1879
It will hardly be pretended this year that the English Christmas has
been a merry one, or that the New Year has the promise of being
particularly happy. The winter is proving very cold and vicious--as if
nature herself were loath to be left out of the general conspiracy
against the comfort and self-complacency of man. The country at large
has a sense of embarrassment and depression, which is brought home more
or less to every class in the closely-graduated social hierarchy, and
the light of Christmas firesides has by no means dispelled the gloom.
Not that I mean to overstate the gloom. It is difficult to imagine any
combination of adverse circumstances powerful enough to infringe very
sensibly upon the appearance of activity and prosperity, social
stability and luxury, which English life must always present to a
stranger. Nevertheless, the times are distinctly hard--there is plenty
of evidence of it--and the spirits of the public are not high. The
depression of business is extreme and universal; I am ignorant whether
it has reached so calamitous a point as that almost hopeless prostration
of every industry which you have lately witnessed in America, and I
believe things are by no means so bad as they have been on two or three
occasions within the present century. The possibility of distress among
the lower classes has been minimised by the gigantic poor-relief system,
which is so characteristic a feature of English civilisation, and which
on particular occasions is supplemented (as is the case at present) by
private charity proportionately huge. I notice, too, that in some parts
of the country discriminating groups of work-people have selected these
dismal days as a happy time for striking. When the labouring classes are
able to indulge in the luxury of a strike I suppose the situation may be
said to have its cheerful side. There is, however, great distress in the
North, and there is a general feeling of impecuniosity throughout the
country. The _Daily News_ has sent a correspondent to the great
industrial regions, and almost every morning for the last three weeks a
very cleverly-executed picture of the misery of certain parts of
Yorkshire and Lancashire has been served up with the matutinal tea and
toast. The work is a good one and, I take it, eminently worth doing, as
it appears to have had a visible effect upon the purse-strings of the
well-to-do. There is nothing more striking in England than the success
with which an "appeal" is always made. Whatever the season or whatever
the cause, there always appears to be enough money and enough
benevolence in the country to respond to it in sufficient measure--a
remarkable fact when one remembers that there is never a moment of the
year when the custom of "appealing" intermits. Equally striking,
perhaps, is the perfection to which the science of distributing charity
has been raised--the way it has been analysed and explored and made one
of the exact sciences. One perceives that it has occupied for a long
time a foremost place among administrative questions, and has received
all the light that experience and practice can throw upon it. The
journal I quoted just now may perhaps, without reproach, be credited
with a political _arrière-pensée_. It would obviously like its readers
to supply in this matter of the stagnation of trade the missing link
between effect and cause--or the link which, if not absolutely missing,
is at any rate difficult to lay one's hand upon. The majority in
Parliament were not apparently of the opinion that the disorganisation
of business is the fault of Lord Beaconsfield; but there is no doubt
that it is a misfortune for the Conservative party that this bad state
of things coincides very much with its tenure of office. When an
Administration may be invidiously described as "restless," "reckless,"
and "adventurous," and when at the same time business is very bad and
distress increasing, it requires no great ingenuity to represent the
former fact as responsible for the latter.
I have spoken of the rigour of the time in the lower walks of English
life; and it is not out of place to say that among those happier people
who stand above the reach of material incommodity, the Christmas season
has been overshadowed sentimentally--or at least conventionally--by the
death of Princess Alice. If I had written to you at the moment this
event occurred I should have been tempted to make some general
reflections upon it, and it is even now perhaps not too late to say that
there was, to an observer, something very interesting and characteristic
in the manner in which the news was received. Broadly speaking, it
produced much more commotion than I should have expected; the papers
overflowed with articles on the subject, the virtues of the deceased
lady and the grief of the Queen were elaborately commemorated; many
shops, on the day of the Princess's funeral, were partially closed, and
the whole nation, it may be said--or the whole of what professes, in any
degree whatever, to be "society"--went into mourning. There was enough
in all this to make a stranger consider and interrogate; and the result
of his reflections would, I think, have been that, after all abatements
are made, the monarchy has still a great hold upon the affections of the
people. The people takes great comfort in its royal family. The love of
social greatness is extraordinarily strong in England, and the royal
family appeals very conveniently to this sentiment. People in the
immense obscurity of that middle class which constitutes the bulk of the
English world like to feel that they are related in some degree to
something that is socially great. They cannot pretend that they are
related to dukes and earls and people of that sort; but they are able to
cultivate a certain sense of being related to the royal family. They may
talk of "our" princes and princesses--and the most exalted members of
the peerage may do no more than that; they may possess photographs of
the Queen's children, and read of their daily comings and goings with an
agreeable sense of property, and without incurring that reproach of
snobbishness which sometimes attaches to too eager an interest in the
doings of the great nobility. There is no reason to suppose that the
Queen takes the humorous view of this situation; her Majesty is indeed
credited with a comfortable, motherly confidence in the salutary effect
of the court-circle upon the mind of the middle class; and there is a
kind of general feeling that, socially speaking, the Queen and the
middle class understand each other. There was something natural,
therefore, in the great impression made by the death of a princess who
was personally known but to an incalculably small proportion of the
people who mourned for her, and on whose behalf propriety would have
resented the idea that she could personally be missed. It is
nevertheless true that Lord Beaconsfield is felt rather to have overdone
his part in announcing the event to the House of Lords in language in
which he might have proclaimed some great national catastrophe. I was
told by a person who was present that the House felt itself to be at the
mercy of his bad taste--that men looked at each other with a blush and a
kind of shudder, and asked each other what was coming next. He remarked,
among other things, that the manner in which the Princess Alice had
contracted her fatal illness (her tender imprudence in kissing her sick
children) was an act worthy to be commemorated in art--"in painting, in
sculpture, and in gems." I have heard these last two words wittily
quoted in illustration of his Semitic origin. An ordinarily florid
speaker would have contented himself with saying "in painting and in
sculpture." The addition "in gems" betrays the genius of the race which
supplies the world with pawnbrokers.
I left town a short time before Christmas and went to spend the festive
season in the North, in a part of the country with which I was
unacquainted. It was quite possible to absent one's self from London
without a sense of sacrifice, for the charms of the metropolis during
the last several weeks have been obscured by peculiarly atrocious
weather. It is, of course, a very old story that London is foggy, and
this simple statement is not of necessity alarming. But there are fogs
and fogs, and these murky visitations, during the present winter, have
been of the least tolerable sort. The fog that draws down and absorbs
the smoke of the housetops, causes it to hang about the streets in
impenetrable density, forces it into one's eyes and down one's throat,
so that one is half-blinded and quite sickened--this atmospheric
abomination has been much more frequent than usual. Just before
Christmas, too, there was a heavy snow-storm, and even a tolerably light
fall of snow has London quite at its mercy. The emblem of purity is
almost immediately converted into a sticky, lead-coloured mush, the cabs
skulk out of sight or take up their stations before the lurid windows of
a public-house, which glares through the sleety darkness at the
desperate wayfarer with an air of vulgar bravado. This state of things
in the London streets made a rather sorry Christmas, though I believe
the Christmas hearth is supposed to burn the more brightly in proportion
as the outer world is less attractive. The wonderful London shops were,
of course, duly transfigured, but they seemed to me, for the most part,
to have an aspect of vain expectation, and I hear that their proprietors
give a melancholy account of the profits of the season. It was only at a
certain charming little French establishment in Bond Street that I
observed any great activity--a little chocolate-shop where
light-fingered young women from Paris dispense the most wonderful
bonbonnières.
To keep one's self in good humour with English civilisation, however,
one must do what I alluded to just now--one must go into the country;
one must limit one's horizon, for the time, to the spacious walls of one
of those admirable homes which at this season overflow with hospitality
and good cheer. By this means the result is triumphantly attained--these
are conditions that you cordially appreciate. Of all the great things
that the English have invented and made a part of the glory of the
national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the one
they have mastered most completely in all its details, so that it has
become a compendious illustration of their social genius and their
manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled
country-house. The grateful stranger makes these reflections--and others
besides--as he wanders about in the beautiful library of such a
dwelling of an inclement winter afternoon just at the hour when six
o'clock tea is impending. Such a place and such a time abound in
agreeable episodes; but I suspect that the episode from which, a
fortnight ago, I received the most ineffaceable impression was but
indirectly connected with the charms of a luxurious fireside. The
country I speak of was a populous manufacturing region, full of tall
chimneys and of an air that is gray and gritty. A lady had made a
present of a Christmas-tree to the children of a workhouse, and she
invited me to go with her and assist at the distribution of the toys.
There was a drive through the early dusk of a very cold Christmas eve,
followed by the drawing-up of a lamp-lit brougham in the snowy
quadrangle of a grim-looking charitable institution. I had never been in
an English workhouse before, and this one transported me, with the aid
of memory, to the early pages of _Oliver Twist_. We passed through
certain cold, bleak passages, to which an odour of suet-pudding, the
aroma of Christmas cheer, failed to impart an air of hospitality; and
then, after waiting a while in a little parlour appertaining to the
superintendent, where the remainder of a dinner of by no means
eleemosynary simplicity and the attitude of a gentleman asleep with a
flushed face on the sofa seemed to effect a tacit exchange of
references, we were ushered into a large frigid refectory, chiefly
illumined by the twinkling tapers of the Christmas-tree. Here entered to
us some hundred and fifty little children of charity, who had been
making a copious dinner, and who brought with them an atmosphere of
hunger memorably satisfied--together with other traces of the occasion
upon their pinafores and their small red faces. I have said that the
place reminded me of _Oliver Twist_, and I glanced through this little
herd for an infant figure that should look as if it were cut out for
romantic adventures. But they were all very prosaic little mortals. They
were made of very common clay indeed, and a certain number of them were
idiotic. They filed up and received their little offerings, and then
they compressed themselves into a tight infantine bunch, and lifting up
their small hoarse voices, directed a melancholy hymn toward their
benefactress. The scene was a picture I shall not forget, with its
curious mixture of poetry and sordid prose--the dying wintry light in
the big, bare, stale room; the beautiful Lady Bountiful, standing in the
twinkling glory of the Christmas-tree; the little multitude of staring
and wondering, yet perfectly expressionless, faces.