Seven English Cities | Page 4

almost any metropolis of our own. Even in journalism, an intensely modern product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able and well- written Guardian, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is said that not above a million of its people live in it; all the rest, who can, escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope to escape the Americans. There, intrenched in charming villas behind myrtle hedges, they measurably do so; but Americans are very penetrating, and I would not be sure that the thickest and highest hedge was invulnerable to them. As it is, they probably constitute the best society of Liverpool, which the natives have abandoned to them, though they do not constitute it permanently, but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star, pours out upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of cultivated Americans, who eddy into its hotels, and then rush out of them by every train within twenty-four hours, and often within twenty-five minutes. They understand that there are no objects of interest in Liverpool; and they are not met at the Customs with invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from the people of rank and fashion with whom they have come to associate. These have their stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but they are not at the landing-stage, and even the uncultivated American cannot stay for the vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool, like the cities of his own land, is composed. Our own cities have a social consciousness, and are each sensible of being a centre, with a metropolitan destiny; but the strange thing about Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are without any social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially unborn; they can come into the world only in London, and in their prenatal obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence, while all the commercial and industrial energies rage round them in a gigantic maturity.
V
The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the historical. With the almost immediate transference of the original transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the only place where you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the rest, would land you nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land you at Glasgow; worse schismatics carried you to Southampton; there were heterodox craft that touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling agnostics bring you to London itself. Still, Liverpool remains the greatest port of entry for our probationers, who are bound out to the hotels and railroad companies of all Europe till they have morally paid back their fare. The superstition that if you go in a Cunarder you can sleep on both ears is no longer so exclusive as it once was; yet the Cunarder continues an ark of safety for the timid and despairing, and the cooking is so much better than it used to be that if in contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger's being carried overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of having eaten something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.
[Illustration: THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS]
I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their exceeding multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the disciplined English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them in the stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and whir away to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the steamer; but many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads and legs, and to prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel conditions. These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class corridor compartments to the different luggage- vans. I must say they have very tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people and railroad folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a reassuring and consoling embrace which leaves all their hands--they are Briarean--free for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust yourself implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern, for then you will have to change four times on the way and at every junction personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to its destination.
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