Jeanne Farewell's delightful essay on the great actor Henry Irving reminds us that some Englishmen thought highly of their experiences in North America. But he was not the only Englishmen who did so: Wilde seems to have enjoyed himself a good deal, and, yes, Kipling didn"t like Chicago, but he lived five years in Brattleboro, Vermont, and his remarks nake him sound as much as like any Yankee of the period as an Englishman. Matthew Arnold's dismissal of all landscape in the Eastern United States just indicates he saw very little landscape in that part of the country. He was writing, we have to remind ourselves, in the midst of the Hudson River School of Painters and the Luminist movement, and Arnold, I"m afraid, was a notoriously inept evaluator of contemporary art and literature: in one of the greatest (and most experimental) periods of British poetry — during the the time in fact when both Brownings, Clough, Hardy, Meredith, Morris, both Rossettis, Swinburne, and many others wrote — Arnold, who found himself unable to write poetry any more, declared his age to be unpoetic. Poor Arnold!
Of course, the criticisms of Trollope, mother and son, and Dickens are far more scathing — and unfortunately, pretty accurate, too: Americans were violent and crude; of course in Martin Chuzzlewit and The Way We Live Now both authors showed their native country in just as bad a light. — George P. Landow
We Americans were the recipients of much negative press around the time of Henry Irving. The criticism was comprehensive: it had to do with our sights, our scenery, our mercantilism, our Wild West mentality, our journalists, our boorishness, our theater, and virtually every aspect of American life. Thank goodness we had a champion in Henry Irving.
Anthony Trollope had only two complaints about New York City, but the two were enough to quell anyone's interest in visiting. He wrote that there was nothing to see in New York and no mode of getting around to see it. Our own Edith Wharton recoiled at the hideousness of New York's brownstones, and fled to Europe, never to return. Matthew Arnold dismissed the landscape of our entire eastern seaboard and all states east of the Alleghenies as uninteresting. The fact that we had no fine cathedrals or castles or Elizabethan manor houses was particularly odious to him, for it meant that we lived with no training in beauty. Rudyard Kipling saw Chicago and flatly stated, "Having seen it I urgently desire never to see it again" (Rapson, 36). But by far the strongest criticisms were leveled at our inhabitants.
We were thought of as avaricious and money-minded, and our materialism made us the subjects of much contumely. The artistic sensibilities of Randolph Caldecott were deeply offended by our signage. Advertising, it appears, was rife. Caldecott looked out of the window of the train between New York and Washington, and saw the roofs and sides of barns painted with inducements to buy miracle elixirs. Billboards dotted and defiled the landscape. Even rocks were made to bear the marks of commercial enterprise. So unlike the bejeweled and sceptered isle.
Anthony Trollope was particularly opinionated about the American panting after wealth. He observed that every man worshiped the dollar, and was down before his shrine from morning till night. Trollope came up with the idea that every man should bear on his forehead a label stating how many dollars he is worth, as that would be in keeping with the spirit of the place.
We were a money-mad society. As Dickens showed in Martin Chuzzlewit, we even ate fast, because we were in such a hurry to make more money.
The perception of our country as the Wild West of sensational dime novels and melodramas was widespread. Ellen Terry was convinced that all American women wore red flannel shirts and carried bowie knives. The nation was overrun with masked bandits and sharpshooters. The cloakrooms of our theaters were armories where we were expected to leave our weapons before the show. We lived in frontier mining towns with names like Tombstone and Cripple Creek, populated with characters called Hoss and Buckskin Joe.
Our manners were reviled. Even James Russell Lowell found them deplorable, and he was a native. He describes us as the most common-schooled and the least cultivated people in the world. The New York Nation recorded that college education was completely lost on our young men because they entered a world in which not one man in a hundred thousand had either the manner or cultivation of a gentleman, or changed his shirt more than once a week, or ate with a fork.
We chewed tobacco and spat it out.
Chicago was "inhabited by savages," wrote Mr. Kipling (Rapson, 36).
We were evidently not as mentally fit as the British. According to Trollope, there was a fundamental difference in our intellectual apparatus. The English mind has more imagination, he averred. Matthew Arnold concurred. The Americans are great observers, he noted, but they only observe material things, rather than things social or picturesque.
Arnold recounts the story of Thomas Carlyle who was up in arms when his younger brother wanted to emigrate to the United States. What? Plant himself in Yankee-land? What a miserable fate! "Could you banish yourself from all that is interesting to your mind . . . that you might eat a better dinner?" (Arnold, 171)
Arnold seized upon Carlyle's use of the word "interesting," and declared "interesting" as a basic human need. America simply was not interesting. We produced precious little in terms of art and literature, and the artists we did have ended up as expatriates.
We were a nation of philistines. The British traveler Miss Isabella Bird, journeying through the Rocky Mountains, lodged with the Chalmers family and reported that the toothless Mrs. Chalmers was never idle for one moment, was severe and hard, and despised everything but work. Our fiction is replete with hillbillies, boors, and backwoods types. Elmer Moffat in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country is the embodiment of crass consumerism. Christopher Newman in Henry James's The American typifies the American man of business. He is a man of decision and prosperity, a man of no real feeling. He offers an apologia: "The fact is I have never had time to "feel" things so very beautifully. I've had to do them" (James, The American, 43). Another character in the book declares that she cannot understand how a man can be so ignorant.
Archibald Higbie in The Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee Masters is an artist who is constrained by his provincial and small-minded upbringing. "I loathed you, Spoon River," he intones from the grave. "I tried to rise above you. I was ashamed of you . . . There was no culture in Spoon River" (Masters, 170). One would think that the whole country was nothing more than one big Gopher Prairie, the Midwestern hick town so unsparingly portrayed in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street.
How could a high-minded Shakespearean actor such as Henry Irving even think of performing here?
Our newspapers were further indictments of our character, representing, it was said, a distinctly lower level of life than the English one. Charles Dickens derided the "monster of depravity" that was the American press (Dickens, American Notes, 219). Our degenerate publications were a moral poison that cast infamy upon our nation. The respectable English journals were vastly superior. Dickens found it nearly impossible to convey an adequate idea of the licentious and frightful engine of American journalism. (Imagine: it was far worse than even a Dickens could describe!) One thing was certain, though: The American people would be better off if they loved the Real less, and the Ideal more.
The sensation-mongering was beyond belief, agreed Mr. Arnold, and the news was for the servants' hall.
The American interviewer was particularly despised. He was seen as someone whose mission it was to inflict mental pain by asking hostile and personal questions. As Henry Irving was sailing on the Britannic toward our shores, American journalists were getting their wits and pencils "duly sharpened for their prey" (Hatton, 41).
Worshipping the golden idols as we did, we were artistically ill equipped to appreciate the theater. Charles Dickens grieved of the existence of only three theaters in New York, two of which were deserted, and the remaining a venue for vaudevilles and burlesques. Vaudeville, that American invention, was the entertainment of choice for the mediocre American intelligence. "These childish and half-savage minds are not moved except by very elementary narratives composed without art, in which burlesque and melodrama, vulgarity and eccentricity, are combined in strong doses," wrote a civilized Frenchman (Arnold, 92).
Our entertainments were variety shows performed in rowdy saloon music halls, or circuses with tent shows. We favored comic songsters, acrobat acts, trained animals, Strong Men, pantomimes, minstrel shows with blackface performers, and attractions such as The Fat Lady, the Two-Headed Pig, the Tattooed Man, and The Living Skeleton. We liked a slam-bang ending.
There was justifiable concern that the Americans, with their taste for the marvelous, the sensational, and the colossal might not appreciate the subtle and poetic effects of a nuanced actor such as Henry Irving.
As Arnold said: "a great void exists in the civilization over there" (Arnold, 181).
Ours was not a very auspicious audience for a Henry Irving. Not very auspicious at all.
Anthony Trollope, in Barchester Towers, writes that "It is astonishing how much difference the point of view makes in the aspect of all that we look at!" (242) Henry Irving's attitudes toward America were refreshingly different from those of his compatriots. Of our cupidity, he was exceedingly charitable. The impulse to advertise was evidently not so pronounced in our English brethren: Irving's programs at the Lyceum were tasteful tabulators of the cast and crew, but the programs in America were slathered with outsized advertisements for corsets, dressed beef, and oyster saloons. The production credits and cast in America were relegated to a painfully small part of the program with painfully small print. But rather than be affronted by the privileging of commerce over art, Mr. Irving was delighted at our "go" (Hatton, 200).
As to the charge of mercantilism, he admired our pluck and the spirit of commerce. "Everyone seems to be engaged in business of some kind or another," he observed (Hatton, 109). The advertisements that so distressed Caldecott had the opposite effect on Irving. "Have you ever noticed what a picturesque effect, both in form and color, the sign-boards give to Chestnut Street?" he said upon visiting Philadelphia (Hatton, 199). He appreciated our absence of ceremony, and the lack of an idle class who have little to do but be amused.
Even that most vile creature, the American interviewer, was highly regarded by Irving. Irving gave a speech in which he declared that the American interviewer was a misrepresented person. The American journalist was, insisted Mr. Irving, a most courteous gentleman who had but an amiable curiosity.
Irving was no less defensive of the American newspapers. He was impressed by the free way Americans criticized their politicians. He particularly liked newspapers such as the Evening Call: its purpose was to amuse, rather than to instruct. It employed humorous versifiers and storytellers. The style was bright and clever. And full of go.
Admittedly, one might murmur something about diplomacy in Mr. Irving's comments, but though a great actor, it appears that as a person, he was incapable of dissembling. Ellen Terry claimed that he was a man who never pretended. By many accounts, he was simply a good-natured fellow with a generous and magnanimous spirit. Menpes was struck by Irving's kindness of heart, and wrote that that his thoughts were always earnest.
Of our much-maligned theater, Irving was also complimentary. He declared New York's Star Theater to be one of the most admirable he had ever seen, noting in particular its auditorium. He commended the quality of our audiences as well. After opening night of The Bells in New York on October 29, 1883, Irving said to a Herald reporter that he had never played to a more responsive or sympathetic audience. He commented on the intelligence of the assembly, and noted that his every look, gesture, and tone was carefully observed.
Audiences elsewhere were just as appreciative of his art. Several houses were largely comprised of people of wealth who had little interest in the theater. Yet Mr. Irving's reception in America was nothing short of sensational, in spite of the high density of yokels and philistines, in spite of the fact that these lovers of trade had no taste for the cultivated life, in spite of the mediocrity of the scandal-hungry American mind, in spite of these enemies of culture. (Admittedly, his biggest successes in New York, The Bells and The Merchant of Venice, are both about money.)
Henry Irving came to America for Art. He professed at the outset that he did not come to make money (although the box office receipts would tally up to $400,000), but to see the country, and to share his art. Yes, to share it even with the Elmer Moffats of the world.
It would be impossible within the confines of this essay to make a case for American erudition and to refute the claim that we are cultural cretins (and I would be too embarrassed it I failed to be convincing), so this author will genially go along with what has been said. But I will underscore the notion that Henry Irving must have been such an actor as to have gripped his audience by the throat and held them in his thrall and moved them and made them feel to a powerful degree. Great artists do that, and they require absolutely no preparation, information, sophistication, or meditation on the part of their audience. The man on the street, after all, would have no interest in or understanding of a classical piano recital, but Arthur Rubinstein could make him cry.
So perhaps our native oafishness is, in effect, a very tribute to the quality and efficacy of Mr. Irving's art. One reads of his mesmeric power; truly, his acting must have been as music to soothe the savage beast, even that most savage of beasts, the American.
Now about our scenery . . . I cannot imagine anyone thinking that our scenery is anything less than spectacular. Yes, we lack salons (not saloons), and ancient castles . . . but scenery? Hardly. And scenery, after all, figured rather prominently in Henry Irving's art.
Henry Irving brought his prodigious English imagination to bear upon our rugged and dramatic terrain, imparting to it something of an air of sophistication, an artistic ambience, a cultural cachet. Upon seeing a rainbow arched over Niagara Falls, he declared, "A great stage manager, Nature! What wonders can be done with effective lighting!" (Bingham, 261).
So we did have a bit of great "theater" after all.
Thank you, Sir Henry.
Related Material
Bibliography
Arnold, Matthew. Civilization in the United States. Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske, and Co., 1900.
Billington, Elizabeth T. The Randolph Caldecott Treasury. New York: Frederick Warne, 1978.
Bingham, Madeleine. Henry Irving and the Victorian Theatre. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes. New York: Books, Inc. [d?]
Hatton, Joseph. Henry Irving's Impressions of America. Boston: R. Osgood, 1884.
Irving, Laurence. Henry Irving. New York: Macmillan, 1952.
James, Henry. The American. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, !907.
Masters, Edgar Lee. Spoon River Anthology. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1915.
Menpes, Mortimer. Henry Irving. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1906.
Rapson, Richard. Britons View America: Travel Commentary 1860-1935. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971.
Schlereth, Thomas J. Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991.
Stoker, Bram. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. New York: MacMillan and Co., 1906.
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Trollope, Anthony. North America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
Unspecified Author. Henry Irving: A Short Account of his Public Life. New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1883.
Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Last modified 27 June 2007