Portraits of places

by Henry James

IX
AN ENGLISH EASTER
1877

I

It may be said of the English, as is said of the council of war in Sheridan's farce of The Critic by one of the spectators of the rehearsal, that when they do agree, their unanimity is wonderful. They differ among themselves greatly just now as regards the machinations of Russia, the derelictions of Turkey, the merits of the Reverend Arthur Tooth, the genius of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters; but neither just now nor at any other time do they fail to conform to those social observances on which respectability has set her seal England is a country of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with her being so interesting to foreign observers. The English individual character is very positive, very independent, very much made up according to its own sentiment of things, very prone to startling eccentricities; and yet at the same time it has beyond any other this peculiar gift of squaring itself with fashion and custom. In no other country, I imagine, are so many people to be found doing the same thing, in the same way, at the same time—using the same slang, wearing the same hats and neckties, collecting the same china-plates, playing the same game of lawn-tennis or of polo, admiring the same professional beauty. The monotony of such a spectacle would soon become oppressive if the foreign observer were not conscious of this latent capacity in the performers for great freedom of action; he finds a good deal of entertainment in wondering how they reconcile the traditional insularity of the individual with this perpetual tribute to usage. Of course, in all civilised societies, the tribute to usage is constantly paid; if it is less apparent in America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think, because individual independence is greater, but because usage is more sparsely established. Where custom can be ascertained people certainly follow it; but for one definite precedent in American life there are fifty in English. I am very far from having discovered the secret; I have not in the least learned what becomes of that explosive personal force in the English character which is compressed and corked down by social conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of the manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the fermenting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most striking example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is, of course, the universal church-going. In the sight of the English people getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its hat, and drawing on its gloves, and taking its wife on its arm, and making its offspring march before, and so, for decency's, respectability's, propriety's sake, taking its way to a place of worship appointed by the State, in which it repeats the formulas of a creed to which it attaches no positive sense, and listens to a sermon over the length of which it explicitly haggles and grumbles—in this exhibition there is something very striking to a stranger, something which he hardly knows whether to regard as a great force or as a great infirmity. He inclines, on the whole, to pronounce the spectacle sublime, because it gives him the feeling that whenever it may become necessary for a people trained in these manœuvres to move all together under a common direction, they will have it in them to do so with tremendous weight and cohesiveness. We hear a good deal about the effect of the Prussian military system in consolidating the German people and making them available for a particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to say that the military punctuality which characterises the English observance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A nation which has passed through the mill will certainly have been stamped by it. And here, as in the German military service, it is really the whole nation. When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his entourage I did not mean to limit the statement to him. The young unmarried men go to church, the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members of society. (That last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance. No one in England is literally irresponsible, that perhaps is the shortest way of describing the nation. Every one is free and every one is responsible. To say what it is people are responsible to is of course a great extension of the question: briefly, to social expectation, to propriety, to morality, to "position," to the classic English conscience, which is, after all, such a powerful factor. With us there is infinitely less responsibility; but there is also, I think, less freedom.)

The way in which the example of the more luxurious classes imposes itself upon the less luxurious may of course be noticed in smaller matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation, nothing, however, is trivial. So I may cite the practice of banishing the servants from the room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and accordingly, through the length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in English history, all great movements have been made—it is arbitrary. But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it for gentility's sake. My instance may seem feeble, and I speak honestly when I say I might give others, forming part of an immense body of prescriptive usage, to which a society possessing in the largest manner, both by temperament and education, the sense of the "inalienable" rights and comforts of the individual, contrives to accommodate itself. I do not mean to say that usage in England is always uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the contrary, few strangers can be unfamiliar with that sensation (a most agreeable one) which consists in perceiving in the rigidity of a tradition which has struck one at first as mechanical, a reason existing in the historic "good sense" of the English race. The sensation is frequent, though in saying so I do not mean to imply that even superficially the presumption is against the usages of English society. It is not, for instance, necessarily against the custom of which I had it more especially in mind to speak in writing these lines. The stranger in London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes out of town, and that if he have no mind to be left as lonely as Marius on the ruins of Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a temporary absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort of unexpectedness in this prompt re-emigration of a body of people who, but a week before, were apparently devoting much energy to settling down for the season. Half of them have but lately come back from the country, where they have been spending the winter, and they have just had time, it may be supposed, to collect the scattered threads of town-life. Presently, however, the threads are dropped and society is dispersed, as if it had taken a false start. It departs as Holy Week draws to a close, and remains absent for the following ten days. Where it goes is its own affair; a good deal of it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that city, I remember how, when I woke up on Easter Monday and looked out of my window, I found the street covered, overnight, with a sort of snow-fall of disembarked Britons. They made, for other people, an uncomfortable week of it. One's customary table at the restaurant, one's habitual stall at the Théâtre Français, one's usual fiacre on the cab-stand, were very apt to have suffered pre-emption. I believe that the pilgrimage to Paris was this year of the usual proportions; and you may be sure that people who did not cross the Channel were not without invitations to quiet old places in the country, where the pale, fresh primroses were beginning to light up the dark turf and the purple bloom of the bare tree-masses to be freckled here and there with verdure. In England country-life is the obverse of the medal, town-life the reverse, and when an occasion comes for quitting London there are few members of what the French call the "easy class" who have not a collection of dull, moist, verdant resorts to choose from. Dull I call them, and I fancy not without reason, though at the moment I speak of, their dulness must have been mitigated by the unintermittent presence of the keenest and liveliest of east winds. Even in mellow English country homes Easter-tide is a period of rawness and atmospheric acridity—the moment at which the frank hostility of winter, which has at last to give up the game, turns to peevishness and spite. This is what makes it arbitrary, as I said just now, for "easy" people to go forth to the wind-swept lawns and the shivering parks. But nothing is more striking to an American than the frequency of English holidays and the large way in which occasions for "a little change" are made use of. All this speaks to Americans of three things which they are accustomed to see allotted in scantier measure. The English have more time than we, they have more money, and they have a much higher relish for active leisure. Leisure, fortune, and the love of sport—these things are implied in English society at every turn. It was a very small number of weeks before Easter that Parliament met, and yet a ten days' recess was already, from the luxurious Parliamentary point of view, a necessity. A short time hence we shall be having the Whitsuntide holidays, which I am told are even more of a season of revelry than Easter, and from this point to midsummer, when everything stops, it is an easy journey. The men of business and the professional men partake in equal measure of these agreeable diversions, and I was interested in hearing a lady whose husband was an active member of the bar say that, though he was leaving town with her for ten days, and though Easter was a very nice "little break," they really amused themselves more during the later festival, which would come on toward the end of May. I thought this highly probable, and admired so dramatic an interfusion of work and play. If my phrase has a slightly ironical sound, this is purely accidental. A large appetite for holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know what to do with them when taken, is the sign of a robust people, and judged by this measure we Americans are rather incompetent. Such holidays as we take are taken very often in Europe, where it is sometimes noticeable that our privilege is rather heavy on our hands. Acknowledgement made of English industry, however (our own stands in no need of compliments), it must be added that for those same easy classes I just spoke of things are very easy indeed. The number of persons obtainable for purely social purposes at all times and seasons is infinitely greater than among ourselves; and the ingenuity of the arrangements permanently going forward to disembarrass them of their superfluous leisure is as yet in America an undeveloped branch of civilisation. The young men who are preparing for the stem realities of life among the gray-green cloisters of Oxford are obliged to keep their terms but half the year; and the rosy little cricketers of Eton and Harrow are let loose upon the parental home for an embarrassing number of months. Happily the parental home is apt to be an affair of gardens, lawns, and parks.

II

Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge dusky city seems to take on a still sadder colouring and a sort of hush steals over its mighty uproar. At such a time, for a stranger, London is not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in a row—a spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday and a "bank-holiday," if I remember aright, had joined hands with a Christmas-day, and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude. I betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character, for I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn't fear; it would not come round again for another year. This information was given me on the occasion of that surprising interruption of one's relations with the laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period. I was told that all the washerwomen were intoxicated, and that, as it would take them some time to revive, I must not count upon a relay of "fresh things." I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning back. One of the incidental agréments of life in the latter city had been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young woman with a large basket covered with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her head a frilled and fluted muslin cap, which was an irresistible advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable blanchisseuse was not in liquor is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was always grateful to her for her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her talkative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon her crisp, dense hair, and her well-made dress was fitted to her well-made waist. I talked with her; I could talk with her; and as she talked she moved about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her light step carried her off again, talking, to the door, and with a brighter smile and an "Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her, leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature a washerwoman may be. London, in December, was livid with sleet and fog, and against this dismal background was offered me the vision of a horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky! She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance, and she almost frightened me away.

I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not strictly accurate, and that at the end of three months I had another array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion, however, nothing occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched, though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of the lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were very much en évidence, and it was an excellent occasion for getting an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the background, and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets were void of carriages, and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the "masses" were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I strolled about and watched them at their gambols. The heavens were most unfavourable, but in an English "outing" there is always a margin left for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky city, beneath the shifting gloom of the sky, the grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of weatherproof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the railway stations overflowed, and the Thames embankment was covered. The "masses," I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even when observed through the distorting medium of London bad weather. There are indeed few things in their way more impressive than a dusky London holiday; it suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at superficially, the British capital is one of the most interesting of cities, and it is perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most felt its interest. London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than any European city of graceful and decorative incident; and though on festal days, like those I speak of, the populace is massed in large numbers at certain points, many of the streets are empty enough of human life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic want of charm. A Christmas-day or a Good Friday uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk along the streets, having no fellow-pedestrians to look at, you look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight stiff window-slits, and finished, by way of a cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curbstone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker Street—a delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying monuments, and it would seem that a city made up of them should have no claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London, however, is not made up of them; there are architectural combinations of a statelier kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details. London is pictorial in spite of details—from its dark-green, misty parks, the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloud-ceiling, and the softness and richness of tone which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aërial gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to such contemplations this is a constant diversion, and yet this is only part of it. What completes the effect of the place is its appeal to the feelings, made in so many ways, but made above all by agglomerated immensity. At any given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners you have a sense of its hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain interest from their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere else is so much human life gathered together, and nowhere does it press upon you with so many suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far from it. But they are of every possible kind, and that is the interest of London. Those that were most forcible during the showery Easter season were certain of the more perplexing and depressing ones; but even with these was mingled a brighter strain.

I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon—walked from Piccadilly across the Green Park and through that of St. James. The parks were densely filled with the populace—the elder people shuffling about the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over the dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of people about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and succeeded in reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to advance, and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the church and promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact, and beneath the gothic arches the odour was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are too numerous. Wherever you go you make the observation. Go to the theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find that, before you arrive, there are people enough in the field. You are a tight fit in your place, wherever you find it; you have too many companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were, swallows up quality, and perpetual association is rather irritating. This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to own a "park"—an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back through the profane pleasure-grounds of London, in the midst of "superfluous herds," and I found that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great English assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest people in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe that the fact requires proof. I never see a large number of them without feeling this impression confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have sometimes felt it to be rather shaken in the presence of a limited group. I suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger percentage of handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to the upper class I suppose this is generally granted; but I should extend it to the whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer by their good looks, they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some of the more romantic forms of poverty. It is the hard prose of misery—an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses," bear in some degree or other the traces of alcoholic action. The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently meant to please. A very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon—the pallid, stunted, misbegotten, and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-moulded faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.

The capacity of an Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as absolutely unlimited, and even if (I repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is most freely exercised, yet among the daughters of the people one sees a great many fine points. Among the men fine points are strikingly numerous—especially among the younger ones. Here the same distinction is to be made—the gentlemen are certainly handsomer than the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman with another, they are physically very well turned out. Their features are finished, composed, as it were, more harmoniously than those of many of their nearer and remoter neighbours, and their figures are apt to be both powerful and compact. They present to view very much fewer accidental noses and inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and ill-planted heads of hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always from the sidewalk, it may be said that as the spring increases in London and the symptoms of the season multiply, the beautiful young men who adorn the West End pavements, and who advance before you in couples, arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial, are among the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have, it at heart to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they are also very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples are uglier than the American; we are far from producing those magnificent types of facial eccentricity which flourish among older civilisations. American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and meanness; English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America there are few grotesques; in England there are many—and some of them have a high pictorial value.