But The Most Striking Peculiarity Of The American Hotels Is In Their
Public Rooms.
Of the ladies' drawing-room I have spoken.
There are
two, and sometimes three, in one hotel, and they are generally
furnished at any rate expensively. It seems to me that the space
and the furniture are almost thrown away. At watering-places and
sea-side summer hotels they are, I presume, used; but at ordinary
hotels they are empty deserts. The intention is good, for they are
established with the view of giving to ladies at hotels the comforts
of ordinary domestic life; but they fail in their effect. Ladies
will not make themselves happy in any room, or with ever so much
gilded furniture, unless some means of happiness are provided for
them. Into these rooms no book is ever brought, no needle-work is
introduced; from them no clatter of many tongues is ever heard. On
a marble table in the middle of the room always stands a large
pitcher of iced water; and from this a cold, damp, uninviting air is
spread through the atmosphere of the ladies' drawing-room.
Below, on the ground floor, there is, in the first place, the huge
entrance hall, at the back of which, behind a bar, the great man of
the place keeps the keys and holds his court. There are generally
seats around it, in which smokers sit - or men not smoking but
ruminating. Opening off from this are reading-rooms, smoking-rooms,
shaving-rooms, drinking-rooms, parlors for gentlemen in which
smoking is prohibited and which are generally as desolate as ladies'
sitting-rooms above. In those other more congenial chambers is
always gathered together a crowd apparently belonging in no way to
the hotel. It would seem that a great portion of an American Inn is
as open to the public as an Exchange or as the wayside of the
street. In the West, during the early months of this war, the
traveler would always see many soldiers among the crowd - not only
officers, but privates. They sit in public seats, silent but
apparently contented, sometimes for an hour together. All Americans
are given to gatherings such as these. It is the much-loved
institution to which the name of "loafing" has been given.
I do not like the mode of life which prevails in the American
hotels. I have come across exceptions, and know one or two that are
very comfortable - always excepting that matter of eating and
drinking. Taking them as a whole, I do not like their mode of life;
but I feel bound to add that the hotels of Canada, which are kept I
think always after the same fashion, are infinitely worse than those
of the United States. I do not like the American hotels; but I must
say in their favor that they afford an immense amount of
accommodation. The traveler is rarely told that a hotel is full, so
that traveling in America is without one of those great perils to
which it is subject in Europe.
CHAPTER XV.
LITERATURE.
In speaking of the literature of any country we are, I think, too
much inclined to regard the question as one appertaining exclusively
to the writers of books - not acknowledging as we should do that the
literary character of a people will depend much more upon what it
reads than upon what it writes. If we can suppose any people to
have an intimate acquaintance with the best literary efforts of
other countries, we should hardly be correct in saying that such a
people had no literary history of their own because it had itself
produced nothing in literature. And, with reference to those
countries which have been most fertile in the production of good
books, I doubt whether their literary histories should not have more
to tell of those ages in which much has been read than of those in
which much has been written.
The United States have been by no means barren in the production of
literature. The truth is so far from this that their literary
triumphs are perhaps those which of all their triumphs are the most
honorable to them, and which, considering their position as a young
nation, are the most permanently satisfactory. But though they have
done much in writing, they have done much more in reading. As
producers they are more than respectable, but as consumers they are
the most conspicuous people on the earth. It is impossible to speak
of the subject of literature in America without thinking of the
readers rather than of the writers. In this matter their position
is different from that of any other great people, seeing that they
share the advantages of our language. An American will perhaps
consider himself to be as little like an Englishman as he is like a
Frenchman. But he reads Shakspeare through the medium of his own
vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue
before he can understand Moliere. He separates himself from England
in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself
from England in mental culture. It may be suggested that an
Englishman has the same advantages as regards America; and it is
true that he is obtaining much of such advantage. Irving, Prescott,
and Longfellow are the same to England as though she herself had
produced them. But the balance of advantage must be greatly in
favor of America. We gave her the work of four hundred years, and
received back in return the work of fifty.
And of this advantage the Americans have not been slow to avail
themselves. As consumers of literature they are certainly the most
conspicuous people on the earth. Where an English publisher
contents himself with thousands of copies, an American publisher
deals with ten thousand. The sale of a new book, which in numbers
would amount to a considerable success with us, would with them be a
lamentable failure. This of course is accounted for, as regards the
author and the publisher, by the difference of price at which the
book is produced.
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