English and American Cousins

PART OF A MAN’S LIFE.

“The uttered part of a man’s life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.”— Carlyle’s Essay on Scott.

I ON on board ship, a few years ago, a discussion as to the comparative number of Americans visiting England and of Englishmen visiting America. None rated the proportion of the former class as less than ten to one ; but the most experienced traveler among us laughed at this low estimate, and declared that five hundred to one would be much nearer. Be the difference less or more, it shows the utterly unequal ground on which the two national bodies meet, as to mutual acquaintance. Traveling on the Continent of Europe, soon after, with a party of young Americans, I was witness of their dismay at being assailed from time to time by friendly English fellow travelers with such questions as these : “ Is it not very lonely in America ? Are there any singing birds there ? Any wild flowers ? Any bishops ? Are there booths in the streets of New York ? Do people read English books there? Have they heard of Ruskin; and how ? ” These were from the rank and file of questioners, while a very cultivated clergyman lost caste somewhat with our young people by asking confidently, “Are Harvard and Yale both in Boston ? ” a question which seemed to them as hopelessly benighted as the remark of a lady, just returned from the wonders of the New World, who had been impressed, like all visitors, with the novelties offered in the way of food at the Baltimore dinnertables, but still sighed with regret at having been obliged to come away without eating “a canvas-backed clam.”

One needs to know but little of large families of collateral kindred to recognize that the nearer the cousinship, the closer the criticism. Theodore Hook profanely declares the phrase “ a friend that sticketh closer than a brother ” to designate a cousin, and Lord Bacon comes near enough to the same thought to point out that we are bidden by the highest authority to forgive our enemies, but are nowhere bidden to forgive our friends. It may be wise, therefore, for Americans to draw their compliments, not from their own newspapers, but from the verdicts of such English critics as Lord Lyons, who, as recorded in the delightful Letters from a Diplomat’s Diary, declared on his return from a long residence in Washington that he “ had never yet met a stupid American woman,” or Mr. Froude, who, during his voyage around the world, records, “Let me say that nowhere in America have I met with vulgarity in its proper sense.” These two compliments are undoubtedly so sweeping that perhaps no American citizen would think it quite safe to apply them to the people who live in the adjoining street ; but they are at least worth a thousand vague newspaper libels. Even Matthew Arnold, who certainly cannot be said to have loved America much, or to have known much about it, — for what can a man be said to know about America who describes a Virginia mob as fortifying its courage with fish balls and ice water ? ¹ — was led, while making a comparison with those whom he had left at home, to say, “Our [English] countrymen, with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility.”

In the same way, Americans might borrow their criticisms on England from those writing in that country. Thus, Mr. H. G. Wells, a novelist and scientist in one, but not himself a university man, writes in the Fortnightly Review of “ the ordinary Oxford, Cambridge, or London B. A.: ” “ He has a useless smattering of Greek; he cannot read Latin with any comfort, much less write or speak that tongue ; he knows a few unedifying facts round and about the classical literature; he cannot speak or read French with any comfort; he has an imperfect knowledge of the English language, insufficient to write it clearly, and none of German ; he has a queer, old-fashioned, and quite useless knowledge of certain rudimentary sections of mathematics, and an odd little bite out of history. He knows practically nothing of the world of thought embodied in English literature, and absolutely nothing of contemporary thought; he is totally ignorant of modern political or social science. If he knows anything of evolutionary science and heredity it is probably matter picked up in a casual way from the magazines, and art is a sealed book to him.”

And lest it be said that Mr. Wells, with all his knowledge and brilliancy, is not himself a graduate of any English university, it is fair to cite the opinion of Mr. Rudolph C. Lehmann (Trinity College, Cambridge, M. A.), who, after spending much time in America, where he was familiar with our university life, makes the following remark as to the English and American schoolboy. He writes : —

“ There can be no comparison between the two. The English public schoolboy is one of the most profoundly ignorant creatures on the face of the earth. Of geography he knows only as much as he may have gathered by collecting postage stamps. With English, literature he is not even on terms of distant politeness. The style and composition of his letters would make a housemaid smile. and modern history, whether of his own country or of the world in general, is a sealed book to him.”

No criticism from Americans is more common than that as to the greater slowness of the English mind as compared with the American ; and Professor Tyndall, when lecturing in this country, was amused to find, as he told me, that whereas in making experiments before a London audience he had to repeat his explanation three times, — once to make his hearers comprehend what he was about to do, then to show what he was doing, and then to explain what he had done, — he could after his first lecture in America omit the final explanation, and latterly the middle one as well. He also told a story to the same effect about an English manager of a “ minstrel ” troupe, traveling in America, who was accustomed to prolong his jokes by the aid of two end men, each bringing out a part of the joke, but who found with indignation that every American audience “ caught on ” without waiting for the second end man. Yet the careful American observer soon finds that the standard of quickness is to be determined in England, as everywhere else, by the point of view. People who go slowly on new ground may turn out to be quick enough when wholly at home with any particular line of thought.

How odious and complicated, for instance, seems to an American observer the computation of pounds, shillings, and pence! It seems strange that any nation should consent for a day to employ anything but a decimal currency; yet with what lightning rapidity does a London bookkeeper make his computations ! Again, what a life of tedious formality seems that of an English house servant ; yet there was no slowmess of intellect in that footman, in an earl’s family, who, when his young lord fell over the banister, and his younger brother called to ask if the elder boy was hurt, answered promptly, “ Killed, my lord ! ” thus promoting the second son to the peerage while the elder was falling over the banister. Even in the House of Commons, the difference from an American deliberative body is found to vary according to the point from which you look at the discussion. The Englishman begins with a curious air of hesitation, whereas the American glides into his speech at once ; but the difference is that the Englishman suddenly surprises you by coming to his point with clearness and decision, after which he amazes you yet more by sitting down; whereas the American, after his first good hit, is apt to seem intoxicated by his own success, and feels bound to keep on indefinitely, waiting for another. You are left under the impression that an ideal speech in any debating body would be achieved by having an American to begin it and an Englishman to end it.

Such plain facts as these show the injustice of attributing to our cousins any deliberate unfairness to ourselves, and any conscious spirit of boastfulness. We have only to read the newspapers to see that party spirit rises, on the whole, higher in England than here; and certainly it is impossible for our cousins to criticise us with more formidable frankness than that which they apply to one another. No man who ever lived was more universally claimed as a typical Englishman than Walter Savage Landor, and yet he wrote to Lady Blessington, “ I would not live in London the six winter months for £1000 a week. No, not even with the privilege of hanging a Tory on every lamp arm to the right, and a Whig on every one to the left, the whole extent of Piccadilly.”

It must be remembered that the progress of events is in one respect, at least, distinctly drawing the two nations into closer connection. The advance of colonization undoubtedly tends to democratize England, while the same development has the opposite effect in America. Froude, in his travels, found the British colonists, here and there, thinking that Tennyson must have lost his wits to accept a peerage, and it is well remembered that at least one of those who came to the Queen’s Jubilee to represent different regions of the globe refused a proffered knighthood on the ground that his constituents would not endure it. Anglo-Indian life, to be sure, shows no such results, the conditions there being wholly different ; but I speak of the self-governing colonies like Canada and Australia; and no one can have stayed any time under the same roof with such colonists in England, or paced the quarter-deck with them on board ship, without feeling them to be nearer to Americans than to Englishmen in their general mental attitude. Both would probably be criticised by Englishmen as having that combination, which a high educational authority once selected as the quality most frequently produced by the great English public schools, — “ a certain shy bumptiousness.”

Perhaps the best single key to the lingering difference between English and American temperament is to be found in that precept brought to the front in almost any text-book of morals or manners one can open in England, bidding each man to be faithful to that station of life to which he is called. For the American upon whom has always been imposed the duty of creating for himself his own station, this seems to explain all the vast and unsatisfactory results which seem to follow from the English method. Is the calling equally providential and even sacred, no matter from whom the voice proceeds ? The first glance at the history of the English peerage shows us six peerages created to ennoble the offspring of Charles II, who left no legitimate child. Seven more were created by William IV for his illegitimate sons ; and his two illegitimate daughters were the wives of peers. All these families are entitled to use the royal liveries. Next to this lineage of degradation come the peerages and other grades of rank founded primarily on wealth, — a process naturally beginning with the lower grades. Hume tells us that James I created the order of Baronets in 1611 by selling two hundred of those titles for a thousand pounds each. Mr. Pitt went so far as to say that all men whose income was rated at more than twelve thousand pounds should be in the House of Lords. How systematically this method has been carried on to this day may be seen in the following passage from the Spectator of May 23, 1896 : —

“The Birthday Honors published on May 20 hardly call for comment. Lord Salisbury does not distribute them eccentrically, but according to the regular custom, taking wealthy squires like Mr. E. Heneage and Colonel Malcolm of Poltalloch for his peerages ; and giving baronetcies to Mr. R. U. P. Fitzgerald, Mr. W. O. Dalgleish, Mr. Lewis McIver, Mr. J. Verdin, and Mr. C. Cave, because they are wealthy men who have done service to the party.”

If it be said that this process does not vary essentially from the method by which social rank is created in America, the reply is plain enough. Grant that the two forms of aristocracy have much in common, both in their sense of power, and in that comforting fact which Lady Eastlake so finely pointed out, that both of them often “ return to the simplest tastes ; they have everything that man can make, and therefore they turn to what only God can make.” Nevertheless there is this further difference, that, as Mr. Howells has so well shown, though the rich man may look down as distinctly as the lord can, the poor man does not equally look up. Note, too, that in the next place, the prestige of the rich American vanishes with his wealth, and in case he dies poor, his children inherit nothing; whereas inherited rank in England goes by blood only, and is not impaired by the fact that it passes afterwards into the hands of a bankrupt or a scoundrel. The same limitation applies to the riches of the brain, which may also refuse to be hereditary. One can hardly cast so much as a glance at the United States Senate in session, and then at the English House of Lords in session, without recognizing the American elective body to have a far more intellectual aspect than the other assemblage ; or without further observing that nine tenths of the visible intellect in the British House is to be seen in the faces and foreheads of the Bench of Bishops, or the so-called Law Lords, whose origin may have been of the humblest. “Why noble Earls should be so ugly,” wrote one English observer of some note in his day, “ is a problem in nature ; ” but the question is not that of mere beauty or ugliness ; it is of visible mental power.

Even so far as a possible heredity goes, it must be recognized that a republican life is what makes grandparents most truly interesting. Free from the technical whims of an organized peerage, — such, for instance, as primogeniture, — one is left free to trace for good or for evil his inheritance from the various lines of ancestry. Those lines may be drawn with especial interest from public service or social prominence ; from pursuits, or education, or even wealth. Whittier’s Quaker inheritance was as important to him as Longfellow’s parentage of judges and landed proprietors was to him. I knew an American radical, who, on going to England, paid some one at the Heralds’ College to look up his ancestry. Coming back to London some months later, he found that the inquirer had gone back no farther, as yet, than to reach one of his name who was hanged as a rebel under the Tudors. “ Just as I expected,” said the American in delight ; “ do not follow it any further. I am perfectly satisfied.”

Fifty years ago, so far as mere traveling was concerned, the distinctions of rank in the mother country did not intrude themselves on the American cousin. It was the frequent habit of traveling Americans, visiting England for the first time, to assume that their hosts would be ungracious, and that they themselves must necessarily wear a hedgehog suit. As a matter of fact, however, even then, the American traveler usually laid aside his prickles on the second day, finding that there was no use for them in those small railway carriages. Traveling Englishmen of all conditions, at least on their own soil, turned out quite as ready to offer a railway guide, or a bit of advice, as in this country. It is to be remembered, moreover, that the whole system of traveling habits in England — railways, hotels, and all — has greatly expanded and liberalized within that time. No doubt much of the former American injustice was due to the example of Englishmen of the last generation in doing injustice to one another. Horace Walpole said that he should love his country very much if it were not for his countrymen. “ I hate Englishmen,” said Keats, “for they are the only men I know.” Heinrich Heine, that Parisian German, said that he was firmly convinced that a blaspheming Frenchman was regarded with more favor by the Almighty than a praying Englishman, and one might find, even among Englishmen themselves, almost equally piquant self-reproaching.

On the other hand, the sense of truthfulness, of national rectitude, of a certain solid quality, comes over you like a whiff of English air in the very tone of voice of the first railway porter you meet. I recall vividly, as a type of this trait, a certain little English sergeant, with hair as fiery as his uniform, whom I met in an Irish post office in 1870. I had landed at Cork the day before, on my first trans-Atlantic trip, soon after the civil war ; and having been lately familiar with our own troops, felt a great desire to see those of the mother country. Having readily obtained information from him as to the barracks near by, we carried the conversation a little further. My new acquaintance seemed pleased at hearing that I had taken a modest part in the civil war, and rather disappointed to find that I had been on what he evidently regarded as the wrong side. He told me in return that although now a sergeant of the Guards, he had previously served in another regiment. Leaving him presently, I went to purchase some stamps at the office, where I was somewhat delayed by other applicants, and also by a natural inexperience in handling British money. During this time I observed that my friend of the brilliant coloring was lingering and keeping his eye on me, as if waiting for some further interview ; and as I went toward the door he approached me, and begged my pardon for saying something more. “ I told you, sir,” he said, “ that I was a sergeant of the Guards, which is true. But I wish to explain that I was not originally a member of that regiment, but was transferred to it after the battle of the Alma, where I was severely wounded, I give you my word of honor, sir, that I am the very shortest man in the corps ! ” I could only think of the phrase attributed to the Duke of Wellington, “The Guard dies, but never surrenders ! ”

The name of the Guards suggests to me a striking instance where an English friend and distant kinsman of mine, then in command of the Grenadier Guards, found himself under the need of testing very suddenly the essential manhood of a body of Englishmen on the dangerous verge of what seemed for the moment an insurrection. It was on that well-remembered night when the London mob tore down the fences of Hyde Park, to be used either as bonfires or as barricades, as the case might be. On that perilous evening, this officer was dining at a friend’s house, all unconscious of impending danger, when he received a summons from the War Department, telling him that his regiment was ordered out to deal with a mob. Hurrying back to his own house, and calling for his man servant to saddle his horse, he found that the man had gone by permission for the evening, and had the key of the stable in his pocket ; so that the officer, after hastily donning his uniform, must proceed on foot to the Guards’ Armory, which lay on the other side of Hyde Park. Walking hastily in that direction, he came out unexpectedly at the very headquarters of the mob, where they were piling up the fences. Already his uniform had been recognized, and angry shouts began to rise. It must have seemed for the moment to the mob that the Lord had delivered their worst enemy into their hands. There was but one thing to be done. Making his way straight toward the centre of action, he called to a man mounted on the pile, the apparent leader of the tumult, “ I say, my good fellow, my regiment has been called out by Her Majesty’s orders. Will you give me a hand over this pile ? ” The man hesitated for an instant, and then said with decision, “ Boys, the gentleman is right! He is doing his duty, and we have no quarrel with him. Lend a hand, and help him over.” This was promptly done, with entire respect, and the officer, in his brilliant uniform, went hastily on his way amid three cheers from the mob, which then returned to its work, to be completed before he whom they had aided should come back at the head of his regiment, and, if needful, order them to be shot down.

Surely the most travel-worn American, one would think, when recalling such scenes, can never revisit London without being reminded of the noble description of that great capital in Milton’s Areopagitica, written in 1644 : “ Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection ; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and fealty, the approaching reformation ; others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. . . . Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and jealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city.”

When it comes to the use of their common language, the English and American cousins have no doubt those variations which habitually mark kindred families, even in adjacent houses ; and, as between those families, there are always arguments on both sides, and many dictionaries and even lexicons need to be turned over before coming to a decision. In the same way, when a New England farmer says, “ I don’t know nothin’ about it,” we are apt to forget that this double negative was a matter of course in the Anglo-Saxon (see Hickes’s Thesaurus), as it still is in the French; and it may be found abundantly in Chaucer and in Shakespeare, as in Romeo and Juliet (act iii, scene v), —

“ a sudden day of joy, That thou expect’st not nor I look’d not for.”

In the same way, when our country people say “learn me,” instead of “teach me,” they have behind them the authority of the English Bible, “ learn me true understanding,” and also of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, the latter, curiously enough, sometimes employing both words in the same sentence, as in The Tempest (act i, scene ii) where Caliban says, —

The French apprendre combines the meaning of the two words in the same way.

All the cousins must admit that such phrases are everywhere better preserved in rustic communities than elsewhere. Even in America, we get nearer the Chaucerian and Shakespearean dialect in the country than in the city. Old people are also necessarily nearer to it than the young, whatever the language. Thus M. Pasquier, who died in France in 1615 at the age of eighty-seven, remembered that in his youth the French word honnête had still an s in it, as in the English “ honest,” and complained that he lived to see the s dropped and a circumflex accent substituted. It is to be noted, also, that in a new country all changes, when once introduced, make their way much faster than in an older one. We still see English critics laying the whole responsibility for the dropping of the “ in “ honor,” “ favor,” and the like, on Webster’s Dictionary, when it really originated in England long before the publication of that work. It is stated in The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1803 (No. lxxiii, part i, p. 146) that there was at that time in the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge, a copy of Middleton’s Life of Cicero printed with the omission of the “ in such words, — a volume in which some pious student had taken the pains to reinsert them all. It would, at that time, have been thought an equal outrage to drop the closing k from physick, musick, publick, and the like, the only difference being that the “ has thus far held its own, and the k has not. The English language simply changes faster in America than in England ; and in this respect, as in some others, we are more like the French in our qualities. Vaugelas, an old French translator of Quintus Curtius, after devoting thirty years to the work, had to correct the language and spelling of the earlier part to make it conform to that of the latter pages; so that the critic Voiture applied to his case the Latin epigram of Martial on a barber who did his work so slowly that the hair began to grow again upon one half the face, while he was shaving the other.

When we pass from the comparative dialects of the English and American cousins to their respective intonations, we find that, as Mr. William Archer has admirably pointed out in the Pall Mall Magazine, there are so many whims and inconsistencies to be counted up in each family that it is hardly worth while to strike the balance. In colloquial utterance it is a curious fact that the nation which uses the more even and uninflected tone is the more impetuous and impulsive of the two, namely, the American ; while the Englishman, slower and more staid, has yet a far more varied intonation. The most patriotic American, after a stay of some months in England, is struck by a certain flatness and monotony in the prevailing utterance of his fellow countrymen, on the quarter-deck of the returning steamer. Here, as in most things, there is a middle ground, and the two families are much less distinguishable in this respect than formerly. The American nasality is also toned down, and it is more and more common for two English-speaking strangers to meet and try in vain to guess the national origin of each other. When it comes to the actual pronunciation, it is a curious fact to notice, that special variations of speech in the English lower class have ceased to be accidental and unconscious, if they ever were so, but are more deliberate and, so to speak, premeditated, than those of the corresponding class — so far as there is such a class — in America. I heard with interest, for the first time, in a third-class railway carriage in London an evidently conscientious and careful mother impressing on her child as a duty that extraordinary transformation of the letter a into i or y, of which the best manual is to be found in Mr. Whiteing’s inexhaustible tale, No. 5 John Street. His neighbors on that street usually transformed “ paper ” into “ piper,” “ lady ” into “ lidy,” and “always ” into “ alwize.” In my own case, when a sudden shower came up, the little boy called attention to it, in what would seem to us a natural enough dialect, ‘ Mother, it’s rainin’! ” “You should n’t say rainin’,” said the anxious mother; “ you should say rynin’! ” It brought home to me a similar attempt, on the part of an Irish-American orator, to correct Senator Lodge’s habitual and very proper pronunciation of the place of his summer residence, Nahant. “ Mr. Lodge of Nahant,” said the orator, with a contemptuous prolongation of the last two vowels. He then paused for a sympathetic response from a Cambridge audience, but receiving none, he repeated, “ Mr. Lodge of Nahant; that’s the way he calls it. Common people call it Năhănt.”

The conclusive statement as to the future relation of English and American cousins may perhaps be found in that quiet sentence in which Emerson’s volume called English Traits sums up (in 1856) its whole contents: “ It is noticeable that England is beginning to interest us a little less.” Toward this tends the whole discussion of that in which the mother country differs from her still formidable rival, France, on the one side, and from her gigantic child, the American Republic, on the other. As against both of these, England still clings to the toy of royalty and all which it implies. Against countries where aspiring intellect finds nothing too high for it to aim at, there still remains in England the absolute precedence of the House of Lords. I knew a young American girl, who, going to England under the care of an ambassador’s family, and attending her first large dinner party, selected, upon looking about her, as the most interesting guest in the room, one man of distinguished aspect, whom she resolved to watch. When the guests were ushered into the dining-hall according to the laws of precedence, she found herself at the very end of the brilliant procession, as one of two untitled plebeians, in company with the very man who had interested her, and who proved to be Samuel Rogers, the poet and patron of art, and the recognized head of literary society in London. She always said that she secured two things at that entertainment, namely, the most delightful companion that she ever had at a dinner party, and, moreover, a lesson in the outcome of mere hereditary rank that would last a lifetime. Rogers’s poems are not now read so much as formerly, but at that time the highest attention a literary American visitor could receive in London was to dine with him. He was also one of the richest bankers in that city, and was very possibly the only person in the room who had won for himself a reputation outside of his own little island ; but he was next to nobody in that company, and the little American girl was the nobody.

Max O’Reil points out that the Frenchman who takes no notice of a duke will turn to take a second look at a great literary man or savant. No doubt the English aristocracy, as is always the case with aristocracies, often goes out of its way to do honor to literature and art in the form of courtesy or patronage; but this, too, has its limits. It is easy enough for a literary man in England to dine with a lord who shares his own tastes; it is only when he is asked to dine with a stupid lord that the attention can be counted as a social recognition. Even in this case it may be in the hope of finding the barbaric guest amusing; and it was said that the immediate cause of the artist Haydon’s suicide was his despair at being hopelessly eclipsed in polite society by Tom Thumb. If this is true, what fatal instances of self-destruction may not have taken place among American artists and authors who found themselves equally outshone in the English fashionable life by Buffalo Bill!

But let us turn from these trifles and go deeper. No American could possibly have passed through England during the anxious days of President McKinley’s final ordeal and death, without being profoundly impressed with the inalienable tie between the two nations whose cousinship never before was so strikingly visible. I happened to be at Exeter, a city as marked, perhaps, as any in England for all that is non-American in church and state. All through that fatal Sunday the telegrams conveying the latest returns were put out, from time to time, at the windows of the office, and all day long one might see groups or single observers coming, going, and pausing to inspect; even children eagerly transmitting the successive items of news from one to another. There was no religious service held in the city, from the most conservative to the most liberal, where there was not some reference made to the incident. In all of these there was reported — and as to three or four I can personally testify — a fullness of feeling such as touched the heart of every American. On the next morning, whole pages of the country newspapers, usually so barren of American items, were crowded with reports of Sunday services in various towns and villages. Driving through the country, in any direction, during those sorrowful days, one saw mourning flags here and there, on the streets, on public buildings, and before private houses. In London the very omnibus drivers sometimes carried them. We were constantly told that no European sovereign’s death had ever brought forth so much testimonial of grief, and we could well believe it. No American who happened to be in England during that experience can ever again doubt the depth and reality of English and American cousinship.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson.