November 22d.--I went on board the ship William Lapscott, lying in the
river, yesterday, to take depositions in reference to a homicide
committed in New York. I sat on a sofa in the cabin, and Mr. Wilding at
a table, with his writing-materials before him, and the crew were
summoned, one by one,--rough, piratical-looking fellows, contrasting
strongly with the gewgaw cabin in which I received them. There is no
such finery on land as in the cabin of one of these ships in the
Liverpool trade, finished off with a complete panelling of rosewood,
mahogany, and bird's-eye maple, polished and varnished, and gilded along
the cornices and the edges of the panels. It is all a piece of elaborate
cabinet-work; and one does not altogether see why it should be given to
the gales, and the salt-sea atmosphere, to be tossed upon the waves, and
occupied by a rude shipmaster in his dreadnaught clothes, when the
fairest lady in the land has no such boudoir. A telltale compass hung
beneath the skylight, and a clock was fastened near it, and ticked
loudly. A stewardess, with the aspect of a woman at home, went in and
out of the cabin, about her domestic calls. Through the cabin door (it
being a house on deck) I could see the arrangement of the ship.
The first sailor that I examined was a black-haired, powerful fellow, in
an oil-skin jacket, with a good face enough, though he, too, might have
been taken for a pirate. In the affray in which the homicide occurred,
he had received a cut across the forehead, and another slantwise across
his nose, which had quite cut it in two, on a level with the face, and
had thence gone downward to his lower jaw. But neither he nor any one
else could give any testimony elucidating the matter into which I had
come to inquire. A seaman had been stabbed just before the vessel left
New York, and had been sent on shore and died there. Most of these men
were in the affray, and all of then were within a few yards of the spot
where it occurred; but those actually present all pleaded that they were
so drunk that the whole thing was now like a dream, with no distinct
images; and, if any had been sober, they took care to know nothing that
could inculpate any individual. Perhaps they spoke truth; they certainly
had a free and honest-like way of giving their evidence, as if their only
object was to tell all the truth they knew. But I rather think, in the
forecastle, and during the night-watches, they have whispered to one
another a great deal more than they told me, and have come to a pretty
accurate conclusion as to the man who gave the stab.
While the examination proceeded, there was a drawing of corks in a side
closet; and, at its conclusion, the captain asked us to stay to dinner,
but we excused ourselves, and drank only a glass of wine. The captain
apologized for not joining us, inasmuch as he had drunk no wine for the
last seventeen years. He appears to be a particularly good and
trustworthy man, and is the only shipmaster whom I have met with, who
says that a crew can best be governed by kindness. In the inner closet
there was a cage containing two land-birds, who had come aboard him,
tired almost to death, three or four hundred miles from shore; and he had
fed them and been tender of them, from a sense of what was due to
hospitality. He means to give them to J-----.
November 28th.--I have grown wofully aristocratic in my tastes, I fear,
since coming to England; at all events, I am conscious of a certain
disgust at going to dine in a house with a small entrance-hall and a
narrow staircase, parlor with chintz curtains, and all other arrangements
on a similar scale. This is pitiable. However, I really do not think I
should mind these things, were it not for the bustle, the affectation,
the intensity, of the mistress of the house. It is certain that a woman
in England is either decidedly a lady or decidedly not a lady. There
seems to be no respectable medium. Bill of fare: broiled soles, half of
a roast pig, a haricot of mutton, stewed oysters, a tart, pears, figs,
with sherry and port wine, both good, and the port particularly so. I
ate some pig, and could hardly resist the lady's importunities to eat
more; though to my fancy it tasted of swill,--had a flavor of the pigsty.
On the parlor table were some poor editions of popular books,
Longfellow's poems and others. The lady affects a literary taste, and
bothered me about my own productions.
A beautiful subject for a romance, or for a sermon, would be the
subsequent life of the young man whom Jesus bade to sell all he had and
give to the poor; and he went away sorrowful, and is not recorded to have
done what he was bid.
December 11th.--This has been a foggy morning and forenoon, snowing a
little now and then, and disagreeably cold. The sky is of an
inexpressibly dreary, dun color. It is so dark at times that I have to
hold my book close to my eyes, and then again it lightens up a little.
On the whole, disgustingly gloomy; and thus it has been for a long while
past, although the disagreeableness seems to be very near the earth, and
just above the steeples and house-tops very probably there may be a
bright, sunshiny day. At about twelve there is a faint glow of sunlight,
like the gleaming reflection from a not highly polished copper kettle.
December 26th.--On Christmas eve and yesterday, there were little
branches of mistletoe hanging in several parts of the house, in the
kitchen, the entries, the parlor, and the smoking-room,--suspended from
the gas-fittings. The maids of the house did their utmost to entrap the
gentlemen boarders, old and young; under the privileged places, and there
to kiss them, after which they were expected to pay a shilling. It is
very queer, being customarily so respectful, that they should assume this
license now, absolutely trying to pull the gentlemen into the kitchen by
main force, and kissing the harder and more abundantly the more they were
resisted. A little rosy-checked Scotch lass--at other times very modest
--was the most active in this business. I doubt whether any gentleman
but myself escaped. I heard old Mr. S------ parleying with the maids
last evening, and pleading his age; but he seems to have met with no
mercy, for there was a sound of prodigious smacking immediately
afterwards. J----- was assaulted, and fought, most vigorously; but was
outrageously kissed,--receiving some scratches, moreover, in the
conflict. The mistletoe has white, wax-looking berries, and dull green
leaves, with a parasitical stem.
Early in the morning of Christmas day, long before daylight, I heard
music in the street, and a woman's voice, powerful and melodious, singing
a Christmas hymn. Before bedtime I presume one half of England, at a
moderate calculation, was the worse for liquor.
The market-houses, at this season, show the national taste for heavy
feeding,--carcasses of prize oxen, immensely fat, and bulky; fat sheep,
with their woolly heads and tails still on, and stars and other devices
ingeniously wrought on the quarters; fat pigs, adorned with flowers, like
corpses of virgins; hares, wild-fowl, geese, ducks, turkeys; and green
boughs and banners suspended about the stalls,--and a great deal of dirt
and griminess on the stone floor of the market-house, and on the persons
of the crowd.
There are some Englishmen whom I like,--one or two for whom I might say I
have an affection; but still there is not the same union between us as if
they were Americans. A cold, thin medium intervenes betwixt our most
intimate approaches. It puts me in mind of Alnaschar and his princess,
with the cold steel blade of his scimitar between them. Perhaps if I
were at home I might feel differently; but in a foreign land I can never
forget the distinction between English and American.
January 1st, 1856.--Last night, at Mrs. Blodgett's, we sat up till twelve
o'clock to open the front door, and let the New Year in. After the
coming guest was fairly in the house, the back door was to be opened, to
let the Old Year out; but I was tired, and did not wait for the latter
ceremony. When the New Year made its entrance, there was a general
shaking of hands, and one of the shipmasters said that it was customary
to kiss the ladies all round; but to my great satisfaction, we did not
proceed to such extremity. There was singing in the streets, and many
voices of people passing, and when twelve had struck, all the bells of
the town, I believe, rang out together. I went up stairs, sad and
lonely, and, stepping into J-----'s little room, wished him a Happy New
Year, as he slept, and many of them.
To a cool observer, a country does not show to best advantage during a
time of war. All its self-conceit is doubly visible, and, indeed, is
sedulously kept uppermost by direct appeals to it. The country must be
humbugged, in order to keep its courage up.
Sentiment seems to me more abundant in middle-aged ladies in England than
in the United States. I don't know how it may be with young ladies.
The shipmasters bear testimony to the singular delicacy of common sailors
in their behavior in the presence of women; and they say that this good
trait is still strongly observable even in the present race of seamen,
greatly deteriorated as it is. On shipboard, there is never an
indecorous word or unseemly act said or done by sailors when a woman can
be cognizant of it; and their deportment in this respect differs greatly
from that of landsmen of similar position in society. This is
remarkable, considering that a sailor's female acquaintances are usually
and exclusively of the worst kind, and that his intercourse with them has
no relation whatever to morality or decency. For this very reason, I
suppose, he regards a modest woman as a creature divine and to be
reverenced.
January 16th.---I have suffered wofully from low spirits for some time
past; and this has not often been the case since I grew to be a man, even
in the least auspicious periods of my life. My desolate bachelor
condition, I suppose, is the cause. Really, I have no pleasure in
anything, and I feel my tread to be heavier, and my physical movement
more sluggish, than in happier times. A weight is always upon me. My
appetite is not good. I sleep ill, lying awake till late at night, to
think sad thoughts and to imagine sombre things, and awaking before light
with the same thoughts and fancies still in my mind. My heart sinks
always as I ascend the stairs to my office, from a dim augury of ill news
from Lisbon that I may perhaps hear,--of black-sealed letters, or some
such horrors. Nothing gives me any joy. I have learned what the
bitterness of exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it
but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"--I can
perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own
torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an
uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to
be worth the trouble of carrying it on any further.
I was at a dinner, the other evening, at Mr. B------'s, where the
entertainment was almost entirely American,--New York oysters, raw,
stewed, and fried; soup of American partridges, particularly good; also
terrapin soup, rich, but not to my taste; American pork and beans, baked
in Yankee style; a noble American turkey, weighing thirty-one pounds;
and, at the other end of the table, an American round of beef, which the
Englishmen present allowed to be delicious, and worth a guinea an ounce.
I forget the other American dishes, if there were any more,--O yes!
canvas-back ducks, coming on with the sweets, in the usual English
fashion. We ought to have had Catawba wine; but this was wanting,
although there was plenty of hock, champagne, sherry, madeira, port, and
claret. Our host is a very jolly man, and the dinner was a merrier and
noisier one than any English dinner within my experience.
February 8th.--I read to-day, in the little office-Bible (greasy with
perjuries) St. Luke's account of the agony, the trial, the crucifixion,
and the resurrection; and how Christ appeared to the two disciples, on
their way to Emmaus, and afterwards to a company of disciples. On both
these latter occasions he expounded the Scriptures to them, and showed
the application of the old prophecies to himself; and it is to be
supposed that he made them fully, or at least sufficiently, aware what
his character was,--whether God, or man, or both, or something between,
together with all other essential points of doctrine. But none of this
doctrine or of these expositions is recorded, the mere facts being most
simply stated, and the conclusion to which he led them, that, whether God
himself, or the Son of God, or merely the Son of man, he was, at all
events, the Christ foretold in the Jewish Scriptures. This last,
therefore, must have been the one essential point.
February 18th.--On Saturday there called on me an elderly Robinson-Crusoe
sort of man, Mr. H------, shipwright, I believe, of Boston, who has
lately been travelling in the East. About a year ago he was here, after
being shipwrecked on the Dutch coast, and I assisted him to get home.
Again, I have supplied him with five pounds, and my credit for an outside
garment. He is a spare man, with closely cropped gray, or rather white
hair, close-cropped whiskers fringing round his chin, and a close-cropped
white mustache, with his under lip and a portion of his chin bare
beneath,--sunburnt and weather-worn. He has been in Syria and Jerusalem,
through the Desert, and at Sebastopol; and says he means to get Ticknor
to publish his travels, and the story of his whole adventurous life, on
his return home. A free-spoken, confiding, hardy, religious, unpolished,
simple, yet world-experienced man; very talkative, and boring me with
longer visits than I like. He has brought home, among other curiosities,
"a lady's arm," as he calls it, two thousand years old,--a piece of a
mummy, of course; also some coins, one of which, a gold coin of
Vespasian, he showed me, and said he bought it of an Arab of the desert.
The Bedouins possess a good many of these coins, handed down immemorially
from father to son, and never sell them unless compelled by want. He had
likewise a Hebrew manuscript of the Book of Ruth, on a parchment roll,
which was put into his care to be given to Lord Haddo.
He was at Sebastopol during the siege, and nearly got his head knocked
off by a cannon-ball. His strangest statement is one in reference to
Lord Raglan. He says that an English officer told him that his Lordship
shut himself up, desiring not to be disturbed, as he needed sleep. When
fifteen hours had gone by, his attendants thought it time to break open
the door; and Lord Raglan was found dead, with a bottle of strychnine by
the bedside. The affair, so far as the circumstances indicated suicide,
was hushed up, and his death represented as a natural one. The English
officer seems to have been an unscrupulous fellow, jesting thus with the
fresh memory of his dead commander; for it is impossible to believe a
word of the story. Even if Lord Raglan had wished for death, he would
hardly have taken strychnine, when there were so many chances of being
honorably shot. In Wood's Narrative of the Campaign, it is stated that
he died surrounded by the members of his staff, after having been for
some time ill. It appears, however, by the same statement, that no
serious apprehensions had been entertained, until, one afternoon, he shut
himself in, desiring not to be disturbed till evening. After two or
three hours he called Lord Burghersh,--"Frank, Frank!" and was found to
be almost in a state of collapse, and died that evening. Mr. H------'s
story might very well have been a camp rumor.
It seems to me that the British Ministry, in its notion of a
life-peerage, shows an entire misunderstanding of what makes people
desire the peerage. It is not for the immediate personal distinction;
but because it removes the peer and his consanguinity from the common
rank of men, and makes a separate order of them, as if they should grow
angelic. A life-peer is but a mortal amid the angelic throng.
February 28th.--I went yesterday with Mrs. ------ and another lady, and
Mr. M------, to the West Derby Workhouse. . . .
[Here comes in the visit to the West Derby Workhouse, which was made the
subject of a paper in Our Old Home, called "Outside Glimpses of English
Poverty." As the purpose in publishing these passages from the private
note-books is to give to those who ask for a memoir of Mr. Hawthorne
every possible incident recorded by himself which shows his character and
nature, the editor thinks it proper to disclose the fact that Mr.
Hawthorne was himself the gentleman of that party who took up in his arms
the little child, so fearfully repulsive in its condition. And it seems
better to quote his own words in reference to it, than merely to say it
was he.
Under date February 28, 1856.
"After this, we went to the ward where the children were kept, and, on
entering this, we saw, in the first place, two or three unlovely and
unwholesome little imps, who were lazily playing together. One of them
(a child about six years old, but I know not whether girl or boy)
immediately took the strangest fancy for me. It was a wretched, pale,
half-torpid little thing, with a humor in its eyes which the Governor
said was the scurvy. I never saw, till a few moments afterwards, a child
that I should feel less inclined to fondle.
"But this little, sickly, humor-eaten fright prowled around me, taking
hold of my skirts, following at my heels, and at last held up its hands,
smiled in my face, and, standing directly before me, insisted on my
taking it up! Not that it said a word, for I rather think it was
underwitted, and could not talk; but its face expressed such perfect
confidence that it was going to be taken up and made much of, that it was
impossible not to do it. It was as if God had promised the child this
favor on my behalf, and that I must needs fulfil the contract. I held my
undesirable burden a little while; and, after setting the child down, it
still followed me, holding two of my fingers and playing with them, just
as if it were a child of my own. It was a foundling, and out of all
human kind it chose me to be its father! We went up stairs into another
ward; and, on coming down again, there was this same child waiting for
me, with a sickly smile round its defaced mouth, and in its dim red
eyes. . . . I never should have forgiven myself if I had repelled its
advances."--ED.]
After leaving the workhouse, we drove to Norris Green; and Mrs. ------
showed me round the grounds, which are very good and nicely kept. O
these English homes, what delightful places they are! I wonder how many
people live and die in the workhouse, having no other home, because other
people have a great deal more home than enough. . . . We had a very
pleasant dinner, and Mr. M------ and I walked back, four miles and a
half, to Liverpool, where we arrived just before midnight.
Why did Christ curse the fig-tree? It was not in the least to blame; and
it seems most unreasonable to have expected it to bear figs out of
season. Instead of withering it away, it would have been as great a
miracle, and far more beautiful, and, one would think, of more beneficent
influence, to have made it suddenly rich with ripe fruit. Then, to be
sure, it might have died joyfully, having answered so good a purpose. I
have been reminded of this miracle by the story of a man in Heywood, a
town in Lancashire, who used such horribly profane language that a
plane-tree in front of his cottage is said to have withered away from
that hour. I can draw no moral from the incident of the fig-tree, unless
it be that all things perish from the instant when they cease to answer
some divine purpose.
March 6th.--Yesterday I lunched on board Captain Russell's ship, the
Princeton. These daily lunches on shipboard might answer very well the
purposes of a dinner; being, in fact, noontide dinners, with soup, roast
mutton, mutton-chops, and a macaroni pudding,--brandy, port and sherry
wines. There were three elderly Englishmen at table, with white heads,
which, I think, is oftener the predicament of elderly heads here than in
America. One of these was a retired Custom-House officer, and the other
two were connected with shipping in some way. There is a satisfaction in
seeing Englishmen eat and drink, they do it so heartily, and, on the
whole, so wisely,--trusting so entirely that there is no harm in good
beef and mutton, and a reasonable quantity of good liquor; and these
three hale old men, who had acted on this wholesome faith for so long,
were proofs that it is well on earth to live like earthly creatures. In
America, what squeamishness, what delicacy, what stomachic apprehension,
would there not be among three stomachs of sixty or seventy years'
experience! I think this failure of American stomachs is partly owing to
our ill usage of our digestive powers, and partly to our want of faith in
them.
After lunch, we all got into an omnibus, and went to the Mersey Iron
Foundry, to see the biggest piece of ordnance in the world, which is
almost finished. The overseer of the works received us, and escorted us
courteously throughout the establishment; which is very extensive, giving
employment to a thousand men, what with night-work and day-work. The big
gun is still on the axle, or turning-machine, by means of which it has
been bored. It is made entirely of wrought and welded iron, fifty tons
of which were originally used; and the gun, in its present state, bored
out and smoothed away, weighs nearly twenty-three tons. It has, as yet,
no trunnions, and does not look much like a cannon, but only a huge iron
cylinder, immensely solid, and with a bore so large that a young man of
nineteen shoved himself into it, the whole length, with a light, in order
to see whether it is duly smooth and regular. I suppose it will have a
better effect, as to the impression of size, when it is finished,
polished, mounted, aid fully equipped, after the fashion of ordinary
cannon. It is to throw a ball of three hundred pounds' weight five
miles, and woe be to whatever ship or battlement shall bear the brunt!
After inspecting the gun we went through other portions of the
establishment, and saw iron in various stages of manufacture. I am not
usually interested in manufacturing processes, being quite unable to
understand them, at least in cotton-machinery and the like; but here
there were such exhibitions of mighty strength, both of men and machines,
that I had a satisfaction in looking on. We saw lumps of iron, intensely
white-hot, and in all but a melting state, passed through rollers of
various size and pressure, and speedily converted into long bars, which
came curling and waving out of the rollers like great red ribbons, or
like fiery serpents wriggling out of Tophet; and finally, being
straightened out, they were laid to cool in heaps. Trip-hammers are very
pleasant things to look at, working so massively as they do, and yet so
accurately; chewing up the hot iron, as it were, and fashioning it into
shape, with a sort of mighty and gigantic gentleness in their mode of
action. What great things man has contrived, and is continually
performing! What a noble brute he is!
Also, I found much delight in looking at the molten iron, boiling and
bubbling in the furnace, and sometimes slopping over, when stirred by the
attendant. There were numberless fires on all sides, blinding us with
their intense glow; and continually the pounding strokes of huge hammers,
some wielded by machinery and others by human arms. I had a respect for
these stalwart workmen, who seemed to be near kindred of the machines
amid which they wrought,--mighty men, smiting stoutly, and looking into
the fierce eyes of the furnace fearlessly, and handling the iron at a
temperature which would have taken the skin off from ordinary fingers.
They looked strong, indeed, but pale; for the hot atmosphere in which
they live cannot but be deleterious, and I suppose their very strength
wears them quickly out. But I would rather live ten years as an
iron-smith than fifty as a tailor.
So much heat can be concentrated into a mass of iron, that a lump a foot
square heats all the atmosphere about it, and burns the face at a
considerable distance. As the trip-hammer strikes the lump, it seems
still more to intensify the heat by squeezing it together, and the fluid
iron oozes out like sap or juice.
"He was ready for the newest fashions!"--this expression was used by Mrs.
Blodgett in reference to Mr. ------ on his first arrival in England, and
it is a very tender way of signifying that a person is rather poorly off
as to apparel.
March 15th.--Mr. ------, our new ambassador, arrived on Thursday
afternoon by the Atlantic, and I called at the Adelphi Hotel, after
dinner, to pay him my respects. I found him and his family at
supper. . . . They seem to be plain, affable people. . . . The
ambassador is a venerable old gentleman, with a full head of perfectly
white hair, looking not unlike an old-fashioned wig; and this, together
with his collarless white neckcloth and his brown coat, gave him
precisely such an aspect as one would expect in a respectable person of
pre-revolutionary days. There was a formal simplicity, too, in his
manners, that might have belonged to the same era. He must have been a
very handsome man in his youthful days, and is now comely, very erect,
moderately tall, not overburdened with flesh; of benign and agreeable
address, with a pleasant smile; but his eyes, which are not very large,
impressed me as sharp and cold. He did not at all stamp himself upon me
as a man of much intellectual or characteristic vigor. I found no such
matter in his conversation, nor did I feel it in the indefinable way by
which strength always makes itself acknowledged. B------, though,
somehow, plain and uncouth, yet vindicates himself as a large man of the
world, able, experienced, fit to handle difficult circumstances of life;
dignified, too, and able to hold his own in any society. Mr. ------ has
a kind of venerable dignity; but yet, if a person could so little respect
himself as to insult him, I should say that there was no innate force in
Mr. ------ to prevent it. It is very strange that he should have made so
considerable a figure in public life, filling offices that the strongest
men would have thought worthy of their highest ambition. There must be
something shrewd and sly under his apparent simplicity; narrow, cold,
selfish, perhaps. I fancied these things in his eyes. He has risen in
life by the lack of too powerful qualities, and by a certain tact, which
enables him to take advantage of circumstances and opportunities, and
avail himself of his unobjectionableness, just at the proper time. I
suppose he must be pronounced a humbug, yet almost or quite an innocent
one. Yet he is a queer representative to be sent from brawling and
boisterous America at such a critical period. It will be funny if
England sends him back again, on hearing the news of ------'s dismissal.
Mr. ------ gives me the impression of being a very amiable man in his own
family. He has brought his son with him, as Secretary of Legation,--a
small young man, with a little mustache. It will be a feeble embassy.
I called again the next morning, and introduced Mrs. ------, who, I
believe, accompanied the ladies about town. This simplicity in
Mr. ------'s manner puzzles and teases me; for, in spite of it, there was
a sort of self-consciousness, as if he were being looked at,--as if he
were having his portrait taken.