But what with the abbey church, the discourse on Christian Science, our lady of the donkey, a very full stomach and a phantasmagoria of toys spinning before my eyes, I went to bed thinking of,—well now, what do you suppose I went to bed thinking of?
CHAPTER XVII
SMOKY ENGLAND
For years before going to England I had been interested in the north of England—the land, as I was accustomed to think, of the under dog. England, if one could trust one’s impression from a distance, was a land of great social contrasts—the ultimate high and the ultimate low of poverty and wealth. In the north, as I understand it, were all of the great manufacturing centers—Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester—a whole welter of smoky cities whence issue tons upon tons of pottery, linen, cotton, cutlery. While I was at Bridgely Level I spoke of my interest in this region to Barfleur, who merely lifted his eyebrows. He knew little or nothing about that northern world. The south of England encompassed his interest. However, Barfleur’s cousin, the agreeable Gerard Barfleur, told me soulfully that the north of England must be like America, because it was so brisk, direct, practical, and that he loved it. (He was a confirmed American “rooter” or “booster,” we would say over here, and was constantly talking about coming to this country to enter the theatrical business.)
I journeyed northward the last day of the old year to Manchester and its environs, which I had chosen as affording the best picture of manufacturing life. I had been directed to a certain hotel, recommended as the best equipped in the country. I think I never saw so large a hotel. It sprawled over a very large block in a heavy, impressive, smoky-stone way. It had, as I quickly discovered, an excellent Turkish and Russian bath in connection with it and five separate restaurants, German, French, English, etc., and an American bar. The most important travel life of Manchester centered here—that was obvious. I was told that buyers and sellers from all parts of the world congregated in this particular caravanserai. It was New Year’s day and the streets were comparatively empty, but the large, showy, heavily furnished breakfast-room was fairly well sprinkled with men whom I took to be cotton operatives. There was a great mill strike on at this time and here were gathered for conference representatives of all the principal interests involved. I was glad to see this, for I had always wondered what type of man it was that conducted the great manufacturing interests in England—particularly this one of cotton. The struggle was over the matter of the recognition of the unions and a slight raise in the wage-scale. These men were very much like a similar collection of wealthy manufacturers in the United States. Great industries seem to breed a certain type of mind and body. You can draw a mental picture of a certain keen, dressy, phlegmatic individual, not tall, not small, round, solid, ruddy—and have them all. These men were so comfortably solid, physically. They looked so content with themselves and the world, so firm and sure. Nearly all of them were between forty-five and sixty, cold, hard, quick-minded, alert. They differed radically from the typical Englishman of the South. It struck me at once that if England were to be kept commercially dominant it would be this type of man, not that of the South, who would keep it so.
And now I could understand from looking at these men why it was that the north of England was supposed to hate the south of England, and vice versa. I had sat at a dinner-table in Portland Place one evening and heard the question of the sectional feeling discussed. Why does it exist? was the question before the guests. Well, the south of England is intellectual, academic, historic, highly socialized. It is rich in military, governmental, ambassadorial and titled life. The very scenery is far more lovely. The culture of the people, because of the more generally distributed wealth, is so much better. In the north of England the poor are very poor and contentious. The men of wealth are not historically wealthy or titled. In many cases they are “hard greedy upstarts like the irrepressible Americans,” one speaker remarked. They have no real culture or refinement. They manage to buy their way in from time to time, it is true, but that does not really count. They are essentially raw and brutal. Looking at these men breakfasting quietly, I could understand it exactly. Their hard, direct efficiency would but poorly adjust itself to the soft speculative intellectuality of the south. Yet we know that types go hand in hand in any country with a claim to greatness.
After my breakfast I struck out to see what I could see of the city. I also took a car to Salford, and another train to Stockport in order to gather as quick a picture of the Manchester neighborhood as I could. What I saw was commonplace enough. All of the larger cities of present-day Europe are virtually of modern construction. Most of them have grown to their present great population in the last fifty years. Hence they have been virtually built—not rebuilt—in that time.
Salford, a part of Manchester, was nothing—great cotton and machine works and warehouses. Stockport was not anything either, save long lines of brick cottages one and two stories high and mills, mills, mills, mills. It always astounds me how life repeats itself—any idea in life such as a design for a house—over and over and over. These houses in Salford, Stockport and Manchester proper were such as you might see anywhere in Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore—in the cheap streets. I had the sense of being pursued by a deadly commonplace. It all looked as people do when they think very little, know very little, see very little, do very little. I expected to learn that the churches flourished here very greatly and that there was an enormous Sunday school somewhere about. There was—at Stockport—the largest in the world I was told, five thousand students attending. The thing that impressed me most was the presence of the wooden clog or shoe.
In Stockport there was a drab silence hanging over everything—the pathetic dullness of the laborer when he has nothing to do save the one thing he cannot do—think. As it was a Sunday the streets were largely empty and silent—a dreary, narrow-minded, probably religious, conventional world which accepts this blank drabness as natural, ordered, probably even necessary. To the west and the south and the east and the north are great worlds of strangeness and wonder—new lands, new people—but these folks can neither see nor hear. Here they are harnessed to cotton-mills, believing no doubt that God intended it to be so, working from youth to age without ever an inkling of the fascinating ramifications of life. It appalled me.
In some respects I think I never saw so dreary a world as manufacturing England. In saying this I do not wish to indicate that the working conditions are any worse than those which prevail in various American cities, such as Pittsburgh, and especially the minor cities like Lawrence and Fall River. But here was a dark workaday world, quite unfavored by climate, a country in which damp and fogs prevail for fully three-fourths of the year, and where a pall of smoke is always present. I remember reading a sign on one of the railway platforms which stated that owing to the prevalence of fogs the company could not be held responsible for the running of trains on time. I noticed too, that the smoke and damp were so thick everywhere that occasionally the trees on the roadside or the houses over the way would disappear in a lovely, Corot-like mist. Lamps were burning in all stores and office-buildings. Street cars carried head-lamps and dawned upon you out of a hazy gloom. Traffic disappeared in a thick blanket a half block away.