Part 10

In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction of Conway. This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately eager to sign their names in the guest-book. They scarcely left space in the sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling photographs and ironically inviting her visitors’ guests to a glimpse of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be seen. She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement, and could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it was built so small she was equally vague. But there it was, to like or to leave, and there, not far off, was the “briny beach” where the Walrus and the Carpenter walked together,--

“And wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand.”

For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that Through the Looking-Glass was written.

There are very few places in those storied British Isles which are not hallowed by some association with literature; but I suppose that Llandudno is as exempt as any can be, and I will not try to invoke any dear and honored shade from its doubtful obscurity. We once varied the even tenor of our days there by driving to Penmaenmawr, and wreaking our love of literary associations so far as we might by connecting the place with the memory of Gladstone, who was literary as well as political. We thought with him that Penmaenmawr was “the most charming watering-place in Wales,” and as you drive into the place, the eye of faith will detect the house, on the right, in which he spent many happy summers. We contented ourselves with driving direct to the principal hotel, where I know not what kept us from placing ourselves for life. We had tea and jam en the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of the yellow-jacket variety, which must have been true Welsh wasps, as peaceful as they were musical, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for they did not offer to attack us, but confined themselves altogether to our jam: to be sure, we thought best to leave it to them.

It is said that the purple year is not purpler at any point on the southernmost shores of England than it is at Llandudno. In proof of the mildness of its winter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender evergreens is alleged, and the persistence of flowers in blooming from Christmas to Easter. But those who have known the deceitful habits of flowers on the Riviera, where they bloom in any but an arctic degree of cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than November. All the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in summer, whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill on which immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather boldly stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness of nature when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no upholsterer or paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow and purple in the decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt the eye in a transport of delight. It was indeed a day when almost any arrangement of colors would have pleased.

VII

It is not easy in that much summer-resorted region to get at the country in other than its wilder moods; it is either town or mountain; but now and then one found one’s self among harvest-fields, where the yield of wheat and oats was far heavier than with us, either because the soil was richer or the tilth thorougher. The farms indeed looked very fertile, and the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the outside. They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as in the Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of slate, and not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much gathered into villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it is out of such houses that the farmers’ boys and girls go to the co-educational colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the preference of the farmers that their sons should be educated for the ministry, which in that country of multiplied dissents has pulpits for every color of contrary-mindedness, as well as livings of the not yet disestablished English Church. It is not indeed the English Church in speech. The Welsh will have their service and their sermon in their own tongue, and when an Oxford or Cambridge man is given a Welsh living, he must do what he can to conform to the popular demand. It is said that in one case, where the incumbent long held out against the parish, he compromised by reading the service in Welsh with the English pronunciation. But the Welsh churches are now supplied with Welsh-speaking clergy, though whether it is well for the Welsh to cling so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many Welshmen. These hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our universal English, offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb back into its Gaelic shell.

I do not know whether an incident of my experience in coming from Chester to Llandudno is to be offered as an illustration of Welsh manners or of English manners. A woman of the middle rank, certainly below gentlewoman, but very personable and well dressed, got into our carriage where there was no seat for her. She was no longer young, but she was not so old as the American who offered her his seat. She refused it, but consented to sit on the hand-bag and rug which he arranged for her, and so remained till she left the train, while a half-grown boy and several young men kept their countenances and their places, not apparently dreaming of offering her a seat, or if they thought of her at all, thought she was well punished for letting the guard crowd her in upon us. By her stature and complexion she was undoubtedly Welsh, and these youth from theirs were as undoubtedly English. Perhaps, then, the incident had better be offered as an illustration of Welsh and English manners combined.

* * * * *

GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER

Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all men. He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with “a little Latin and less Greek” from his earliest visitors and invaders. This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.

No error of the Englishman’s latest invader is commoner than the notion, which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of American, tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the disadvantages of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in unfriendly conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be a sort of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides with us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a possible future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort of Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather too largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he will speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King, or the Royal Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to prevail. The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good writer, but in no case does he spell American. He prefers, as far as he remembers it, the Norman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said “geôle,” the Conquered print “gaol,” which the American invader must pronounce “jail,” not “gayol.”

The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago--say, fifteen or twenty--it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I should not be going farther than some Englishmen if I said that her personal character saved the monarchy; when she died there was not a vestige of the republican dream which had remained from a sentiment for “the free peoples of antiquity” rather than from the Commonwealth. Democracy had indeed effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen’s subjects when the Prince of Wales, who was the first of them, went about praising loyalty as prime among the civic virtues and duties. The notion took the general fancy, and met with an acceptance in which the old superstition of kings by divine right was resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar lately said to an American woman who owned that we did not yield an equal personal fealty to all our Presidents, “Oh yes, but you know that it is only your people that choose the President, but God gave us the King.” Nothing could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the churches of the eldest faith the humble worshipper could not well be told that the picture or the statue of his adoration was not itself sacred. In fact, it is not going too far, at least for a very adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with the English is a sort of religious principle. What is with us more or less a joke, sometimes bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the powers that be in the person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most serious thing, at which no man may smile without loss.

I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, “What is loyalty? How did you come by it? Why are you loyal?”--I felt that it would be embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in the English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used to be mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at. That sort of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the King, or any of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill bred, and quite unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to criticism. Even the Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though in their hearts, if not in their sleeves, they must all the while be smiling at the notion of anything sacred in the Sovereign.

Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable, perhaps, than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of society which hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family counts for much with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it counts for nothing at all in comparison with the face value at which it is current in England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when we are very much out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as the commoners of England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is nonsense. A very rich man with us is all the more ridiculous for his more millions; he becomes a byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of the paragrapher, the awful example of the preacher; his money is found to smell of his methods. But in England, the greater a nobleman is, the greater his honor. The American mother who imagines marrying her daughter to an English duke, cannot even imagine an English duke--say, like him of Devonshire, or him of Northumberland, or him of Norfolk--with the social power and state which wait upon him in his duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in degree down to the latest and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet humbler men who have been knighted for their merits and services in medicine, in literature, in art. The greater and greatest nobles are established in a fear which is very like what the fear of God used to be when the common people feared Him; and, though they are potent political magnates, they mainly rule as the King himself does, through the secular reverence of those beneath them for their titles and the visible images of their state. They are wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that, when one now and then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their wealth alone would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth does no such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is much desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor than it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of families first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless hold upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for, though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people into or out of the administration, it is always--or so nearly always that the exception proves the rule--family that rules, from the King down to the least attaché of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had never occurred to anybody before, “Yes, isn’t it strange that those few families should keep it all among themselves!” It was a slender female voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive surprise, as at a curious usage of some realm of faery.

III

England is in fact, to the American, always a realm of faery, in its political and social constitution. It must be owned, concerning the government by family, that it certainly seems to work well. That justifies it, so far as the exclusion of the immense majority from the administration of their own affairs can be justified by anything; though I hold that the worst form of graft in office is hardly less justifiable: that is, at least, one of the people picking their pockets. But it is the universal make-believe behind all the practical virtue of the state that constitutes the English monarchy a realm of faery. The whole population, both the great and the small, by a common effort of the will, agree that there is a man or a woman of a certain line who can rightfully inherit the primacy amongst them, and can be dedicated through this right to live the life of a god, to be so worshipped and flattered, so cockered about with every form of moral and material flummery, that he or she may well be more than human not to be made a fool of. Then, by a like prodigious stroke of volition, the inhabitants of the enchanted island universally agree that there is a class of them which can be called out of their names in some sort of title, bestowed by some ancestral or actual prince, and can forthwith be something different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do them reverence, them and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing process, the realm of faery is constituted, a thing which could not have any existence in nature, yet by its existence in fancy becomes the most absolute of human facts.

It is not surprising that, in the conditions which ensue, snobbishness should abound; the surprising thing would be if it did not abound. Even with ourselves, who by a seven years’ struggle burst the faery dream a century ago, that least erected spirit rears its loathly head from the dust at times, and in our polite press we can read much if we otherwise see nothing of its subtle influence. But no evil is without its compensating good, and the good of English snobbishness is that it has reduced loyalty, whether to the prince or to the patrician, from a political to a social significance. That is, it does so with the upper classes; with the lower, loyalty finds expression in an unparalleled patriotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know very well that he is not much in himself; but he believes that England stands for him, and that royalty and nobility stand for England. Both of these, there, are surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence wholly inconceivable to the natives of a country where there are only millionaires to revere.

The most curious thing is that the persons in the faery dream seem to believe it as devoutly as the simplest and humblest of the dreamers. The persons in the dream apparently take themselves as seriously as if there were or could be in reality kings and lords. They could not, of course, do so if they were recently dreamed, as they were, say, in the France of the Third Empire. There, one fancies, these figments must have always been smiling in each other’s faces when they were by themselves. But the faery dream holds solidly in England because it is such a very old dream. Besides, the dream does not interfere with the realities; it even honors them. If a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure of the faery dream recognizes his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up among the other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever. After that he has standing, such as no man may have with us for more than that psychological moment, when all the papers cry him up, and then everybody tries to forget him. But, better than this, the dream has the effect, if it has not the fact, of securing every man in his place, so long as he keeps to it. Nowhere else in the world is there so much personal independence, without aggression, as in England. There is apparently nothing of it in Germany; in Italy, every one is so courteous and kind that there is no question of it; in the French Republic and in our own, it exists in an excess that is molestive and invasive; in England alone does it strike the observer as being of exactly the just measure.

Very likely the observer is mistaken, and in the present case he will not insist. After all, even the surface indications in such matters are slight and few. But what I noted was that, though the simple and humble have to go to the wall, and for the most part go to it unkicking, in England they were, on their level, respectfully and patiently entreated. At a railroad junction one evening, when there was a great hurrying up stairs and down, and a mad seeking of wrong trains by right people, the company’s servants who were taking tickets, and directing passengers this way and that, were patiently kind with futile old men and women, who came up, in the midst of their torment, and pestered them with questions as to the time when trains that had not arrived would leave after they did arrive. I shuddered to think what would have at least verbally happened to such inquirers with us; but, there, not only their lives but their feelings were safe, and they could go away with such self-respect as they had quite intact.

In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so wrong-headed as the English baggage system be suffered. But, there, passengers of all kinds help the porters to sort their trunks from other people’s trunks, on arrival at their stations, and apparently think it no hardship. The porters, who do not seem especially inspired persons, have a sort of guiding instinct in the matter, and wonderfully seldom fail to get the things together for the cab, or to get them off the cab, and, duly labelled, into the luggage-van. Once, at a great junction, my porter seemed to have missed my train, and after vain but not unconsidered appeals to the guard, I had to start without it. At the next station, the company telegraphed back at its own cost the voluminous message of my anxiety and indignation, and I was assured that the next train would bring my valise from Crewe to Edinburgh. When I arrived at Edinburgh, I casually mentioned my trouble to a guard whom I had not seen before. He asked how the bags were marked, and then he said they had come with us. My porter had run with them to my train, but in despair of getting to my car with his burden, had put them into the last luggage-van, and all I had to do was now to identify them at my journey’s end.

Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people’s baggage, I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom. Perhaps in this, the deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery dream, operates the security of the respective owners of baggage that could otherwise easily be the general prey. While I saw constant regard paid for personal rights, I saw only one case in which they were offensively asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we attempted to take possession of a compartment we had paid for from the nearest junction, in order to make certain of it. We found it in the keeping of a gentleman who had turned it from a non-smoking into a smoking compartment, and bestrewn it with his cigar ashes. When told by the porters that we had engaged the compartment, he refused to stir, and said that he had paid for his seat, and he should not leave it till he was provided with another. In vain they besought him to consider our hard case, in being kept out of our own, and promised him another place as good as the one he held. He said that he would not believe it till he saw it, and as he would not go to see it, and it could not be brought to him, there appeared little chance of our getting rid of him. I thought it best to let him and the porters fight it out among themselves. When a force of guards appeared, they were equally ineffective against the intruder, who could not, or did not, say that he did not know the compartment was engaged. Suddenly, for no reason, except that he had sufficiently stood, or sat, upon his rights, he rose, and the others precipitated themselves upon his hand-baggage, mainly composed of fishing-tackle, such as a gentleman carries who has been asked to somebody’s fishing, and bore it away to another part of the train. They left one piece behind, and the porter who came back for it was radiantly smiling, as if the struggle had been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke of his antagonist without the least exasperation; evidently, he regarded him as one who had justly defended himself from corporate aggression; his sympathies were with him rather than with us, perhaps because we had not so vigorously asserted ourselves.

A case in which a personal wrong rather than a personal right was offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so unfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Races to York. She had kept a whole first-class compartment to herself, putting her maid into the second-class adjoining, and heaping the vacant seats with her hand-baggage, which had also overflowed into the corridor. At the time the train started she was comforting herself in her luxurious solitude with a cup of tea, and she stood up, as if to keep other people out. But, after waiting, seven of us, in the corridor, until she should offer to admit us, we all swarmed in upon her, and made ourselves indignantly at home. When it came to that she offered no protest, but gathered up her belongings, and barricaded herself with them. Among the rest there was a typewriting-machine, but what manner of young lady she was, or whether of the journalistic or the theatrical tribe, has never revealed itself to this day. We could not believe that she was very high-born, not nearly so high, for instance, as the old lady who helped dispossess her, and who, when we ventured the hope that it would not rain on the morrow, which was to be St. Leger Day, almost lost the kindness for us inspired by some small service, because we had the bad taste to suggest such a possibility for so sacred a day.

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.