VII. FROM MARCELLUS COCKEREL, IN WASHINGTON, TO MRS. COOLER, NEE
COCKEREL, AT OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
October 25.
I ought to have written to you long before this, for I have had your
last excellent letter for four months in my hands. The first half
of that time I was still in Europe; the last I have spent on my
native soil. I think, therefore, my silence is owing to the fact
that over there I was too miserable to write, and that here I have
been too happy. I got back the 1st of September--you will have seen
it in the papers. Delightful country, where one sees everything in
the papers--the big, familiar, vulgar, good-natured, delightful
papers, none of which has any reputation to keep up for anything but
getting the news! I really think that has had as much to do as
anything else with my satisfaction at getting home--the difference
in what they call the "tone of the press." In Europe it's too
dreary--the sapience, the solemnity, the false respectability, the
verbosity, the long disquisitions on superannuated subjects. Here
the newspapers are like the railroad trains, which carry everything
that comes to the station, and have only the religion of
punctuality. As a woman, however, you probably detest them; you
think they are (the great word) vulgar. I admitted it just now, and
I am very happy to have an early opportunity to announce to you that
that idea has quite ceased to have any terrors for me. There are
some conceptions to which the female mind can never rise. Vulgarity
is a stupid, superficial, question-begging accusation, which has
become today the easiest refuge of mediocrity. Better than anything
else, it saves people the trouble of thinking, and anything which
does that, succeeds. You must know that in these last three years
in Europe I have become terribly vulgar myself; that's one service
my travels have rendered me. By three years in Europe I mean three
years in foreign parts altogether, for I spent several months of
that time in Japan, India, and the rest of the East. Do you
remember when you bade me good-bye in San Francisco, the night
before I embarked for Yokohama? You foretold that I should take
such a fancy to foreign life that America would never see me more,
and that if YOU should wish to see me (an event you were good enough
to regard as possible), you would have to make a rendezvous in Paris
or in Rome. I think we made one (which you never kept), but I shall
never make another for those cities. It was in Paris, however, that
I got your letter; I remember the moment as well as if it were (to
my honour) much more recent. You must know that, among many places
I dislike, Paris carries the palm. I am bored to death there; it's
the home of every humbug. The life is full of that false comfort
which is worse than discomfort, and the small, fat, irritable
people, give me the shivers. I had been making these reflections
even more devoutly than usual one very tiresome evening toward the
beginning of last summer, when, as I re-entered my hotel at ten
o'clock, the little reptile of a portress handed me your gracious
lines. I was in a villainous humour. I had been having an over-
dressed dinner in a stuffy restaurant, and had gone from there to a
suffocating theatre, where, by way of amusement, I saw a play in
which blood and lies were the least of the horrors. The theatres
over there are insupportable; the atmosphere is pestilential.
People sit with their elbows in your sides; they squeeze past you
every half-hour. It was one of my bad moments; I have a great many
in Europe. The conventional perfunctory play, all in falsetto,
which I seemed to have seen a thousand times; the horrible faces of
the people; the pushing, bullying ouvreuse, with her false
politeness, and her real rapacity, drove me out of the place at the
end of an hour; and, as it was too early to go home, I sat down
before a cafe on the Boulevard, where they served me a glass of
sour, watery beer. There on the Boulevard, in the summer night,
life itself was even uglier than the play, and it wouldn't do for me
to tell you what I saw. Besides, I was sick of the Boulevard, with
its eternal grimace, and the deadly sameness of the article de
Paris, which pretends to be so various--the shop-windows a
wilderness of rubbish, and the passers-by a procession of manikins.
Suddenly it came over me that I was supposed to be amusing myself--
my face was a yard long--and that you probably at that moment were
saying to your husband: "He stays away so long! What a good time
he must be having!" The idea was the first thing that had made me
smile for a month; I got up and walked home, reflecting, as I went,
that I was "seeing Europe," and that, after all, one MUST see
Europe. It was because I had been convinced of this that I came
out, and it is because the operation has been brought to a close
that I have been so happy for the last eight weeks. I was very
conscientious about it, and, though your letter that night made me
abominably homesick, I held out to the end, knowing it to be once
for all. I sha'n't trouble Europe again; I shall see America for
the rest of my days. My long delay has had the advantage that now,
at least, I can give you my impressions--I don't mean of Europe;
impressions of Europe are easy to get--but of this country, as it
strikes the re-instated exile. Very likely you'll think them queer;
but keep my letter, and twenty years hence they will be quite
commonplace. They won't even be vulgar. It was very deliberate, my
going round the world. I knew that one ought to see for one's self,
and that I should have eternity, so to speak, to rest. I travelled
energetically; I went everywhere and saw everything; took as many
letters as possible, and made as many acquaintances. In short, I
held my nose to the grindstone. The upshot of it all is that I have
got rid of a superstition. We have so many, that one the less--
perhaps the biggest of all--makes a real difference in one's
comfort. The superstition in question--of course you have it--is
that there is no salvation but through Europe. Our salvation is
here, if we have eyes to see it, and the salvation of Europe into
the bargain; that is, if Europe is to be saved, which I rather
doubt. Of course you'll call me a bird of freedom, a braggart, a
waver of the stars and stripes; but I'm in the delightful position
of not minding in the least what any one calls me. I haven't a
mission; I don't want to preach; I have simply arrived at a state of
mind; I have got Europe off my back. You have no idea how it
simplifies things, and how jolly it makes me feel. Now I can live;
now I can talk. If we wretched Americans could only say once for
all, "Oh, Europe be hanged!" we should attend much better to our
proper business. We have simply to live our life, and the rest will
look after itself. You will probably inquire what it is that I like
better over here, and I will answer that it's simply--life.
Disagreeables for disagreeables, I prefer our own. The way I have
been bored and bullied in foreign parts, and the way I have had to
say I found it pleasant! For a good while this appeared to be a
sort of congenital obligation, but one fine day it occurred to me
that there was no obligation at all, and that it would ease me
immensely to admit to myself that (for me, at least) all those
things had no importance. I mean the things they rub into you in
Europe; the tiresome international topics, the petty politics, the
stupid social customs, the baby-house scenery. The vastness and
freshness of this American world, the great scale and great pace of
our development, the good sense and good nature of the people,
console me for there being no cathedrals and no Titians. I hear
nothing about Prince Bismarck and Gambetta, about the Emperor
William and the Czar of Russia, about Lord Beaconsfield and the
Prince of Wales. I used to get so tired of their Mumbo-Jumbo of a
Bismarck, of his secrets and surprises, his mysterious intentions
and oracular words. They revile us for our party politics; but what
are all the European jealousies and rivalries, their armaments and
their wars, their rapacities and their mutual lies, but the
intensity of the spirit of party? what question, what interest, what
idea, what need of mankind, is involved in any of these things?
Their big, pompous armies, drawn up in great silly rows, their gold
lace, their salaams, their hierarchies, seem a pastime for children;
there's a sense of humour and of reality over here that laughs at
all that. Yes, we are nearer the reality--we are nearer what they
will all have to come to. The questions of the future are social
questions, which the Bismarcks and Beaconsfields are very much
afraid to see settled; and the sight of a row of supercilious
potentates holding their peoples like their personal property, and
bristling all over, to make a mutual impression, with feathers and
sabres, strikes us as a mixture of the grotesque and the abominable.
What do we care for the mutual impressions of potentates who amuse
themselves with sitting on people? Those things are their own
affair, and they ought to be shut up in a dark room to have it out
together. Once one feels, over here, that the great questions of
the future are social questions, that a mighty tide is sweeping the
world to democracy, and that this country is the biggest stage on
which the drama can be enacted, the fashionable European topics seem
petty and parochial. They talk about things that we have settled
ages ago, and the solemnity with which they propound to you their
little domestic embarrassments makes a heavy draft on one's good
nature. In England they were talking about the Hares and Rabbits
Bill, about the extension of the County Franchise, about the
Dissenters' Burials, about the Deceased Wife's Sister, about the
abolition of the House of Lords, about heaven knows what ridiculous
little measure for the propping-up of their ridiculous little
country. And they call US provincial! It is hard to sit and look
respectable while people discuss the utility of the House of Lords,
and the beauty of a State Church, and it's only in a dowdy musty
civilisation that you'll find them doing such things. The lightness
and clearness of the social air, that's the great relief in these
parts. The gentility of bishops, the propriety of parsons, even the
impressiveness of a restored cathedral, give less of a charm to life
than that. I used to be furious with the bishops and parsons, with
the humbuggery of the whole affair, which every one was conscious
of, but which people agreed not to expose, because they would be
compromised all round. The convenience of life over here, the quick
and simple arrangements, the absence of the spirit of routine, are a
blessed change from the stupid stiffness with which I struggled for
two long years. There were people with swords and cockades, who
used to order me about; for the simplest operation of life I had to
kootoo to some bloated official. When it was a question of my doing
a little differently from others, the bloated official gasped as if
I had given him a blow on the stomach; he needed to take a week to
think of it. On the other hand, it's impossible to take an American
by surprise; he is ashamed to confess that he has not the wit to do
a thing that another man has had the wit to think of. Besides being
as good as his neighbour, he must therefore be as clever--which is
an affliction only to people who are afraid he may be cleverer. If
this general efficiency and spontaneity of the people--the union of
the sense of freedom with the love of knowledge--isn't the very
essence of a high civilisation, I don't know what a high
civilisation is. I felt this greater ease on my first railroad
journey--felt the blessing of sitting in a train where I could move
about, where I could stretch my legs, and come and go, where I had a
seat and a window to myself, where there were chairs, and tables,
and food, and drink. The villainous little boxes on the European
trains, in which you are stuck down in a corner, with doubled-up
knees, opposite to a row of people--often most offensive types, who
stare at you for ten hours on end--these were part of my two years'
ordeal. The large free way of doing things here is everywhere a
pleasure. In London, at my hotel, they used to come to me on
Saturday to make me order my Sunday's dinner, and when I asked for a
sheet of paper, they put it into the bill. The meagreness, the
stinginess, the perpetual expectation of a sixpence, used to
exasperate me. Of course, I saw a great many people who were
pleasant; but as I am writing to you, and not to one of them, I may
say that they were dreadfully apt to be dull. The imagination among
the people I see here is more flexible; and then they have the
advantage of a larger horizon. It's not bounded on the north by the
British aristocracy, and on the south by the scrutin de liste. (I
mix up the countries a little, but they are not worth the keeping
apart.) The absence of little conventional measurements, of little
cut-and-dried judgments, is an immense refreshment. We are more
analytic, more discriminating, more familiar with realities. As for
manners, there are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad
manners organised. (I don't mean that they may not be polite among
themselves, but they are rude to every one else.) The sight of all
these growing millions simply minding their business, is impressive
to me,--more so than all the gilt buttons and padded chests of the
Old World; and there is a certain powerful type of "practical"
American (you'll find him chiefly in the West) who doesn't brag as I
do (I'm not practical), but who quietly feels that he has the Future
in his vitals--a type that strikes me more than any I met in your
favourite countries. Of course you'll come back to the cathedrals
and Titians, but there's a thought that helps one to do without
them--the thought that though there's an immense deal of plainness,
there's little misery, little squalor, little degradation. There is
no regular wife-beating class, and there are none of the stultified
peasants of whom it takes so many to make a European noble. The
people here are more conscious of things; they invent, they act,
they answer for themselves; they are not (I speak of social matters)
tied up by authority and precedent. We shall have all the Titians
by and by, and we shall move over a few cathedrals. You had better
stay here if you want to have the best. Of course, I am a roaring
Yankee; but you'll call me that if I say the least, so I may as well
take my ease, and say the most. Washington's a most entertaining
place; and here at least, at the seat of government, one isn't
overgoverned. In fact, there's no government at all to speak of; it
seems too good to be true. The first day I was here I went to the
Capitol, and it took me ever so long to figure to myself that I had
as good a right there as any one else--that the whole magnificent
pile (it IS magnificent, by the way) was in fact my own. In Europe
one doesn't rise to such conceptions, and my spirit had been broken
in Europe. The doors were gaping wide--I walked all about; there
were no door-keepers, no officers, nor flunkeys--not even a
policeman to be seen. It seemed strange not to see a uniform, if
only as a patch of colour. But this isn't government by livery.
The absence of these things is odd at first; you seem to miss
something, to fancy the machine has stopped. It hasn't, though; it
only works without fire and smoke. At the end of three days this
simple negative impression--the fact is, that there are no soldiers
nor spies, nothing but plain black coats--begins to affect the
imagination, becomes vivid, majestic, symbolic. It ends by being
more impressive than the biggest review I saw in Germany. Of
course, I'm a roaring Yankee; but one has to take a big brush to
copy a big model. The future is here, of course; but it isn't only
that--the present is here as well. You will complain that I don't
give you any personal news; but I am more modest for myself than for
my country. I spent a month in New York, and while I was there I
saw a good deal of a rather interesting girl who came over with me
in the steamer, and whom for a day or two I thought I should like to
marry. But I shouldn't. She has been spoiled by Europe!
