IF a student of life will only take his stand in the hall of one of those Swiss caravansaras which receives a trainful of Britons about six o'clock some evening in August and despatches them on their way by Diligence next morning, he will not lose his time, for he will have an opportunity of studying the foreign manners of his nation. The arrival of an Englishman of the John Bull type is indeed an event, and the place is shaken as by a whirlwind. A loud, clear, strident voice is heard sounding in the English tongue to the extremities of the hall, demanding that its owner be instantly taken to the rooms—“First floor,” I said, “with best view, according to the telegram sent yesterday,” refusing every explanation as to there being none disengaged, insisting that, somehow or other, rooms of that very kind be offered, and then grumbling its way upstairs, with an accompaniment in the minor key from a deprecating landlord, till a distant rumble dying away into the silence closes the incident. The landlord has reluctantly admitted that he has rooms on the second floor, better than any other in the house, which are being kept for a Russian prince, and if Monsieur will accept them for the night—and then Monsieur calls his wife's attention to the fact that when he put his foot down he gets his way. One does not, of course, believe that the landlord said what was absolutely true, and one would have been delighted had he plucked up courage and shown our compatriot to the door. But nothing is easier (and more enjoyable) than to point out how other people ought to conduct their affairs, and no doubt, were we Swiss innkeepers, needing to make a year's profit out of three months, we also would have taken rampant Englishmen by guile, as bulls are lassoed with ropes. Your heart would be adamant if you did not pardon the poor little device when our national voice is again raised in the dining-room ordering away a plate on account of an invisible smut, complaining of the wine because of a bit of cork, comparing the beef with the home roasts, and enlarging on a dozen defects in bedroom service to sympathetic spirits right and left, and, for that matter, as far as the voice can reach. In England that voice will give it to be understood that it could not be heard amid the chatter of noisy foreigners “gabbling away goodness knows what,” but as a matter of fact no combination of German, French, and Italian could resist the penetrating, domineering, unflinching accent. When that host bows the voice into an omnibus next morning with great politeness, then one has an illustration of the spread of the Christian spirit enough to reinforce the heart in the hours of blackest pessimism.
Would a foreigner believe that the owner of this terrible voice is really one of the best? He is the soul of honour, and would cut off his hand rather than do a mean deed; his servants adore him, though he gives them what he calls a round of the guns once a week; and the last thing he did before leaving home was to visit an old gamekeeper who taught him to shoot the year he went to Harrow. When a good man preaches the charity sermon, this unsympathetic Englishman is quite helpless, and invariably doubles the sum set aside in his waistcoat pocket. Upon the bench he is merciless on poachers and tramps; in private he is the chosen prey of all kinds of beggars. In fact, he is in one way just what he specially detests—a sham—being the most overbearing, prejudiced, bigoted, the most modest, simple-minded, kind-hearted of men; and, in spite of that unchastened voice, a gentleman from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. Certainly he ordereth over much, but he will take care that every servant has a reward before he leaves—going back from the omnibus to tip “that fellow with the green apron” who did some trifle for him last night—and if the landlord had only had the discernment to have described that accident to him, the driver's widow would have been richer by fifty francs.
The blame of our foreign manners is partly geographical. We happen to be bom in an island, and our amazing ideas about continentals are being very slowly worn away by travel. It is just breaking on the average Briton that, although a foreigner does not splash in his bath of a morning so that neighbouring rooms can follow the details of his toilette, he may not be quite uncleanly; that one need not hide all his valuables beneath his pillow because the other three men in his compartment of the wagon lit do not speak English; that an Italian prince is not always a swindler, but may have as long a pedigree as certain members of the House of Lords; and that the men who constructed the Mont Cenis and St. Gothard tunnels must at least have understood the rudiments of engineering science. The puzzled expression on our countryman's face when he discovers that the foreigner can give us points—in conveyance of luggage, for instance, or the making of coffee, or in the small agriculture—goes to your heart. It seems to him a surprise on the part of Providence, and a violation of the favoured nation's clause.
Perhaps it ought also to be said in our defence that we are afflicted by the infirmities of a ruling people. We are not only profoundly conscious that we are an invincible nation ourselves, but also are saturated with the belief that we have a commission to govern other nations. Our talents are mostly exercised in India and Africa, but if one reigns absolutely anywhere, he carries himself as a king everywhere, and the ordinary Englishman annexes any place he fancies in holiday time because his fathers have been appropriating provinces from time immemorial. One sometimes falls a prey to the Philistine that is in us all, and begins also to despise what our friend pleasantly calls “all this scraping and bowing,” by which he means a Frenchman's politeness in little things, and is tempted to think that it would be better if local government on the Continent were relieved of a burden of petty rules and a host of gorgeous officials, and were reinforced by a strong infusion of downright common sense. One means, in plain words, that if a foreign district were handed over to an English stipendiary magistrate and a score of London policemen, its people would learn for the first time the scope and meaning of good government.
Many well-doing Englishmen cannot unto this day achieve a single grammatical sentence in any language except their own, and are free from all pretensions. Our rector stoutly declares that in his popular lecture, “To Paris and back, or a Glimpse of French Life,” he did not cite the familiarity of Parisian children with French as a proof of the precocity of foreigners, but he can never watch two Frenchmen in conversation without innocent enjoyment. The sounds they make are marvellous, but it is beyond question that they mean something, and it is pleasant to know that persons who cannot speak English are not left without means of communication. Foreigners, an Englishman remembers, labour under hopeless disabilities. Little can be expected from a people whose language permits a sentence—in a scientific book too—to end with “zu, ab,” and one may not be Pharisaic and yet have gloomy views—this illustration can be used in the pulpit—about a nation that has no word for home. One of our French class at school, a stout gentleman now, and worth £100,000, declares he would never demean himself by any attempt at foreign tongues, and demands that foreigners should learn English, “which will yet be the language of the world.” He was recently boasting that he had travelled a month by the aid of signs, although he does himself less than justice, for on sight of the railway station he will say “Bannhof, eh?” to the driver in quite a jocular way, as one by way of pleasing a four-footed pet.
Tittups, on the other hand, who reached the confines of the future tense with Moossy, and who affects culture, is understood to have an easy acquaintance with at least three Continental tongues in their more literary forms—colloquialisms he firmly refuses—and is worth hearing in a Florentine shop. “Avete voi” (Tittups is a little man, with a single eyeglass, and a voice three sizes too large for him); “ah... what you call... ah, papier und... ah, ein, that is eine Feder,” goes through a panto-mine of writing, and finally obtains what he wants by pointing it out with his stick. He is fond of enlarging on the advantage of reading Italian, and insists that no translation has ever conveyed the grander ideas of Dante, although Tittups admits that the ancient Italian tries him. “Have to work at it, you know; but the modern, a boy who knows his grammar can manage it. Seen the Giomate di Roma to-day?” Italians have a keener insight into character than any people in Europe, and one could almost pardon the attendant in the Mediterranean sleeper who insisted that Tittups must be a native-born Tuscan from the way he said “baga-glia.”
“Gli,” Tittups mentioned casually to a friend, is a test in Italian pronunciation, and he presented the discerning critic with a five-franc piece at Calais.
But why should the average man laugh at Tittups, as if he had never had experiences? Has he never been asked by his companion, to whom he has been an oracle on German literature, to translate some utterly absurd and unnecessary piece of information posted on the carriage, and been humbled in the dust?
“Oh,” he said, quite carelessly, “something about not leaving the train when it is in motion—zug, you know.”
“Pardon, mein Herr” (voice from the opposite side—what business had he to interfere?) “but the rule, when it has into English been translated, shall read———” and it turns out to be a warning not to stop the train without “plausible” reasons. Nothing is more disconcerting (and offensive) than to discover that the two imperturbable Germans in your carriage understand English perfectly, after you have been expressing your mind on German habits with that courtesy and freedom which are the prerogative of the Briton abroad. And can anything be more irritating and inexplicable than to find one's painfully accumulated store of foreign words ooze away in the crisis of travel, so that a respectable British matron, eager to be driven by the sea road at Cannes, is reduced to punching cocher in the small of the back with her parasol and shouting “eau de vie”—“and he drew up at a low public-house, as if we had been wanting a drink”—while her husband just escapes an apoplectic seizure, utilizing the remnants of three languages to explain his feelings as a Custom-house officer turns the contents of his portmanteau upside down.
It is not wise, however, for avaricious foreigners to trade upon our simplicity, for there is always a chance that they may catch a Tartar. Never have I seen a more ingenuous youth (in appearance) than one who travelled with me one night from Geneva to Paris. His unbroken ignorance of Continental ways, which opposed (successfully) the introduction of more than four persons into our second; his impenetrable stupidity, which at last saved him from the Customs; his unparalleled atrocities on the French language, seemed to precede him on the line and suggest opportunities of brigandage. They charged him eighteen francs for his supper at a place where we stopped for nearly twenty minutes, and would likely have appropriated the remaining two francs out of the Napoleon he offered, but the bell sounded, and he bolted, forgetting in his nervousness that he had not paid. The garçon followed, whom he failed to understand, and three officials could not make the matter plainer. When the public meeting outside our door reached its height there were present the station-master, seven minor officials, two gendarmes in great glory, a deputation of four persons from the buffet, an interpreter whose English was miraculous, and a fringe of loafers. Just as the police were about to do their duty our fellow passenger condescended on French—he had preferred English words with foreign terminations up to that point. His speech could not have exceeded three minutes, but it left nothing to be desired. It contained a succinct statement of facts—what he had eaten, and how much each dish cost; what he was charged, and the exact difference between the debt and the demand; an appeal to the chef de gare to investigate the conduct of the buffet where such iniquities were perpetrated on guileless Englishmen; and lastly a fancy sketch of the garçon's life, with a selection of Parisian terms of abuse any two of which were enough to confer distinction for a lifetime. He concluded by offering three francs, forty-five cents, as his just due to the manager of the buffet, and his thanks to the audience for their courteous attention.
“I am an Englishman by birth,” he explained to a delighted compartment, “but Parisian by education, and I think this incident may do good.”
Certainly it has often done one man good, and goes excellently with another where imagination reinforces memory with happy effect. One had a presentiment something was going to happen when two devout ladies secured their places in the Paris express at Lourdes, and before they entered placed the tin vessel with water from the sacred well on the floor of the compartment. It was certainly unfortunate that they did not keep it in their arms till the precious treasure could be deposited in the rack. Lourdes pilgrims would recognize the vessel even in its state of temporary humiliation, but there was a distinct suggestion of humbler uses, and an excited Englishman must not be hardly judged.
“Here you are, dear,” he shouts to his wife, guarding the rugs; “plenty of room, and a hot water pan for your feet.”
They all got in together—two Parisian ladies, who (likely) could not speak a word of English, and our fellow patriot, who was (likely) as ignorant of French. And the tin vessel.
Did they lift it with reverence and fold it in many wraps, and did he fight for its possession? Are they still describing the wanton impiety of this heretic? and has he a conclusive illustration of the incredible folly of our neighbours? Perhaps, after all, they knew each other's tongues, and then nothing happened; but surely there must have been circumstances, and I, with a spare moment at my disposal occasionally, refused to be robbed of that interior.
IF one has only three weeks' holiday, and desires sunshine for his body, let him spend the time upon the Riviera, where he will get a few degrees higher temperature and a little more sunshine than in Cornwall—with worse food and a more treacherous climate—and if he rather desires inspiration for his mind, let him go to Florence; but in any case let him understand that there is no place in Europe where one can get equal good both for mind and body, and no place where one can escape winter. Upon this matter doctors dream dreams and invalids fondly talk against facts, for the cold in Florence, say, in the month of February, is quite monumental for its piercing quality, and bad weather on the Riviera is more cheerless than a wet day in the West Highlands, since in the latter case you can get a decent fire during the day, and in the evening you may have a sunset to remember for life. If, however, through any conjunction of favourable circumstances, a man has six weeks at his disposal in winter time (it is not likely he will have this very often in the present vale of tears), then let him take his courage in both his hands, and go to the Nile. Suppose he had three months, and were a good sailor, then he ought to join a P. and O. liner at London, and go the long sea voyage, for there is a chance, even in December or January, that he might have summer weather on the fickle Mediterranean, and—such things have happened—across the Bay. But with half that, time his plan is to go by the special boat express to Marseilles, and join his steamer there for Port Said; or, if he be hopelessly in fear of the sea, and wishes to save every hour for Egypt, to take the Brindisi mail, and cross to Port Said by one of the two passenger torpedo boats which make the passage between Italy and Egypt in about forty-eight hours either over the sea or through it.
Until it has been completely rebuilt after Western fashions, and electric trolley cars are running down a widened Mooskee, and the men have given up the tarboosh and the women their veil, Cairo will always fascinate a European by its Eastern atmosphere. Sitting on the verandah before his hotel, and looking over the heads of a herd of dragomen, guides, pedlars, and beggars, he will see a panorama pass. A Pasha's carriage, with a running footman in front, and the great man within, mourning the restraints of European government; a camel from the outlands laden with fresh green grass; a water-seller with his leather barrel upon his back; a company of Egyptian soldiers, marching admirably, and looking as if they could go anywhere; working women in dark blue, with only their eyes visible, which are said to be the single beautiful feature they possess; a closed carriage, with two ladies of a great man's harem; a miscellaneous crowd of sellers of many articles, shouting their goods, and workmen of many trades carrying things they have made; a Bedouin from the desert in his white flowing robes, tall and stately, and a Nubian as black as ebony from up country, with people of all shades between white and black, and in all colours; here and there a European tourist looking very much out of place in his unsightly garments, and a couple of Highland soldiers looking as if the whole place belonged to them. And if one desires to bathe in the life of the place, then he can spend a day drifting up and down the Mooskee, plunging down side alleys, attending native auctions, watching street dramas, bargaining in bazaars, and visiting mosques; but the wise man who is seeking for rest will not abide long in Cairo. Its air is close and not invigorating, its smells innumerable and overpowering, its social occupations wearisome and exacting, and its fleas larger, hungrier, more impudent, and more insinuating than those of any other place I have ever known. When the visitor has seen the citadel—and sunset from the citadel is worth the journey to Cairo—and half a dozen of the grander mosques, and the Pyramids and the great Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, then, although it may be difficult to resist the delightful hospitality of the English community, military and civil, the traveller had better start by the Nile for Upper Egypt.
Nothing surely can be so restful as life on a Nile boat, where one lies at his ease upon the deck with some book like Pyramids in Progress in his hand, and watches the procession along the banks of men, women, and children, donkeys, camels, cattle, and occasionally horses, which goes on from Cairo to Assouan, and, so far as I know, to Khartoum, and looking into the far distances of the desert, across the strip of green on either side of the river, and listening to the friendly sound of the water wheels which distribute the Nile through the parched ground, and then standing to see the blood-red sunset fade into orange and green and violet, while the river turns into that delicate and indescribable colour which, for want of some other word, is known as water-of-Nile. The river itself takes hold of the imagination, whose origin has been a historical mystery, on whose rise and fall the welfare of a country depends, which carries the fertility of Egypt in its bosom, and on which nations depend for their very life. No wonder it runs as a blue streak through the frescoes in the tombs, and is never away from the thoughts of the painters, for the Nile runs also through the life of the people. It is the great highway up which the native boats sail their skilful course driven by the north wind, down which they drop laden with produce or pottery. It gives them the soil they till, which is rich enough to bear twelve harvests a year, if crops could be ripened in a month. Upon its banks the people sit as at their club; they bring down their cattle to water at it, they wash in the Nile, both themselves and their clothes, they swim and dive in the Nile as if they had been bom in it, and they drink its thick, brown, sweet water with such relish that a native Egyptian resents the idea of a filter because it takes away from him the very joy of taste, and laughs at the idea of danger from his loved Nile, which may give typhoid fever to Western tourists, but will never do any injury to its own children.
After sugar cane and doora, the chief product of the steaming, prolific Nile valley is the Fellaheen, who are not the descendants of the ancient Egyptians, a lineage justly claimed by the Copts, but who are the Egyptian people of to-day. The Fellah is the absolute creature of his environment, an offspring of Nile mud, and when he is working on his field, in the garments nature gave him, can hardly be distinguished from the soil. He is brown, well-built, enduring, with perfect teeth and excellent health. His home is a mud hut, with one room where he and his family eat, and another where they sleep, and a courtyard inhabited by the livestock of goats, donkeys, cocks and hens, pigeons, and a dog. It is thatched with palm branches or doora straw, and on the roof the dog will promenade in the daytime with great dignity, and from the roof, when the moon is shining, and thoughts occur to his mind, he will express himself to the other seventy-six dogs of the village who are on their roofs, and are also moved to speech, with the result that no European can sleep in the vicinity. Add a few vessels and mats by way of furniture to the inside of the hut, and build a mud jar on the top of the courtyard wall where the baby of the family can be put in safety, and the household equipment of the Fellah is complete. He is very ignorant, is not very keen about his religion, has no principles, except a habit of industry and a keen sense of property, and he has not one comfort or luxury of civilization, and not one political or national ambition. But he has all the clothes he needs, which certainly is not very much; he has plenty to eat, and for drink the endlessly delightful Nile water; he is very seldom cold, and he has sunshine from January to December, and from morning to night. Thanks to England, he is no longer dragged away to work upon canals and public enterprises without wages and without food, and to perish through toil and disease as his father did, but is now paid and cared for when working for the community. He is no longer in terror of the lash, and he is not robbed by his rulers; he gets justice at the courts, and is now being delivered from the hands of the money-lender, that terror of the East, by the excellent national bank which has been recently established, and which advances him money on reasonable terms. We pity him as we pass, toiling at his shadoof, or coming like a rabbit out of his burrow, because he works so hard and lives so plainly, and has no books and no vote, and no glass in his windows, and no cheap trips. But perhaps we had better reserve our pity for the home land. One does not see in the Arab village the ignoble squalor of a town slum, nor the dreary, hopeless poverty, nor the evil look of degraded people, nor the miserable intemperance. The Fellah does not stand very high in the evolution of society, and neither his wife nor his child is particularly fortunate; one would not wish to be a Fellah, but, at any rate, he does not know the pinch of want, he is on good terms with everybody, he has a ready joke, which perhaps it is better you do not understand, and a quick smile; he is a well-fed and contented animal.
The Fellah can be studied near at hand in your donkey boy, who is simply a Nile peasant quickened by contact with Europeans. Within five minutes he sizes you up with unerring judgment, and knows whether he can get baksheesh from you by annoyance, or will fare better by leaving you in peace; whether he can do as he pleases with you in the matter of speed, or whether it will be better to do as you tell him. Once you are on good terms with him—have learned the name of the donkey, approved the donkey's excellence and his own, and settled whether you are going to race or not—he settles down to make the journey agreeable both for himself and you. He will make jests about every little incident, join in the chorus of English songs, give information, such as he can, on antiquities, and delight to teach you Arabic. Suppose you have a long wait somewhere, and time is dragging, two of the junior donkey boys will improvise a play. They will get up a fight, and after cuffing one another in a way that would almost deceive you into the belief that they were serious, one will knock the other down, and the fallen hero will look as dead as Rames es the Great. A crowd will gather round him, lifting a leg or an arm, which falls heavily to the ground, raising his head, which rolls helplessly to the side. Horrified, they will then look at one another, and shake their heads; they will cover the dead man's face, and proceed to carry him home. By-and-by they will have a funeral, and convey the corpse to the cemetery with wailing and weeping, and after it has been solemnly laid to rest there will be a rapid and delightful resurrection. The mourners will turn a set of somersaults with extraordinary rapidity, the murderer and his victim will give a gymnastic exhibition, and then the whole company, having raised an enthusiastic hip, hip, hurrah! in applause for their own drama and as a genial tribute to the Anglo-Saxon race, will stand opposite you in a body with the most solemn countenance and demand baksheesh.
Like other folk, the donkey boys have their own trials, and I am still sorry for Hassan, who attended me for four days at Luxor, and with whom I became very friendly. His donkey was called Telephone, and was very strong, handsome, and well caparisoned, and had, indeed, only one vice, and that was that he would not go slowly, although the thermometer stood at 130 degrees in the sun, but insisted on leading the procession. Hassan had just married, and was never weary of describing the beauty and goodness of his sixteen-year-old bride, and he was greatly lifted when I sent home to her by his own hand a present of a silk headdress—I think at least that was what the silk would be used for—such as I was assured by a native friend the young women of that ilk greatly loved. Hassan parted with me in high spirits when I went up the river, and I promised that, on my third visit to Egypt, which will likely never take place, I would ride no other donkey but “Telephone,” and have no other footman but Hassan. And then tidings reached me at Assouan that the poor bridegroom had been drawn for the army. For thirteen years he would have to serve, partly in the regular forces, partly in the police, and for half the time he would be entirely separated from his wife, and perhaps for it all, and at the thought thereof and the terror of the army, and the unknown places and duties before him, there was great lamentation in Hassan's little home. So Hassan is by this time being drilled at Cairo, and soon will be a smart soldier in the Egyptian army; but up at Luxor his young wife will be mourning for him, and, alas! for an Eastern woman, she will be aged before Hassan returns. This is the shadow which hangs over the life of a Fellah.
MANY Americans were good enough to call upon me before I had the pleasure of visiting their country, and many Americans have called since, and no American ever does me this honour without charging the very atmosphere of my study with oxygen, and leaving an impression of activity which quickens my slow pulses and almost reduces me to despair.
It is now several years ago that a tall, thin, alert man followed his card into my study with such rapidity that I had barely time to read it before my visitor was in the room.
“My name is Elijah K. Higgins, and I am a busy man. You are also busy and have no time to fool away. Four days is all I can give to the United Kingdom, and I wished to shake hands with you. Good-bye, I am off to Drumtochty.”
I calculate that Mr. Higgins spent thirty seconds in my study, and left the room so swiftly that I overtook him only at the front door. When I asked him if he knew where Drumtochty was, “Guess I do!” he said. “Got the route in my pocket, north-west from Perth, N.B.,” and in two seconds more he was whirling away in a fast hansom. As I returned to my study and imagined my visitor compassing Great Britain (I think he excluded Ireland, but I am not certain) in four days, I was for a moment roused from the state of comparative lethargy which we, in England, call work, and added six more engagements to my afternoon's programme. For days afterwards, and as often as I was tempted to rest in my chair, the remembrance of that whirlwind gave me a shock of new vigour. Sometimes a reaction would follow, and I humbly thanked Providence, although that was to write myself a weakling and a sluggard, that I was not bom in the country where Mr. Higgins lived and was at home.
Such lively experiences, which I often recall in jaded moments, prepare one for a visit or a re-visit to America, as a tonic gives a sluggish person an appetite for dinner, and it is bare justice to say that one's expectations of American energy in its own home have not been disappointed. If Americans, depressed by our heavy climate and our leisurely life, could yet maintain such a level of thought and motion, what might not be possible to them in their own country, where the atmosphere is charged with electricity, and every second man is a “hustler from way-back.” The stir of the New World affects the visitor and quickens his pulses as he goes up the Hudson and gets his first glimpse of New York. Your steamer had waited four hours at Queenstown for the mails, but the same mails were transferred to the United States tender as the steamer steams up the bay. Little tugs dart about on all sides with feverish speed, and larger steamers pass with their upper machinery indecently exposed, as if there had not been time, or it had not been worth while, to cover it. Buildings of incredible height line the shores, and suggest that the American nation, besides utilizing the ground, proposes also to employ the heavens for commercial purposes. It was, I think, a Texas paper which translated the austere saying, “Per aspera ad astra,” into “the hustler gets to heaven,” and certain New York builders seem now to be on the way. Whetted by this overture on the river, one is ready for the full music of the city; and I wish to pay the compliment with all honesty that New York, with the possible exception of Chicago, is the activest and noisiest place I have ever seen, or expect to see, in this present world. While an English merchant saunters down to his office between nine and ten, a New York man rises at half-past six in his suburb and is busy at work at eight o'clock. The Englishman takes off an hour during the day for luncheon at his club, while the American eats his meal in fifteen minutes. The Englishman spends more than another hour at afternoon tea, and gossip with friends, and sauntering about between his club and his office, while the American packs every minute with work. The very walk of an English merchant, slow, dignified, self-satisfied, and that of the American, rapid, eager, anxious—the one looking as if time were of no importance nor circumstances, and the other as if the loss of a minute might mean ruin—are the visible indices to the character of the nations. It is only yesterday that elevators were introduced into English city buildings, and there are many London offices to which you still have to make an Alpine ascent of four stairs; but a New Yorker regards a stair as a survival of barbarism, and hardly knows how to use it. The higher buildings have several sets of elevators, like the four tracks which railways lay down to work the swift and slow traffic.
“Don't go in there,” my friend said, with whom I was going to lunch at a club on the top floor of a many-storied New York building. “That's an accommodation elevator; stops, you know, at every station. This is the express for the top floor.”
“Would it have made much difference?” I said.
“Very nearly a minute,” as if the loss of the minute would have thrown us back for the rest of the day.
No man goes slow if he has the chance of going fast, no man stops to talk if he can talk walking, no man walks if he can ride in a trolley car, no one goes in a trolley car if he can get a convenient railway, and by-and-by no one will go by railway car if he can be shot through a pneumatic tube. No one writes with his own hand if he can dictate to a stenographer, no one dictates if he can telegraph, no one telegraphs if he can telephone, and by-and-by, when the spirit of American invention has brought wireless telegraphy into thorough condition, a man will simply sit with his mouth at one hole and his ear at another, and do business with the ends of the earth in a few seconds, which the same machine will copy and preserve in letter books and ledgers. It is the American's regret that at present he can do nothing with his feet while he is listening at the telephone, but doubtless some employment will be found for them in the coming age.
If a slow-witted and slow-moving Englishman desires a liberal education, let him take a journey of a month on the steam cars in the United States. No train in Europe travels as fast as certain American expresses, and if other trains go slower it is a matter of thankfulness, because they are less likely to kill passengers on level crossings, or in the main streets of the city along which they take their way, and cattle have more time to get off the unprotected tracks. As trains have also a trick of jumping the rails, either through the rails spreading or the eccentricity of the engine, both being instances of exuberant national vitality, it is just as well that every express does not go at the rate of the Empire State Express on the New York Central. Nowhere in Europe can a traveller find stronger or handsomer cars, and they are marvels of adaptability and convenience. There is a dining car, in order that you may not lose time at a station, and also, which is not unimportant, in order that you may be able to occupy your time with something practical on the train. Of course, there is a smoking compartment, where men can compare notes upon politics and business, and be able to escape from idleness and themselves. The best expresses have a reading car, where the American can pick up such morsels of information from the magazines as he can contain between the interstices of business. There is a desk where he can read his letters, and a typewriter to answer them, for this train is the American's sleep-ing-place and dining-place, and his home and his office. One thing only he regrets; the train, as it flies along, is not connected with the telegraph and the telephone, so that, as an idea occurs to him or he obtains a hint from a man in the smoking car, he might be able to do business with his correspondents in Chicago or San Francisco. While an Englishman on a railway journey is generally dressed in roughly and loosely fitting tweeds, suggestive of a country life and of sport, the coat of his American cousin is of dark material and has not a superfluous inch of cloth. From his collar to his neat little boot the American is prim, spick-and-span, and looks as if he had come out of a band-box and were ready to appear in the principal room of any office. He is dressed in fact for business, and looks like business from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet, while an Englishman's appearance suggests that he is going to see a cricket match or that he has retired to live upon a farm.
My countryman arrives at the station with two and a half minutes to spare, and laden with small baggage. A porter carries his rug and an ulster, very likely also a hat-box and a bag with books, papers, and such like in it, to say nothing of an umbrella and a mackintosh, and he secures his seat at the last moment. He fastens his hat above his head, puts on a travelling cap, changes into an ulster, if it be winter time, and throws a rug over his knee; he puts on travelling gloves, and gets out the Times, and he will sit without budging and read his Times without intermission for fifty minutes. Besides these trifles with him in the carriage, he has a portmanteau in the van, which he hopes has been addressed, and which the porter promised to see put in, and he will scramble for it at his terminus along with a hundred other passengers, who are all trying to identify and extricate their luggage from a huge heap on the platform.
The American reaches the dépôt by a trolley car ten minutes at least before the hour of departure, having sent his heavy luggage, if he has any—which is not likely—by baggage express. His only personal equipment is a slim and compact valise, which, in regard to opening and shutting, is a marvel of convenience. This he carries in his hand, and places beneath or beside the seat which he has secured two days before. He does not carry a rug because the cars are heated, nor an umbrella because it is not the rainy season. His top coat he hangs up beside his seat, as if he were in his own house; and his hat if he so please. He does not wear a travelling-cap any more than in his own drawing-room, nor gloves in the train any more than in his own office. Should his hands be soiled, he goes to the lavatory where there are large basins and an ample supply of water, and if his coat be dusty, there is a negro porter in every car to brush it. The immense repose of the English traveller is quite impossible for this mercurial man, whose blood and whose brain are ever on a stir. Very rarely will you see him reading a book, because he is not accustomed to read, and the demands of a book would lessen his time for business meditation. Boys with newspapers circulate through the cars, and he buys each new paper as it appears at the different towns. Whether it be Republican, or Democratic, or a family paper or a yellow journal, does not matter to him; he glances at the startling headings, takes an accident or a political scandal at a mouthful, skims over the business news, sees whether anything has happened at the Philippines, notes that the canard of the morning has been contradicted in the afternoon, and flings paper after paper on the floor. Three minutes or, in cases of extreme interest, five minutes suffice for each paper, and by-and-by this omnivorous reader, who consumes a paper even more quickly than his food, is knee deep in printed information or sensation. For two minutes he is almost quiet, and seems to be digesting some piece of commercial information. He then rises hurriedly, as if he had been called on the telephone, and makes for the smoking-car, where he will discuss “Expansion” with vivid, picturesque speech, and get through a cigar with incredible celerity. Within fifteen minutes he is in his place again; and, a little afterwards, wearying of idleness, he is chewing the end of a cigar, which is a substitute for smoking and saves him from being wearied with his own company. Half an hour before the train is due at his station, he is being brushed, and getting ready to alight. Before the train has reached the outskirts of the town, he has secured his place in a procession which stands in single file in the narrow exit passage from the Pullman. Each man is ready dressed for business and has his valise in his hand; he is counting the minutes before he can alight, and is envying the man at the head of the procession, who will have a start of about two seconds. This will give him a great advantage in business, and he may never be overtaken by his competitors till evening.
Suppose he lands at 6 a.m., he will find breakfast ready in a hotel, and half a dozen men eating as if their lives depended upon finishing by 6.15 a.m. Before seven he will have disposed of a pile of letters, dictating answers to a typist attached to the hotel, he will have telegraphed in all directions, and made half a dozen appointments in the town by telephone. Within the forenoon he will finish his business and depart for some neighbouring town, lunching on the cars. The second town he will dispose of in the afternoon, and that evening go on board the sleeper to travel 400 miles to a third town, where he is going to negotiate a contract at 8 o'clock next morning. If you sympathize with him, and wonder how flesh and blood can stand the speed, he accepts your sympathy as a compliment, and assures you that he never sleeps so well as on the cars. He never seems to be out of sorts or out of temper: he is always thoroughly alive and quite good-natured. Sometimes he may seem for a moment annoyed, when he cannot telegraph as often as he wants along the line, or when the train is not on time, that he may make a connection. Nothing would wound him so deeply as to “get left,” and he can only affect to be unconscious when some one declares that he is “no slouch, and that there are no flies on him.” If he is obliged to spend two hours doing nothing in a hotel, when business is over, then he rocks himself and smokes, and it is a wonderful spectacle for an indolent Englishman to look down from the gallery that commands the hall of the hotel, and to see fifty able-bodied fellow-men who have worked already twelve hours, at least, and put eighteen hours' work into the time, all in motion. (One wonders why this motion is not utilized to drive something.) He discovers how unlike cousins may be, for an Englishman never moves unless he is obliged to or unless he wants to shoot something, and these remarkable men never rest unless when they are asleep. About that even, I am not sure, and I was often tempted to draw aside the curtain from a berth in a sleeping-car, and, had I done so, I should not have been at all surprised to find our friend wide awake with a cold cigar in his cheek, and rocking his knees for want of more extensive accommodation. He has always rebelled against the ancient custom of sleep, which he regards as a loss of time and an anachronism. All that he can do is to spend the night in a sleeping car, which, as he will tell you, annihilates time and space.
Foreigners travelling in the States in their innocence are amazed that a delicate-minded nation, like the Americans, should be willing to sleep after the fashion of the Pullman cars, and should not insist upon the Continental cabin-car. The reason for the Arcadian simplicity of the sections is not really economy, for no American would ever think twice of spending a dollar; it is simply their abounding and dominant energy. If you sleep in cabins at night, you must sit in cabins by day; and this would mean a seclusion and repose which are very distasteful to the high-strung American temperament. It would be like bottling up a volatile gas; and one imagines that it might lead to an explosion, which some day would break down the partitions and break up the car from end to end. The American must see everything in his car and hear everything, for which he depends upon the peculiar quality of the local voice; and he must be at liberty to prowl about his car, and to sit with his friends here and there. The car is his little world for the time, and he is not going to live in a backwater.
There seems no doubt that an American workman will do from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent, more than an Englishman in the same time, and that the higher wages of the American have their compensation for the capitalist in a workman's quickness of mind and sleight of hand. Everything goes at an accelerated speed, with wonderful inventions in labour-saving machinery and devices to economize time. If the great end of a nation be to do as much as possible in as short a time as possible, then the American climate has been practically arranged for that end. An Englishwoman living in the States becomes effervescent, and the native American is the brightest woman on the face of the earth. While the English atmosphere is heavy and soothing, and lends itself to thought and quietness, the American climate is exciting and exhilarating, and quickens both mind and body to the highest activity. It is an electric climate, and the electricity has passed into the people, who are simply vessels charged up to a certain number of volts. These vessels as sources of motive power can then be attached to pulpits, or offices, or workshops or politics. Of course, a day is apt to come when the vessels will have been completely discharged, and it arrives very frequently without warning. A little confusion in the head, and a slight numbness in the limbs, and the man has to go away a year to Colorado Springs or to Los Angeles. If he is fortunate, he can be recharged and run for another five or ten years; then nature does not give any warning, but simply stops the heart or darkens the brain, and you must get another man.
No one, unless he leaves the country or becomes a crank, can escape from this despotism of activity; he is part of the regiment and must march with his fellows. The idea of making a competency and then retiring, say, into the country, never crosses a man's mind. When you urge economy upon a man for this end, you have injured your case, and are pleading on the other side. With such a prospect before him, he is more than ever resolved to be a spendthrift. To seclude an active American in an old-fashioned country house, with ivy climbing round its Tudor windows, even although there should be a library of black oak inside and a rose garden outside, would be cruelty; it would be to imprison a squirrel in a golden cage. What greatly impresses the traveller in the United States is that the rich men work as hard and as long as the poor, and that they cannot even give attention to the affairs of their country, but are willing to leave them to the very doubtful management of the “Boss,” because it would not pay them to leave their business and go into politics. If the end of life be riches, then the clever American is a successful man, for in no country does a respectable man become so very rich, or rich so soon, and if not respectable he still may do fairly well. You cannot have everything, however, and one notes that the average rich man has paid a price for his dollars. He has read very little—his wife reads for him; he has travelled very little—his daughters travel for him. He has no voice in the State—professional politicians speak for him; he has no amusements, unless you include speculation; and he has no pleasant periods of rest, unless you accept as an equivalent comparatively early and sudden death, which often arises from acute indigestion. He has not time to stop and realize himself, unless, but this is a large exception, when he has dyspepsia. One reason, perhaps, why Americans do not rest is that given to me by a bright woman: “We are all so tired,” and the American is the victim of his own qualities.
One, of course, acknowledges the advantages of this amazing energy, and there are times when a stolid Englishman grows envious. A university in America is created in ten years and endowed to the extent of millions sterling, and equipped with chairs of which a European never dreamt, and laboratories which border upon palaces. Libraries and picture galleries are rising in every city, for which the treasuries of Europe have been ransacked; and, were it not for the restriction of governments, the Old Masters would have to be sought, not in Italy and England, but in New York and Chicago. New towns are designed upon a scale of magnificence, as if each were to be the capital of an empire, and are at least outlined in building within a few years. Should it be necessary, an army can be created within a few months, and in a couple of years a new trade can be established which will kill its European rivals. An English farmer with fifteen hundred acres is a considerable man, but an American can have fifteen thousand acres and his different farm buildings will be connected by telephone. A self-made man in England marries his daughter to a baronet and is much lifted; but the daughter of a self-made man in America will marry an English duke, and consider she has conferred a benefit. When you go to a Western town, you may be taken to see a university; if not, you are taken to a dry-goods store; each, in its own way, is the largest of its kind. Certainly, there are stores in America which have no rival in the Old World, and which you are expected to visit with the same appreciation as the Duomo of Florence.
There is almost nothing that the United States does not possess, except political purity, and nothing which an American cannot do, except rest; and in the conflict with foreign competition, he has almost discounted victory. Whether he be able, that is, patient and thorough in the discovery of principles, may be a question; that he is clever, by which one means bright and ingenious in turning principles to account, is beyond all question. If America has not yet had time to produce a Lord Kelvin, it has given us telephones; and if Professor Dewar has astonished the world with his liquid air, an American trust is, it is said, being formed to handle it for commercial purposes. If we are thought to be dull and slow, as we travel among the most stimulating and hospitable people on the face of the earth, let some excuse be made for us and let our hosts share the blame. An Englishman in the United States is half dazed, like one moving amid the ceaseless din and whirling wheels of a huge manufactory, where the voice has to be raised to a shriek, and a sentence compressed into a single word. He goes home greatly humbled in his estimation of himself, and in low spirits about the commercial future of his country. He has no bitterness, however, within his heart, for are not these people of his own blood, and are not their triumphs his, even if they threaten to outrun his own nation in the race of productive commerce? And when he comes back to England, has he not his compensations, Stratford-on-Avon, and Westminster Abbey, and the greenery of the Home Counties, and the lights and shadows of the Scots Lochs, and the musical voices of the English women, and the quiet, contented, cultured English homes?