MR. HOWELLS AND RELICS OF FEUDALISM.
MR. HOWELLS'S latest book, "Certain Delightful English Towns" (Harper and Brothers, 10s. 6c1), will be read with great interest both in the Old Country and the New, not for the sake of his descriptions of cities or of scenery, though both are excellent, but as a study of comparative manners and ways of life in England and America. Comparisons are not always tactful, though they are always interesting—we all instinctively compare—but Mr. Howells is one of those just and genial observers who can make comparisons without offence. A writer whose sympathies are sufficiently keen never needs to point his criticisms with disparagement.
The first thing which strikes the English reader as he follows Mr. Howells upon his tour through the towns and cities of the West Country is the place which the American assigns to feudalism in the formation of English life and character. Perhaps we are too apt to forget the vitality which still exists in what we carelessly call "the relics of feudalism." A visitor from a new country, on the other hand, is likely to give them too great an importance. The amount of class deference to be found here is a surprise to the American visitor. The fact that the modern crowd sees no great objection to the luxurious seclusion of the landowner fills him with amaze- ment. As be drives round the great towns he sees "woodlands calling themselves • Private,' and hiding the way to stately mansions withdrawn from the common- ness of our course." The sight of an English park is something wholly strange to him, something belonging to another time. "As for the deer, lying in herds, or posing statuesquely against the sky on some stretch of summit, they were as absolutely a part of it as if they had been in the peerage." In the midst of such a park Mr. Howella finds an "Elizabethan mansion of gray stone (rained a fine greenish in the long succession of springs and falls)." A flag floated over it "to intimate that the family was at home, and invite the public to respect its privacy by keeping away from the grounds next about it" You read of such things as these, he says, addressing his American friends, "all your life, till you imagine them things of actual experience ; but when you come face to face with them you perceive that till then they have q, been as unreal as anything else in the romances where you fre- quented them." Encountered in solid fact, they imply, he thinks, "the robust survival, in commercial and industrial times, of a feudal condition so wholly obsolete in its alien admirer's experience that none of the imitations of it which he has seen at home suggest it more than by a picturesqueness almost as provisional as that of the theatre." Love of seclusion, again, is evidently difficult even for a cultivated American to under- stand. Mr. Howells regards it as a survival, an instinct having no proper place in modern times, a belated witness to primeval selfishness. In England he is perpetually coming across it, for though never seen in the lower, it is by no means confined to the highest or to the moneyed class. Picturesque witnesses to the sentiment appeal to him—" mansions" in country towns "peering over their high garden wall "—but during the whole of his spring tour he never quite made out why his friends had warned him not to travel on Bank Holidays, or why " trippers " are "mysteriously objected to in England."
He is a little oppressed by the sparseness of the cottages in country districts, and by what strikes him as the strange soli- tariness of this small country. Nevertheless, while visiting Sutton Court, in Somersetshire, he fella under the spell of an English country house, noting its architectural beauty with the fervent admiration of an American for everything that is old. Families who live in such houses regard it, he comments, as "the home of their race. We have no like terms in America," he continues, "and our generations, which are each separately housed, can only guess at the feeling for the place of their succession which the generations of such an English house must feel." Yet be does understand it, and understands, too, "the somewhat defiant tenderness with which the children of such a house must cherish the system which keeps it inalienably their common home." He discussed the matter at length, he tells us, on his way home to Bath with his travelling companion. "We tried again to realise the sentiment which, as well as the law, keeps such places in England in the ordered descent I think we failed because we conceived of the fact too objectively, and imagined conscious a thing that tradition has made part of English nature We fancied that in their order one class yielded to another without grudging and without grasp- ing, and that this, which fills England with picturesqueness and drama, was the secret of England. In the end we were not so sure. We were not sure even of our day's experience; it was like something we had read rather than lived ; and in this final unreality, I prefer to shirk the assertion of a different faith, which all the same I devoutly hold."
Yes, Mr. Howells does hold a different ideal, and can put that ideal very well and knows how to imply it throughout his book. But he sees that his creed is somewhat illogical and must not be stated without many riders. "The easy theory," we read, "about a man whom you find magnificently housed in the heart of eight thousand acres, themselves a very minor portion of his incalculable possessions, is that he is personally to blame for it. In your generous indignation you wish to have him out, and his pleasure-grounds divided up into small farms "; but where, he continues, is such indignation to end ? "We all, who have the least bit more than we need, are in the same boat, and we cannot begin throwing one another overboard, with a good conscience. What the people already struggling for their lives in the water have a right to do is another matter." The great defence for the English system is, he admits, that it works well, though as the "New Worldling" looks at what Matthew Arnold called "the strongholds of the barbarians" it seems to him that, for all the charm of antiquity and custom, they are still the living memorials to "the relentless greed of ages, fed strong with the prey of poverty and toil." It is, however, to our "feudalism" that Mr. Howells is inclined to attribute what he is kind enough to consider our good manners. Below the cultivated class, he certainly implies that our manners are better than those of our American brothers. Again and again he praises the courtesy of the streets and trains,—the politeness with which information is supplied to the traveller, the kindness shown by thirsl-class passengers to one another, often in very irritating circum- stances, the almost invariable good temper and obligingness of railway officials. He notices "the kind looks which prevail in English faces of the commoner sort," and remarked with amusement while staying at a hotel bow "the servant thanked the served for being served, and the served thanked the servant for serving," while both, he suspected, felt some kind of dim pity for any man who was not over or under another.
As to the manners of the cultivated, he says The manners of the English are better in being simpler. They are not better in being suppler. I should say that as life passed with him the American limbered and the Englishman stiffened, and that the first gained and the last lost in the power to imagine another which they both perhaps equally possessed in their shy nonage, and which chiefly, if not solely, enables men to be comfortable to their fellows." This criticism is not perhaps altogether true, yet it contains much truth. For ourselves, we should hesitate to assert that the young of any nation are more sympathetic than the old.
Sympathy is to a large extent the direct outcome of experi- ence. All the same, it cannot be denied that the average Englishman who has reached middle age, and has, so to speak come into his convictions, is apt to he stiff-minded. That is he is not appreciative of ideas with which he is not in funds. mental agreement, nor does he care to study them in detail. Can we, for instance, imagine a Tory Englishman holding to the Conservative faith as devoutly as Mr. Howells bolds to the Democratic, writing of American democracy as sympathetically as Mr. Howells writes of what he calls English feudalism ? Hardly, perhaps. Yet let us be as true to our own people us Mr. Howells is to his, and while taking off our bats to our receptive cousins across the water, let us not forget that the Englishman's failure to "imagine another" is but the worser side of his strength and his originality, a part of the necessity laid upon him by Providence always and everywhere to be himself.
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