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
national, the 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 private person 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 certainly 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, wending its way to a
place of worship appointed by the State, 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 impressive to a stranger,
something which he hardly knows whether to estimate as a great force
or as a great futility. 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 such a 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 expressing a stranger’s, certainly
an American’s, sense of their cohesion. 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
conventional 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.)
[Illustration: DARK MYSTERIOUS LONDON
Near Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster]
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 to some fate the universal terror of which half allures
half appals his curiosity, 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
estrangement. I believe 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
are felicities encountered 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, 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 in their
career such an effect of breeze-blown light and shade. 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 sadly inexpert. 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. Acknowledgment 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 stern realities of life among the grey-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.