Seven English Cities | Page 4

be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been studying
a page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive the reader. It is
true; but it is also true that I had some wonder, altogether my own, that
so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagination. In
this it outdoes 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