1877
I
It may be said of the English, as is said of the council of war in
Sheridan's farce of _The Critic_ by one of the spectators of the
rehearsal, that when they do agree, their unanimity is wonderful. They
differ among themselves greatly just now as regards the machinations of
Russia, the derelictions of Turkey, the merits of the Reverend Arthur
Tooth, the genius of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters;
but neither just now nor at any other time do they fail to conform to
those social observances on which respectability has set her seal
England is a country of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with
her being so interesting to foreign observers. The English individual
character is very positive, very independent, very much made up
according to its own sentiment of things, very prone to startling
eccentricities; and yet at the same time it has beyond any other this
peculiar gift of squaring itself with fashion and custom. In no other
country, I imagine, are so many people to be found doing the same thing,
in the same way, at the same time--using the same slang, wearing the
same hats and neckties, collecting the same china-plates, playing the
same game of lawn-tennis or of polo, admiring the same professional
beauty. The monotony of such a spectacle would soon become oppressive if
the foreign observer were not conscious of this latent capacity in the
performers for great freedom of action; he finds a good deal of
entertainment in wondering how they reconcile the traditional insularity
of the individual with this perpetual tribute to usage. Of course, in
all civilised societies, the tribute to usage is constantly paid; if it
is less apparent in America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think,
because individual independence is greater, but because usage is more
sparsely established. Where custom can be ascertained people certainly
follow it; but for one definite precedent in American life there are
fifty in English. I am very far from having discovered the secret; I
have not in the least learned what becomes of that explosive personal
force in the English character which is compressed and corked down by
social conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of the
manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the fermenting
idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most striking
example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is, of
course, the universal church-going. In the sight of the English people
getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its
hat, and drawing on its gloves, and taking its wife on its arm, and
making its offspring march before, and so, for decency's,
respectability's, propriety's sake, taking its way to a place of worship
appointed by the State, in which it repeats the formulas of a creed to
which it attaches no positive sense, and listens to a sermon over the
length of which it explicitly haggles and grumbles--in this exhibition
there is something very striking to a stranger, something which he
hardly knows whether to regard as a great force or as a great infirmity.
He inclines, on the whole, to pronounce the spectacle sublime, because
it gives him the feeling that whenever it may become necessary for a
people trained in these manœuvres to move all together under a common
direction, they will have it in them to do so with tremendous weight and
cohesiveness. We hear a good deal about the effect of the Prussian
military system in consolidating the German people and making them
available for a particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful
to say that the military punctuality which characterises the English
observance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A
nation which has passed through the mill will certainly have been
stamped by it. And here, as in the German military service, it is really
the whole nation. When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his
_entourage_ I did not mean to limit the statement to him. The young
unmarried men go to church, the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members
of society. (That last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance.
No one in England is literally irresponsible, that perhaps is the
shortest way of describing the nation. Every one is free and every one
is responsible. To say what it is people are responsible to is of course
a great extension of the question: briefly, to social expectation, to
propriety, to morality, to "position," to the classic English
conscience, which is, after all, such a powerful factor. With us there
is infinitely less responsibility; but there is also, I think, less
freedom.)
The way in which the example of the more luxurious classes imposes
itself upon the less luxurious may of course be noticed in smaller
matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem
trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation, nothing, however,
is trivial. So I may cite the practice of banishing the servants from
the room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and accordingly, through the
length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest
pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is
blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those
at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of
waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in
English history, all great movements have been made--it is arbitrary.
But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into
each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it
for gentility's sake. My instance may seem feeble, and I speak honestly
when I say I might give others, forming part of an immense body of
prescriptive usage, to which a society possessing in the largest manner,
both by temperament and education, the sense of the "inalienable" rights
and comforts of the individual, contrives to accommodate itself. I do
not mean to say that usage in England is always uncomfortable and
arbitrary. On the contrary, few strangers can be unfamiliar with that
sensation (a most agreeable one) which consists in perceiving in the
rigidity of a tradition which has struck one at first as mechanical, a
reason existing in the historic "good sense" of the English race. The
sensation is frequent, though in saying so I do not mean to imply that
even superficially the presumption is against the usages of English
society. It is not, for instance, necessarily against the custom of
which I had it more especially in mind to speak in writing these lines.
The stranger in London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes
out of town, and that if he have no mind to be left as lonely as Marius
on the ruins of Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a
temporary absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort of
unexpectedness in this prompt re-emigration of a body of people who, but
a week before, were apparently devoting much energy to settling down for
the season. Half of them have but lately come back from the country,
where they have been spending the winter, and they have just had time,
it may be supposed, to collect the scattered threads of town-life.
Presently, however, the threads are dropped and society is dispersed, as
if it had taken a false start. It departs as Holy Week draws to a close,
and remains absent for the following ten days. Where it goes is its own
affair; a good deal of it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that
city, I remember how, when I woke up on Easter Monday and looked out of
my window, I found the street covered, overnight, with a sort of
snow-fall of disembarked Britons. They made, for other people, an
uncomfortable week of it. One's customary table at the restaurant, one's
habitual stall at the Théâtre Français, one's usual fiacre on the
cab-stand, were very apt to have suffered pre-emption. I believe that
the pilgrimage to Paris was this year of the usual proportions; and you
may be sure that people who did not cross the Channel were not without
invitations to quiet old places in the country, where the pale, fresh
primroses were beginning to light up the dark turf and the purple bloom
of the bare tree-masses to be freckled here and there with verdure. In
England country-life is the obverse of the medal, town-life the reverse,
and when an occasion comes for quitting London there are few members of
what the French call the "easy class" who have not a collection of dull,
moist, verdant resorts to choose from. Dull I call them, and I fancy not
without reason, though at the moment I speak of, their dulness must have
been mitigated by the unintermittent presence of the keenest and
liveliest of east winds. Even in mellow English country homes
Easter-tide is a period of rawness and atmospheric acridity--the moment
at which the frank hostility of winter, which has at last to give up the
game, turns to peevishness and spite. This is what makes it arbitrary,
as I said just now, for "easy" people to go forth to the wind-swept
lawns and the shivering parks. But nothing is more striking to an
American than the frequency of English holidays and the large way in
which occasions for "a little change" are made use of. All this speaks
to Americans of three things which they are accustomed to see allotted
in scantier measure. The English have more time than we, they have more
money, and they have a much higher relish for active leisure. Leisure,
fortune, and the love of sport--these things are implied in English
society at every turn. It was a very small number of weeks before Easter
that Parliament met, and yet a ten days' recess was already, from the
luxurious Parliamentary point of view, a necessity. A short time hence
we shall be having the Whitsuntide holidays, which I am told are even
more of a season of revelry than Easter, and from this point to
midsummer, when everything stops, it is an easy journey. The men of
business and the professional men partake in equal measure of these
agreeable diversions, and I was interested in hearing a lady whose
husband was an active member of the bar say that, though he was leaving
town with her for ten days, and though Easter was a very nice "little
break," they really amused themselves more during the later festival,
which would come on toward the end of May. I thought this highly
probable, and admired so dramatic an interfusion of work and play. If my
phrase has a slightly ironical sound, this is purely accidental. A large
appetite for holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know
what to do with them when taken, is the sign of a robust people, and
judged by this measure we Americans are rather incompetent. Such
holidays as we take are taken very often in Europe, where it is
sometimes noticeable that our privilege is rather heavy on our hands.
Acknowledgement made of English industry, however (our own stands in no
need of compliments), it must be added that for those same easy classes
I just spoke of things are very easy indeed. The number of persons
obtainable for purely social purposes at all times and seasons is
infinitely greater than among ourselves; and the ingenuity of the
arrangements permanently going forward to disembarrass them of their
superfluous leisure is as yet in America an undeveloped branch of
civilisation. The young men who are preparing for the stem realities of
life among the gray-green cloisters of Oxford are obliged to keep their
terms but half the year; and the rosy little cricketers of Eton and
Harrow are let loose upon the parental home for an embarrassing number
of months. Happily the parental home is apt to be an affair of gardens,
lawns, and parks.