First Voyage to England—Extracts from Diary—Warwick
Castle—Stratford-on-Avon—The Skylark—Oxford—Bodleian
Library—London—Old-time Sadness—Paris—Catch-Words from Diary—Effect
of Picture-Gallery—The Louvre—His Return.
In the middle of the year 1850 his labors were interrupted.
“Henry Ward Beecher, our esteemed brother, sailed for Europe on Tuesday,
July 9, in the ship _New World_, Captain Knight. It was a sudden move,
but having received a friendly invitation from the captain, and taking
the advice of his friends that a voyage out and back would be of
essential benefit to his health, which has been considerably shattered
by repeated attacks of illness, he accepted the invitation, but expects
to return with the vessel. During his absence the pulpit of Plymouth
Church will be supplied by the pastor’s younger brother, Rev. Charles
Beecher, of Indiana.” This item we find in the _Independent_ of that
week:
“_Journal._—Landed from _New World_ July 30, 1850. Waterloo Inn.”
This is the first entry in a memorandum-book now in our hands, and it
tells its own story. He is in Liverpool, England.
We have spoken of Mr. Beecher’s perfect health, and such he enjoyed, for
the most part, through life. But it was only retained, after he came to
Brooklyn, by great care on his part. Before he had learned the necessity
of this there had been several failures. One was an attack of
erysiphaltic fever, in the spring of 1849, which kept him out of his
pulpit for several months. During the following winter he had a severe
attack of quinsy, from the exhaustion of which it seemed to his friends
that he was breaking down, and they procured passage for him to Europe,
as has just been stated, and gave him a three months’ leave of absence.
Another experience now opened to him. The sea, out upon which he had so
often looked with longing eyes, in boyhood, from the wharves of Boston,
and across whose waters he had often sailed in imagination, he now, for
the first time, traversed in reality. He found it far less agreeable
than he expected, and learned on this his first voyage, what no
after-experience ever contradicted, that for him “the only pleasant
thing about going to sea was the going ashore.”
From his note-book and diary we can follow him, step by step, and from
his letters to friends can learn of some of those experiences that made
this trip memorable in its impressions and influence. The next entry in
his journal reads:
“July 31, Manchester and back. Hedges same as combed and uncombed hair.
Railroad mile-posts subdivided; grading in manufacturing villages. Go
out from London under ground, come into Manchester over tops of houses.
Clothes-line across streets.
“August 3, Birmingham; railroad stations. Knight says thirty-three ocean
steamers have been put afloat in eighteen months; only the Bremen
steamers before afloat.
”_Plated Ware._—Pattern dies, stamping, handles, etc.; spoons, forks,
plain piece, cut shape, then slit tines, stamp shape; filing-room,
polishing, chasing or fretting, plating, brushing. Designer gets £2 to
£2 10/per week.”
This is the first page of his note-book, and is given entire, not
because there is anything remarkable about it, but because it is a
sample of his note-books in general. They are full of facts, and facts
of every description. He seldom gives impressions or sentiments. He has
a hunger for all kinds of items; give him these and the sentiments will
take care of themselves. Occasionally he concludes with a description
that sets the items in some higher relation and shows the processes that
are going on in his own mind; as when, after giving some dozen
particulars in the process of manufacturing papier-maché, he closes the
list of catch-words with this: “It is the art of creating plastic wood.
It grows by hand and not by vegetable vitality, then hardens and
receives _Art_.”
But it was not items alone that he learned in his travels; he became
familiar with objects of which he had read, and gained inspiration from
a more intimate acquaintance. In Warwick Castle and Kenilworth he walked
among scenes made vivid to him in his youth in the pages of Sir Walter
Scott. He entered, as he said, “into the very life of that olden time,
and took from it its good without tasting its evil.”
Cæsar’s Tower, which had stood for eight hundred years, co-eval with the
Norman Conquest, especially aroused his imagination:
“I stood upon its mute stones and imagined the ring of the hammer upon
them when the mason was laying them to their bed of ages. What were the
thoughts, the fancies, the conversations of these rude fellows at that
age of the world? I was wafted backward, and backward, until I stood on
the foundations upon which old England herself was builded, when as yet
there was none of her. There, far back of all literature, before the
English tongue itself was formed, earlier than her jurisprudence and
than all modern civilization, I stood in imagination, and, reversing my
vision, looked down into a far future to search for the men and deeds
which had been, as if they were yet to be; thus making a prophecy of
history, and changing memory into a dreamy foresight.
“Against these stones, on which I lay my hand, have rung the sounds of
battle. Yonder, on these very grounds, there raged, in sight of men that
stand where I do, fiercest and deadliest conflicts. All this ground has
fed on blood....
“I walked across to Guy’s Tower, up its long stone stairway, into some
of its old soldiers’ rooms. The pavements were worn, though of stone,
with the heavy, grinding feet of men-at-arms. I heard them laugh between
their cups, I saw them devouring their gross food, I heard them recite
their feats, or tell the last news of some knightly outrage or cruel
oppression of the despised laborer. I stood by the window out of which
the archer sent his whistling arrows. I stood by the openings through
which scalding water or molten lead was poured upon the heads of the
assailants, and heard the hoarse shriek of the wretched fellows who got
the shocking baptism. I ascended to the roof of the tower, and looked
over the wide glory of the scene, still haunted with the same
imaginations of olden time. How many thoughts had flown hence besides
mine!—here where warriors looked out or ladies watched for their
knights’ return. How did I long to stand for one hour, really, in their
position and in their consciousness who lived in those days; and then to
come back, with the new experience, to my modern self!”
In this is shown his sympathy with the old Saxon yeomanry, and was his
Saxon ancestry taking voice; all the romantic, picturesque elements of
his nature were fed, and ran, like the streams of springtide,
full-banked to the sea.
We next find in his note-book these items and references:
“Approach to Stratford-on-Avon. How peaceful the associations in
contrast with those of Warwick and Kenilworth!”
“The place: old English houses; Red Horse Inn.”
“Birds: thrush, lark, nightingale, sparrow, robin, starling, rooks,
cuckoo.”
“A different but, to me, even greater interest attaches to Avon from the
throngs from every nation that have visited it.”
“Shakspere: eleven years old when Elizabeth visited Kenilworth.”
“No greater change can be imagined than from the warlike towers of Guy
of Warwick to the quiet home of Shakspere, Stratford-on-Avon.” The
change in his experience was equally marked. In the one the martial
spirit of the warrior, in the other the loving, receptive spirit of the
prophet and poet, were aroused and fed. In Stratford-on-Avon he had one
of those luminous hours which were, in his experience, like Mountains of
Transfiguration.
In a letter to a friend describing a Sabbath here, written at this time,
he says:
“The scenes of Saturday had fired me; every visit to various points in
Stratford-on-Avon added to the inspiration, until, as I sallied forth to
church, I seemed not to have a body. I could hardly feel my feet
striking against the ground; it was as if I were numb. But my soul was
clear, penetrating, and exquisitely susceptible....
“I had been anxious lest some Cowper’s ministerial fop should officiate,
and the sight of this aged man was good. The form of his face and head
indicated firmness, but his features were suffused with an expression of
benevolence.
“He ascended the reading-desk and the services began. You know my mother
was, until her marriage, in the communion of the Episcopal Church. This
thought hardly left me while I sat, grateful for the privilege of
worshipping God through a service that had expressed so often her
devotions. I cannot tell you how much I was affected. I had never had
such a trance of worship, and I shall never have such another view until
I gain the Gate.
“I am so ignorant of the church service that I cannot call the various
parts by their right names, but the portions which most affected me were
the prayers and responses which the choir sang. I had never heard any
part of a supplication, a direct prayer, chanted by a choir, and it
seemed as though I heard not with my ear but with my soul. I was
dissolved; my whole being seemed to me like an incense wafted gratefully
toward God. The divine presence rose before me in wondrous majesty, but
of ineffable gentleness and goodness, and I could not stay away from
more familiar approach, but seemed irresistibly yet gently drawn toward
God. My soul, then thou didst magnify the Lord and rejoice in the God of
thy salvation! And then came to my mind the many exultations of the
Psalms of David, and never before were the expressions and figures so
noble and so necessary to express what I felt. I had risen, it seemed to
me, so high as to be where David was when his soul conceived the things
which he wrote. Throughout the service—and it was an hour and a quarter
long—whenever an ‘Amen!’ occurred it was given by the choir accompanied
by the organ and the congregation. Oh! that swell and solemn cadence
rings in my ear yet!
“Not once, not a single time, did it occur in that service without
bringing tears from my eyes. I stood like a shrub on a spring
morning—every leaf covered with dew, and every breeze shook down some
drops. I trembled so much at times that I was obliged to sit down. Oh!
when in the prayers, breathed forth in strains of sweet, simple, solemn
music, the love of Christ was recognized, how I longed then to give
utterance to what that love seemed to me. There was a moment in which
the heavens seemed opened to me and I saw the glory of God! All the
earth seemed to me a store-house of images made to set forth the
Redeemer, and I could scarcely be still from crying out. I never knew, I
never dreamed before of what heart there was in that word _amen_. Every
time it swelled forth and died away solemnly, not my lips, not my mind,
but my whole being said: ‘Saviour, so let it be.’
“The sermon was preparatory to the communion, which I then first learned
was to be celebrated. It was plain and good; and although the rector had
done many things in a way that led me to suppose that he sympathized
with over-much ceremony, yet in his sermon he seemed evangelical and
gave a right view of the Lord’s Supper.
“For the first time in my life I went forward to commune in an Episcopal
church. Without any intent of my own, but because from my seat it was
nearest, I knelt down at the altar, with the dust of Shakspere beneath
my feet. I thought of it as I thought of ten thousand other things,
without the least disturbance of devotion. It seemed as if I stood upon
a place so high that, like one looking over a wide valley, all objects
conspired to make but one view. I thought of the General Assembly and
Church of the First-Born, of my mother and brother and children in
heaven, of my living family on earth, of you, of the whole church
entrusted to my hands—they afar off, I upon the banks of the Avon.”
He did not forget his old friends, birds and trees. From
Stratford-on-Avon he writes:
“As I stood looking over on the masses of foliage and the single trees
dotted in here and there, I could see every shade of green, and all of
them most beautiful, and as refreshing to me as old friends. After
standing awhile to take a last view of Stratford-on-Avon from this high
ground and the beautiful slopes around it, and of the meadows of the
Avon, I began to walk homeward, when I heard such an outbreak behind me
as wheeled me about quick enough. There he flew, singing as he rose, and
rising gradually, not directly up, but with gentle slope—there was the
free-singing lark, not half so happy to sing as I was to hear. In a
moment more he had reached the summit of his ambition and suddenly fell
back to the grass again. And now if you laugh at my enthusiasm I will
pity you for the want of it. I have heard one poet’s lark, if I never
hear another, and am much happier for it.”
At Oxford a new world opened to him—that of an English university town
enriched with the growth and associations of seven hundred years. The
beauty of its architecture, its cloistered quiet, its galleries, and,
most of all, its libraries, impressed him.
“Few places affect me more than libraries, and especially the Bodleian
Library, reputed to have half a million printed books and manuscripts. I
walked solemnly and reverently among the alcoves and through the halls,
as if in the pyramid of embalmed souls. It was their life, their heart,
their mind, that they treasured in these book-urns. Silent as they are,
should all the emotions that went to their creation have utterance,
could the world itself contain the various sounds? They longed for fame!
Here it is—to stand silently for ages, moved only to be dusted and
catalogued, valued only as units in the ambitious total, and gazed at
occasionally by men ignorant as I am of their name, their place, their
language, and their worth. Indeed, unless a man can link his written
thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from
them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and
feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones. A library is but
the soul’s burial-ground. It is the land of shadows.”
It was, however, not all shadowy.
“_Noon Refection._—‘What will you take to drink, Oxford ale or a little
wine?’ Cold water. ‘Oh! not cold water, surely? A little sherry and
water?’ ‘Surely you will not come to England to drink cold water?’ My
dear sir, I am a thorough-going teetotaler, and you surely would not
have me come to England to lose my good principles? ‘Why, sir, I am not
a teetotaler, but I am a temperance man—was never drunk in my life—but
you surprise me!’
“Dining and tea-room of Fellows. Elaborate carved oak—no sham. In all
respects college in quadrangle proposes to take care of its students,
head and stomach, soul, intellect, and body, and therefore has added
kitchen to library.”
“_London, August 9._—Arrived last night. Old Bell. Visited Trafalgar
Square and Westminster Abbey, Guildhall, Bank of England, Tower, Tunnel,
etc.”
In London something of the old-time sadness came over him, with the
old-time sources of relief:
“Now, too, I am apt, if I do not fall asleep soon enough—or more
frequently when I awake, hours before it is the fashion here to get
up—to lie and think over my way of life hitherto; and my life-work seems
to me to be so little, and so poorly done, that I feel discouraged at
the thought of resuming it! I have everywhere in my travelling—at the
shrine of the martyrs in Oxford, at the graves of Bunyan and Wesley in
London, at the vault in which Raleigh was for twelve years confined in
the Tower—asked myself whether I could have done and endured what they
did, and _as_ they did! It is enough to make one tremble for himself to
have such a heart-sounding as this gives him. I cast the lead for the
depth of my soul, and it strikes so soon that I have little reason for
pride.
“Had it not been for paintings, and flowers, and trees, and the
landscapes, I do not know what I should have done with myself. Often
when extremely distressed I have gone to the parks or out of the city to
some quiet ground where I could find a wooded stream, and the woods
filled with birds, and found, almost in a moment, a new spirit coming
over me. I was rid of _men_, almost of myself. I seemed to find a sacred
sweetness and calmness, not coming over me, but into me. I seemed nearer
to heaven. I felt less sadness about life, for God would take care of
it; and my own worthlessness, too, became a source of composure, for on
that very account it made little difference in the world’s history
whether I lived or died. God worked, it seemed to me, upon a scale so
vast and rich in details that anything and anybody could be spared and
not affect the results of life.”
He crossed over to Paris in August, and his note-book gives us
catch-words and sentences evidently intended for reminders of sights,
incidents, and adventures that he wished to remember. So disconnected
are they that they are of little worth except as showing what interested
him in this great city on this his first visit, and as affording the raw
materials out of which grew his letters and more finished descriptions.
_When_ he arrived, by what route, at what hotel he stopped, he
apparently did not think worth noting; but what he saw in the life of
the people he wished to remember, and the first few pages of his diary
are filled with items like these: “Three mothers with their babies.”
“Boy and sister frolicking, six or seven years old.” “Family on seat;
little thing talking, about three years old.” “Twelve soldiers going to
relieve sentinels.” “Stand for flowers,” etc.
Next to the life of the common people the largest space in his diary is
given to the art-galleries. On two pages he jots down “Effect of Gallery
on my Mind”:
“1st. Astonishment, at number and exquisite character, beyond what had
expected—not of something finer, but such as to make me feel that before
I had not seen anything.
“2d. Then sense of intense pleasure, from _what_ do not stop to inquire.
It is not color, form, composition, nor mere sympathy with thing
expressed. _It is the whole._ The walls flame out as if the hall was a
_summer_ and all shining in concentration upon you. I see all that is
painted—and _more_. I see, beyond, other visions, the mute figures
speak. I imagine the scene before the time chosen and afterwards.
“3d. Then comes sense of _beauty_, complex, of rich and exquisite
_coloring_; also the beauty of the scenes. The objects, in other words,
and the instrument of their manifestation.
“4th. Then you begin to select and to hang in a dreamy review over one
or another. _Time_ is not known; you wake by some footfall. Whether you
have been here an hour or four you cannot tell; it seems by the populous
experience a long time. You do not _weary_, but you _exhale_—_i.e._, the
senses seem to flag, while mind is keener than ever, and you _imagine_
rather than see; as one who is exhilarated by wine _sees_, to be sure,
but his own mind affords the color and—”
In his letters he afterwards enlarged upon this topic: “Ah! what a new
world has been opened to me, and what a new sense within myself! I knew
that I had gradually grown fond of pictures from my boyhood. I had felt
the power of some few. But nothing had ever come up to a certain ideal
that had hovered in my mind, and I supposed I was not fine enough to
appreciate with discrimination the works of masters. To find myself
absolutely intoxicated; to find my system so much affected that I could
not control my nerves; to find myself trembling, and laughing, and
weeping, and almost hysterical, and that in spite of my shame and
determination to behave better—such a power of these galleries over me I
had not expected. I have lived for two days in fairyland, wakened out of
it by some few sights which I have mechanically visited, more for the
sake of pleasing friends at home, when I return, than for a present
pleasure to myself, but relapsing again into the golden vision....
“I could not tell whether hours or minutes were passing. It was a
blessed exhalation of soul, in which I seemed freed from matter, and, as
a diffused intelligence, to float in the atmosphere. I could not believe
that a dull body was the centre from which thought and emotion radiated.
I had a sense of expansion, of etherealization, which gave me some faint
sense of a spiritual state. Nor was I in a place altogether unfitted for
such a state. The subject of many of the works—suffering, heroic
resistance, angels, Arcadian scenes, especially the scenes of Christ’s
life and death—seemed not unfitting accompaniment to my mind, and
suggested to me, in a glorious vision, the drawing near of a redeemed
soul to the precincts of heaven! Oh! with what an outburst of soul did I
implore Christ to wash me, and all whom I loved, in His precious blood,
that we might not fail of entering the glorious city whose builder and
maker is God! All my sins seemed not only _sins_ but great deformities.
They seemed not merely affronts against God but insults to my own
nature! My soul snuffed at them and trod them down as the mire in the
street. Then, holy and loving thoughts toward God or toward man seemed
to me to be as beautiful as those fleecy islets along the west at
sunset, crowned with glory; and the gentler aspirations for goodness and
nobleness and knowledge seemed to me like silver mists through which the
morning is striking, wafting them gently and in wreaths and films
heavenward. Great deeds, heroism for worthy objects, for God, or for
one’s fellows, or for one’s own purity, seemed not only natural but as
things without which a soul could not live.
“But at length I perceived myself exhausted, not by any sense of fatigue
(I had no sense or body), but by perceiving that my mind would not fix
upon material objects, but strove to act by itself. Thus a new picture
was examined only for an instant, and then I exhaled into all kinds of
golden dreams and visions.
“I left the gallery, and in this mood, as I threaded my way back, how
beautiful did everything and everybody seem! The narrow streets were
beautiful for being narrow, and the broad ones for being broad; old
buildings had their glory, and new structures had theirs; children were
all glorified children; I loved the poor workmen that I saw in the
confined and narrow shops; the various women, young and old, with huge
buck-baskets, or skipping hither and thither on errands, all seemed
happy, and my soul blessed them as I passed.
“My own joy of being overflowed upon everything which I met. Sometimes
singing to myself, or smiling to others so as to make men think,
doubtless, that I had met some good luck or was on some prosperous
errand of love, I walked on through street after street, turning
whichever corner, to the right or left, happened to please the moment,
neither knowing or caring where I went, but always finding something to
see and enjoying all things. Nor do I know yet by what instinct I
rounded up my journeyings by finding my proper lodging. That night I
slept, as to my body, but felt little difference between dreaming asleep
and dreaming awake.”
We turn from his note-book and letters to one of the papers of the day,
and read: “Rev. H. W. Beecher, our esteemed brother, has returned from
his transatlantic trip with improved health. He reached New York
yesterday (evening) in the _Asia_, September 11.”
He arrived unexpectedly and found his family, which had been spending
the summer at Sutton, Mass., with the grandmother, awaiting him. His
trip had been a success in every particular. Not only was his health
restored, but his field of observation had been vastly broadened and his
experiences greatly deepened. England, the home of his race, had been
seen and touched; he had visited her castles, colleges, and churches;
walked among her fields, become acquainted with her people; and
henceforth her noble history, great achievements, and mighty names
seemed more real to him, and she was more admired and beloved than ever.
In Paris he became conscious for the first time of the power of true
art, and began that study of it which only ended with his life.
But, whether in England or France, so well read was he in the history of
the places visited, and so vivid was his imagination to bring back the
scenes and men that made these places memorable, that his journey was as
a sojourn with the wisest and best of our race, and he returned from it
refreshed and enlarged for the work that, for a few weeks, had been laid
aside.