The main reason for the difference in tone between the American saloon and the English public-house is that the latter is hallowed by the familiar presence of women. In England the male bartender is practically unknown, and drinks are served almost universally by bar-maids. It is part of the inalienable birthright of women that they can always set the social tone of any business that they engage in, and without effort can compel the men with whom they come in contact to ascend or to descend to meet them on the level they have set. In New York, for instance, the same man who is flippant with the manicure-lady is respectful to the woman usher in the opera-house: instinctively, and without conscious consideration, he meets any business-woman in the mood that she expects of him. To the women and not to the men is it granted to control the tone of any association between the sexes: bad women can debase a business, good women can uplift it, whereas the men with whom they are engaged would of themselves be powerless to lower or to elevate its tone. The way in which stenographers and shop-girls are treated depends on the stenographers and shop-girls much more than on the men with whom their occupation throws them. This, as everybody knows, is a law of human nature. In England, custom has, for many generations, decreed that women shall control the tone of social drinking in the public bars; and it must be registered to the credit of the host of honorable women who have served as bar-maids that the tone of public drinking in England has been lifted to a level that has not been attained in any other country.
Of English bars and bar-maids I think that I may speak with a certain authority. In the course of four visits to England during the last decade, I have traveled over nearly all the country; I have slept in every county in England except two, and wandered from town to town with an insatiable interest; and since I care more about people than about any other feature of the panoramic world, I have rarely in my rambles let slip an opportunity to pass an evening in a public-house and listen to the chat. To attempt a similar experience in America would be to discard it with disgust after three or four wasted evenings; but in the bars of England there is nearly always someone who is worthy to repay the task of seeking.
Of English bar-maids as a class I may say with certainty that they are almost uniformly chaste and—in the literal sense of that reverent adjective—respectable. Most of them are mature women,—the average age, I should say, being rather above thirty than below it; many of them are married; they have seen much of men and know how to keep all sorts and conditions in their proper places and in the proper mood. Yet they exercise this high command without any affectation of austerity. They are easily affable and pleasantly familiar with all who come. Many of them are endowed with a genuine and contagious jollity,—a merriment that is not assumed but which has arisen naturally from continuous converse with men of many humors. Their business introduces them to all the world; you step in from the street and know them; they talk with you frankly from the start, without any preliminary dodges and retreatings: and yet no one abuses their easy familiarity. They are addressed with deference as "Miss"; and the casual loiterer from the street takes leave of them as if he were saying good-evening to a hostess. In my entire experience of English bars—setting aside only a few in the tragic East End of London—I have never heard an obscene story told, and I have never heard the name of God taken in vain. The conversation is necessarily refined, out of respect for the women who stand within hearing. Furthermore, because the bars are tended by women, there is an accepted rule in every public-house of any standing that no drink shall ever be served to any customer who is at all intoxicated. A drunkard who would resent a refusal from a man accepts it without rudeness from a girl; and the result of this system is that (barring the slums, for whose degradation alcohol is not alone responsible) you can ramble from one end of England to the other without finding a drunken person in a single bar.
But you will notice at once a tragic change if you cross the border into Scotland. In Scotland, bars are tended by men, as in America; and their social tone is immeasurably lower than that which is maintained in England. They are noisy and riotous; the common conversation is heavily underscored with profanities and obscenities; and drunkenness is so prevalent as to seem an habitual detail. Of course, other causes than the absence of bar-maids contribute to the foulness of the Scottish public-houses. The austere and irksome law which makes it impossible to buy a drink after ten o'clock on any week-day evening and shuts up every bar in the country throughout the whole of the unbearable Scottish Sunday leads, naturally, to excessive and sodden drinking. It is tragic, on a Saturday evening in Edinburgh or Glasgow, to watch the hampered laborer and tradesman swilling liquor against the ticking of the clock in a rash attempt to swallow enough before the terminal hour of ten to carry them through the intolerable Sabbath. This is a dark picture, for which the fanatical austerity of the Scottish law must, in the main, be held responsible. It would be impossible to imagine English bar-maids in such a setting; and yet one cannot help wondering whether they might not alleviate that sodden atmosphere if they could be introduced in Scotland.
And similarly, one wonders what would happen if we should introduce them in America. The tone of our saloons is now prevailingly so low that it seems likely that if bar-maids were employed sporadically here and there they would be met with insults and be obliged either to resign or else to debase themselves. To our shame it must be said that, as a nation, we do not know how to treat women when we encounter them suddenly in what is to us an unaccustomed situation. The English, because they are many centuries older than we are, evince a traditional respect for women of all classes and in all circumstances that to us is not native and instinctive. The waitresses in our cheap restaurants are usually vulgar and we treat them vulgarly. It would doubtless take us a long time to educate ourselves up to bar-maids of the English type; but if we could successfully adopt the English custom, we should go far toward solving the problem of the American saloon, and should relegate the question of prohibition to the lumber-room of issues that are dead.
Thus far I have spoken only of the ordinary run of English bar-maids,—the affable and wholesome type that you may encounter everywhere. But those who linger in the memory are the exceptional among them, who have made the bar-rooms over which they have presided memorable among the really worthy places which one has discovered in the world. The English bar-maid of the better class creates an atmosphere of hospitable homeliness—in the historic sense of that sweetly connotative word—which is a boon to everyone who comes within its influence. You have arrived in a certain city after dark, a stranger in a strange environment; you have wandered about the moon-silvered solitude of the hushed cathedral close, wondering at a majesty half glimpsed and half imagined; you have mingled with the chattering multitude in the market-place, profoundly lonely among many who knew and cared about each other; and at last, in a hospitable bar-room, you meet without formality a woman who is glad to talk with you and who mystically, for an easy half an hour, makes you feel at home. How much of good may subtly be effected by a system that makes the homeless feel at home I leave the reader to imagine. Surely whatever soothes away the loneliness of the lonely may serve as a specific against the darker moods and a preventive of vice and even crime.
To the untraveled American, who knows only the saloons of his own country, it may seem incredible that a common bar-room should ever feel like home. But there is a passage in Ruskin which poetically explains this possibility. In his second lecture in "Sesame and Lilies," he has been saying that a true woman, wherever she goes, carries with her the sense of home; and he adds, with a fine poetic flourish:—
The stars only may be over her head; the glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless.
Even if Ruskin in this passage, as all too often in his writings, may be accused of an excess of sentiment [one wonders, for instance, if he has ever actually slept upon "the night-cold grass" and arisen without rheumatism to write eloquent prose about it], we may yet discern beneath his ecstasy of phrasing the existence of a solid and indisputable truth. Merely to meet a woman who personifies the sense of homeliness is to feel yourself at home.
And this comfortable sense of homeliness you may find in many an English bar-maid. If you wish to investigate upon your own account, you might try Bolland's Restaurant in Chester, or the Yates Wine Cellar in Manchester, or the Nelson in Gloucester, or the Crown in Salisbury, or—but I am not writing a guide-book to the bars of England, and, besides, every traveler is likely to fare best if he is left to his own devices. Of all the English bar-maids I have known, one (as is but natural) recurs preeminent in my recollections. I think that I shall tell you her name, because so many poems echo in it; but I shall not tell you more precisely where she may be found than to say that she is one of many who serve drinks in the bar of one of the great hotels that are clustered near Trafalgar Square. I think it was I who discovered Eileen; but I introduced her very soon to several of my friends in London, and thereafter (forsaking the clubs to which we had formerly reverted for a talk and a night-cap after the theatre) we formed a habit of gathering at midnight to meet Eileen and to chat amicably within the range of her most hospitable smile until the bar closed at half past twelve. Assuredly, in that alien metropolis, she made us feel at home; and we escaped out of the cacophonous reverberation of the Strand into the quietude of her presence like men who relax to slippered ease within the halo of a hearth. "She had a weary little way with her that made you think of quiet, intimate things,"—as one of us said at the outset of one of the many sonnets she inspired. There is a sweet weariness that reminds you of lullabying mothers and the drooping eyelids of little children drifting into dreams; and this was, I think, the essence of her. Her voice was like the soothing of a cool hand upon a tired brow. She was very simple in her dark dress and dark hair; and there was something maiden-motherly in her smile. You saw her most clearly when her frank eyes looked directly at you and deepened with a gleam of gentleness, and her lips parted tenderly to answer to the light within her eyes. Her hand, when she gave it to you in good-night, was like a memory of her voice; it had the same softness as of a whisper, it suggested the same sense of insuperable peace. I grew to know her very well, and could tell you her history if I would,—how she was brought up in the country, one of many children; how, when her sisters married and she did not (because the men who came were none of them the right one), she had to earn her living and began as a bar-maid in a railway station in the Midlands; how she came up to London and grew to be (though this she won't admit) a light in her particular occupation; of the long hours and the scanty leisure of her labor; of the compensation in the occasional people who come in and make an hour live with talk that is illumined and sincere, and in the occasional half-holiday rambles with a married sister over Hampstead Heath; of what is worth while in such a life and what is not; and of how it is that the eyes, though weary, can still sincerely smile with that glow as of a fireside, and the voice will evermore grow gentler through the years.