Chapter 17. Britain In Twenty Minutes

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_ Chapter XVII. Britain in Twenty Minutes

To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English have mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs. The average Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own concerns and monumentally ignorant about all other things. If an Englishman's business requires that he shall learn the habits and customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric, he goes and learns them--and learns them well. Otherwise your Britisher does not bother himself with what the outlander may or may not do.

An Englishman cannot understand an American's instinctive desire to know about things; we do not understand his lack of curiosity in that direction. Both of us forget what I think must be the underlying reasons--that we are a race which, until comparatively recently, lived wide distances apart in sparsely settled lands, and were dependent on the passing stranger for news of the rest of the world, where he belongs to a people who all these centuries have been packed together in their little island like oats in a bin. London itself is so crowded that the noses of most of the lower classes turn up--there is not room for them to point straight ahead without causing a great and bitter confusion of noses; but whether it points upward or outward or downward the owner of the nose pretty generally refrains from ramming it into other folks' business. If he and all his fellows did not do this; if they had not learned to keep their voices down and to muffle unnecessary noises; if they had not built tight covers of reserve about themselves, as the oyster builds a shell to protect his tender tissues from irritation--they would long ago have become a race of nervous wrecks instead of being what they are, the most stolid beings alive.

In London even royalty is mercifully vouchsafed a reasonable amount of privacy from the intrusion of the gimlet eye and the chisel nose. Royalty may ride in Rotten Row of a morning, promenade on the Mall at noon, and shop in the Regent Street shops in the afternoon, and at all times go unguarded and unbothered--I had almost said unnoticed. It may be that long and constant familiarity with the institution of royalty has bred indifference in the London mind to the physical presence of dukes and princes and things; but I am inclined to think a good share of it should be attributed to the inborn and ingrown British faculty for letting other folks be.

One morning as I was walking at random through the aristocratic district, of which St. James is the solar plexus and Park Lane the spinal cord, I came to a big mansion where foot-guards stood sentry at the wall gates. This house was further distinguished from its neighbors by the presence of a policeman pacing alongside it, and a newspaper photographer setting up his tripod and camera in the road, and a small knot of passers-by lingering on the opposite side of the way, as though waiting for somebody to come along or something to happen. I waited too. In a minute a handsome old man and a well-set-up young man turned the corner afoot. The younger man was leading a beautiful stag hound. The photographer touched his hat and said something, and the younger man smiling a good-natured smile, obligingly posed in the street for a picture. At this precise moment a dirigible balloon came careening over the chimneypots on a cross-London air jaunt; and at the sight of it the little crowd left the young man and the photographer and set off at a run to follow, as far as they might, the course of the balloon. Now in America this could not have occurred, for the balloon man would not have been aloft at such an hour. He would have been on the earth; moreover he would have been outside the walls of that mansion house, along with half a million, more or less, of his patriotic fellow countrymen, tearing his own clothes off and their clothes off, trampling the weak and sickly underfoot, bucking the doubled and tripled police lines in a mad, vain effort to see the flagpole on the roof or a corner of the rear garden wall. For that house was Clarence House, and the young man who posed so accommodatingly for the photographer was none other than Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was getting himself married the very next day.

The next day I beheld from a short distance the passing of the bridal procession. Though there were crowds all along the route followed by the wedding party, there was no scrouging, no shoving, no fighting, no disorderly scramble, no unseemly congestion about the chapel where the ceremony took place. It reminded me vividly of that which inevitably happens when a millionaire's daughter is being married to a duke in a fashionable Fifth Avenue church--it reminded me of that because it was so different.

Fortunately for us we were so placed that we saw quite distinctly the entrance of the wedding party into the chapel inclosure. Personally I was most concerned with the members of the royal house. As I recollect, they passed in the following order:

His Majesty, King George the Fifth.
Her Majesty, Queen Mary, the Other Four Fifths.
Small fractional royalties to the number of a dozen or more.

I got a clear view of the side face of the queen. As one looked on her profile, which was what you might call firm, and saw the mild-looking little king, who seemed quite eclipsed by her presence, one understood--or anyway one thought one understood--why an English assemblage, when standing to chant the national anthem these times, always puts such fervor and meaning into the first line of it.

Only one untoward incident occurred: The inevitable militant lady broke through the lines as the imperial carriage passed and threw a Votes for Women handbill into His Majesty's lap. She was removed thence by the police with the skill and dexterity of long practice. The police were competently on the job. They always are--which brings me round to the subject of the London bobby and leads me to venture the assertion that individually and collectively, personally and officially, he is a splendid piece of work. The finest thing in London is the London policeman and the worst thing is the shamefully small and shabby pay he gets. He is majestic because he represents the majesty of the English law; he is humble and obliging because, as a servant, he serves the people who make the law. And always he knows his business.

In Charing Cross, where all roads meet and snarl up in the bewildering semblance of many fishing worms in a can, I ventured out into the roadway to ask a policeman the best route for reaching a place in a somewhat obscure quarter. He threw up his arm, semaphore fashion, first to this point of the compass and then to that, and traffic halted instantly. As far as the eye might reach it halted; and it stayed halted, too, while he searched his mind and gave me carefully and painstakingly the directions for which I sought. In that packed mass of cabs and taxis and buses and carriages there were probably dukes and archbishops--dukes and archbishops are always fussing about in London--but they waited until he was through directing me. It flattered me so that I went back to the hotel and put on a larger hat. I sincerely hope there was at least one archbishop.

Another time we went to Paddington to take a train for somewhere. Following the custom of the country we took along our trunks and traps on top of the taxicab. At the moment of our arrival there were no porters handy, so a policeman on post outside the station jumped forward on the instant and helped our chauffeur to wrestle the luggage down on the bricks. When I, rallying somewhat from the shock of this, thanked him and slipped a coin into his palm, he said in effect that, though he was obliged for the shilling, I must not feel that I had to give him anything--that it was part of his duty to aid the public in these small matters. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine a New York policeman doing as much for an unknown alien; but the effort gave me a severe headache. It gave me darting pains across the top of the skull--at about the spot where he would probably have belted me with his club had I even dared to ask him to bear a hand with my baggage.

I had a peep into the workings of the system of which the London bobby is a spoke when I went to what is the very hub of the wheel of the common law--a police court. I understood then what gave the policeman in the street his authority and his dignity--and his humility--when I saw how carefully the magistrate on the bench weighed each trifling cause and each petty case; how surely he winnowed out the small grain of truth from the gross and tare of surmise and fiction; how particular he was to give of the abundant store of his patience to any whining ragpicker or street beggar who faced him, whether as defendant at the bar, or accuser, or witness.

It was the very body of the law, though, we saw a few days after this when by invitation we witnessed the procession at the opening of the high courts. Considered from the stand-points of picturesqueness and impressiveness it made one's pulses tingle when those thirty or forty men of the wig and ermine marched in single and double file down the loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor in wig and robes of state leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, knee-breeched and sword-belted, a pace or two behind him; and then, in turn, the justices; and, going on ahead of them and following on behind them, knight escorts and ushers and clerks and all the other human cogs of the great machine. What struck into me deepest, however, was the look of nearly every one of the judges. Had they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of the judicial temperament--men born to hold the balances and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped, long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship --the Clay-Calhoun-Benton-Webster period.

Just watching these men pass helped me to know better than any reading I had ever done why the English have faith and confidence in their courts. I said to myself that if I wanted justice--exact justice, heaping high in time scales--I should come to this shop and give my trade to the old-established firm; but if I were looking for a little mercy I should take my custom elsewhere.

I cannot tell why I associate it in my mind with this grouped spectacle of the lords of the law, but somehow the scene to be witnessed in Hyde Park just inside the Marble Arch of a Sunday evening seems bound up somehow with the other institution. They call this place London's safety valve. It's all of that. Long ago the ruling powers discovered that if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and destruction unlimited they would not be so apt to practice their cheerful doctrines. So, without let or hindrance, any apostle of any creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or, what comes to the same thing, into speechlessness.

When I went to Hyde Park on a certain Sunday rain was falling and the crowds were not so large as usual, a bored policeman on duty in this outdoor forum told me; still, at that, there must have been two or three thousand listeners in sight and not less than twelve speakers. These latter balanced themselves on small portable platforms placed in rows, with such short spaces between them that their voices intermingled confusingly. In front of each orator stood his audience; sometimes they applauded what he said in a sluggish British way, and sometimes they asked him questions designed to baffle or perplex him--heckling, I believe this is called--but there was never any suggestion of disorder and never any violent demonstration for or against a statement made by him.

At the end of the line nearest the Arch, under a flary light, stood an old bearded man having the look on his face of a kindly but somewhat irritated moo-cow. At the moment I drew near he was having a long and involved argument with another controversialist touching on the sense of the word tabernacle as employed Scripturally, one holding it to mean the fleshly tenement of the soul and the other an actual place of worship. The old man had two favorite words--behoove and emit--but behoove was evidently his choice. As an emitter he was only fair, but he was the best behoover I ever saw anywhere.

The orator next to him was speaking in a soft, sentimental tone, with gestures gently appropriate. I moved along to him, being minded to learn what particular brand of brotherly love he might be expounding. In the same tone a good friend might employ in telling you what to do for chapped lips or a fever blister he was saying that clergymen and armaments were useless and expensive burdens on the commonwealth; and, as a remedy, he was advocating that all the priests and all the preachers in the kingdom should be loaded on all the dreadnoughts, and then the dreadnoughts should be steamed to the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean and there cozily scuttled, with all aboard.

There was scattering applause and a voice: "Ow, don't do that! Listen, 'ere! Hi've got a better plan." But the next speaker was blaring away at the top of his voice, making threatening faces and waving his clenched fists aloft and pounding with them on the top of his rostrum.

"Now this," I said to myself, "is going to be something worth while. Surely this person would not be content merely with drowning all the parsons and sinking all the warships in the hole at the bottom of the sea. Undoubtedly he will advocate something really radical. I will invest five minutes with him."

I did; but I was sold. He was favoring the immediate adoption of a universal tongue for all the peoples of the earth--that was all. I did not catch the name of his universal language, but I judged the one at which he would excel would be a language with few if any h's in it. After this disappointment I lost heart and came away.

Another phase, though a very different one, of the British spirit of fair play and tolerance, was shown to me at the National Sporting Club, which is the British shrine of boxing, where I saw a fight for one of the championship belts that Lord Lonsdale is forever bestowing on this or that worshipful fisticuffer. Instead of being inside the ring prying the fighters apart by main force as he would have been doing in America, the referee, dressed in evening clothes, was outside the ropes. At a snapped word from him the fighters broke apart from clinches on the instant. The audience--a very mixed one, ranging in garb from broadcloths to shoddies--was as quick to approve a telling blow by the less popular fighter as to hiss any suggestion of trickiness or fouling on the part of the favorite. When a contestant in one of the preliminary goes, having been adjudged a loser on points, objected to the decision and insisted on being heard in his own behalf, the crowd, though plainly not in sympathy with his contention, listened to what he had to say. Nobody jeered him down.

Had he been a foreigner and especially had he been an American I am inclined to think the situation might have been different. I seem to recall what happened once when a certain middleweight from this side went over there and broke the British heart by licking the British champion; and again what happened when a Yankee boy won the Marathon at the Olympic games in London a few years ago. But as this man was a Briton himself these other Britons harkened to his sputterings, for England, you know, grants the right of free speech to all Englishmen--and denies it to all Englishwomen.

The settled Englishman declines always to be jostled out of his hereditary state of intense calm. They tell of a man who dashed into the reading room of the Savage Club with the announcement that a lion was loose on the Strand--a lion that had escaped from a traveling caravan and was rushing madly to and fro, scaring horses and frightening pedestrians.

"Great excitement! Most terrific, old dears--on my word!" he added, addressing the company.

Over the top of the Pink Un an elderly gentleman of a full habit of life regarded him sourly.

"Is that any reason," he inquired, "why a person should rush into a gentleman's club and kick up such a deuced hullabaloo?"

The first man--he must have been a Colonial--gazed at the other man in amazement.

"Well," he asked, "what would you do if you met a savage lion loose on the Strand?"

"Sir, I should take a cab!"

And after meeting an Englishman or two of this type I am quite prepared to say the story might have been a true one. If he met a lion on the Strand to-day he would take a cab; but if to-morrow, walking in the same place, he met two lions, he would write a letter to the Times complaining of the growing prevalence of lions in the public thoroughfares and placing the blame on the Suffragettes or Lloyd George or the Nonconformists or the increasing discontent of the working classes--that is what he would do.

On the other hand, if he met a squirrel on a street in America it would be a most extraordinary thing. Extraordinary would undoubtedly be the word he would use to describe it. Lions on the Strand would be merely annoying, but chipmunks on Broadway would constitute a striking manifestation of the unsettled conditions existing in a wild and misgoverned land; for, you see, to every right-minded Englishman of the insular variety--and that is the commonest variety there is in England--whatever happens at home is but part of an orderly and an ordered scheme of things, whereas whatever happens beyond the British domains must necessarily be highly unusual and exceedingly disorganizing. If so be it happens on English soil he can excuse it. He always has an explanation or an extenuation handy. But if it happens elsewhere--well, there you are, you see! What was it somebody once called England--Perfidious Alibi-in', wasn't it? Anyhow that was what he meant. The party's intentions were good but his spelling was faulty.

An Englishman's newspapers help him to attain this frame of mind; for an English newspaper does not print sensational stories about Englishmen residing in England; it prints them about people resident in other lands. There is a good reason for this and the reason is based on prudence. In the first place the private life of a private individual is a most holy thing, with which the papers dare not meddle; besides, the paper that printed a faked-up tale about a private citizen in England would speedily be exposed and also extensively sued. As for public men, they are protected by exceedingly stringent libel laws. As nearly as I might judge, anything true you printed about an English politician would be libelous, and anything libelous you printed about him would be true.

It befalls, therefore, as I was told on most excellent authority, that when the editor of a live London daily finds the local grist to be dull and uninteresting reading he straightway cables to his American correspondent or his Paris correspondent--these two being his main standbys for sensations--asking, if his choice falls on the man in America, for a snappy dispatch, say, about an American train smash-up, or a Nature freak, or a scandal in high society with a rich man mixed up in it. He wires for it, and in reply he gets it. I have been in my time a country correspondent for city papers, and I know that what Mr. Editor wants Mr. Editor gets.

As a result America, to the provincial Englishman's understanding, is a land where a hunter is always being nibbled to death by sheep; or a prospective mother is being so badly frightened by a chameleon that her child is born with a complexion changeable at will and an ungovernable appetite for flies; or a billionaire is giving a monkey dinner or poisoning his wife, or something. Also, he gets the idea that a through train in this country is so called because it invariably runs through the train ahead of it; and that when a man in Connecticut is expecting a friend on the fast express from Boston, and wants something to remember him by, he goes down to the station at traintime with a bucket. Under the headlining system of the English newspapers the derailment of a work-train in Arizona, wherein several Mexican tracklayers get mussed up, becomes Another Frightful American Railway Disaster! But a head-on collision, attended by fatalities, in the suburbs of Liverpool or Manchester is a Distressing Suburban Iincident. Yet the official Blue Book, issued by the British Board of Trade, showed that in the three months ending March 31, 1913, 284 persons were killed and 2,457 were injured on railway lines in the United Kingdom.

Just as an English gentleman is the most modest person imaginable, and the most backward about offering lip-service in praise of his own achievements or his country's achievements, so, in the same superlative degree, some of his newspapers are the most blatant of boasters. About the time we were leaving England the job of remodeling and beautifying the front elevation of Buckingham Palace reached its conclusion, and a dinner was given to the workingmen who for some months had been engaged on the contract. It had been expected that the occasion would be graced by the presence of Their Majesties; but the king, as I recall, was pasting stamps in the new album the Czar of Russia sent him on his birthday, and the queen was looking through the files of Godey's Lady's Book for the year 1874, picking out suitable costumes for the ladies of her court to wear. At any rate they could not attend. Otherwise, though, the dinner must have been a success. Reading the account of it as published next morning in a London paper, I learned that some of the guests, "with rare British pluck," wore their caps and corduroys; that others, "with true British independence," smoked their pipes after dinner; that there was "real British beef" and "genuine British plum pudding" on the menu; and that repeatedly those present uttered "hearty British cheers." From top to bottom the column was studded thick with British thises and British thats.

Yet the editorial writers of that very paper are given to frequent and sneering attacks on the alleged yellowness and the boasting proclivities of the jingo Yankee sheets; also, they are prone to spasmodic attacks on the laxity of our marriage laws. Perhaps what they say of us is true; but for unadulterated nastiness I never saw anything in print to equal the front page of a so-called sporting weekly that circulates freely in London, and I know of nothing to compare with the brazen exhibition of a certain form of vice that is to be witnessed nightly in the balconies of two of London's largest music halls. It was upon the program of another London theater that I came across the advertisement of a lady styling herself "London's Woman Detective" and stating, in so many words, that her specialties were "Divorce Shadowings" and "Secret Inquiries." Maybe it is a fact that in certain of our states marriage is not so much a contract as a ninety-day option, but the lady detective who does divorce shadowing and advertises her qualifications publicly has not opened up her shop among us.

In the campaign to give the stay-at-home Englishman a strange conception of his American kinsman the press is ably assisted by the stage. In London I went to see a comedy written by a deservedly successful dramatist, and staged, I think, under his personal direction. The English characters in the play were whimsical and, as nearly as I might judge, true to the classes they purported to represent. There was an American character in this piece too--a multimillionaire, of course, and a collector of pictures--presumably a dramatically fair and realistic drawing of a wealthy, successful, art-loving American. I have forgotten now whether he was supposed to be one of our meaty Chicago millionaires, or one of our oily Cleveland millionaires, or one of our steely Pittsburgh millionaires, or just a plain millionaire from the country at large; and I doubt whether the man who wrote the lines had any conception when he did write them of the fashion in which they were afterward read. Be that as it may, the actor who essayed to play the American used an inflection, or an accent, or a dialect, or a jargon--or whatever you might choose to call it--which was partly of the oldtime drawly Wild Western school of expression and partly of the oldtime nasal Down East school. I had thought--and had hoped--that both these actor-created lingoes were happily obsolete; but in their full flower of perfection I now heard them here in London. Also, the actor who played the part interpreted the physical angles of the character in a manner to suggest a pleasing combination of Uncle Joshua Whitcomb, Mike the Bite, Jefferson Brick and Coal-Oil Johnny, with a suggestion of Jesse James interspersed here and there. True, he spat not on the carpet loudly, and he refrained from saying I vum! and Great Snakes!--quaint conceits that, I am told, every English actor who respected his art formally employed when wishful to type a stage American for an English audience; but he bragged loudly and emphatically of his money and of how he got it and of what he would do with it. I do not perceive why it is the English, who themselves so dearly love the dollar after it is translated into terms of pounds, shillings and pence, should insist on regarding us as a nation of dollar-grabbers, when they only see us in the act of freely dispensing the aforesaid dollar.

They do so regard us, though; and, with true British setness, I suppose they always will. Even so I think that, though they may dislike us as a nation, they like us as individuals; and it is certainly true that they seem to value us more highly than they value Colonials, as they call them--particularly Canadian Colonials. It would appear that your true Briton can never excuse another British subject for the shockingly poor taste he displayed in being born away from home. And, though in time he may forgive us for refusing to be licked by him, he can never forgive the Colonials for saving him from being licked in South Africa.

When I started in to write this chapter, I meant to conclude it with an apology for my audacity in undertaking--in any wise--to sum up the local characteristics of a country where I had tarried for so short a time, but I have changed my mind about that. I have merely borrowed a page from the book of rules of the British essayists and novelists who come over here to write us up. Why, bless your soul, I gave nearly eight weeks of time to the task of seeing Europe thoroughly, and, of those eight weeks, I spent upward of three weeks in and about London--indeed, a most unreasonably long time when measured by the standards of the Englishman of letters who does a book about us.

He has his itinerary all mapped out in advance. He will squander a whole week on us. We are scarcely worth it, but, such as we are, we shall have a week of his company! Landing on Monday morning, he will spend Monday in New York, Tuesday in San Francisco, and Wednesday in New Orleans. Thursday he will divide between Boston and Chicago, devoting the forenoon to one and the afternoon to the other. Friday morning he will range through the Rocky Mountains, and after luncheon, if he is not too fatigued, he will take a carriage and pop in on Yosemite Valley for an hour or so.

But Saturday--all of it--will be given over to the Far Southland. He is going 'way down South--to sunny South Dakota, in fact, to see the genuine native American darkies, the real Yankee blackamoors. Most interesting beings, the blackamoors! They live exclusively on poultry--fowls, you know--and all their women folk are named Honey Gal.

He will observe them in their hours of leisure, when, attired in their national costume, consisting of white duck breeches, banjos, and striped shirts with high collars, they gather beneath the rays of the silvery Southern moon to sing their tribal melodies on the melon-lined shores of the old Oswego; and by day he will study them at their customary employment as they climb from limb to limb of the cottonwood trees, picking cotton. On Sunday he will arrange and revise his notes, and on Monday morning he will sail for home.

Such is the program of Solomon Grundy, Esquire, the distinguished writing Englishman; but on his arrival he finds the country to be somewhat larger than he expected--larger actually than the Midlands. So he compromises by spending five days at a private hotel in New York, run by a very worthy and deserving Englishwoman of the middle classes, where one may get Yorkshire puddings every day; and two days more at a wealthy tufthunter's million-dollar cottage at Newport, studying the habits and idiosyncrasies of the common people. And then he rushes back to England and hurriedly embalms his impressions of us in a large volume, stating it to be his deliberate opinion that, though we mean well enough, we won't do --really. He necessarily has to hurry, because, you see, he has a contract to write a novel or a play--or both a novel and a play --with Lord Northcliffe as the central figure. In these days practically all English novels and most English comedies play up Lord Northcliffe as the central figure. Almost invariably the young English writer chooses him for the axis about which his plot shall revolve. English journalists who have been discharged from one of Northcliffe's publications make him their villian, and English journalists who hope to secure jobs on one of his publications make him their hero. The literature of a land is in perilous case when it depends on the personality of one man. One shudders to think what the future of English fiction would be should anything happen to his Lordship!

Business of shuddering! _

Read next: Chapter 18. Guyed Or Guided?

Read previous: Chapter 16. As Done In London

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