casual experience of the American traveller or sojourner in England,
that his nationality was now liked less rather than more there, I should
still be sorry to disturb what is at the worst no worse than a fond
illusion. The case is by no means the contrary, and yet in consenting to
some reason in the iridescence which the situation wears in the American
fancy I should wish to distinguish. For a beginning I should not wish to
go farther than to say that the sort of Englishmen who have always liked
Americans, because they have liked the American ideal and the kind of
character realized from it, now probably like them better than ever.
They are indeed less critical of our departure from our old ideal
than some Americans, perhaps because they have not foreseen, as such
Americans have foreseen, the necessary effect in American character.
They can still allow themselves the pleasure which comes from being
confirmed in an impression by events, and in that pleasure they may
somewhat romance us; but even such Englishmen are not blindly fond of
us. The other sort of Englishmen, the sort that never liked our ideal
or our character, probably now like us as little as ever, except as they
have noted our change of ideal, and expect a change of character. To
them we may very well have seemed a sort of civic dissenters, with the
implication of some such quality of offence as the notion of dissent
suggests to minds like theirs. We had a political religion like their
own, with a hierarchy, a ritual, an establishment all complete, and we
violently broke with it. But it is safe to conjecture that this sort
of Englishman is too old or too old-fashioned to live much longer; he
suffers with the decay of certain English interests which the American
prosperity imperilled before it began to imperil English ideals, if it
has indeed done so. His dying out counts for an increase of favor for
us; we enjoy through it a sort of promotion by seniority.
But a new kind of Englishman has come up of late years, and so far as he
is friendly to us his friendliness should be more gratifying than
that even of our older friends. He has been in America, either much or
little, and has come to like us because he has seen us at home. If such
an Englishman is rich and noble, he has seen our plutocracy, and has
liked it because it is lively and inventive in its amusements and
profusely original in its splendors; but he need not be poor and
plebeian to have seen something of our better life, and divined
something of our real meaning from it. He will not be to blame if he has
not divined our whole meaning; for we are at present rather in the dark
as to that ourselves, and certainly no American who met him in England
could wish to blame him, for his cordiality forms the warmest welcome
that the American can have there. If he has been in America and not
liked us, or our order or ideal, he has still the English good-nature,
and if you do not insist upon being taken nationally, there are many
chances that he will take you personally, and if he finds you not at all
like an American, he will like you, as he liked others in America whom
he found not at all like Americans.
It is the foible, however, of many Americans, both at home and
abroad, that they want to be taken nationally, and not personally,
by foreigners. Beyond any other people we wish to be loved by other
peoples, even by others whom we do not love, and we wish to be loved in
the lump. We would like to believe that somehow our sheer Americanism
rouses the honor and evokes the veneration of the alien, and as we have
long had a grudge against the English, we would be particularly glad
to forget it in a sense of English respect and affection. We would fain
believe that the English have essentially changed towards us, but
we might easily deceive ourselves, as we could realize if we asked
ourselves the reasons for such a change.
The English are very polite, far politer than they have been
represented, and they will not wittingly wound the American visitor,
unless for just cause, like business, or the truth. Still, I should say
that the American will fare best with them if he allows himself to
be taken individually, rather than typically. One's nationality is to
others, after a first moment of surprise, a bore and a nuisance, which
cannot be got out of the way too soon. I cannot keep my interest in a
German or an Italian because he is such; and why should not it be the
same with an Englishman in regard to Americans? If he thinks about our
nationality at all, in its historical character, it is rather a pill,
which he may be supposed to take unwillingly, whether he believes we
were historically right or not. He may say just things about it, but he
will say them more for the profit of Englishmen than for the pleasure
of Americans. With our pleasure nationally an Englishman is very little
concerned, and either he thinks it out of taste to show any curiosity
concerning us, in the bulk, or else he feels none. He has lately read
and heard a good deal of talk about us; but I doubt if it has indelibly
impressed him. If we have lately done things which in their way could
not be ignored, they could certainly be forgotten, and many Englishmen,
in spite of them, still remain immensely incurious about us. The
American who wishes to be taken nationally by them must often inspire
them with a curiosity about us, before he can gratify it, and that is a
species of self-indulgence which leaves a pang.
The English have, or they often express, an amiable notion of us as
enormously rich, and perhaps they think we are vain of our millionaires,
and would be flattered by an implication of wealth as common to us all
as our varying accent. But it is as hard for some of us to live up to a
full pocket as for others to live up to a full brain. It is hard even to
meet the expectation that you will know, or know about, our tremendously
moneyed people; but here is a curiosity which you do not have to inspire
before you gratify it, for it exists already, while as to our political
affairs, or even our military or naval affairs, not to speak of our
scientific or literary affairs, the curiosity that you gratify you must
first have inspired.
Their curiosity as to our riches does not judge the English, as might be
supposed. They are very romantic, with a young, lusty appetite for the
bizarre and the marvellous, as their taste in fiction evinces; and they
need not be contemned as sordid admirers of money because they wish to
know the lengths it can go to with the people who seem to be just now
making the most money. Their interest in a phenomenon which we ourselves
have not every reason to be proud of, is not without justification, as
we must allow if we consider a little, for if we consider, we must own
that our greatest achievement in the last twenty or thirty years has
been in the heaping up of riches. Our magnificent success in that sort
really eclipses our successes in every other, and the average American
who comes abroad must be content to shine in the reflected glory of
those Americans who have recently, more than any others, rendered our
name illustrious. If we do not like the fact all that we have to do is
to set about doing commensurate things in art, in science, in letters,
or even in arms.
It will not quite do to say that the non-millionaire American enjoys in
England the interest mixed with commiseration which is the lot of a poor
relation of the great among kindly people. That would not be true, and
possibly the fact is merely that the name American first awakens in the
English some such associations with riches as the name South African
awakened before it awakened others more poignant and more personal.
Already the South African had begun to rival the American in the popular
imagination; as the Boer war fades more and more into the past, the time
may come when we shall be confusedly welcomed as Africanders or South
Americans.
If I were to offer what I have been saying as my opinions, or my
conclusions from sufficient observations I should be unfair, if not
uncandid. The sum of what one sees and hears in a foreign country is as
nothing to the sum of what one does not see and hear; and the immense
balance may be so far against the foregoing inferences that it is
the part of mere prudence to declare that they are not my opinions or
conclusions, but are only impressions, vague and hurried, guesses from
cursory observations, deductions from slight casual incidents. They are
mere gleams from social facets, sparks struck out by chance encounter,
and never glancing lights from the rarefied atmosphere in which the two
nations have their formal reciprocities. For all that I have really the
right to say from substantial evidence to the contrary, I might very
well say that the English value us for those things of the mind and soul
which we are somewhat neglectful of ourselves, and I insist the more,
therefore, that it is only their love of fairy-tales which is taken with
the notion of an opulence so widespread among us as to constitute us a
nation of potential, if not actual, millionaires.
They would hasten to reproach me, I am afraid, for speaking of England,
though merely for purposes of illustration, as a foreign country. One is
promptly told that Americans are not regarded as foreigners in England,
and is left to conjecture one's self a sort of compromise between
English and alien, a little less kin than Canadian and more kind than
Australian. The idea has its quaintness; but the American in England
has been singularly unfortunate if he has had reason to believe that the
kindness done him is not felt. What has always been true of the English
is true now. They do not say or do the thing which is not, out of
politeness; their hypocrisies, if they have any, are for their God, and
not for their fellow-man. When they talk of their American brethren,
they mean it; just as when they do not talk of them so they mean
something less, or nothing at all. The American who wishes to be taken
nationally, may trust any expression friendly to our nation that he
hears; but still I think he will have a better time if he prefers
being taken personally. That is really making one's self at home in
a different, I will no longer say a foreign, country; the English are
eager hosts, and wish you to make yourself at home--if they like you.
Nationally we cannot make ourselves, or be made at home, except in the
United States. To any other people, to people sometimes claiming to be
nearer than the first degree of cousinship, our nationality, taking it
in bulk, is necessarily a mystery. We are so very like them; why should
we be so very unlike them? The difference puzzles them, annoys them;
why seek points of it, and turn them to the light? The same mystery
distresses the American when the points of their difference are turned
to the light. A man's nationality is something he is justly proud of,
but not till it is put aside can the man of another nation have any joy
of him humanly, spiritually. If you insist upon talking to the English
about American things, you have them in an unknown world, a really
unknowable world, as you yourself know it; and you bewilder and weary
them, unless they are studying Americanism, and then they still do not
understand you. You are speaking English, but the meaning is a strange
tongue.
I say again that I do not know why any one should wish to be caressed
for his nationality. I think one might more self-respectfully wish to be
liked for one's self than joined with a hundred million compatriots, and
loved in the lump. If the English, however, are now trying to love us
nationally we should be careful not to tax their affections too heavily,
or demand too much of them. We must remember that they are more apt to
be deceived by our likeness to themselves than by our unlikeness. When
an Englishman and an American meet on common ground they have arrived
from opposite poles. The Englishman, though he knows the road the
American has come, cannot really imagine it. His whole experience of
life has taught him that if you have come that road, you are not the
kind of man you seem; therefore, you have not come that road, or
else you are another kind of man. He revolves in a maze of hopeless
conjecture; he gives up trying to guess your conundrum, and reads into
you the character of some Englishman of parallel tradition. If he likes
you after that, you may be sure it is for yourself and not for your
nation. All the same he may not know it, and may think he likes you
because you are an agreeable American.
My line of reasoning, or I had better say of fancying (that, on such
dangerous ground, is safest), is forcing an inference from which I
shrink a little; it seems so very bold, so very contrary to recent
prepossessions. But the candor which I would be so glad not to practise,
obliges me to say that I think the American who is himself interesting,
would have been as welcome in England twenty-five years ago as at this
day, and he would not have been expected to be rich, or to have the
acquaintance of rich Americans. Already, at that remote period, certain
fellow-countrymen of ours had satisfied the English taste for wildness
in us. There had been Buffalo Bill, with his show, and there had been
other Buffalo Bills, literary ones, who were themselves shows. There
had then arisen a conjecture, a tardy surmise, of an American fineness,
which might be as well in its way as the American wildness, and the
American who had any imaginable touch of this found as warm a liking
ready for him then as the wild American found earlier, or the rich
American finds later.
In fact, interesting Americans have always been personally liked in
England, if I must really go to the extreme of saying it. What the
English now join in owning, if the question of greater kindness between
the two countries comes up, is that their ruling class made a vast
mistake in choosing, officiously though not officially, the side of the
South in our Civil War. They own it frankly, eagerly. But they owned
the same thing frankly, if not so eagerly, twenty-five years ago. Even
during the Civil War, I doubt if an acceptable American would have
suffered personally among them. He would have suffered nationally, but
he has now and then to suffer so still, for they cannot have the same
measure of his nationality as he, and they necessarily tread upon its
subtile circumferences here and there.
From the very beginning of Americanism the case has been the same. The
American in England during the Civil War was strangely unfortunate if
he did not meet many and great Englishmen who thought and felt with him;
and if there were now any American so stricken in years as to be able
to testify from his own experience of the English attitude towards us in
the War of Independence, he could tell us of the outspoken and constant
sympathy of Chatham, Burke, Fox, Walpole, and their like, with the
American cause--which they counted the English cause. He could tell
of the deep undercurrent of favor among the English people, which the
superficial course of power belied and at last ceased to control, in our
earlier vital war as well as in our later.
So much for that consideration of us nationally, which I do not think
England, in her quality of hostess, is bound to show her several
American guests. I do not blame her that the sympathy of her greatest
sons, so far as it has been shown us nationally, has been shown in her
interest, which they believed the supreme interest of mankind, rather
than in our interest, which it is for us to believe the supreme interest
of mankind. Even when they are talking America they are thinking
England; they cannot otherwise; they must; it is imperative; it is
essential that they should. We talk of England on the same terms, with
our own inner version.
There is another point in this inquiry which I hesitate to touch, and
which if I were better advised I should not touch--that is, the English
interest in the beauty and brilliancy of our women. Their charm is
now magnanimously conceded and now violently confuted in their public
prints; now and then an Englishman lets himself go--over his own
signature even, at times--and denounces our women, their loveliness,
their liveliness, their goodness, in terms which if I repeated them
would make some timider spirits pause in their resolution to marry
English dukes and run English society. But his hot words are hardly cold
before another Englishman comes to the rescue of our countrywomen, and
lifts them again to that pinnacle where their merits quite as much as
the imagination of their novelists have placed them. Almost as much as
our millionaires they are the object of a curiosity which one has not
had to inspire. Where, in what part, in which favored city, do they most
abound? What is the secret of their dazzling wit and beauty, the heart
of their mystery? The most ardent of their votaries must flush in
generous deprecation when those orphic inquiries flow from lips quite as
divine as their own.
For the rest, if there is really that present liking for Americans in
England, which we must wish to touch with all delicacy as the precious
bloom of a century-plant at last coming to flower, the explanation may
be sought perhaps in an effect of the English nature to which I shall
not be the one to limit it. They have not substantially so much as
phenomenally changed towards us. They are, like ourselves, always taking
stock, examining themselves to see what they have on hand. From time
to time they will, say, accuse themselves of being insular, and then,
suddenly, they invite themselves to be continental, to be French, to
be German, to be Italian, to be Bulgarian, or whatever; and for a
while they believe that they have become so. All this time they remain
immutably English. It is not that they are insensible of their defects;
they tell themselves of them in clamorous tones; and of late, possibly,
they have asked themselves why they are not what they think the
Americans are in certain things. If the logic of their emotions in this
direction were a resolution to like all the Americans with a universal
affection, I should admire their spirit, but I should feel a difficulty
in its operation for a reason which I hesitate to confess; I do not like
_all_ the Americans myself.
VII
IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS
In speaking of any specific social experience it is always a question
of how far one may pardonably err on the side of indiscretion; and if
I remember here a dinner in the basement of the House of Commons--in
a small room of the architectural effect of a chapel in a cathedral
crypt--it is with the sufficiently meek hope of keeping well within
bounds which only the nerves can ascertain.
The quaintness of the place may have contributed to an uncommon charm
in the occasion; but its charm was perhaps a happy accident which would
have tried in vain to repeat itself even there. It ended in a visit to
the House, where the strangers were admitted on the rigid terms and in
the strict limits to which non-members must submit themselves. But one
might well undergo much more in order to hear John Burns speak in the
place to which he has fought his right under a system of things as
averse as can be imagined to a working-man's sharing in the legislation
for working-men. The matter in hand that night chanced to be one
peculiarly interesting to a believer in the people's doing as many
things as possible for themselves, as the body politic, instead of
leaving them to a variety of bodies corporate. The steamboat service on
the Thames had grown so insufficient and so inconvenient that it was now
a question of having it performed by the London County Council,
which should be authorized to run lines of boats solely in the public
interest, and not merely for the pleasure and profit of directors and
stockholders. The monstrous proposition did not alarm those fears of
socialism which anything of the kind would have roused with us; nobody
seemed to expect that blowing up the Parliament buildings with dynamite
would be the next step towards anarchy. There was a good deal of
hear-hearing from Mr. Burns's friends, with some friendly chaffing from
his enemies as he went on, steadily and quietly, with his statement of
the case; but there was no serious opposition to the measure which was
afterwards carried in due course of legislation.
I was left to think two or three things about the matter which, though
not strictly photographic, are yet so superficial that they will not
be out of place here. Several members spoke besides Mr. Burns, but the
labor leader was easily first, not only in the business quality of what
he said, but in his business fashion of saying it. As much as any of
them, as the oldest-familied and longest-leisured of them, his manners
had
“that repose
Which marks the caste of Vere de Vere,”
and is supposed to distinguish them from those of the castes of Smith
and Brown. But I quickly forgot this in considering how far socialism
had got itself realized in London through the activities of the County
Council, which are so largely in the direction of municipal control. One
hears and reads as little of socialism now in London as in New York, but
that is because it has so effectually passed from the debated principle
to the accomplished fact. It has been embodied in so many admirable
works that the presumption is rather in favor of it as something truly
conservative. It is not, as with us, still under the ban of a prejudice
too ignorant to know in how many things it is already effective; but
this is, of course, mainly because English administration is so much
honester than ours. It can be safely taken for granted that a thing
ostensibly done for the greatest good of the greatest number is not
really done for the profit of a few on the inside. The English can
let the County Council put municipal boats on the Thames with the full
assurance that the County Council will never be in case to retire on a
cumulative income from them.
But apparently the English can do this only by laying the duty and
responsibility upon the imperial legislature. It was droll to sit there
and hear a body, ultimately if not immediately charged with the welfare
of a state conscious in every continent and the islands of every sea,
debating whether the municipal steamboats would not be too solely for
the behoof of the London suburb of West Ham. England, Scotland, Ireland,
Canada, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, with any of
their tremendous interests, must rest in abeyance while that question
concerning West Ham was pending. We, in our way, would have settled it
by the vote of a Board of Aldermen, subject to the veto of a mayor; but
we might not have settled it so justly as the British Parliament did in
concentrating the collective wisdom of a world-empire upon it.
The House of Commons took its tremendous responsibility lightly, even
gayly. Except for the dramatic division into government and opposition
benches, the spectacle was in no wise impressive. There was a restless
going and coming of members, as if they could not stand being bored by
their duties any longer, and then, after a brief absence, found strength
for them. Some sat with their hats on, some with their hats off; some
with their legs stretched out, some with their legs pulled in. One could
easily distinguish the well-known faces of ministers, who paid no more
heed, apparently, to what was going on than the least recognizable
members unknown to caricature. The reporters, in their gallery, alone
seemed to give any attention to the proceedings, but doubtless the
speaker, under his official wig, concerned himself with them. The people
apparently most interested were, like myself, in the visitors' gallery.
From time to time one of them asked the nearest usher who it was that
was speaking; in his eagerness to see and hear, one of them would rise
up and crane forward, and then the nearest usher would make him sit
down; but the ushers were generally very lenient, and upon the whole
looked quite up to the level of the average visitor in intelligence.