Equally with the foxes and the pheasants, the royalties and nobilities
abound in English novels, which really form the chief means of our
acquaintance with English life; but the chances that reveal them to the
average unintroduced, unpresented American are rarer. By these chances,
I heard, out of the whole peerage, but one lord so addressed in public,
and that was on a railroad platform where a porter was reassuring him
about his luggage. Similarly, I once saw a lady of quality, a tall and
girlish she, who stood beside her husband, absently rubbing with her
glove the window of her motor, and whom but for the kind interest of our
cabman we might never have known for a duchess. It is by their personal
uninsistence largely, no doubt, that the monarchy and the aristocracy
exist; the figures of the faery dream remain blent with the background,
and appear from it only when required to lay cornerstones, or preside at
races, or teas or bazars, or to represent the masses at home and abroad,
and invisibly hold the viewless reins of government.
Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never
jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse
themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings
off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for
some forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies
of society, I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a
nobleman who had somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors
that they were not his friends, and regularly voted down his men,
whether they stood for Parliament or County Council, and whether they
were better than the popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was
said that they were really better, but the people would not have them
because they were his; and one of the theories of English manliness
is that the constant pressure from above has toughened the spirit and
enabled Englishmen to stand up stouter and straighter each in his place,
just as it is contended elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the
human race have been heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the
struggle of life.
For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People
are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and
coarser for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social
inequality is such that there are not four men in London who are not
snobs, it cannot boast itself greater than the success of economic
inequality with ourselves, among whom the fight for money has not
produced of late a first-class poet, painter, or sculptor. The English,
if they are now the manliest people under the sun, have to thank not
their masters but themselves, and a nature originally so generous that
no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no political absurdity spoil it. But
if this nature had been left free from the beginning, we might see now a
nation of Englishmen who, instead of being bound so hard and fast in
the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would be the first in a world-wide
altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout that it may well pass itself
off upon them for a religious emotion, instead of the superstition which
seems to the stranger the implication of an England in the next world as
well as in this.
X
We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its
hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that
is a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life,
as the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so
frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and
as distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in
the cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison.
At home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church
without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed
in the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with
other men, and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad
time-tables will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the
limits of Lent; you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays,
and the minor saints’ days. When once you have mastered this
difficult science, you will realize what a colossal transaction the
disestablishment of the English Church in England would be, and how it
would affect the whole social fabric.
But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as
that knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever
to question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has
moved in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is
pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one
has always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a
sort of despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who
perceives that he never will be able to speak English. The American is
rather worse off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form
even the wish to pronounce some English words as the English do. He
has, for example, always said “financier,” with the accent on the last
syllable; and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there
was no choice for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by
the head of a college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns
on asking that it is never otherwise accented in England, his head
whirls a little, and he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had
better let the verb “to be” govern the accusative as the English do,
and be done with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or
stop! He must not “telegraph,” he must “wire.”