"Full of men and newspapers, the former carrying the latter. There were sixty-five travellers. When I went in, every place seemed full, and no one stirred. I had a right to my place, for which I had paid beforehand. The conductor addressed a few words to one of the occupants of a bench intended for four persons, but which was then occupied but by three. The traveller continued to read, and paid not the least attention to what was said to him. Second appeal, same insensibility. Then the conductor pushed him. He yielded to this third and energetic summons, but without raising his head from his newspaper, and as if he had been displaced by a jolt of the carriage. This passenger was the only one who wore gloves. One must see this nation to form an idea of its manners. Here a man lets himself be pushed, elbowed, hustled, and suffers his toes to be trodden upon, without wincing; what is still more astonishing, he sees people lean upon his wife before his eyes, and endures all these insults with stoical tranquillity—the contrary would appear absurd or ridiculous.... During the journey, my neighbour thought proper to rest his back against my shoulder. I gently told him of it. He took no heed, and preserved his position—not with any impertinent intention, but because he found himself comfortable. At sight of this, my young companion, a Spaniard by blood, a Frenchman by education, turned red and pale alternately; his lips were compressed, his eyes flashed. I was frightened; but suddenly, assuming an air of calmness, he extended his hands, placed them on the back of my boorish neighbour, and pushed him quietly into his place.
'If I had put myself in a passion with him,' he afterwards said to me, 'he would never have understood why.'
'And you would have been wrong,' added Mr W—n; 'how can one be angry with people who would think it quite natural that you should behave in the same way to their wives and daughters?'"
It is not surprising that Mr Taylor, at his age, and in his superficial glance at the United States, should have overlooked a point of American character which particularly strikes M. Marmier, the poet and dilettante, and Madame de Merlin, the high-bred and intellectual woman. This is, the general sacrifice, to the positively and materially useful, of those pursuits and refinements which are the grace, and embellishment of human existence. The neglect of the fine arts, the absence of feeling for the beautiful, are there the result of the ardour for speculation and the all-absorbing pursuit of dollars.
"The artist," says Madame de Merlin, "is assimilated to the artisan, and art is measured by the yard, like merchandise. They do not cultivate music or painting, or even flowers. Do you wish to inhale the perfume of a flower? you must buy it at a high price: it is an article of trade, and only to be found at the nurseryman's. I am not aware of a single picture in the United States, unless it be in the Pantheon, where several memorable epochs of the American Revolution are rudely represented upon some old panels of wall. In this country, all that is beautiful is forbidden: the beautiful is not useful. The grace of the human form, music, poetry, painting, flowers, are blessings vouchsafed by Providence to man to soften the bitterness of his days of mourning, to alleviate the burthen of his chains; they are gleams of joy amidst long years of struggle, brilliant flashes through the gloom of night; they are the luxury of human life."
Less elegant and eloquent than Madame de Merlin, M. Marmier resumes in greater detail, but with equal force, nearly the same idea:—
"The Americans may say to me, 'We are not a polite people it is true; we seek not to be affable or attentive, it must be owned; and the foreigner who comes amongst us may well be shocked by our coldness. But if we disdain, as frivolous, the elegant habits of European society, we have an audacity of enterprise, and a rapidity of action, which must astonish Europe. To start from the spot where we now are (on the Hudson.) In less than forty years, we have covered this desert river with steamers and vessels of every kind, we have cleared and peopled its banks, converted its hamlets into flourishing cities, dug harbours and canals, laid down railroads, given life, movement, and commercial prosperity to the whole district. Before us is Albany, which, in the seventeenth century, was a mere fort, and which now has a population of forty-two thousand souls; and down yonder is the commercial metropolis of New York, the first in the world after Liverpool. Nothing equals the spring of our activity and the boldness of our conceptions. Things that you in France take years to combine, and which you lengthily discuss in the tribune and the newspapers, we accomplish in a turn of the hand. In a couple of months we shall establish a line of steamers to Havre, and another to England. Already we have similar communication with Germany by the port of Bremen, with the Antilles and the Pacific Ocean. Not a corner of the globe is there where our flag does not wave. How many projects have there not been elaborated in your old Europe for cutting through the Isthmus of Panama? England and France sent thither their engineers, who published long reports—reports which were examined by councils of ministers, submitted to commissions, and finally shelved in public offices. At New York, two or three merchants formed an association, which decided, in two or three days, that the Isthmus of Panama should be crossed by a railroad. No sooner said than done. Already the workmen are on the ground; another year, and the United States' steam-engine will connect the two oceans.'
I recognise," says M. Marmier, "the justice of such reasoning, and I bow my head before this power of human genius applied to the wonders of industry. But, O worthy Yankees, Scripture says that 'man shall not live by bread alone,'—the heart and the mind have other requirements. Unless our mind be absorbed in the movements of a high-pressure steam-engine, and our heart changed into a bank-note, there will always remain to us pleasing reveries, thoughts of art and poetry, the enjoyments of social life and of expansive affections, which all the efforts of your courage and the success of your toil can never replace."
Appositely to Madame de Merlin's slighting mention of the pictures of Revolutionary scenes, comes in a passage from M. Marmier's first volume, relating to the Americans' exaggerated estimate of their military glories.
"At Plattsburg, situated where the Saranac enters Lake Champlain, there is a chance that the American, who has passed whole hours without heeding you, and who has hitherto received your advances like a dog in a bad humour, will suddenly embellish his metallic physiognomy with a jovial smile, and approach you with a complaisant air. For he longs to tell you of the victory gained near this town by the Americans, in the year 1814, commanded by Commodore Macdonough, over the English troops; and he narrates the story with so many details, and such an emphasis, that you at last wish he would relapse into his habitual silence.
The Americans, like the Russians, have a national pride surpassing all expression. They cannot, like the Russians, talk of their old traditions; nor have they, like them, ancient monuments of a venerable character, and modern ones of grand aspect. They have not, like the soldiers of Suwarrow and Alexander, conquered a valiant reputation upon the chief battle-fields of Europe. Neither have they the literature of Russia, so artless in its popular poetry, so original in the compositions of Pushkin and Gogol. But little do they care what exists in other countries. They have the happiness to believe all other nations very inferior to them, and all the imagination that the perpetual use of figures has left them is agreeably employed in raising the airy edifice of their glory. Their least success is an event which must occupy the thoughts of the whole world. A battle in which they have taken a banner And slain thirty men is a second Marengo. The name of their General Scott is to be transmitted to posterity with the same lustre as that of Alexander or Cæsar; and not a soldier who served in the war against Mexico but is a Napoleon on a small scale. When they talk of their country and of its progress, the ordinary vocabulary is too weak for their enthusiasm. They are fain to seek extraordinary epithets, words which the learned Johnson never admitted into his dictionary. They remind me of the Italian cicerone who exclaimed, when showing a picture of Albano to a traveller, 'Ah, Signor! questo è un maestro, e un grande pittore, e un pittorissimo!'
I accordingly heard, from one end to the other, the story of the battle of Plattsburg, after which my officious American, satisfied probably with my attention, made me a bow—a rare circumstance! I even believe—a still rarer event—that he made a motion as if to raise his hand to his hat. Then, having no other Homeric epic to narrate, he took himself off, and left me opposite to the shores of the Champlain, at liberty to indulge in meditation."
Thus left to his reflections, M. Marmier grows pathetic—as is not unfrequently the case with him—and feels his heart oppressed with an unspeakable sadness, and gives us a French prose version of some German verses by Tieck, which he might just as well have omitted, as also some gossip about the moon and other analogous matters, which merely serves to swell his book, and will inevitably be passed unread by every sane reader. However, we must take the gentleman as we find him, and sift, as well as we can, the wheat from the chaff, when the latter occasionally predominates. Presently he relapses from the pathetic into the sarcastic, on occasion of a visit to the Legislative Assembly of the United States, which reminded him a good deal of that of France. There were certain points of difference, however. "The American deputies, he says, chewed tobacco very agreeably, and spat with remarkable dexterity to a distance of fifteen paces,"—through a keyhole at that distance, we have heard it asserted, but do not guarantee the fact. Even Mr Taylor but imperfectly conceals his disgust at the "antique vases, vulgarly called spittoons," placed beside the desk of each member of Congress. From the senate-house to the President's levee is but a step. It is taken by M. Marmier under the guidance and protection of a lady, to do honour to whose introduction he put on, he tells us, his whitest cravat and his blackest coat. But soon he perceived that this garb of ceremony formed a striking contrast with the motley costumes that thronged the White House at Washington. Frocks of every colour were there, and vests of every cut, but of coats very few.
"There was no servant at the door or in the antechamber. We walked at once into the saloon, where the President was on his legs, fulfilling the arduous duty imposed upon him, without respect for his age and for the dignity of his military services, by the arrogant republic. My amiable conductress advanced towards him. He held out his hand and said, 'How do you do?' She named me, he turned towards me, holding out his hand, and saying 'How do you do?' A crowd of visitors came up; he shook hands with them all, repeating 'How do you do?' These amiable salutations bidding fair to be indefinitely prolonged, my charming introductress thought I had enough of it, and took me up to the President's daughter, who welcomed me with the never-failing 'How do you do?' After which we went to walk about another saloon with a crowd of individuals who were parading it in pairs in silent procession; women, such as exist nowhere but in Henri Monnier's comedies, and men to whom you would fear to grant admittance into your anteroom. For opening his marble palace once a-week to this plebeian crowd, for courteously saluting all these ladies who keep stalls, for shaking hands with some hundreds of unclean citizens, the republic gives its President only one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs a year. It is poor pay!"
The pittance certainly appears paltry, contrasted with the more ample allowance of a French president; but the two cases will hardly admit of a comparison, nor does M. Marmier draw one. There is evidently very little of the republican in his composition; we should rather take him for one of the class which M. Louis Blanc's followers designate, in picturesque abbreviation, as aristos; and indeed he makes no secret of his aversion to what he terms demagoguery—a word which is probably not to be found either in Boyer or Walker, but which some of our ballad-writing friends may possibly think no bad rhyme to roguery.