Reflections and Comments 1865 1895 by Edwin Lawrence Godkin

E >> Edwin Lawrence Godkin >> Reflections and Comments 1865 1895

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There is, however, still a good deal of intolerance about people's
mode of spending their vacation. Those who take it by simply sitting
still or lounging with no particular occupation, are more or less
worried by the people who take their rest actively and with much
movement and bustle. So also the young man who goes off fishing and
hunting, on the other hand, scorns the young man who hangs about the
hotels and plays lawn-tennis, or goes to picnics with the girls--a
rapidly diminishing class, let us add. A correspondent, who takes a
low view of sermons, wrote to us the other day complaining of some
mention which recently appeared in our columns of Mount Desert as a
good place for "tired clergymen," and wished to know what there was
to tire them, seeing that they did nothing but produce two essays a
week, which need not be very original. The truth is, however, that
everybody's occupation, including that of the young man who does
nothing at all, does a great deal to tire him. What probably tires a
minister most is not the sermons, but his parishioners; and we
suspect that nine-tenths of the ministers, if they made a clean
breast of it, would confess that rest to them meant getting away
from their parishioners, and not in getting away from the sermons.
Sermon-writing in our day, when the area over which a preacher may
select his subject is so greatly widened, is probably to a
reflective man a great help and relief, as furnishing what nearly
every student needs to stimulate study--a means of expression.
Sustained solitary thinking is something of which very few men are
capable. To keep up what is called active-mindedness nearly everyone
needs somebody to talk to. Conversation with a friend is enough for
most, but those who have more to say find a sermon or a magazine
article just the kind of intellectual stimulus they need. What
probably most wears on a clergyman's nerves are his pastoral duties,
which do not consist simply in consoling people in great trials, but
in listening to their fussy accounts of small ones. Nine-tenths of a
minister's patients, like a doctor's, do not know what is the matter
with them, and consult a physician largely because they take comfort
in talking to anybody about themselves, and doctors and clergymen
are the only persons who are bound to listen to them. A professor or
teacher is somewhat similarly situated. His business is the most
wearing of human occupations--that of putting knowledge into heads
only half willing to receive it, and persuading a large number of
people to do their duty to whom duty is odious.

To these men, a Summer School of philosophy or theology, or anything
else, must be repose of the best sort. It gives light work of the
kind they love, free from all nagging, and in good air and fine
scenery. At such schools, too, one finds uses for "papers" that no
periodical will print, and which no audience would assemble to
listen to in a city in the busy part of the year, and to many men an
audience of any sort, interested or uninterested, is a great luxury.

The persons who perhaps find it hardest to get rest in summer are
brokers. Their activity in their business and the excitement
attending it are so great, that quiet to them, more than to most
other men, is a hell; so that their vacation is a problem not easy
of solution, except to the rich ones, who have yachts and horses
without limit. Even to those, every day of a vacation has to be full
of movement and change. An hour not filled by some sort of activity,
spent on a piazza or under a tree, is to them an hour wasted. A land
where it was always afternoon would be to them the most "odious
section of country" on earth. The story of one of them, who in Rome
lost flesh through pining for "the corner of Wall and William," is
well known. Such a man finds nearly all summer resorts vanity and
vexation of spirit, because none of them provides excitement. The
class known as financiers, such as presidents of banks and insurance
companies, is much better off, because it has Saratoga. Its members
have generally reached the time of life when men love to sit still,
and when the liver is torpid, and they are generally men of means,
and wear black broadcloth at all seasons, as being what they have
from their youth considered outward and visible signs of
"respectability" in the financial sense. What they need is a place
where they can have their livers roused without exercise, and this
the mineral water does for them; where they can see a good deal
going on and many evidences of wealth, without moving from their
chairs; and where their financial standing will follow them; and for
this there is perhaps no place in the country like Saratoga. Newport
has not nearly as much solidity. It is brighter and gayer and more
select, but though it contains enormous fortunes, a great fortune
does not here do so much for a man. It has to bear the competition
of youth and beauty and polo and lawn-tennis. The young man with
little besides a polo pony, an imported racquet, and good looks
counts for a good deal at Newport; at Saratoga he would be nobody.

THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES

The London _Daily News_, in the course of an article on what it
calls "International Reproaches," refers to the fact that there is
much that is "traditional" in them. It thinks that, both in America
and in France, the qualities and peculiarities attributed to English
people are derived, to a great extent, less from experience than
from inherited tradition. "We hear that Englishmen are rude to ladies;
that they fail to yield them precedence at the ticket-offices of
steamboats and railway stations; that they complain of everything
that is given them as food; that they occupy more than their share of
public conveyances with multitudinous wraps, sticks, and umbrellas.
They assert themselves, it would seem, when they have placed 3,000
miles between themselves and their old home. There is, however,
in all these complaints the ring of old coin." In the same way it
says that the Parisian of the boulevards still believes the English
man to be a creature who wears long red whiskers of the mutton-chop
species, and wears a plaid--although, as a matter of fact,
the typical Englishman of to-day does not look like this at all.

Anyone interested in the matter might make a very queer collection
of types which, having disappeared from actual life, survive in the
popular imagination, and by surviving keep alive international
prejudice, hostility, suspicion, or distrust, and which go on doing
duty in this way for years and years, until suddenly some fine day
it is discovered that they are out of date and must in future be
dispensed with. There is, for instance, our old friend, the stage
Irishman. How often have our hearts been touched by the qualities of
gratitude, devotion to sentiment, faithful friendship, and heroism
of this noble creature. No doubt, there must have been a time when
he was as common in Ireland as he has been in our day in melodrama.
But the Irishman, as he exists in New York, and as he is described
by those who have seen him at home, is strangely unlike the type. He
is a decidedly practical, hard-headed man, with a keen eye to the
main chance, a considerable fondness for fighting, and a disposition
which we should call the reverse of sentimental. Harrigan and Hart
represent the actual Irishman in America capitally at their little
theatre in Broadway, yet the stage Irishman is to multitudes of
Americans a more real creature than the actual Irishman, and we
suppose there is hardly a Democratic statesman from one end of the
country to the other who has not constantly before his mind an image
of him, by the contemplation of which he solves many of the
knottiest problems of contemporary politics.

Then there is the Dundreary Englishman, first-cousin or lineal
descendant of the Englishman so dear to the French imagination.
Dundreary really represents, as we know very well, when we think
about it, a past type of swell as extinct as the dodo. It is not
common any longer for English swells to change all their rs to ws,
and to spice their sentences with "aw-aws." We have numbers of them
over here every year, but we do not hear them talk nowadays the once
familiar Dundreary language. Yet there is hardly a newspaper in the
United States whose funny man does not assume for the benefit of his
readers that Dundreary is alive, and every now and then reproduce
him with gusto. It is not in _Punch_ that we find Dundreary, but in
the funny department of the Oshkosh _Monitor_ and the "All Sorts"
column of the Bungtown _Clarion_. Even _Puck_ contributes to
perpetuate the belief in the continued existence of Dundreary by
devoting a column a week to observations on American society in the
Dundreary dialect, which thirty years ago might have been decidedly
funny.

_Punch_ still has John Bull as a national type; but it shows great
reserve in the use of him, and now continually resorts to Britannia
as a substitute. Is not this because our old friend John is now
only a survival, a tradition of the past? The bluff, stout, honest,
red-faced, irascible rural person--of whom the photographs of John
Bright remind us--has really been supplanted by a more modern,
thinner, nervous, intellectual, astute type. For English use the
Yankee type of Uncle Sam still seems to represent America, although
it belongs to the past as much as slavery or the stage-coach. He
would be a bold man who should undertake to say what the national
type is now; but it is safe to say that it is not a long, thin, cute
Yankee, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat with brass buttons,
whittling a stick, and interlarding his conversation with "I swan!"
and "I calc'late." If Mr. Lowell were writing the "Biglow Papers"
now, would "Uncle S." serve his purpose as he did during the war? By
a merciful dispensation of Providence, however, Brother Jonathan and
Uncle Sam still live on in the imaginations of large masses of
conservative Englishmen, and no doubt enable many a Tory to people
the United States with a race as alien from that which actually
inhabits it as Zulus would be.

In the same way it may be possible--to the Providence that guides
the destinies of nations nothing is impossible--that the rude
Englishman is, as the _Daily News_ suggests, getting to be a
survival. The _Daily News's_ portrait of him is fair enough,
though it would require Americans who have suffered from him to do
him real justice. He is, or, was, a very rude person, and always
seemed to take great delight in "asserting himself" in such a way as
to produce as much general annoyance and discomfort as possible.
During the war he had a brilliant career. He used to come over and
express great surprise at the silly fuss made about the Constitution
and secession, and profess an entire inability to discover what it
was "all about." If they want to go, he always said, why don't you
let 'em go? What is the use of fighting about the meaning of a word
in the dictionary? It was in small things as in great. When he went
into society he dressed to suit himself, and not as gentlemen in
England or anywhere else do, thus contriving to exhibit a general
contempt for his host and his friends. When his meek entertainer
ventured to offer him some American dish which he did not like, he
would frankly warn his companions against it; and if he asked for
sugar in his coffee he would, in the same outspoken way, explain
that he always sweetened it "when it was bad." One of his favorite
topics of conversation was the awful corruption and rottenness of
American society and politics, and he dwelt so much upon this that
it often seemed as if what he was really interested in was to find
out whether the people he was staying with, and being entertained
by, were not themselves, if the truth were known, rotten to the
core.

He was a very rude man, and he did exist. But is he gone, or going?
Is the time coming when we shall have to regard him too as a
survival, and admit that the rude Englishman is a creature of the
past? Time and continued international experience can alone settle
this question. There are, however, bitter memories of past
sufferings at his hands in hundreds of American homes, that make it
better for both countries not to probe the subject too deeply.

WILL WIMBLES

Mr. Thomas Hughes's attempt to provide a refuge in Tennessee for the
large class of young Englishmen whom he calls "Will Wimbles," after
one of Sir Roger de Coverley's friends in Addison's _Spectator_, is
said to be a failure, owing mainly to the poverty of the land and
the remoteness of the markets. An acute writer in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ maintains that there is another and more potent cause to be
found in the quality of the Will Wimbles. The Will Wimbles are the
young men who are educated in the public schools and universities,
or at least in the public schools, and are turned out into the world
between eighteen and twenty-one, without any special training
whatever, but with the manners and instincts of gentlemen, and with
entire willingness to take to any calling but the lower walks of
"trade." The great body of them are the sons of middle-class
parents--clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and small squires--whose means
are very moderate, and who have to submit to more or less privation
in order to send their sons to the public schools at all. They do it
in order to launch them in the world unmistakably in the gentle
class, and in order to enable them to form their first social
relations in that class. Unfortunately, however, as the writer in
the _Pall Mall Gazette_ points out, the tone and temper of the
public schools, and their way of looking at life, are the products
of a vague, but none the less powerful, assumption that every boy is
the son of a man with about five thousand pounds a year. The whole
atmosphere of the school is permeated with this assumption. The
boys' code of manners is formed in it. Their intercourse with each
other is more or less influenced by it, and they all look out on the
world, up to their last day at school, with the eyes of youths whose
home is a well-equipped manor-house surrounded by a prosperous
estate.

The love of the middle-class Englishman of every age for this point
of view is curiously exemplified in the social articles, not only in
the "society paper," properly so called, but in the _Saturday
Review_. The troubles and perplexities and minor disappointments
of life form a favorite topic with the writer of the "sub-leaders"
in this last-named paper, but they are always of the troubles,
perplexities, and disappointments of a landed gentleman who keeps
hunters, and has a stud groom and extensive covers. He hardly ever
examines the state of mind of anyone less well-to-do than a younger
son whose means only allow him to hunt two days in a week instead of
six, and who has to rely on invitations for his shooting. These and
their sisters, cousins, and aunts, apparently form the reviewer's
entire world, and the only world in which there are any social
phenomena worth discussion. It is, in other words, a world made up
exclusively of "gentlemen," and of the persons, male and female, who
wait upon them. Its sorrows are the sorrows of gentlemen, and arise
mostly out of the failure of some amusement, or the loss of the
money with which amusements are provided, the missing of some social
distinction, or the misconduct of "upper servants." It is, however,
really the only world that the English public-school boy or
university man sees, or hears of, or thinks about while in _statu
pupillari_. This is true, let his own home be never so modest, or
the sacrifices made by his father to secure him the fashionable
curriculum be never so painful. The result is, of course, that when
his "education" is finished, he is really only prepared for what is
technically called a gentleman's life. He has only thought of
certain employments as possible to him, and all these are
exceedingly hard to get. The manners of the great bulk of mankind,
too, are more or less repulsive to him, and so is a good deal of the
popular morality. In short, he is turned out a Will Wimble--or, in
other words, a good-hearted, kindly, gentlemanly, honorable fellow,
who is, however, entirely unfitted for the social _milieu_, in
which he must not only live, but make a living.

Mr. Hughes's idea has been that, though he dislikes trade, and is a
little too nice for it as now carried on, at least on the retail
side, he has an innate liking and readiness for agriculture, and
that, if enabled to till the soil under pleasant, or at least not
too novel, social conditions, he would do it successfully. Out of
this the Rugby, Tenn., experiment has grown, and if it has not
actually failed, as some say, it is certainly too early to pronounce
it a success. At all events, the signs that it is going to fail are
numerous. Among them is the deep disappointment of the settlers, few
of whom probably realized not only the monotony and drudgery of
labor in the fields--these things can be borne by men with stout
hearts and strong arms--but its effect in unfitting a man for any
kind of amusement. There has been much delusion on this subject in
this country, where far more is known by the reading class about all
kinds of manual labor than is known in England. The possibility of
working hard in the fields and keeping up at the same time some
process of intellectual culture, has been much preached among us
both by educational projectors and social reformers, though nearly
every man who listens to them here knows the effect of physical toil
in the open air in producing sleepiness and mental inertness. It is
not surprising, therefore, that it should find ready acceptance in
England among people who think ability to bear a hard day on the
moors after grouse, or a long run in the saddle after the hounds,
argues capacity to hoe potatoes or corn for twelve hours, and settle
down in the evening, after a bath and a good dinner, to Dante, or
Wallace, or Huxley.

Will Wimbles are much less common among us than in England. We
fortunately have not a dozen great endowments used in turning them
out, or a large and rich society occupied in spreading the
gentlemanly view of life. But they, nevertheless, are more numerous
than is altogether pleasant. The difficulty which our college
graduate experiences in getting room for what the newspapers call
his "bark" on the stream of life, is one of the standing jokes of
our light literature. We have no schools which take the place of the
English public schools in our scheme of education. But the view of
life which prevails in the English public schools and turns out the
Will Wimbles, is more or less prevalent in our colleges, and tends
to spread as the wealth of the class which sends its boys to college
increases. In other words, colleges are to a much greater extent
than they used to be places in which social relations are found,
rather than places of preparation for the active work of life. This
last character, indeed, they almost wholly lost when they ceased to
have the training of ministers as their main function. Scarcely any
man who can afford it now likes to refuse his son a college
education if the boy wants it; but probably not one boy in one
thousand can say, five years after graduating, that he has been
helped by his college education in making his start in life. It may
have been never so useful to him as a means of moral and
intellectual culture, but it has not helped to adapt him to the
environment in which he has to live and work; or, in other words, to
a world in which not one man in a thousand has either the manners or
cultivation of a gentleman, or changes his shirt more than once a
week, or eats with a fork.

College education is prevented from suffering as much from this
source in popular estimation in England as it does here, by the fact
that, owing to the peculiar political traditions of the country,
college-bred men begin life in a large number of cases in possession
of great advantages of other kinds, such as hereditary wealth. Here
they have almost all to face the world on their own merits, and in
so far as they face it feebly or unskilfully their defects are set
down in the popular mind to the fact that they went to college. If
the discredit ended here, it would perhaps be of small consequence.
But it may be safely said that the college graduate is never seen
groping about in a helpless and timid way for "a position," and
shrinking from the turmoil and dirt of some walks of life, without
spreading among the uncultivated a contempt for culture and
increasing their confidence in the rule of thumb. The mere "going to
college" is recognized as a sign of pecuniary ease, and of a desire
for social advancement, but not as preparation for the kind of work
which the bulk of the community is doing, and thus makes mental
culture seem less desirable, and cultivated men less potent,
especially in politics.

The question is a serious one for all colleges, and it is not here
only, but in England and France, that it is undergoing grave
consideration. In Germany society may be said to have been organized
as an appendage to the universities, but here the universities are
simply appendages to society, which is continually doubting whether
their existence can be justified.

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