Part 58 (2/2)

Immense female symposia at which every delicacy is provided are one of the most striking features of American life, and would seem to prove that our s.e.x is scarcely so indispensable in the scheme of creation as it sometimes supposes. I've been admitted on the footing of an Englishman-”just to show you some of our bright women,” the hostess yesterday remarked. (”Bright” here has the meaning of _intellectually remarkable_.) I noted indeed the frequency of the predominantly cerebral-as they call it here ”brainy”-type. These rather oddly invidious banquets are organised according to age, for I've also been present as an inquiring stranger at several ”girls' lunches,” from which married ladies are rigidly excluded, but here the fair revellers were equally numerous and equally ”bright.” There's a good deal I should like to tell you about my study of the educational question, but my position's now somewhat cramped, and I must dismiss the subject briefly. My leading impression is that the children are better educated (in proportion of course) than the adults. The position of a child is on the whole one of great distinction. There's a popular ballad of which the refrain, if I'm not mistaken, is ”Make me a child again just for to-night!” and which seems to express the sentiment of regret for lost privileges. At all events they are a powerful and independent cla.s.s, and have organs, of immense circulation, in the press. They are often extremely ”bright.”

I've talked with a great many teachers, most of them lady-teachers, as they are here called. The phrase doesn't mean teachers of ladies, as you might suppose, but applies to the s.e.x of the instructress, who often has large cla.s.ses of young men under her control. I was lately introduced to a young woman of twenty-three who occupies the chair of Moral Philosophy and Belles-Lettres in a Western University and who told me with the utmost frankness that she's ”just adored” by the undergraduates. This young woman was the daughter of a petty trader in one of the South-western States and had studied at Amanda College in Missourah, an inst.i.tution at which young people of the two s.e.xes pursue their education together. She was very pretty and modest, and expressed a great desire to see something of English country life, in consequence of which I made her promise to come down to Thistleton in the event of her crossing the Atlantic. She's not the least like Gwendolen or Charlotte, and I'm not prepared to say how they would get on with her; the boys would probably do better. Still, I think her acquaintance would be of value to dear Miss Gulp, and the two might pa.s.s their time very pleasantly in the school-room. I grant you freely that those I have seen here are much less comfortable than the school-room at Thistleton. Has Charlotte, by the way, designed any more texts for the walls? I've been extremely interested in my visit to Philadelphia, where I saw several thousand little red houses with white steps, occupied by intelligent artisans and arranged (in streets) on the rectangular system. Improved cooking-stoves, rosewood pianos, gas and hot water, esthetic furniture and complete sets of the British Essayists. A tramway through every street; every block of exactly equal length; blocks and houses economically lettered and numbered. There's absolutely no loss of time and no need of looking for, or indeed _at_, anything. The mind always on one's object; it's very delightful.

V FROM LOUIS LEVERETT IN BOSTON TO HARVARD TREMONT IN PARIS

_November_ 1880.

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'm 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'm consumed with the love of the further sh.o.r.e. I've been so long away that I've dropped out of my place in this little Boston world and the shallow tides of New England life have closed over it. I'm a stranger here and find it hard to believe I ever was a native. It's very hard, very cold, very vacant. I think of your warm rich Paris; I think of the Boulevard Saint-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. The sense is of a supreme splendour and an incomparable arrangement, yet there's a kind of tone, of body, in the radiance; 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, pa.s.s by. I've a little book in my pocket; it's exquisitely printed, a modern Elzevir. It consists of a lyric cry from the heart of young France and is full of the sentiment of form. There's no form here, dear Harvard; I had no idea how little form there is. I don't know what I shall do; I feel so undraped, so uncurtained, so uncus.h.i.+oned; 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've not got back my rooms in West Cedar Street; they're occupied by a mesmeric healer. I'm staying at an hotel and it's all 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 ”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's all done in silence; there's no answer to your own wild wail-”What's to be done with me, please?” ”Wait and you'll see” the awful silence seems to say. There's a great crowd round you, but there's 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's lighted by a thousand gas-jets and heated by cast-iron screens which vomit forth torrents of scorching air. The temperature's terrible; the atmosphere's more so; the furious light and heat seem to intensify the dreadful definiteness. When things are so ugly they shouldn't be so definite, and they're terribly ugly here. There's no mystery in the corners, there's no light and shade in the types. The people are haggard and joyless; they look as if they had no pa.s.sions, no tastes, no senses.

They sit feeding in silence under the dry hard light; occasionally I hear the high firm note of a child. The servants are black and familiar; their faces s.h.i.+ne as they shuffle about; there are blue tones in their dark masks. They've no manners; they address but 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'll bring you; if you look round to summon them they've 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.

Then 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 pa.s.ses; 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 that he thrusts into my spine as he goes. It's laden with large white jugs; they tinkle as he moves, and I recognise the unconsoling fluid. We're dying of iced water, of hot air, of flaring 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 I thus employ for 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 on the covers of my book but not upon the page-the little French Elzevir I love so well. I rise and put out the gas-when my room becomes even lighter than before. Then a crude illumination from the hall, from the neighbouring room, pours through the gla.s.s 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's accompanied by the most vulgar, though the most human, sounds. I spring up to call for some help, some remedy; but there's no bell and I feel desolate and weak. There's 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 const.i.tute an awful 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 barbarous laugh would come up from the office. Fancy appealing in these sacred, these intimate moments to an ”office”; fancy calling out into indifferent s.p.a.ce for a candle, for a curtain! I pay incalculable sums in this dreadful house, and yet haven't a creature to a.s.sist me. I fling myself back on my couch and for a long time afterwards the orifice in the wall emits strange murmurs and rumblings. It seems unsatisfied and indignant and 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's a terrible absence of variety of type. Every one's Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown, and every one looks like Mr. Jones and Mr. Brown. They're thin, they're diluted in the great tepid bath of Democracy! They lack completeness of ident.i.ty; they're quite without modelling. No, they're not beautiful, my poor Harvard; it must be whispered that they're not beautiful. You may say that they're 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're only plain. Many of the girls are pretty, but to be only pretty is (to my sense) to be plain.

Yet I've had some talk. I've seen a young woman. She was on the steamer, and I afterwards saw her in New York-a mere maiden thing, yet a peculiar type, a real personality: a great deal of modelling, a great deal of colour, and withal something elusive and ambiguous. 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've lost her now; I'm sorry, because she liked to listen to me. She has pa.s.sed 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 IN WAs.h.i.+NGTON TO M. ADOLPHE BOUCHE IN PARIS

_December_ 1880.

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 plat.i.tude of unbalanced democracy intensified by the plat.i.tude of the spirit of commerce. Everything on an immense scale-everything ill.u.s.trated 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 suddenly discharge their revolver. If you fall they empty your pockets; the only chance is to shoot them first. With this no amenities, no preliminaries, no manners, no care for the appearance. I wander about while my brother's occupied; I lounge along the streets; I stop at the corners; I look into the shops; _je regarde pa.s.ser les femmes_. It's an easy country to see; one sees everything there is; the civilisation's skin deep; you don't have to dig. This positive practical pus.h.i.+ng bourgeoisie is always about its business; it lives in the street, in the hotel, in the train; one's 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 pa.s.s they simply push you. Everything in silence; they know that silence is golden and they've the wors.h.i.+p of gold. When the conductor wishes your fare he gives you a poke, very serious, without a word. As for the types-but there's only one, they're 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'll serve; but they don't want what you might think (_du moines on me l'a.s.sure_); they only want the husband. A Frenchman may mistake; he needs to be sure he's 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 by that time found him 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's 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 regrets. There's no imagination, no sensibility, no desire for the convent.

We've made several journeys-few of less than three hundred miles.

Enormous trains, enormous _wagons_, with beds and lavatories, with 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 pa.s.ses up and down hurling pamphlets and sweetmeats into your face: that's an American journey. There are windows in the _wagons_-enormous like everything else; but there's nothing to see. The country's a void-no features, no objects, no details, nothing to show you that you're in one place more than another. _Aussi_ you're not in one place, you're 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've opened some of the books-_ils ne se laissent pas lire_. No form, no matter, no style, no general ideas: they seem written for children and young ladies. The most successful (those that they praise most) are the facetious; they sell in thousands of editions. I've looked into some of the most _vantes_; but you need to be forewarned to know they're amusing; grins through a horse-collar, burlesques of the Bible, _des plaisanteries de croquemort_. They've 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 primeval 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts), 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'm 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 find _au beau milieu_, apropos of nothing, the announcement: ”Miss Susan Green has the longest nose in Western New York.” Miss Susan Green (_je me renseigne_) is a celebrated auth.o.r.ess, and the Americans have the reputation of spoiling their women.

They spoil them _a coups de poing_.

We've seen few interiors (no one speaks French); but if the newspapers give an idea of the domestic _murs_, the _murs_ must be curious. The pa.s.sport's abolished, but they've 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 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; the Englishman ceases to understand. It encourages me to find I'm not the only one. There are things every day that one can't describe. Such is Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 will explode. It is true that you'd never suspect they _have_ a government; this is the princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.ses but the tramway. The Capitol-a vast structure, false cla.s.sic, white marble, iron and stucco, which has _a.s.sez grand air_-must be seen to be appreciated. The G.o.ddess 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 reservations, no authority-nothing but a crowd of shabby people circulating in a labyrinth of spittoons. We're too much governed perhaps in France; but at least we have a certain incarnation of the national conscience, of the national dignity. The dignity's absent here, and I'm told the public conscience is an abyss. ”_L'etat c'est moi_” even-I like that better than the spittoons. These implements are architectural, monumental; they're the only monuments. _En somme_ the country's interesting, now that we too have the Republic; it is the biggest ill.u.s.tration, the biggest warning. It's the last word of democracy, and that word is-plat.i.tude. It's 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 one has nothing to appreciate. As for the people, they're 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's probable I shall see again. She's 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've said, may mistake, and he needs to be sure he's right. _Aussi_ I always make sure!

VII FROM MARCELLUS c.o.c.kEREL IN WAs.h.i.+NGTON TO MRS. COOLER, NeE c.o.c.kEREL, AT OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

_October_ 1880.

I ought to have written you long before this, for I've had your last excellent letter these four months in my hands. The first half of that time I was still in Europe, the last I've spent on my native soil. I think accordingly my silence is owing to the fact that over there I was too miserable to write and that here I've been too happy. I got back the 1st of September-you'll 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're (the great word) vulgar. I admitted it just now, and I'm 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's a stupid superficial question-begging accusation, which has become to-day the easiest refuge of mediocrity.

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