Travels With Henry James Page 19

  “This admirable Edinburgh,” I said just now; and I must venture to emphasize the fresh approbation of a susceptible stranger. The night of my arrival here was a superb one; the full moon had possession of a cloudless sky. I saw, on my way from the station, that it was working wonders on some very remunerative material; so that after a very brief delay I came forth into the street, and presently wandered all over the place. There is no street in Europe more spectacular than Princes Street, where all the hotels stand in a row, looking off, across the long green gulf that divides the New Town from the Old, at the dark, rugged mass of the latter section. But on the evening of which I speak Princes Street was absolutely operatic. The radiant moon hung right above the Castle and the ancient houses that keep it company on its rocky pedestal, and painted them over with a thousand silvery, ghostly touches. They looked fantastic and ethereal, like the battlements of a magician’s palace. I had not gone many steps from my hotel before I encountered the big gothic monument to Scott, which rises on the edge of the terrace into which Princes Street practically resolves itself. Viewing it in the broad daylight of good taste, I am not sure that I greatly care for this architectural effort, which, as all the world knows, consists of a colossal canopy erected above a small seated image of the great romancer. It looks a little too much like a steeple without a church, or like a hat a great deal too big for the head it covers. But the other night, in the flattering moonlight, it presented itself in all respects so favorably that I found myself distinctly what the French call ému, and said to myself that it was a grand thing to have deserved so well of one’s native town that she should build a towering temple in one’s honor. Sir Walter’s great canopy is certainly an object which a member of the scribbling fraternity may contemplate with a sort of reflex complacency. I carried my reflex complacency—a rather awkward load—up the Calton Hill, whose queer jumble of monuments and colonnades looked really sublime in the luminous night, and then I descended into the valley and watched the low, black mass of Holyrood Palace sleeping in its lonely outlying corner, where Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat seemed rather to lose than to define themselves in the clarified dusk. The sight of all this really splendid picturesqueness suggested something that has occurred to me more than once since I have been in Scotland—the idea, namely, that if that fine quality of Scotch conceit which, if I mistake not, all the world recognizes, is, as I take it to be, the most robust thing of its kind in the world, the wonder after all is not great. I have said to myself during the last fortnight that if I were a Scotchman I too should be conceited, and that I should especially avail myself of this privilege if I were a native of Edinburgh. I should be proud of a great many things. I should be proud of belonging to a country whose capital is one of the most romantic and picturesque in Europe. I should be proud of Scott and Burns, of Wallace and Bruce, of Mary Stuart and John Knox, of the tremendously long list of Scotch battles and heroic deeds. I should brag about the purple of the heather and the colors of the moors, and I should borrow a confidence (which indeed I should be far from needing) from the bold, masculine beauty of my native mountains. Above all, I should take comfort in belonging to a country in which natural beauty and historical association are blended only less perfectly than they are blended in Italy and Greece; whose physiognomy is so intensely individual and homogeneous, and, as the artists say, has so much style.

  I am afraid, however, that I am sketching here a fancy picture of Scottish conceit; the chief characteristic of this great gift being its extreme independence—the fact that it is much more personal than national. An Englishman believes in England and a Frenchman in France, but a Scotchman believes in—a Scotchman. The acute Scotch intellect—the perfervidum ingenium—believes in itself. Of the frankness with which it can acknowledge national shortcomings I find an interesting example in a speech which Principal Shairp, of St. Andrew’s, who was lately the successful candidate for the chair of Poetry at Oxford, has just had occasion to deliver at Edinburgh. The main subject of his remarks was the existing defects in some portions of the present Scotch educational system; but before he had done he devoted some observations to a cognate topic—the tone of Scotch manners. These he described as rather rough and rude, dry and wanting in urbanity; and he attributed the defect to the influence of those two principles which he declared to be paramount on this side of the Tweed—sectarianism and the love of money. “Mr. Matthew Arnold had spoken of the uncivilizedness of Glasgow. That was strong language; but he dared not deny it when he remembered what he himself had seen in walking down the High Street of Glasgow on a Saturday night—a spectacle of human hideousness of which, he believed, no other civilized country could produce a parallel.” Among various remedies for this state of things Principal Shairp, as befits a professor of poetry, recommends the perusal of the great bards and the cultivation of music. I am afraid the poets and singers would quite lose their way in Glasgow High Street. It is not for a visitor who has received none but delightful impressions to pretend to agree with Principal Shairp; but there is nothing invidious in saying that an American coming into Scotland after a residence in England cannot fail to be struck with the democratic tone of the common people. They address you as from equal to equal, they are not in the least cap-in-hand, and they are frugal—almost miserly—in the use of the “sir.” This is as good a basis of good manners as any other, though of course one can’t answer for it when Principal Shairp’s “sectarianism” comes in. But I have really no business even to quote such expressions. I have encountered in Scotland but a single sect—the sect whose religion is hospitality.

  II. SEPTEMBER 30, 1878

  There are two things in England in regard to which I think it safe to say that a stranger, however familiar he may become with English life, remains always a stranger—always uninitiated, profane, and even more or less indifferent. One of these matters is—with all respect be it written—the internal dissensions and perplexities of the Anglican Church. This remarkable body strikes the pure outsider so much more as a social than as a religious institution that he feels inclined to say to himself that these are purely local and national mysteries, and that, so far as he is concerned, they may be left to take care of themselves. The other point is the great British passion for sport—the deepest and most general of all British passions. This, in England, is the touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. A person from another country may have a lively enjoyment of riding, shooting, rowing; but in face of the tremendous cohesiveness of the sporting interest in England he feels that to care for such things as these people do, one must be to the manner born. It will seem to him at times that they care too much, and he will, perhaps, embark upon that interesting line of enquiry, at what particular point the love of physical exercise becomes stultifying. It behooves him to remember, however, that there is one particular way in which the sporting interest in England is humanizing. It is the subject on which the greatest number of Englishmen, at a given moment, can feel together; it is the thing which, as M. Thiers said of the French Republic, divides them least. It serves as a bond of union, as a patch of common ground, in a country extraordinarily cut up by social distinctions; it introduces the leaven of democracy into the most aristocratically constituted society in the world. On the receipt of the latest intelligence from Newmarket a “cad” may feel very much like a lord; I won’t, indeed, go so far as to say that a lord may feel like a cad.

  What I intended especially to say was that a fortnight spent in Scotland is to the alien mind a kind of revelation of the part allotted to physical recreation in a well-arranged English life. It is very true that I am unable to add that in this particular case the democratic bearings of the fact are noticeable. Scotland, for the late summer and autumn, becomes an immense “shooting.” It is excellently arranged for the purpose, and its purple moors and heathery hillsides resolve themselves into the last luxury of a supremely luxurious class. This is the real identity of the various elements of the beautiful Scottish scenery. The uninitiated
eye sees nothing but a lovely purple mountain or a blushing moor, adorned with the advantages of aerial perspective. But in its essential and individual character such a piece of landscape is Mr. So-and-So’s deer-forest (a deer-forest by no means implies trees) or Lord Such-a-One’s provision of grouse. There is something very singular in the part played by Scotland nowadays—the small number of proprietors of the territory, the immense extent of the estates, and the fact that these exist almost wholly for purposes of recreation. I spoke the other day of a Scotchman’s just grounds for national pride; but it is fair to add that just here this tendency might perhaps encounter an obstacle. It seems to me that if I were a fervid Caledonian I should find something irritating, and even mortifying, in the sight of my beautiful little country parcelled out, on so immense a scale, into playgrounds for English millionaires. Was it for this that my ancestors bled with Wallace or flocked about Bruce? Doubtless, however, this is an idle line of speculation, for the moors and hillsides are apparently better for playgrounds than for anything else, and if the Sassenach has money to pay for them it is hard to see how he is to be prevented. In the south of Scotland (in Dumfriesshire) a friend with whom I was walking led me up to a hilltop and showed me a remarkable view. The country seemed of immense extent—it consisted of innumerable grassy sheepdowns—and the blue horizon looked ever so far away. The afternoon light was slanting over the long undulations and dying away in the distance; the whole region looked like a little kingdom. “It’s all the Duke’s,” said my friend—“this, twenty miles away, and ever so much besides.” In every Scotch or English county there is a personage known as “the Duke” par excellence. This fortunate mortal, in the present case, was the Duke of Buccleuch, upon whose remarkable merits as a landlord my companion proceeded to expatiate. What I saw of the Duke’s kingdom seemed an admirable grazing country: but elsewhere my observation was confined to picturesque expanses of rock-scattered heath. Even if they were keeping a superior sort of exploitation at bay, it would be hard, from their own point of view, to blame the deer-stalking and grouse-shooting gentry. I speak not even from the point of view of a sportsman, but simply from that of an unarmed promenader stepping across the elastic heather on a brilliant September morning. On such an occasion the admirable freshness of the Scotch air, the glory of the light and color, the absence from the landscape of economical suggestions, appear to be equal parts of one’s entertainment.

  This absence of economical suggestions does not in the least mean, however, that the happy residents on a Scotch moor are obliged to rough it. The English, who arrange their lives everywhere so well, arrange them nowhere better than in Scotland. It is indeed, in many cases, simply Mayfair among the heather. From the point of view of a purely Wordsworthian love of nature, a shooting-lodge with ball-room may appear an anomaly; but I encountered this phenomenon in the midst of a Scotch deer-forest. The ball-room, too, was in full operation, and the national dance—the Highland reel—in course of performance. The ladies and gentlemen engaged in this choregraphic revel were by no means all, or even preponderantly, native—a fact which may account for the vivacity of their movements, inasmuch as we know that proselytes are always more violent than the natural heirs of a tradition. Apart, however, from its suggesting that the Highland kilt is an odd sort of garment for ceremonial purposes and the sanctity of the English after-dinner period, the Scotch reel, with its leapings and hootings, its liftings of the leg and brandishings of the arm, is a very pretty country-house frolic. A stranger, looking for local color in everything, finds a great deal of it here; and he pays a compliment, moreover, to the muscular resources and good spirits of those young Englishmen who can dance till three o’clock in the morning after tramping over the moors all day with a gun. Like a good many other things, the reel has doubtless suffered by the conversion of the Highlanders into an adjunct of Piccadilly. Among the things that have suffered, I believe, are the old Highland sports, from which it was intimated to me that the good faith and the ancient cunning had departed. Though it was further intimated to me that one must be a deplorable cockney to be still taken in by them. I ventured to find a great deal of entertainment in what I saw of them. There was certainly one occasion with which it was impossible not to be charmed, including as it did a capital collation under a graceful marquee, not at all crowded, on the edge of a great green meadow that was circled about with hills. Through the front of the tent, largely looped up, one saw the bright-colored little crowd sitting about on the grass, and in the midst, on a platform, a series of Highlanders, one by one, with their great tartans flying, jumping about in the figures of the sword-dance. And then there were leaping and tugging and hurdle-racing and a little tournament of bag-pipes. The lively drone of this instrument came in from the distance with the summer breeze; far away, as an undertone to agreeable talk, it was not unpleasant. I was annoyed at being told the Highlanders were “cads”; and indeed, on a nearer view, they had a rather jaded and histrionic look. But if the play was a comedy, it was a very successful one.

  There are some other old Scottish institutions which have retained their vitality and are apparently in very good repair. The Caledonian “Sawbath,” I believe, still flourishes, and I am told that in Edinburgh and Aberdeen it may be observed in high perfection. I had a glimpse of it, only in the country, where it was mitigated by the charming scenery, which remained persistently and profanely bright. But it was very ugly; it was grotesquely ugly. There was a horrible little kirk on a windy hillside equally naked without and within—except, indeed, as regards such internal warmth as was supplied by the deportment of a rustic congregation listening in almost voracious silence and immobility to a doctrine addressed to violent theological appetites. My host had recommended me to attend this service (which was an excellent example of grim Presbyterianism) for local color’s sake; and certainly the little exhibition was very complete. The strange compound produced in the sermon by the profusion of Jewish names and of Scotch accents; the air of doctrinal vigilance on the part of the cautious, dry-faced auditory; the crude, nasal singing; the rapid dispersal afterwards, over the stony hillsides to their rugged little cottages, of a congregation for which this occasion represented the imaginative side of life, as if the native granite had given it out and had immediately reabsorbed it—all this had at least a character of its own.

  Old Scotland survives, however, fortunately, in more graceful forms than this. There is one advantage which European life will long have over American—the opportunity that it affords for going to picnic in the shadow of ancient castles. Given one of those Franco-Scottish fortified dwellings which sprang up so thickly under the influence of that long union between Scotland and France which was produced by their having an enemy in common; given, moreover, one of those admirable English lunch-hampers which, as it exposes its ingenious receptacles to view, the passing stranger pauses to admire in the shop-windows of Piccadilly; given in connection with this instrument a British butler’s punctual performance of familiar duties; given, finally, a stretch of greensward, a group of bushes, a peeping above them of grey old towers and battlements, a charming company, and you have the elements of one of the most agreeable episodes of a sojourn beyond the Tweed. Some of the old foreign-looking Scotch castles are admirable; there are very few of them that would not seem very much more in their proper place in France or Germany than in Scotland. The Scotch nobility, before the son of Mary Stuart came to the English throne, must have been intensely Gallicized; the taste for French forms is visible in every detail of their domestic architecture. The old poivrière—the “pepper-pot” turret—is almost universal, and the very material of the edifice is Continental. In England it is a very rare thing to find an old manor-house covered with stucco or untimbered plaster; it is almost invariably of honest brick or stone. There is plenty of stucco in English street-architecture, but our own ingenious period must have the credit of it. In Scotland it abounds on the tall sides of the old domiciliary fortresses. One of these interesting monuments s
truck me as more than French—it was absolutely Italian. On its roof, in the midst of its gables and turrets, it had a couple of balustraded loggias, such as you see in very old Italian villas; and the resemblance was carried out by the large, windowless expanses of grey, rugged, sunbaked plaster on the walls. There is something decidedly Continental, too, in the older portions of the Scotch towns. I except the granitic Aberdeen and the industrial Glasgow; but nothing is less recognizably British than the high-piled, unconventional Edinburgh. The other evening, at Stirling, taking a stroll at hazard, I encountered a porte-cochére.

  THE LONDON THEATRES

  May 24, 1879

  Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, ca. 1813.

  MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, IN HIS VOLUME OF “MIXED Essays,” lately published, in speaking somewhere of some of the less creditable features of English civilization, alludes to the British theatre as “probably the most contemptible in Europe.” The judgment is a harsh one, but he would be a bold man who, looking round him at the condition of the London stage at the present moment, should attempt to gainsay it. I have lately made a point of gathering such impressions on the subject as were easily obtainable, and a brief record of them may not be without interest. The first impression one receives in England on turning one’s attention at all in this direction, is that a very large number of people are doing the same. The theatre just now is the fashion, just as “art” is the fashion and just as literature is not. The English stage has probably never been so bad as it is at present, and at the same time there probably has never been so much care about it. It sometimes seems to an observer of English customs that this interest in histrionic matters almost reaches the proportions of a mania. It pervades society—it breaks down barriers. If you go to an evening party, nothing is more probable than that all of a sudden a young lady or a young gentleman will jump up and strike an attitude and begin to recite a poem or a speech. Every pretext for this sort of exhibition is ardently cultivated, and the London world is apparently filled with stage-struck young persons whose relatives are holding them back from a dramatic career by the skirts of their garments. Plays and actors are perpetually talked about, private theatricals are incessant, and members of the dramatic profession are “received” without restriction. They appear in society, and the people of society appear on the stage; it is as if the great gate which formerly divided the theatre from the world had been lifted off its hinges. There is, at any rate, such a passing to and fro as has never before been known; the stage has become amateurish and society has become professional. There are various explanations of this state of things, of which I am far from expressing disapproval; I mention it only because, superficially, it might seem that the theatre would have drawn strength from this large development of public favor. It is part of a great general change which has come over English manners—of the confusion of many things which forty years ago were kept very distinct. The world is being steadily democratized and vulgarized, and literature and art give their testimony to the fact. The fact is better for the world perhaps, but I question greatly whether it is better for art and literature; and therefore it is that I was careful to say just now that it is only superficially that one might expect to see the stage elevated by becoming what is called the fashion. They are in the truth of the matter very much more in France. In France, too, the democratizing, vulgarizing movement, the confusion of kinds, is sufficiently perceptible; but the stage has still, and will probably long have, the good fortune of not becoming the fashion. It is something at once more and less than the fashion, and something more respectable and permanent, and a part of the national life. It is a need, a constant habit, enjoying no fluctuations of credit. The French esteem the theatre too much to take rash liberties with it, and they have a wholesome dread, very natural in an artistic people, of abusing the source of their highest pleasure. Recitations, readings, private theatricals, public experiments by amateurs who have fallen in love with the footlights, are very much less common in France than in England, and of course still less common in the United States. Another fact that helps these diversions to flourish in England is the immense size of society, the prevalence of country life, the existence of an enormous class of people who have nothing in the world to do. The famous “leisure class,” which is the envy and admiration of so many good Americans, has certainly invented a great many expedients for getting through the time; but there still remains for this interesting section of the human race a considerable danger of being bored, and it is to escape this danger that many of the victims of leisure take refuge in playing at histrionics.