IV

How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the mention

of Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but the thought of

Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years there, and has left a

record of them which I had read, with the wish that it were cheerfuler.

Yet, now, here on the ground his feet might have trod, and in the very

smoke he breathed, I did not once think of him. I thought as little of

that poor Felicia Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years

with the roar of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth Bay

on the stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers landed on a

bowlder measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against the predatory

hammers and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that Gladstone was born

at Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only literary shade I could

summon from a past vague enough to my ignorance was William Roscoe,

whose _Life of Leo X._, in the Bohn Library, had been too much for my

young zeal when my zeal was still young. My other memories of Liverpool

have been acquired since my visit, and I now recur fondly to the

picturesque times when King John founded a castle there, to the prouder

times when Sir Francis Bacon represented it in Parliament; or again to

the brave days when it resisted Prince Rupert for three weeks, and the

inglorious epoch when the new city (it was then only some four or five

hundred years old) began to flourish on the trade in slaves with the

colonies of the Spanish Main, and on the conjoint and congenial traffic

in rum, sugar, and tobacco.

[Illustration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL]

It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been studying

a page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive the reader. It

is true; but it is also true that I had some wonder, altogether my own,

that so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagination.

In this it outdoes almost any metropolis of our own. Even in journalism,

an intensely modern product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able

and well-written _Guardian_, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its

Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is said

that not above a million of its people live in it; all the rest, who

can, escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope to escape the

Americans. There, intrenched in charming villas behind myrtle hedges,

they measurably do so; but Americans are very penetrating, and I would

not be sure that the thickest and highest hedge was invulnerable to

them. As it is, they probably constitute the best society of Liverpool,

which the natives have abandoned to them, though they do not constitute

it permanently, but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star,

pours out upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of

cultivated Americans, who eddy into its hotels, and then rush out

of them by every train within twenty-four hours, and often within

twenty-five minutes. They understand that there are no objects of

interest in Liverpool; and they are not met at the Customs with

invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from the people of rank

and fashion with whom they have come to associate. These have their

stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but they are not at the

landing-stage, and even the uncultivated American cannot stay for the

vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool, like the cities of his own land,

is composed. Our own cities have a social consciousness, and are each

sensible of being a centre, with a metropolitan destiny; but the strange

thing about Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are

without any social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially

unborn; they can come into the world only in London, and in their

prenatal obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence, while all

the commercial and industrial energies rage round them in a gigantic

maturity.

V

The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry

for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the

historical. With the almost immediate transference of the original

transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the

only place where you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the

seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the

rest, would land you nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land

you at Glasgow; worse schismatics carried you to Southampton; there

were heterodox craft that touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling

agnostics bring you to London itself. Still, Liverpool remains the

greatest port of entry for our probationers, who are bound out to the

hotels and railroad companies of all Europe till they have morally paid

back their fare. The superstition that if you go in a Cunarder you can

sleep on both ears is no longer so exclusive as it once was; yet the

Cunarder continues an ark of safety for the timid and despairing,

and the cooking is so much better than it used to be that if in

contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger’s being carried

overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of having eaten

something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.

[Illustration: THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS]

I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving

Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their

exceeding multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the

disciplined English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them

in the stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and

whir away to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the

steamer; but many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads

and legs, and to prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel

conditions. These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land

everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by

their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class

corridor compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they

have very tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people

and railroad folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a

reassuring and consoling embrace which leaves all their hands--they are

Briarean--free for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust

yourself implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not

trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern,

for then you will have to change four times on the way and at every

junction personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to

its destination.

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