Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  XV

  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.

  XVI

  Yet he was standing stiffly up for himself, and strewing his convictions and opinions broadcast as the English all do when pressed by circumstance, while we, with none of their shyness, mostly think our thoughts to ourselves. I suppose we do it because we like better than they to seem of one effect with the rest of our kind. In England one sees a variety of dress in men which one rarely sees at home. They dress there not only in keeping with their work and their play, but in the indulgence of any freak of personal fancy, so that in the street of a provincial town, like Bath, for instance, you will encounter in a short walk a greater range of trousers, leggings, caps, hats, coats, jackets, collars, scarfs, boots and shoes, of tan and black, than you would meet at home in a month of Sundays. The differences do not go to the length of fashions, such as reduce our differences to uniformity, and clothe, say, our legs in knickerbockers till it is found everybody is wearing them, when immediately nobody wears them. Only ladies, of fashions beyond men’s, gratify caprices like ours, and even these perhaps not voluntarily. In the obedience they show to the rule that they must never wear the same dinner or ball gown twice, it was said (but who can ever find out the truth of such things?) that they sometimes had sent home from the dressmaker’s a number of dresses on liking, and wore them in succession, only to return them, all but one at least, as not liked, the dressmaker having found her account in her work being shown in society.

  {Illustration: AN ENGLISH HOUSEMAID}

  I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or statement like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of social position is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether we spend more or not, I believe that the English live much nearer their incomes than Americans do. I think that we save more out of our earnings than they out of theirs, and that in this we are more like the Continental peoples, the French or the Italians. They spend vastly more on state than we do, because, for one thing, they have more state to spend on. A man may continue to make money in America, and not change his manner of living till he chooses, and he may never change it. Such a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as happened to the elderly American housewife who walked through the magnificent house which her husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed out at last, “Well, now I suppose I shall have to keep a girl!” The girl would have been kept from the beginning of her husband’s prosperity, and multiplied, till the house was full of servants. If you have the means of a gentleman in England, you must live like a gentleman, apparently; you cannot live plainly, and put by, and largely you must trust to your life-insurance as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It cannot be denied that the more generous expenditure of the English adds to the grace of life, and that they are more hospitable according to their means than we are; or than those Continental peoples who are not hospitable at all.

  A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that, while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be as unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage. A person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance, or call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively upon our judge. But that is not fair an
d it is not wise; he does not mean to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his own house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If you ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell you frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind of helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to make it palatable.

  XVII

  An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was a good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France, was inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia which should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was always coming upon illustrations of the loyalty of sentiment with which of course one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom concerned us, except rather handsomely to include us. The French have ceased to be the hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their place in the popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower classes when I could, perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy way, and one evening in a grassy lane I made the acquaintance of a friendly man letting his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the livery-stable line, but he had been a soldier many years. Upon this episode he became freely autobiographical, especially concerning his service in India. He volunteered the declaration that he had had enough of war, but he added, thoughtfully, “I should like to go out for a couple of years if there was any trouble with Russia.”

  The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes outnumber them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful minority at the memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere beside the natives. I liked their fondness for their own so much that I never could feel the fine scorn for “trippers” which I believe all persons of condition ought to assume. Even when the trippers did not seem very intelligently interested in what they saw, they were harmlessly employed, for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could not be desecrated by the courtships which are constantly going on all over England, especially at the holiday seasons.

  The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age of putting their arms around one another’s waists. The many and many seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will pay for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year round for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds, repair to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They take the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable provisions, and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the sea, and at the pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots, who equally abound, make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no one would suspect from their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they go home at the end “high sorrowful and cloyed,” there is no forecast of it in their demeanor, which is as little troubled as it is animated. The young people are even openly gay, and the robustness of their flirtations adds sensibly to the interest of the spectator. Our own public lovers seem of a humbler sort, and they mostly content themselves with the passive embraces of which every seat in our parks affords an example; but in England such lovers add playful struggles. A favorite pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold something in the hand, and for the other to try prying it open. When it was the young man who kept his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost indefinitely. I suppose it led to many engagements and marriages.

  When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at the volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it was all out of the circulating library. As there were often several young women to one man, most of the girls had to content themselves with the flirtations in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines were always prying the heroes’ hands open. On every seat one found them poring upon the glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume under the arm, and another clasped to the heart. At places where the hand played, and they were ostensibly listening to the music, they were bowed upon their books, and the flutter of the turning leaves almost silenced the blare of the horns. By what inspiration they knew when God Save the King was coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common, I should not be able to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a story at the time the band came to that closing number, or perhaps they felt its imminence in their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the young girls, however. Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as many old girls as young girls reading novels, and mothers of families were apparently as much addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put by their books when they took tea, which is the other most noticeable dissipation in England. But I cannot enter upon that chapter; it is too large a theme; I will say, merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth Avenue, so the tearooms are in every part of the island.

  {Illustration: LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS}

  XVIII

  It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last I have a more cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the forenoon. Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower classes, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses, and the upper classes to the evening parade in the Park. As to the relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to be sure; but I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to be. Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on week-days. The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday. Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church as much as formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors. Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.

  But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained at home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally conscienced, as those who came to America in the times of the successive Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The home-keeping English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the peoples who still acknowledged as their head “the Bishop of Rome.” Their greater morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than spiritual, and, leaving the church to look after religion much more than our Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists of New England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our ancestors were the children of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized, and that if th
ey lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate handsomely. From our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able to imagine a life more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life from which theirs must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government kept, by assent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society so intimately and thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip makes its whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive misery never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn and ingrained that all things English seem righteous because English; with a willingness to share the general well-being quite to the verge, but never beyond the verge, of public control of the administration — with all this, the thing must strike the unbelieving observer as desperately perfect. “They have got it down cold,” he must say to himself, and confirm himself in his unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.