Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for some forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies of society, I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a nobleman who had somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors that they were not his friends, and regularly voted down his men, whether they stood for Parliament or County Council, and whether they were better than the popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was said that they were really better, but the people would not have them because they were his; and one of the theories of English manliness is that the constant pressure from above has toughened the spirit and enabled Englishmen to stand up stouter and straighter each in his place, just as it is contended elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the human race have been heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the struggle of life.

  For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and coarser for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social inequality is such that there are not four men in London who are not snobs, it cannot boast itself greater than the success of economic inequality with ourselves, among whom the fight for money has not produced of late a first-class poet, painter, or sculptor. The English, if they are now the manliest people under the sun, have to thank not their masters but themselves, and a nature originally so generous that no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no political absurdity spoil it. But if this nature had been left free from the beginning, we might see now a nation of Englishmen who, instead of being bound so hard and fast in the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would be the first in a world-wide altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout that it may well pass itself off upon them for a religious emotion, instead of the superstition which seems to the stranger the implication of an England in the next world as well as in this.

  X

  We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that is a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life, as the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and as distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in the cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison. At home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed in the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with other men, and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad time-tables will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the limits of Lent; you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays, and the minor saints’ days. When once you have mastered this difficult science, you will realize what a colossal transaction the disestablishment of the English Church in England would be, and how it would affect the whole social fabric.

  But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as that knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever to question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has moved in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one has always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a sort of despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who perceives that he never will be able to speak English. The American is rather worse off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form even the wish to pronounce some English words as the English do. He has, for example, always said “financier,” with the accent on the last syllable; and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there was no choice for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by the head of a college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns on asking that it is never otherwise accented in England, his head whirls a little, and he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had better let the verb “to be” govern the accusative as the English do, and be done with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or stop! He must not “telegraph,” he must “wire.”

  XI

  As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping one’s aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last of my English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice purely cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through the National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that till the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard in their pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in England, but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish border. Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had scattered far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low breeding, and the infection is now spread as far as popular learning. Like the wrong breathing, it is social death “to any he that utters it,” not indeed that swift extinction which follows having your name crossed by royalty from the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to visit, but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole island, where you can nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing a woman call herself “a lydy.” It may indeed be the contagion of the National School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of the wrong breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of national origin and extent, and both are individual or personal in their manifestation. That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk through their noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop their aitches.

  The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them, any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation among us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales are otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They seem capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings, which is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is the fault of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English fair. Where the work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a difference between the two peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a horse-race. While all the singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at their national musical festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met in the national pastime of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money probably changed hands on the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it was characteristic of the prevalent influence in the common civilization (if there is a civilization common to both races) that the King was at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But I do not say this to his disadvantage, for I was myself at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a race.

  XII

  What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently. We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul, the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, fro
m the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey that the Welsh are “the prize liars of the universe.” He was an expert accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame the others.

  I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment in the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at least of a different mind concerning the Welsh. “These Welsh farmers,” he said, “send their sons and daughters to college as if it were quite the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant sending his boy to a University!”

  We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase are no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by which the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving through the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify because every part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an illustration of the reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide. It was the accumulation, not merely within men’s memories, but within the actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great nobleman who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of enclosing the people’s commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of the wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through the broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to their aid. Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of our national foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin. Doubtless the aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know what the attacks of the press amount to against the steadfast will of a powerful corporation, and a great nobleman in England is a powerful corporation. In this instance he had not apparently taken the people’s land without some wish to make them a return for it. He had built a handsome road through their property, which he maintained in splendid condition, and he allowed them to drive over his road, and to walk freely in certain portions of their woods. He had also built a magnificent hospital for them, and it seemed rather hard, then, to hear that one of the humblest of them had been known to speak of him in whispered confidence as a “Upas tree.”

  XIII

  Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward him left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we had taken in his enclosure, “That’s a private path!” was unjust. There was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place secure from intrusion. The word “Private” painted up anywhere does the effect of bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it, and is not for a moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it seems so often with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so mandatory, the English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not told to keep your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are “requested,” and sometimes even “kindly requested”; I do not know but once I was “respectfully requested.” Perhaps that nobleman’s possession of these lands was so new that his retainers had to practise something of unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At any rate, the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from class to class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare say he does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but apparently the manners of the lower class, where they have been touched by the upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence and complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and insistences, and acceptances between people of condition, such as I witnessed once in a crowded first-class carriage from London on an Oxford holiday, nothing could be more gently urgent, more beautifully forbearing. If the writers of our romantic novels could get just those manners into their fiction, I should not mind their dealing so much with the English nobility and gentry; for those who intend being our nobility and gentry, by-and-by, could not do better than study such high-breeding.

  If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we are in a region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be honest, I know nothing about them, and I will not assume to know anything. I heard from authority which I could not suspect of posing for omniscience that the English rustics were apt to be very depraved, but they may on the other hand be saints for all that I can prove against them. They are superstitious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses that have not their tutelary spectres. The belief in ghosts is almost universal among the people; as I may allow without superiority, for I do not know but I believe in them myself, and there are some million of American spiritualists who make an open profession of faith in them. It is said also that the poor in England are much spoiled by the constant aid given them in charity. This is supposed to corrupt them, and to make them dependent upon the favors of fortune, rather than the sweat of their brows. On the other hand, they often cannot get work, as I infer from the armies of the unemployed, and, in these cases, I cannot hold them greatly to blame if they bless their givers by their readiness to receive. If one may infer from the incessant beneficences, and the constant demands for more and more charities, one heaped upon another, there are more good objects in England than anywhere else under the sun, for one only gives to good objects, of course. The oppression of the subscriptions is tempered by the smallness of the sum which may satisfy them. “Five shillings is a subscription,” said a friend who was accused of really always giving five pounds.

  XIV

  The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do — that is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that there is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the worse off more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All this is believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the certainty of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose body is doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for much of the evil that ensues from giving something to people who have nothing; but I dare say the Dissenters are also guilty.

  Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it would be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of the frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able to feed themselves. One day, in the outskirts — they were very tattered and draggled — of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind woman “thought she could accommodate” us with a cup of tea, though she was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids and small boys coming in for “penn’orths” of that frightf
ul variety of tart and cake which dismays the beholder from innumerable shop windows in England. When we were brought our safer refection, we noted her activities to the hostess, and she said, “Yes, they all want a bit of cake with their tea, even the poorest”; and when we ventured our supposition that they made their afternoon tea the last meal of the day, she laughed at the notion. “Last meal! They have a good supper before they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four meals a day.”

  Another time, thriftily running in a third-class carriage from Crewe to Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank cordiality of the lower classes in recognizing one of their sort. “They don’t know how to charge!” he said, with an irony that referred to the fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station tea; and when I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the company, he readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to eating generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to do a job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for his board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will find to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward’s time, five hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose every morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread, butter, and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had soup, meat, and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from work, he had a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He thought that English people ate too much, generally, and especially on Sunday, when they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home without asking, “Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?” When I remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I thought that he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact remained that they looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh, though the difference may have had as much to do with the air as the food. I liked him, and I cannot leave him without noting that he was of the lean-faced, slightly aquiline British type, with a light mustache; he was well dressed and well set up, and he spoke strongly, as North Britons do, with nothing of our people’s husky whine. I found him on further acquaintance of anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to the late war, and rather socialistic. He blamed the labor men for not choosing labor men to office instead of the gentry who offered themselves. He belonged to a plumbers’ union, and he had nothing to complain of, but he inferred that the working-man was better off in America, from the fact that none of his friends who had gone to the States ever came home to stay, though they nearly all came home for a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my other friend, the accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be owned their race seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of two sovereigns which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the other hand, he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially at Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking with them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook on life, but I dare say there was more of it.