excellent letter for four months in my hands. The first half of that
time I was still in Europe; the last I have spent on my native soil. I
think, therefore, my silence is owing to the fact that over there I was
too miserable to write, and that here I have been too happy. I got back
the 1st of September—you will have seen it in the papers. Delightful
country, where one sees everything in the papers—the big, familiar,
vulgar, good-natured, delightful papers, none of which has any reputation
to keep up for anything but getting the news! I really think that has
had as much to do as anything else with my satisfaction at getting
home—the difference in what they call the “tone of the press.” In Europe
it’s too dreary—the sapience, the solemnity, the false respectability,
the verbosity, the long disquisitions on superannuated subjects. Here
the newspapers are like the railroad trains, which carry everything that
comes to the station, and have only the religion of punctuality. As a
woman, however, you probably detest them; you think they are (the great
word) vulgar. I admitted it just now, and I am very happy to have an
early opportunity to announce to you that that idea has quite ceased to
have any terrors for me. There are some conceptions to which the female
mind can never rise. Vulgarity is a stupid, superficial,
question-begging accusation, which has become today the easiest refuge of
mediocrity. Better than anything else, it saves people the trouble of
thinking, and anything which does that, succeeds. You must know that in
these last three years in Europe I have become terribly vulgar myself;
that’s one service my travels have rendered me. By three years in Europe
I mean three years in foreign parts altogether, for I spent several
months of that time in Japan, India, and the rest of the East. Do you
remember when you bade me good-bye in San Francisco, the night before I
embarked for Yokohama? You foretold that I should take such a fancy to
foreign life that America would never see me more, and that if _you_
should wish to see me (an event you were good enough to regard as
possible), you would have to make a rendezvous in Paris or in Rome. I
think we made one (which you never kept), but I shall never make another
for those cities. It was in Paris, however, that I got your letter; I
remember the moment as well as if it were (to my honour) much more
recent. You must know that, among many places I dislike, Paris carries
the palm. I am bored to death there; it’s the home of every humbug. The
life is full of that false comfort which is worse than discomfort, and
the small, fat, irritable people, give me the shivers. I had been making
these reflections even more devoutly than usual one very tiresome evening
toward the beginning of last summer, when, as I re-entered my hotel at
ten o’clock, the little reptile of a portress handed me your gracious
lines. I was in a villainous humour. I had been having an over-dressed
dinner in a stuffy restaurant, and had gone from there to a suffocating
theatre, where, by way of amusement, I saw a play in which blood and lies
were the least of the horrors. The theatres over there are
insupportable; the atmosphere is pestilential. People sit with their
elbows in your sides; they squeeze past you every half-hour. It was one
of my bad moments; I have a great many in Europe. The conventional
perfunctory play, all in falsetto, which I seemed to have seen a thousand
times; the horrible faces of the people; the pushing, bullying
_ouvreuse_, with her false politeness, and her real rapacity, drove me
out of the place at the end of an hour; and, as it was too early to go
home, I sat down before a _café_ on the Boulevard, where they served me a
glass of sour, watery beer. There on the Boulevard, in the summer night,
life itself was even uglier than the play, and it wouldn’t do for me to
tell you what I saw. Besides, I was sick of the Boulevard, with its
eternal grimace, and the deadly sameness of the _article de Paris_, which
pretends to be so various—the shop-windows a wilderness of rubbish, and
the passers-by a procession of manikins. Suddenly it came over me that I
was supposed to be amusing myself—my face was a yard long—and that you
probably at that moment were saying to your husband: “He stays away so
long! What a good time he must be having!” The idea was the first thing
that had made me smile for a month; I got up and walked home, reflecting,
as I went, that I was “seeing Europe,” and that, after all, one _must_
see Europe. It was because I had been convinced of this that I came out,
and it is because the operation has been brought to a close that I have
been so happy for the last eight weeks. I was very conscientious about
it, and, though your letter that night made me abominably homesick, I
held out to the end, knowing it to be once for all. I sha’n’t trouble
Europe again; I shall see America for the rest of my days. My long delay
has had the advantage that now, at least, I can give you my impressions—I
don’t mean of Europe; impressions of Europe are easy to get—but of this
country, as it strikes the re-instated exile. Very likely you’ll think
them queer; but keep my letter, and twenty years hence they will be quite
commonplace. They won’t even be vulgar. It was very deliberate, my
going round the world. I knew that one ought to see for one’s self, and
that I should have eternity, so to speak, to rest. I travelled
energetically; I went everywhere and saw everything; took as many letters
as possible, and made as many acquaintances. In short, I held my nose to
the grindstone. The upshot of it all is that I have got rid of a
superstition. We have so many, that one the less—perhaps the biggest of
all—makes a real difference in one’s comfort. The superstition in
question—of course you have it—is that there is no salvation but through
Europe. Our salvation is here, if we have eyes to see it, and the
salvation of Europe into the bargain; that is, if Europe is to be saved,
which I rather doubt. Of course you’ll call me a bird of freedom, a
braggart, a waver of the stars and stripes; but I’m in the delightful
position of not minding in the least what any one calls me. I haven’t a
mission; I don’t want to preach; I have simply arrived at a state of
mind; I have got Europe off my back. You have no idea how it simplifies
things, and how jolly it makes me feel. Now I can live; now I can talk.
If we wretched Americans could only say once for all, “Oh, Europe be
hanged!” we should attend much better to our proper business. We have
simply to live our life, and the rest will look after itself. You will
probably inquire what it is that I like better over here, and I will
answer that it’s simply—life. Disagreeables for disagreeables, I prefer
our own. The way I have been bored and bullied in foreign parts, and the
way I have had to say I found it pleasant! For a good while this
appeared to be a sort of congenital obligation, but one fine day it
occurred to me that there was no obligation at all, and that it would
ease me immensely to admit to myself that (for me, at least) all those
things had no importance. I mean the things they rub into you in Europe;
the tiresome international topics, the petty politics, the stupid social
customs, the baby-house scenery. The vastness and freshness of this
American world, the great scale and great pace of our development, the
good sense and good nature of the people, console me for there being no
cathedrals and no Titians. I hear nothing about Prince Bismarck and
Gambetta, about the Emperor William and the Czar of Russia, about Lord
Beaconsfield and the Prince of Wales. I used to get so tired of their
Mumbo-Jumbo of a Bismarck, of his secrets and surprises, his mysterious
intentions and oracular words. They revile us for our party politics;
but what are all the European jealousies and rivalries, their armaments
and their wars, their rapacities and their mutual lies, but the intensity
of the spirit of party? what question, what interest, what idea, what
need of mankind, is involved in any of these things? Their big, pompous
armies, drawn up in great silly rows, their gold lace, their salaams,
their hierarchies, seem a pastime for children; there’s a sense of humour
and of reality over here that laughs at all that. Yes, we are nearer the
reality—we are nearer what they will all have to come to. The questions
of the future are social questions, which the Bismarcks and Beaconsfields
are very much afraid to see settled; and the sight of a row of
supercilious potentates holding their peoples like their personal
property, and bristling all over, to make a mutual impression, with
feathers and sabres, strikes us as a mixture of the grotesque and the
abominable. What do we care for the mutual impressions of potentates who
amuse themselves with sitting on people? Those things are their own
affair, and they ought to be shut up in a dark room to have it out
together. Once one feels, over here, that the great questions of the
future are social questions, that a mighty tide is sweeping the world to
democracy, and that this country is the biggest stage on which the drama
can be enacted, the fashionable European topics seem petty and parochial.
They talk about things that we have settled ages ago, and the solemnity
with which they propound to you their little domestic embarrassments
makes a heavy draft on one’s good nature. In England they were talking
about the Hares and Rabbits Bill, about the extension of the County
Franchise, about the Dissenters’ Burials, about the Deceased Wife’s
Sister, about the abolition of the House of Lords, about heaven knows
what ridiculous little measure for the propping-up of their ridiculous
little country. And they call _us_ provincial! It is hard to sit and
look respectable while people discuss the utility of the House of Lords,
and the beauty of a State Church, and it’s only in a dowdy musty
civilisation that you’ll find them doing such things. The lightness and
clearness of the social air, that’s the great relief in these parts. The
gentility of bishops, the propriety of parsons, even the impressiveness
of a restored cathedral, give less of a charm to life than that. I used
to be furious with the bishops and parsons, with the humbuggery of the
whole affair, which every one was conscious of, but which people agreed
not to expose, because they would be compromised all round. The
convenience of life over here, the quick and simple arrangements, the
absence of the spirit of routine, are a blessed change from the stupid
stiffness with which I struggled for two long years. There were people
with swords and cockades, who used to order me about; for the simplest
operation of life I had to kootoo to some bloated official. When it was
a question of my doing a little differently from others, the bloated
official gasped as if I had given him a blow on the stomach; he needed to
take a week to think of it. On the other hand, it’s impossible to take
an American by surprise; he is ashamed to confess that he has not the wit
to do a thing that another man has had the wit to think of. Besides
being as good as his neighbour, he must therefore be as clever—which is
an affliction only to people who are afraid he may be cleverer. If this
general efficiency and spontaneity of the people—the union of the sense
of freedom with the love of knowledge—isn’t the very essence of a high
civilisation, I don’t know what a high civilisation is. I felt this
greater ease on my first railroad journey—felt the blessing of sitting in
a train where I could move about, where I could stretch my legs, and come
and go, where I had a seat and a window to myself, where there were
chairs, and tables, and food, and drink. The villainous little boxes on
the European trains, in which you are stuck down in a corner, with
doubled-up knees, opposite to a row of people—often most offensive types,
who stare at you for ten hours on end—these were part of my two years’
ordeal. The large free way of doing things here is everywhere a
pleasure. In London, at my hotel, they used to come to me on Saturday to
make me order my Sunday’s dinner, and when I asked for a sheet of paper,
they put it into the bill. The meagreness, the stinginess, the perpetual
expectation of a sixpence, used to exasperate me. Of course, I saw a
great many people who were pleasant; but as I am writing to you, and not
to one of them, I may say that they were dreadfully apt to be dull. The
imagination among the people I see here is more flexible; and then they
have the advantage of a larger horizon. It’s not bounded on the north by
the British aristocracy, and on the south by the _scrutin de liste_. (I
mix up the countries a little, but they are not worth the keeping apart.)
The absence of little conventional measurements, of little cut-and-dried
judgments, is an immense refreshment. We are more analytic, more
discriminating, more familiar with realities. As for manners, there are
bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organised. (I
don’t mean that they may not be polite among themselves, but they are
rude to every one else.) The sight of all these growing millions simply
minding their business, is impressive to me,—more so than all the gilt
buttons and padded chests of the Old World; and there is a certain
powerful type of “practical” American (you’ll find him chiefly in the
West) who doesn’t brag as I do (I’m not practical), but who quietly feels
that he has the Future in his vitals—a type that strikes me more than any
I met in your favourite countries. Of course you’ll come back to the
cathedrals and Titians, but there’s a thought that helps one to do
without them—the thought that though there’s an immense deal of
plainness, there’s little misery, little squalor, little degradation.
There is no regular wife-beating class, and there are none of the
stultified peasants of whom it takes so many to make a European noble.
The people here are more conscious of things; they invent, they act, they
answer for themselves; they are not (I speak of social matters) tied up
by authority and precedent. We shall have all the Titians by and by, and
we shall move over a few cathedrals. You had better stay here if you
want to have the best. Of course, I am a roaring Yankee; but you’ll call
me that if I say the least, so I may as well take my ease, and say the
most. Washington’s a most entertaining place; and here at least, at the
seat of government, one isn’t overgoverned. In fact, there’s no
government at all to speak of; it seems too good to be true. The first
day I was here I went to the Capitol, and it took me ever so long to
figure to myself that I had as good a right there as any one else—that
the whole magnificent pile (it _is_ magnificent, by the way) was in fact
my own. In Europe one doesn’t rise to such conceptions, and my spirit
had been broken in Europe. The doors were gaping wide—I walked all
about; there were no door-keepers, no officers, nor flunkeys—not even a
policeman to be seen. It seemed strange not to see a uniform, if only as
a patch of colour. But this isn’t government by livery. The absence of
these things is odd at first; you seem to miss something, to fancy the
machine has stopped. It hasn’t, though; it only works without fire and
smoke. At the end of three days this simple negative impression—the fact
is, that there are no soldiers nor spies, nothing but plain black
coats—begins to affect the imagination, becomes vivid, majestic,
symbolic. It ends by being more impressive than the biggest review I saw
in Germany. Of course, I’m a roaring Yankee; but one has to take a big
brush to copy a big model. The future is here, of course; but it isn’t
only that—the present is here as well. You will complain that I don’t
give you any personal news; but I am more modest for myself than for my
country. I spent a month in New York, and while I was there I saw a good
deal of a rather interesting girl who came over with me in the steamer,
and whom for a day or two I thought I should like to marry. But I
shouldn’t. She has been spoiled by Europe!
VIII.
FROM MISS AURORA CHURCH, IN NEW YORK, TO
MISS WHITESIDE, IN PARIS.
January 9.
I TOLD you (after we landed) about my agreement with mamma—that I was to
have my liberty for three months, and if at the end of this time I
shouldn’t have made a good use of it, I was to give it back to her.
Well, the time is up today, and I am very much afraid I haven’t made a
good use of it. In fact, I haven’t made any use of it at all—I haven’t
got married, for that is what mamma meant by our little bargain. She has
been trying to marry me in Europe, for years, without a _dot_, and as she
has never (to the best of my knowledge) even come near it, she thought at
last that, if she were to leave it to me, I might do better. I couldn’t
certainly do worse. Well, my dear, I have done very badly—that is, I
haven’t done at all. I haven’t even tried. I had an idea that this
affair came of itself over here; but it hasn’t come to me. I won’t say I
am disappointed, for I haven’t, on the whole, seen any one I should like
to marry. When you marry people over here, they expect you to love them,
and I haven’t seen any one I should like to love. I don’t know what the
reason is, but they are none of them what I have thought of. It may be
that I have thought of the impossible; and yet I have seen people in
Europe whom I should have liked to marry. It is true, they were almost
always married to some one else. What I _am_ disappointed in is simply
having to give back my liberty. I don’t wish particularly to be married;
and I do wish to do as I like—as I have been doing for the last month.
All the same, I am sorry for poor mamma, as nothing has happened that she
wished to happen. To begin with, we are not appreciated, not even by the
Rucks, who have disappeared, in the strange way in which people over here
seem to vanish from the world. We have made no sensation; my new dresses
count for nothing (they all have better ones); our philological and
historical studies don’t show. We have been told we might do better in
Boston; but, on the other hand, mamma hears that in Boston the people
only marry their cousins. Then mamma is out of sorts because the country
is exceedingly dear and we have spent all our money. Moreover, I have
neither eloped, nor been insulted, nor been talked about, nor—so far as I
know—deteriorated in manners or character; so that mamma is wrong in all
her previsions. I think she would have rather liked me to be insulted.
But I have been insulted as little as I have been adored. They don’t
adore you over here; they only make you think they are going to. Do you
remember the two gentlemen who were on the ship, and who, after we
arrived here, came to see me _à tour de rôle_? At first I never dreamed
they were making love to me, though mamma was sure it must be that; then,
as it went on a good while, I thought perhaps it _was_ that; and I ended
by seeing that it wasn’t anything! It was simply conversation; they are
very fond of conversation over here. Mr. Leverett and Mr. Cockerel
disappeared one fine day, without the smallest pretension to having
broken my heart, I am sure, though it only depended on me to think they
had! All the gentlemen are like that; you can’t tell what they mean;
everything is very confused; society appears to consist of a sort of
innocent jilting. I think, on the whole, I _am_ a little disappointed—I
don’t mean about one’s not marrying; I mean about the life generally. It
seems so different at first, that you expect it will be very exciting;
and then you find that, after all, when you have walked out for a week or
two by yourself, and driven out with a gentleman in a buggy, that’s about
all there is of it, as they say here. Mamma is very angry at not finding
more to dislike; she admitted yesterday that, once one has got a little
settled, the country has not even the merit of being hateful. This has
evidently something to do with her suddenly proposing three days ago that
we should go to the West. Imagine my surprise at such an idea coming
from mamma! The people in the pension—who, as usual, wish immensely to
get rid of her—have talked to her about the West, and she has taken it up
with a kind of desperation. You see, we must do something; we can’t
simply remain here. We are rapidly being ruined, and we are not—so to
speak—getting married. Perhaps it will be easier in the West; at any
rate, it will be cheaper, and the country will have the advantage of
being more hateful. It is a question between that and returning to
Europe, and for the moment mamma is balancing. I say nothing: I am
really indifferent; perhaps I shall marry a pioneer. I am just thinking
how I shall give back my liberty. It really won’t be possible; I haven’t
got it any more; I have given it away to others. Mamma may recover it,
if she can, from _them_! She comes in at this moment to say that we must
push farther—she has decided for the West. Wonderful mamma! It appears
that my real chance is for a pioneer—they have sometimes millions. But,
fancy us in the West!