever done why the English have faith and confidence in their courts.
I said to myself that if I wanted justice--exact justice, heaping high
in time scales--I should come to this shop and give my trade to the
old-established firm; but if I were looking for a little mercy I should
take my custom elsewhere.
I cannot tell why I associate it in my mind with this grouped spectacle
of the lords of the law, but somehow the scene to be witnessed in Hyde
Park just inside the Marble Arch of a Sunday evening seems bound up
somehow with the other institution. They call this place London's safety
valve. It's all of that. Long ago the ruling powers discovered that
if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and
destruction unlimited they would not be so apt to practice their
cheerful doctrines. So, without let or hindrance, any apostle of any
creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come
here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith
that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or, what comes
to the same thing, into speechlessness.
When I went to Hyde Park on a certain Sunday rain was falling and the
crowds were not so large as usual, a bored policeman on duty in this
outdoor forum told me; still, at that, there must have been two or three
thousand listeners in sight and not less than twelve speakers. These
latter balanced themselves on small portable platforms placed in rows,
with such short spaces between them that their voices intermingled
confusingly. In front of each orator stood his audience; sometimes they
applauded what he said in a sluggish British way, and sometimes they
asked him questions designed to baffle or perplex him--heckling, I
believe this is called--but there was never any suggestion of disorder
and never any violent demonstration for or against a statement made by
him.
At the end of the line nearest the Arch, under a flary light, stood an
old bearded man having the look on his face of a kindly but somewhat
irritated moo-cow. At the moment I drew near he was having a long and
involved argument with another controversialist touching on the sense of
the word tabernacle as employed Scripturally, one holding it to mean the
fleshly tenement of the soul and the other an actual place of worship.
The old man had two favorite words--behoove and emit--but behoove was
evidently his choice. As an emitter he was only fair, but he was the
best behoover I ever saw anywhere.
The orator next to him was speaking in a soft, sentimental tone, with
gestures gently appropriate. I moved along to him, being minded to learn
what particular brand of brotherly love he might be expounding. In
the same tone a good friend might employ in telling you what to do
for chapped lips or a fever blister he was saying that clergymen and
armaments were useless and expensive burdens on the commonwealth;
and, as a remedy, he was advocating that all the priests and all the
preachers in the kingdom should be loaded on all the dreadnoughts,
and then the dreadnoughts should be steamed to the deepest part of the
Atlantic Ocean and there cozily scuttled, with all aboard.
There was scattering applause and a voice: "Ow, don't do that! Listen,
'ere! Hi've got a better plan." But the next speaker was blaring away at
the top of his voice, making threatening faces and waving his clenched
fists aloft and pounding with them on the top of his rostrum.
"Now this," I said to myself, "is going to be something worth while.
Surely this person would not be content merely with drowning all the
parsons and sinking all the warships in the hole at the bottom of the
sea. Undoubtedly he will advocate something really radical. I will
invest five minutes with him."
I did; but I was sold. He was favoring the immediate adoption of a
universal tongue for all the peoples of the earth--that was all. I did
not catch the name of his universal language, but I judged the one at
which he would excel would be a language with few if any h's in it.
After this disappointment I lost heart and came away.
Another phase, though a very different one, of the British spirit of
fair play and tolerance, was shown to me at the National Sporting Club,
which is the British shrine of boxing, where I saw a fight for one of
the championship belts that Lord Lonsdale is forever bestowing on this
or that worshipful fisticuffer. Instead of being inside the ring prying
the fighters apart by main force as he would have been doing in America,
the referee, dressed in evening clothes, was outside the ropes. At a
snapped word from him the fighters broke apart from clinches on
the instant. The audience--a very mixed one, ranging in garb from
broadcloths to shoddies--was as quick to approve a telling blow by the
less popular fighter as to hiss any suggestion of trickiness or fouling
on the part of the favorite. When a contestant in one of the preliminary
goes, having been adjudged a loser on points, objected to the decision
and insisted on being heard in his own behalf, the crowd, though plainly
not in sympathy with his contention, listened to what he had to say.
Nobody jeered him down.
Had he been a foreigner and especially had he been an American I am
inclined to think the situation might have been different. I seem to
recall what happened once when a certain middleweight from this side
went over there and broke the British heart by licking the British
champion; and again what happened when a Yankee boy won the Marathon
at the Olympic games in London a few years ago. But as this man was
a Briton himself these other Britons harkened to his sputterings,
for England, you know, grants the right of free speech to all
Englishmen--and denies it to all Englishwomen.
The settled Englishman declines always to be jostled out of his
hereditary state of intense calm. They tell of a man who dashed into the
reading room of the Savage Club with the announcement that a lion was
loose on the Strand--a lion that had escaped from a traveling caravan
and was rushing madly to and fro, scaring horses and frightening
pedestrians.
"Great excitement! Most terrific, old dears--on my word!" he added,
addressing the company.
Over the top of the Pink Un an elderly gentleman of a full habit of life
regarded him sourly.
"Is that any reason," he inquired, "why a person should rush into a
gentleman's club and kick up such a deuced hullabaloo?"
The first man--he must have been a Colonial--gazed at the other man in
amazement.
"Well," he asked, "what would you do if you met a savage lion loose on
the Strand?"
"Sir, I should take a cab!"
And after meeting an Englishman or two of this type I am quite prepared
to say the story might have been a true one. If he met a lion on the
Strand to-day he would take a cab; but if to-morrow, walking in the
same place, he met two lions, he would write a letter to the
Times complaining of the growing prevalence of lions in the public
thoroughfares and placing the blame on the Suffragettes or Lloyd George
or the Nonconformists or the increasing discontent of the working
classes--that is what he would do.
On the other hand, if he met a squirrel on a street in America it would
be a most extraordinary thing. Extraordinary would undoubtedly be the
word he would use to describe it. Lions on the Strand would be merely
annoying, but chipmunks on Broadway would constitute a striking
manifestation of the unsettled conditions existing in a wild and
misgoverned land; for, you see, to every right-minded Englishman of
the insular variety--and that is the commonest variety there is in
England--whatever happens at home is but part of an orderly and an
ordered scheme of things, whereas whatever happens beyond the
British domains must necessarily be highly unusual and exceedingly
disorganizing. If so be it happens on English soil he can excuse it.
He always has an explanation or an extenuation handy. But if it happens
elsewhere--well, there you are, you see! What was it somebody once
called England--Perfidious Alibi-in', wasn't it? Anyhow that was what he
meant. The party's intentions were good but his spelling was faulty.
An Englishman's newspapers help him to attain this frame of mind; for
an English newspaper does not print sensational stories about Englishmen
residing in England; it prints them about people resident in other
lands. There is a good reason for this and the reason is based on
prudence. In the first place the private life of a private individual is
a most holy thing, with which the papers dare not meddle; besides, the
paper that printed a faked-up tale about a private citizen in England
would speedily be exposed and also extensively sued. As for public men,
they are protected by exceedingly stringent libel laws. As nearly as I
might judge, anything true you printed about an English politician would
be libelous, and anything libelous you printed about him would be true.
It befalls, therefore, as I was told on most excellent authority, that
when the editor of a live London daily finds the local grist to be
dull and uninteresting reading he straightway cables to his American
correspondent or his Paris correspondent--these two being his main
standbys for sensations--asking, if his choice falls on the man in
America, for a snappy dispatch, say, about an American train smash-up,
or a Nature freak, or a scandal in high society with a rich man mixed up
in it. He wires for it, and in reply he gets it. I have been in my time
a country correspondent for city papers, and I know that what Mr. Editor
wants Mr. Editor gets.
As a result America, to the provincial Englishman's understanding, is
a land where a hunter is always being nibbled to death by sheep; or a
prospective mother is being so badly frightened by a chameleon that her
child is born with a complexion changeable at will and an ungovernable
appetite for flies; or a billionaire is giving a monkey dinner or
poisoning his wife, or something. Also, he gets the idea that a through
train in this country is so called because it invariably runs through
the train ahead of it; and that when a man in Connecticut is expecting a
friend on the fast express from Boston, and wants something to remember
him by, he goes down to the station at train time with a bucket. Under
the headlining system of the English newspapers the derailment of a
work-train in Arizona, wherein several Mexican tracklayers get mussed
up, becomes Another Frightful American Railway Disaster! But a head-on
collision, attended by fatalities, in the suburbs of Liverpool or
Manchester is a Distressing Suburban Incident. Yet the official Blue
Book, issued by the British Board of Trade, showed that in the three
months ending March 31, 1913, 284 persons were killed and 2,457 were
injured on railway lines in the United Kingdom.
Just as an English gentleman is the most modest person imaginable,
and the most backward about offering lip-service in praise of his own
achievements or his country's achievements, so, in the same superlative
degree, some of his newspapers are the most blatant of boasters. About
the time we were leaving England the job of remodeling and beautifying
the front elevation of Buckingham Palace reached its conclusion, and a
dinner was given to the workingmen who for some months had been engaged
on the contract. It had been expected that the occasion would be graced
by the presence of Their Majesties; but the king, as I recall, was
pasting stamps in the new album the Czar of Russia sent him on his
birthday, and the queen was looking through the files of Godey's Lady's
Book for the year 1874, picking out suitable costumes for the ladies of
her court to wear. At any rate they could not attend. Otherwise, though,
the dinner must have been a success. Reading the account of it as
published next morning in a London paper, I learned that some of the
guests, "with rare British pluck," wore their caps and corduroys; that
others, "with true British independence," smoked their pipes after
dinner; that there was "real British beef" and "genuine British plum
pudding" on the menu; and that repeatedly those present uttered "hearty
British cheers." From top to bottom the column was studded thick with
British thises and British thats.
Yet the editorial writers of that very paper are given to frequent and
sneering attacks on the alleged yellowness and the boasting proclivities
of the jingo Yankee sheets; also, they are prone to spasmodic attacks
on the laxity of our marriage laws. Perhaps what they say of us is true;
but for unadulterated nastiness I never saw anything in print to equal
the front page of a so-called sporting weekly that circulates freely in
London, and I know of nothing to compare with the brazen exhibition of a
certain form of vice that is to be witnessed nightly in the balconies of
two of London's largest music halls. It was upon the program of another
London theater that I came across the advertisement of a lady styling
herself "London's Woman Detective" and stating, in so many words, that
her specialties were "Divorce Shadowings" and "Secret Inquiries." Maybe
it is a fact that in certain of our states marriage is not so much a
contract as a ninety-day option, but the lady detective who does divorce
shadowing and advertises her qualifications publicly has not opened up
her shop among us.
In the campaign to give the stay-at-home Englishman a strange conception
of his American kinsman the press is ably assisted by the stage.
In London I went to see a comedy written by a deservedly successful
dramatist, and staged, I think, under his personal direction. The
English characters in the play were whimsical and, as nearly as I might
judge, true to the classes they purported to represent. There was an
American character in this piece too--a multimillionaire, of course, and
a collector of pictures--presumably a dramatically fair and realistic
drawing of a wealthy, successful, art-loving American. I have forgotten
now whether he was supposed to be one of our meaty Chicago millionaires,
or one of our oily Cleveland millionaires, or one of our steely
Pittsburgh millionaires, or just a plain millionaire from the country
at large; and I doubt whether the man who wrote the lines had any
conception when he did write them of the fashion in which they were
afterward read. Be that as it may, the actor who essayed to play the
American used an inflection, or an accent, or a dialect, or a jargon--or
whatever you might choose to call it--which was partly of the oldtime
drawly Wild Western school of expression and partly of the oldtime
nasal Down East school. I had thought--and had hoped--that both these
actor-created lingoes were happily obsolete; but in their full flower of
perfection I now heard them here in London. Also, the actor who played
the part interpreted the physical angles of the character in a manner to
suggest a pleasing combination of Uncle Joshua Whitcomb, Mike the Bite,
Jefferson Brick and Coal-Oil Johnny, with a suggestion of Jesse James
interspersed here and there. True, he spat not on the carpet loudly, and
he refrained from saying I vum! and Great Snakes!--quaint conceits that,
I am told, every English actor who respected his art formally employed
when wishful to type a stage American for an English audience; but he
bragged loudly and emphatically of his money and of how he got it and of
what he would do with it. I do not perceive why it is the English, who
themselves so dearly love the dollar after it is translated into terms
of pounds, shillings and pence, should insist on regarding us as a
nation of dollar-grabbers, when they only see us in the act of freely
dispensing the aforesaid dollar.
They do so regard us, though; and, with true British setness, I suppose
they always will. Even so I think that, though they may dislike us as a
nation, they like us as individuals; and it is certainly true that they
seem to value us more highly than they value Colonials, as they call
them--particularly Canadian Colonials. It would appear that your true
Briton can never excuse another British subject for the shockingly poor
taste he displayed in being born away from home. And, though in time he
may forgive us for refusing to be licked by him, he can never forgive
the Colonials for saving him from being licked in South Africa.
When I started in to write this chapter, I meant to conclude it with an
apology for my audacity in undertaking--in any wise--to sum up the local
characteristics of a country where I had tarried for so short a time,
but I have changed my mind about that. I have merely borrowed a page
from the book of rules of the British essayists and novelists who come
over here to write us up. Why, bless your soul, I gave nearly eight
weeks of time to the task of seeing Europe thoroughly, and, of those
eight weeks, I spent upward of three weeks in and about London--indeed,
a most unreasonably long time when measured by the standards of the
Englishman of letters who does a book about us.
He has his itinerary all mapped out in advance. He will squander a whole
week on us. We are scarcely worth it, but, such as we are, we shall have
a week of his company! Landing on Monday morning, he will spend Monday
in New York, Tuesday in San Francisco, and Wednesday in New Orleans.
Thursday he will divide between Boston and Chicago, devoting the
forenoon to one and the afternoon to the other. Friday morning he will
range through the Rocky Mountains, and after luncheon, if he is not too
fatigued, he will take a carriage and pop in on Yosemite Valley for an
hour or so.
But Saturday--all of it--will be given over to the Far Southland. He
is going 'way down South--to sunny South Dakota, in fact, to see the
genuine native American darkies, the real Yankee blackamoors.
Most interesting beings, the blackamoors! They live exclusively on
poultry--fowls, you know--and all their women folk are named Honey Gal.
He will observe them in their hours of leisure, when, attired in their
national costume, consisting of white duck breeches, banjos, and striped
shirts with high collars, they gather beneath the rays of the silvery
Southern moon to sing their tribal melodies on the melon-lined shores
of the old Oswego; and by day he will study them at their customary
employment as they climb from limb to limb of the cottonwood trees,
picking cotton. On Sunday he will arrange and revise his notes, and on
Monday morning he will sail for home.
Such is the program of Solomon Grundy, Esquire, the distinguished
writing Englishman; but on his arrival he finds the country to be
somewhat larger than he expected--larger actually than the Midlands. So
he compromises by spending five days at a private hotel in New York, run
by a very worthy and deserving Englishwoman of the middle classes, where
one may get Yorkshire puddings every day; and two days more at a wealthy
tufthunter's million-dollar cottage at Newport, studying the habits and
idiosyncrasies of the common people. And then he rushes back to England
and hurriedly embalms his impressions of us in a large volume, stating
it to be his deliberate opinion that, though we mean well enough, we
won't do--really. He necessarily has to hurry, because, you see, he has
a contract to write a novel or a play--or both a novel and a play--with
Lord Northcliffe as the central figure. In these days practically all
English novels and most English comedies play up Lord Northcliffe as the
central figure. Almost invariably the young English writer chooses him
for the axis about which his plot shall revolve. English journalists
who have been discharged from one of Northcliffe's publications make him
their villian, and English journalists who hope to secure jobs on one
of his publications make him their hero. The literature of a land is
in perilous case when it depends on the personality of one man. One
shudders to think what the future of English fiction would be should
anything happen to his Lordship!
Business of shuddering!