OCEAN VOYAGE.--ARRIVAL AT LIVERPOOL.--THE LAKE
COUNTRY.--WORDSWORTH.--MISS MARTINEAU.--EDINBURGH.--DE QUINCEY.--MARY,
QUEEN OF SCOTS.--NIGHT ON BEN LOMOND.--JAMES MARTINEAU.--WILLIAM J.
FOX.--LONDON.--JOANNA BAILLIE.--MAZZINI.--THOMAS CARLYLE.--MARGARET'S
IMPRESSIONS OF HIM.--HIS ESTIMATE OF HER.
The time had now come when Margaret's darling wish was to be fulfilled.
An opportunity of going abroad offered itself under circumstances which
she felt able to accept. On the 1st of August, 1846, she sailed for
Europe in the "Cambria," then the favorite steamer of the Cunard line,
with Captain Judkins, the most popular and best known of the company's
commanders. Her travelling companions were Mr. and Mrs. Marcus Spring,
of Eaglewood, N. J.
She anticipated much from this journey,--delight, instruction, and the
bodily view of a whole world of beauties which she knew, as yet, only
ideally. Beyond and unguessed lay the mysteries of fate, from whose
depths she was never to emerge in her earthly form.
Margaret already possessed the spirit of all that is most valuable in
European culture. She knew the writers of the Old World by study, its
brave souls by sympathy, its works of art, more imperfectly, through
copies and engravings. The Europe which she carried in her mind was not
that which the superficial observer sees with careless eyes, nor could
it altogether correspond with that which she, in her careful and
thoughtful travel, would discern. But the possession of the European
mind was a key destined to unlock for her the true significance of
European society.
The voyage was propitious. Arriving in England, Margaret visited the
Mechanics' Institute in Liverpool, and found the "Dial" quoted in an
address recently given by its director. Sentences from the writings of
Charles Sumner and Elihu Burritt adorned the pages of Bradshaw's
"Railway Guide," and she was soon called upon to note the wide
discrepancy between the views of enlightened Englishmen and the selfish
policy of their government, corresponding to the more vulgar passions
and ambitions of the people at large.
Passing into the Lake Country, she visited Wordsworth at Ambleside, and
found "no Apollo, flaming with youthful glory, but, instead, a reverend
old man, clothed in black, and walking with cautious step along the
level garden path." The aged poet, then numbering seventy-six years,
"but of a florid, fair old age," showed the visitors his household
portraits, his hollyhocks, and his fuchsias. His secluded mode of life,
Margaret learned, had so separated him from the living issues of the
time, that the needs of the popular heart touched him but remotely. She
found him, however, less intolerant than she had feared concerning the
repeal of the Corn Laws, a measure upon which public opinion was at the
time strongly divided.
In this neighborhood Margaret again saw Miss Martineau, at a new home
"presented to her by the gratitude of England for her course of
energetic and benevolent effort." Dean Milman, historian and dramatist,
was here introduced to Margaret, who describes him as "a specimen of the
polished, scholarly man of the world."
Margaret now visited various places of interest in Scotland, and in
Edinburgh saw Dr. Andrew Combe, Dr. Chalmers, and De Quincey. Dr. Combe,
an eminent authority in various departments of medicine and physiology,
was a younger brother of George Combe, the distinguished phrenologist.
He had much to say about his tribulations with the American publishers
who had pirated one of his works, but who refused to print an emended
edition of it, on the ground that the book sold well enough as it was.
Margaret describes Dr. Chalmers as "half shepherd, half orator, florid,
portly, yet of an intellectually luminous appearance."
De Quincey was of the same age as Wordsworth. Margaret finds his
"thoughts and knowledge" of a character somewhat superseded by the
progress of the age. She found him, not the less, "an admirable
narrator, not rapid, but gliding along like a rivulet through a green
meadow, giving and taking a thousand little beauties not required to
give his story due relief, but each, in itself, a separate boon." She
admires, too, "his urbanity, so opposed to the rapid, slang,
Vivian-Greyish style current in the literary conversation of the day."
Among Margaret's meditations in Scotland was one which she records as
"the bootless, best thoughts I had while looking at the dull bloodstain
and blocked-up secret stair of Holyrood, at the ruins of Loch Leven
Castle, and afterwards at Abbotsford, where the picture of Queen Mary's
head, as it lay on the pillow when severed from the block, hung opposite
to a fine caricature of Queen Elizabeth, dancing high and disposedly."
We give here a part of this meditation:--
"Surely, in all the stern pages of life's account-book there is none on
which a more terrible price is exacted for every precious endowment. Her
rank and reign only made her powerless to do good, and exposed her to
danger. Her talents only served to irritate her foes and disappoint her
friends. This most charming of women was the destruction of her lovers.
Married three times, she had never any happiness as a wife, but in both
the connections of her choice found that she had either never possessed
or could not retain, even for a few weeks, the love of the men she had
chosen.... A mother twice, and of a son and daughter, both the children
were brought forth in loneliness and sorrow, and separated from her
early, her son educated to hate her, her daughter at once immured in a
convent. Add the eighteen years of her imprisonment, and the fact that
this foolish, prodigal world, when there was in it one woman fitted by
her grace and loveliness to charm all eyes and enliven all fancies,
suffered her to be shut up to water with her tears her dull embroidery
during the full rose-blossom of her life, and you will hardly get beyond
this story for a tragedy, not noble, but pallid and forlorn."
From Edinburgh Margaret and her party made an excursion into the
Highlands. The stage-coach was not yet displaced by the locomotive, and
Margaret enjoyed, from the top, the varying aspect of that picturesque
region. Perth, Loch Leven, and Loch Katrine were visited, and
Rowardennan, the place from which the ascent of Ben Lomond is usually
made by travellers. Margaret attempted this feat with but one companion,
and without a guide, the people at the inn not having warned her of any
danger in so doing.
The ascent she found delightful. So magnificent was the prospect, that,
in remembering it, she said: "Had that been, as afterwards seemed
likely, the last act of my life, there could not have been a finer
decoration painted on the curtain which was to drop upon it."
The proverbial _facilis descensus_ did not here hold good, and the
_revocare gradum_ nearly cost Margaret her life. Beginning to descend at
four in the afternoon, the indistinct path was soon lost. Margaret's
companion left her for a moment in search of it, and could not find her.
"Soon he called to me that he had found it [the path], and I followed in
the direction where he seemed to be. But I mistook, overshot it, and saw
him no more. In about ten minutes I became alarmed, and called him many
times. It seems he, on his side, did the same, but the brow of some hill
was between us, and we neither saw nor heard one another."
Margaret now made many attempts to extricate herself from her dangerous
situation, and at last attained a point from which she could see the
lake, and the inn from which she had started in the morning. But the
mountain paths were crossed by watercourses, and hemmed in by bogs.
After much climbing up and down, Margaret, already wet, very weary, and
thinly clad, saw that she must pass the night on the mountain. The spot
at which the light forsook her was of so precipitous a character as to
leave her, in the dark, no liberty of movement. Yet she did keep in
motion of some sort through the whole of that weary night; and this, she
supposes, saved her life. The stars kept her company for two hours, when
the mist fell and hid them. The moon rose late, and was but dimly
discernible. At length morning came, and Margaret, starting homeward
once more, came upon a company of shepherds, who carried her, exhausted,
to the inn, where her distressed friends were waiting for news of her.
Such was the extent of the mountain, that a party of twenty men, with
dogs, sent in search of the missing one, were not heard by her, and did
not hear her voice, which she raised from time to time, hoping to call
some one to her rescue. The strength of Margaret's much-abused
constitution was made evident by her speedy recovery from the effects
of this severe exposure. A fit vigil, this, for one who was about to
witness the scenes of 1848. She speaks of the experience as "sublime
indeed, a never-to-be-forgotten presentation of stern, serene
realities.... I had had my grand solitude, my Ossianic visions, and the
pleasure of sustaining myself." After visiting Glasgow and Stirling,
Margaret and her friends returned to England by Abbotsford and Melrose.
In Birmingham Margaret heard two discourses from George Dawson, then
considered a young man of much promise. In Liverpool she had already
heard James Martineau, and in London she listened to William Fox. She
compares these men with William Henry Channing and Theodore Parker:--
"None of them compare in the symmetrical arrangement of extempore
discourse, or in pure eloquence and communication of spiritual beauty,
with Channing, nor in fulness and sustained flow with Parker."
Margaret's estimate of Martineau is interesting:--
"Mr. Martineau looks like the over-intellectual, the partially developed
man, and his speech confirms this impression. He is sometimes
conservative, sometimes reformer, not in the sense of eclecticism, but
because his powers and views do not find a true harmony. On the
conservative side he is scholarly, acute; on the other, pathetic,
pictorial, generous. He is no prophet and no sage, yet a man full of
fine affections and thoughts; always suggestive, sometimes
satisfactory."
Mr. Fox appears to her "the reverse of all this. He is homogeneous in
his materials, and harmonious in the results he produces. He has great
persuasive power; it is the persuasive power of a mind warmly engaged in
seeking truth for itself."
What a leap did our Margaret now make, from Puritanic New England,
Roundhead and Cromwellian in its character, into the very heart of Old
England,--into that London which, in those days, and for long years
after, might have been called the metropolis of the world! Wonders of
many sorts the "province in brick" still contains. Still does it most
astonish those who bring to it the most knowledge. But the social
wonders which it then could boast have passed away, leaving no equals to
take their place.
Charles Dickens was then in full bloom,--Thackeray in full bud. Sydney
Smith exercised his keen, discreet wit. Kenyon not only wrote about pink
champagne, but dispensed it with many other good things. Rogers
entertained with exquisite taste, and showed his art-treasures without
ostentation. Tom Moore, like a veteran canary, chirped, but would not
sing. Lord Brougham and the Iron Duke were seen in the House of Lords.
Carlyle growled and imbibed strong tea at Chelsea. The Queen was in the
favor of her youth, with her handsome husband always at her side. The
Duchess of Sutherland, a beautiful woman with lovely daughters, kept her
state at Stafford House. Lord Houghton was known as Monckton Milnes. The
Honorable Mrs. Norton wore her dark hair folded upon her classic head,
beneath a circlet of diamonds. A first season in London was then a
bewilderment of brilliancy in reputations, beauties, and entertainments.
Margaret did not encounter the season, but hoped to do so at a later
day. For the moment she consoled herself thus:--
"I am glad I did not at first see all that pomp and parade of wealth and
luxury in contrast with the misery--squalid, agonizing, ruffianly--which
stares one in the face in every street of London, and hoots at the gates
of her palaces a note more ominous than ever was that of owl or raven in
the portentous times when empires and races have crumbled and fallen
from inward decay."
Margaret expresses the hope that the social revolution, which to her
seemed imminent in England, may be a peaceful one, "which shall destroy
nothing except the shocking inhumanity of exclusiveness." She speaks
with appreciation of the National and Dulwich Galleries, the British
Museum, the Zoölogical Gardens. Among the various establishments of
benevolence and reform, she especially mentions a school for poor
Italian boys, with which Mazzini had much to do. This illustrious man
was already an exile in London, as was the German poet, Freiligrath.
Margaret was an admirer of Joanna Baillie, and considered her and the
French Madame Roland as "the best specimens hitherto offered of women of
a Roman strength and singleness of mind, adorned by the various culture
and capable of the various action opened to them by the progress of the
Christian idea."
She thus chronicles her visit to Miss Baillie:
"We found her in her little, calm retreat at Hampstead, surrounded by
marks of love and reverence from distinguished and excellent friends.
Near her was the sister, older than herself, yet still sprightly and
full of active kindness, whose character she has, in one of her last
poems, indicated with such a happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and
tender pathos, and with so absolute a truth of outline. Although no
autograph hunter, I asked for theirs; and when the elder gave hers as
'sister to Joanna Baillie,' it drew a tear from my eye,--a good tear, a
genuine pearl, fit homage to that fairest product of the soul of man,
humble, disinterested tenderness."
Margaret also visited Miss Berry, the friend of Horace Walpole, long a
celebrity, and at that time more than eighty years old. In spite of
this, Margaret found her still characterized by the charm, "careless
nature or refined art," which had made her a social power once and
always.
But of all the notable personages who might have been seen in the London
of that time, no one probably interested Margaret so much as did Thomas
Carlyle. Her introduction to him was from Mr. Emerson, his friend and
correspondent; and it was such as to open to her, more than once, the
doors of the retired and reserved house, in which neither time nor money
was lavished upon the entertainment of strangers.
Mr. Carlyle's impressions of Margaret have now been given to the world
in the published correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson. She had, long
before, drawn her portrait of him in one of her letters descriptive of
London and its worthies. The candid criticism of both is full of
interest, and may here be contrasted. Margaret says:--
"I approached him with more reverence after a little experience of
England and Scotland had taught me to appreciate the strength and height
of that wall of shams and conventions which he, more than any other man,
or thousand men,--indeed, he almost alone,--has begun to throw down. He
has torn off the veils from hideous facts; he has burnt away foolish
illusions; he has touched the rocks, and they have given forth musical
answer. Little more was wanting to begin to construct the city; but that
little was wanting, and the work of construction is left to those that
come after him. Nay, all attempts of the kind he is the readiest to
deride, fearing new shams worse than the old, unable to trust the
general action of a thought, and finding no heroic man, no natural king,
to represent it and challenge his confidence."
How significant is this phrase,--"unable to trust the general action of
a thought." This saving faith in the power of just thought Carlyle, the
thinker, had not.
With a reverence, then, not blind, but discriminating, Margaret
approached this luminous mind, and saw and heard its possessor thus:--
"Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings,
his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with
steady eyes. He does not converse, only harangues. It is the usual
misfortune of such marked men that they cannot allow other minds room to
breathe and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the
refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from
the experience of the humblest.... Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and
overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness or self-love:
it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror; it is his
nature, and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the
dragons.
"For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that
subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd.... He puts out his chin
sometimes till it looks like the beak of a bird; and his eyes flash
bright, instinctive meanings, like Jove's bird. Yet he is not calm and
grand enough for the eagle: he is more like the falcon, and yet not of
gentle blood enough for that either.... I cannot speak more nor wiselier
of him now; nor needs it. His works are true to blame and praise
him,--the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite
invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than to legislate
for good."
In a letter to Mr. Emerson, Margaret gives some account of her visits at
the Carlyle mansion. The second of these was on the occasion of a
dinner-party, at which she met "a witty, French, flippant sort of a man,
author of a History of Philosophy, and now writing a life of Goethe,"
presumably George Lewes. Margaret acknowledges that he told stories
admirably, and that his occasional interruptions of Carlyle's persistent
monologue were welcome. Of this, her summary is too interesting to be
omitted here:--
"For a couple of hours he was talking about poetry, and the whole
harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind.
Tennyson wrote in verse because the schoolmasters had taught him that it
was great to do so; and had thus, unfortunately, been turned from the
true path for a man. Burns had, in like manner, been turned from his
vocation. Shakespeare had not had the good sense to see that it would
have been better to write straight on in prose; and such nonsense which,
though amusing enough at first, he ran to death after a while.... The
latter part of the evening, however, he paid us for this by a series of
sketches, in his finest style of railing and raillery, of modern French
literature. All were depreciating except that of Béranger. Of him he
spoke with perfect justice, because with hearty sympathy."
The retirement of the ladies to the drawing-room afforded Margaret an
opportunity which she had not yet enjoyed.
"I had afterward some talk with Mrs. Carlyle, whom hitherto I had only
seen,--for who can speak while her husband is there? I like her very
much; she is full of grace, sweetness, and talent. Her eyes are sad and
charming."
Margaret saw the Carlyles only once more.
"They came to pass an evening with us. Unluckily, Mazzini was with us,
whose society, when he was there alone, I enjoyed more than any. He is a
beauteous and pure music; also, he is a dear friend of Mrs. Carlyle. But
his being there gave the conversation a turn to progress and ideal
subjects, and Carlyle was fluent in invectives on all our 'rose-water
imbecilities.' We all felt distant from him, and Mazzini, after some
vain efforts to remonstrate, became very sad. Mrs. Carlyle said to me:
'These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his
all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold in pursuit of such
subjects, it is a matter of life and death.'"
Clearly, Carlyle had not, in Margaret's estimation, the true gospel. She
would not bow to the Titanic forces, whether met with in the romances of
Sand or in his force-theory. And so, bidding him farewell with great
admiration, she passes on, as she says, "more lowly, more willing to be
imperfect, since Fate permits such noble creatures, after all, to be
only this or that. Carlyle is only a lion."
Carlyle, on his side, writes of her to Mr. Emerson:--
"Margaret is an excellent soul: in real regard with both of us here.
Since she went, I have been reading some of her papers in a new Book we
have got: greatly superior to all I knew before: in fact, the undeniable
utterances (now first undeniable to me) of a truly heroic mind;
altogether unique, so far as I know, among the writing women of this
generation; rare enough, too, God knows, among the writing men. She is
very narrow, sometimes, but she is truly high. Honor to Margaret, and
more and more good speed to her."
At a later day he sums up his impressions of her in this wise:--
"Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her
egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her
heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her
'mountain me,'[B] indeed; but her courage, too, is high and clear, her
chivalrous nobleness _à toute épreuve_."
Margaret's high estimate of Mazzini will be justified by those who knew
him or knew of him:--
"Mazzini, one of these noble refugees, is not only one of the heroic,
the courageous, and the faithful,--Italy boasts many such,--but he is
also one of the wise,--one of those who, disappointed in the outward
results of their undertakings, can yet 'bate no jot of heart and hope,'
but must 'steer right onward.' For it was no superficial enthusiasm, no
impatient energies, that impelled him, but an understanding of what must
be the designs of Heaven with regard to man, since God is Love, is
Justice. He is one of those beings who, measuring all things by the
ideal standard, have yet no time to mourn over failure or imperfection;
there is too much to be done to obviate it."
She finds in his papers, published in the "People's Journal," "the
purity of impulse, largeness and steadiness of view, and fineness of
discrimination which must belong to a legislator for a _Christian_
commonwealth."
Much as Margaret admired the noble sentiments expressed in Mazzini's
writings, she admired still more the love and wisdom which led the
eminent patriot to found, with others, the school for poor Italian boys
already spoken of. More Christ-like did she deem this labor than aught
that he could have said or sung.
"As among the fishermen and poor people of Judæa were picked up those
who have become to modern Europe a leaven that leavens the whole mass,
so may these poor Italian boys yet become more efficacious as
missionaries to their people than would an Orphic poet at this period."
At the distribution of prizes to the school, in which Mazzini and
Mariotti took part, some of the Polish exiles also being present, she
seemed to see "a planting of the kingdom of Heaven."
Margaret saw a good deal of James Garth Wilkinson, who later became
prominent as the author of the work entitled "The Human Body in its
Relation to the Constitution of Man." She found in him "a sane, strong,
and well-exercised mind, but in the last degree unpoetical in its
structure." Dr. Wilkinson published, years after this time, a volume of
verses which amply sustains this judgment.
"Browning," she writes, "has just married Miss Barrett, and gone to
Italy. I may meet them there." Hoping for a much longer visit at some
future time, and bewildered, as she says, both by the treasures which
she had found, and those which she had not had opportunity to explore,
Margaret left London for its social and æsthetic antithesis, Paris.