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Henry James >> The Point of View
V. FROM LOUIS LEVERETT, IN BOSTON, TO HARVARD TREMONT, IN PARIS.
November.
The scales have turned, my sympathetic Harvard, and the beam that
has lifted you up has dropped me again on this terribly hard spot.
I am extremely sorry to have missed you in London, but I received
your little note, and took due heed of your injunction to let you
know how I got on. I don't get on at all, my dear Harvard--I am
consumed with the love of the farther shore. I have been so long
away that I have dropped out of my place in this little Boston
world, and the shallow tides of New England life have closed over
it. I am a stranger here, and I find it hard to believe that I ever
was a native. It is very hard, very cold, very vacant. I think of
your warm, rich Paris; I think of the Boulevard St. Michel on the
mild spring evenings. I see the little corner by the window (of the
Cafe de la Jeunesse)--where I used to sit; the doors are open, the
soft deep breath of the great city comes in. It is brilliant, yet
there is a kind of tone, of body, in the brightness; the mighty
murmur of the ripest civilisation in the world comes in; the dear
old peuple de Paris, the most interesting people in the world, pass
by. I have a little book in my pocket; it is exquisitely printed, a
modern Elzevir. It is a lyric cry from the heart of young France,
and is full of the sentiment of form. There is no form here, dear
Harvard; I had no idea how little form there was. I don't know what
I shall do; I feel so undraped, so uncurtained, so uncushioned; I
feel as if I were sitting in the centre of a mighty "reflector." A
terrible crude glare is over everything; the earth looks peeled and
excoriated; the raw heavens seem to bleed with the quick hard light.
I have not got back my rooms in West Cedar Street; they are occupied
by a mesmeric healer. I am staying at an hotel, and it is very
dreadful. Nothing for one's self; nothing for one's preferences and
habits. No one to receive you when you arrive; you push in through
a crowd, you edge up to a counter; you write your name in a horrible
book, where every one may come and stare at it and finger it. A man
behind the counter stares at you in silence; his stare seems to say
to you, "What the devil do YOU want?" But after this stare he never
looks at you again. He tosses down a key at you; he presses a bell;
a savage Irishman arrives. "Take him away," he seems to say to the
Irishman; but it is all done in silence; there is no answer to your
own speech,--"What is to be done with me, please?" "Wait and you
will see," the awful silence seems to say. There is a great crowd
around you, but there is also a great stillness; every now and then
you hear some one expectorate. There are a thousand people in this
huge and hideous structure; they feed together in a big white-walled
room. It is lighted by a thousand gas-jets, and heated by cast-iron
screens, which vomit forth torrents of scorching air. The
temperature is terrible; the atmosphere is more so; the furious
light and heat seem to intensify the dreadful definiteness. When
things are so ugly, they should not be so definite; and they are
terribly ugly here. There is no mystery in the corners; there is no
light and shade in the types. The people are haggard and joyless;
they look as if they had no passions, no tastes, no senses. They
sit feeding in silence, in the dry hard light; occasionally I hear
the high firm note of a child. The servants are black and familiar;
their faces shine as they shuffle about; there are blue tones in
their dark masks. They have no manners; they address you, but they
don't answer you; they plant themselves at your elbow (it rubs their
clothes as you eat), and watch you as if your proceedings were
strange. They deluge you with iced water; it's the only thing they
will bring you; if you look round to summon them, they have gone for
more. If you read the newspaper--which I don't, gracious Heaven! I
can't--they hang over your shoulder and peruse it also. I always
fold it up and present it to them; the newspapers here are indeed
for an African taste. There are long corridors defended by gusts of
hot air; down the middle swoops a pale little girl on parlour
skates. "Get out of my way!" she shrieks as she passes; she has
ribbons in her hair and frills on her dress; she makes the tour of
the immense hotel. I think of Puck, who put a girdle round the
earth in forty minutes, and wonder what he said as he flitted by. A
black waiter marches past me, bearing a tray, which he thrusts into
my spine as he goes. It is laden with large white jugs; they tinkle
as he moves, and I recognise the unconsoling fluid. We are dying of
iced water, of hot air, of gas. I sit in my room thinking of these
things--this room of mine which is a chamber of pain. The walls are
white and bare, they shine in the rays of a horrible chandelier of
imitation bronze, which depends from the middle of the ceiling. It
flings a patch of shadow on a small table covered with white marble,
of which the genial surface supports at the present moment the sheet
of paper on which I address you; and when I go to bed (I like to
read in bed, Harvard) it becomes an object of mockery and torment.
It dangles at inaccessible heights; it stares me in the face; it
flings the light upon the covers of my book, but not upon the page--
the little French Elzevir that I love so well. I rise and put out
the gas, and then my room becomes even lighter than before. Then a
crude illumination from the hall, from the neighbouring room, pours
through the glass openings that surmount the two doors of my
apartment. It covers my bed, where I toss and groan; it beats in
through my closed lids; it is accompanied by the most vulgar, though
the most human, sounds. I spring up to call for some help, some
remedy; but there is no bell, and I feel desolate and weak. There
is only a strange orifice in the wall, through which the traveller
in distress may transmit his appeal. I fill it with incoherent
sounds, and sounds more incoherent yet come back to me. I gather at
last their meaning; they appear to constitute a somewhat stern
inquiry. A hollow impersonal voice wishes to know what I want, and
the very question paralyses me. I want everything--yet I want
nothing--nothing this hard impersonality can give! I want my little
corner of Paris; I want the rich, the deep, the dark Old World; I
want to be out of this horrible place. Yet I can't confide all this
to that mechanical tube; it would be of no use; a mocking laugh
would come up from the office. Fancy appealing in these sacred,
these intimate moments, to an "office"; fancy calling out into
indifferent space for a candle, for a curtain! I pay incalculable
sums in this dreadful house, and yet I haven't a servant to wait
upon me. I fling myself back on my couch, and for a long time
afterward the orifice in the wall emits strange murmurs and
rumblings. It seems unsatisfied, indignant; it is evidently
scolding me for my vagueness. My vagueness, indeed, dear Harvard!
I loathe their horrible arrangements; isn't that definite enough?
You asked me to tell you whom I see, and what I think of my friends.
I haven't very many; I don't feel at all en rapport. The people are
very good, very serious, very devoted to their work; but there is a
terrible absence of variety of type. Every one is Mr. Jones, Mr.
Brown; and every one looks like Mr. Jones and Mr. Brown. They are
thin; they are diluted in the great tepid bath of Democracy! They
lack completeness of identity; they are quite without modelling.
No, they are not beautiful, my poor Harvard; it must be whispered
that they are not beautiful. You may say that they are as beautiful
as the French, as the Germans; but I can't agree with you there.
The French, the Germans, have the greatest beauty of all--the beauty
of their ugliness--the beauty of the strange, the grotesque. These
people are not even ugly; they are only plain. Many of the girls
are pretty; but to be only pretty is (to my sense) to be plain. Yet
I have had some talk. I have seen a woman. She was on the steamer,
and I afterward saw her in New York--a peculiar type, a real
personality; a great deal of modelling, a great deal of colour, and
yet a great deal of mystery. She was not, however, of this country;
she was a compound of far-off things. But she was looking for
something here--like me. We found each other, and for a moment that
was enough. I have lost her now; I am sorry, because she liked to
listen to me. She has passed away; I shall not see her again. She
liked to listen to me; she almost understood!
VI. FROM M. GUSTAVE LEJAUNE, OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY, TO M. ADOLPHE
BOUCHE, IN PARIS.
Washington, October 5.
I give you my little notes; you must make allowances for haste, for
bad inns, for the perpetual scramble, for ill-humour. Everywhere
the same impression--the platitude of unbalanced democracy
intensified by the platitude of the spirit of commerce. Everything
on an immense scale--everything illustrated by millions of examples.
My brother-in-law is always busy; he has appointments, inspections,
interviews, disputes. The people, it appears, are incredibly sharp
in conversation, in argument; they wait for you in silence at the
corner of the road, and then they suddenly discharge their revolver.
If you fall, they empty your pockets; the only chance is to shoot
them first. With that, no amenities, no preliminaries, no manners,
no care for the appearance. I wander about while my brother is
occupied; I lounge along the streets; I stop at the corners; I look
into the shops; je regarde passer les femmes. It's an easy country
to see; one sees everything there is; the civilisation is skin deep;
you don't have to dig. This positive, practical, pushing
bourgeoisie is always about its business; it lives in the street, in
the hotel, in the train; one is always in a crowd--there are
seventy-five people in the tramway. They sit in your lap; they
stand on your toes; when they wish to pass they simply push you.
Everything in silence; they know that silence is golden, and they
have the worship of gold. When the conductor wishes your fare he
gives you a poke, very serious, without a word. As for the types--
but there is only one--they are all variations of the same--the
commis-voyageur minus the gaiety. The women are often pretty; you
meet the young ones in the streets, in the trains, in search of a
husband. They look at you frankly, coldly, judicially, to see if
you will serve; but they don't want what you might think (du moins
on me l'assure); they only want the husband. A Frenchman may
mistake; he needs to be sure he is right, and I always make sure.
They begin at fifteen; the mother sends them out; it lasts all day
(with an interval for dinner at a pastry-cook's); sometimes it goes
on for ten years. If they haven't found the husband then, they give
it up; they make place for the cadettes, as the number of women is
enormous. No salons, no society, no conversation; people don't
receive at home; the young girls have to look for the husband where
they can. It is no disgrace not to find him--several have never
done so. They continue to go about unmarried--from the force of
habit, from the love of movement, without hopes, without regret--no
imagination, no sensibility, no desire for the convent. We have
made several journeys--few of less than three hundred miles.
Enormous trains, enormous waggons, with beds and lavatories, and
negroes who brush you with a big broom, as if they were grooming a
horse. A bounding movement, a roaring noise, a crowd of people who
look horribly tired, a boy who passes up and down throwing pamphlets
and sweetmeats into your lap--that is an American journey. There
are windows in the waggons--enormous, like everything else; but
there is nothing to see. The country is a void--no features, no
objects, no details, nothing to show you that you are in one place
more than another. Aussi, you are not in one place, you are
everywhere, anywhere; the train goes a hundred miles an hour. The
cities are all the same; little houses ten feet high, or else big
ones two hundred; tramways, telegraph-poles, enormous signs, holes
in the pavement, oceans of mud, commis-voyageurs, young ladies
looking for the husband. On the other hand, no beggars and no
cocottes--none, at least, that you see. A colossal mediocrity,
except (my brother-in-law tells me) in the machinery, which is
magnificent. Naturally, no architecture (they make houses of wood
and of iron), no art, no literature, no theatre. I have opened some
of the books; mais ils ne se laissent pas lire. No form, no matter,
no style, no general ideas! they seem to be written for children and
young ladies. The most successful (those that they praise most) are
the facetious; they sell in thousands of editions. I have looked
into some of the most vantes; but you need to be forewarned, to know
that they are amusing; des plaisanteries de croquemort. They have a
novelist with pretensions to literature, who writes about the chase
for the husband and the adventures of the rich Americans in our
corrupt old Europe, where their primaeval candour puts the Europeans
to shame. C'est proprement ecrit; but it's terribly pale. What
isn't pale is the newspapers--enormous, like everything else (fifty
columns of advertisements), and full of the commerages of a
continent. And such a tone, grand Dieu! The amenities, the
personalities, the recriminations, are like so many coups de
revolver. Headings six inches tall; correspondences from places one
never heard of; telegrams from Europe about Sarah Bernhardt; little
paragraphs about nothing at all; the menu of the neighbour's dinner;
articles on the European situation a pouffer de rire; all the
tripotage of local politics. The reportage is incredible; I am
chased up and down by the interviewers. The matrimonial
infelicities of M. and Madame X. (they give the name), tout au long,
with every detail--not in six lines, discreetly veiled, with an art
of insinuation, as with us; but with all the facts (or the
fictions), the letters, the dates, the places, the hours. I open a
paper at hazard, and I find au beau milieu, a propos of nothing, the
announcement--"Miss Susan Green has the longest nose in Western New
York." Miss Susan Green (je me renseigne) is a celebrated
authoress; and the Americans have the reputation of spoiling their
women. They spoil them a coups de poing. We have seen few
interiors (no one speaks French); but if the newspapers give an idea
of the domestic moeurs, the moeurs must be curious. The passport is
abolished, but they have printed my signalement in these sheets,--
perhaps for the young ladies who look for the husband. We went one
night to the theatre; the piece was French (they are the only ones),
but the acting was American--too American; we came out in the
middle. The want of taste is incredible. An Englishman whom I met
tells me that even the language corrupts itself from day to day; an
Englishman ceases to understand. It encourages me to find that I am
not the only one. There are things every day that one can't
describe. Such is Washington, where we arrived this morning, coming
from Philadelphia. My brother-in-law wishes to see the Bureau of
Patents, and on our arrival he went to look at his machines, while I
walked about the streets and visited the Capitol! The human machine
is what interests me most. I don't even care for the political--for
that's what they call their Government here--"the machine." It
operates very roughly, and some day, evidently, it will explode. It
is true that you would never suspect that they have a government;
this is the principal seat, but, save for three or four big
buildings, most of them affreux, it looks like a settlement of
negroes. No movement, no officials, no authority, no embodiment of
the state. Enormous streets, comme toujours, lined with little red
houses where nothing ever passes but the tramway. The Capitol--a
vast structure, false classic, white marble, iron and stucco, which
has assez grand air--must be seen to be appreciated. The goddess of
liberty on the top, dressed in a bear's skin; their liberty over
here is the liberty of bears. You go into the Capitol as you would
into a railway station; you walk about as you would in the Palais
Royal. No functionaries, no door-keepers, no officers, no uniforms,
no badges, no restrictions, no authority--nothing but a crowd of
shabby people circulating in a labyrinth of spittoons. We are too
much governed, perhaps, in France; but at least we have a certain
incarnation of the national conscience, of the national dignity.
The dignity is absent here, and I am told that the conscience is an
abyss. "L'etat c'est moi" even--I like that better than the
spittoons. These implements are architectural, monumental; they are
the only monuments. En somme, the country is interesting, now that
we too have the Republic; it is the biggest illustration, the
biggest warning. It is the last word of democracy, and that word
is--flatness. It is very big, very rich, and perfectly ugly. A
Frenchman couldn't live here; for life with us, after all, at the
worst is a sort of appreciation. Here, there is nothing to
appreciate. As for the people, they are the English MINUS the
conventions. You can fancy what remains. The women, pourtant, are
sometimes--rather well turned. There was one at Philadelphia--I
made her acquaintance by accident--whom it is probable I shall see
again. She is not looking for the husband; she has already got one.
It was at the hotel; I think the husband doesn't matter. A
Frenchman, as I have said, may mistake, and he needs to be sure he
is right. Aussi, I always make sure!
VII. FROM MARCELLUS COCKEREL, IN WASHINGTON, TO MRS. COOLER, NEE
COCKEREL, AT OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
October 25.
I ought to have written to you long before this, for I have had your
last excellent letter for four months in my hands. The first half
of that time I was still in Europe; the last I have spent on my
native soil. I think, therefore, my silence is owing to the fact
that over there I was too miserable to write, and that here I have
been too happy. I got back the 1st of September--you will have seen
it in the papers. Delightful country, where one sees everything in
the papers--the big, familiar, vulgar, good-natured, delightful
papers, none of which has any reputation to keep up for anything but
getting the news! I really think that has had as much to do as
anything else with my satisfaction at getting home--the difference
in what they call the "tone of the press." In Europe it's too
dreary--the sapience, the solemnity, the false respectability, the
verbosity, the long disquisitions on superannuated subjects. Here
the newspapers are like the railroad trains, which carry everything
that comes to the station, and have only the religion of
punctuality. As a woman, however, you probably detest them; you
think they are (the great word) vulgar. I admitted it just now, and
I am very happy to have an early opportunity to announce to you that
that idea has quite ceased to have any terrors for me. There are
some conceptions to which the female mind can never rise. Vulgarity
is a stupid, superficial, question-begging accusation, which has
become today the easiest refuge of mediocrity. Better than anything
else, it saves people the trouble of thinking, and anything which
does that, succeeds. You must know that in these last three years
in Europe I have become terribly vulgar myself; that's one service
my travels have rendered me. By three years in Europe I mean three
years in foreign parts altogether, for I spent several months of
that time in Japan, India, and the rest of the East. Do you
remember when you bade me good-bye in San Francisco, the night
before I embarked for Yokohama? You foretold that I should take
such a fancy to foreign life that America would never see me more,
and that if YOU should wish to see me (an event you were good enough
to regard as possible), you would have to make a rendezvous in Paris
or in Rome. I think we made one (which you never kept), but I shall
never make another for those cities. It was in Paris, however, that
I got your letter; I remember the moment as well as if it were (to
my honour) much more recent. You must know that, among many places
I dislike, Paris carries the palm. I am bored to death there; it's
the home of every humbug. The life is full of that false comfort
which is worse than discomfort, and the small, fat, irritable
people, give me the shivers. I had been making these reflections
even more devoutly than usual one very tiresome evening toward the
beginning of last summer, when, as I re-entered my hotel at ten
o'clock, the little reptile of a portress handed me your gracious
lines. I was in a villainous humour. I had been having an over-
dressed dinner in a stuffy restaurant, and had gone from there to a
suffocating theatre, where, by way of amusement, I saw a play in
which blood and lies were the least of the horrors. The theatres
over there are insupportable; the atmosphere is pestilential.
People sit with their elbows in your sides; they squeeze past you
every half-hour. It was one of my bad moments; I have a great many
in Europe. The conventional perfunctory play, all in falsetto,
which I seemed to have seen a thousand times; the horrible faces of
the people; the pushing, bullying ouvreuse, with her false
politeness, and her real rapacity, drove me out of the place at the
end of an hour; and, as it was too early to go home, I sat down
before a cafe on the Boulevard, where they served me a glass of
sour, watery beer. There on the Boulevard, in the summer night,
life itself was even uglier than the play, and it wouldn't do for me
to tell you what I saw. Besides, I was sick of the Boulevard, with
its eternal grimace, and the deadly sameness of the article de
Paris, which pretends to be so various--the shop-windows a
wilderness of rubbish, and the passers-by a procession of manikins.
Suddenly it came over me that I was supposed to be amusing myself--
my face was a yard long--and that you probably at that moment were
saying to your husband: "He stays away so long! What a good time
he must be having!" The idea was the first thing that had made me
smile for a month; I got up and walked home, reflecting, as I went,
that I was "seeing Europe," and that, after all, one MUST see
Europe. It was because I had been convinced of this that I came
out, and it is because the operation has been brought to a close
that I have been so happy for the last eight weeks. I was very
conscientious about it, and, though your letter that night made me
abominably homesick, I held out to the end, knowing it to be once
for all. I sha'n't trouble Europe again; I shall see America for
the rest of my days. My long delay has had the advantage that now,
at least, I can give you my impressions--I don't mean of Europe;
impressions of Europe are easy to get--but of this country, as it
strikes the re-instated exile. Very likely you'll think them queer;
but keep my letter, and twenty years hence they will be quite
commonplace. They won't even be vulgar. It was very deliberate, my
going round the world. I knew that one ought to see for one's self,
and that I should have eternity, so to speak, to rest. I travelled
energetically; I went everywhere and saw everything; took as many
letters as possible, and made as many acquaintances. In short, I
held my nose to the grindstone. The upshot of it all is that I have
got rid of a superstition. We have so many, that one the less--
perhaps the biggest of all--makes a real difference in one's
comfort. The superstition in question--of course you have it--is
that there is no salvation but through Europe. Our salvation is
here, if we have eyes to see it, and the salvation of Europe into
the bargain; that is, if Europe is to be saved, which I rather
doubt. Of course you'll call me a bird of freedom, a braggart, a
waver of the stars and stripes; but I'm in the delightful position
of not minding in the least what any one calls me. I haven't a
mission; I don't want to preach; I have simply arrived at a state of
mind; I have got Europe off my back. You have no idea how it
simplifies things, and how jolly it makes me feel. Now I can live;
now I can talk. If we wretched Americans could only say once for
all, "Oh, Europe be hanged!" we should attend much better to our
proper business. We have simply to live our life, and the rest will
look after itself. You will probably inquire what it is that I like
better over here, and I will answer that it's simply--life.
Disagreeables for disagreeables, I prefer our own. The way I have
been bored and bullied in foreign parts, and the way I have had to
say I found it pleasant! For a good while this appeared to be a
sort of congenital obligation, but one fine day it occurred to me
that there was no obligation at all, and that it would ease me
immensely to admit to myself that (for me, at least) all those
things had no importance. I mean the things they rub into you in
Europe; the tiresome international topics, the petty politics, the
stupid social customs, the baby-house scenery. The vastness and
freshness of this American world, the great scale and great pace of
our development, the good sense and good nature of the people,
console me for there being no cathedrals and no Titians. I hear
nothing about Prince Bismarck and Gambetta, about the Emperor
William and the Czar of Russia, about Lord Beaconsfield and the
Prince of Wales. I used to get so tired of their Mumbo-Jumbo of a
Bismarck, of his secrets and surprises, his mysterious intentions
and oracular words. They revile us for our party politics; but what
are all the European jealousies and rivalries, their armaments and
their wars, their rapacities and their mutual lies, but the
intensity of the spirit of party? what question, what interest, what
idea, what need of mankind, is involved in any of these things?
Their big, pompous armies, drawn up in great silly rows, their gold
lace, their salaams, their hierarchies, seem a pastime for children;
there's a sense of humour and of reality over here that laughs at
all that. Yes, we are nearer the reality--we are nearer what they
will all have to come to. The questions of the future are social
questions, which the Bismarcks and Beaconsfields are very much
afraid to see settled; and the sight of a row of supercilious
potentates holding their peoples like their personal property, and
bristling all over, to make a mutual impression, with feathers and
sabres, strikes us as a mixture of the grotesque and the abominable.
What do we care for the mutual impressions of potentates who amuse
themselves with sitting on people? Those things are their own
affair, and they ought to be shut up in a dark room to have it out
together. Once one feels, over here, that the great questions of
the future are social questions, that a mighty tide is sweeping the
world to democracy, and that this country is the biggest stage on
which the drama can be enacted, the fashionable European topics seem
petty and parochial. They talk about things that we have settled
ages ago, and the solemnity with which they propound to you their
little domestic embarrassments makes a heavy draft on one's good
nature. In England they were talking about the Hares and Rabbits
Bill, about the extension of the County Franchise, about the
Dissenters' Burials, about the Deceased Wife's Sister, about the
abolition of the House of Lords, about heaven knows what ridiculous
little measure for the propping-up of their ridiculous little
country. And they call US provincial! It is hard to sit and look
respectable while people discuss the utility of the House of Lords,
and the beauty of a State Church, and it's only in a dowdy musty
civilisation that you'll find them doing such things. The lightness
and clearness of the social air, that's the great relief in these
parts. The gentility of bishops, the propriety of parsons, even the
impressiveness of a restored cathedral, give less of a charm to life
than that. I used to be furious with the bishops and parsons, with
the humbuggery of the whole affair, which every one was conscious
of, but which people agreed not to expose, because they would be
compromised all round. The convenience of life over here, the quick
and simple arrangements, the absence of the spirit of routine, are a
blessed change from the stupid stiffness with which I struggled for
two long years. There were people with swords and cockades, who
used to order me about; for the simplest operation of life I had to
kootoo to some bloated official. When it was a question of my doing
a little differently from others, the bloated official gasped as if
I had given him a blow on the stomach; he needed to take a week to
think of it. On the other hand, it's impossible to take an American
by surprise; he is ashamed to confess that he has not the wit to do
a thing that another man has had the wit to think of. Besides being
as good as his neighbour, he must therefore be as clever--which is
an affliction only to people who are afraid he may be cleverer. If
this general efficiency and spontaneity of the people--the union of
the sense of freedom with the love of knowledge--isn't the very
essence of a high civilisation, I don't know what a high
civilisation is. I felt this greater ease on my first railroad
journey--felt the blessing of sitting in a train where I could move
about, where I could stretch my legs, and come and go, where I had a
seat and a window to myself, where there were chairs, and tables,
and food, and drink. The villainous little boxes on the European
trains, in which you are stuck down in a corner, with doubled-up
knees, opposite to a row of people--often most offensive types, who
stare at you for ten hours on end--these were part of my two years'
ordeal. The large free way of doing things here is everywhere a
pleasure. In London, at my hotel, they used to come to me on
Saturday to make me order my Sunday's dinner, and when I asked for a
sheet of paper, they put it into the bill. The meagreness, the
stinginess, the perpetual expectation of a sixpence, used to
exasperate me. Of course, I saw a great many people who were
pleasant; but as I am writing to you, and not to one of them, I may
say that they were dreadfully apt to be dull. The imagination among
the people I see here is more flexible; and then they have the
advantage of a larger horizon. It's not bounded on the north by the
British aristocracy, and on the south by the scrutin de liste. (I
mix up the countries a little, but they are not worth the keeping
apart.) The absence of little conventional measurements, of little
cut-and-dried judgments, is an immense refreshment. We are more
analytic, more discriminating, more familiar with realities. As for
manners, there are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad
manners organised. (I don't mean that they may not be polite among
themselves, but they are rude to every one else.) The sight of all
these growing millions simply minding their business, is impressive
to me,--more so than all the gilt buttons and padded chests of the
Old World; and there is a certain powerful type of "practical"
American (you'll find him chiefly in the West) who doesn't brag as I
do (I'm not practical), but who quietly feels that he has the Future
in his vitals--a type that strikes me more than any I met in your
favourite countries. Of course you'll come back to the cathedrals
and Titians, but there's a thought that helps one to do without
them--the thought that though there's an immense deal of plainness,
there's little misery, little squalor, little degradation. There is
no regular wife-beating class, and there are none of the stultified
peasants of whom it takes so many to make a European noble. The
people here are more conscious of things; they invent, they act,
they answer for themselves; they are not (I speak of social matters)
tied up by authority and precedent. We shall have all the Titians
by and by, and we shall move over a few cathedrals. You had better
stay here if you want to have the best. Of course, I am a roaring
Yankee; but you'll call me that if I say the least, so I may as well
take my ease, and say the most. Washington's a most entertaining
place; and here at least, at the seat of government, one isn't
overgoverned. In fact, there's no government at all to speak of; it
seems too good to be true. The first day I was here I went to the
Capitol, and it took me ever so long to figure to myself that I had
as good a right there as any one else--that the whole magnificent
pile (it IS magnificent, by the way) was in fact my own. In Europe
one doesn't rise to such conceptions, and my spirit had been broken
in Europe. The doors were gaping wide--I walked all about; there
were no door-keepers, no officers, nor flunkeys--not even a
policeman to be seen. It seemed strange not to see a uniform, if
only as a patch of colour. But this isn't government by livery.
The absence of these things is odd at first; you seem to miss
something, to fancy the machine has stopped. It hasn't, though; it
only works without fire and smoke. At the end of three days this
simple negative impression--the fact is, that there are no soldiers
nor spies, nothing but plain black coats--begins to affect the
imagination, becomes vivid, majestic, symbolic. It ends by being
more impressive than the biggest review I saw in Germany. Of
course, I'm a roaring Yankee; but one has to take a big brush to
copy a big model. The future is here, of course; but it isn't only
that--the present is here as well. You will complain that I don't
give you any personal news; but I am more modest for myself than for
my country. I spent a month in New York, and while I was there I
saw a good deal of a rather interesting girl who came over with me
in the steamer, and whom for a day or two I thought I should like to
marry. But I shouldn't. She has been spoiled by Europe!