Chapter 12
I never saw people standing in a train, except that once which I have already noted, when in a very crowded car in Wales, two women, decent elderly persons, got in and were suffered to remain on foot by the young men who had comfortable places; no one dreamed, apparently, of offering to give up his seat. But, on the other hand, a superior civilization is shown in what I may call the manual forbearance of the trolley and railway folk, who are so apt to nudge and punch you at home here, when they wish your attention. The like happened to me only once in England, and that was at Liverpool, where the tram conductor, who laid hands on me instead of speaking, had perhaps been corrupted by the unseen American influences of a port at which we arrive so abundantly and indiscriminately. I did not resent the touch, though it is what every one is expected to do, if aggrieved, and every one else does it in England. Within his rights, every one is safe; though there may be some who have no rights. If there were, I did not see them, and I suppose that, as an alien, I might have refused to stand up and uncover when the band began playing _God Save the King_, as it did at the end of every musical occasion; I might have urged that, being no subject of the King, I did not feel bound to join in the general prayer. But that would have been churlish, and, where every one had been so civil to me, I did not see why I should not be civil to the King, in a small matter. In the aggregate indeed, it is not a small matter, and I suppose that the stranger always finds the patriotism of a country molestive. Patriotism is, at any rate, very disagreeable, with the sole exception of our own, which we are constantly wishing to share with other people, especially with English people. We spare them none of it, even in their own country, and yet many of us object to theirs; I feel that I am myself being rather offensive about it, now, at this distance from them. Upon the whole, not caring very actively for us, one way or the other, they take it amiably; they try to get our point of view, and, as if it were a thorn, self-sacrificially press their bosoms against it, in the present or recent _entente cordiale_. None of their idiosyncrasies is more notable than their patience, their kindness with our divergence from them; but I am not sure that, having borne with us when we are by, they do not take it out of us when we are away.
We are the poetry of a few, who, we like to think, have studied the most deeply into the causes of our being, or its excuses. But you cannot always be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that our lovers must sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gentleness comes from the common indifference, and from something else that I will not directly touch upon. What is certain is that, with all manner of strangers, the English seem very gentle, when they meet in chance encounter. The average level of good manners is high. My experience was not the widest, and I am always owning it was not deep; but, such as it was, it brought me to the distasteful conviction that in England I did not see the mannerless uncouthness which I often see in America, not so often from high to low, or from old to young, but the reverse. There may be much more than we infer, at the moment, from the modulated voices, which sweetens casual intercourse, but there are certain terms of respect, almost unknown to us, which more obviously do that effect. It is a pity that democracy, being the fine thing it essentially is, should behave so rudely. Must we come to family government, in order to be filial or fraternal in our bearing with one another? Why should we be so blunt, so sharp, so ironical, so brutal in our kindness?
VII
The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to the instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we are not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But there is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes his perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the sense of always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried expectation that there is really something in what you say which, will be clear by-and-by.
Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen I have known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those story-telling Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless. It is true that, wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon lump, the expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are subtile spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose delicate gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself of a heavier and grosser fibre.
No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than half-way for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile spirits are shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are also of such an exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit is funny, they will not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our jokers. But, if you have something fine and good in you, you need not be afraid they will fail of it, and they will not be so long about finding it out as some travellers say. When it comes to the grace of the imaginative in your pleasantry, they will be even beforehand with you. But in their extreme of impersonality they will leave the initiative to you in the matter of humor as in others. They will no more seek out your peculiar humor than they will name you in speaking with you.
VIII
Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with in fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the birds in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights. In fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over and kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for the joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by easy chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness of the barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw him standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like a statue of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic death and martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the peril of poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many gunners pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows how shy the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt from the same coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I had almost indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink coats and the flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were mine by a kind of sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.
IX
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.”
XI
As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping one’s aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last of my English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice purely cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through the National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that till the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard in their pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in England, but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish border. Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had scattered far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low breeding, and the infection is now spread as far as popular learning. Like the wrong breathing, it is social death “to any he that utters it,” not indeed that swift extinction which follows having your name crossed by royalty from the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to visit, but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole island, where you can nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing a woman call herself “a lydy.” It may indeed be the contagion of the National School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of the wrong breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of national origin and extent, and both are individual or personal in their manifestation. That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk through their noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop their aitches.
The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them, any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation among us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales are otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They seem capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings, which is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is the fault of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English fair. Where the work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a difference between the two peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a horse-race. While all the singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at their national musical festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met in the national pastime of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money probably changed hands on the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it was characteristic of the prevalent influence in the common civilization (if there is a civilization common to both races) that the King was at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But I do not say this to his disadvantage, for I was myself at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a race.
XII
What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently. We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul, the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey that the Welsh are “the prize liars of the universe.” He was an expert accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame the others.
I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment in the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at least of a different mind concerning the Welsh. “These Welsh farmers,” he said, “send their sons and daughters to college as if it were quite the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant sending his boy to a University!”
We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase are no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by which the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving through the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify because every part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an illustration of the reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide. It was the accumulation, not merely within men’s memories, but within the actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great nobleman who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of enclosing the people’s commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of the wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through the broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to their aid. Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of our national foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin. Doubtless the aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know what the attacks of the press amount to against the steadfast will of a powerful corporation, and a great nobleman in England is a powerful corporation. In this instance he had not apparently taken the people’s land without some wish to make them a return for it. He had built a handsome road through their property, which he maintained in splendid condition, and he allowed them to drive over his road, and to walk freely in certain portions of their woods. He had also built a magnificent hospital for them, and it seemed rather hard, then, to hear that one of the humblest of them had been known to speak of him in whispered confidence as a “Upas tree.”
XIII
Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward him left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we had taken in his enclosure, “That’s a private path!” was unjust. There was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place secure from intrusion. The word “Private” painted up anywhere does the effect of bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it, and is not for a moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it seems so often with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so mandatory, the English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not told to keep your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are “requested,” and sometimes even “kindly requested”; I do not know but once I was “respectfully requested.” Perhaps that nobleman’s possession of these lands was so new that his retainers had to practise something of unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At any rate, the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from class to class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare say he does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but apparently the manners of the lower class, where they have been touched by the upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence and complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and insistences, and acceptances between people of condition, such as I witnessed once in a crowded first-class carriage from London on an Oxford holiday, nothing could be more gently urgent, more beautifully forbearing. If the writers of our romantic novels could get just those manners into their fiction, I should not mind their dealing so much with the English nobility and gentry; for those who intend being our nobility and gentry, by-and-by, could not do better than study such high-breeding.