The Land of Contrasts Part 11

1. The combination of the present _a la carte_ system with the inclusive or American system, by which those who don't want the trouble of ordering their repasts may be sure of finding meals, with a reasonable lat.i.tude of choice in time and fare, ready when desired. It is a sensible comfort to know beforehand exactly, or almost exactly, what one's hotel expenses will amount to.

2. The abolition of the charge for attendance.

3. A greater variety of dishes than is usually offered in any except our very largest hotels. This is especially to be desired at breakfast. Without going to the American extreme of fifty or a hundred dishes to choose from, some intermediate point short of the Scylla of sole and the Charybdis of ham and eggs might surely be found. There is probably more pig-headed conservatism than justified fear of expense in the reluctance to follow this most excellent "American lead." The British tourist in the United States takes so kindly to the preliminary fruit and cereal dishes of America that he would probably show no objection to them on his native heath.

4. An extension of the system of ringing once for the boots, twice for the chambermaid, and so on. The ordinary American table of calls goes up to nine.

5. The provision of writing materials free for the guests of the hotels. The charge for stationery is one of the pettiest and most exasperating cheese-parings of the English Boniface's system of account-keeping. If, however, he imitates the liberality of his American brother, it is to be hoped that he will "go him one better"

in the matter of blotting-paper. Nothing in the youthful country across the seas has a more venerable appearance than the strips of blotting-paper supplied in the writing-rooms of its hotels.

Nothing in its way could be more inviting or seem more appropriate than the cool and airy architecture of the summer hotels in such districts as the White Mountains, with their wide and shady verandas, their overhanging eaves, their balconies, their s.p.a.cious corridors and vestibules, their simple yet tasteful wood-panelling, their creepers outside and their growing plants within. Mr. Howells has somewhere reversed the threadbare comparison of an Atlantic liner to a floating hotel, by likening a hostelry of this kind to a saloon steamer; and indeed the comparison is an apt one, so light and buoyant does the construction seem, with its gaily painted wooden sides, its gla.s.s-covered veranda decks, and its streaming flags. Perhaps the nearest a.n.a.logue that we have to the life of an American summer hotel is seen in our large hydropathic establishments, such as those at Peebles or Crieff, where the therapeutic appliances play but a subdued obbligato to the daily round of amus.e.m.e.nts. The same spirit of camaraderie generally rules at both; both have the same regular meal-hours, at which almost as little drinking is seen at the one as the other; both have their evening entertainments got up (_gotten_ up, our American cousins say, with a delightfully old fas.h.i.+oned flavour) by the enterprise of the most active guests. The hydropathists have to go to bed a little sooner, and must walk to the neighbouring village if they wish a bar-room; but on the whole their scheme of life is much the same. Whether it is due to the American temperament or the American weather, the palm for brightness, vivacity, variety, and picturesqueness must be adjudged to the hotel. For those who are young enough to "stand the racket," no form of social gaiety can he found more amusing than a short sojourn at a popular summer hotel among the mountains or by the sea, with its constant round of drives, rides, tennis and golf matches, picnics, "germans," bathing, boating, and loafing, all permeated by flirtation of the most audacious and innocent description. The focus of the whole carnival is found in the "piazza" or veranda, and no prettier sight in its way can be imagined than the groups and rows of "rockers" and wicker chairs, each occupied by a lithe young girl in a summer frock, or her athletic admirer in his tennis flannels.

The enormous extent of the summer exodus to the mountains and the seas in America is overwhelming; and a population of sixty-five millions does not seem a bit too much to account for it. I used to think that about all the Americans who could afford to travel came to Europe. But the American tourists in Europe are, after all, but a drop in the bucket compared with the oceans of summer and winter visitors to the Adirondacks and Florida, Manitoba Springs and the coast of Maine, the Catskills and Long Branch, Newport and Lenox, Bar Harbor and California, White Sulphur Springs and the Minnesota Lakes, Saratoga and Richfield, The Thousand Isles and Martha's Vineyard, Niagara and Trenton Falls, Old Point Comfort and Asheville, the Yellowstone and the Yosemite, Alaska and the Hot Springs of Arkansas. And everywhere that the season's visitor is expected he will find hotels awaiting him that range all the way from reasonable comfort to outrageous magnificence; while a simpler taste will find a plain boarding-house by almost every mountain pool or practicable beach in the whole wide expanse of the United States. The Briton may not have yet abdicated his post as the champion traveller or explorer of unknown lands, but the American is certainly the most restless mover from one resort of civilisation to another.

Perhaps the most beautiful hotel in the world is the Ponce de Leon at St. Augustine, Florida, named after the Spanish voyager who discovered the flowery[32] State in 1512, and explored its streams on his romantic search for the fountain of eternal youth. And when I say beautiful I use the word in no auctioneering sense of mere size, and height, and evidence of expenditure, but as meaning a truly artistic creation, fine in itself and appropriate to its environment. The hotel is built of "coquina," or sh.e.l.l concrete, in a Spanish renaissance style with Moorish features, which harmonises admirably with the sunny sky of Florida and the historic a.s.sociations of St. Augustine.

Its colour scheme, with the creamy white of the concrete, the overhanging roofs of red tile, and the brick and terra-cotta details, is very effective, and contrasts well with the deep-blue overhead and the luxuriant verdancy of the orange-trees, magnolias, palmettos, oleanders, bananas, and date-palms that surround it. The building encloses a large open court, and is lined by columned verandas, while the minaret-like towers dominate the expanse of dark-red roof. The interior is richly adorned with wall and ceiling paintings of historical or allegorical import, skilfully avoiding crudity or garishness; and the marble and oak decorations of the four-galleried rotunda are worthy of the rest of the structure. The general effect is one of luxurious and artistic ease, with suggestions of an Oriental _dolce far niente_ in excellent keeping with the idea of the winter idler's home. The Ponce de Leon and the adjoining and more or less similar structures of the Alcazar, the Cordova, and the Villa Zorayda form indeed an architectural group which, taken along with the semi-tropical vegetation and atmosphere, alone repays a long journey to see. But let the strictly economical traveller take up his quarters in one of the more modest hostelries of the little town, unless he is willing to pay dearly (and yet not perhaps too dearly) for the privilege of living in the most artistic hotel in the world.

It is a long cry from Florida to California, where stands another hotel which suggests mention for its almost unique perfections. The little town of Monterey, with its balmy air, its beautiful sandy beach, its adobe buildings, and its charming surroundings, is, like St. Augustine, full of interesting Spanish a.s.sociations, dating back to 1602. The Hotel del Monte, or "Hotel of the Forest," one of the most comfortable, best-kept, and moderate-priced hotels of America, lies amid bluegra.s.s lawns and exquisite grounds, in some ways recalling the parks of England's gentry, though including among its n.o.ble trees such un-English specimens as the sprawling and moss-draped live-oaks and the curious Monterey pines and cypresses. Its gardens offer a continual feast of colour, with their solid acres of roses, violets, calla lilies, heliotrope, narcissus, tulips, and crocuses; and one part of them, known as "Arizona," contains a wonderful collection of cacti. The hotel itself has no pretension to rival the Ponce de Leon in its architecture or appointments, and is, I think, built of wood. It is, however, very large, encloses a s.p.a.cious garden-court, and makes a pleasant enough impression, with its turrets, balconies, and verandas, its many sharp gables, dormers, and window-hoods. The economy of the interior reminded me more strongly of the amenities and decencies of the house of a refined, well-to-do, and yet not extravagantly wealthy family than of the usual hotel atmosphere. There were none of the blue satin hangings, ormolu vases, and other entirely superfluous luxuries for which we have to pay in the bills of certain hotels at Paris and elsewhere; but on the other hand nothing was lacking that a fastidious but reasonable taste could demand. The rooms and corridors are s.p.a.cious and airy; everything was as clean and fresh as white paint and floor polish could make them; the beds were comfortable and fragrant; the linen was spotless; there was lots of "hanging room;" each pair of bedrooms shared a bathroom; the _cuisine_ was good and sufficiently varied; the waiters were attentive; flowers were abundant without and within. The price of all this real luxury was $3 to $3.50 (12_s._ to 14_s._) a day. Possibly the absolute perfection of the bright and soft Californian spring when I visited Monterey, and the exquisite beauty of its environment, may have lulled my critical faculties into a state of unusual somnolence; but when I quitted the Del Monte Hotel I felt that I was leaving one of the most charming homes I had ever had the good fortune to live in.

The only hotel that to my mind contests with the Del Monte the position of the best hotel in the North American continent is the Canadian Pacific Hotel at Banff, in the National Rocky Mountains Park of Canada. Here also magnificent scenery, splendid weather, and moderate charges combined to bias my judgment; but the residuum, after all due allowance made for these factors, still, after five years, a.s.sures me of most unusual excellence. Two things in particular I remember in connection with this hotel. The one is the almost absolute perfection of the waiting, carried on by gentlemanly youths of about eighteen or twenty, who must, I think, have formed the _corps d'elite_ of the thousands of waiters in the service of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The marvellous speed and dexterity with which they ministered to my wants, the absolutely neat and even dainty manner in which everything was done by them, and their modest readiness to make suggestions and help one's choice (always to the point!) make one of the pleasantest pictures of hotel life lurking in my memory. The other dominant recollection of the Banff Hotel is the wonderfully beautiful view from the summer-house at its northeast corner. Just below the bold bluff on which this hotel stands the piercingly blue Bow River throws itself down in a string of foaming white cataracts to mate with the amber and rapid-rus.h.i.+ng Spray. The level valley through which the united and now placid stream flows is carpeted with the vivid-red painter's brush, white and yellow marguerites, asters, fireweed, golden-rod, and blue-bells; to the left rise the perpendicular cliffs of Tunnel Mountain, while to the right Mt. Rundle lifts its weirdly sloping, snow-flecked peaks into the azure.

In the dense green woods of the Adirondacks, five miles from the nearest high road on the one side and on the other lapped by an ocean of virgin forest which to the novice seems almost as pathless as the realms of Neptune, stands the Adirondack Lodge, probably one of the most quaint, picturesque little hotels in the world. It is tastefully built in the style of a rustic log-hut, its timber being merely rough-hewn by the axe and not reduced to monotonous symmetry by the saw-mill. It is roofed with bark, and its wide-eaved verandas are borne by tree-trunks with the bark still on. The same idea is carried out in the internal equipment, and the bark is left intact on much of the furniture. The wood retains its natural colours, and there are no carpets or paint. This charming little hotel is due to the taste or whim of a New York electrical engineer (the inventor, I believe, of the well-known "ticker"), who acts the landlord in such a way as to make the sixty or seventy inmates feel like the guests of a private host. The clerk is a medical student, the very bell-boy ("Eddy") a candidate for Harvard, and both mix on equal terms with the genial circle that collects round the bonfire lighted in front of the house every summer's evening. As one lazily lay there, watching the wavering play of the ruddy blaze on the dark-green pines, listening to the educated chatter of the boy who cleaned the boots, realising that a deer, a bear, or perchance even a catamount might possibly be lurking in the dark woods around, and knowing that all the material comforts of civilised life awaited one inside the house, one felt very keenly the genuine Americanism of this Arcadia, and thought how hard it would be to reproduce the effect even in the imagination of the European.

It was in this same Adirondack Wilderness that I stayed in the only hotel that, so far as I know, caught on to the fact that I was a "chiel amang them takin' notes" for a guidebook. With true American enterprise I was informed, when I called for my bill, that that was all right; and I still recall with amus.e.m.e.nt the incredulous and obstinate resistance of the clerk to my insistence on paying my way. I hope that the genial proprietors do not attribute the asterisk that I gave the hotel to their well-meant efforts to give me _quid pro quo_, but credit me with a totally unbia.s.sed admiration for their good management and comfortable quarters.

Mention has already been made (p. 30) of a hotel at a frequented watering-place, at which the lowest purchasable quant.i.ty of sleep cost one pound sterling. It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that the rest procured at this cost was certainly not four or five times better than that easily procurable for four or five s.h.i.+llings; and that the luxury of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but certainly in its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the refined demands of the traveller. Shenstone certainly never a.s.sociated the ease of his inn with any such hyperbolical sumptuousness as this; and it probably could not arise in any community that did not include a large cla.s.s of individuals with literally more money than they knew what to do with, and desirous of any means of indicating their powers of expenditure.

It has been said of another hotel at Bar Harbor that "Anyone can stay there who is worth two millions of dollars, or can produce a certificate from the Recorder of New York that he is a direct descendant of Hendrik Hudson or Diedrich Knickerbocker."

Many other American hotels suggest themselves to me as sufficiently individual in character to discriminate them from the ruck. Such are the Hygieia at Old Point Comfort, with its Southern guests in summer and its Northern guests in winter; looking out from its carefully enclosed and glazed piazzas over the waste of Hampton Roads, where the "Merrimac" wrought devastation to the vessels of the Union until itself vanquished by the turret-s.h.i.+p "Monitor;" the enormous caravansaries of Saratoga, one of which alone accommodates two thousand visitors, or the population of a small town, while the three largest have together room for five thousand people; the hotel at the White Sulphur Springs of Virginia, for nearly a century the typical resort of the wealth and aristocracy of the South, and still furnis.h.i.+ng the eligible stranger with a most attractive picture of Southern beauty, grace, warm-heartedness, and manners; the Stockbridge Inn in the Berks.h.i.+re Hills, long a striking exception to the statement that no country inns of the best English type can be found in the United States, but unfortunately burned down a year or two ago; the Catskill Mountain House, situated on an escarpment rising so abruptly from the plain of the Hudson that the view from it has almost the same effect as if we were leaning out of the car of a balloon or over the battlements of a castle two thousand feet high; the colossal Auditorium of Chicago, with its banquet hall and kitchen on the tenth floor; and the Palace Hotel of San Francisco, with its twelve hundred beds and its covered and resonant central court. Enough has, however, been said to show that all American hotels are not the immense and featureless barracks that many Europeans believe, but that they also run through a full gamut of variety and character.

The restaurant is by no means such an inst.i.tution in the United States as in the continental part of Europe; in this matter the American habit is more on all fours with English usage. The cafe of Europe is, perhaps, best represented by the piazza. Of course there are numerous restaurants in all the larger cities; but elsewhere the traveller will do well to stick to the meals at his hotel. The best restaurants are often in the hands of Germans, Italians, or Frenchmen. This is conspicuously so at New York. Delmonico's has a worldwide reputation, and is undoubtedly a good restaurant; but it may well be questioned whether the New York estimate of its merits is not somewhat excessive.

If price be the criterion, it has certainly few superiors. The _a la carte_ restaurants are, indeed, all apt to be expensive for the single traveller, who will find that he can easily spend eight to twelve s.h.i.+llings on a by no means sumptuous meal. The French system of supplying one portion for two persons or two portions for three is, however, in vogue, and this diminishes the cost materially. The _table d'hote_ restaurants, on the other hand, often give excellent value for their charges. The Italians have especially devoted themselves to this form of the art, and in New York and Boston furnish one with a very fair dinner indeed, including a flask of drinkable Chianti, for four or five s.h.i.+llings. At some of the simple German restaurants one gets excellent German fare and beer, but these are seldom available for ladies. The fair s.e.x, however, takes care to be provided with more elegant establishments for its own use, to which it sometimes admits its husbands and brothers. The sign of a large restaurant in New York reads: "Women's Cooperative Restaurant; tables reserved for gentlemen," in which I knew not whether more to admire the uncompromising ant.i.thesis between the plain word "women" and the complimentary term "gentlemen" or the considerateness that supplies separate accommodation for the shrinking creatures denoted by the latter. Perhaps this is as good a place as any to note that it is usually as unwise to patronise a restaurant which professedly caters for "gents" as to buy one's leg-coverings of a tailor who knows them only as "pants." Probably the "adult gents' bible-cla.s.s," which Professor Freeman encountered, was equally unsatisfactory.

Soup, poultry, game, and sweet dishes are generally as good as and often better than in English restaurants. Beef and mutton, on the other hand, are frequently inferior, though the American porterhouse and other steaks sometimes recall English glories that seem largely to have vanished. The list of American fish is by no means identical with that of Europe, and some of the varieties (such as salmon) seem scarcely as savoury. The stranger, however, will find some of his new fishy acquaintances decided acquisitions, and it takes no long time to acquire a very decided liking for the ba.s.s, the pompano, and the bluefish, while even the shad is discounted only by his innumerable bones. The praises of the American oyster should be sung by an abler and more poetic pen than mine! He may not possess the full oceanic flavour (coppery, the Americans call it) of our best "natives," but he is large, and juicy, and cool, and succulent, and fresh, and (above all) cheap and abundant. The variety of ways in which he is served is a striking index of the fertile ingenuity of the American mind; and the man who knows the oyster only on the half-sh.e.l.l or _en escalope_ is a mere culinary suckling compared with him who has been brought face to face with the bivalve in stews, plain roasts, fancy roasts, fries, broils, and frica.s.sees, to say nothing of the form "pigs in blankets," or as parboiled in its own liquor, creamed, sauted, or pickled.

Wine or beer is much less frequently drunk at meals than in Europe, though the amount of alcoholic liquor seen on the tables of a hotel would be a very misleading measure of the amount consumed. The men have a curious habit of flocking to the bar-room immediately after dinner to imbibe the stimulant that preference, or custom, or the fear of their wives has deprived them of during the meal. Wine is generally poor and dear. The mixed drinks at the bar are fascinating and probably very indigestible. Their names are not so bizarre as it is an article of the European's creed to believe. America possesses the largest brewery in the world, that of Pabst at Milwaukee, producing more than a million of gallons a year; and there are also large breweries at St. Louis, Rochester, and many other places. The beer made resembles the German lager, and is often excellent. Its use is apparently spreading rapidly from the German Americans to Americans of other nationalities. The native wine of California is still fighting against the unfavourable reputation it acquired from the ignorance and impatience of its early manufacturers. The art of wine-growing, however, is now followed with more brains, more experience, and more capital, and the result is in many instances excellent. The _vin ordinaire_ of California, largely made from the Zinfandel grape, has been described as a "peasant's wine," but when drunk on the spot compares fairly with the cheaper wines of Europe. Some of the finest brands of Californian red wine (such as that known as Las Palmas), generally to be had from the producers only, are sound and well-flavoured wines, which will probably improve steadily. It is a thousand pities that the hotels and restaurants of the United States do not do more to push the sale of these native wines, which are at least better than most of the foreign wine sold in America at extravagant charges. It is also alleged that the Californian and other American wines are often sold under French labels and at French prices, thus doing a double injustice to their native soil. Coffee or tea is always included in the price of an American meal, and these comforting beverages (particularly coffee) appear at luncheon and dinner in the huge cups that we a.s.sociate with breakfast exclusively.

Nor do they follow the meal, as with us, but accompany it. This practice, of course, does not hold in the really first-cla.s.s hotels and restaurants.

The real national beverage is, however, ice-water. Of this I have little more to say than to warn the British visitor to suspend his judgment until he has been some time in the country. I certainly was not prejudiced in favour of this chilly draught when I started for the United States, but I soon came to find it natural and even necessary, and as much so from the dry hot air of the stove-heated room in winter as from the natural ambition of the mercury in summer. The habit so easily formed was as easily unlearned when I returned to civilisation.

On the whole, it may be philosophic to conclude that a universal habit in any country has some solid if cryptic reason for its existence, and to surmise that the drinking of ice-water is not so deadly in the States as it might be elsewhere. It certainly is universal enough.

When you ring a bell or look at a waiter, ice-water is immediately brought to you. Each meal is started with a full tumbler of that fluid, and the observant darkey rarely allows the tide to ebb until the meal is concluded. Ice-water is provided gratuitously and copiously on trains, in waiting-rooms, even sometimes in the public fountains. If, finally, I were asked to name the characteristic sound of the United States, which would tell you of your whereabouts if transported to America in an instant of time, it would be the musical tinkle of the ice in the small white pitchers that the bell-boys in hotels seem perennially carrying along all the corridors, day and night, year in and year out.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Lady Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, in her book, "A Round Trip in North America," bears the same testimony: "Over eleven thousand miles of railway travelling and miles untold of driving besides, without an accident or a semblance of one. No _contretemps_ of any kind, except the little delay at Hope from the 'washout,' which did not matter the least; lovely weather, and universal kindness and courtesy from man, woman, and child."

[31]

"Had you seen but those roads before they were made, You would hold up your hands and bless General Wade."

[32] This epithet must not confirm the usual erroneous belief that Florida means "the flowery State." It is so called because discovered on Easter Day (Spanish _Pascua Florida_).

XIII

The American Note

Those who have done me the honour to read through the earlier pages of this volume will probably find nothing in the present chapter that has not already been implied in them, if not expressed. Indeed, I should not consider these pages written to any purpose if they did not give some indication of what I believe to be the dominant trend of American civilisation. A certain amount of condensed explication and recapitulation may not, however, be out of place.

In spite of the heterogeneous elements of which American civilisation consists, and in spite of the ever-ready pitfalls of spurious generalisation, it seems to me that there is very distinctly an American note, different in pitch and tone from any note in the European concert. The scale to which it belongs is not, indeed, one out of all relation to that of the older hemisphere, in the way, for example, in which the laws governing Chinese music seem to stand apart from all relations to those on which the Sonata Appa.s.sionata is constructed. "The American," as Emerson said, "is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious;" and the American note, as I understand it, is, with allowance for modifications by other nationalities, after all merely the New World incarnation of a British potentiality.

To sum it up in one word is hardly practicable; even a Carlylean epithet could scarcely focus the content of this idea. It includes a sense of illimitable expansion and possibility; an almost childlike confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the present and the future; a wider realisation of human brotherhood than has yet existed; a greater theoretical willingness to judge by the individual rather than by the cla.s.s; a breezy indifference to authority and a positive predilection for innovation; a marked alertness of mind and a manifold variety of interest; above all, an inextinguishable hopefulness and courage. It is easy to lay one's finger in America upon almost every one of the great defects of civilisation--even those defects which are specially characteristic of the civilisation of the Old World. The United States cannot claim to be exempt from manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor, of exploitation of the weak, of unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of sn.o.bbery, of cla.s.s prejudice, of respect of persons, of a preference of the material over the spiritual. In a word, America has not attained, or nearly attained, perfection. But below and behind and beyond all its weaknesses and evils, there is the grand fact of a n.o.ble national theory, founded on reason and conscience. Those may scoff who will at the idea of anything so intangible being allowed to count seriously in the estimation of a nation's or an individual's happiness but the man of any imagination can surely conceive the stimulus of the constantly abiding sense of a fine national ideal. The vagaries of the Congress at Was.h.i.+ngton may sometimes cause a man more personal inconvenience than the doings of the Parliament at Westminster, but they cannot wound his self-respect or insult his reason in the same way as the idea of being ruled by a group of individuals who have merely taken the trouble to be born. The hauteur and insolence of those "above" us are always unpleasant, but they are much easier to bear when we feel that they are entirely at variance with the theory of the society in which they appear, and are at worst merely sporadic manifestations.

Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared to the tyranny of landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and (it is hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while the other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence. It is the old story of freedom and hards.h.i.+p being preferable to chains and luxury. The material environment of the American may often be far less interesting and suggestive than that of the European, but his mind is freer, his mental att.i.tude more elastic. Every American carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack in a way that has hardly ever been true in Europe. It may not a.s.sume a more tangible shape than a feeling of self-respect that has never been wounded by the thought of personal inferiority for merely conventional reasons; but he must be a materialist indeed who undervalues this priceless possession. It is something for a country to have reached the stage of pa.s.sing "resolutions," even if their conversion into "acts" lags a little; it is bootless to sneer at a real "land of promise" because it is not at once and in every way a "land of performance."

There is something wonderfully rare and delicate in the finest blossoms of American civilisation--something that can hardly be paralleled in Europe. The mind that has been brought up in an atmosphere theoretically free from all false standards and conventional distinctions acquires a singularly unbia.s.sed, detached, absolute, purely human way of viewing life. In Matthew Arnold's phrase, "it sees life steadily and sees it whole." Just this att.i.tude seems unattainable in England; neither in my reading nor my personal experience have I encountered what I mean elsewhere than in America.

We may feel ourselves, for example, the equal of a marquis, but does he? And even if he does, do A, and B, and C? No profoundness of belief in our own superiority or the superiority of a humble friend to the aristocrat can make us ignore the circ.u.mambient feeling on the subject in the same way that the man brought up in the American vacuum does.

The true-born American is absolutely incapable of comprehending the sense of difference between a lord and a plebeian that is forced on the most philosophical among ourselves by the mere pressure of the social atmosphere. It is for him a fourth dimension of s.p.a.ce; it may be talked about, but practically it has no existence. It is entirely within the bounds of possibility for an American to attempt graciously to put royalty at its ease, and to try politely to make it forget its anomalous position. The British radical philosopher may attain the height of saying, "With a great sum obtained I this 'freedom';" the American may honestly reply, "But I was free-born."

It is necessary to take long views of American civilisation; not to fix our gaze upon small evils in the foreground, not to mistake an attack of moral measles for a s...o...b..tic taint. It is quite conceivable that a philosophic observer of a century ago might almost have predicted the moral and social course of events in the United States, if he had only been informed of the coming material conditions, such as the overwhelmingly rapid growth of the country in wealth and population, coupled with a democratic form of government. Even if a.s.sured that the ultimate state of the nation would be satisfactory, he would still have foreseen the difficulties hemming its progress toward the ideal: the inevitable delays, disappointments, and set-backs; the struggle between the gross and the spiritual; the troubles arising from the constant accession of new raw material before the old was welded into shape. There is nothing in the present evils of America to lead us to despair of the Republic, if only we let a legitimate imagination place us on a view-point sufficiently distant and sufficiently high to enable us to look backwards and forwards over long stretches of time, and lose the effect of small roughnesses in the foreground. Even M. de Tocqueville exaggerated the evils existing when he wrote his famous work, and forecast catastrophes that have never arisen and seem daily less and less likely ever to arise. Let it be enough for the present that America has worked out "a rough average happiness for the million," that the great ma.s.ses of the people have attained a by no means despicable amount of independence and comfort.

Those who are apt to think that the comfort of the crowd must mean the _ennui_ of the cultured may safely be reminded of Obermann's saying, that no individual life can (or ought to) be happy _pa.s.see au milieu des generations qui souffrent_. _This_ source of unhappiness, at any rate, is less potent in the United States than elsewhere. It is only natural that material prosperity should come more quickly than emanc.i.p.ation from ignorance, as Professor Norton has noted in a masterly, though perhaps characteristically pessimistic, article in the _Forum_ for February, 1896. It may, too, be true, as the same writer remarks, that the common school system of America does little "to quicken the imagination, to refine and elevate the moral intelligence;" and the remark is valuable as a note of warning. But it may well be asked whether the American school system is in this respect unfavourably distinguished from that of any other country; and it must not be forgotten that even instruction in ordinary topics stimulates the soil for more valuable growths. The methods of the Salvation Army do not appeal to the dilettante; but it is more than possible that the grandchildren of the man whose imagination has been touched, if ever so slightly, by the crude appeal of trombones out of tune and the sight of poke-bonnets and backward-striding maidens, will be more intelligent and susceptible human beings than the grandchildren of the chawbacon whose mental horizon has been bounded by the bottom of his pewter mug.

Those who think for themselves will naturally make more mistakes than those who carefully follow the dictates of a competent authority; but there are other counterbalancing advantages which bring the enterprising mistake-maker more speedily to the goal than his impeccable rival. The poet might almost have sung "'Tis better to have erred and learned than never to have erred at all." The _intellectual_ monopoly of England is, perhaps, even more dangerous than the material. The monastic societies of Oxford and Cambridge are too apt to insist on certain _forms_ of knowledge, and to think that real wisdom is the prerogative of the few. And we undoubtedly owe many of the healthy breezes of rebellion and scepticism in such matters to the example of America. The keen-eyed Yankees distinguish more clearly than we do between the essential conditions of existence and the "stupid and vulgar accidents of human contrivance," and are consequently readier to lay irreverent hands on time-honoured abuses.

If a balance could be struck between the influence of Europe on America and that of America on Europe, it is not by any means clear that the scale would descend in favour of the older world.

There is a long list of influential witnesses in favour of the theory that the development of the democratic spirit is bound inevitably to hamper individuality and encourage mediocrity. De Tocqueville, Scherer, Renan, Maine, Bourget, Matthew Arnold, all lend the weight of their names to this conclusion. It does not seem to me that this theory is supported by the social facts of the United States. When we have made allowance for the absence of a number of picturesque phenomena which are due to temporal and physical conditions, and would be equally lacking if the country were an autocracy or oligarchy, there remains in the United States greater room for the development of idiosyncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has been paradoxically argued by an English writer that individualism could not reach its highest point except in a socialistic community; _i.e._, that the unbridled compet.i.tion of the present day drives square pegs into round holes and thus forces the individual, for the sake of bread and b.u.t.ter, to do that which is foreign to his nature; whereas in an ideal socialism each individual would be encouraged to follow his own bent and develop his own special talent for the good of the community.

To a certain extent this seems true of the United States. The career there is more open to the talents; the world is an oyster which the individual can open with many kinds of knives; what the Germans call "_umsatteln_", or changing one's profession as one changes one's horse, is much more feasible in the New World than in the Old. The freedom and largeness of opportunity is a stimulus to all strong minds. Lincoln, as Professor Dowden remarks, would in the Middle Ages have probably continued to split rails all his life.

The fact is that if the predominant power of a few great minds is diminished in a democracy, it is because, together with such minds, a thousand others are at work contributing to the total result.... It is surely for the advantage of the most eminent minds that they should be surrounded by men of energy and intellect, who belong neither to the cla.s.s of hero-wors.h.i.+ppers nor to the cla.s.s of _valets de chambre_.

The truth seems to be that with an increased population and the multiplicity of interests and influences at play on men, we may expect a greater diversity of mental types in the future than could be found at any period in the past. The supposed uniformity of society in a democratic age is apparent, not real; artificial distinctions are replaced by natural differences; and within the one great community exists a vast number of smaller communities, each having its special intellectual and moral characteristics.

In the few essentials of social order the majority rightly has its way, but within certain broad bounds, which are fixed, there remains ample scope for the action of a mult.i.tude of various minorities.--_"New Studies in Literature," by Prof. E. Dowden._

The so-called uniformity and monotony of American life struck me as existing in appearance much more than in reality. If all my ten neighbours have pretty much the same income and enjoy pretty much the same comforts, their little social circle is certainly in a sense much more uniform than if their incomes ranged down from 10,000 to 300 and their household state from several powdered footmen to a little maid-of-all-work; but surely in all that really matters--in thoughts, ideas, personal habits and tastes, internal storms and calms, the elements of tragedy and comedy, talents and ambitions, loves and fears--the former circle might be infinitely more varied than the latter. Many critics of American life seem to have been led away by merely external similarities, and to have jumped at once to the conclusion that one Philadelphian must be as much like another as each little red-brick, white-stooped house of the Quaker City is like its neighbours. A single glance at the enormous number of _intelligent_ faces one sees in American society, or even in an American street, is enough to dissipate the idea that this can be a country of greater monotony than, say, England, where expressionless faces are by no means uncommon, even in the best circles. America is more monotonous than England, if a more equitable distribution of material comforts be monotony; it is not so, if the question be of originality of character and susceptibility to ideas.