Chapter XV: An English New Year

1879

It will hardly be pretended this year that the English Christmas has been a merry one, or that the New Year has the promise of being particularly happy. The winter is proving very cold and vicious--as if nature herself were loath to be left out of the general conspiracy against the comfort and self-complacency of man. The country at large has a sense of embarrassment and depression, which is brought home more or less to every class in the closely-graduated social hierarchy, and the light of Christmas firesides has by no means dispelled the gloom. Not that I mean to overstate the gloom. It is difficult to imagine any combination of adverse circumstances powerful enough to infringe very sensibly upon the appearance of activity and prosperity, social stability and luxury, which English life must always present to a stranger. Nevertheless, the times are distinctly hard--there is plenty of evidence of it--and the spirits of the public are not high. The depression of business is extreme and universal; I am ignorant whether it has reached so calamitous a point as that almost hopeless prostration of every industry which you have lately witnessed in America, and I believe things are by no means so bad as they have been on two or three occasions within the present century. The possibility of distress among the lower classes has been minimised by the gigantic poor-relief system, which is so characteristic a feature of English civilisation, and which on particular occasions is supplemented (as is the case at present) by private charity proportionately huge. I notice, too, that in some parts of the country discriminating groups of work-people have selected these dismal days as a happy time for striking. When the labouring classes are able to indulge in the luxury of a strike I suppose the situation may be said to have its cheerful side. There is, however, great distress in the North, and there is a general feeling of impecuniosity throughout the country. The _Daily News_ has sent a correspondent to the great industrial regions, and almost every morning for the last three weeks a very cleverly-executed picture of the misery of certain parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire has been served up with the matutinal tea and toast. The work is a good one and, I take it, eminently worth doing, as it appears to have had a visible effect upon the purse-strings of the well-to-do. There is nothing more striking in England than the success with which an "appeal" is always made. Whatever the season or whatever the cause, there always appears to be enough money and enough benevolence in the country to respond to it in sufficient measure--a remarkable fact when one remembers that there is never a moment of the year when the custom of "appealing" intermits. Equally striking, perhaps, is the perfection to which the science of distributing charity has been raised--the way it has been analysed and explored and made one of the exact sciences. One perceives that it has occupied for a long time a foremost place among administrative questions, and has received all the light that experience and practice can throw upon it. The journal I quoted just now may perhaps, without reproach, be credited with a political _arrière-pensée_. It would obviously like its readers to supply in this matter of the stagnation of trade the missing link between effect and cause--or the link which, if not absolutely missing, is at any rate difficult to lay one's hand upon. The majority in Parliament were not apparently of the opinion that the disorganisation of business is the fault of Lord Beaconsfield; but there is no doubt that it is a misfortune for the Conservative party that this bad state of things coincides very much with its tenure of office. When an Administration may be invidiously described as "restless," "reckless," and "adventurous," and when at the same time business is very bad and distress increasing, it requires no great ingenuity to represent the former fact as responsible for the latter.

I have spoken of the rigour of the time in the lower walks of English life; and it is not out of place to say that among those happier people who stand above the reach of material incommodity, the Christmas season has been overshadowed sentimentally--or at least conventionally--by the death of Princess Alice. If I had written to you at the moment this event occurred I should have been tempted to make some general reflections upon it, and it is even now perhaps not too late to say that there was, to an observer, something very interesting and characteristic in the manner in which the news was received. Broadly speaking, it produced much more commotion than I should have expected; the papers overflowed with articles on the subject, the virtues of the deceased lady and the grief of the Queen were elaborately commemorated; many shops, on the day of the Princess's funeral, were partially closed, and the whole nation, it may be said--or the whole of what professes, in any degree whatever, to be "society"--went into mourning. There was enough in all this to make a stranger consider and interrogate; and the result of his reflections would, I think, have been that, after all abatements are made, the monarchy has still a great hold upon the affections of the people. The people takes great comfort in its royal family. The love of social greatness is extraordinarily strong in England, and the royal family appeals very conveniently to this sentiment. People in the immense obscurity of that middle class which constitutes the bulk of the English world like to feel that they are related in some degree to something that is socially great. They cannot pretend that they are related to dukes and earls and people of that sort; but they are able to cultivate a certain sense of being related to the royal family. They may talk of "our" princes and princesses--and the most exalted members of the peerage may do no more than that; they may possess photographs of the Queen's children, and read of their daily comings and goings with an agreeable sense of property, and without incurring that reproach of snobbishness which sometimes attaches to too eager an interest in the doings of the great nobility. There is no reason to suppose that the Queen takes the humorous view of this situation; her Majesty is indeed credited with a comfortable, motherly confidence in the salutary effect of the court-circle upon the mind of the middle class; and there is a kind of general feeling that, socially speaking, the Queen and the middle class understand each other. There was something natural, therefore, in the great impression made by the death of a princess who was personally known but to an incalculably small proportion of the people who mourned for her, and on whose behalf propriety would have resented the idea that she could personally be missed. It is nevertheless true that Lord Beaconsfield is felt rather to have overdone his part in announcing the event to the House of Lords in language in which he might have proclaimed some great national catastrophe. I was told by a person who was present that the House felt itself to be at the mercy of his bad taste--that men looked at each other with a blush and a kind of shudder, and asked each other what was coming next. He remarked, among other things, that the manner in which the Princess Alice had contracted her fatal illness (her tender imprudence in kissing her sick children) was an act worthy to be commemorated in art--"in painting, in sculpture, and in gems." I have heard these last two words wittily quoted in illustration of his Semitic origin. An ordinarily florid speaker would have contented himself with saying "in painting and in sculpture." The addition "in gems" betrays the genius of the race which supplies the world with pawnbrokers.

I left town a short time before Christmas and went to spend the festive season in the North, in a part of the country with which I was unacquainted. It was quite possible to absent one's self from London without a sense of sacrifice, for the charms of the metropolis during the last several weeks have been obscured by peculiarly atrocious weather. It is, of course, a very old story that London is foggy, and this simple statement is not of necessity alarming. But there are fogs and fogs, and these murky visitations, during the present winter, have been of the least tolerable sort. The fog that draws down and absorbs the smoke of the housetops, causes it to hang about the streets in impenetrable density, forces it into one's eyes and down one's throat, so that one is half-blinded and quite sickened--this atmospheric abomination has been much more frequent than usual. Just before Christmas, too, there was a heavy snow-storm, and even a tolerably light fall of snow has London quite at its mercy. The emblem of purity is almost immediately converted into a sticky, lead-coloured mush, the cabs skulk out of sight or take up their stations before the lurid windows of a public-house, which glares through the sleety darkness at the desperate wayfarer with an air of vulgar bravado. This state of things in the London streets made a rather sorry Christmas, though I believe the Christmas hearth is supposed to burn the more brightly in proportion as the outer world is less attractive. The wonderful London shops were, of course, duly transfigured, but they seemed to me, for the most part, to have an aspect of vain expectation, and I hear that their proprietors give a melancholy account of the profits of the season. It was only at a certain charming little French establishment in Bond Street that I observed any great activity--a little chocolate-shop where light-fingered young women from Paris dispense the most wonderful bonbonnières.

To keep one's self in good humour with English civilisation, however, one must do what I alluded to just now--one must go into the country; one must limit one's horizon, for the time, to the spacious walls of one of those admirable homes which at this season overflow with hospitality and good cheer. By this means the result is triumphantly attained--these are conditions that you cordially appreciate. Of all the great things that the English have invented and made a part of the glory of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the one they have mastered most completely in all its details, so that it has become a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country-house. The grateful stranger makes these reflections--and others besides--as he wanders about in the beautiful library of such a dwelling of an inclement winter afternoon just at the hour when six o'clock tea is impending. Such a place and such a time abound in agreeable episodes; but I suspect that the episode from which, a fortnight ago, I received the most ineffaceable impression was but indirectly connected with the charms of a luxurious fireside. The country I speak of was a populous manufacturing region, full of tall chimneys and of an air that is gray and gritty. A lady had made a present of a Christmas-tree to the children of a workhouse, and she invited me to go with her and assist at the distribution of the toys. There was a drive through the early dusk of a very cold Christmas eve, followed by the drawing-up of a lamp-lit brougham in the snowy quadrangle of a grim-looking charitable institution. I had never been in an English workhouse before, and this one transported me, with the aid of memory, to the early pages of _Oliver Twist_. We passed through certain cold, bleak passages, to which an odour of suet-pudding, the aroma of Christmas cheer, failed to impart an air of hospitality; and then, after waiting a while in a little parlour appertaining to the superintendent, where the remainder of a dinner of by no means eleemosynary simplicity and the attitude of a gentleman asleep with a flushed face on the sofa seemed to effect a tacit exchange of references, we were ushered into a large frigid refectory, chiefly illumined by the twinkling tapers of the Christmas-tree. Here entered to us some hundred and fifty little children of charity, who had been making a copious dinner, and who brought with them an atmosphere of hunger memorably satisfied--together with other traces of the occasion upon their pinafores and their small red faces. I have said that the place reminded me of _Oliver Twist_, and I glanced through this little herd for an infant figure that should look as if it were cut out for romantic adventures. But they were all very prosaic little mortals. They were made of very common clay indeed, and a certain number of them were idiotic. They filed up and received their little offerings, and then they compressed themselves into a tight infantine bunch, and lifting up their small hoarse voices, directed a melancholy hymn toward their benefactress. The scene was a picture I shall not forget, with its curious mixture of poetry and sordid prose--the dying wintry light in the big, bare, stale room; the beautiful Lady Bountiful, standing in the twinkling glory of the Christmas-tree; the little multitude of staring and wondering, yet perfectly expressionless, faces.