Chapter 14

I say nothing of the wars in which the British troops and the Colonial, side by side, at last succeeded in driving the French out of the country. They belong to the history of the eighteenth century and to the expansion of the English-speaking race. But for them, North America would now be half French and a quarter Spanish. These, however, were regular wars, with no more romance about them than belongs to war wherever it is conducted according to the war-game of the day. The manœuvres of generals and the deploying of men in masses inspire none but students, just as a fine game of chess can only be judged by one who knows the game. Louisburg, Quebec, 'Queen Anne's War,' 'King George's War'--Wolfe and Montcalm--these things and these men produced little effect upon the popular view of America. In the colonies themselves murmurings and complaints began to make themselves heard; as they became stronger, the discontent increased; but they did not reach the ear of the average Englishman, who still looked across the ocean and still saw the country bathed in all the glories of the West. Then--violently, suddenly--all this romance which had grown up around and after so much fighting, so many achievements, was broken off and destroyed. It perished with the War of Independence; it was no longer possible when the Colonies had become not only a foreign country, but a country bitterly hostile. The romance of America was dead.

After the war was over, with much humiliation and shame for the nation--the better part of which had been against the war from the outset--the country turned for consolation to the East. But, as has been said above, neither India, nor Australia, nor New Zealand, has ever taken such a place in the affections of our country as that continent which was planted by our own sons, for whose safety and freedom from foreign enemies we cheerfully spent treasure incalculable and lives uncounted.

Then came the long twenty-three years' war in which Great Britain, for the most part single-handed, fought for the freedom of Europe against the most colossal tyranny ever devised by victorious captain. No nation in the history of the world ever carried on such a war, so stubborn, so desperate, so vital. Had Great Britain failed, what would now be the position of the world? The victories, the defeats, the successes, the disasters, which marked that long struggle, at least made our people forget their humiliation in America. The final triumph gave us back, as it was certain to do, more than our former pride, more than our old self-reliance. America was forgotten, the old love for America was gone; how could we remember our former affections when, at the very time when our need was the sorest, when every ship, every soldier, every sailor that we could find, was wanted to break down the power of the man who had subjugated the whole of Europe, except Russia and Great Britain, the United States--the very Land of Liberty--did her best to cripple the Armies of Liberty by proclaiming war against us? And now, indeed, there was nothing left at all of the old romance. It was quite, quite dead. In the popular imagination all was forgotten, except that on the other side of the Atlantic lived an implacable enemy, whose rancour--it then seemed to our people--was even greater than their boasted love of liberty.

I take it that the very worst time in the history of the relation of the United States with this country was the first half of this century. There was very little intercourse between the countries; there were very few travellers; there was ignorance on both sides, with misunderstandings, wilful misrepresentations and deliberate exaggerations. Remember how Nathaniel Hawthorne speaks about the English people among whom he lived; read how Thoreau speaks of us when he visits Quebec. Is that time past? Hardly. Among the better class of Americans one seldom finds any trace of hatred to Great Britain. I think that, with the exception of Mr. W.D. Howells, I have never found any American gentleman who would manifest such a passion. But, as regards the lower class of Americans, it is reported that there still survives a meaningless, smouldering hostility. The going and the coming, to and fro, are increasing and multiplying; arbitration seems to be established as the best way of terminating international disputes; if the tone of the press is not always gracious, it is not often openly hostile; we may, perhaps, begin to hope, at last, that the future of the world will be secured for freedom by the confederation of all the English-speaking nations.

The old romance is dead. Yet--yet--as Kingsley cried, when he landed on a West Indian island, 'At last!' so I, also, when I found myself in New England, was ready to cry. 'At last!' The old romance is not everywhere dead, since there can be found one Englishman who, when he stands for the first time on New England soil, feels that one more desire of his life has been satisfied. To see the East; to see India and far Cathay; to see the tropics and to live for a while in a tropical island; to be carried along the Grand Canal of Venice in a gondola; to see the gardens of Boccaccio and the cell of Savonarola; to camp and hunt in the backwoods of Canada, and to walk the streets of New York, all these things have I longed, from youth upwards, to see and to do--yea, as ardently as ever Drake desired to set an English sail upon the great and unknown sea, and all these things, and many more, have been granted to me. One great thing--perhaps more than one thing, one unsatisfied desire--remained undone. I would set foot on the shore of New England. It is a sacred land, consecrated to me long years ago, for the sake of the things which I used to read--for the sake of the long-yearning thoughts of childhood and the dim and mystic splendours which played about the land beyond the sunset, in the days of my sunrise.

'At last!'

Wherever a boy finds a quiet place for reading--an attic lumbered with rubbish, a bedroom cold and empty, even a corner on the stairs--he makes of that place a theatre, in which he is the sole audience. Before his eyes--to him alone--the drama is played, with scenery complete and costume correct, by such actors as never yet played upon any other stage, so natural, so lifelike--nay, so godlike, and for that very reason so lifelike.

This boy sat where he could--in a crowded household it is not always possible to get a quiet corner; wherever he sat, this stage rose up before him and the play went on. He saw upon that stage all these things of which I have spoken, and more. He saw the fight at Nombre de Dios, the capture of the rich galleon, the sacking of Maracaibo. I do not know whether other boys of that time were reading the American authors with such avidity, or whether it was by some chance that these books were thrown in his way. Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, Prescott, Emerson (in parts), Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Lowell, Holmes, not to mention Thoreau, Herman Melville, Dana, certain religious novelists and many others whose names I do not recall, formed a tolerably large field of American reading for an English boy--without prejudice, be it understood, to the writers of his own country. To him the country of the American writers became almost as well known as his own. One thing alone he could not read. When he came to the War of Independence, he closed the book and ordered his theatre to vanish. And, to this day, the events of that war are only partly known to him. No boy who is jealous for his country will read, except upon compulsion, the story of a war which was begun in stupidity, carried on with incompetence, and concluded with humiliation.

The attack on Panama, the beginning of the Colonies, the exiles for religion, the long struggle with the French, the driving back of the Indians: it was a very fine drama--the Romance of America--in ever so many acts, and twice as many tableaux, that this boy saw. And always on the stage, now like Drake, now like Raleigh, now like Miles Standish, now like Captain John Smith, he saw a young Englishman, performing prodigies of valour and bearing a charmed life. Yet, do not think that it was a play with nothing but fighting in it. There were the Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam, under Walter the Doubter, or the renowned Peter Stuyvesant; there was Rip Van Winkle on the Catskill Mountains; there were the king-killers, hiding in the rocks beside Newhaven; there were the witch trials of Salem; there was the peaceful village of Concord, from which came voices that echoed round and round the world; there was the Lake, lying still and silent, ringed by its woods, where the solitary student of Nature loved to sit and watch and meditate. Hundreds of things, too many to mention, were acted on that boy's imaginary stage and lived in his brain as much as if he had himself played a part in them.

As that boy grew up, the memory of this long pageant survived; there fell upon him the desire to see some of the places; such a desire, if it is not gratified, dies away into a feeble spark--but it can always be blown again into a flame. This year the chance came to the boy, now a graybeard, to see these places; and the spark flared up again, into a bright, consuming flame.

I have seen my Land of Romance; I have travelled for a few weeks among the New England places, and, with a sigh of satisfaction and relief, I say with Kingsley: 'At Last!'

This romance, which belonged to my boyhood, and has grown up with me, and will never leave me, once belonged then, more or less, to the whole of the English people. Except with those who, like me, have been fed with the poetry and the literature of America, this romance is impossible. I suppose that it can never come again. Something better and more stable, however, may yet come to us, when the United States and Great Britain will be allied in amity as firm as that which now holds together those Federated States. The thing is too vast, it is too important, to be achieved in a day, or in a generation. But it will come--it will come; it must come--it must come; Asia and Europe may become Chinese or Cossack, but our people shall rule over every other land, and all the islands, and every sea.

II.-THE LAND OF REALITY

When a man has received kindnesses unexpected and recognition unlooked for from strangers and people in a foreign country on whom he had no kind of claim, it seems a mean and pitiful thing in that man to sit down in cold blood and pick out the faults and imperfections, if he can descry any, in that country. The 'cad with a kodak'--where did I find that happy collocation?--is to be found everywhere; that is quite certain; every traveller, as is well known, feels himself justified after six weeks of a country to sit in judgment upon that country and its institutions, its manners, its customs and its society; he constitutes himself an authority upon that country for the rest of his life. Do we not know the man who 'has been there'? Lord Palmerston knew him. 'Beware,' he used to say, 'of the man who has been there!' As Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs he was privileged to make quite a circle of acquaintance with the men who 'had been there'; and he estimated their experience at its true value.

The man who has been there very seldom speaks its language with so much ease as to understand all classes; he has therefore no real chance of seeing and understanding things otherwise than as they seem. When an Englishman travels in America, however, he can speak the language. Therefore, he thinks that he really does understand the things he sees. Does he? Let us consider. To understand the true meaning of things in any strange land is not to see certain things by themselves, but to be able to see them in their relation to other things. Thus, the question of price must be taken with the question of wage; that of supply with that of demand; that of things done with the national opinion on such things; that of the continued existence of certain recognised evils with, the conditions and exigencies of the time; and so on. Before an observer can understand the relative value of this or that he must make a long and sometimes a profound study of the history of the country, the growth of the people, and the present condition of the nation. It is obvious that it is given to very few visitors to conduct such an investigation. Most of them have no time; very, very few have the intellectual grasp necessary for an undertaking of this magnitude. It is obvious, therefore, that the criticism of a two months' traveller must be worthless generally, and impertinent almost always. The kodak, you see, in the bands of the cads, produces mischievous and misleading pictures.

Let us take one or two familiar instances of the dangers of hasty objection. Nothing worries the average American visitor to Great Britain more than the House of Lords, and, generally, the national distinctions. He sees very plainly that the House of Lords no longer represents an aristocracy of ancient descent, because by far the greater number of peers belong to modern creations and new families, chiefly of the trading class; that it no longer represents the men of whom the country has most reason to be proud, because out of the whole domain of science, letters, and art there have been but two creations in the history of the peerage. He sees, also, that an Englishman has, apparently, only to make enough money in order to command a peerage for himself, and the elevation to a separate caste of himself and his children forever. Again, as regards the lower distinctions, he perceives that they are given for this reason and for that reason; but he knows nothing at all of the services rendered to the State by the dozens of knights made every year, while he can see very well that the men of real distinction, whom he does know, never get any distinctions at all. These difficulties perplex and irritate him. Probably he goes home with a hasty generalization.

But the answer to these objections is not difficult. Without posing as a champion of the House of Lords, one may point out that it is a very ancient and deep-rooted institution; that to pull it up would cost an immense deal of trouble; that it gives us a second or upper house quite free from the acknowledged dangers of popular election; that the lords have long ceased to oppose themselves to changes once clearly and unmistakably demanded by the nation; that the hereditary powers actually exercised by the very small number of peers who sit in the House do give us an average exhibition of brain power quite equal to that found in the House of Commons, in which are the six hundred chosen delegates of the people; that, as regards the elevation of rich men, a poor man cannot well accept a peerage, because custom does not permit a peer to work for his livelihood; that it is necessary to create new peers continually, in order to keep as close a connection as possible between the Lords and the Commons; _e.g._, if a peer has a hundred brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins, they are all commoners and he is the one peer, so that for six hundred peers there may be a hundred thousand people closely allied to the House of Lords. Again, as to the habitual contempt with which the advisers of the Crown pass over the men who by their science, art, and literature bring honour upon their generation, the answer is, that when the newspaper press thinks fit to take up the subject and becomes as jealous over the national distinctions as they are now over the national finances, the thing will get itself righted. And not till then. I instance this point and these objections as illustrating what is often said, and thought, by American visitors who record their first impressions.

The same kind of danger, of course, awaits the English traveller in America. If he is an unwise traveller, he will note, for admiring or indignant quotation, many a thing which the wise traveller notes only with a query and the intention of finding out, if he can, what it means or why it is permitted. The first questions, in fact, for the student of manners and laws are why a thing is permitted, encouraged, or practised; how the thing in consideration affects the people who practise it, and how they regard it. Thus, to go back to ancient history, English people, forty years ago, could not understand how slavery was allowed to continue in the States. We ourselves had virtuously given freedom to all our slaves; why should not the Americans? We had not grown up under the institution, you see; we had little personal knowledge of the negro; we believed that, in spite of the discouraging examples in Hayti and in our own Jamaica, there was a splendid future for the black, if only he could be free and educated. Again, none of our people realized, until the Civil War actually broke out, the enormous magnitude of the interests involved; we had read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and our hearts glowed with virtuous indignation; we could not understand the enormous difficulties of the question. Finally, we succeeded in enraging the South against us before the war began, because of our continual outcry against slavery; and in enraging the North after the war began, by reason of our totally unexpected Southern sympathies. It is a curious history of wrongheadedness and ignorance.

This was a big thing. The things which the English traveller in the States now notices are little things; as life is made up of little things, he is noting differences all day long, because everything that he sees is different. Speech is different: the manner of enunciating the words is different; it is clearer, slower, more grammatical; among the better sort it is more careful; it is even academical. We English speak thickly, far back in the throat, the voice choked by beard and moustache, and we speak much more carelessly. Then the way of living at the hotels is different; the rooms are much--very much--better furnished than would be found in towns of corresponding size in England--_e.g._, at Providence, Rhode Island, which is not a large city, there is a hotel which is most beautifully furnished; and at Buffalo, which is a city half the size of Birmingham, the hotel is perhaps better furnished than any hotel in London. An immense menu is placed before the visitor for breakfast and dinner. There is an embarrassment of choice. Perhaps it is insular prejudice which makes one prefer the simple menu, the limited choice, and the plain food of the English hotels. At least, rightly or wrongly, the English hotels appear to the English traveller the more comfortable. I return to the differences. In the preparation and the serving of food there are differences--the mid-day meal, far more in America than in England, is the national dinner. In most American hotels that received us we found the evening meal called supper--and a very inferior spread it was, compared to the one o'clock service. In the drinks there is a difference--the iced water which forms so welcome a part of every meal in the States is generally the only drink; it is not common, out of the great cities, to see claret on the table. There are differences in the conduct of the trains and in the form of the railway carriages; differences in the despatch and securing of luggage; difference in the railway whistle; difference in the management of the station, until one knows the way about, travelling in America is a continual trial to the temper. Until, for instance, an understanding of the manners and customs in this respect has been attained, the conveyance of the luggage to the hotel is a ruinous expense. And unless one understands the rough usage of luggage on American lines, there will be further trials of temper over the breakage of things. In France and Italy such small differences do not exasperate, because they ate known to exist; one expects them; they are benighted foreigners who know no better. But in America, where they speak our own language, one seems to have a right, somehow, to expect that all the usages will be exactly the same--and they are not; and so the cad with the kodak gets his chance.

I can quite understand, even at this day, the making of a book which should hold up to ridicule the whole of a nation on account of these differences. 'The Americans a great nation? Why, sir, I could not get--the whole time that I was them--such a simple thing as English mustard. The Americans a great nation? Well, sir, all I can say is that their breakfast in the Wagner car is a greasy pretence. The Americans a great nation? They may be, sir; but all I can say is that there isn't such a thing--that I could discover--as an honest bar-parlour, where a man can have his pipe and his grog in comfort.' And so on--the kind of thing may be multiplied indefinitely. What Mrs. Trollope did sixty years ago might be done again.

But, if I had the time, I would write the companion volume--that of the American in England--in which it should be proved, after the same fashion, that this poor old country is in the last stage of decay, because we have compartment carriages on the railway; no checks for the luggage; no electric trolleys in the street; at the hotels no elaborate menu, but only a simple dinner of fish and roast-beef; no iced water, an established Church (the clergy all bursting with fatness); a House of Lords (all profligates); and a Queen who chops off heads when so disposed. It would also be noted, as proving the contemptible decay of the country, that a large proportion of the lower classes omit the aspirate; that rough holiday-makers laugh and sing and play the accordion as they take their trips abroad; that the factory girls wear hideous hats and feathers; that all classes drink beer, and that men are often seen rolling drunk in the streets. Nor would the American traveller in Great Britain fail to observe, with the scorn of a moralist, the political corruption of the time; he would hold up to the contempt of the world the statesman who with the utmost vehemence condemns a movement one day which, on the following day, in order to gain votes and recover power, he adopts, and with equal vehemence advocates; he would ask what can be the moral standards of a country where a great party turns right round, at the bidding of their leader, and follows him like a flock of sheep, applauding, voting, advocating as he bids them, to-day, this--to-morrow, its opposite.

These things and more will be found in that book of the American in England when it appears. You see how small and worthless and prejudiced would be such a volume. Well, it is precisely such a volume that the ordinary traveller is capable of writing. All the things that I have mentioned are accidentals; they are differences which mean nothing; they are not essentials; what I wish to show is that he who would think rightly of a country must disregard the accidentals and get at the essentials. What follows is my own attempt--which I am well aware must be of the smallest account--to feel my way to two or three essentials.