A FRENCHMAN'S |MPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND By PAUL GOURMAND ºnes a week Subscription. - - - a -- A FRENCHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND *** By PAUL GOURMAND Office of ſºublication: Rooms 2128-29-30-31, Park Row Building A FRENCHMAN’S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND." Hardly does one come in sight of the coasts of Great Brit- ain before one perceives a total change in the aspect of the country and the life of the inhabitants. Yet some miles of sea seem to the traveller a very short distance to produce so characteristic a difference of manners and customs; and never- theless it strikes you everywhere, not as a superficial im- pression which is effaced as fast as one learns to know the population and its habits, but as an indubitable fact which must be admitted. It is no longer the blithe shore of France with its pretty and picturesque notches, its precipitous rocks, on whose summits are perched here and there lighthouses and white cottages, all bathed in sunshine and rosy vapors; the coasts of England are sad and stern, mangled and tortured by the ceaseless surge of the waves, enveloped in sombre fogs which drape the chalky ledges as with a veil of crape: here and there appear broad greenish spots of scanty turf, lighted at intervals by the reflections of a wan and dismal sun; and sometimes, on the scarped crest of some mass of granite, through the blackened embrasures of mediaeval fortresses, opens the steel throat of a cannon beside which, impassive and rigid, a sentinel in a long gray overcoat is keeping watch. . . . But, if the shore of England forms a strange contrast to that of France, the interior of the country falls no way short * Originally printed in “La Plume,” Paris, February 1, 1900. 3 4. A FRIENCHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND - of it. . . . On each side of the triple and often quadruple track that leads to London are spread out numerous villages, all alike, built of red brick, and dominated by the Gothic steeples of ten churches of ten different persuasions. . . . It is very rare to make the trip to London without having your compartment invaded by a disdainful clergyman, followed by expressionless young girls who are always thin and stiff as wax figures, or without meeting at some intermediate station a homely, affected woman handing out biblical pamphlets, who reaches you her tract with the most gracious smile of a large mouth adorned with long teeth. . . . Soon the atmosphere. thickens, the sun is hidden, the trains cross and recross with frightful rapidity on the line bordered with the tall chimneys of innumerable factories, which darken the sky with torrents of black smoke: it is London, the enormous city buried under a canopy of fog, and in which the immense movement of mill- ions of passers-by and thousands of carriages and horses go- ing this way and that is accomplished with that calmness and order which are so remarkable in our neighbors. . . . Ah! the London streets, they alone are worth a jour- ney! . . . In the middle of the roadway, on a pile of straw when it is damp, the gigantic policeman, respected by all the world, even by the hackmen and truckmen, regulates the move- ment of the vehicles and the pedestrians; with a sign of his hand he makes men and beasts advance, draw back, or stop, so that accidents are much rarer than in Paris. And it is really a strange spectacle for one newly arrived in the capital,— that of this man dressed in dark blue, gloved with cotton in A FRIENCHMAN'S IMPREssions OF ENGLAND 5 summer and wool in winter, alone in the midst of an indescrib- able movement, commanding, arranging, regulating, without opening his mouth, without noise, without dispute, and having for arm of defence only a short and rather thick stick. . . . When I set foot for the first time in this great shop of the world, I had a deep feeling of sadness mixed with ad- miration and inexpressible regret. . . . It seemed to me that I had changed lives and planets. In the midst of this almost silent crowd, whose conversation is carried on in the tone of a bird’s murmur, I felt myself more lost than an explorer in the deserts of Africa; habituated to the exquisite politeness and the open and engaging manners of the Latin peoples, I felt like one superfluous among these Anglo-Saxons, vulgar and material, destitute—the majority of them—of artistic sense and delicate tastes. I afterward recognized that my first opinions were not all justified; but it is impressions that I am describing, and I give them as I felt them and for what they are worth. Deafened by the cries of a hundred street boys selling papers, barefooted, dirty and in rags, with lively and intelligent eyes, but also, often, with vicious and bestial faces, -stupefied by the rapid circulation of that busy crowd which runs almost automatically to such a place at such an hour of the day, -I could easily have thought myself in an immense stock exchange at the moment of closing. And then there were always those long, interminable streets between two rows of tall houses, peppered with advertising signs and un- sightly posters, with their brick walls º undecided color and their windows arranged to slide up and down. Here and 6 A FRIENCHMAN’S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND there, at the corner of some building painted in loud colors, one reads in great gold letters, “Pale Ale, Stout, Whiskey'; and the odor of bad grain-spirit reaches you in fetid puffs, while the eye stops to rest on these anthropoids of both sexes cowering against the walls of the dram-shops, spectres in whose puffy red faces is revealed the last degree of moral degradation and of physical decay. In all the Anglo-Saxon cities which it has been my lot to pass through during twelve years, I have always had a qualm at the stomach in perceiv- ing the abject brutalization of the working classes. Neither the Latins or the Teutons, or even the Slavs, though very backward, present so heart-rending a spectacle of low igno- rance and gross animality. The French peasant is, in gen- eral, a perfect model of a being in human form living only by instinct; but the salutary influence of the full sunlight, the vigorous perfumes of the trees, the scent of the ripe wheat, counterbalance to a certain point the intellectual abasement of the individual. Avaricious and narrow, he lives bent over the ground like the oxen that draw his plough, but his life is use- ful, and one can clasp his hand without disgust. The Italian peasant, like the Spanish husbandman, has the lofty pride of a great lord; the laborer in the city or the fields, be he Ger- man, Latin, or Slav, is endowed with the passion for economy, and possesses a fund of natural politeness which readers ap- proach to him supportable, unless he belongs to the lowest strata of society, hotbeds of assassins and thieves; only the Anglo-Saxon displays to us this absolute corruption, this total lack of self-respect, among the members of his laboring class. A FRENCHMAN's IMPREssions of ENGLAND 7 All nations, all cities, have their social ulcers and their gal- lows-quarters; but nowhere, I affirm boldly, does one encoun- ter such degradation as among the Anglo-Saxon masses. . . If you doubt it, go to New York, to Chicago, to Manchester, to Birmingham; place yourself some Saturday evening near a bar in a plebeian neighborhood, and count the drunkards, men and women, whom you will see going in and out till the hour for shutting up; observe those ragged couples whose greasy clothes smell of the den; see them led home to their sordid and squalid dwellings by little children whose food they have been drinking up, poor creatures barely covered with a dirty shirt and a rag of skirt or trousers, shivering with cold and hunger, whom their wretched parents continue to bring into the world without disturbing themselves as to how the nine or fif- teen unfortunates who compose their . . . family? . . . shall get the hard morsel of black bread which will help them to drag themselves to the common ditch. When you re-enter our great cities of Europe, you will then understand why the temperance party and the crusades of the Salvation Army re- ceive, in England as well as in the United States, the support of all purses and of all honorable influences. A Scotchman, a friend of mine, a man of the world, of high intelligence and an observing character, whose attention I called to this ter- rible state of things, which constitutes an increasing danger for England, answered me: “ This class exists only here, they are cannibals” (sic). I should add, to be just, that Wales and Scotland form a happy contrast to the picture I have been sketching: there economy reigns; labor, and the prosperity 8 A FRIENCHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND which is its result, begeta race as robust and intelligent as it is moral and honest; suum cuique. Before terminating these notes on the vices of the Anglo-Saxon proletariat, and that I may not have to come back to the point again in the course of these studies, it is necessary to say some words on the possible causes of such degradation. Public instruction is flourishing, and, as we shall have occasion to see later, constitutes one of the forces of the British empire; and yet the most sordid ig- norance reigns generally among the people; it is because the Anglo-Saxons, like their neighbors, have thought of instruction while neglecting education, and the grain, falling on an ill- cleared ground, could not germinate. On the other hand, the preponderance that athletic sports have among the Anglo-Saxon races (a preponderance which at first produced excellent results, but which is now degenerating into a real passion) has contributed not a little to turn minds away from the artistic spectacles which elevate souls and open to them the doors of the ideal. Whether you are in a rail- way compartment or in an omnibus, you hear only sporty con- versations: the intelligence of the entire people, from the lord to the navvy, seems concentrated on two fixed ideas, -money and sport. Finally, the stage, where the grossest personifica- tions of the lowest melodramas are flaunted, offers to the famished brain of the obtuse masses the necessary purely animal sensation which alone is still able to stir it. . . . Such a social state must necessarily bring a nation to the lowest grade of the artistic and intellectual scale. Panem et cir- censes! that is its rallying-cry. A FRIENCHMAN’S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND 9 But has nothing been done to palliate these influences? Al- most nothing . . . The bigoted Anglo-Saxon, bowed beneath the yoke of a minister often illiterate and almost always nar- row and short-sighted, has not been able to soar above preju- dice and biblical form even to a partial conception of the great truths of science and hyper-science; a mercantile and practical man, turned toward the earth to wrest its gold from it, he has not understood that the aesthetic education of man is necessary to the prosperity of a people, and that the indi- vidual is led to the practice of the good only by the concep- tion of the beautiful. So the philanthropists across the chan- nel, far from developing the latent artistic sense of their fel- low-countrymen, have tried to subject them to the moral law by austere respect for a disagreeable and morose virtue. When the observer passes through this crowd, keen after gain and greedy for preaching, it seems to him that he sees march past, as if in the twilight of a dream, the gloomy spectres of those Ironsides and Roundheads, wearing long dark cloaks and broad-brimmed hats, whose shades, called up by their chief, Cromwell, hover over the sad climate of old England. Those times are already distant; but under the Gothic arches of the old edifices, unfortunately almost all built in the same style, flung up toward the sky and covering with merry sculp- tures the deep, low vaults of immense cathedrals and castles, one hears revived the past of this great people, which mounted higher in glory with Elizabeth than it ever will mount again; for to-day, disdainful of what made the greatness of its an- cestors, it bows before the golden calf, henceforth its only 10 A FRIENCHMAN’S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND master and its only idol, though it often dissembles its rapac- ity, its thirst for millions, under the cover of religious prose- lytism. How many times it has been my lot, while dreaming under the high ogives of palaces hardly lighted by the light from beyond that filters through the narrow panes, how many times it has been my lot to see the great dead of British earth pass again with slow steps. . . . The souls of Shakspere and Milton seem still to fill these ancient edifices with their giant breath, while down by the blue waves one hears thundering the haughty and sublime imprecations of that last bard who called himself Byron during his raging course through life. . . . When, after one of these mute conversations with these awesome geniuses, one re-enters the atmosphere, poisoned by stock-jobbing, of present-day English life, one cannot help asking himself how a race that soared so high in the realms of the sublime can now creep so low in the prosiness of the wholesale and retail shopkeeper. For England, like the United States (and the latter are yet pardonable, for they have no past), is to-day a vast bazaar during six days of the week, and a vast preaching-place on the seventh. In all their municipalities, all their cities, they live that uniform, insignificant, and empty life whose supreme end is the ac- quisition of fortune, and whose monotony is varied only by the reading of a sporting paper and the hearing of a sermon preached by a pedant on a symbolic text whose sublime depth his narrow brain cannot sound . . . they are there in their little red brick houses, like snails in their shells, thinking A FRENCHMAN's IMPREssions of ENGLAND 11 that man is on earth to amass wealth and play cricket, and that their eternal salvation is assured by their weekly exhibi- tion of their estimable persons at church. . . . Poor ninnies! who, shut into the circumscribed compass of your utilitarian ideas, look with sovereign contempt on other peoples, among whom thought rumbles, raising the mighty billow of creative revolutions; poor ninnies who, with feet on the andirons, pipe in mouth and newspaper in hand, believe yourselves the kings and sole masters of the earth; do you then think in your little- ness that you have accomplished the task which the destinies had assigned you, you who with your native phlegm revolve in the narrow circle that you have traced for yourselves? . . . Ah, how sad is the soul that thinks, when it has understood that all the aspirations of this nation, destined perhaps to be- come the first in the world, are summed up in the inane word business! What a regret cramps the artist’s heart when he casts his eyes over those dreamy landscapes of the north, hardly touched with rose by their pale summer sun, and per- ceives at the bottom of some shady Yorkshire valley a tuft of black smoke making a spot on the freshness of the foliage. . . . On the summit of those mountains of Scotland, on the banks of those calm lakes that seem to be azure sheets im- mobilized forever, you feel the middle ages revive; and, when the bagpipe of a solitary shepherd strikes your ear, playing some old war-song, you instinctively rise to see if Wallace’s clans or the faithful adherents of the Stuarts are not issuing, claymore in hand, from some ancient oak forest. 12 A FRIENCHMAN’S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND How beautiful it was, this nature in its sad and savage dream- aspect, before the gold-seekers overwhelmed it with their in- dustry and changed the bonny lasses of Scotland, free in the fresh air of their mountains, into slaves of the furnace and the spinning trade! The Englishmen—and there are such– who deplore the incessant progress of this mercantile and venal spirit which reduces everything to a cost price; for which speculative science has value only so far as it can be transformed into a profitable application; which estimates the worth of a man by the fatness of his money-bag,-the Eng- lishmen, I say, who think with Ruskin that the ultra-utili- tarian tendencies of their race will little by little stifle in it all generous aspirations, all efforts toward the ideal, will be grateful to me for pointing out the danger to them. . . . Will- iam Morris, the great humanitarian poet, who died, alas! too soon for his fatherland, had understood the danger well, since he had throughout his life striven to bring to birth among the laboring masses the feeling of the beautiful, occupying himself with their aesthetic education; but the men of finance, specula- tion, and sport, laughed at the dreamer who dared awake the sleeping ideal in an age of steam, electricity, and monopoly, and the dreamer went elsewhere to seek his “Earthly Para- dise.” Deaf to his threats as well as to his prayers, the Anglo Saxon race has continued to move on in its downward course, greedy and rapacious, rounding out ceaselessly its gi- gantic empire, hiding the conqueror's sword under the mantle of philanthropy, by which some simple minds have let them- A FRIENCHMAN’S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND 13 selves be caught; and they still go on, these pseudo-puritans, grasping in their talons every acre of land available for some financial adventure, Bible in one hand and gin-bottle in the other; they go on cornering the world in the name of a Christ whom they insult without knowing it, by the practice of a bigoted and ignorant religion which Christ, that sweet-tem- pered, laughing reformer, never preached; they go on to satisfy their insatiable thirst for riches. They move forward in thicker and thicker darkness as their wallet swells and their domains widen more and more, bent over toward the earth which shall open to swallow them up into the chill of intellec- tual death. In vain does the still uncertain dawn of ideal-jus- tice whiten behind them, in vain do they meet on their road the scouts of the future, torch in hand, painfully guiding the tottering steps of humanity toward the distant light; they go on till the day when a lightning-flash of blood shall shine dis- mally in their night, and when the roll of the thunder shall wake the proletarian mass brutalized under their feet, which then shall rise, savage and cruel, to devour them. When the storm breaks out around them, when the immense billow of accumulated hatreds and unsated vices rises foaming to sub- merge them, they will understand too late that their enormous wealth, their vast colonies, this empire of which they were so proud, this arrogant superiority over all other nations that they affect, —all, in a word, that made up their power and their glory, -was only a shadow that the breath of the tempest dissipates to reveal to them the hideous reality! . . . It is 14 A FRIENCHMAN’S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND time for men to wrestle, in England and in the United States, against this error which from day to day takes on more and more the appearance of reality, to wit, that man is born to trade and coin money. - The utilitarian spirit certainly should not be completely smothered, but it must be counterbalanced by causing lofty aspirations to spring up alongside it; the aesthetic faculties must be cultivated, and compensate by their development the materialism of facts. Far from me be the thought of dis- paraging manufacturers and tradesmen; they are necessary to the general prosperity, and I have the honor of knowing some who succeed in joining with their high commercial capacity the most artistic tastes. Have we not in France a number of leading provincial reviews, whose directors are either chiefs or employees of commerce? But what we must at any price avoid is the production of a material generation, for which time is money, and money the end of human life. . I am unhappily compelled to testify that such a generation exists in England; that its education prepares it with an ex- clusive view to the store or the factory; and that the result of such an aberration of judgment is already making itself cruelly felt. Will there be a reaction? Never among the Anglo-Saxons at least, so long as their religious views remain as narrow as they are, and so long as they fail to understand that behind the apparently gross form of the sacred books is hidden a deep sense that opens to the thinker all the splendors of the beautiful, the true, and the good. Will they ever free themselves from their prejudices? I doubt it, for their busi- A FRIENCHMAN’S IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND 15 ness will not leave them time for it, and the voice of philoso- phers will not be heard in the midst of the rolling of trucks and the tinkling of gold. As to the press, which ought to en- lighten the masses, it is almost always infeudated to a relig- 1Ous party." For the moment, then, sad to say, the escutcheon of the Anglo-Saxons might well be a money-bag resting on a Bible, between two race-horses.