CALLS
It was one evening shortly after I had lunched with Mrs. W. that
Barfleur and I dined with Miss E., the young actress who had come over
on the steamer with us. It was interesting to find her in her own
rather smart London quarters surrounded by maid and cook, and with
male figures of the usual ornamental sort in the immediate background.
One of them was a ruddy, handsome, slightly corpulent French count of
manners the pink of perfection. He looked for all the world like the
French counts introduced into American musical comedy,--just the right
type of collar about his neck, the perfect shoe, the close-fitting,
well-tailored suit, the mustachios and hair barbered to the last touch.
He was charming, too, in his easy, gracious aloofness, saying only the
few things that would be of momentary interest and pressing nothing.
Miss E. had prepared an appetizing luncheon. She had managed to collect
a group of interesting people--a Mr. T., for instance, whose _bête
noire_ was clergymen and who stood prepared by collected newspaper
clippings and court proceedings, gathered over a period of years, to
prove that all ecclesiastics were scoundrels. He had, as he insisted,
amazing data, showing that the most perverted of all English criminals
were usually sons of bishops and that the higher you rose in the scale
of hieratic authority the worse were the men in charge. The delightful
part of it all was the man’s profound seriousness of manner, a thin,
magnetic, albeit candle-waxy type of person of about sixty-five who had
the force and enthusiasm of a boy.
“Ah, yes,” you would hear him exclaim often during lunch, “I know
him well. A greater scoundrel never lived. His father is bishop of
Wimbledon”--or, for variation--“his father was once rector of Christ
Church, Mayfair.”
There was a thin, hard, literary lady present, of the obviously and
militantly virgin type. She was at the foot of the table, next to the
count, but we fell into a discussion of the English woman’s-suffrage
activity under his very nose, the while he talked lightly to Barfleur.
She was for more freedom for women, politically and otherwise, in order
that they might accomplish certain social reforms. You know the type.
How like a sympathetic actress, I thought, to pick a lady of this
character to associate with! One always finds these opposing types
together.
The thing that interested me was to see this charming little actress
keeping up as smart a social form as her means would permit and still
hoping after years of effort and considerable success to be taken up
and made much of. She could not have been made to believe that society,
in its last reaches, is composed of dullness and heaviness of soul,
which responds to no schools of the unconventional or the immoral and
knows neither flights of fancy nor delicacy and tenderness of emotion.
Individuals like Miss E. think, somehow, that if they achieve a certain
artistic success they will be admitted everywhere. Dear aspiring little
Miss E.! She could hardly have been persuaded that there are walls that
are never scaled by art. And morality, any more than immorality or
religion, has nothing to do with some other walls. Force is the thing.
And the ultimate art force she did not possess. If she had, she would
have been admitted to a certain interchange in certain fields. Society
is composed of slightly interchanging groups, some members of which
enter all, most members of which never venture beyond their immediate
individual circle. And only the most catholic minded and energetic
would attempt or care to bother with the labor of keeping in touch with
more than one single agreeable circle.
Another evening I went with Barfleur to call on two professional
critics, one working in the field of literature, the other in art
exclusively. I mention these two men and their labors because they were
very interesting to me, representing as they did two fields of artistic
livelihood in London and both making moderate incomes, not large, but
sufficient to live on in a simple way. They were men of mettle, as I
discovered, urgent, thinking types of mind, quarreling to a certain
extent with life and fate, and doing their best to read this very
curious riddle of existence.
These two men lived in charming, though small quarters, not far from
fashionable London, on the fringe of ultra-respectability, if not of
it. Mr. F. was a conservative man, thirty-two or thirty-three years
of age, pale, slender, remote, artistic. Mr. Tyne was in character
not unlike Mr. F., I should have said, though he was the older
man--artistic, remote, ostensibly cultivated, living and doing all the
refined things on principle more than anything else.
It amuses me now when I think of it, for of course neither of these
gentlemen cared for me in the least, beyond a mild curiosity as to what
I was like, but they were exceedingly pleasant. How did I like London?
What did I think of the English? How did London contrast with New York?
What were some of the things I had seen?
[Illustration: Hoped for the day when the issue might be tried out
physically]
I stated as succinctly as I could, that I was puzzled in my mind as to
what I did think, as I am generally by this phantasmagoria called
life, while Mr. Tyne served an opening glass of port and I toasted
my feet before a delicious grate-fire. Already, as I have indicated
in a way, I had decided that England was deficient in the vitality
which America now possesses--certainly deficient in the raw creative
imagination which is producing so many new things in America, but far
superior in what, for want of a better phrase, I must call social
organization as it relates to social and commercial interchange
generally. Something has developed in the English social consciousness
a sense of responsibility. I really think that the English climate has
had a great deal to do with this. It is so uniformly damp and cold
and raw that it has produced a sober-minded race. When subsequently
I encountered the climates of Paris, Rome and the Riviera I realized
quite clearly how impossible it would be to produce the English
temperament there. One can see the dark, moody, passionate temperament
of the Italian evolving to perfection under their brilliant skies. The
wine-like atmosphere of Paris speaks for itself. London is what it is,
and the Englishmen likewise, because of the climate in which they have
been reared.
I said something to this effect without calling forth much protest,
but when I ventured that the English might possibly be falling behind
in the world’s race and that other nations--such as the Germans and
the Americans--might rapidly be displacing them, I evoked a storm of
opposition. The sedate Mr. F. rose to this argument. It began at the
dinner-table and was continued in the general living-room later. He
scoffed at the suggestion that the Germans could possibly conquer
or displace England, and hoped for the day when the issue might be
tried out physically. Mr. Tyne good-humoredly spoke of the long way
America had to go before it could achieve any social importance even
within itself. It was a thrashing whirlpool of foreign elements. He
had recently been to the United States, and in one of the British
quarterlies then on the stands was a long estimate by him of America’s
weaknesses and potentialities. He poked fun at the careless, insulting
manners of the people, their love of show, their love of praise. No
Englishman, having tasted the comforts of civilized life in England,
could ever live happily in America. There was no such thing as a
serving class. He objected to American business methods as he had
encountered them, and I could see that he really disliked America. To
a certain extent he disliked me for being an American, and resented my
modest literary reputation for obtruding itself upon England. I enjoyed
these two men as exceedingly able combatants--men against whose wits I
could sharpen my own.
I mention them because, in a measure, they suggested the literary and
artistic atmosphere of London.