Produced by Bethanne M. Simms, Karen Dalrymple, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
The
Land of Contrasts
_A Briton's View of his American Kin_
By
James Fullarton Muirhead
Author of _Baedeker's Handbooks to Great Britain
and the United States_
Lamson, Wolffe and Company
Boston, New York and London
_MDCCCXCVIII._
Copyright, 1898
By Lamson, Wolffe and Company
_All rights reserved_
Press of
Rockwell and Churchill
BOSTON, U.S.A.
_To
The Land
That has given me
What makes Life most worth living_
Contents
Chapter Page
I. Introductory 1
II. The Land of Contrasts 7
III. Lights and Shadows of American Society 24
IV. An Appreciation of the American Woman 45
V. The American Child 63
VI. International Misapprehensions and National Differences 74
VII. Sports and Amusements 106
VIII. The Humour of the "Man on the Cars" 128
IX. American Journalism--A Mixed Blessing 143
X. Some Literary Straws 162
XI. Certain Features of Certain Cities 190
XII. Baedekeriana 219
XIII. The American Note 273
Author's Note
My first visit to the United States of America--a short one--was paid
in 1888. The observations on which this book is mainly based were,
however, made in 1890-93, when I spent nearly three years in the
country, engaged in the preparation of "Baedeker's Handbook to the
United States." My work led me into almost every State and Territory
in the Union, and brought me into direct contact with representatives
of practically every class. The book was almost wholly written in what
leisure I could find for it in 1895 and 1896. The foot-notes, added on
my third visit to the country (1898), while I was seeing the chapters
through the press, have at least this significance, that they show how
rapidly things change in the Land of Contrasts.
No part of the book has been previously published, except some ten
pages or so, which appeared in the _Arena_ for July, 1892. Most of the
matter in this article has been incorporated in Chapter II. of the
present volume.
So far as the book has any general intention, my aim has been, while
not ignoring the defects of American civilisation, to dwell rather on
those features in which, as it seems to me, John Bull may learn from
Brother Jonathan. I certainly have not had so much trouble in finding
these features as seems to have been the case with many other British
critics of America. My sojourn in the United States has been full of
benefit and stimulus to myself; and I should like to believe that my
American readers will see that this book is substantially a tribute of
admiration and gratitude.
J.F.M.
I
Introductory
It is not everyone's business, nor would it be everyone's pleasure, to
visit the United States of America. More, perhaps, than in any other
country that I know of will what the traveller finds there depend on
what he brings with him. Preconception will easily fatten into a
perfect mammoth of realisation; but the open mind will add
immeasurably to its garner of interests and experiences. It may be
"but a colourless crowd of barren life to the dilettante--a poisonous
field of clover to the cynic" (Martin Morris); but he to whom man is
more than art will easily find his account in a visit to the American
Republic. The man whose bent of mind is distinctly conservative, to
whom innovation always suggests a presumption of deterioration, will
probably be much more irritated than interested by a peregrination of
the Union. The Englishman who is wedded to his own ideas, and whose
conception of comfort and pleasure is bounded by the way they do
things at home, may be goaded almost to madness by the gnat-stings of
American readjustments--and all the more because he cannot adopt the
explanation that they are the natural outcome of an alien blood and a
foreign tongue. If he expects the same servility from his "inferiors"
that he has been accustomed to at home, his relations with them will
be a series of electric shocks; nay, his very expectation of it will
exasperate the American and make him show his very worst side. The
stately English dame must let her amusement outweigh her resentment if
she is addressed as "grandma" by some genial railway conductor of the
West; she may feel assured that no impertinence is intended.
The lover of scenery who expects to see a Jungfrau float into his ken
before he has lost sight of a Mte. Rosa; the architect who expects to
find the railway time-table punctuated at hourly intervals by a
venerable monument of his art; the connoisseur who hopes to visit a
Pitti Palace or a Dresden Picture Gallery in every large city; the
student who counts on finding almost every foot of ground soaked with
historic gore and every building hallowed by immemorial association;
the sociologist who looks for different customs, costumes, and
language at every stage of his journey;--each and all of these will do
well to refrain his foot from the soil of the United States. On the
other hand, the man who is interested in the workings of civilisation
under totally new conditions; who can make allowances, and quickly and
easily readjust his mental attitude; who has learned to let the new
comforts of a new country make up, temporarily at least, for the loss
of the old; who finds nothing alien to him that is human, and has a
genuine love for mankind; who can appreciate the growth of general
comfort at the expense of caste; who delights in promising experiments
in politics, sociology, and education; who is not thrown off his
balance by the shifting of the centre of gravity of honour and
distinction; who, in a word, is not congealed by conventionality, but
is ready to accept novelties on their merits,--he, unless I am very
grievously mistaken, will find compensations in the United States that
will go far to make up for Swiss Alp and Italian lake, for Gothic
cathedral and Palladian palace, for historic charters and
time-honoured tombs, for paintings by Raphael and statues by Phidias.
Perhaps, in the last analysis, our appreciation of America will depend
on whether we are optimistic or pessimistic in regard to the great
social problem which is formed of so many smaller problems. If we
think that the best we can do is to preserve what we have, America
will be but a series of disappointments. If, however, we believe that
man's sympathies for others will grow deeper, that his ingenuity will
ultimately be equal to at least a partial solution of the social
question, we shall watch the seething of the American crucible with
intensest interest. The solution of the social problem, speaking
broadly, must imply that each man must in some direction, simple or
complex, work for his own livelihood. Equality will always be a word
for fools and doctrinaires to conjure with, but those who believe in
man's sympathy for man must have faith that some day relative human
justice will be done, which will be as far beyond the justice of
to-day as light is from dark.[1] And it would be hard to say where we
are to look for this consummation if not in the United States of
America, which "has been the home of the poor and the eccentric from
all parts of the world, and has carried their poverty and passions on
its stalwart young shoulders." We may visit the United States, like M.
Bourget, _pour reprendre un peu de foi dans le lendemain de
civilisation_.
The paragraph on a previous page is not meant to imply that the United
States are destitute of scenic, artistic, picturesque, and historic
interest. The worst that can be said of American scenery is that its
best points are separated by long intervals; the best can hardly be
put too strongly. Places like the Yosemite Valley (of which Mr.
Emerson said that it was the only scenery he ever saw where "the
reality came up to the brag"), the Yellowstone Park, Niagara, and the
stupendous Cañon of the Colorado River amply make good their worldwide
reputation; but there are innumerable other places less known in
Europe, such as the primeval woods and countless lakes of the
Adirondacks, the softer beauties of the Berkshire Hills, the Hudson
(that grander American Rhine), the Swiss-like White Mountains, the
Catskills, the mystic Ocklawaha of Florida, and the Black Mountains of
Carolina that would amply repay the easy trouble of an Atlantic
passage under modern conditions. The historic student, too, will find
much that is worthy of his attention, especially in the older Eastern
States; and will, perhaps, be surprised to realise how relative a term
antiquity is. In a short time he will find himself looking at an
American building of the seventeenth century with as much reverence as
if it had been a contemporary of the Plantagenets; and, indeed, if
antiquity is to be determined by change and development rather than by
mere flight of time, the two centuries of New York will hold their own
with a cycle of Cathay. It is, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked
to the present writer, like the different thermometrical scales; it
does not take very long to realise that twenty-five degrees of Réaumur
mean as great a heat as ninety degrees of Fahrenheit. Such a city as
Boston amply justifies its inclusion in a "Historic Towns" series,
along with London and Oxford; and it is by no means a singular
instance. Even the lover of art will not find America an absolute
Sahara. To say nothing of the many masterpieces of European painters
that have found a resting-place in America, where there is at least
one public picture gallery and several private ones of the first
class, the best efforts of American painters, and perhaps still more
those of American sculptors, are full of suggestion and charm; while I
cannot believe that the student of modern architecture will anywhere
find a more interesting field than among the enterprising and original
works of the American school of architecture.
This book will be grievously misunderstood if it is supposed to be in
any way an attempt to cover, even sketchily, the whole ground of
American civilisation, or to give anything like a coherent
appreciation of it. In the main it is merely a record of personal
impressions, a series of notes upon matters which happened to come
under my personal observation and to excite my personal interest. Not
only the conditions under which I visited the country, but also my own
disqualifications of taste and knowledge, have prevented me from more
than touching on countless topics, such as the phenomena of politics,
religion, commerce, and industry, which would naturally find a place
in any complete account of America. I have also tried to avoid, so far
as possible, describing well-known scenery, or in other ways going
over the tracks of my predecessors. The phenomena of the United States
are so momentous in themselves that the observation of them from any
new standpoint cannot be wholly destitute of value; while they change
so rapidly that he would be unobservant indeed who could not find
something new to chronicle.
It is important, also, to remember that the generalisations of this
book apply in very few cases to the whole extent of the United States.
I shall be quite contented if any one section of the country thinks
that I cannot mean _it_ in such-and-such an assertion, provided it
allows that the cap fits some other portion of the great community. As
a rule, however, it may be assumed that unqualified references to
American civilisation relate to it as crystallised in such older
communities as New York or Philadelphia, not to the fermenting process
of life-in-the-making on the frontier.
In the comparisons between Great Britain and the United States I have
tried to oppose only those classes which substantially correspond to
each other. Thus, in contrasting the Lowell manufacturer, the
Hampshire squire, the Virginian planter, and the Manchester man, it
must not be forgotten that the first and the last have many points of
difference from the second and third which are not due to their
geographical position. Many of the instances on which my remarks are
based may undoubtedly be called _extreme_; but even extreme cases are
suggestive, if not exactly typical. There is a breed of poultry in
Japan, in which, by careful cultivation, the tail-feathers of the cock
sometimes reach a length of ten or even fifteen feet. This is not
precisely typical of the gallinaceous species; but it is none the less
a phenomenon which might be mentioned in a comparison with the
apteryx.
Finally, I ought perhaps to say, with Mr. E.A. Freeman, that I
sometimes find it almost impossible to believe that the whole nation
can be so good as the people who have been so good to me.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I have some suspicion that this ought to be in quotation marks,
but cannot now trace the passage.
II
The Land of Contrasts
When I first thought of writing about the United States at all, I soon
came to the conclusion that no title could better than the above
express the general impression left on my mind by my experiences in
the Great Republic. It may well be that a long list of inconsistencies
might be made out for any country, just as for any individual; but so
far as my knowledge goes the United States stands out as preëminently
the "Land of Contrasts"--the land of stark, staring, and stimulating
inconsistency; at once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting
ground of the charlatan and the quack; a land in which nothing happens
but the unexpected; the home of Hyperion, but no less the haunt of the
satyr; always the land of promise, but not invariably the land of
performance; a land which may be bounded by the aurora borealis, but
which has also undeniable acquaintance with the flames of the
bottomless pit; a land which is laved at once by the rivers of
Paradise and the leaden waters of Acheron.
If I proceed to enumerate a few of the actual contrasts that struck
me, in matters both weighty and trivial, it is not merely as an
exercise in antithesis, but because I hope it will show how easy it
would be to pass an entirely and even ridiculously untrue judgment
upon the United States by having an eye only for one series of the
startling opposites. It should show in a very concrete way one of the
most fertile sources of those unfair international judgments which led
the French Academician Joüy to the statement: "Plus on réfléchit et
plus on observe, plus on se convainct de la fausseté de la plupart de
ces jugements portés sur un nation entière par quelques ecrivains et
adoptés sans examen par les autres." The Americans themselves can
hardly take umbrage at the label, if Mr. Howells truly represents them
when he makes one of the characters in "A Traveller from Altruria"
assert that they pride themselves even on the size of their
inconsistencies. The extraordinary clashes that occur in the United
States are doubtless largely due to the extraordinary mixture of youth
and age in the character of the country. If ever an old head was set
upon young shoulders, it was in this case of the United States--this
"Strange New World, thet yit was never young." While it is easy, in a
study of the United States, to see the essential truth of the analogy
between the youth of an individual and the youth of a State, we must
also remember that America was in many respects born full-grown, like
Athena from the brain of Zeus, and coördinates in the most
extraordinary way the shrewdness of the sage with the naïveté of the
child. Those who criticise the United States because, with the
experience of all the ages behind her, she is in some points vastly
defective as compared with the nations of Europe are as much mistaken
as those who look to her for the fresh ingenuousness of youth unmarred
by any trace of age's weakness. It is simply inevitable that she
should share the vices as well as the virtues of both. Mr. Freeman
has well pointed out how natural it is that a colony should rush ahead
of the mother country in some things and lag behind it in others; and
that just as you have to go to French Canada if you want to see Old
France, so, for many things, if you wish to see Old England you must
go to New England.
Thus America may easily be abreast or ahead of us in such matters as
the latest applications of electricity, while retaining in its legal
uses certain cumbersome devices that we have long since discarded.
Americans still have "Courts of Oyer and Terminer" and still insist on
the unanimity of the jury, though their judges wear no robes and their
counsel apply to the cuspidor as often as to the code. So, too, the
extension of municipal powers accomplished in Great Britain still
seems a formidable innovation in the United States.
The general feeling of power and scope is probably another fruitful
source of the inconsistencies of American life. Emerson has well said
that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; and no doubt the
largeness, the illimitable outlook, of the national mind of the United
States makes it disregard surface discrepancies that would grate
horribly on a more conventional community. The confident belief that
all will come out right in the end, and that harmony can be attained
when time is taken to consider it, carries one triumphantly over the
roughest places of inconsistency. It is easy to drink our champagne
from tin cans, when we know that it is merely a sense of hurry that
prevents us fetching the chased silver goblets waiting for our use.
This, I fancy, is the explanation of one series of contrasts which
strikes an Englishman at once. America claims to be the land of
liberty _par excellence_, and in a wholesale way this may be true in
spite of the gap between the noble sentiments of the Declaration of
Independence and the actual treatment of the negro and the Chinaman.
But in what may be called the retail traffic of life the American puts
up with innumerable restrictions of his personal liberty. Max O'Rell
has expatiated with scarcely an exaggeration on the wondrous sight of
a powerful millionaire standing meekly at the door of a hotel
dining-room until the consequential head-waiter (very possibly a
coloured gentleman) condescends to point out to him the seat he may
occupy. So, too, such petty officials as policemen and railway
conductors are generally treated rather as the masters than as the
servants of the public. The ordinary American citizen accepts a long
delay on the railway or an interminable "wait" at the theatre as a
direct visitation of Providence, against which it would be useless
folly to direct cat-calls, grumbles, or letters to the _Times_.
Americans invented the slang word "kicker," but so far as I could see
their vocabulary is here miles ahead of their practice; they dream
noble deeds, but do not do them; Englishmen "kick" much better,
without having a name for it. The right of the individual to do as he
will is respected to such an extent that an entire company will put up
with inconvenience rather than infringe it. A coal-carter will calmly
keep a tramway-car waiting several minutes until he finishes his
unloading. The conduct of the train-boy, as described in Chapter XII.,
would infallibly lead to assault and battery in England, but hardly
elicits an objurgation in America, where the right of one sinner to
bang a door outweighs the desire of twenty just persons for a quiet
nap. On the other hand, the old Puritan spirit of interference with
individual liberty sometimes crops out in America in a way that would
be impossible in this country. An inscription in one of the large
mills at Lawrence, Mass., informs the employees (or did so some years
ago) that "regular attendance at some place of worship and a proper
observance of the Sabbath will be expected of every person employed."
So, too, the young women of certain districts impose on their admirers
such restrictions in the use of liquor and tobacco that any less
patient animal than the native American would infallibly kick over the
traces.
In spite of their acknowledged nervous energy and excitability,
Americans often show a good deal of a quality that rivals the phlegm
of the Dutch. Their above-mentioned patience during railway or other
delays is an instance of this. So, in the incident related in Chapter
XII. the passengers in the inside coach retained their seats
throughout the whole experiment. Their resemblance in such cases as
this to placid domestic kine is enhanced--out West--by the inevitable
champing of tobacco or chewing-gum, than which nothing I know of so
robs the human countenance of the divine spark of intelligence. Boston
men of business, after being whisked by the electric car from their
suburban residences to the city at the rate of twelve miles an hour,
sit stoically still while the congested traffic makes the car take
twenty minutes to pass the most crowded section of Washington
street,--a walk of barely five minutes.[2]
Even in the matter of what Mr. Ambassador Bayard has styled "that form
of Socialism, Protection," it seems to me that we can find traces of
this contradictory tendency. Americans consider their country as
emphatically the land of protection, and attribute most of their
prosperity to their inhospitable customs barriers. This may be so; but
where else in the world will you find such a volume and expanse of
free trade as in these same United States? We find here a huge section
of the world's surface, 3,000 miles long and 1,500 miles wide,
occupied by about fifty practically independent States, containing
seventy millions of inhabitants, producing a very large proportion of
all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life, and all enjoying
the freest of free trade with each other. Few of these States are as
small as Great Britain, and many of them are immensely larger.
Collectively they contain nearly half the railway mileage of the
globe, besides an incomparable series of inland waterways. Over all
these is continually passing an immense amount of goods. The San
Francisco _News Letter_, a well-known weekly journal, points out that
of the 1,400,000,000 tons of goods carried for 100 miles or upwards on
the railways of the world in 1895, no less than 800,000,000 were
carried in the United States. Even if we add the 140,000,000 carried
by sea-going ships, there remains a balance of 60,000,000 tons in
favor of the United States as against the rest of the world. It is,
perhaps, impossible to ascertain whether or not the actual value of
the goods carried would be in the same proportion; but it seems
probable that the value of the 800,000,000 tons of the home trade of
America must considerably exceed that of the _free_ portion of the
trade of the British Empire, _i.e._, practically the whole of its
import trade and that portion of its export trade carried on with
free-trade countries or colonies. The internal commerce of the United
States makes it the most wonderful market on the globe; and Brother
Jonathan, the rampant Protectionist, stands convicted as the greatest
Cobdenite of them all!
We are all, it is said, apt to "slip up" on our strongest points.
Perhaps this is why one of the leading writers of the American
democracy is able to assert that "there is no country in the world
where the separation of the classes is so absolute as ours," and to
quote a Russian revolutionist, who lived in exile all over Europe and
nowhere found such want of sympathy between the rich and poor as in
America. If this were true it would certainly form a startling
contrast to the general kind-heartedness of the American. But I fancy
it rather points to the condition of greater relative equality. Our
Russian friend was accustomed to the patronising kindness of the
superior to the inferior, of the master to the servant. It is easy, on
an empyrean rock, to be "kind" to the mortals toiling helplessly down
below. It costs little, to use Mr. Bellamy's parable, for those
securely seated on the top of the coach to subscribe for salve to
alleviate the chafed wounds of those who drag it. In America there is
less need and less use of this patronising kindness; there is less
kindness from class to class simply because the conscious realisation
of "class" is non-existent in thousands of cases where it would be to
the fore in Europe. As for the first statement quoted at the head of
this paragraph, I find it very hard of belief. It is true that there
are exclusive _circles_, to which, for instance, Buffalo Bill would
not have the entrée, but the principle of exclusion is on the whole
analogous to that by which we select our intimate personal friends. No
man in America, who is personally fitted to adorn it, need feel that
he is _automatically_ shut out (as he might well be in England) from a
really congenial social sphere.
Another of America's strong points is its sense of practical comfort
and convenience. It is scarcely open to denial that the laying of too
great stress on material comfort is one of the rocks ahead which the
American vessel will need careful steering to avoid; and it is certain
that Americans lead us in countless little points of household comfort
and labour-saving ingenuity. But here, too, the exception that proves
the rule is not too coy for our discovery. The terrible roads and the
atrociously kept streets are amongst the most vociferous instances of
this. It is one of the inexplicable mysteries of American civilisation
that a young municipality,--or even, sometimes, an old one,--with a
million dollars to spend, will choose to spend it in erecting a most
unnecessarily gorgeous town-hall rather than in making the street in
front of it passable for the ordinarily shod pedestrian. In New York
itself the hilarious stockbroker returning at night to his palace
often finds the pavement between his house and his carriage more
difficult to negotiate than even the hole for his latch-key; and I
have more than once been absolutely compelled to make a détour from
Broadway in order to find a crossing where the icy slush would not
come over the tops of my boots.[3] The American taste for luxury
sometimes insists on gratification even at the expense of the ordinary
decencies of life. It was an American who said, "Give me the luxuries
of life and I will not ask for the necessities;" and there is more
truth in this epigram, as characteristic of the American point of
view, than its author intended or would, perhaps, allow. In private
life this is seen in the preference shown for diamond earrings and
Paris toilettes over neat and effective household service. The
contrast between the slatternly, unkempt maid-servant who opens the
door to you and the general luxury of the house itself is sometimes of
the most startling, not to say appalling, description. It is not a
sufficient answer to say that good servants are not so easily obtained
in America as in England. This is true; but a slight rearrangement of
expenditure would secure much better service than is now seen. To the
English eye the cart in this matter often seems put before the horse;
and the combination of excellent waiting with a modest table equipage
is frequent enough in the United States to prove its perfect
feasibility.
In American hotels we are often overwhelmed with "all the discomforts
that money can procure," while unable to obtain some of those things
which we have been brought up to believe among the prime necessaries
of existence. It is significant that in the printed directions
governing the use of the electric bell in one's bedroom, I never found
an instance in which the harmless necessary bath could be ordered with
fewer than nine pressures of the button, while the fragrant cocktail
or some other equally fascinating but dangerous luxury might often be
summoned by three or four. The most elaborate dinner, served in the
most gorgeous china, is sometimes spoiled by the Draconian regulation
that it must be devoured between the unholy hours of twelve and two,
or have all its courses brought on the table at once. Though the
Americans invent the most delicate forms of machinery, their hoop-iron
knives, silver plated for facility in cleaning, are hardly calculated
to tackle anything harder than butter, and compel the beef-eater to
return to the tearing methods of his remotest ancestors. The waiter
sometimes rivals the hotel clerk himself in the splendour of his
attire, but this does not render more appetising the spectacle of his
thumb in the soup. The furniture of your bedroom would not have
disgraced the Tuileries in their palmiest days, but, alas, you are
parboiled by a diabolic chevaux-de-frise of steam-pipes which refuse
to be turned off, and insist on accompanying your troubled slumbers by
an intermittent series of bubbles, squeaks, and hisses. The mirror
opposite which you brush your hair is enshrined in the heaviest of
gilt frames and is large enough for a Brobdignagian, but the basin in
which you wash your hands is little larger than a sugar-bowl; and when
you emerge from your nine-times-summoned bath you find you have to dry
your sacred person with six little towels, none larger than a
snuff-taker's handkerchief. There is no carafe of water in the room;
and after countless experiments you are reduced to the blood-curdling
belief that the American tourist brushes his teeth with ice-water, the
musical tinkling of which in the corridors is the most characteristic
sound of the American caravanserai.
If there is anything the Americans pride themselves on--and justly--it
is their handsome treatment of woman. You will not meet five Americans
without hearing ten times that a lone woman can traverse the length
and breadth of the United States without fear of insult; every
traveller reports that the United States is the Paradise of women.
Special entrances are reserved for them at hotels, so that they need
not risk contamination with the tobacco-defiled floors of the public
office; they are not expected to join the patient file of room-seekers
before the hotel clerk's desk, but wait comfortably in the
reception-room while an employee secures their number and key. There
is no recorded instance of the justifiable homicide of an American
girl in her theatre hat. Man meekly submits to be the hewer of wood,
the drawer of water, and the beast of burden for the superior sex. But
even this gorgeous medal has its reverse side. Few things provided for
a class well able to pay for comfort are more uncomfortable and
indecent than the arrangements for ladies on board the sleeping cars.
Their dressing accommodation is of the most limited description; their
berths are not segregated at one end of the car, but are scattered
above and below those of the male passengers; it is considered
_tolerable_ that they should lie with the legs of a strange, disrobing
man dangling within a foot of their noses.
Another curious contrast to the practical, material, matter-of-fact
side of the American is his intense interest in the supernatural, the
spiritualistic, the superstitious. Boston, of all places in the world,
is, perhaps, the happiest hunting-ground for the spiritualist medium,
the faith healer, and the mind curer. You will find there the most
advanced emancipation from theological superstition combined in the
most extraordinary way with a more than half belief in the
incoherences of a spiritualistic séance. The Boston Christian
Scientists have just erected a handsome stone church, with chime of
bells, organ, and choir of the most approved ecclesiastical cut; and,
greatest marvel of all, have actually had to return a surplus of
$50,000 (£10,000) that was subscribed for its building. There are two
pulpits, one occupied by a man who expounds the Bible, while in the
other a woman responds with the grandiloquent platitudes of Mrs. Eddy.
In other parts of the country this desire to pry into the Book of Fate
assumes grosser forms. Mr. Bryce tells us that Western newspapers
devote a special column to the advertisements of astrologers and
soothsayers, and assures us that this profession is as much recognised
in the California of to-day as in the Greece of Homer.
It seems to me that I have met in America the nearest approaches to my
ideals of a _Bayard sans peur et sans reproche_; and it is in this
same America that I have met flagrant examples of the being wittily
described as _sans père et sans proche_--utterly without the
responsibility of background and entirely unacquainted with the
obligation of _noblesse_. The superficial observer in the United
States might conceivably imagine the characteristic national trait to
be self-sufficiency or vanity (this mistake _has_, I believe, been
made), and his opinion might be strengthened should he find, as I did,
in an arithmetic published at Richmond during the late Civil War, such
a modest example as the following: "If one Confederate soldier can
whip seven Yankees, how many Confederate soldiers will it take to whip
forty-nine Yankees?" America has been likened to a self-made man,
hugging her conditions because she has made them, and considering
them divine because they have grown up with the country. Another
observer might quite as easily come to the conclusion that diffidence
and self-distrust are the true American characteristics. Certainly
Americans often show a saving consciousness of their faults, and lash
themselves with biting satire. There are even Americans whose very
attitude is an apology--wholly unnecessary--for the Great Republic,
and who seem to despise any native product until it has received the
hall-mark of London or of Paris. In the new world that has produced
the new book, of the exquisite delicacy and insight of which Mr. Henry
James and Mr. Howells may be taken as typical exponents, it seems to
me that there are more than the usual proportion of critics who prefer
to it what Colonel Higginson has well called "the brutalities of
Haggard and the garlic-flavors of Kipling." While, perhaps, the
characteristic charm of the American girl is her thorough-going
individuality and the undaunted courage of her opinions, which leads
her to say frankly, if she think so, that Martin Tupper is a greater
poet than Shakespeare, yet I have, on the other hand, met a young
American matron who confessed to me with bated breath that she and her
sister, for the first time in their lives, had gone unescorted to a
concert the night before last, and, _mirabile dictu_, no harm had come
of it! It is in America that I have over and over again heard language
to which the calling a spade a spade would seem the most delicate
allusiveness; but it is also in America that I have summoned a blush
to the cheek of conscious sixty-six by an incautious though innocent
reference to the temperature of my morning tub. In that country I have
seen the devotion of Sir Walter Raleigh to his queen rivalled again
and again by the ordinary American man to the ordinary American woman
(if there be an _ordinary_ American woman), and in the same country I
have myself been scoffed at and made game of because I opened the
window of a railway carriage for a girl in whose delicate veins flowed
a few drops of coloured blood. In Washington I met Miss Susan B.
Anthony, and realised, to some extent at least, all she stands for. In
Boston and other places I find there is actually an organised
opposition on the part of the ladies themselves to the extension of
the franchise to women. I have hailed with delight the democratic
spirit displayed in the greeting of my friend and myself by the porter
of a hotel as "You fellows," and then had the cup of pleasure dashed
from my lips by being told by the same porter that "the other
_gentleman_ would attend to my baggage!" I have been parboiled with
salamanders who seemed to find no inconvenience in a room-temperature
of eighty degrees, and have been nigh frozen to death in open-air
drives in which the same individuals seemed perfectly comfortable. Men
appear at the theatre in orthodox evening dress, while the tall and
exasperating hats of the ladies who accompany them would seem to
indicate a theory of street toilette. From New York to Buffalo I am
whisked through the air at the rate of fifty or sixty miles an hour;
in California I travelled on a train on which the engineer shot
rabbits from the locomotive, and the fireman picked them up in time to
jump on the baggage-car at the rear end of the train. At Santa Barbara
I visited an old mission church and convent which vied in quaint
picturesqueness with anything in Europe; but, alas! the old monk who
showed us round, though wearing the regulation gown and knotted cord,
had replaced his sandals by elastic-sided boots and covered his
tonsure with a common chummy.[4]
Few things in the United States are more pleasing than the widespread
habits of kindness to animals (most American whips are, as far as
punishment to the horse is concerned, a mere farce). Yet no American
seems to have any scruple about adding an extra hundred weight or two
to an already villainously overloaded horse-car; and I have seen a
score of American ladies sit serenely watching the frantic straining
of two poor animals to get a derailed car on to the track again, when
I knew that in "brutal" Old England every one of them would have been
out on the sidewalk to lighten the load.
In England that admirable body of men popularly known as Quakers are
indissolubly associated in the public mind with a pristine simplicity
of life and conversation. My amazement, therefore, may easily be
imagined, when I found that an entertainment given by a young member
of the Society of Friends in one of the great cities of the Eastern
States turned out to be the most elaborate and beautiful private ball
I ever attended, with about eight hundred guests dressed in the height
of fashion, while the daily papers (if I remember rightly) estimated
its expense as reaching a total of some thousands of pounds. Here the
natural expansive liberality of the American man proved stronger than
the traditional limitations of a religious society. But the opposite
art of cheese-paring is by no means unknown in the United States.
Perhaps not even canny Scotland can parallel the record of certain
districts in New England, which actually elected their parish paupers
to the State Legislature to keep them off the rates. Let the opponents
of paid members of the House of Commons take notice!
Amid the little band of tourists in whose company I happened to enter
the Yosemite Valley was a San Francisco youth with a delightful
baritone voice, who entertained the guests in the hotel parlour at
Wawona by a good-natured series of songs. No one in the room except
myself seemed to find it in the least incongruous or funny that he
sandwiched "Nearer, my God, to thee" between "The man who broke the
bank at Monte Carlo" and "Her golden hair was hanging down her back,"
or that he jumped at once from the pathetic solemnity of "I know that
my Redeemer liveth" to the jingle of "Little Annie Rooney." The name
Wawona reminds me how American weather plays its part in the game of
contrasts. When we visited the Grove of Big Trees near Wawona on May
21, it was in the midst of a driving snow-storm, with the thermometer
standing at 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Next day, as we drove into Raymond,
less than forty miles to the west, the sun was beating down on our
backs, and the thermometer marked 80 degrees in the shade.
There is probably no country in the world where, at times, letters of
introduction are more fully honoured than in the United States. The
recipient does not content himself with inviting you to call or even
to dinner. He invites you to make his house your home; he invites all
his friends to meet you; he leaves his business to show you the lions
of the town or to drive you about the country; he puts you up at his
club; he sends you off provided with letters to ten other men like
himself, only more so. On the other hand, there is probably no country
in the world where a letter of introduction from a man quite entitled
to give it could be wholly ignored as it sometimes is in the United
States. The writer has had experience of both results. No more
fundamental contrast can well be imagined than that between the noisy,
rough, crude, and callous street-life of some Western towns and the
quiet, reticence, delicacy, spirituality, and refinement of many of
the adjacent interiors.
The table manners of the less-educated American classes are hardly of
the best, but where but in America will you find eleven hundred
charity-school boys sit down daily to dinner, each with his own table
napkin, as they do at Girard College, Philadelphia? And where except
at that same institute will you find a man leaving millions for a
charity, with the stipulation that no parson of any creed shall ever
be allowed to enter its precincts?
In concluding this chapter, let me say that its object, as indeed the
object of this whole book, will have been achieved if it convinces a
few Britons of the futility of generalising on the complex organism of
American society from inductions that would not justify an opinion
about the habits of a piece of protoplasm.[5]
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The Boston Subway, opened in 1898, has impaired the truth of this
sentence.
[3] It is only fair to say that this was originally written in 1893,
and that matters have been greatly improved since then.
[4] This may be paralleled in Europe: "The Franciscan monks of Bosnia
wear long black robes, with rope, black 'bowler hats,' and long and
heavy military moustachios (by special permission of the
Pope)."--_Daily Chronicle_, Oct 5, 1895.
[5] In the just-ended war with Spain, the United States did not fail
to justify its character as the Land of Contrasts. From the wealthy
and enlightened United States we should certainly have expected all
that money and science could afford in the shape of superior weapons
and efficiency of commissariat and medical service, while we could
have easily pardoned a little unsteadiness in civilians suddenly
turned into soldiers. As a matter of fact, the poverty-stricken
Spaniards had better rifles than the Americans; the Commissariat and
Medical Departments are alleged to have broken down in the most
disgraceful way; the citizen-soldiers behaved like veterans.
III
Lights and Shadows of American Society
By "society" I do not mean that limited body which, whether as the
Upper Ten Thousand of London or as the Four Hundred of New York,
usually arrogates the title. Such narrowness of definition seems
peculiarly out of place in the vigorous democracy of the West. By
society I understand the great body of fairly well-educated and fairly
well-mannered people, whose means and inclinations lead them to
associate with each other on terms of equality for the ordinary
purposes of good fellowship. Such people, not being fenced in by
conventional barriers and owning no special or obtrusive privileges,
represent much more fully and naturally the characteristic national
traits of their country; and their ways and customs are the most
fruitful field for a comparative study of national character. The
daughters of dukes and princes can hardly be taken as typical English
girls, since the conditions of their life are so vastly different from
those of the huge majority of the species--conditions which deny a
really natural or normal development to all but the choicest and
strongest souls. So the daughter of a New York multimillionaire, who
has been brought up to regard a British duke or an Italian prince as
her natural partner for life, does not look out on the world through
genuinely American spectacles, but is biassed by a point of view which
may be somewhat paradoxically termed the "cosmopolitan-exclusive." As
Mr. Henry James puts it: "After all, what one sees on a Newport piazza
is not America; it is the back of Europe."
There are, however, reasons special to the United States why we should
not regard the "Newport set" as typical of American society. Illustrious
foreign visitors fall not unnaturally into this mistake; even so keen a
critic as M. Bourget leans this way, though Mr. Bryce gives another
proof of his eminent sanity and good sense by his avoidance of the
tempting error. But, as Walt Whitman says, "The pulse-beats of the nation
are never to be found in the sure-to-be-put-forward-on-such-occasions
citizens." European fashionable society, however unworthy many of its
members may be, and however relaxed its rules of admission have
become, has its roots in an honourable past; its theory is fine; not
_all_ the big names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to
strong ales or weak (Lucy) Waters. Even those who desire the abolition
of the House of Peers, or look on it, with Bagehot, as "a vapid
accumulation of torpid comfort," cannot deny that it is an institution
that has grown up naturally with the country, and that it is only now
(if even now) that it is felt with anything like universality to be an
anomaly. The American society which is typified by the four hundred of
New York, the society which marries its daughters to English peers, is
in a very different position. It is of mushroom growth even according
to American standards; it has theoretically no right to exist; it is
entirely at variance with the spirit of the country and contradictory
of its political system; it is almost solely conditioned by
wealth;[6] it is disregarded if not despised by nine-tenths of the
population; it does not really count. However seriously the little
cliques of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may take themselves,
they are not regarded seriously by the rest of the country in any
degree comparable to the attitude of the British Philistine towards
the British Barbarian. Without the appropriate background of king and
nobility, the whole system is ridiculous; it has no _national_ basis.
The source of its honour is ineradicably tainted. It is the _reductio
ad absurdum_ of the idea of aristocratic society. It is divorced from
the real body of democracy. It sets no authoritative standard of
taste. If anything could reconcile the British Radical to his House of
Lords, it would be the rankness of taste, the irresponsible freaks of
individual caprice, that rule in a country where there is no carefully
polished noblesse to set the pattern. George William Curtis puts the
case well: "Fine society is no exotic, does not avoid, but all that
does not belong to it drops away like water from a smooth statue. We
are still peasants and parvenues, although we call each other princes
and build palaces. Before we are three centuries old we are
endeavouring to surpass, by imitating, the results of all art and
civilisation and social genius beyond the sea. By elevating the
standard of expense we hope to secure select society, but have only
aggravated the necessity of a labour integrally fatal to the kind of
society we seek."