Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 427, May, 1851

"The enthusiasm," she says, "was immense; I thought myself at Rome, and had difficulty in recognising the nation that talks by measure and walks by springs. But soon these men, with hat on head and coat off, lying down upon their seats, and who, after placing their heavy-nailed shoes on the ground, carelessly rested their woollen-stockinged feet on the back of their neighbours' chairs, reminded me that I was in the United States."

On entering the railway between New York and Philadelphia, the Countess found it —

"Full of men and newspapers, the former carrying the latter. There were sixty-five travellers. When I went in, every place seemed full, and no one stirred. I had a right to my place, for which I had paid beforehand. The conductor addressed a few words to one of the occupants of a bench intended for four persons, but which was then occupied but by three. The traveller continued to read, and paid not the least attention to what was said to him. Second appeal, same insensibility. Then the conductor pushed him. He yielded to this third and energetic summons, but without raising his head from his newspaper, and as if he had been displaced by a jolt of the carriage. This passenger was the only one who wore gloves. One must see this nation to form an idea of its manners. Here a man lets himself be pushed, elbowed, hustled, and suffers his toes to be trodden upon, without wincing; what is still more astonishing, he sees people lean upon his wife before his eyes, and endures all these insults with stoical tranquillity – the contrary would appear absurd or ridiculous… During the journey, my neighbour thought proper to rest his back against my shoulder. I gently told him of it. He took no heed, and preserved his position – not with any impertinent intention, but because he found himself comfortable. At sight of this, my young companion, a Spaniard by blood, a Frenchman by education, turned red and pale alternately; his lips were compressed, his eyes flashed. I was frightened; but suddenly, assuming an air of calmness, he extended his hands, placed them on the back of my boorish neighbour, and pushed him quietly into his place.

'If I had put myself in a passion with him,' he afterwards said to me, 'he would never have understood why.'

'And you would have been wrong,' added Mr W – n; 'how can one be angry with people who would think it quite natural that you should behave in the same way to their wives and daughters?'"

It is not surprising that Mr Taylor, at his age, and in his superficial glance at the United States, should have overlooked a point of American character which particularly strikes M. Marmier, the poet and dilettante, and Madame de Merlin, the high-bred and intellectual woman. This is, the general sacrifice, to the positively and materially useful, of those pursuits and refinements which are the grace, and embellishment of human existence. The neglect of the fine arts, the absence of feeling for the beautiful, are there the result of the ardour for speculation and the all-absorbing pursuit of dollars.

"The artist," says Madame de Merlin, "is assimilated to the artisan, and art is measured by the yard, like merchandise. They do not cultivate music or painting, or even flowers. Do you wish to inhale the perfume of a flower? you must buy it at a high price: it is an article of trade, and only to be found at the nurseryman's. I am not aware of a single picture in the United States, unless it be in the Pantheon, where several memorable epochs of the American Revolution are rudely represented upon some old panels of wall. In this country, all that is beautiful is forbidden: the beautiful is not useful. The grace of the human form, music, poetry, painting, flowers, are blessings vouchsafed by Providence to man to soften the bitterness of his days of mourning, to alleviate the burthen of his chains; they are gleams of joy amidst long years of struggle, brilliant flashes through the gloom of night; they are the luxury of human life."

Less elegant and eloquent than Madame de Merlin, M. Marmier resumes in greater detail, but with equal force, nearly the same idea: —

"The Americans may say to me, 'We are not a polite people it is true; we seek not to be affable or attentive, it must be owned; and the foreigner who comes amongst us may well be shocked by our coldness. But if we disdain, as frivolous, the elegant habits of European society, we have an audacity of enterprise, and a rapidity of action, which must astonish Europe. To start from the spot where we now are (on the Hudson.) In less than forty years, we have covered this desert river with steamers and vessels of every kind, we have cleared and peopled its banks, converted its hamlets into flourishing cities, dug harbours and canals, laid down railroads, given life, movement, and commercial prosperity to the whole district. Before us is Albany, which, in the seventeenth century, was a mere fort, and which now has a population of forty-two thousand souls; and down yonder is the commercial metropolis of New York, the first in the world after Liverpool. Nothing equals the spring of our activity and the boldness of our conceptions. Things that you in France take years to combine, and which you lengthily discuss in the tribune and the newspapers, we accomplish in a turn of the hand. In a couple of months we shall establish a line of steamers to Havre, and another to England. Already we have similar communication with Germany by the port of Bremen, with the Antilles and the Pacific Ocean. Not a corner of the globe is there where our flag does not wave. How many projects have there not been elaborated in your old Europe for cutting through the Isthmus of Panama? England and France sent thither their engineers, who published long reports – reports which were examined by councils of ministers, submitted to commissions, and finally shelved in public offices. At New York, two or three merchants formed an association, which decided, in two or three days, that the Isthmus of Panama should be crossed by a railroad. No sooner said than done. Already the workmen are on the ground; another year, and the United States' steam-engine will connect the two oceans.'

I recognise," says M. Marmier, "the justice of such reasoning, and I bow my head before this power of human genius applied to the wonders of industry. But, O worthy Yankees, Scripture says that 'man shall not live by bread alone,' – the heart and the mind have other requirements. Unless our mind be absorbed in the movements of a high-pressure steam-engine, and our heart changed into a bank-note, there will always remain to us pleasing reveries, thoughts of art and poetry, the enjoyments of social life and of expansive affections, which all the efforts of your courage and the success of your toil can never replace."

Appositely to Madame de Merlin's slighting mention of the pictures of Revolutionary scenes, comes in a passage from M. Marmier's first volume, relating to the Americans' exaggerated estimate of their military glories.

"At Plattsburg, situated where the Saranac enters Lake Champlain, there is a chance that the American, who has passed whole hours without heeding you, and who has hitherto received your advances like a dog in a bad humour, will suddenly embellish his metallic physiognomy with a jovial smile, and approach you with a complaisant air. For he longs to tell you of the victory gained near this town by the Americans, in the year 1814, commanded by Commodore Macdonough, over the English troops; and he narrates the story with so many details, and such an emphasis, that you at last wish he would relapse into his habitual silence.

The Americans, like the Russians, have a national pride surpassing all expression. They cannot, like the Russians, talk of their old traditions; nor have they, like them, ancient monuments of a venerable character, and modern ones of grand aspect. They have not, like the soldiers of Suwarrow and Alexander, conquered a valiant reputation upon the chief battle-fields of Europe. Neither have they the literature of Russia, so artless in its popular poetry, so original in the compositions of Pushkin and Gogol. But little do they care what exists in other countries. They have the happiness to believe all other nations very inferior to them, and all the imagination that the perpetual use of figures has left them is agreeably employed in raising the airy edifice of their glory. Their least success is an event which must occupy the thoughts of the whole world. A battle in which they have taken a banner And slain thirty men is a second Marengo. The name of their General Scott is to be transmitted to posterity with the same lustre as that of Alexander or Cæsar; and not a soldier who served in the war against Mexico but is a Napoleon on a small scale. When they talk of their country and of its progress, the ordinary vocabulary is too weak for their enthusiasm. They are fain to seek extraordinary epithets, words which the learned Johnson never admitted into his dictionary. They remind me of the Italian cicerone who exclaimed, when showing a picture of Albano to a traveller, 'Ah, Signor! questo è un maestro, e un grande pittore, e un pittorissimo!'

I accordingly heard, from one end to the other, the story of the battle of Plattsburg, after which my officious American, satisfied probably with my attention, made me a bow – a rare circumstance! I even believe – a still rarer event – that he made a motion as if to raise his hand to his hat. Then, having no other Homeric epic to narrate, he took himself off, and left me opposite to the shores of the Champlain, at liberty to indulge in meditation."

Thus left to his reflections, M. Marmier grows pathetic – as is not unfrequently the case with him – and feels his heart oppressed with an unspeakable sadness, and gives us a French prose version of some German verses by Tieck, which he might just as well have omitted, as also some gossip about the moon and other analogous matters, which merely serves to swell his book, and will inevitably be passed unread by every sane reader. However, we must take the gentleman as we find him, and sift, as well as we can, the wheat from the chaff, when the latter occasionally predominates. Presently he relapses from the pathetic into the sarcastic, on occasion of a visit to the Legislative Assembly of the United States, which reminded him a good deal of that of France. There were certain points of difference, however. "The American deputies, he says, chewed tobacco very agreeably, and spat with remarkable dexterity to a distance of fifteen paces," – through a keyhole at that distance, we have heard it asserted, but do not guarantee the fact. Even Mr Taylor but imperfectly conceals his disgust at the "antique vases, vulgarly called spittoons," placed beside the desk of each member of Congress. From the senate-house to the President's levee is but a step. It is taken by M. Marmier under the guidance and protection of a lady, to do honour to whose introduction he put on, he tells us, his whitest cravat and his blackest coat. But soon he perceived that this garb of ceremony formed a striking contrast with the motley costumes that thronged the White House at Washington. Frocks of every colour were there, and vests of every cut, but of coats very few.

"There was no servant at the door or in the antechamber. We walked at once into the saloon, where the President was on his legs, fulfilling the arduous duty imposed upon him, without respect for his age and for the dignity of his military services, by the arrogant republic. My amiable conductress advanced towards him. He held out his hand and said, 'How do you do?' She named me, he turned towards me, holding out his hand, and saying 'How do you do?' A crowd of visitors came up; he shook hands with them all, repeating 'How do you do?' These amiable salutations bidding fair to be indefinitely prolonged, my charming introductress thought I had enough of it, and took me up to the President's daughter, who welcomed me with the never-failing 'How do you do?' After which we went to walk about another saloon with a crowd of individuals who were parading it in pairs in silent procession; women, such as exist nowhere but in Henri Monnier's comedies, and men to whom you would fear to grant admittance into your anteroom. For opening his marble palace once a-week to this plebeian crowd, for courteously saluting all these ladies who keep stalls, for shaking hands with some hundreds of unclean citizens, the republic gives its President only one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs a year. It is poor pay!"

The pittance certainly appears paltry, contrasted with the more ample allowance of a French president; but the two cases will hardly admit of a comparison, nor does M. Marmier draw one. There is evidently very little of the republican in his composition; we should rather take him for one of the class which M. Louis Blanc's followers designate, in picturesque abbreviation, as aristos; and indeed he makes no secret of his aversion to what he terms demagoguery– a word which is probably not to be found either in Boyer or Walker, but which some of our ballad-writing friends may possibly think no bad rhyme to roguery.

Soon after his visit to the President, we find our errant Frenchman steaming down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans. At Cincinnati, when about to embark on a steamer pompously advertised as "The splendid and fast-running John Hancock," he is somewhat startled by a conversation between two Americans, from which he gathers that the said "Hancock" is a worthless boat, whose boilers have been condemned by the inspector, and which the insurance companies refuse to take, but out of whose rotten hull and rickety engines the considerate proprietors propose to squeeze a little more passage-money at risk of the passengers' lives. So M. Marmier takes his place by the "Western World," also announced as "splendid and fast-running," but which, he flatters himself, is more sea, or at least river worthy, and devotes a few pages to the perils of the West, the recklessness of steamboat captains in America, and the unpaternal nature of a Government which imposes no check on the employment of damaged steamers. Explosions, conflagrations, inundations, snags, sawyers, and races – he makes out a terrible list of dangers, and estimates at thirty or forty per annum the number of steamers lost in the Western waters.

"The average existence of a boat is here about four years. In four years it must have brought in its cost, with interest. If it lasts longer, it is by unhoped-for good luck. But the American does not trouble his head about difficulties or perils. He must travel, and he travels at all risks. You have doubtless read the account of that terrible explosion of the "Louisiana," which, about a month ago, discharged the fragments of her boilers and some hundreds of corpses upon the quay of New Orleans. Next day, not a steamer had a passenger the less. Go ahead is the American motto. Is there a new territory to explore at three hundred leagues distance, a sale of goods to be effected north or south —go ahead! The weather may be bad, the roads covered with snow, the journey long and difficult, no matter —go ahead. The steamer by which they are to go is of bad repute, is ill organised and worse commanded; there is danger of its sinking at the very first casualty; never mind —go ahead. Fatigue and danger are nothing – movement before everything. I ought to admire such intrepidity; but, with my old-fashioned European notions, I regret to think that the seductions of fortune can inspire as great courage as the chivalrous sentiments of glory, religion, and love."

M. Marmier is manifestly of too romantic a turn to travel in the States with gratification to himself, or to write about them in a manner likely to satisfy their inhabitants. He humbly confesses his deficiencies, and implores indulgence. A poor tourist, he says, incapable of correctly adding up a column of figures, and ignorant of the very first principles of mechanical science, he prefers the fresh morning breeze to the roar of a locomotive, and would never dream of putting a railway in competition with a hawthorn-hedged footpath. And although, before starting on his Transatlantic expedition, he assiduously studied the works on America of Michel Chevalier, De Tocqueville, and Miss Martineau, even they had not sufficiently guarded him against disappointments. At the bottom of his heart there still lingered fanciful dreams of vast forests, Indian traditions, and deep silent savannahs. He had dreamed of New York as "rising like an enchanted isle between the waves of ocean and the azure current of the Hudson, in the poetical prestige of a world decked in all the charms of youth." We feel that our imperfect translation but feebly renders the elevation of M. Marmier's style and sentiments; but it may suffice to give the reader an idea of that gentleman's bitter disappointment on finding the city of his dreams a vast focus of speculation, cupidity, and roguery; where "the stranger is every moment exposed to find himself gently duped or audaciously robbed;" where the proportion of knaves and adventurers to the mass of the population exceeds that in any other city of the world; and where the religion, even of the most honest, is the blind and unbounded worship of the Golden Calf. The most ungallant of Frenchmen, he spares not even the ladies, but imagines that the gay swarm which daily flutters in Broadway, between the hours of twelve and two, laden to excess with silks and velvets, shawls and laces, collars and jewellery, do not repair thither solely for their amusement, nor yet for the more important business of shopping; but that they are intended as sauntering advertisements of the wealth of their houses, "and to announce, perhaps, by an increased display of plumes and diamonds, each new victory achieved in the campaigns of speculation." In America, according to M. Marmier, and particularly in New York, everything is reducible into dollars and cents, and is duly reduced accordingly.

"To understand the ardour with which they toil in this reproduction, (of dollars,) we must bear in mind that, in their virtuous democracy, there is no other real sign of distinction, neither birth nor titles of nobility, nor artistic and literary talent. Here everything must be reckoned by figures, or weighed in the goldsmith's balance. A captain of a vessel has distinguished himself by a voyage of discovery, and you take pleasure in quoting the interesting places he has seen, and the observations he has made. You are interrupted by an inquiry of how much he was paid. A painter has been successful at the Exhibition, and has received the most encouraging eulogiums, accompanied with a gold medal. They overlook the eulogiums, but desire to know the weight of the medal. Tell an American that Murray gave Lord Byron sixteen hundred guineas for a canto of Childe Harold, he opens his eyes, and exclaims, with poetic enthusiasm, that he should like to have written Childe Harold. But if you add, that Béranger lives in a cottage at Passy, and that his whole fortune consists of a slender annuity, he ridicules Béranger's glory, and reckons he would have done better to take to trade. With such ideas, you will understand that here literature takes no very high flight. Cooper, Washington Irving, and the learned historian Prescott, have certainly acquired much more fame in Europe than in the United States. For there the merit of their works is alone thought of; but here it is gravely remarked that, with all their writings, they have not made their fortunes.

Nevertheless, standing in a New York library, and reckoning up the immense number of newspapers published in America, one might suppose that a more literary country did not exist on the globe's surface. But those publishers do but reprint, in a compact form, and at the lowest possible price, the feuilletons of France, and the elegant octavos of England. Alexander Dumas gives employment to more printing-presses, papermakers, and stitchers here than in France. As to the two thousand four hundred newspapers of which the United States boast, as of a sign of the diffusion of enlightenment, it is impossible, until one has held them in one's hand, and read them with one's own eyes, to form an idea of such a mass of personal diatribes, coarse chronicles, puerile anecdotes – of such a confused medley of political and commercial notices, mingled with shopkeepers' puffs in prose and verse, and smothered in an ocean of advertisements. Nothing that you see in France can give you an idea of these advertisements. They are a daily inventory of all imaginable merchandise, heaped up, pêle-mêle, as in an immense arena – a register of all the inventions possible, and of every conceivable trade… With the exception of the New Orleans Bee, and of the Courier of the United States, (both published in the French language,) I do not know an American paper – not even the best of all, that of a distinguished poet, Mr Bryant – which can be compared, for the order of its contents, and its general getting-up, to the most unpretending of our provincial newspapers. As every considerable city publishes at least a dozen papers, and every little town two or three, the consequence is, that none attain sufficient circulation to afford fair remuneration to a body of able writers. Some are sustained by the funds of partymen, whose organs they are; and the majority exist only by the proceeds of their advertisements."

Arrived at New Orleans, M. Marmier makes his moan over the fair and broad territories once possessed by France in the Western Hemisphere, and predicts the loss of nearly all that she still retains in those latitudes, the Islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique, as a natural consequence of that decree of the Provisional Government which liberated, at one blow, the whole of the blacks, thereby ruining the white proprietors. The slaves had cost three or four thousand francs a-piece; four hundred francs was the indemnity granted to their owners. The negroes, thus suddenly emancipated, at once took to idleness, and would work only when they pleased, and as they pleased, and on their own terms. The sugar-fields were deserted, and the Creoles, abandoning their plantations, worthless for want of hands to cultivate them, were emigrating in numbers to the United States. M. Marmier met a great many of these unfortunate men, ruined and exiled by the mad precipitation of one of the most worthless and despicable Governments that ever swayed, even for a brief space, the destinies of a great country and its colonies.

"Some day," he says, "the negroes will no longer be satisfied to receive wages. With the ideas of equality preached to them by their apostles, they will grow indignant at their condition of hired labourers. They will desire to possess lands. The sooner to have them, they will seize them by force. All the emigrants from Guadaloupe and Martinique with whom I conversed respecting the present condition of the two islands, foresaw a bloody and terrible catastrophe. Failing energetic repression, those islands, like that of St Domingo, will be lost to us. But we shall have the satisfaction, perhaps, of witnessing the foundation of a new kingdom of blacks, and of manufacturing at Paris the crown and sceptre of another Faustin I."

Such gloomy accounts of their condition and prospects were not calculated to encourage M. Marmier in any design he may have entertained of a visit to the French West-Indian colonies. He preferred Cuba – previously, however, abiding some days in New Orleans, where, as in Canada, he fondly traced the lingering habits and traditions of his native land. The gay, urbane, and sociable Creoles contrasted most favourably with the dry, taciturn, tobacco-chewing men of business of the Northern States. M. Marmier was no less surprised than pleased at the striking difference, having expected to find the people of New Orleans already "vitrified by the American furnace."

"For of all the things," he says, "which astonish the stranger in the United States, the most astonishing, perhaps, is the power of absorption of the American character. Suppose a skilful chemist throwing five or six different ingredients into his crucible, mingling and crushing them with a view to the extraction of one homogeneous essence, and you have the image of the moral and intellectual chemistry which continually acts upon this country. What we call the American people is but an agglomeration of emigrants from various regions and races. The first came from England; others have come from Germany, Ireland, France, the mountains of Switzerland, the shores of the Baltic – in short, from all the countries of Europe. At first this agglomeration was effected slowly, by small detachments. Now it annually consists of whole armies of artisans and tillers of the soil, and of thousands upon thousands of families. All these foreigners naturally take with them to the United States their particular predilections, their national habits, doubtless also their prejudices. At first the character of the American displeases them, and they are disagreeably surprised by his habits. They resolve to keep aloof from him, to live apart with their own countrymen, to preserve, upon that distant continent, the manners of their native land, and in their mother tongue they energetically protest that they never will become Americans. Vain is the project! useless the protestation! The American atmosphere envelopes them, and by its constant action weakens their recollections, dissolves their prejudices, decomposes their primitive elements. Little by little, by insensible modifications, they change their views and mode of living, adopt the usages and language of the Americans, and end by being absorbed in the American nation, as are the streamlets from the valleys in the great rivers that bear them onward to the ocean. How many are the honest Germans, who, after cursing the rudeness of American manners, and bitterly regretting their good kindly Germany, have come at last to stick their hat, Yankee fashion, on the back of their head, to stiffen themselves, like the Yankee, in a coat buttoned up to the chin, to disdain all the rules of European courtesy, and to use no other language but the consecrated dialect of business."