Produced by Al Haines.
ENGLISH TRAITS.
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
NEW AND REVISED EDITION.
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.
1876.
COPYRIGHT, 1856 AND 1876,
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & Co., CAMBRIDGE.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.--FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.
CHAPTER II.--VOYAGE TO ENGLAND.
CHAPTER III.--LAND.
CHAPTER IV.--RACE.
CHAPTER V.--ABILITY.
CHAPTER VI.--MANNERS.
CHAPTER VII.--TRUTH.
CHAPTER VIII.--CHARACTER.
CHAPTER IX.--COCKAYNE.
CHAPTER X.--WEALTH.
CHAPTER XI.--ARISTOCRACY.
CHAPTER XII.--UNIVERSITIES.
CHAPTER XIII.--RELIGION.
CHAPTER XIV.--LITERATURE.
CHAPTER XV.--THE "TIMES."
CHAPTER XVI.--STONEHENGE.
CHAPTER XVII.--PERSONAL.
CHAPTER XVIII.--RESULT.
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ENGLISH TRAITS.
CHAPTER I.--FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.
I have been twice in England. In 1833, on my return from a short tour
in Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed from Boulogne, and landed in
London at the Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning; there were
few people in the streets; and I remember the pleasure of that first
walk on English ground, with my companion, an American artist, from the
Tower up through Cheapside and the Strand, to a house in Russell Square,
whither we had been recommended to good chambers. For the first time
for many months we were forced to check the saucy habit of travellers'
criticism, as we could no longer speak aloud in the streets without
being understood. The shop-signs spoke our language; our country names
were on the door-plates; and the public and private buildings wore a
more native and wonted front.
Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted to the men of
Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh Review,--to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam,
and to Scott, Playfair, and De Quincey; and my narrow and desultory
reading had inspired the wish to see the faces of three or four
writers,--Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, and the latest and
strongest contributor to the critical journals, Carlyle; and I suppose
if I had sifted the reasons that led me to Europe, when I was ill and
was advised to travel, it was mainly the attraction of these persons.
If Goethe had been still living, I might have wandered into Germany
also. Besides those I have named (for Scott was dead), there was not in
Britain the man living whom I cared to behold, unless it were the Duke
of Wellington, whom I afterwards saw at Westminster Abbey, at the
funeral of Wilberforce. The young scholar fancies it happiness enough
to live with people who can give an inside to the world; without
reflecting that they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and
cannot apply themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success
are almost destructive of the best social power, as they do not leave
that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best
terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in
the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed
sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, however,
found writers superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief,
that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments, and
give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and
a larger horizon.
On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833, I find nothing to
publish in my memoranda of visits to places. But I have copied the few
notes I made of visits to persons, as they respect parties quite too
good and too transparent to the whole world to make it needful to affect
any prudery of suppression about a few hints of those bright
personalities.
At Florence, chief among artists, I found Horatio Greenough, the
American sculptor. His face was so handsome, and his person so well
formed, that he might be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of his
Medora, and the figure of a colossal Achilles in clay, were
idealizations of his own. Greenough was a superior man, ardent and
eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation and magnanimity. He
believed that the Greeks had wrought in schools or fraternities,--the
genius of the master imparting his design to his friends, and inflaming
them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new hand, with equal
heat, continued the work; and so by relays, until it was finished in
every part with equal fire. This was necessary in so refractory a
material as stone; and he thought art would never prosper until we left
our shy jealous ways, and worked in society as they. All his thoughts
breathed the same generosity. He was an accurate and a deep man. He
was a votary of the Greeks, and impatient of Gothic art. His paper on
Architecture, published in 1843, announced in advance the leading
thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on the _morality_ in architecture,
notwithstanding the antagonism in their views of the history of art. I
have a private letter from him,--later, but respecting the same
period,--in which he roughly sketches his own theory. "Here is my
theory of structure: A scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to
functions and to site; an emphasis of features proportioned to their
_gradated_ importance in function; color and ornament to be decided and
arranged and varied by strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason
for each decision; the entire and immediate banishment of all makeshift
and make-believe."
Greenough brought me, through a common friend, an invitation from Mr.
Landor, who lived at San Domenica di Fiesole. On the 15th May I dined
with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of
pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful
landscape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified from some
anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath,--an untamable petulance. I
do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on
this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and he was the most
patient and gentle of hosts. He praised the beautiful cyclamen which
grows all about Florence; he admired Washington; talked of Wordsworth,
Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he is decided in
his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well content to impress, if
possible, his English whim upon the immutable past. No great man ever
had a great son, if Philip and Alexander be not an exception; and Philip
he calls the greater man. In art, he loves the Greeks, and in
sculpture, them only. He prefers the Venus to everything else, and,
after that, the head of Alexander, in the gallery here. He prefers John
of Bologna to Michel Angelo; in painting, Raffaelle; and shares the
growing taste for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek histories
he thought the only good; and after them, Voltaire's. I could not make
him praise Mackintosh, nor my more recent friends; Montaigne very
cordially,--and Charron also, which seemed undiscriminating. He thought
Degerando indebted to "Lucas on Happiness" and "Lucas on Holiness"! He
pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey?
He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I did not fail to go,
and this time with Greenough. He entertained us at once with reciting
half a dozen hexameter lines of Julius Caesar's!--from Donatus, he said.
He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary, and undervalued
Burke, and undervalued Socrates; designated as three of the greatest of
men, Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon; much as our pomologists, in
their lists, select the three or the six best pears "for a small
orchard"; and did not even omit to remark the similar termination of
their names. "A great man," he said, "should make great sacrifices, and
kill his hundred oxen, without knowing whether they would be consumed by
gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat them." I had visited
Professor Amici, who had shown me his microscopes, magnifying (it was
said) two thousand diameters; and I spoke of the uses to which they were
applied. Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, said, "the
sublime was in a grain of dust." I suppose I teased him about recent
writers, but he professed never to have heard of Herschel, _not even by
name_. One room was full of pictures, which he likes to show,
especially one piece, standing before which, he said "he would give
fifty guineas to the man that would swear it was a Pomenichino." I was
more curious to see his library, but Mr. H----, one of the guests, told
me that Mr. Landor gives away his books, and has never more than a dozen
at a time in his house.
Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which the English
delight to indulge, as if to signalize their commanding freedom. He has
a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible, meant for a
soldier, by what chance converted to letters, in which there is not a
style nor a tint not known to him, yet with an English appetite for
action and heroes. The thing done avails, and not what is said about
it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the
censures. Landor is strangely undervalued in England; usually ignored;
and sometimes savagely attacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be
right or wrong, and is quickly forgotten; but year after year the
scholar must still go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant
sentences,--for wisdom, wit, and indignation that are unforgetable.
From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, and wrote a note to
Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my respects to him. It was near
noon. Mr. Coleridge sent a verbal message, that he was in bed, but if I
would call after one o'clock, he would see me. I returned at one, and
he appeared, a short, thick old man, with bright blue eyes and fine
clear complexion, leaning on his cane. He took snuff freely, which
presently soiled his cravat and neat black suit. He asked whether I
knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and doings when he knew him
in Rome; what a master of the Titianesque he was, etc., etc. He spoke
of Dr. Channing. It was an unspeakable misfortune that he should have
turned out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst into a declamation
on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism,--its high unreasonableness;
and taking up Bishop Waterland's book, which lay on the table, he read
with vehemence two or three pages written by himself in the
fly-leaves,--passages, too, which, I believe, are printed in the "Aids
to Reflection." When he stopped to take breath, I interposed, that,
"whilst I highly valued all his explanations, I was bound to tell him
that I was born and bred a Unitarian." "Yes," he said, "I supposed so";
and continued as before. "It was a wonder, that after so many ages of
unquestioning acquiescence in the doctrine of St. Paul,--the doctrine of
the Trinity, which was also, according to Philo Judaeus, the doctrine of
the Jews before Christ,--this handful of Priestleians should take on
themselves to deny it, etc., etc. He was very sorry that Dr.
Channing,--a man to whom he looked up,--no, to say that he looked _up_
to him would be to speak falsely; but a man whom he looked _at_ with so
much interest,--should embrace such views. When he saw Dr. Channing, he
had hinted to him that he was afraid he loved Christianity for what was
lovely and excellent,--he loved the good in it, and not the true; and I
tell you, sir, that I have known ten persons who loved the good, for one
person who loved the true; but it is a far greater virtue to love the
true for itself alone, than to love the good for itself alone. He
(Coleridge) knew all about Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had
once been a Unitarian, and knew what quackery it was. He had been
called "the rising star of Unitarianism."' He went on defining, or
rather refining: 'The Trinitarian doctrine was realism; the idea of God
was not essential, but super-essential'; talked of _trinism_ and
_tetrakism_, and much more, of which I only caught this: 'that the will
was that by which a person is a person; because, if one should push me
in the street, and so I should force the man next me into the kennel, I
should at once exclaim, "I did not do it, sir," meaning it was not my
will.' And this also: 'that if you should insist on your faith here in
England, and I on mine, mine would be the hotter side of the fagot.'
I took advantage of a pause to say, that he had many readers of all
religious opinions in America, and I proceeded to inquire if the
"extract" from the Independent's pamphlet, in the third volume of the
Friend, were a veritable quotation. He replied that it was really taken
from a pamphlet in his possession, entitled "A Protest of one of the
Independents," or something to that effect. I told him how excellent I
thought it, and how much I wished to see the entire work. "Yes," he
said, "the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the knowledge that God
was a god of order. Yet the passage would no doubt strike you more in
the quotation than in the original, for I have filtered it."
When I rose to go, he said, "I do not know whether you care about
poetry, but I will repeat some verses I lately made on my baptismal
anniversary"; and he recited with strong emphasis, standing, ten or
twelve lines, beginning,--
Born unto God in Christ--
He inquired where I had been travelling; and on learning that I had been
in Malta and Sicily, he compared one island with the other, 'repeating
what he had said to the Bishop of London when he returned from that
country, that Sicily was an excellent school of political economy; for,
in any town there, it only needed to ask what the government enacted,
and reverse _that_ to know what ought to be done; it was the most
felicitously opposite legislation to anything good and wise. There were
only three things which the government had brought into that garden of
delights, namely, itch, pox, and famine; whereas, in Malta, the force of
law and mind was seen, in making that barren rock of semi-Saracen
inhabitants the seat of population and plenty.' Going out, he showed me
in the next apartment a picture of Allston's, and told me 'that
Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to see him, and, glancing towards
this, said, "Well, you have got a picture!" thinking it the work of an
old master; afterwards, Montague, still talking with his back to the
canvas, put up his hand and touched it, and exclaimed, "By Heaven! this
picture is not ten years old":--so delicate and skilful was that man's
touch.'
I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impossible to recall
the largest part of his discourse, which was often like so many printed
paragraphs in his book,--perhaps the same,--so readily did he fall into
certain commonplaces. As I might have foreseen, the visit was rather a
spectacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my
curiosity. He was old and preoccupied, and could not bend to a new
companion and think with him.
From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return, I came from
Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had
brought from Rome, inquired for Cragenputtock. It was a farm in
Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public
coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I
found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar
nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author
who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the
world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own
terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like
brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers of
conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with
evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor,
which floated everything he looked upon. His talk playfully exalting
the familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance
with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was
predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely
the man, "not a person to speak to within sixteen miles except the
minister of Dunscore"; so that books inevitably made his topics.
He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse.
"Blackwood's" was the "sand magazine"; "Fraser's" nearer approach to
possibility of life was the "mud magazine"; a piece of road near by that
marked some failed enterprise was the "grave of the last sixpence."
When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to
admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and
contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but
pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board
down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most
plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death, "_Qualis
artifex pereo!_" better than most history. He worships a man that will
manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good
deal about America. Landor's principle was mere rebellion, and _that_
he feared was the American principle. The best thing he knew of that
country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read
in Stewart's book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the
Boots, he had been shown across the street and had found Mungo in his
own house dining on roast turkey.
We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates;
and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he
called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own
reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first
books after Robinson Crusoe, and Robertson's America an early favorite.
Rousseau's Confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce;
and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a
man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted.
He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment;
recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers
for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books
are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.
He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish
abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform.
'Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come
wandering over these moors. My dame makes it a rule to give to every
son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But
here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody
to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the
stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.'
We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without
his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country. There we sat down, and
talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle's fault that
we talked on that topic, for he had the natural disinclination of every
nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place
himself where no step can be taken. But he was honest and true, and
cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how
every event affects all the future. 'Christ died on the tree: that
built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time has
only a relative existence.'
He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar's
appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only
from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps
its own round. The baker's boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed
hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on
the subject. But it turned out good men. He named certain individuals,
especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom
London had well served.
On the 23th August, I went to Rydal Mount, to pay my respects to Mr.
Wordsworth. His daughters called in their father, a plain, elderly,
white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles.
He sat down, and talked with great simplicity. He had just returned
from a journey. His health was good, but he had broken a tooth by a
fall, when walking with two lawyers, and had said, that he was glad it
did not happen forty years ago; whereupon they had praised his
philosophy.
He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his
favorite topic,--that society is being enlightened by a superficial
tuition, out of all proportion to its being restrained by moral culture.
Schools do no good. Tuition is not education. He thinks more of the
education of circumstances than of tuition. 'T is not a question
whether there are offences of which the law takes cognizance, but
whether there are offences of which the law does not take cognizance.
Sin is what he fears, and how society is to escape without gravest
mischiefs from this source--? He has even said, what seemed a paradox,
that they needed a civil war in America, to teach the necessity of
knitting the social ties stronger. 'There may be,' he said, 'in America
some vulgarity in manner, but that 's not important. That comes of the
pioneer state of things. But I fear they are too much given to the
making of money; and secondly, to politics; that they make political
distinction the end, and not the means. And I fear they lack a class of
men of leisure,--in short, of gentlemen,--to give a tone of honor to the
community. I am told that things are boasted of in the second class of
society there, which, in England,--God knows, are done in England every
day,--but would never be spoken of. In America I wish to know not how
many churches or schools, but what newspapers? My friend, Colonel
Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was a year in America, assures me
that the newspapers are atrocious, and accuse members of Congress of
stealing spoons!' He was against taking off the tax on newspapers in
England, which the reformers represent as a tax upon knowledge, for this
reason, that they would be inundated with base prints. He said, he
talked on political aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good
Americans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, etc., etc., and
never to call into action the physical strength of the people, as had
just now been done in England in the Reform Bill,--a thing prophesied by
Delolme. He alluded once or twice to his conversation with Dr.
Channing, who had recently visited him (laying his hand on a particular
chair in which the Doctor had sat).
The conversation turned on books. Lucretius he esteems a far higher
poet than Virgil: not in his system, which is nothing, but in his power
of illustration. Faith is necessary to explain anything, and to
reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil. Of Cousin (whose
lectures we had all been reading in Boston) he knew only the name.
I inquired if he had read Carlyle's critical articles and translations.
He said he thought him sometimes insane. He proceeded to abuse Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister heartily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It
was like the crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone further
than the first part; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across
the room. I deprecated this wrath, and said what I could for the better
parts of the book; and he courteously promised to look at it again.
Carlyle, he said, wrote most obscurely. He was clever and deep, but he
defied the sympathies of everybody. Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more
clearly, though he had always wished Coleridge would write more to be
understood. He led me out into his garden, and showed me the
gravel-walk in which thousands of his lines were composed. His eyes are
much inflamed. This is no loss, except for reading, because he never
writes prose, and of poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his
head before writing them. He had just returned from a visit to Staffa,
and within three days had made three sonnets on Fingal's Cave, and was
composing a fourth, when he was called in to see me. He said, "If you
are interested in my verses, perhaps you will like to hear these lines."
I gladly assented; and he recollected himself for a few moments, and
then stood forth and repeated, one after the other, the three entire
sonnets with great animation. I fancied the second and third more
beautiful than his poems are wont to be. The third is addressed to the
flowers, which, he said, especially the ox-eye daisy, are very abundant
on the top of the rock. The second alludes to the name of the cave,
which is "Cave of Music"; the first to the circumstance of its being
visited by the promiscuous company of the steamboat.
This recitation was so unlooked for and surprising,--he, the old
Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a
school-boy declaiming,--that I at first was near to laugh; but
recollecting myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and he was
chanting poems to me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, and
gladly gave myself up to hear. I told him how much the few printed
extracts had quickened the desire to possess his unpublished poems. He
replied, he never was in haste to publish; partly, because he corrected
a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously received after
printing; but what he had written would be printed, whether he lived or
died. I said, "Tintern Abbey" appeared to be the favorite poem with the
public, but more contemplative readers preferred the first books of the
"Excursion," and the Sonnets. He said, "Yes, they are better." He
preferred such of his poems as touched the affections, to any others;
for whatever is didactic--what theories of society, and so on--might
perish quickly; but whatever combined a truth with an affection was
[Greek: _chtema es aei_], good to-day and good forever. He cited the
sonnet "On the feelings of a high-minded Spaniard," which he preferred
to any other (I so understood him), and the "Two Voices"; and quoted,
with evident pleasure, the verses addressed "To the Skylark." In this
connection, he said of the Newtonian theory, that it might yet be
superseded and forgotten; and Dalton's atomic theory.
When I prepared to depart, he said he wished to show me what a common
person in England could do, and he led me into the enclosure of his
clerk, a young man, to whom he had given this slip of ground, which was
laid out, or its natural capabilities shown, with much taste. He then
said he would show me a better way towards the inn; and he walked a good
part of a mile, talking, and ever and anon stopping short to impress the
word or the verse, and finally parted from me with great kindness, and
returned across the fields.
Wordsworth honored himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was
very willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard limits of his
thought. To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of
a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation
by general tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were
of no value. It is not very rare to find persons loving sympathy and
ease, who expiate their departure from the common in one direction, by
their conformity in every other.