On a Preference for Living in England

WHEN men pitch their life-tents far away, they have manifold causes and reasons: some sound, some questionable, some wholly weak and unworthy. It is one thing feloniously to cast off one’s derivation, nurture, and responsibilities; and quite another thing to brave homesickness in order to outwit and escape too difficult outward conditions. It is the pride of absence to remember Argos forever, to rest upon its garnered glories, and brooding upon its future with thoughtful affection, to

The purpose of this paper is to hold a brief not so much for those who go, as for those who cannot stay. European passports, for instance, must be cheerfully furnished to our artist fraternity. With us, the historical sense, the scholastic mind, the instinct for color and form, must bring, in time, their own obsession. Whoever has a rage for origin, a lust for things at first-hand, is foredoomed to chafe at a civilization which dates from this morning, and spends its energies on tasks far other than the effort to see life steadily and see it whole. There is something rational, surely, in an attraction which has already drained the United States of so much genius, literary and artistic; which has resulted in forming so many wise, devoted, and detached critics to whip us up to our ideals, and remind us of our sins.

But the fellow-citizen, of all others, who must have the right of way over sea, is the wounded man, the tired man, the sufferer from Hustlerium Tremens sive Americanitis. Let that true lover of the Republic fear not, but sink his foot in alien turf for the most defensible reason in life; like Denham’s hero, unblamed,

He has “gone to be a fairy,” not for ambition, not for excitement, nor for vogue; but for the velvety feel of the Past under foot, like moss of the forest floor to a barefooted child; or for the hardly less gentle feel of the Present, whence noise and worry seem miraculously to have vanished away. Well for him, when at last, from his own foolish impetus, as well as from the epic newness, and startling developments, and too eager gynæcocracy of the States, he has fled into transmarine twilight, and the ever noble State of Suspended Animation!

An American living on the Continent suggests, somehow, a career of genius or of crime. An American in England, on the other hand, is a perfect working hypothesis. Scotland, Wales, Ireland (and Ireland especially), are bristling with ideas, as with so many spiritual burs and mosquitoes. But England, with her queer and meek climate, presents no such intimidations to the weary who would rest there. She is a heaven for retired and non-rheumatic racers, who are set only upon a smoke and a sleep. The quality of the Past and of the Peace proffered is incomparably the best, for these debased reasons: that the past is the very one, next his own, about which the average educated American knows most; and peace is certainly promoted, in the adult breast at least, when no necessity exists for the full dress of a foreign language. That ghostly encounter with “chaunt” or “gulph,” in columns yet wet from the printing-press, that strange sea-change of what was a “spool of cotton” into a “reel of thread,” — these and their like are pleasing titillations, and to the truly lazy mind are beatific substitutes for the diplomacies of Latin idiom, and the strangling vocabulary of the Fatherland.

Oh, the grave charm of rural England! Every hedgerow seems to imply a racial age-long deliberate choice of simplicity and sincerity over all which would dim them or drive them away. None can know this people at home well enough to poke fun at them, without reverencing them all the while: their moral etiquette is so sure, their standards so disinterested. Outside tainted London, loud success is accorded little preëminence. All other things being equal, the rich stranger, not the poor one, is put on his social probation. There is extraordinary trustfulness in business relations; fabrics are genuine; street noises come under legislation; a fare in any conveyance (except where Americans are in control) means a seat; the children are wholesomely childish, and the old are fearlessly aged; the decorum and honor of life, excluding sensationalism, rule the national imagination. Here are some rather large towns (to say nothing of the country districts) which are no more agitating than a dove’s note or a junket. You cannot walk through them for three minutes in any direction without seeing something famous and ancient and uniquely beautiful; nor beyond them, without meeting a landscape which is almost mystically dreamy. There is never, so far as one can make out, any fickle fashion in clothes, any fad in amusements. There is no highway army of poles and wires; no appreciable slush or drifts or icicles; no continuous agony of heat; no mosquitoes; no nerves! Work is lonely and unhurried, and recreation reasonable and calm. One can the better endure the scarcity of wild wood, moor, and river, when daily conventional pleasuring, even at its worst, is so near to Nature. The god of Tea is propitiated on a greensward, in the company of gentle dames who all say “Quite so!” and mannerly little girls with their mannerly dogs; “a summer shower,” as Hazlitt says, “is dropping manna on your head, and an old crazy hand-organ is playing ‘Robin Adair’” on the other side of the blessed ivied garden wall. This is to loaf and to reign.

You know now that you will never long to get anywhere in particular, or strain after anything except salvation. You set up for a smug, rich, intellectual Pharisee, with immaterial horizons which never were, nor can be, in the West. Time and eternity are pretty nearly one in the moist amethyst-colored air. You realize fully that the ozone is gone out of it, and that the sad heart of the earth beneath has bled for long. But you also realize that you are acquiring from contact with these an almost sportive sense of the unseen and the supernatural, and a sense which unravels essence from accident, true from plausible, lasting from uncertain, innocent from profane. Very grateful some outlanders are for this strange, painless stretching of their spirits. They have done with the Puritans. They have been kidnapped and catholicized. Small wonder if they feel that they have come home, body and soul, in coming near to the Simple Life and the Quiet Mind: not, mind you, to mere talk of these healthful and beatific things. Not that our happier natures in the United States have not at all times attained to them. But their exemption from the hurly-burly is a bought one: you do not have to buy it in England. It commends itself to the indigent, for it is as a flowing fountain in the streets.

Our imaginary friend Fugacius, hungry for rest, may attain even that, and a better thing. — anonymity. He may possibly be tired of keeping awake, of toeing the mark, of showing interest, and wearing an intelligent expression. He may have been martyred, more or less, by the Public Eye; but in England, if anywhere, he may indulge to the full a lifelong passion for silence and seclusion. He will not be asked by an interviewer at 4 A. M., and at the point of the moral bayonet, for his impressions concerning problems fiscal or forensic. If he is understood to have exhibited in the Salon, or to have published a sonnet, not a living British creature will think any the better of him for it. Mention was made, a moment ago, of a garden wall: ubiquitous and beloved symbol! Conscious that it is stone, ten feet high, and ninety-one feet in circumference, the American memory runs across, in the wake of ships, to the exquisite suburban streets where the graceful houses, with their wooden gables and verandas, their lilacs and syringas, and wide graveled paths, lie open to one another and to the road. An American feels sure, of a sudden, that the English inclosure gives a freedom that he never knew, and that even a king, in such a fastness, could defy the demon of publicity. Too much praise cannot be given to the universal inviolable respect for privacy in the land of the garden wall. The human ear, even in a drawing-room, is as holy as any mediæval ambry. There have been two celebrated instances, in our own generation, where real names of English writers, objects of curiosity to the whole reading world, were kept from it through many years, and up to the deaths of the authors, although the secret of identification had been quite casually shared, for long, by scores of discreet friends. Such instances commend the conditions (how unlike ours!) which make them possible. Indeed, they arouse enthusiasm in any natural enemy of newspaper headlines.

A wit once remarked that the English love Americans but not America, and that the Americans love England, but not the English. The truth of this discerning remark is obvious, whatever the explanation of it may be. But every day one hears some anecdote or other which makes one feel that shell and snail, at least with them, are inseparable: that an Englishman is just what he is, because England is just what she is. Here is one slight illustration of the point. During the August of 1906 a party of three Americans went north from Euston Station in London. The railway porter put them aboard the train, after his wont, observing, as it would appear, the name marking their luggage. The gentleman of the party asked the porter whether he should have to change carriages before reaching his destination; the porter answered in the negative, the door was slammed to, and the day-long journey began. Hours later, at a station, as the train slowed up, an inspector came along the corridor, repeating in a loud voice a name which the travelers recognized as their own. He held a telegram in his hand. This had been sent to him direct, asking him to find aboard a certain train Mr. —, bound for —, and to tell him that, he had been misinformed and that he must make a change at — Junction. Now that London porter must have known that the Americans were mere sightseeing strangers, that he would never see them or hear of them again, and that the odds were that they would inquire anew about changing on the journey, and find their way to — as scheduled, or, for that matter, not lose their wits or lives if they did not: in fact, there was every inducement to make him wash his hands of them. Yet it was he who sent the wire, taking all that thoughtful trouble to set his blunder right. Could such a thing have happened under ordinary circumstances in our country ? We have heroisms on every side; but we are too busy for contritions. Exercise of scrupulous conscience in official matters is precisely England and the English; the little fortuitous error, the abundant reparation, are not exceptional and individual, but as typical as they can possibly be. Here is a people which fumbles, which drops many stitches, which has its multiform inefficiencies. But it may boast truly that a passion for duty is in its very marrow; it will not in the end consciously go forward with unre pent ed wrong in its bosom. Is it any wonder if some children of a more heedless and elliptical nation, harassed by rude corporations and their units, think it pleasant to dwell among the million blood-relatives of that unknown adored railway porter ? For so soothing a privilege, they will even endure the immemorial cabbage, the sacred Brussels sprouts of Great Britain and Ireland, for three hundred and sixty-five days of the gastronomical year.

In England, notably in middle England, flourishes the most unbelievable and ubiquitous density of mind. It is there indeed; and it is disciplinary; it is funny; it is maddening. Does it dash your joy, in some village of heavenly picturesqueness, to find (as you are always finding!) that the parson is a stock, and the laundress a stone ? Well, never ultimately; for the stocks and stones are excellent to live with and have staying qualities. The secret of happiness for us, under their roof, as elsewhere, is the spirit of conformity and compromise. The English ethnological key seems to be D minor, and the household metronome to be set at Adagio Marcato; until you have tried the tune of Yankee Doodle in that unexpected key, and to that revolutionizing measure, you can have no idea of its moving effectiveness, and its powers of accommodation. The expatriate, if any one, should get a right perspective, and an unconfused sense of values. He knows that for the joy of life; for zest, thorough and permeating; for organization and invention; for autumn forest pageantry in its perfection; for idyllic things to eat, and the magical cooking of the same; for the prevalence of personal and domestic taste; for true touchstones of human worth and worthlessness; for exquisite chivalry in the relations between men and women, — he knows that for these he must cross the bounding main: he must go home. But dear as these things are, deeply as these things (especially the last) are respected and lamented by all who knew them, one can do without them for a while. The Past, and Peace, are dearer yet. The faction which stays on and on, in a land not quite foreign, is agreed quite passionately about that.