IT was one evening shortly after I had lunched with Mrs. W. that Barfleur and I dined with Miss E., the young actress who had come over on the steamer with us. It was interesting to find her in her own rather smart London quarters surrounded by maid and cook, and with male figures of the usual ornamental sort in the immediate background. One of them was a ruddy, handsome, slightly corpulent French count of manners the pink of perfection. He looked for all the world like the French counts introduced into American musical comedy,—just the right type of collar about his neck, the perfect shoe, the close-fitting, well-tailored suit, the mustachios and hair barbered to the last touch. He was charming, too, in his easy, gracious aloofness, saying only the few things that would be of momentary interest and pressing nothing.
Miss E. had prepared an appetizing luncheon. She had managed to collect a group of interesting people—a Mr. T., for instance, whose bête noire was clergymen and who stood prepared by collected newspaper clippings and court proceedings, gathered over a period of years, to prove that all ecclesiastics were scoundrels. He had, as he insisted, amazing data, showing that the most perverted of all English criminals were usually sons of bishops and that the higher you rose in the scale of hieratic authority the worse were the men in charge. The delightful part of it all was the man’s profound seriousness of manner, a thin, magnetic, albeit candle-waxy type of person of about sixty-five who had the force and enthusiasm of a boy.
“Ah, yes,” you would hear him exclaim often during lunch, “I know him well. A greater scoundrel never lived. His father is bishop of Wimbledon”—or, for variation—“his father was once rector of Christ Church, Mayfair.”
There was a thin, hard, literary lady present, of the obviously and militantly virgin type. She was at the foot of the table, next to the count, but we fell into a discussion of the English woman’s-suffrage activity under his very nose, the while he talked lightly to Barfleur. She was for more freedom for women, politically and otherwise, in order that they might accomplish certain social reforms. You know the type. How like a sympathetic actress, I thought, to pick a lady of this character to associate with! One always finds these opposing types together.
The thing that interested me was to see this charming little actress keeping up as smart a social form as her means would permit and still hoping after years of effort and considerable success to be taken up and made much of. She could not have been made to believe that society, in its last reaches, is composed of dullness and heaviness of soul, which responds to no schools of the unconventional or the immoral and knows neither flights of fancy nor delicacy and tenderness of emotion.
Individuals like Miss E. think, somehow, that if they achieve a certain artistic success they will be admitted everywhere. Dear aspiring little Miss E.! She could hardly have been persuaded that there are walls that are never scaled by art. And morality, any more than immorality or religion, has nothing to do with some other walls. Force is the thing. And the ultimate art force she did not possess. If she had, she would have been admitted to a certain interchange in certain fields. Society is composed of slightly interchanging groups, some members of which enter all, most members of which never venture beyond their immediate individual circle. And only the most catholic minded and energetic would attempt or care to bother with the labor of keeping in touch with more than one single agreeable circle.
Another evening I went with Barfleur to call on two professional critics, one working in the field of literature, the other in art exclusively. I mention these two men and their labors because they were very interesting to me, representing as they did two fields of artistic livelihood in London and both making moderate incomes, not large, but sufficient to live on in a simple way. They were men of mettle, as I discovered, urgent, thinking types of mind, quarreling to a certain extent with life and fate, and doing their best to read this very curious riddle of existence.
These two men lived in charming, though small quarters, not far from fashionable London, on the fringe of ultra-respectability, if not of it. Mr. F. was a conservative man, thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, pale, slender, remote, artistic. Mr. Tyne was in character not unlike Mr. F., I should have said, though he was the older man—artistic, remote, ostensibly cultivated, living and doing all the refined things on principle more than anything else.
It amuses me now when I think of it, for of course neither of these gentlemen cared for me in the least, beyond a mild curiosity as to what I was like, but they were exceedingly pleasant. How did I like London? What did I think of the English? How did London contrast with New York? What were some of the things I had seen?
Hoped for the day when the issue might be tried out physically
I stated as succinctly as I could, that I was puzzled in my mind as to what I did think, as I am generally by this phantasmagoria called life, while Mr. Tyne served an opening glass of port and I toasted my feet before a delicious grate-fire. Already, as I have indicated in a way, I had decided that England was deficient in the vitality which America now possesses—certainly deficient in the raw creative imagination which is producing so many new things in America, but far superior in what, for want of a better phrase, I must call social organization as it relates to social and commercial interchange generally. Something has developed in the English social consciousness a sense of responsibility. I really think that the English climate has had a great deal to do with this. It is so uniformly damp and cold and raw that it has produced a sober-minded race. When subsequently I encountered the climates of Paris, Rome and the Riviera I realized quite clearly how impossible it would be to produce the English temperament there. One can see the dark, moody, passionate temperament of the Italian evolving to perfection under their brilliant skies. The wine-like atmosphere of Paris speaks for itself. London is what it is, and the Englishmen likewise, because of the climate in which they have been reared.
I said something to this effect without calling forth much protest, but when I ventured that the English might possibly be falling behind in the world’s race and that other nations—such as the Germans and the Americans—might rapidly be displacing them, I evoked a storm of opposition. The sedate Mr. F. rose to this argument. It began at the dinner-table and was continued in the general living-room later. He scoffed at the suggestion that the Germans could possibly conquer or displace England, and hoped for the day when the issue might be tried out physically. Mr. Tyne good-humoredly spoke of the long way America had to go before it could achieve any social importance even within itself. It was a thrashing whirlpool of foreign elements. He had recently been to the United States, and in one of the British quarterlies then on the stands was a long estimate by him of America’s weaknesses and potentialities. He poked fun at the careless, insulting manners of the people, their love of show, their love of praise. No Englishman, having tasted the comforts of civilized life in England, could ever live happily in America. There was no such thing as a serving class. He objected to American business methods as he had encountered them, and I could see that he really disliked America. To a certain extent he disliked me for being an American, and resented my modest literary reputation for obtruding itself upon England. I enjoyed these two men as exceedingly able combatants—men against whose wits I could sharpen my own.
I mention them because, in a measure, they suggested the literary and artistic atmosphere of London.