Author’s Note
MY first visit to the
United States of America — a short one—was paid in 1888. The
observations on which this book is mainly based were, however, made
in 1890-93, when I spent nearly three years in the country, engaged
in the preparation of “ Baedeker’s Handbook to the United States.”
My work led me into almost every State and Territory in the Union,
and brought me into direct contact with representatives of
practically every class. The book was almost wholly written in what
leisure I could find for it in 1895 and 1896. The foot-notes, added
on my third visit to the country (1898), while I was seeing the
chapters through the press, have at least this significance, that
they show how rapidly things change in the Land of Contrasts.
No part of the book has been previously published, except some ten
pages or so, which appeared in the Arena for July, 1892. Most of the
matter in this article has been incorporated in Chapter II. of the
present volume.
So far as the book has any general intention, my aim has been, while
not ignoring the defects of American civilisation, to dwell rather
on those features in which, as it seems to me, John Bull may learn
from Brother Jonathan. I certainly have not had so much trouble in
finding these features as seems to have been the case with many
other British critics of America. My sojourn in the United States
has been full of benefit and stimulus to myself; and I should like
to believe that my American readers will see that this book is
substantially a tribute of admiration and gratitude.
J. F. M.
Introductory
IT is not everyone’s business, nor would it be everyone’s pleasure,
to visit the United States of America. More, perhaps, than in any
other country that I know of will what the traveller finds there
depend on what he brings with him. Preconception will easily fatten
into a perfect mammoth of realisation; but the open mind will add
immeasurably to its gamer of interests and experiences. It may be “but a colourless crowd of barren life to the dilettante — a
poisonous field of clover to the cynic” (Martin Morris); but he to
whom man is more than art will easily find his account in a visit to
the American Republic. The man whose bent of mind is distinctly
conservative, to whom innovation always suggests a presumption of
deterioration, will probably be much more irritated than interested
by a peregrination of the Union. The Englishman who is wedded to his
own ideas, and whose conception of comfort and pleasure is bounded
by the way they do things at home, may be goaded almost to madness
by the gnat-stings of American readjustments — and all the more
because he cannot adopt the explanation that they are the natural
outcome of an alien blood and a foreign tongue. If he expects the
same servility from his “inferiors” that he has been accustomed to
at home, his relations with them will be a series of electric
shocks; nay, his very expectation of it will exasperate the American
and make him show his very worst side.
The stately English dame must let her amusement outweigh her
resentment if she is addressed as “grandma” by some genial railway
conductor of the West; she may feel assured that no impertinence is
intended.
The lover of scenery who expects to see a Jungfrau float into his
ken before he has lost sight of a Mte. Rosa 5 the architect who
expects to find the railway time-table punctuated at hourly
intervals by a venerable monument of his art; the connoisseur who
hopes to visit a Pitti Palace or a Dresden Picture Gallery in every
large city; the student who counts on finding almost every foot of
ground soaked with historic gore and every building hallowed by
immemorial association; the sociologist who looks for different
customs, costumes, and language at every stage of his journey; —
each and all of these will do well to refrain his foot from the soil
of the United States. On the other hand, the man who is interested
in the workings of civilisation under totally new conditions ; who
can make allowances, and quickly and easily readjust his mental
attitude; who has learned to let the new comforts of a new country
make up, temporarily at least, for the loss of the old; who finds
nothing alien to him that is human, and has a genuine love for
mankind; who can appreciate the growth of general comfort at the
expense of caste; who delights in promising experiments in politics,
sociology, and education; who is not thrown off his balance by the
shifting of the centre of gravity of honour and distinction; who, in
a word, is not congealed by conventionality, but is ready to accept
novelties on their merits, — he, unless I am very grievously
mistaken, will find compensations in the United States that will go
far to make up for Swiss Alp and Italian lake, for Gothic cathedral
and Palladian palace, for historic charters and time-honoured tombs,
for paintings by Raphael and statues by Phidias.
Perhaps, in the last analysis, our appreciation of America will
depend on whether we are optimistic or pessimistic in regard to the
great social problem which is formed of so many smaller problems. If
we think that the best we can do is to preserve what we have,
America will be but a series of disappointments. If, however, we
believe that man’s sympathies for others will grow deeper, that his
ingenuity will ultimately be equal to at least a partial solution of
the social question, we shall watch the seething of the American
crucible with intensest interest. The solution of the social
problem, speaking broadly, must imply that each man must in some
direction, simple or complex, work for his own livelihood. Equality
will always be a word for fools and doctrinaires to conjure with,
but those who believe in man’s sympathy for man must have faith
that some day relative human justice will be done, which will be as
far beyond the justice of to-day as light is from dark. And it
would be hard to say where we are to look for this consummation if notin the United States of America, which has been the home of the
poor and the eccentric from all parts of the world, and has carried
their poverty and passions on its stalwart young shoulders. We may
visit the United States, like M. Bourget, pour reprendre un peu
defoi dans le lendemain de civilisation.
The paragraph on a previous page is not meant to imply that the
United States are destitute of scenic, artistic, picturesque, and
historic interest. The worst I have some suspicion that this ought to be in quotation marks, but
cannot now trace the passage.that can be said of American
scenery is that its best points are separated by long intervals; the
best can hardly be put too strongly. Places like the Yosemite Valley
(of which Mr. Emerson said that it was the only scenery he ever saw
where “the reality came up to the brag”), the Yellowstone Park,
Niagara, and the stupendous Canon of the Colorado River amply make
good their worldwide reputation; but there are innumerable other
places less known in Europe, such as the primeval woods and
countless lakes of the Adirondacks, the softer beauties of the
Berkshire Hills, the Hudson (that grander American Rhine), the
Swiss-like White Mountains, the Catskills, the mystic Ocklawaha of
Florida, and the Black Mountains of Carolina that would amply repay
the easy trouble of an Atlantic passage under modern conditions. The
historic student, too, will find much that is worthy of his
attention, especially in the older Eastern States; and will,
perhaps, be surprised to realise how relative a term antiquity is.
In a short time he will find himself looking at an American building
of the seventeenth century with as much reverence as if it had been
a contemporary of the Plantagenets; and, indeed, if antiquity is to
be determined by change and development rather than by mere flight
of time, the two centuries of New York will hold their own with a
cycle of Cathay. It is, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked to the
present writer, like the different thermometrical scales; it does
not take very long to realise that twenty-five degrees of Reaumur
mean as great a heat as ninety degrees of Fahrenheit. Such a city as
Boston amply justifies its inclusion in a “Historic Towns” series,
along with London and Oxford; and it is by no means a singular
instance. Even the lover of art will not find America an absolute
Sahara. To say nothing of the many masterpieces of European painters
that have found a resting-place in America, where there is at least
one public picture gallery and several private ones of the first
class, the best efforts of American painters, and perhaps still more
those of American sculptors, are full of suggestion and charm; while
I cannot believe that the student of modern architecture will
anywhere find a more interesting field than among the enterprising
and original works of the American school of architecture.
This book will be grievously misunderstood if it is supposed to be
in any way an attempt to cover, even sketchily, the whole ground of
American civilisation, or to give anything like a coherent
appreciation of it. In the main it is merely a record of personal
impressions, a series of notes upon matters which happened to come
under my personal observation and to excite my personal interest.
Not only the conditions under which I visited the country, but also
my own disqualifications of taste and knowledge, have prevented me
from more than touching on countless topics, such as the phenomena
of politics, religion, commerce, and industry, which would naturally
find a place in any complete account of America. I have also tried
to avoid, so far as possible, describing well-known scenery, or in
other ways going over the tracks of my predecessors. The phenomena
of the United States are so momentous in themselves that the
observation of them from any new standpoint cannot be wholly
destitute of value; while they change so rapidly that he would be
unobservant indeed who could not find something new to chronicle.
It is important, also, to remember that the generalisations of this
book apply in very few cases to the whole extent of the United
States. I shall be quite contented if any one section of the country
thinks that I cannot mean it in such-and-such an assertion, provided
it allows that the cap fits some other portion of the great
community. As a rule, however, it may be assumed that unqualified
references to American civilisation relate to it as crystallised in
such older communities as New York or Philadelphia, not to the
fermenting process of life-in-the-making on the frontier.
In the comparisons between Great Britain and the United States I
have tried to oppose only those classes which substantially
correspond to each other. Thus, in contrasting the Lowell
manufacturer, the Hampshire squire, the Virginian planter, and the
Manchester man, it must not be forgotten that the first and the last
have many points of difference from the second and third which are
not due to their geographical position. Many of the instances on
which my remarks are based may undoubtedly be called extreme; but
even extreme cases are suggestive, if not exactly typical. There is
a breed of poultry in Japan, in which, by careful cultivation, the
tail-feathers of the cock sometimes reach a length of ten or even
fifteen feet. This is not precisely typical of the gallinaceous
species; but it is none the less a phenomenon which might be
mentioned in a comparison with the apteryx.
Finally, I ought perhaps to say, with Mr. E. A. Freeman, that I
sometimes find it almost impossible to believe that the whole nation
can be so good as the people who have been so good to me.
America The Land of
Contrasts
A Briton's View of his American Kin By James Fullarton Muirhead
(1898) (pdf)
