SOCIETY.
We bite at the tempting bait of London society a little eagerly. In our case, as veterans, it is like returning to a delicious element from which we have long been weaned. The cheerfulness with which English people respond to the modest presentment of a card well-motived, the cordiality with which they welcome an old friend, once truly a friend, may well offset the reserve with which they respond to advances made at random, and the resolute self-defence of the British Lion in particular against all vague and vagabond enthusiasms. Carlyle's wrath at the Americans who homaged and tormented him prompted a grandiose vengeance. He called them a nation of hyperbores. Not for this do we now vigorously let him alone, but because his spleeny literary utterances these many years attest the precise moment in which bright Apollo left him. The most brilliant genius should beware of the infirmity of the fireside and admiring few, whose friendship applauds his poorest sayings, and, at the utmost, shrugs its shoulders where praise is out of the question.
Our remembrance of the London of twenty-four years ago is, indeed hyperdelightful, and of that description which one does not ask to have repeated, so perfect is it in the first instance. A second visit was less social and more secluded in its opportunities. But now—for what reason it matters not; would it were that of our superior merit—we find the old delightful account reopened, the friendly visits frequent, and the luxurious invitations to dinner occupy every evening of our short week in London, crowding out theatres and opera,—the latter now just in the bud. To these dissipations a new one has been added, and the afternoon tea is now a recognized institution. Less formal and expensive than a New York afternoon reception, it answers the same purpose of a final object and rest for the day's visiting. In some instances, it continues through the season; in others, invitations are given for a single occasion only. You go, if invited, in spruce morning dress, with as much or as little display of train and bonnet as may suit with your views. You find a cheerful and broken-up assemblage—people conversing in twos, or, at most, in threes. And here is the Very Reverend the Dean. And here is the Catholic Archbishop, renowned for the rank and number of his proselytes. And here is Sir Charles—not he of the hunting-whip and breeches, but one renowned in science, and making a practical as well as a theoretical approximation to the antiquity of man. And here is Sir Samuel, who has finally discovered those parent lakes of the Nile which have been among the lost arts of geography for so many centuries. In this society, no man sees or shows a full-length portrait. A word is given, a phrase exchanged, and "tout est dit." What it all may amount to must be made out in another book than mine.
Well, having been more or less introduced, you take a cup of tea, with the option of bread and butter or a fragment of sponge cake. Having finished this, you vanish; you have shown yourself, reported yourself; more was not expected of you.
A graver and more important institution is the London dinner, commencing at half past seven, with good evening clothes—a white neckcloth and black vest for gentlemen; for nous autres, evening dress, not resplendent. The dinners we attend have perhaps the edge of state a little taken off, being given at short notice; but we observe female attire to be less showy than in our recollections of twenty-four years previous, and our one evening dress, devised to answer for dinner, evening party, and ball, proves a little over, rather than under, the golden mean of average appearance. As one dinner is like all, the briefest sketch of a single possible occasion may suffice. If you have been at afternoon tea before dinner, your toilet has been perforce a very hurried one. If it is your first appearance, the annonce of a French hair-dresser in the upper floor of your hotel may have inspired you with the insane idea of submitting your precious brain-case to his manipulations. Having you once in his dreadful seat, he imposes upon you at his pleasure. You must accept his hair-string, his pins, his rats, at a price at which angola cats were dear. You are palpitating with haste, he with the conceit of his character and profession. Fain would he add swindle to swindle, and perfidy to perfidy. "Don't you want a little crayon to darken the hair?" and hide the ravages of age; "it is true it colors a little, since it is made on purpose." You desire it not. "A cream? a pomade? a hair-wash?" None of all this; only in Heaven's name to have done with him! He capers behind you, puffing your sober head with curls, as if he had the breath of Æolus, according to Flaxman's illustration. Finally he dismisses you at large and unwarranted cost; but in your imagination he capers at your back for a week to come.
This prelude, which gives to
| "hairy nothing |
| A local habitation and a name," |
leaves little time for further adornment. A hired cab takes your splendors to the door of the inviting mansion, and leaves them there. When you depart, you request the servant of the house which feeds you to call another cab, which he does with the air of rendering a familiar service.
I have no intention of giving a detailed portrait of the entertainment that follows. Its few characteristic features can be briefly given. Introductions are not general; and even in case the occasion should have been invoked and invited for you, the greater part of your fellow-guests may not directly make your acquaintance. Servants are graver than senators with us. Dishes follow each other in bewildering and rather oppressive variety. You could be very happy with any one of them alone, but with a dozen you fear even to touch and taste. Conversation is not loud nor general, scarcely audible across the table. As in marriage, your partner is your fate. One would be very glad to present one brick so that another could be laid on top of it, or even to attempt an angle and a corner adjustment. But this conversation is not architectonic. It aims at nothing more than the requisite small change. If by chance the society be assembled at an informal house, and composed of artists and authors, we shall hear jests and laughter, but the themes of these will scarcely go beyond the most familiar matters. Having told thus much we have told all, except that ice is not served, as with us, upon the table, in picturesque variety of form and color, but is usually bestowed in spoonfuls, one of either kind to each person, the quality being excellent, and the quantity, after all else that has been offered, quite sufficient. It is here one of the most expensive articles of luxe—costing thrice its Yankee prices. The ladies leave the table a little before the gentlemen; but these arrive with no symptoms of inordinate drinking. The latter, as is well known, is long gone out of fashion, and with it, we imagine, the description of wit and anecdote, whose special enjoyment used to be reserved for the time "after the ladies had left the table." This is all that can be told of the dinner, which is the ne plus ultra of English social enjoyments; for balls everywhere are stale affairs, save to the dancing neophytes, and the enjoyment to be had at them is either official or gymnastic. At a "select" soirée following a state dinner, we hear Mr. Ap Thomas, the renowned harpist, whose execution is indeed brilliant and remarkable. The harp, however, is an instrument that owes its prestige partly to its beauty of form, partly to the romance of its traditions, from King David to the Welsh bards. In tone and temper it remains greatly inferior to the piano-forte, the finger governing the strings far better with than without the intervention of the keys and hammers.
But while we thankfully accept the offered opportunities of meeting those whom we desire to see, we are forced, as hygienists and economists, to enter our protest against the English dinner—this last joint in the back-bone of luxury. After hearty luncheon and social tea, it would seem to be a mere superfluity, not needed, a danger if partaken of, a mockery if neglected. So let New England cherish while she can the early dinner; for with the extended areas of business and society, dinner grows ever later, and the man and his family wider apart. By the time that tea and coffee are got through with, it may well be half past ten o'clock, and by eleven, at latest, unless there should be music or some special after-entertainment, you take leave.
Hoping to revisit more fully this ancestral isle before the tocsin of depart for home, we will now, with a little more of our sketchiness, take leave of it, which we should do with heartier regret but for the prospect of a not distant return.
In philosophy, England at the present day does not seem to go beyond Mill on the one hand, and Stewart on the other. The word "science" is still used, as it was ten years ago with us, to express the rules and observances of physical and mathematical study. Science, as the mother of the rules of thought, generating logic, building metaphysics, and devising the rules of coherence by which human cogitation is at once promoted and measured,—this conception of science I did not recognize in those with whom I spoke, unless I except Rev. H. Martineau, with whom I had only general conversation, but whose intellectual position is at once without the walls of form, and within the sanctuary of freedom. I was referred to Jowett and his friends as the authorities under this head, but this was not the moment in which to find them. In religion, Miss Cobbe leads the van, her partial method assuming as an original conception what the Germans have done, and much better done, before her. Theodore Parker is, I gather, her great man; and in her case, as in his, largeness of nature, force and geniality of temperament, take the place of scientific construction and responsible labor. Mr. Martineau's position is well known, and is for us New Englanders beyond controversy. The broad church is best known to us by Kingsley and Maurice. To those who still stand within the limits of an absolute authority in spiritual matters, its achievements may appear worthy of surprise and of gratulation. To those who have passed that barrier they present no intellectual feature worth remarking.
I well remember to-day my childish astonishment when I first learned that I and my fellows were outside the earth's crust, not within it. In connection with this came also the fact of a mysterious force binding us to the surface of the planet, so that, in its voyages and revolutions, it can lose nothing of its own.
Something akin to this may be the discovery of believers that they and those whom they follow are, so far as concerns actual opportunity of knowledge, on the outside of the world of ideal truth. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived, any absolute form of its manifestation. A divine, mysterious force binds us to our place on its smiling borders. Of what lies beyond we construe as we can—Moses according to his ability, Christ and Paul according to theirs. Unseen and unmanifested it must ever remain; for though men say that God has done so and so, God has never said so. Of this we become sure: religion spiritualizes, inspires, and consoles us. The strait gate and narrow path are blessed for all who find them, and are the same for all who seek them. But this oneness of morals is learned experimentally; it cannot be taught dogmatically.
Proposing to return to this theme, and to see more of the broad church before I decide upon its position, I take leave of it and of its domain together. Farewell, England! farewell, London! For three months to come thou wilt contain the regalia of all wits, of all capabilities. Fain would we have lingered beside the hospitable tables, and around the ancient monuments, considering also the steadfast and slowly-developing institutions. But the chief veteran is in haste for Greece, and on the very Sunday on which we should have heard Martineau in the forenoon, and Dean Stanley in the afternoon, with delightful social recreation in the evening, we break loose from our moorings, reach Folkstone, and embark for its French antithesis, Boulogne sur mer.