I was always regretting that I got at the people so little, and that
only chance hints of what they were thinking and feeling reached me.
Now and then, a native observer said something about them which
seemed luminous. “We are frightfully feudal,” such an observer said,
“especially the poor.” He did not think it a fault, I believe, and only
used his adverb intensifyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the
poor among the country people, who have at last mastered that principle
of the feudal system which early enabled the great nobles to pay nothing
for the benefits they enjoyed from it. But my other friend, the plumber,
was not the least feudal, or not so feudal as many a lowly ward-heeler
in New York, who helps to make up the muster of some captain of
politics, under the lead of a common boss. The texture of society, in
the smarter sense, the narrower sense, is what I could not venture to
speak of more confidently. Once I asked a friend, a very dear and valued
friend, whether a man’s origin or occupation would make any difference
in his social acceptance, if he were otherwise interesting and
important. He seemed not to know what I would be at, and, when he
understood, he responded with almost a shout of amazement, “Oh, not the
least in the world!” But I have my doubts still; and I should say that
it might be as difficult for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant
to get on in London society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home
in the first circles of New York. Possibly, however, London society,
because of its almost immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more
sorts of people, without the consciousness of differences which keeps
our own first circles so elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat
unwarrantably, the belief that English society is less sensitive to
moral differences than ours, and that people with their little _taches_
would find less anxiety in London than in New York lest they should come
off on the people they rubbed against. Some Americans, who, even with
our increasing prevalence of divorces, are not well seen at home, are
cheerfully welcomed in England.
Perhaps, there, all Americans, good and bad, high and low, coarse and
fine, are the same to senses not accustomed to our varying textures
and shades of color; that is a matter I should be glad to remand to the
psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire
into such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take
us, or how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined
to think that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were
perceptible, they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial
angels are aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans
were distressful to their consciousness, they did not know why; and
then they tried to ignore us. But perhaps this is putting it a little
fantastically. What I know is that one comes increasingly to reserve the
fact of one’s nationality, when it is not essential to the occasion, and
to become as much as possible an unknown quality, rather than a quality
aggressive or positive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my
ground, I ventured my conviction that Englishmen were not so much
interested in Americans as those Americans who stayed at home were apt
to think; but when I once expressed this belief to a Unitarian minister,
whom I met in the West of England, he received it with surprise and
refusal. He said that in his own immediate circle, at least, his friends
were interested and increasingly interested in America, what she was
and what she meant to be, and still looked toward her for the lead
in certain high things which Englishmen have ceased to expect of
themselves. My impression is that most of the most forward of the
English Sociologists regard America as a back number in those political
economics which imply equality as well as liberty in the future. They do
not see any difference between our conditions and theirs, as regards
the man who works for his living with his hands, except that wages are
higher with us, and that physically there is more elbow-room, though
mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my Unitarian
minister, and this only conjecturally, I did not encounter that fine
spirit which in Old England used to imagine the New World we have not
quite turned out to be; but once I met an Englishman who had lived
in Canada, and who, gentleman-bred as he was, looked back with fond
homesickness to the woods where he had taken up land, and built himself
a personable house, chiefly with his own hands. He had lived himself out
of touch with his old English life in that new country, and had drawn
breath in an opener and livelier air which filled his lungs as the home
atmosphere never could again.