(which, as Americans have at present no centre of their own, we may
allow to be somewhere in the vicinity, we will say, of St. Paul's
Cathedral), it might have seemed natural that I should be tossed about
by the turbulence of the vast London whirlpool. But I had drifted into a
still eddy, where conflicting movements made a repose, and, wearied with
a good deal of uncongenial activity, I found the quiet of my temporary
haven more attractive than anything that the great town could offer. I
already knew London well; that is to say, I had long ago satisfied (so
far as it was capable of satisfaction) that mysterious yearning--the
magnetism of millions of hearts operating upon one--which impels every
man's individuality to mingle itself with the immensest mass of human
life within his scope. Day after day, at an earlier period, I had
trodden the thronged thoroughfares, the broad, lonely squares, the
lanes, alleys, and strange labyrinthine courts, the parks, the gardens
and inclosures of ancient studious societies, so retired and silent amid
the city uproar, the markets, the foggy streets along the riverside, the
bridges,--I had sought all parts of the metropolis, in short, with an
unweariable and indiscriminating curiosity; until few of the native
inhabitants, I fancy, had turned so many of its corners as myself. These
aimless wanderings (in which my prime purpose and achievement were to
lose my way, and so to find it the more surely) had brought me, at one
time or another, to the sight and actual presence of almost all the
objects and renowned localities that I had read about, and which had
made London the dream-city of my youth. I had found it better than my
dream; for there is nothing else in life comparable (in that species of
enjoyment, I mean) to the thick, heavy, oppressive, sombre delight which
an American is sensible of, hardly knowing whether to call it a
pleasure or a pain, in the atmosphere of London. The result was, that I
acquired a home-feeling there, as nowhere else in the world,--though
afterwards I came to have a somewhat similar sentiment in regard to
Rome; and as long as either of those two great cities shall exist, the
cities of the Past and of the Present, a man's native soil may crumble
beneath his feet without leaving him altogether homeless upon earth.
Thus, having once fully yielded to its influence, I was in a manner free
of the city, and could approach or keep away from it as I pleased. Hence
it happened that, living within a quarter of an hour's rush of the
London Bridge Terminus, I was oftener tempted to spend a whole summer
day in our garden than to seek anything new or old, wonderful or
commonplace, beyond its precincts. It was a delightful garden, of no
great extent, but comprising a good many facilities for repose and
enjoyment, such as arbors and garden-seats, shrubbery, flower-beds,
rose-bushes in a profusion of bloom, pinks, poppies, geraniums,
sweetpeas, and a variety of other scarlet, yellow, blue, and purple
blossoms, which I did not trouble myself to recognize individually, yet
had always a vague sense of their beauty about me. The dim sky of
England has a most happy effect on the coloring of flowers, blending
richness with delicacy in the same texture; but in this garden, as
everywhere else, the exuberance of English verdure had a greater charm
than any tropical splendor or diversity of hue. The hunger for natural
beauty might be satisfied with grass and green leaves forever. Conscious
of the triumph of England in this respect, and loyally anxious for the
credit of my own country, it gratified me to observe what trouble and
pains the English gardeners are fain to throw away in producing a few
sour plums and abortive pears and apples,--as, for example, in this very
garden, where a row of unhappy trees were spread out perfectly flat
against a brick wall, looking as if impaled alive, or crucified, with a
cruel and unattainable purpose of compelling them to produce rich fruit
by torture. For my part, I never ate an English fruit, raised in the
open air, that could compare in flavor with a Yankee turnip.
The garden included that prime feature of English domestic scenery, a
lawn. It had been leveled, carefully shorn, and converted into a
bowling-green, on which we sometimes essayed to practice the
time-honored game of bowls, most unskillfully, yet not without a
perception that it involves a very pleasant mixture of exercise and
ease, as is the case with most of the old English pastimes. Our little
domain was shut in by the house on one side, and in other directions by
a hedge-fence and a brick wall, which last was concealed or softened by
shrubbery and the impaled fruit-trees already mentioned. Over all the
outer region, beyond our immediate precincts, there was an abundance of
foliage, tossed aloft from the near or distant trees with which that
agreeable suburb is adorned. The effect was wonderfully sylvan and
rural, insomuch that we might have fancied ourselves in the depths of a
wooded seclusion; only that, at brief intervals, we could hear the
galloping sweep of a railway-train passing within a quarter of a mile,
and its discordant screech, moderated by a little farther distance, as
it reached the Blackheath Station. That harsh, rough sound, seeking me
out so inevitably, was the voice of the great world summoning me forth.
I know not whether I was the more pained or pleased to be thus
constantly put in mind of the neighborhood of London; for, on the one
hand, my conscience stung me a little for reading a book, or playing
with children in the grass, when there were so many better things for an
enlightened traveler to do,--while, at the same time, it gave a deeper
delight to my luxurious idleness to contrast it with the turmoil which I
escaped. On the whole, however, I do not repent of a single wasted hour,
and only wish that I could have spent twice as many in the same way; for
the impression on my memory is, that I was as happy in that hospitable
garden as the English summer day was long.
[Illustration: _A Country House._]
One chief condition of my enjoyment was the weather. Italy has nothing
like it, nor America. There never was such weather except in England,
where, in requital of a vast amount of horrible east wind between
February and June, and a brown October and black November, and a wet,
chill, sunless winter, there are a few weeks of incomparable summer,
scattered through July and August, and the earlier portion of September,
small in quantity, but exquisite enough to atone for the whole year's
atmospherical delinquencies. After all, the prevalent sombreness may
have brought out those sunny intervals in such high relief that I see
them, in my recollection, brighter than they really were: a little light
makes a glory for people who live habitually in a gray gloom. The
English, however, do not seem to know how enjoyable the momentary gleams
of their summer are; they call it broiling weather, and hurry to the
seaside with red, perspiring faces, in a state of combustion and
deliquescence; and I have observed that even their cattle have similar
susceptibilities, seeking the deepest shade, or standing midleg deep in
pools and streams to cool themselves, at temperatures which our own cows
would deem little more than barely comfortable. To myself, after the
summer heats of my native land had somewhat effervesced out of my blood
and memory, it was the weather of Paradise itself. It might be a little
too warm; but it was that modest and inestimable superabundance which
constitutes a bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly enough.
During my first year in England, residing in perhaps the most ungenial
part of the kingdom, I could never be quite comfortable without a fire
on the hearth; in the second twelvemonth, beginning to get
acclimatized, I became sensible of an austere friendliness, shy, but
sometimes almost tender, in the veiled, shadowy, seldom smiling summer;
and in the succeeding years,--whether that I had renewed my fibre with
English beef and replenished my blood with English ale, or whatever were
the cause,--I grew content with winter and especially in love with
summer, desiring little more for happiness than merely to breathe and
bask. At the midsummer which we are now speaking of, I must needs
confess that the noontide sun came down more fervently than I found
altogether tolerable; so that I was fain to shift my position with the
shadow of the shrubbery, making myself the movable index of a sundial
that reckoned up the hours of an almost interminable day.
For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your
actual experience is concerned, the English summer day has positively no
beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is
already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours
of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon
their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is
bedtime again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make
the pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such
season, hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone day
beholds its successor; or, if not quite true of the latitude of London,
it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island,
that To-morrow is born before its Yesterday is dead. They exist together
in the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the
face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may
simultaneously touch them both with one finger of recollection and
another of prophecy. I cared not how long the day might be, nor how many
of them. I had earned this repose by a long course of irksome toil and
perturbation, and could have been content never to stray out of the
limits of that suburban villa and its garden. If I lacked anything
beyond, it would have satisfied me well enough to dream about it,
instead of struggling for its actual possession. At least, this was the
feeling of the moment; although the transitory, flitting, and
irresponsible character of my life there, was perhaps the most
enjoyable element of all, as allowing me much of the comfort of house
and home, without any sense of their weight upon my back. The nomadic
life has great advantages, if we can find tents ready pitched for us at
every stage.
So much for the interior of our abode,--a spot of deepest quiet, within
reach of the intensest activity. But, even when we stepped beyond our
own gate, we were not shocked with any immediate presence of the great
world. We were dwelling in one of those oases that have grown up (in
comparatively recent years, I believe) on the wide waste of Blackheath,
which otherwise offers a vast extent of unoccupied ground in singular
proximity to the metropolis. As a general thing, the proprietorship of
the soil seems to exist in everybody and nobody; but exclusive rights
have been obtained, here and there, chiefly by men whose daily concerns
link them with London, so that you find their villas or boxes standing
along village streets which have often more of an American aspect than
the elder English settlements. The scene is semi-rural. Ornamental trees
overshadow the sidewalks, and grassy margins border the wheel-tracks.
The houses, to be sure, have certain points of difference from those of
an American village, bearing tokens of architectural design, though
seldom of individual taste; and, as far as possible, they stand aloof
from the street, and separated each from its neighbor by hedge or fence,
in accordance with the careful exclusiveness of the English character,
which impels the occupant, moreover, to cover the front of his dwelling
with as much concealment of shrubbery as his limits will allow. Through
the interstices, you catch glimpses of well-kept lawns, generally
ornamented with flowers, and with what the English call rock-work, being
heaps of ivy-grown stones and fossils, designed for romantic effect in a
small way. Two or three of such village streets as are here described
take a collective name,--as, for instance, Blackheath Park,--and
constitute a kind of community of residents, with gateways, kept by a
policeman, and a semi-privacy, stepping beyond which, you find yourself
on the breezy heath.
On this great, bare, dreary common I often went astray, as I afterwards
did on the Campagna of Rome, and drew the air (tainted with London smoke
though it might be) into my lungs by deep inspirations, with a strange
and unexpected sense of desert freedom. The misty atmosphere helps you
to fancy a remoteness that perhaps does not quite exist. During the
little time that it lasts, the solitude is as impressive as that of a
Western prairie or forest; but soon the railway shriek, a mile or two
away, insists upon informing you of your whereabout; or you recognize in
the distance some landmark that you may have known,--an insulated villa,
perhaps, with its garden-wall around it, or the rudimental street of a
new settlement which is sprouting on this otherwise barren soil. Half a
century ago, the most frequent token of man's beneficent contiguity
might have been a gibbet, and the creak, like a tavern sign, of a
murderer swinging to and fro in irons. Blackheath, with its highwaymen
and footpads, was dangerous in those days; and even now, for aught I
know, the Western prairie may still compare favorably with it as a safe
region to go astray in. When I was acquainted with Blackheath, the
ingenious device of garroting had recently come into fashion; and I can
remember, while crossing those waste places at midnight, and hearing
footsteps behind me, to have been sensibly encouraged by also hearing,
not far off, the clinking hoof-tramp of one of the horse-patrols who do
regular duty there. About sunset, or a little later, was the time when
the broad and somewhat desolate peculiarity of the heath seemed to me to
put on its utmost impressiveness. At that hour, finding myself on
elevated ground, I once had a view of immense London, four or five miles
off, with the vast Dome in the midst, and the towers of the two Houses
of Parliament rising up into the smoky canopy, the thinner substance of
which obscured a mass of things, and hovered about the objects that were
most distinctly visible,--a glorious and sombre picture, dusky, awful,
but irresistibly attractive, like a young man's dream of the great
world, foretelling at that distance a grandeur never to be fully
realized.
While I lived in that neighborhood, the tents of two or three sets of
cricket-players were constantly pitched on Blackheath, and matches were
going forward that seemed to involve the honor and credit of communities
or counties, exciting an interest in everybody but myself, who cared not
what part of England might glorify itself at the expense of another. It
is necessary to be born an Englishman, I believe, in order to enjoy
this great national game; at any rate, as a spectacle for an outside
observer, I found it lazy, lingering, tedious, and utterly devoid of
pictorial effects. Choice of other amusements was at hand. Butts for
archery were established, and bows and arrows were to be let, at so many
shots for a penny,--there being abundance of space for a farther
flight-shot than any modern archer can lend to his shaft. Then there was
an absurd game of throwing a stick at crockery-ware, which I have
witnessed a hundred times, and personally engaged in once or twice,
without ever having the satisfaction to see a bit of broken crockery. In
other spots you found donkeys for children to ride, and ponies of a very
meek and patient spirit, on which the Cockney pleasure-seekers of both
sexes rode races and made wonderful displays of horsemanship. By way of
refreshment there was gingerbread (but, as a true patriot, I must
pronounce it greatly inferior to our native dainty), and ginger-beer,
and probably stancher liquor among the booth-keeper's hidden stores. The
frequent railway-trains, as well as the numerous steamers to Greenwich,
have made the vacant portions of Blackheath a play-ground and
breathing-place for the Londoners, readily and very cheaply accessible;
so that, in view of this broader use and enjoyment, I a little grudged
the tracts that have been filched away, so to speak, and individualized
by thriving citizens. One sort of visitors especially interested me:
they were schools of little boys or girls, under the guardianship of
their instructors,--charity schools, as I often surmised from their
aspect, collected among dark alleys and squalid courts; and hither they
were brought to spend a summer afternoon, these pale little progeny of
the sunless nooks of London, who had never known that the sky was any
broader than that narrow and vapory strip above their native lane. I
fancied that they took but a doubtful pleasure, being half affrighted at
the wide, empty space overhead and round about them, finding the air too
little medicated with smoke, soot, and graveyard exhalations, to be
breathed with comfort, and feeling shelterless and lost because grimy
London, their slatternly and disreputable mother, had suffered them to
stray out of her arms.
[Illustration _The Houses of Parliament._]
Passing among these holiday people, we come to one of the gateways of
Greenwich Park, opening through an old brick wall. It admits us from
the bare heath into a scene of antique cultivation and woodland
ornament, traversed in all directions by avenues of trees, many of which
bear tokens of a venerable age. These broad and well-kept pathways rise
and decline over the elevations, and along the bases of gentle hills,
which diversify the whole surface of the park. The loftiest and most
abrupt of them (though but of very moderate height) is one of the
earth's noted summits, and may hold up its head with Mont Blanc and
Chimborazo, as being the site of Greenwich Observatory, where, if all
nations will consent to say so, the longitude of our great globe begins.
I used to regulate my watch by the broad dial-plate against the
observatory wall, and felt it pleasant to be standing at the very centre
of Time and Space.
There are lovelier parks than this in the neighborhood of London, richer
scenes of greensward and cultivated trees; and Kensington, especially,
in a summer afternoon, has seemed to me as delightful as any place can
or ought to be, in a world which, some time or other, we must quit. But
Greenwich, too, is beautiful,--a spot where the art of man has
conspired with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel
together how to make a pleasant scene, and the longest liver of the two
had faithfully carried out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an
additional charm of its own, because, to all appearance, it is the
people's property and play-ground in a much more genuine way than the
aristocratic resorts in closer vicinity to the metropolis. It affords
one of the instances in which the monarch's property is actually the
people's, and shows how much more natural is their relation to the
sovereign than to the nobility, which pretends to hold the intervening
space between the two: for a nobleman makes a paradise only for himself,
and fills it with his own pomp and pride; whereas the people are sooner
or later the legitimate inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens
create, as now of Greenwich Park. On Sundays, when the sun shone, and
even on those grim and sombre days when, if it does not actually rain, the
English persist in calling it fine weather, it was too good to see how
sturdily the plebeians trod under their own oaks, and what fullness of
simple enjoyment they evidently found there. They were the people,--not
the populace,--specimens of a class whose Sunday clothes are a distinct
kind of garb from their week-day ones: and this, in England, implies
wholesome habits of life, daily thrift, and a rank above the lowest. I
longed to be acquainted with them, in order to investigate what manner
of folks they were, what sort of households they kept, their politics,
their religion, their tastes, and whether they were as narrow-minded as
their betters. There can be very little doubt of it; an Englishman is
English, in whatever rank of life, though no more intensely so, I should
imagine, as an artisan or petty shopkeeper, than as a member of
Parliament.
The English character, as I conceive it, is by no means a very lofty
one; they seem to have a great deal of earth and grimy dust clinging
about them, as was probably the case with the stalwart and quarrelsome
people who sprouted up out of the soil, after Cadmus had sown the
dragon's teeth. And yet, though the individual Englishman is sometimes
preternaturally disagreeable, an observer standing aloof has a sense of
natural kindness towards them in the lump. They adhere closer to the
original simplicity in which mankind was created than we ourselves do;
they love, quarrel, laugh, cry, and turn their actual selves inside out
with greater freedom than any class of Americans would consider
decorous. It was often so with these holiday folks in Greenwich Park;
and, ridiculous as it may sound, I fancy myself to have caught very
satisfactory glimpses of Arcadian life among the Cockneys there, hardly
beyond the scope of Bow-Bells, picnicking in the grass, uncouthly
gamboling on the broad slopes, or straying in motley groups or by single
pairs of love-making youths and maidens, along the sun-streaked avenues.
Even the omnipresent policemen or park-keepers could not disturb the
beatific impression on my mind. One feature, at all events, of the
Golden Age was to be seen in the herds of deer that encountered you in
the somewhat remoter recesses of the park, and were readily prevailed
upon to nibble a bit of bread out of your hand. But, though no wrong had
ever been done them, and no horn had sounded nor hound bayed at the
heels of themselves or their antlered progenitors for centuries past,
there was still an apprehensiveness lingering in their hearts; so that
a slight movement of the hand or a step too near would send a whole
squadron of them scampering away, just as a breath scatters the winged
seeds of a dandelion.
The aspect of Greenwich Park, with all those festal people wandering
through it, resembled that of the Borghese Gardens under the walls of
Rome, on a Sunday or Saint's day; but, I am not ashamed to say, it a
little disturbed whatever grimly ghost of Puritanic strictness might be
lingering in the sombre depths of a New England heart, among severe and
sunless remembrances of the Sabbaths of childhood, and pangs of remorse
for ill-gotten lessons in the catechism, and for erratic fantasies or
hardly suppressed laughter in the middle of long sermons. Occasionally,
I tried to take the long-hoarded sting out of these compunctious smarts
by attending divine service in the open air. On a cart outside of the
park-wall (and, if I mistake not, at two or three corners and secluded
spots within the park itself) a Methodist preacher uplifts his voice and
speedily gathers a congregation, his zeal for whose religious welfare
impels the good man to such earnest vociferation and toilsome gesture
that his perspiring face is quickly in a stew. His inward flame
conspires with the too fervid sun, and makes a positive martyr of him,
even in the very exercise of his pious labor; insomuch that he purchases
every atom of spiritual increment to his hearers by loss of his own
corporeal solidity, and, should his discourse last long enough, must
finally exhale before their eyes. If I smile at him, be it understood,
it is not in scorn; he performs his sacred office more acceptably than
many a prelate. These wayside services attract numbers who would not
otherwise listen to prayer, sermon, or hymn, from one year's end to
another, and who, for that very reason, are the auditors most likely to
be moved by the preacher's eloquence. Yonder Greenwich pensioner,
too,--in his costume of three-cornered hat, and old-fashioned,
brass-buttoned blue coat with ample skirts, which makes him look like a
contemporary of Admiral Benbow,--that tough old mariner may hear a word
or two which will go nearer his heart than anything that the chaplain of
the Hospital can be expected to deliver. I always noticed, moreover,
that a considerable proportion of the audience were soldiers, who came
hither with a day's leave from Woolwich,--hardy veterans in aspect,
some of whom wore as many as four or five medals, Crimean or East
Indian, on the breasts of their scarlet coats. The miscellaneous
congregation listen with every appearance of heartfelt interest; and,
for my own part, I must frankly acknowledge that I never found it
possible to give five minutes' attention to any other English preaching:
so cold and commonplace are the homilies that pass for such, under the
aged roofs of churches. And as for cathedrals, the sermon is an
exceedingly diminutive and unimportant part of the religious
services,--if, indeed, it be considered a part,--among the pompous
ceremonies, the intonations, and the resounding and lofty-voiced strains
of the choristers. The magnificence of the setting quite dazzles out
what we Puritans look upon as the jewel of the whole affair; for I
presume that it was our forefathers, the Dissenters in England and
America, who gave the sermon its present prominence in the Sabbath
exercises.[5]
[5] We all, together with Mr. Squarey, went to Chester last Sunday, and
attended the cathedral service.... In America the sermon is the
principal thing; but here all this magnificent ceremonial of prayer and
chanted responses and psalms and anthems was the setting to a short,
meagre discourse, which would not have been considered of any account
among the elaborate intellectual efforts of New England ministers.--I.
466.