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The Germany of 1886 had liberated, it had not enamoured me: and at the age of twenty-three a young man needs to be enamoured. A siren, however, was not far off, across the North Sea. After our first semester at Berlin, Strong and I decided to spend our holiday in England, and took ship at Bremen for London. It was a nasty voyage in a smallish German Lloyd steamer, an excellent cathartic to clear away all obstructions and leave a clean and keen appetite for something new. Regarding England I had favourable preconceptions derived from my father. It was in his opinion the leading country, the model country, for the modern world; and although this eminence might be patriotically claimed by Americans for America, it was not yet possessed by their country even in material things of importance; while in literature and philosophy, as well as in the art of living, the autarchy of the New World was that of the log-cabin: you might like roughing it and camping in the woods, but that did not create a new civilisation.

In approaching England I felt the excitement of a child at the play, before the curtain rises. I was about to open my eyes on a scene in one sense familiar from having heard and read so much about it. There was keen intellectual curiosity to discover the fact and compare it with my anticipations. There was my youthful hunger, still unappeased, for architectural effects, and picturesque scenes in general; and there was a more recent interest, destined to grow gradually stronger, in discovering and understanding human types, original or charming persons. And where were these more likely to be found than in England?

On our second evening from Bremen we had anchored in the Thames and were to go ashore at Tilbury in the morning. Meanwhile, the customs officers came aboard to examine our papers and our luggage. We were almost the only first-class passengers; and it was without the least hurry, and almost in silence, that we laid our passports on the cabin table before the two quiet officials who had sat down there. Quiet they were, well spoken, laconic yet civil; half business-like and half deferential as if in the first place they recognised us for gentlemen, and as if in general they were respectful towards other people’s privacy and peace. Perfectly ordinary men like policemen; yet how different from any customs officials that I had ever come upon in Spain or America, in France or Germany! What decent officials! They didn’t seem to suspect us of lying or cheating, and showed no tendency to brow-beat or deceive us with rigmarole and loudness. A national note, firmness beneath simplicity; a decent people, not very perceptive, a little stolid, decidedly limited, but sound, trained, running easily in the national harness. And this among the common people, when not misled. I was glad of this first impression; and it was curiously confirmed in my first journey to Oxford, in a third-class carriage. It happened to be full, five persons on a side, yet nobody said a word; or if any word passed from one to another, it was so brief, and so low in tone, as to disturb nobody else. Not genial, other nations might say, not friendly or human; but I felt that it was truly friendly, since it was considerate; it showed aptitude for getting on together, political aptitude, precisely because it let everyone alone, allowed them their place, and didn’t blame them for existing even if their existence were a bit inconvenient.

So much for public manners, the best in the world; but soon I had a glimpse of the private feelings that might go with those manners in humble and ordinary people. We went to a boarding-house that Strong had heard of in Notting Hill, a remote place for the sightseer, but correspondingly cheap and decent, besides having the incidental advantage of involving long drives on the top of busses, and often sitting (since we started at the start), only a little above and behind the driver’s box, with whom a word might be exchanged occasionally, and whose powerful horses and skilful driving through the dense traffic might be admired. It was six miles, an hour’s drive, to the Bank; and in that cool misty season with the sun high, but coppery and shining dubiously through the grey atmosphere, the swarming city, still moderately uniform in the character and the height of buildings, offered a scene of inexhaustible interest, justifying the humour of Dickens and Cruikshank, as well as the gentility of Thackeray. Everything seemed ready to be etched, from the broken-down old women in black bonnets selling matches at corners, to the black-and-white harmonies of St. Paul’s and the churches in the Strand, poetic to see looming in the distance, and interesting to study on a nearer approach. Yet here doubts began to assail the mind, concerning the solidity of England in subtler matters of taste and allegiance; doubts confirmed by the then brand-new Law Courts. This Italian architecture of Wren’s, this Ruskinian Gothic, were foreign here: they were whims, they were fashions, they were essentially shams. But the function of shams in English society is a large subject, and I shall revert to it often.

At table in Notting Hill one of the inevitable solitary elderly ladies explained to us how much they all loved Longfellow: he was a household poet in England no less than in America. I replied that I was not surprised to hear it; but that in America his vogue was beginning to pass away; at least we poets at Harvard never read anything written in America except our own compositions. As for English poets we admitted nobody less revolutionary than Swinburne or less pessimistic than Matthew Arnold. If the lady had been an American and younger she would have said I was horrid; being English and old she silently thought so, and merely repeated gently, that in England they loved Longfellow best.

There was also at table a modest, well-set-up young man, a clerk, who betrayed some interest in philosophy or, as I soon gathered, in religion. On that footing we became friends at once: I have always found it easy to form casual friendships, especially with Englishmen. He said he belonged to the Church of the Apostles, commonly called Irvingites. Should I like to go to one of their services? Very much: and on the next Sunday he conducted me to a church like a Roman basilica, with an apse, quite orthodox mosaics, and a semi-circle of living apostles in stalls, wearing white smocks, and looking like a row of butchers, except that butchers seldom have long beards. The sermon informed us that it was not necessary to die. The Day of Judgment had long since come and people were constantly being caught up to heaven alive, perhaps as they walked in the streets, or through the chimney. My friend gave me no further evidence of this phenomenon; but I saw (which was what interested me) that for him these absurdities furnished a happy interlude in a drab life, a peep-hole into fairy-land, a little secret, unsuspected by the world, to keep up his self-respect, and cast a ray of supernatural hope into that small room in the third floor back, which might prove any day a jumping off place for a flight to heaven. By some chance his need of faith had attached him to the Irvingites; had his connections and education been more fortunate he might have become a high Anglican or Catholic; and his case showed, as it were under the microscope, the mechanism of conversion in higher spheres.

After two or three weeks at Notting Hill, spent in seeing everything in London that the guidebook recommended, Strong unexpectedly announced that he was obliged to join some family friends in Paris. He had evidently fresh money to spend, or was invited: I was not able or inclined to accompany him. Paris suggested a different side of life, and greater expenses; besides, I was intent on continuing my explorations in England and extending them at least to Oxford. Strong had dutifully kept me in the straight path of the earnest sightseer, visiting historic spots and notable monuments in the order of their importance and instructiveness, from the Tower to Madame Tussaud’s. But when I was left alone, I began to live on a different plan, which I have followed when possible in all my wanderings. I moved to lodgings in Jermyn Street, Saint James’s, No. 87, a house to which I was faithful for more than twenty-five years, and abandoned only bowing to force majeure. First Miss Bennett, the genial motherly landlady died: then her younger sister, a widow, married Colonel Sandys, who had long occupied the first floor. On arriving one year I noticed a change in the aspect of the house. The front door was painted a well-varnished dark green, with shining brass knocker and door-knobs; there was a fresh thick doormat, and when I rang the bell, though the man was the same familiar valet, he seemed much more spruce, and even a bit embarrassed in his conspicuously clean linen. The same lady, he explained, still lived here, but the house was no longer an hotel. And he politely presented me, on a solid silver tray, the letters that had arrived for me. There was nothing to do but to look foolish, and say, “Oh, indeed—I see—thank you,” and get again into my taxi—it was already the age of taxis—and vaguely tell the driver to go somewhere else—anywhere—to the British Hotel a few doors beyond. But neither at the British Hotel nor elsewhere did I ever feel at home again in London lodgings; and this circumstance contributed to make my stay there always shorter and shorter.

Miss Bennett’s was not a luxurious house, and I never took more than a single room there, and breakfast; yet though not a very profitable guest, I was a constant one, and always seemed to be welcome. I would even leave a hat-box there from year to year, as a sort of pledge, to get rid of the useless burden of a top-hat in the rest of my journeys. The full savour of the London of my youth, in the 1880’s and 1890’s, clings to my memories of Jermyn Street. I usually came down at nine or half-past to breakfast in a small back room on the ground floor, always on bacon and eggs and The Morning Post. Sometimes another lodger would be there too but not often; and then we politely ignored each other’s presence, concentrating each on his own teapot and toast-rack and dish of marmalade, and on his own newspaper, which in the other man’s case was likely to be The Times. In the early days I preferred The Standard, because it was the Anglican clerical paper, opening to me the side of English life that interested me most; and when The Standard stopped publication, I took up The Morning Post, until that too succumbed—to the flood of vulgar journalism. After that I subscribed to no English newspaper; the continental press could inform me sufficiently about gross events, and I could always procure single copies of The Times, if there was anything of special importance.

The fire in Miss Bennett’s breakfast room was the only common interest between the other lodger and me. Neither of us would attempt to monopolise it; we both kept at the distance that good form required. It would have been beneath us to huddle up close to it, as if we were ignominiously suffering from cold; yet we took good care not to retreat to such a distance as to abdicate the right to the best place, if we had come early and secured it. The best place then exalted the person who occupied it, and to preserve his Rights had become his Duty. I was being initiated into the secret of British politics.

In those days Jermyn Street preserved the character of a quiet and correct street in the heart of Saint James’s. No. 87 was directly opposite the pleasant red brick church with its pleasant trees, that made a green landmark, and with the pleasant broad face and pleasant chimes of its clock, that told you the hours. At night, lying warm in bed with the window open, I also liked to hear the patter, as of a child’s drum, on the probably wet asphalt, as each hansom-cab, noiseless as to its wheels but quadrupedante sonitu as to its horse’s hoofs, drove up the street, and drove away again in a brisk diminuendo.

It was precisely to the inveterate stranger in me that London had mightily appealed. All those hollow principles and self-indulgent whims of a decadent age had merged in the English gentleman into good form and sly humour; and in the Cockney they were reflected in his goodnatured derision and comfortable jollity. The spirit of London seemed remarkably mellow and rich in experience; for that very reason leisurely, gently mocking, not miscellaneously eager and hurried, like New York, nor false, cynical and covetous, like Paris. Not that great things have happened in London; it has no such memories as Rome or Florence; but being a commercial city, a port and the centre of a colonial empire, it has encyclopedic contacts, and means of knowing the world at a distance without being very much disturbed by it in its own back-parlour. There is therefore balance in its omniscience, and a wise perspective in its interests. Experience fosters both affection and unconcern; and we are lucky when the affection settles down upon what is near, and the unconcern upon what is distant and irremediable, with a subtle amusement at both. This seemed to me to happen in the typical Londoner, and it made him an engaging person.

London has always responded to a rather youthful interest of mine, the interest in streets, in clothes, in manners, in curious architecture; also to my pleasure in casual acquaintances and small explorations. These human episodes enlivened the landscape and made particular spots memorable that would otherwise have been merged indistinguishably in the motley scene: yet it was the aerial landscape, always evanescent and always picturesque, that fed the spirit, as the cool moist air expanded the lungs. I loved the Parks—St. James’s with its suggestions of by-gone fashions and a smaller town; Green Park, spacious and empty, like a country common; and Hyde Park above all, with its fashionable pedestrians and riders, its horses and carriages, and its band concerts; all easy to turn one’s back on, for the sake of a long solitary walk. Yet these pleasures presupposed summer and fine weather. It was a setting for a holiday, not for a life. I never studied in London or read in the British Museum (as I did in the Bodleian) or gathered books, or made lasting friends. I visited nobody, not even the Sturgis connection: I was, and I liked to remain, an unrecognised wanderer.

Even the theatres seldom attracted me. British plays are anodyne, transparently moral or sentimental or intellectual; that is to say, not spontaneous products of the imagination. I think it must have been Protestantism that so completely extinguished Elizabethan genius. When the theatres were reopened at the Restoration, writers and audiences were utterly cut off from the healthy current of national life, and from the great classic and poetic tradition. They cared only for wit and satire and the evil pleasure of scandal. Now the wish to be edified has been added; but that limits the already slight range of the plays, without infusing into them anything poetical. The acting, too, is awkward and uninspired; the players are interested in themselves and not in their parts, and so are the audiences. Everything is modish, affected, trivial, and amateurish. Earlier, in the days of Irving and Terry, the stage production had been an object in itself. Elaborate scenery and costumes were designed to bring some historic epoch to light. Taste was preraphaelite; the stage resembled the Arundel prints after Pinturicchio that I had had in my rooms in Brattle Street. That fashion had passed when I was much in London, but the taste had not died in me, when the Russian ballet made its appearance. Here imagination and passion had fallen back upon first principles. Aestheticism had become absolute and violent, the appeal to the exotic and dream-like scorned to be accurate or instructive and was content to be vivid. Nor was elegance excluded, but it figured only as one genre among many, just as it does in Shakespeare and in real life. Delicacy was cultivated in its place, yet the way was left open in every direction to strength, to passion, to nature and to fancy. I wonder if Shakespeare could not be turned into Russian ballets to advantage: or into a kind of opera-ballet, in which the more important speeches could be introduced in recitative into the music. Aristophanes also might lend himself to such treatment.

It was only on rare evenings in London that I dressed or dined with friends or went to any show. I tasted the specific quality of the place better when I strolled about alone, dined in some grill room or in some restaurant in Soho, or walked out over the bridges to watch the evening glow reflected on the river. England preserves the softness and verdure of the country even in the city; and London, the densest of Babylons, is everywhere turned into a landscape by the mist, by the cloudracks, by the docks and shipping towards the East, by the green reaches, the fields, the boating crowds towards the West. It thins out and becomes rural imperceptibly in its immense suburbs, and not always vulgarly; there are royal preserves and stately seats in all directions. Woolwich steps down grandly to the sea, and Kensington Palace and Hampton Court lead nobly towards Windsor Castle. This instinct to merge town and country in one limitless park, and never to lose sight of a green field, an overhanging tree, or an impenetrable hedgerow no doubt renounces architecture on the grand scale. The city remains a conglomeration of accidents, of incongruous whims and private rights huddled together. The roads turn and wind round the freehold cottages and jealously fenced gardens, and comfort is never sacrificed to symmetry. Yet in neglecting grandeur the Englishman remains jealous of his dignity, and also of his privacy. He plants his neighbours out, if he possibly can; the comforts he exacts are simple; too much luxury would be incompatible with quietness and liberty. Even in the great respect that he shows for wealth and station he honours freedom rather than power. Your rich man can do as he likes, and can live as he chooses. Then the liberty that is a sham in public becomes a reality in private.

To the classic mind landscapes are always landscapes with figures. Even the desert, the sea, or the stars draw all their magic from the solitude or sacred companionship that the soul feels in their presence. So the aspects of a town borrow their quality from the life that they suggest—market, temple, fortress, or garden. London is essentially a commercial city. Everything about it hangs upon that fact, even the golden mist and the black fog that makes its beauty and its monstrosity; for they are effects of occupying a watery place near the corner of an island; ideal for shipping and in the midst of sea routes, and of being able at the same time to burn prodigious quantities of soft coal. Civilisations and towns created by commerce may grow indefinitely, since they feed on a toll levied on everything transportable; yet they are secondary. However much they may collect and exhibit the riches of the world they will not breed anything original. Their individuality and excellence, no less in Venice than in London, will be the fruit of accidents, of converging influences and borrowed traditions. If an Englishman set out to be a great man, a genius, a saint, or a responsible monarch, the devil would soon pocket him. It is only the rich Englishman that can truly prosper in England. Like the Lord Mayor of London, he can dress up in a traditional costume, and receive Royalty and all other grand people at his feasts. He can repeat the consecrated platitudes, and drink the approved wines; and in his hours of obscurity and thrift, labor; he can revise accounts, poke his library fire, drink tea with his buxom wife, and send his sons to Eton or Harrow. Commercial communities in this way accumulate great treasures and hand down admirable institutions; yet in them the whole exists only for the sake of the parts and their greatness is only littleness multiplied. They become museums, immense hostelries, perpetual fairs. Society will be nowhere brisker or more various. Everything that money can buy will be at the command of those that have money. The dandies and snobs will lead the aristocracy; fashion will nowhere be more splendid and more respected, and misery nowhere more squalid. The metropolis will overflow with life gathered from the four quarters of the heavens; it will never be a fountain of life.

As to the fish swimming about in this whirlpool, I could infer from my American experience of a society even more commercial and casual, that they had individual souls and personal histories; and I had learned in Dickens something about such souls in the lower classes, the Sam Wellers and the Mrs. Gamps, and among the merchants and lawyers, for whom London was all in all. These are not classes in which a stray foreigner like me would be likely to make acquaintances; and a metropolis is not like a ship or a college, where prolonged contact with the same persons discloses their individualities even to the least sympathetic stranger. Yet in the classes with which intercourse was easier for me, I did pick up various acquaintances; and some of those figures have remained pleasantly painted in my memory.

One day in Jermyn Street, when I had breakfasted in bed and came down nicely dressed about noon, fat Miss Bennett, who was arranging the flowers in a row of little vases in the narrow entry, smiled in her motherly way as she made room for me to pass, and said, “You have been doing the young lady this morning, Sir.” Yes; though I was no longer a young man (this was in 1901) I had had a momentary lapse into fashionable life, and was going to take a turn in the Park before lunching at Hatchett’s; and I confided to her that the previous evening I had been dining at the Savoy with two young officers of the Guards. It had been as far as possible from a debauch—I will describe it presently—but it had thrown me back into the mood of 1897, when I had known a knot of young men about town, acquaintances made at Cambridge; not all English, for there was an Australian and a Frenchman, and for that reason all the more knowing and entertaining. At that time (in my holiday year at King’s and in Italy) I had been wide awake; but now I had entered a somnambulist tunnel, where the engines worked and the wheels made a more furious noise than ever, but where the spirit was suspended on the thought: When shall we come out again into the light and air? The two Guardsmen brought a glimpse into the open, not promising but suggestive. They knew nobody in my world, I knew nobody in theirs. Yet I, at least, was never more in my element than when I was far from myself. How did I know them?

We were waiting on the pier at Southampton in the previous September for the German liner that was to convey us to America. Fog had kept her from making the port on time. In standing about the steamer-office, waiting for information, I noticed two young Englishmen, well dressed, good-naturedly accepting the accident of being sent to dine and to spend the night at a local hotel, and being correspondingly delayed in their arrival in New York. They evidently didn’t care. They were not going to America on business: I wondered what they were going for. For nothing, perhaps, to spend the time, to see the Rocky Mountains, or to look for heiresses. There was an air about them of being thoroughly equipped, perfectly trained and hardened, thoroughly competent to do anything and not knowing what on earth to do.

The next day on board, when the chief steward had found a place for me in the dining-room, there were the two young men, directly opposite me at the same table. Their casual conversation was not audible to me: they were English. After a day or two, however, in passing the mustard or the salt, we began to exchange a few phrases, and gradually came to joining forces on deck or in the smoking-room. The smoking-room was my place of refuge in transatlantic steamers, when I was not walking on the lower deck, which was clear of chairs, nearer the water, and comparatively deserted, allowing freedom of movement as well as of mind. When I had taken my exercise, and wished to sit down, I looked for a comfortable corner in the smoking-room. The smoking-room was the one place sure to be well ventilated; there were deep leather chairs where I could read at ease or even write in a note-book. The crowd and the hubbub didn’t in the least disturb me, since I wasn’t asked to attend to it. Here I could have tea, and here sometimes my two new friends would join me, and would explain incidentally they were simply on a tour, curious about America and apparently entertained by what I said of it. They were eventually coming to Boston, and I rashly offered to show them the sights of Harvard.

Rashly, I say, because when they turned up a month or two later, it puzzled me to think what the sights of Harvard were. These young men didn’t want to see the stadium (then a novelty) nor the glass flowers. The Yard was leafless, muddy and at its ugliest, and I no longer lived there but in Brattle Street, not in rooms worth showing. Nor had I any longer any interesting friends that I could have asked to meet them at tea. So I frankly confessed my predicament and took them to see Memorial Hall with the panorama (and smell) of a hundred tables and a thousand men at dinner—for it was already six o’clock. They said it looked like Sandhurst. Evening had already come and there was nothing to do but to walk back to Main Street and to the electric car that would take them back to Boston. By way of apology for this futile afternoon, I sent two books to their ship to entertain them on their homeward voyage: my Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, then just out, for A, the one who seemed more intellectual, and Flandrau’s Diary of a Freshman for the other, B, who was apparently simpler and younger. I knew that the first book was too serious and the second too frivolous, but perhaps between them they might represent the winds blowing at Harvard.

When I dined with them the next summer in London, I felt that they had asked me to the Savoy because they were in much the same predicament that I had been when I took them to the gallery of Memorial Hall: they wanted to be civil to me, but they had to invent a way. The food was excellent—all cold, by a caprice of B’s—and they spied well-known people at some other tables, whose names they whispered with smiles: but they might have dined more pleasantly and cheaply by themselves at the Guard’s Club, to which strangers were not admitted. The evening was clear and they proposed walking back to Pall Mall, exactly what my instinct would have prompted me to do. This undercurrent of common tastes was what established pleasant relations between them and me, in spite of completely different backgrounds. When we reached Pall Mall, I knew they were making for their club; I therefore said good night and turned up through St. James’s Square, reflecting on what a tax it is to entertain strangers, even for people enjoying every advantage in the heart of London. Besides, three, except among very intimate friends, is not a propitious number for conversation: it renders sympathies shy to show themselves and interesting subjects hard to follow up. To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time. No such spark had seemed to pass between these young men and me; and yet I was sure, especially in the case of B, that a latent sympathy existed unexpressed: and the proof of it appeared not many days later. B wrote asking me to dine with him again, without dressing, in the most singular of places for dining—in the Bank of England. He happened to be for the moment the officer commanding the guard at that place; and this officer had the privilege of inviting one person to dine with him, and of drinking one bottle of claret and one of port. Would I come?

It was raining hard on the appointed evening and when I told my cabby to go to the Bank—the Bank of England—the fellow almost laughed in my face, but in a moment recovered his professional gravity, and observed a bit quizzically, “Bank, Sir? Bank will be closed, Sir,” evidently doubting whether I was a little mad, or excessively green. I said I knew it was closed to the public, but went there by special appointment; and I jumped in resolutely, and closed the doors. My man started, driving at first rather slowly, but being once in for it, gained courage, and drove smartly the rest of the way. When I had got out and paid him, I noticed that he lingered a moment. His curiosity wasn’t satisfied, without seeing whether people ever got into the Bank of England at eight o’clock in the evening.

The policeman at the door, on the contrary, understood everything, said “This way, Sir,” affably, and hurried me across the court faster than I could have wished, because the scene was wonderful. In those days the court you first entered was surrounded by pavilions no higher than the blank outer wall; various crosslights from archways, doors and windows were caught and reflected by the wet pavements and casual puddles, or lit up bright patches of scarlet or brass or shining white belts in the groups of soldiers, hard to distinguish under the black sky, who lounged in the doors or huddled for shelter under the eaves. I thought of Rembrandt’s Night Watch; but this scene was more formless yet more alive. Here everything trembled, water trickled and sparkled over all; and in the darkness itself there was a sense of suspended animation among ambiguous shadows that would yield for a moment to recognisable reality, where a face lifted or an arm moved or a voice spoke some commonplace word.

The room into which I was ushered had a dingy Dickensian look of solidity grown old-fashioned and a bit shabby. There was a walnut mantelpiece with a small clock and two candlesticks without candies; heavy black walnut chairs, with horsehair bottoms, and a table set unpretentiously, with thick white plates and thick glasses. But there was a pleasant fire in the grate, and the rather superannuated butler served us an excellent absolutely English dinner: mock-turtle soup, boiled halibut with egg-sauce: roast mutton: gooseberry tart and cream, and anchovies on toast; together with the two bottles of wine already mentioned. Too much food, you might say; but in the English climate, distressing to the lazy but friendly to the active man, after a long day pacing the streets in rain and shine as if you were pacing a deck, all that food was appetising. The old butler knew that it was just right, whatever notions the young officers of to-day might have got into their heads. One had to put up with them; but he was conscious of the whole weight and authority of the Bank of England backing him up. Where would the Army be without the Bank? Nowhere.

The good claret and port were left entirely to me. My poor friend was under the doctor’s care and could drink only milk. He seemed very young and very dejected, in his white flannel shirt and sporting jacket, while his red and gold tunic and his huge bearskin lay on a chair, waiting to be put on at eleven o’clock for the evening inspection, when I should have to leave. We had a friendly philosophic talk about the troubles of youth—the chief of them being that youth cannot last. This fatality casts its shadow before it and makes the young dissatisfied with youth, although what will follow will probably be no better. My two Guardsmen were apparently thinking of resigning their commissions; something that surprised me a little in the case of A who I knew had made a special study of gunnery. As for B, soldiering was what any obligation is for the vaguely young—a constraint with some compensations. He was bored in the Army; but the devil of it was, what to do afterwards. Pity he hadn’t found an American heiress; he would have been quite happy as a country gentleman, with nice horses and nice children. Perhaps he would have preferred an English heiress, who wouldn’t have wanted to rush back to New York every winter; or perhaps he was already in love with someone who was not an heiress, and who drove him to foolish adventures in the vain effort to forget her. I was sorry for the poor chap. Most enviable of men, I should have thought him, in his person and surroundings; yet for that very reason he seemed to have no future. The garden that had bred him, having seen him bloom, had no further use for him. It is indeed in the nature of existence to undermine its best products, and also its worst. This may be an acceptable reflection to the philosopher, who dwells in the eternal, but not for the fatted calf being led to the slaughter.

Our conversation was interrupted by a knock at the door. The sergeant came to report that one of the men had been taken ill. “Get a cab—a four-wheeler would be better”—my friend said thoughtfully, “take him to the barracks and bring back another man,” and he gave the sergeant some money for the fares. “Doesn’t the Government,” I asked, “pay little items of this sort?” “Oh, I suppose I might charge it, but it’s hardly worth while. It doesn’t happen very often.” He spoke in his habitual tone, half resignation, half amusement; but I suspected an impulse beneath to look after his men personally, and to let them feel that the imperturbable air of an officer didn’t exclude a discerning good will towards his soldiers. The ethos of an aristocratic society, I perceived, is of a very high order. It involves imaginative sympathy with those who are not like oneself, loyalty, charity and self-knowledge.

It seemed a good moment to say good night, without waiting for the hour when I should be asked to leave. The rain had ceased; many of the lights in the court had been put out; the place seemed emptier and more ordinary than before. When the ponderous doors had been closed after me, I looked at my watch. It was half-past ten. The pavement was wet, but I had on thick boots. Why not walk back the whole length of Fleet Street and the Strand? If I had melancholy thoughts, the cool moist air and the pleasant exercise would transform them. Scattered lights revealed only nebulous spaces, as the stars do in the sky, save where a few stragglers loitered in the glare of the theatre entrances. Morally all things are neutral in themselves. It is we that bathe them in whatever emotion may be passing through us. That singular evening at the Bank of England remains for me a picturesque image, lurid, cynical yet on the whole happy.

Thirteen years later, in July 1914, I was on my way for a short visit to England with a return ticket to Paris in my pocket, good for three months. As soon as I got into the boat at Calais, I prudently hastened to have a bite in the cabin before we left the dock; that, with a useful medicine that I had learned to take, would help me to weather the passage. I was having my cold meat and beer at one end of the empty table, when a steward came to ask me if I was Mr. Santayana—or something that represented that sound. The gentleman at the other end had sent him to inquire. I looked up, and in spite of astigmatism and near-sightedness in me and the ravages of ten years in him, I recognised my young Guardsman. I nodded assent to him, and immediately gulped down the rest of my beer and went over to say how-do-you-do. But I couldn’t stop; he knew I was a bad sailor; and I must go and find a sheltered spot on deck. I would look for him there later, weather permitting, or in any case at Dover. Yet I didn’t look for him: on the contrary I chose a nook on the lower deck, in the second-class portion, wrapped myself up in a great-coat and rug, and weathered the passage undisturbed and without accident. At Dover, however, I found him standing before the train that was to take us to Charing Cross. We exchanged a few words. He was going home, he said, to rejoin his regiment. He was with ladies. The ladies were already in the carriage, and looked as if they might be his mother and sister or his wife and mother-in-law. In any case, they would certainly prefer to travel by themselves, and I discreetly got into another compartment.

We had each other’s addresses. Perhaps if I had known I was to remain in England for five years, or if he had known that he was to die in five months, it might have occurred to one of us to write; but neither of us did so. It was better not to force a renewal of our acquaintance. Our paths were divergent, neither of us was any longer young, and it had been his youth and that very divergence that for me had made our acquaintance interesting. There would no longer be anything strange in his being unhappy. He had lost his good looks and his mocking pleasure at the ways of the world. Although still a soldierly figure and distinguished, he was now yellow, battered and preoccupied. I rather suspect a wife and children didn’t exist; if they did, his end, for them, may have been a tragedy. But for a bachelor tired of knocking about and doing nothing in particular, a gallant death was a solution. It placed him becomingly in the realm of truth and crowned the nonchalance of his boyhood.

It was on this trip, in July 1914, that I found 87 Jermyn Street, “no longer an hotel”; a trivial circumstance in itself that still marked the end of my pleasant days in London. I was there henceforth only on the wing, as at a centre from which to visit my friends in the country, or to go for a season to Oxford or Cambridge. I was at Cambridge, at the Red Lion, in the first days of that August, when war broke out; and I was again in London, at rooms I often took afterwards at 3 Ryder Street, when one evening, as I was going to bed, I heard a great crash. They must have dropped a heavy tray of dishes in the pantry, I thought: but presently came another crash very like the first, and then other detonations: it was the first Zeppelin raid. I put on again such clothes as I had taken off, and went down into the streets. It was not late, hardly eleven o’clock; and the people about were naturally excited and communicative. I went as far as Piccadilly Circus, from whence I could see, towards the east, the glare of distant fires. One corner shop in the Circus had been smashed: I suppose that was the first great noise that I had taken for broken crockery. The next evening many people waited late in Hyde Park, to see if there would be another raid; but nothing occurred. Nevertheless here was now another reason for not staying in town, and I soon moved to Oxford, favourably placed, from the point of view of safety, in the very middle of England, not yet an industrial town, and the proverbial seat of quietness, religion and study.

The moment when I lost my pleasure in London was the very moment when I was at last free and might have settled down there, as would be natural for an unattached man who writes in the English language. Moreover, unlike most foreigners, I was perfectly happy in the English climate and the English way of living. They were a great relief from America in softness and dignity, and from the Continent in comfort and privacy. Yet a somewhat mysterious contrary force prevented me from making the attempt. Perhaps it was my age. I was fifty, and the prospect backward had begun decidedly to gain on the prospect forward. For the future, I desired nothing fixed, no place in society, no circle of prescribed friends and engagements. Direct human relations, certainly, with whatever persons I might come across, which might include stray poets or philosophers, or agreeable ladies, for instance, like “Elisabeth.” But they should come and go, and I should be free always to change the scene and to move into another sphere. For constant company I had enough, and too much, with myself. A routine had established itself in my day, which I could carry with me wherever I went; it gave me abundance of private hours, and for relief and refreshment, I liked solitude in crowds, meals in restaurants, walks in public parks, architectural rambles in noble cities. To have become simply an old bachelor in London would have been monotonous. Acquaintance with varied and distinguished people, which London might have afforded, didn’t in the least tempt me. The intellectual world of my time alienated me intellectually. It was a Babel of false principles and blind cravings, a zoological garden of the mind, and I had no desire to be one of the beasts. I wished to remain a visitor, looking in at the cages. This could be better done by reading people’s books than by frequenting their society.

With few exceptions, nobody of consequence in London knew of my existence. Even my publishers, except old Mr. Dent, remained unknown to me, as Scribner had remained unknown in New York. I can remember only one literary man that (through Loeser, I believe) became a sort of friend of mine: and then it was his wife rather than himself that was eventually well-known to the international public: but my London friend was her husband, Arthur Strong. He was at that time librarian to the House of Lords and was believed to get up the facts for the speeches of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. He had been originally librarian to the Duke of Devonshire, with whose house he was said to be somehow connected.

Mrs. Strong was a large woman, with bold pseudo-classic features like a late Roman statue of Niobe; and when I saw her in their house in London, she looked like a figure by Burne-Jones that had walked out of the canvas: great heavy eyes, a big nose, a short upper lip, and full, richly curving lips, over a conspicuous round chin. But the most characteristic thing about her was the neck, long, columnar, and extremely convex in the throat, as if she habitually yearned forwards and upwards at once. She was also, at that time, preraphaelite in dress. I remember her one day at luncheon in green cotton brocade, with a broad lace collar, like a bib drooping over it. She was silent, and let her husband talk. Perhaps her thoughts were far away from him and from me. She was destined to become a Catholic and an authority on the history of Christian art, especially Roman archeology of the early centuries: and when I came across her once at the Berensons’ in Florence, she did not recognise me or seem to remember that I had several times been her guest in London.

With Arthur Strong’s mind I felt a decided sympathy. He was very learned in important but remote matters, such as Arabic literature. His central but modest position in the great world gave him a satirical insight into affairs, and he summed up his inner solitude in pungent maxims. He reminded me of my father. Through the Moors he had good knowledge of Spain also: and he said something about the Spanish mind that has given me food for reflection. “The Spaniard,” he said, “respects only one thing, and that is—”, and he raised his forefinger, pointing to heaven. There is no power but Allah: he is omnificent, and all appearances and all wills are nought. It is quite true that no genuine or reflective person in Spain trusts anybody or is proud of himself. He may be vain and punctilious, but that is play-acting: he thinks that pose is set down for him in his rôle; but inwardly he knows that he is dust. This is the insight that I express by saying to myself that the only authority in existence is the authority of things: that since only things have any authority there is, morally, no authority at all, and the spirit is free in its affections. Is this what the Moslems really feel? At any rate something keeps them (and me) from hurrying and fussing and being surprised. It is better to put up with things than to be responsible for them. We may leave responsibility, like vengeance, to God who made us and made the world and seems not to be disturbed at the result.

There was another member of the intelligentsia in London with whom I sometimes discussed high subjects. Of late years he has explained himself very well in his memoirs, entitled Unforgotten Years. I came upon him from two sides: Bertie Russell had married one of his sisters, and Berenson eventually married the other. It was Bertie that first introduced me to the Smith family, Quakers from Philadelphia long resident in England. In the name of his parents-in-law he wrote asking me to come to Friday’s Hill, a place they had taken in Haslemere. I went, and found myself in an odd society. Old Mr. Smith, prosperous and proprietor of a thriving factory, had been also a Quaker preacher, and no less successful in saving souls than in making money; but, alas, in the midst of his apostolate he had lost his faith, and was at a loss how to reply to his trustful converts when they came to him for further guidance along the narrow path. “Don’t tell Mrs. Smith,” he said to me while showing me his garden, “but I am not a Christian at all. I am a Buddhist.” And he pointed to what he called his Bo Tree, a great oak, in the midst of which he had had a glass house constructed. We climbed the ladder into it, a single small chamber with a black horsehair lounge and a small bookcase, filled with little old-fashioned American books, among which I spied Prue and I, a novel by our “Aunt Sarah’s” son-in-law, George William Curtis. I had expected the Dhammapada or the Upanishads. Vain flight of the American puritan to softer climates! He carries his horizon with him, and remains rooted at home.

Mrs. Smith too had been a preacher, and she remained a Quaker inasmuch as she continued to advocate simplicity of life and to call her children “thee”; and although she had abandoned the belief in hell, she went on preaching and feeling the immense importance of rescuing oneself from perdition; for as she wisely thought, there were bad enough hells on earth from which people needed to be saved. However, with a resignation that had a touch of defiance and warning in it, she put up with the unregenerate views of her children, and of the world at large.

It was strange to see Bertie, and even his brother, who turned up one day for luncheon, in that American Quaker family, and to hear those young women speak of the elder brother as Frank, which I never heard any of his friends or his wives do. But the Russells never knew themselves or their proper place in the world: that was a part of their mixture of genius and folly. I myself felt out of my element in the Smith family, yet was destined to come upon them all my life long in various ways. They not unnaturally thought of me among their class of expatriate Americans and members of the intelligentsia: only Mrs. Berenson, who had motherly insights and had been married to an Irish Catholic, understood me a little, and perceived how unwillingly and deceptively I had come to fall under those categories. However, I have much to thank the Smiths for. They formed a lively band in the carnival, and led me into other bands in the masquerade, which I should hardly have joined of my own initiative.

At Haslemere, they took me to visit “Michael Field,” whose identity and whose poems I had never heard of. Michael Field was a pseudonym for two ladies, aunt and niece, who were linked together by the tenderest affection and by a common inspiration of the classic Muse. They had been forewarned, they may have read up my poetry expressly; in any case, they awaited me as if I had been Orpheus approaching lyre in hand towards their bower. The aunt stood at the door, serene but intense; dressed in rich black lace: I noticed a preciously bound small volume in her hand and pink roses in her bosom. The niece kept somewhat in the shadow, as if too young to be more than silent and curious. On the tea-table there were red and green apples in a golden basket, and under the table a large dog, with a wonderful coat of long silken bronze-coloured hair. Unfortunately the dog couldn’t travel and would die if they left him: for that reason they were prevented from ever going to Italy and Greece. But what did that matter, when they had Greece and Italy in their hearts? They didn’t say so in words, but words in such a case were superfluous. Everything breathed inexpressible tenderness and silent passion.

Some years later the Smiths introduced me to a better-known personage: Henry James. Bertie and his first wife had then been divorced and she and her brother lived together in St. Leonard’s Terrace in Chelsea. By that time Logan Pearsall Smith had developed his amiable interest in my writings and the Berensons also had shown me the greatest kindness. Now the brother and sister asked me one day to lunch with Henry James. Those were his last years and I never saw him again. Nevertheless in that one interview he made me feel more at home and better understood than his brother William ever had done in the long years of our acquaintance. Henry was calm, he liked to see things as they are, and be free afterwards to imagine how they might have been. We talked about different countries as places of residence. He was of course subtle and bland, appreciative of all points of view, and amused at their limitations. He told me an anecdote about Prosper Mérimée wondering at him for choosing to live in England, and finding that a good background for his inspiration. “Vous vivez,” he had said, “parmi des gens moins fins que vous.” All of us naturally felt the truth of this as applied to Henry James, and each of us no doubt thought it true of himself also: yet how well we all understood, notwithstanding, the incomparable charm of living in England!

As for me, apart from the climate and the language, both entirely to my taste, there was the refinement, if not the finesse of English people in all their ways. They were certainly less disinterested than I, intellectually, morally and materially; and it was not from them that I wished to draw my ideas. But I respected and loved the English psyche, and the primacy there of the physical and moral nature over the intellectual. It was the safer order of things, more vital, more manly than the reverse. Man was not made to understand the world, but to live in it. Yet nature, in some of us, lets out her secret; it spoils the game, but it associates us with her own impartiality. We cannot abdicate that privilege. It is final, ultimate, proper for the funeral oration over the earth: but those who are destined to live in this world had better not hear of it, or if they hear of it had better not take it too much to heart.

Of the London suburbs, the only one where I have stayed for any time is Richmond. I saw the old Star and Garter at its last gasp; it was being sold and transformed: and while the dinner there was good enough, there was an uncomfortable air of removal. But during the year of the armistice I spent some weeks at the Richmond Hill Hotel; I was waiting to obtain leave to return to Paris. The French authorities made a great fuss about it. Why, if I had lived in Paris, had I abandoned La France in the hour of danger? The military official evidently suspected that I was not a neutral or an elderly man, but a young coward or a secret enemy. I might have retorted that if I had returned at the outbreak of war, I should only have added another mouth to the population, quite likely to be starved during another siege. But I never protest or argue with persons in authority: instead I produced a note in a fashionable lady’s handwriting. It was from Madame de Fontenay, addressed to the Chancellor of the French Embassy, requesting him to facilitate my journey, and including her husband’s card. She wrote because I was a friend of the Strongs who were great friends of hers; and they were great friends of hers because they were son-in-law and granddaughter of Rockefeller. Monsieur Rockefeller, she once said to me with decision, was like a king. Her perfumed little letter worked like magic; and I was immediately able to cross the Channel; it was on the very day of the signing of the peace of Versailles.

In Richmond I had not had the comfort of private lodgings, but had quiet and rather nice early Victorian rooms; and for going in to London, as I did often, I liked the top of the busses, now motor-busses, and the long drive over Fulham Heath. On other days Richmond Park was at hand for walks in almost complete solitude. The Terrace, the tea-rooms, the river, and the trippers entertained me after the fashion of the Paris boulevards.

One day I fell into conversation with a young man who was reading a French novel conspicuous in its yellow cover. They all knew French and Italian, he said, in the Navy. He had cruised all over the Mediterranean. Now he was on special leave because his father was on his way to England to try the Kaiser. His father was a Chief Justice in India—Watkins: I had of course seen the name. Yes: I had certainly seen the name somewhere: I didn’t add, over the fishmonger’s round the corner. And the Chief Justice and his gallant son were enjoying their holiday for nothing. They didn’t after all hang the Kaiser. Such little casual acquaintances amused me in my travels.

I had been in Richmond once before on a much briefer, soberer, more exalted errand: to visit old Lady Russell at Pembroke Lodge. Bertie took me there to high tea one evening. There was a beef-steak, and a half bottle of claret, exclusively for me. The atmosphere was exactly that of old-fashioned Boston: only the voices and the subjects of conversation were different. Lady Russell at once asked me if I knew The Bible in Spain. I had heard of Borrow’s book, but unfortunately hadn’t read it, so that I was at a loss to make a suitable reply. Soon, however, I was put at my ease by not being questioned, and Lady Russell—her daughter Lady Agatha was present but didn’t talk—began to speak about herself and her feelings. The world had moved away from what it was in other days: she never went to London now except to dine with Mr. Gladstone. In fine, a picture of self-confirming but melancholy old age, when the nebula of experience contracts into a single central sun, alone now visible or trusted, and destined soon to be extinguished in its turn.

This visit forms an interesting contrast to the one, already mentioned, which I had made some years before to the Russells’ other grandmother, Lady Stanley of Alderley. There I had been taken by the elder brother, here tabooed. I had just returned to London from Oxford, and Russell had asked me to join him at his grandmother’s, on the way to Teddington, where he then lived. It was a large house in Dover Street, now a club or hotel. The front door, at one end of the façade, opened directly into a large square hall, where I was received by two flunkeys in white silk stockings. When I asked for Lord Russell and gave my name, it was evident that I was expected, for the footman I spoke to said, “Yes, Sir. In a moment,” and the other instantly disappeared. Presently I saw the youthful figure of Russell himself tripping down the red carpeted grand stairs, and I can see it still, silhouetted against the western sunlight that streamed from the opposite windows above the landing. He was in an amiable mood, seemed to approve of my new clothes and hat and discreet tie, and led me up in the most friendly manner into a long room like a gallery that evidently occupied the whole front of the house. There was a row of windows, with boxes of plants in front of them, running along one side, and opposite a row of cabinets and sofas against the wall, the whole floor between being clear, and with the parquet highly burnished and waxed, so that footing was a bit precarious. At the other end, however, there was a large rug spread, on which stood the tea-table, surrounded by three ladies, and two or three vacant chairs of comfortable and homelike appearance. Lady Stanley, fat, old, jolly, and monumental was enthroned in the centre; on one side sat the Hon. Maud Stanley, her daughter, amiable and middle-aged, and on the other her granddaughter, Lady Griselda Ogilvie, charming in the latest fashion and smiling with an easy grace. Our visit was as short as it was agreeable, for Russell was always conscious of the due time for catching trains. But it sufficed to leave a permanent impression in my mind, since this is the only glimpse I ever had of a grand house and of good society in London.

The recollection will serve to bring my rambling narrative back to the year 1887, and to the most extraordinary of all my friends.