Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales

What I was distinctly not prepared for is the very considerable body of aristocratic feeling that lurks beneath this republican simplicity.  I’ve on several occasions been made the confidant of these romantic but delusive vagaries, of which the stronghold appears to be the Empire City—a slang name for the rich and predominant, but unprecedentedly maladministered and disillusioned New York.  I was assured in many quarters that this great desperate eternally-swindled city at least is ripe, everything else failing, for the monarchical experiment or revolution, and that if one of the Queen’s sons would come over to sound the possibilities he would meet with the highest encouragement.  This information was given me in strict confidence, with closed doors, as it were; it reminded me a good deal of the dreams of the old Jacobites when they whispered their messages to the king across the water.  I doubt, however, whether these less excusable visionaries will be able to secure the services of a Pretender, for I fear that in such a case he would encounter a still more fatal Culloden.  I have given a good deal of time, as I told you, to the educational system, and have visited no fewer than one hundred and forty-three schools and colleges.  It’s extraordinary the number of persons who are being educated in this country; and yet at the same time the tone of the people is less scholarly than one might expect.  A lady a few days since described to me her daughter as being always “on the go,” which I take to be a jocular way of saying that the young lady was very fond of paying visits.  Another person, the wife of a United States Senator, informed me that if I should go to Washington in January I should be quite “in the swim.”  I don’t regard myself as slow to grasp new meanings, however whimsical; but in this case the lady’s explanation made her phrase rather more than less ambiguous.  To say that I’m on the go describes very accurately my own situation.  I went yesterday to the Poganuc High School, to hear fifty-seven boys and girls recite in unison a most remarkable ode to the American flag, and shortly afterward attended a ladies’ luncheon at which some eighty or ninety of the sex were present.  There was only one individual in trousers—his trousers, by the way, though he brought several pair, begin to testify to the fury of his movements!  The men in America absent themselves systematically from this meal, at which ladies assemble in large numbers to discuss religious, political and social topics.

Immense female symposia at which every delicacy is provided are one of the most striking features of American life, and would seem to prove that our sex is scarcely so indispensable in the scheme of creation as it sometimes supposes.  I’ve been admitted on the footing of an Englishman—“just to show you some of our bright women,” the hostess yesterday remarked.  (“Bright” here has the meaning of intellectually remarkable.)  I noted indeed the frequency of the predominantly cerebral—as they call it here “brainy”—type.  These rather oddly invidious banquets are organised according to age, for I’ve also been present as an inquiring stranger at several “girls’ lunches,” from which married ladies are rigidly excluded, but here the fair revellers were equally numerous and equally “bright.”  There’s a good deal I should like to tell you about my study of the educational question, but my position’s now somewhat cramped, and I must dismiss the subject briefly.  My leading impression is that the children are better educated (in proportion of course) than the adults.  The position of a child is on the whole one of great distinction.  There’s a popular ballad of which the refrain, if I’m not mistaken, is “Make me a child again just for to-night!” and which seems to express the sentiment of regret for lost privileges.  At all events they are a powerful and independent class, and have organs, of immense circulation, in the press.  They are often extremely “bright.”  I’ve talked with a great many teachers, most of them lady-teachers, as they are here called.  The phrase doesn’t mean teachers of ladies, as you might suppose, but applies to the sex of the instructress, who often has large classes of young men under her control.  I was lately introduced to a young woman of twenty-three who occupies the chair of Moral Philosophy and Belles-Lettres in a Western University and who told me with the utmost frankness that she’s “just adored” by the undergraduates.  This young woman was the daughter of a petty trader in one of the South-western States and had studied at Amanda College in Missourah, an institution at which young people of the two sexes pursue their education together.  She was very pretty and modest, and expressed a great desire to see something of English country life, in consequence of which I made her promise to come down to Thistleton in the event of her crossing the Atlantic.  She’s not the least like Gwendolen or Charlotte, and I’m not prepared to say how they would get on with her; the boys would probably do better.  Still, I think her acquaintance would be of value to dear Miss Gulp, and the two might pass their time very pleasantly in the school-room.  I grant you freely that those I have seen here are much less comfortable than the school-room at Thistleton.  Has Charlotte, by the way, designed any more texts for the walls?  I’ve been extremely interested in my visit to Philadelphia, where I saw several thousand little red houses with white steps, occupied by intelligent artisans and arranged (in streets) on the rectangular system.  Improved cooking-stoves, rosewood pianos, gas and hot water, esthetic furniture and complete sets of the British Essayists.  A tramway through every street; every block of exactly equal length; blocks and houses economically lettered and numbered.  There’s absolutely no loss of time and no need of looking for, or indeed at, anything.  The mind always on one’s object; it’s very delightful.

V
FROM LOUIS LEVERETT IN BOSTON TO HARVARD TREMONT IN PARIS

The scales have turned, my sympathetic Harvard, and the beam that has lifted you up has dropped me again on this terribly hard spot.  I’m extremely sorry to have missed you in London, but I received your little note and took due heed of your injunction to let you know how I got on.  I don’t get on at all, my dear Harvard—I’m consumed with the love of the further shore.  I’ve been so long away that I’ve dropped out of my place in this little Boston world and the shallow tides of New England life have closed over it.  I’m a stranger here and find it hard to believe I ever was a native.  It’s very hard, very cold, very vacant.  I think of your warm rich Paris; I think of the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the mild spring evenings; I see the little corner by the window (of the Café de la Jeunesse) where I used to sit: the doors are open, the soft deep breath of the great city comes in.  The sense is of a supreme splendour and an incomparable arrangement, yet there’s a kind of tone, of body, in the radiance; the mighty murmur of the ripest civilisation in the world comes in; the dear old peuple de Paris, the most interesting people in the world, pass by.  I’ve a little book in my pocket; it’s exquisitely printed, a modern Elzevir.  It consists of a lyric cry from the heart of young France and is full of the sentiment of form.  There’s no form here, dear Harvard; I had no idea how little form there is.  I don’t know what I shall do; I feel so undraped, so uncurtained, so uncushioned; I feel as if I were sitting in the centre of a mighty “reflector.”  A terrible crude glare is over everything; the earth looks peeled and excoriated; the raw heavens seem to bleed with the quick hard light.

I’ve not got back my rooms in West Cedar Street; they’re occupied by a mesmeric healer.  I’m staying at an hotel and it’s all very dreadful.  Nothing for one’s self, nothing for one’s preferences and habits.  No one to receive you when you arrive; you push in through a crowd, you edge up to a counter, you write your name in a horrible book where every one may come and stare at it and finger it.  A man behind the counter stares at you in silence; his stare seems to say “What the devil do you want?”  But after this stare he never looks at you again.  He tosses down a key at you; he presses a bell; a savage Irishman arrives.  “Take him away,” he seems to say to the Irishman; but it’s all done in silence; there’s no answer to your own wild wail—“What’s to be done with me, please?”  “Wait and you’ll see” the awful silence seems to say.  There’s a great crowd round you, but there’s also a great stillness; every now and then you hear some one expectorate.  There are a thousand people in this huge and hideous structure; they feed together in a big white-walled room.  It’s lighted by a thousand gas-jets and heated by cast-iron screens which vomit forth torrents of scorching air.  The temperature’s terrible; the atmosphere’s more so; the furious light and heat seem to intensify the dreadful definiteness.  When things are so ugly they shouldn’t be so definite, and they’re terribly ugly here.  There’s no mystery in the corners, there’s no light and shade in the types.  The people are haggard and joyless; they look as if they had no passions, no tastes, no senses.  They sit feeding in silence under the dry hard light; occasionally I hear the high firm note of a child.  The servants are black and familiar; their faces shine as they shuffle about; there are blue tones in their dark masks.  They’ve no manners; they address but don’t answer you; they plant themselves at your elbow (it rubs their clothes as you eat) and watch you as if your proceedings were strange.  They deluge you with iced water; it’s the only thing they’ll bring you; if you look round to summon them they’ve gone for more.  If you read the newspaper—which I don’t, gracious heaven, I can’t!—they hang over your shoulder and peruse it also.  I always fold it up and present it to them; the newspapers here are indeed for an African taste.

Then there are long corridors defended by gusts of hot air; down the middle swoops a pale little girl on parlour skates.  “Get out of my way!” she shrieks as she passes; she has ribbons in her hair and frills on her dress; she makes the tour of the immense hotel.  I think of Puck, who put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, and wonder what he said as he flitted by.  A black waiter marches past me bearing a tray that he thrusts into my spine as he goes.  It’s laden with large white jugs; they tinkle as he moves, and I recognise the unconsoling fluid.  We’re dying of iced water, of hot air, of flaring gas.  I sit in my room thinking of these things—this room of mine which is a chamber of pain.  The walls are white and bare, they shine in the rays of a horrible chandelier of imitation bronze which depends from the middle of the ceiling.  It flings a patch of shadow on a small table covered with white marble, of which the genial surface supports at the present moment the sheet of paper I thus employ for you; and when I go to bed (I like to read in bed, Harvard) it becomes an object of mockery and torment.  It dangles at inaccessible heights; it stares me in the face; it flings the light on the covers of my book but not upon the page—the little French Elzevir I love so well.  I rise and put out the gas—when my room becomes even lighter than before.  Then a crude illumination from the hall, from the neighbouring room, pours through the glass openings that surmount the two doors of my apartment.  It covers my bed, where I toss and groan; it beats in through my closed lids; it’s accompanied by the most vulgar, though the most human, sounds.  I spring up to call for some help, some remedy; but there’s no bell and I feel desolate and weak.  There’s only a strange orifice in the wall, through which the traveller in distress may transmit his appeal.  I fill it with incoherent sounds, and sounds more incoherent yet come back to me.  I gather at last their meaning; they appear to constitute an awful inquiry.  A hollow impersonal voice wishes to know what I want, and the very question paralyses me.  I want everything—yet I want nothing, nothing this hard impersonality can give!  I want my little corner of Paris; I want the rich, the deep, the dark Old World; I want to be out of this horrible place.  Yet I can’t confide all this to that mechanical tube; it would be of no use; a barbarous laugh would come up from the office.  Fancy appealing in these sacred, these intimate moments to an “office”; fancy calling out into indifferent space for a candle, for a curtain!  I pay incalculable sums in this dreadful house, and yet haven’t a creature to assist me.  I fling myself back on my couch and for a long time afterwards the orifice in the wall emits strange murmurs and rumblings.  It seems unsatisfied and indignant and is evidently scolding me for my vagueness.  My vagueness indeed, dear Harvard!  I loathe their horrible arrangements—isn’t that definite enough?

You asked me to tell you whom I see and what I think of my friends.  I haven’t very many; I don’t feel at all en rapport.  The people are very good, very serious, very devoted to their work; but there’s a terrible absence of variety of type.  Every one’s Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown, and every one looks like Mr. Jones and Mr. Brown.  They’re thin, they’re diluted in the great tepid bath of Democracy!  They lack completeness of identity; they’re quite without modelling.  No, they’re not beautiful, my poor Harvard; it must be whispered that they’re not beautiful.  You may say that they’re as beautiful as the French, as the Germans; but I can’t agree with you there.  The French, the Germans, have the greatest beauty of all, the beauty of their ugliness—the beauty of the strange, the grotesque.  These people are not even ugly—they’re only plain.  Many of the girls are pretty, but to be only pretty is (to my sense) to be plain.  Yet I’ve had some talk.  I’ve seen a young woman.  She was on the steamer, and I afterwards saw her in New York—a mere maiden thing, yet a peculiar type, a real personality: a great deal of modelling, a great deal of colour, and withal something elusive and ambiguous.  She was not, however, of this country; she was a compound of far-off things.  But she was looking for something here—like me.  We found each other, and for a moment that was enough.  I’ve lost her now; I’m sorry, because she liked to listen to me.  She has passed away; I shall not see her again.  She liked to listen to me; she almost understood.

VI
FROM M. GUSTAVE LEJAUNE OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY IN WASHINGTON TO M. ADOLPHE BOUCHE IN PARIS

I give you my little notes; you must make allowances for haste, for bad inns, for the perpetual scramble, for ill-humour.  Everywhere the same impression—the platitude of unbalanced democracy intensified by the platitude of the spirit of commerce.  Everything on an immense scale—everything illustrated by millions of examples.  My brother-in-law is always busy; he has appointments, inspections, interviews, disputes.  The people, it appears, are incredibly sharp in conversation, in argument; they wait for you in silence at the corner of the road and then suddenly discharge their revolver.  If you fall they empty your pockets; the only chance is to shoot them first.  With this no amenities, no preliminaries, no manners, no care for the appearance.  I wander about while my brother’s occupied; I lounge along the streets; I stop at the corners; I look into the shops; je regarde passer les femmes.  It’s an easy country to see; one sees everything there is; the civilisation’s skin deep; you don’t have to dig.  This positive practical pushing bourgeoisie is always about its business; it lives in the street, in the hotel, in the train; one’s always in a crowd—there are seventy-five people in the tramway.  They sit in your lap; they stand on your toes; when they wish to pass they simply push you.  Everything in silence; they know that silence is golden and they’ve the worship of gold.  When the conductor wishes your fare he gives you a poke, very serious, without a word.  As for the types—but there’s only one, they’re all variations of the same—the commis-voyageur minus the gaiety.  The women are often pretty; you meet the young ones in the streets, in the trains, in search of a husband.  They look at you frankly, coldly, judicially, to see if you’ll serve; but they don’t want what you might think (du moines on me l’assure); they only want the husband.  A Frenchman may mistake; he needs to be sure he’s right, and I always make sure.  They begin at fifteen; the mother sends them out; it lasts all day (with an interval for dinner at a pastry-cook’s); sometimes it goes on for ten years.  If they haven’t by that time found him they give it up; they make place for the cadettes, as the number of women is enormous.  No salons, no society, no conversation; people don’t receive at home; the young girls have to look for the husband where they can.  It’s no disgrace not to find him—several have never done so.  They continue to go about unmarried—from the force of habit, from the love of movement, without hopes, without regrets.  There’s no imagination, no sensibility, no desire for the convent.

We’ve made several journeys—few of less than three hundred miles.  Enormous trains, enormous wagons, with beds and lavatories, with negroes who brush you with a big broom, as if they were grooming a horse.  A bounding movement, a roaring noise, a crowd of people who look horribly tired, a boy who passes up and down hurling pamphlets and sweetmeats into your face: that’s an American journey.  There are windows in the wagons—enormous like everything else; but there’s nothing to see.  The country’s a void—no features, no objects, no details, nothing to show you that you’re in one place more than another.  Aussi you’re not in one place, you’re everywhere, anywhere; the train goes a hundred miles an hour.  The cities are all the same; little houses ten feet high or else big ones two hundred; tramways, telegraph-poles, enormous signs, holes in the pavement, oceans of mud, commis-voyageurs, young ladies looking for the husband.  On the other hand no beggars and no cocottes—none at least that you see.  A colossal mediocrity, except (my brother-in-law tells me) in the machinery, which is magnificent.  Naturally no architecture (they make houses of wood and of iron), no art, no literature, no theatre.  I’ve opened some of the books—ils ne se laissent pas lire.  No form, no matter, no style, no general ideas: they seem written for children and young ladies.  The most successful (those that they praise most) are the facetious; they sell in thousands of editions.  I’ve looked into some of the most vantés; but you need to be forewarned to know they’re amusing; grins through a horse-collar, burlesques of the Bible, des plaisanteries de croquemort.  They’ve a novelist with pretensions to literature who writes about the chase for the husband and the adventures of the rich Americans in our corrupt old Europe, where their primeval candour puts the Europeans to shame.  C’est proprement écrit, but it’s terribly pale.  What isn’t pale is the newspapers—enormous, like everything else (fifty columns of advertisements), and full of the commérages of a continent.  And such a tone, grand Dieu!  The amenities, the personalities, the recriminations, are like so many coups de revolver.  Headings six inches tall; correspondences from places one never heard of; telegrams from Europe about Sarah Bernhardt; little paragraphs about nothing at all—the menu of the neighbour’s dinner; articles on the European situation à pouffer de rire; all the tripotage of local politics.  The reportage is incredible; I’m chased up and down by the interviewers.  The matrimonial infelicities of M. and Madame X. (they give the name) tout au long, with every detail—not in six lines, discreetly veiled, with an art of insinuation, as with us; but with all the facts (or the fictions), the letters, the dates, the places, the hours.  I open a paper at hazard and find au beau milieu, apropos of nothing, the announcement: “Miss Susan Green has the longest nose in Western New York.”  Miss Susan Green (je me renseigne) is a celebrated authoress, and the Americans have the reputation of spoiling their women.  They spoil them à coups de poing.

We’ve seen few interiors (no one speaks French); but if the newspapers give an idea of the domestic mœurs, the mœurs must be curious.  The passport’s abolished, but they’ve printed my signalement in these sheets—perhaps for the young ladies who look for the husband.  We went one night to the theatre; the piece was French (they are the only ones) but the acting American—too American; we came out in the middle.  The want of taste is incredible.  An Englishman whom I met tells me that even the language corrupts itself from day to day; the Englishman ceases to understand.  It encourages me to find I’m not the only one.  There are things every day that one can’t describe.  Such is Washington, where we arrived this morning, coming from Philadelphia.  My brother-in-law wishes to see the Bureau of Patents, and on our arrival he went to look at his machines while I walked about the streets and visited the Capitol!  The human machine is what interests me most.  I don’t even care for the political—for that’s what they call their Government here, “the machine.”  It operates very roughly, and some day evidently will explode.  It is true that you’d never suspect they have a government; this is the principal seat, but, save for three or four big buildings, most of them affreux, it looks like a settlement of negroes.  No movement, no officials, no authority, no embodiment of the State.  Enormous streets, comme toujours, lined with little red houses where nothing ever passes but the tramway.  The Capitol—a vast structure, false classic, white marble, iron and stucco, which has assez grand air—must be seen to be appreciated.  The goddess of liberty on the top, dressed in a bear’s skin; their liberty over here is the liberty of bears.  You go into the Capitol as you would into a railway station; you walk about as you would in the Palais Royal.  No functionaries, no door-keepers, no officers, no uniforms, no badges, no reservations, no authority—nothing but a crowd of shabby people circulating in a labyrinth of spittoons.  We’re too much governed perhaps in France; but at least we have a certain incarnation of the national conscience, of the national dignity.  The dignity’s absent here, and I’m told the public conscience is an abyss.  “L’état c’est moi” even—I like that better than the spittoons.  These implements are architectural, monumental; they’re the only monuments.  En somme the country’s interesting, now that we too have the Republic; it is the biggest illustration, the biggest warning.  It’s the last word of democracy, and that word is—platitude.  It’s very big, very rich, and perfectly ugly.  A Frenchman couldn’t live here; for life with us, after all, at the worst, is a sort of appreciation.  Here one has nothing to appreciate.  As for the people, they’re the English minus the conventions.  You can fancy what remains.  The women, pourtant, are sometimes rather well turned.  There was one at Philadelphia—I made her acquaintance by accident—whom it’s probable I shall see again.  She’s not looking for the husband; she has already got one.  It was at the hotel; I think the husband doesn’t matter.  A Frenchman, as I’ve said, may mistake, and he needs to be sure he’s right.  Aussi I always make sure!

VII
FROM MARCELLUS COCKEREL IN WASHINGTON TO MRS. COOLER, NÉE COCKEREL, AT OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

I ought to have written you long before this, for I’ve had your last excellent letter these four months in my hands.  The first half of that time I was still in Europe, the last I’ve spent on my native soil.  I think accordingly my silence is owing to the fact that over there I was too miserable to write and that here I’ve been too happy.  I got back the 1st of September—you’ll have seen it in the papers.  Delightful country where one sees everything in the papers—the big familiar vulgar good-natured delightful papers, none of which has any reputation to keep up for anything but getting the news!  I really think that has had as much to do as anything else with my satisfaction at getting home—the difference in what they call the “tone of the press.”  In Europe it’s too dreary—the sapience, the solemnity, the false respectability, the verbosity, the long disquisitions on superannuated subjects.  Here the newspapers are like the railroad-trains which carry everything that comes to the station and have only the religion of punctuality.  As a woman, however, you probably detest them; you think they’re (the great word) vulgar.  I admitted it just now, and I’m very happy to have an early opportunity to announce to you that that idea has quite ceased to have any terrors for me.  There are some conceptions to which the female mind can never rise.  Vulgarity’s a stupid superficial question-begging accusation, which has become to-day the easiest refuge of mediocrity.  Better than anything else it saves people the trouble of thinking, and anything which does that succeeds.  You must know that in these last three years in Europe I’ve become terribly vulgar myself; that’s one service my travels have rendered me.  By three years in Europe I mean three years in foreign parts altogether, for I spent several months of that time in Japan, India and the rest of the East.  Do you remember when you bade me good-bye in San Francisco the night before I embarked for Yokohama?  You foretold that I’d take such a fancy to foreign life that America would never see me more, and that if you should wish to see me (an event you were good enough to regard as possible) you’d have to make a rendezvous in Paris or in Rome.  I think we made one—which you never kept; but I shall never make another for those cities.  It was in Paris, however, that I got your letter; I remember the moment as well as if it were (to my honour) much more recent.  You must know that among many places I dislike Paris carries the palm.  I’m bored to death there; it’s the home of every humbug.  The life is full of that false comfort which is worse than discomfort, and the small fat irritable people give me the shivers.

I had been making these reflexions even more devoutly than usual one very tiresome evening toward the beginning of last summer when, as I re-entered my hotel at ten o’clock, the little reptile of a portress handed me your gracious lines.  I was in a villainous humour.  I had been having an overdressed dinner in a stuffy restaurant and had gone from there to a suffocating theatre, where, by way of amusement, I saw a play in which blood and lies were the least of the horrors.  The theatres over there are insupportable; the atmosphere’s pestilential.  People sit with their elbows in your sides; they squeeze past you every half hour.  It was one of my bad moments—I have a great many in Europe.  The conventional mechanical play, all in falsetto, which I seemed to have seen a thousand times; the horrible faces of the people, the pushing bullying ouvreuse with her false politeness and her real rapacity, drove me out of the place at the end of an hour; and as it was too early to go home, I sat down before a café on the Boulevard, where they served me a glass of sour watery beer.  There on the Boulevard, in the summer night, life itself was even uglier than the play, and it wouldn’t do for me to tell you what I saw.  Besides, I was sick of the Boulevard, with its eternal grimace and the deadly sameness of the article de Paris, which pretends to be so various—the shop-windows a wilderness of rubbish and the passers-by a procession of manikins.  Suddenly it came over me that I was supposed to be amusing myself—my face was a yard long—and that you probably at that moment were saying to your husband: “He stays away so long!  What a good time he must be having!”  The idea was the first thing that had made me smile for a month; I got up and walked home, reflecting as I went that I was “seeing Europe” and that after all one must see Europe.  It was because I had been convinced of this that I had come out, and it’s because the operation has been brought to a close that I’ve been so happy for the last eight weeks.  I was very conscientious about it, and, though your letter that night made me abominably homesick, I held out to the end, knowing it to be once for all.  I shan’t trouble Europe again; I shall see America for the rest of my days.  My long delay has had the advantage that now at least I can give you my impressions—I don’t mean of Europe; impressions of Europe are easy to get—but of this country as it strikes the reinstated exile.  Very likely you’ll think them queer; but keep my letter and twenty years hence they’ll be quite commonplace.  They won’t even be vulgar.  It was very deliberate, my going round the world.  I knew that one ought to see for one’s self and that I should have eternity, so to speak, to rest.  I travelled energetically; I went everywhere and saw everything; took as many letters as possible and made as many acquaintances.  In short I held my nose to the grindstone and here I am back.

Well, the upshot of it all is that I’ve got rid of a superstition.  We have so many that one the less—perhaps the biggest of all—makes a real difference in one’s comfort.  The one in question—of course you have it—is that there’s no salvation but through Europe.  Our salvation is here, if we have eyes to see it, and the salvation of Europe into the bargain; that is if Europe’s to be saved, which I rather doubt.  Of course you’ll call me a bird of freedom, a vulgar patriot, a waver of the stars and stripes; but I’m in the delightful position of not minding in the least what any one calls me.  I haven’t a mission; I don’t want to preach; I’ve simply arrived at a state of mind.  I’ve got Europe off my back.  You’ve no idea how it simplifies things and how jolly it makes me feel.  Now I can live, now I can talk.  If we wretched Americans could only say once for all “Oh Europe be hanged!” we should attend much better to our proper business.  We’ve simply to mind that business and the rest will look after itself.  You’ll probably inquire what it is I like better over here, and I’ll answer that it’s simply—life.  Disagreeables for disagreeables I prefer our own.  The way I’ve been bored and bullied in foreign parts, and the way I’ve had to say I found it pleasant!  For a good while this appeared to be a sort of congenital obligation, but one fine day it occurred to me that there was no obligation at all and that it would ease me immensely to admit to myself that (for me at least) all those things had no importance.  I mean the things they rub into you over there; the tiresome international topics, the petty politics, the stupid social customs, the baby-house scenery.  The vastness and freshness of this American world, the great scale and great pace of our development, the good sense and good nature of the people, console me for there being no cathedrals and no Titians.  I hear nothing about Prince Bismarck and Gambetta, about the Emperor William and the Czar of Russia, about Lord Beaconsfield and the Prince of Wales.  I used to get so tired of their Mumbo-Jumbo of a Bismarck, of his secrets and surprises, his mysterious intentions and oracular words.  They revile us for our party politics; but what are all the European jealousies and rivalries, their armaments and their wars, their rapacities and their mutual lies, but the intensity of the spirit of party?  What question, what interest, what idea, what need of mankind, is involved in any of these things?  Their big pompous armies drawn up in great silly rows, their gold lace, their salaams, their hierarchies, seem a pastime for children: there’s a sense of humour and of reality over here that laughs at all that.

Yes, we’re nearer the reality, nearer what they’ll all have to come to.  The questions of the future are social questions, which the Bismarcks and Beaconsfields are very much afraid to see settled; and the sight of a row of supercilious potentates holding their peoples like their personal property and bristling all over, to make a mutual impression, with feathers and sabres, strikes us as a mixture of the grotesque and the abominable.  What do we care for the mutual impressions of potentates who amuse themselves with sitting on people?  Those things are their own affair, and they ought to be shut up in a dark room to have it out together.  Once one feels, over here, that the great questions of the future are social questions, that a mighty tide is sweeping the world to democracy, and that this country is the biggest stage on which the drama can be enacted, the fashionable European topics seem petty and parochial.  They talk about things that we’ve settled ages ago, and the solemnity with which they propound to you their little domestic embarrassments makes a heavy draft on one’s good nature.  In England they were talking about the Hares and Rabbits Bill, about the extension of the County Franchise, about the Dissenters’ Burials, about the Deceased Wife’s Sister, about the abolition of the House of Lords, about heaven knows what ridiculous little measure for the propping-up of their ridiculous little country.  And they call us provincial!  It’s hard to sit and look respectable while people discuss the utility of the House of Lords and the beauty of a State Church, and it’s only in a dowdy musty civilisation that you’ll find them doing such things.  The lightness and clearness of the social air—that’s the great relief in these parts.  The gentility of bishops, the propriety of parsons, even the impressiveness of a restored cathedral, give less of a charm to life than that.  I used to be furious with the bishops and beadles, with the humbuggery of the whole affair, which every one was conscious of but which people agreed not to expose because they’d be compromised all round.  The convenience of life in our conditions, the quick and simple arrangements, the absence of the spirit of routine, are a blessed change from the stupid stiffness with which I struggled for two long years.  There were people with swords and cockades who used to order me about; for the simplest operation of life I had to kootoo to some bloated official.  When it was a question of my doing a little differently from others the bloated official gasped as if I had given him a blow on the stomach; he needed to take a week to think of it.

On the other hand it’s impossible to take an American by surprise; he’s ashamed to confess he hasn’t the wit to do a thing another man has had the wit to think of.  Besides being as good as his neighbour he must therefore be as clever—which is an affliction only to people who are afraid he may be cleverer.  If this general efficiency and spontaneity of the people—the union of the sense of freedom with the love of knowledge—isn’t the very essence of a high civilisation I don’t know what a high civilisation is.  I felt this greater ease on my first railroad journey—felt the blessing of sitting in a train where I could move about, where I could stretch my legs and come and go, where I had a seat and a window to myself, where there were chairs and tables and food and drink.  The villainous little boxes on the European trains, in which you’re stuck down in a corner with doubled-up knees, opposite to a row of people, often most offensive types, who stare at you for ten hours on end—these were part of my two years’ ordeal.  The large free way of doing things here is everywhere a pleasure.  In London, at my hotel, they used to come to me on Saturday to make me order my Sunday’s dinner, and when I asked for a sheet of paper they put it into the bill.  The meagreness, the stinginess, the perpetual expectation of a sixpence, used to exasperate me.  Of course I saw a great many people who were pleasant; but as I’m writing to you and not to one of them I may say that they were dreadfully apt to be dull.  The imagination among the people I see here is more flexible, and then they have the advantage of a larger horizon.  It’s not bounded on the north by the British aristocracy and on the south by the scrutin de liste.  (I mix up the countries a little, but they’re not worth the keeping apart.)  The absence of little conventional measurements, of little cut-and-dried judgements, is an immense refreshment.  We’re more analytic, more discriminating, more familiar with realities.  As for manners, there are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organised.  (I don’t mean that they mayn’t be polite among themselves, but they’re rude to every one else.)  The sight of all these growing millions simply minding their business is impressive to me—more so than all the gilt buttons and padded chests of the Old World; and there’s a certain powerful type of “practical” American (you’ll find him chiefly in the West) who doesn’t “blow” as I do (I’m not practical) but who quietly feels that he has the Future in his vitals—a type that strikes me more than any I met in your favourite countries.

Of course you’ll come back to the cathedrals and Titians, but there’s a thought that helps one to do without them—the thought that, though we’ve an immense deal of pie-eating plainness, we’ve little misery, little squalor, little degradation.  There’s no regular wife-beating class, and there are none of the stultified peasants of whom it takes so many to make a European noble.  The people here are more conscious of things; they invent, they act, they answer for themselves; they’re not (I speak of social matters) tied up by authority and precedent.  We shall have all the Titians by and by, and we shall move over a few cathedrals.  You had better stay here if you want to have the best.  Of course I’m a roaring Yankee; but you’ll call me that if I say the least, so I may as well take my ease and say the most.  Washington’s a most entertaining place; and here at least, at the seat of government, one isn’t overgoverned.  In fact there’s no government at all to speak of; it seems too good to be true.  The first day I was here I went to the Capitol, and it took me ever so long to figure to myself that I had as good a right there as any one else—that the whole magnificent pile (it is magnificent, by the way) was in fact my own.  In Europe one doesn’t rise to such conceptions, and my spirit had been broken in Europe.  The doors were gaping wide—I walked all about; there were no door-keepers, no officers nor flunkeys, there wasn’t even a policeman to be seen.  It seemed strange not to see a uniform, if only as a patch of colour.  But this isn’t government by livery.  The absence of these things is odd at first; you seem to miss something, to fancy the machine has stopped.  It hasn’t, though; it only works without fire and smoke.  At the end of three days this simple negative impression, the fact that there are no soldiers nor spies, nothing but plain black coats, begins to affect the imagination, becomes vivid, majestic, symbolic.  It ends by being more impressive than the biggest review I saw in Germany.  Of course I’m a roaring Yankee; but one has to take a big brush to copy a big model.  The future’s here of course, but it isn’t only that—the present’s here as well.  You’ll complain that I don’t give you any personal news, but I’m more modest for myself than for my country.  I spent a month in New York and while there saw a good deal of a rather interesting girl who came over with me in the steamer and whom for a day or two I thought I should like to marry.  But I shouldn’t.  She has been spoiled by Europe—and yet the prime stuff struck me as so right.

VIII
FROM MISS AURORA CHURCH IN NEW YORK TO MISS WHITESIDE IN PARIS

I told you (after we landed) about my agreement with mamma—that I was to have my liberty for three months and that if at the end of this time I shouldn’t have made a good use of it I was to give it back to her.  Well, the time’s up to-day, and I’m very much afraid I haven’t made a good use of it.  In fact I haven’t made any use of it at all—I haven’t got married, for that’s what mamma meant by our little bargain.  She has been trying to marry me in Europe for years, without a dot, and as she has never (to the best of my knowledge) even come near it, she thought at last that if she were to leave it to me I might possibly do better.  I couldn’t certainly do worse.  Well, my dear, I’ve done very badly—that is I haven’t done at all.  I haven’t even tried.  I had an idea that the coup in question came of itself over here; but it hasn’t come to me.  I won’t say I’m disappointed, for I haven’t on the whole seen any one I should like to marry.  When you marry people in these parts they expect you to love them, and I haven’t seen any one I should like to love.  I don’t know what the reason is, but they’re none of them what I’ve thought of.  It may be that I’ve thought of the impossible; and yet I’ve seen people in Europe whom I should have liked to marry.  It’s true they were almost always married to some one else.  What I am disappointed in is simply having to give back my liberty.  I don’t wish particularly to be married, and I do wish to do as I like—as I’ve been doing for the last month.  All the same I’m sorry for poor mamma, since nothing has happened that she wished to happen.  To begin with, we’re not appreciated, not even by the Rucks, who have disappeared in the strange way in which people over here seem to vanish from the world.  We’ve made no sensation; my new dresses count for nothing (they all have better ones); our philological and historical studies don’t show.  We’ve been told we might do better in Boston; but on the other hand mamma hears that in Boston the people only marry their cousins.  Then mamma’s out of sorts because the country’s exceedingly dear and we’ve spent all our money.  Moreover, I’ve neither eloped, nor been insulted, nor been talked about, nor—so far as I know—deteriorated in manners or character; so that she’s wrong in all her previsions.  I think she would have rather liked me to be insulted.  But I’ve been insulted as little as I’ve been adored.  They don’t adore you over here; they only make you think they’re going to.

Do you remember the two gentlemen who were on the ship, and who, after we arrived, came to see me à tour de rôle?  At first I never dreamed they were making love to me, though mamma was sure it must be that; then, as it went on a good while, I thought perhaps it was that—after which I ended by seeing it wasn’t anything!  It was simply conversation—and conversation a precocious child might have listened to at that.  Mr. Leverett and Mr. Cockerel disappeared one fine day without the smallest pretension to having broken my heart, I’m sure—though it only depended on me to think they must have tried to.  All the gentlemen are like that; you can’t tell what they mean; the “passions” don’t rage, the appearances don’t matter—nobody believes them.  Society seems oddly to consist of a sort of innocent jilting.  I think on the whole I am a little disappointed—I don’t mean about one’s not marrying; I mean about the life generally.  It looks so different at first that you expect it will be very exciting; and then you find that after all, when you’ve walked out for a week or two by yourself and driven out with a gentleman in a buggy, that’s about all there is to it, as they say here.  Mamma’s very angry at not finding more to dislike; she admitted yesterday that, once one has got a little settled, the country hasn’t even the merit of being hateful.  This has evidently something to do with her suddenly proposing three days ago that we should “go West.”  Imagine my surprise at such an idea coming from mamma!  The people in the pension—who, as usual, wish immensely to get rid of her—have talked to her about the West, and she has taken it up with a kind of desperation.  You see we must do something; we can’t simply remain here.  We’re rapidly being ruined and we’re not—so to speak—getting married.  Perhaps it will be easier in the West; at any rate it will be cheaper and the country will have the advantage of being more hateful.  It’s a question between that and returning to Europe, and for the moment mamma’s balancing.  I say nothing: I’m really indifferent; perhaps I shall marry a pioneer.  I’m just thinking how I shall give back my liberty.  It really won’t be possible; I haven’t got it any more; I’ve given it away to others.  Mamma may get it back if she can from them!  She comes in at this moment to announce that we must push further—she has decided for the West.  Wonderful mamma!  It appears that my real chance is for a pioneer—they’ve sometimes millions.  But fancy us at Oshkosh!