worshiped in the open air since the ancient Britons listened to the
preaching of the Druids; and it reminded me of that old priesthood, to
see certain memorials of their dusky epoch--not religious, however, but
warlike--in the neighborhood of the spot where the Methodist was holding
forth. These were some ancient barrows, beneath or within which are
supposed to lie buried the slain of a forgotten or doubtfully remembered
battle, fought on the site of Greenwich Park as long ago as two or three
centuries after the birth of Christ. Whatever may once have been their
height and magnitude, they have now scarcely more prominence in the
actual scene than the battle of which they are the sole monuments
retains in history,--being only a few mounds side by side, elevated a
little above the surface of the ground, ten or twelve feet in diameter,
with a shallow depression in their summits. When one of them was opened,
not long since, no bones, nor armor, nor weapons were discovered,
nothing but some small jewels, and a tuft of hair,--perhaps from the
head of a valiant general, who, dying on the field of his victory,
bequeathed this lock, together with his indestructible fame, to after
ages. The hair and jewels are probably in the British Museum, where the
potsherds and rubbish of innumerable generations make the visitor wish
that each passing century could carry off all its fragments and relics
along with it, instead of adding them to the continually accumulating
burden which human knowledge is compelled to lug upon its back.[6] As
for the fame, I know not what has become of it.
[6] The fact is, the world is accumulating too many materials for
knowledge. We do not recognize for rubbish what is really rubbish; and
under this head might be reckoned very many things one sees in the
British Museum: and, as each generation leaves its fragments and
potsherds behind it, such will finally be the desperate conclusion of
the learned.--II. 143.
Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an
exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at
once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart,
wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin Marbles and the frieze of
the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian
statues were hewn and squared into building-stones, and that the mummies
had all turned to dust two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all
the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the
generations that produced them. The present is burdened too much with
the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what
is warm with life, and immediately around us; yet we heap up these old
shells, out of which human life has long emerged, casting them off
forever. I do not see how future ages are to stagger onward under all
this dead weight, with the additions that will be continually made to
it.--II. 207.
After traversing the park, we come into the neighborhood of Greenwich
Hospital, and will pass through one of its spacious gateways for the
sake of glancing at an establishment which does more honor to the heart
of England than anything else that I am acquainted with, of a public
nature. It is very seldom that we can be sensible of anything like
kindliness in the acts or relations of such an artificial thing as a
National Government. Our own government, I should conceive, is too much
an abstraction ever to feel any sympathy for its maimed sailors and
soldiers, though it will doubtless do them a severe kind of justice, as
chilling as the touch of steel. But it seemed to me that the Greenwich
pensioners are the petted children of the nation, and that the
government is their dry-nurse, and that the old men themselves have a
child-like consciousness of their position. Very likely, a better sort
of life might have been arranged, and a wiser care bestowed on them;
but, such as it is, it enables them to spend a sluggish, careless,
comfortable old age, grumbling, growling, gruff, as if all the foul
weather of their past years were pent up within them, yet not much more
discontented than such weather-beaten and battle-battered fragments of
human kind must inevitably be. Their home, in its outward form, is on a
very magnificent plan. Its germ was a royal palace, the full expansion
of which has resulted in a series of edifices externally more beautiful
than any English palace that I have seen, consisting of several
quadrangles of stately architecture, united by colonnades and
gravel-walks, and inclosing grassy squares, with statues in the centre,
the whole extending along the Thames. It is built of marble, or very
light-colored stone, in the classic style, with pillars and porticos,
which (to my own taste, and, I fancy, to that of the old sailors)
produce but a cold and shivery effect in the English climate. Had I been
the architect, I would have studied the characters, habits, and
predilections of nautical people in Wapping, Rotherhithe, and the
neighborhood of the Tower (places which I visited in affectionate
remembrance of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and other actual or mythological
navigators), and would have built the hospital in a kind of ethereal
similitude to the narrow, dark, ugly, and inconvenient, but snug and
cosey homeliness of the sailor boarding-houses there. There can be no
question that all the above attributes, or enough of them to satisfy an
old sailor's heart, might be reconciled with architectural beauty and
the wholesome contrivances of modern dwellings, and thus a novel and
genuine style of building be given to the world.
But their countrymen meant kindly by the old fellows in assigning them
the ancient royal site where Elizabeth held her court and Charles II.
began to build his palace. So far as the locality went, it was treating
them like so many kings; and, with a discreet abundance of grog, beer,
and tobacco, there was perhaps little more to be accomplished in behalf
of men whose whole previous lives have tended to unfit them for old age.
Their chief discomfort is probably for lack of something to do or think
about. But, judging by the few whom I saw, a listless habit seems to
have crept over them, a dim dreaminess of mood, in which they sit
between asleep and awake, and find the long day wearing towards bedtime
without its having made any distinct record of itself upon their
consciousness. Sitting on stone benches in the sunshine, they subside
into slumber, or nearly so, and start at the approach of footsteps
echoing under the colonnades, ashamed to be caught napping, and rousing
themselves in a hurry, as formerly on the midnight watch at sea. In
their brightest moments, they gather in groups and bore one another with
endless sea-yarns about their voyages under famous admirals, and about
gale and calm, battle and chase, and all that class of incident that has
its sphere on the deck and in the hollow interior of a ship, where their
world has exclusively been. For other pastime, they quarrel among
themselves, comrade with comrade, and perhaps shake paralytic fists in
furrowed faces. If inclined for a little exercise, they can bestir their
wooden legs on the long esplanade that borders by the Thames,
criticising the rig of passing ships, and firing off volleys of
malediction at the steamers, which have made the sea another element
than that they used to be acquainted with. All this is but cold comfort
for the evening of life, yet may compare rather favorably with the
preceding portions of it, comprising little save imprisonment on
shipboard, in the course of which they have been tossed all about the
world and caught hardly a glimpse of it, forgetting what grass and trees
are, and never finding out what woman is, though they may have
encountered a painted spectre which they took for her. A country owes
much to human beings whose bodies she has worn out and whose immortal
part she has left undeveloped or debased, as we find them here; and
having wasted an idle paragraph upon them, let me now suggest that old
men have a kind of susceptibility to moral impressions, and even (up to
an advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which often appears to come
to them after the active time of life is past. The Greenwich pensioners
might prove better subjects for true education now than in their
schoolboy days; but then where is the Normal School that could educate
instructors for such a class?
There is a beautiful chapel for the pensioners, in the classic style,
over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at
it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains
me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a
knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the
spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other
limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience,
I seize this opportunity to wreak a lifelong abhorrence upon the poor,
blameless man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an explosion
of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to me in the Athenaeum
Exhibition. Would fire burn it, I wonder?
The principal thing that they have to show you, at Greenwich Hospital,
is the Painted Hall. It is a splendid and spacious room, at least a
hundred feet long and half as high, with a ceiling painted in fresco by
Sir James Thornhill. As a work of art, I presume, this frescoed canopy
has little merit, though it produces an exceedingly rich effect by its
brilliant coloring and as a specimen of magnificent upholstery. The
walls of the grand apartment are entirely covered with pictures, many of
them representing battles and other naval incidents that were once
fresher in the world's memory than now, but chiefly portraits of old
admirals, comprising the whole line of heroes who have trod the
quarter-decks of British ships for more than two hundred years back.
Next to a tomb in Westminster Abbey, which was Nelson's most elevated
object of ambition, it would seem to be the highest meed of a naval
warrior to have his portrait hung up in the Painted Hall; but, by dint
of victory upon victory, these illustrious personages have grown to be a
mob, and by no means a very interesting one, so far as regards the
character of the faces here depicted. They are generally commonplace,
and often singularly stolid; and I have observed (both in the Painted
Hall and elsewhere, and not only in portraits, but in the actual
presence of such renowned people as I have caught glimpses of) that the
countenances of heroes are not nearly so impressive as those of
statesmen,--except, of course, in the rare instances where warlike
ability has been but the one-sided manifestation of a profound genius
for managing the world's affairs.
Nine tenths of these distinguished admirals, for instance, if their
faces tell truth, must needs have been blockheads, and might have
served better, one would imagine, as wooden figure-heads for their own
ships than to direct any difficult and intricate scheme of action from
the quarter-deck. It is doubtful whether the same kind of men will
hereafter meet with a similar degree of success; for they were
victorious chiefly through the old English hardihood, exercised in a
field of which modern science had not yet got possession. Rough valor
has lost something of its value since their days, and must continue to
sink lower and lower in the comparative estimate of warlike qualities.
In the next naval war, as between England and France, I would bet,
methinks, upon the Frenchman's head.
It is remarkable, however, that the great naval hero of England--the
greatest, therefore, in the world, and of all time--had none of the
stolid characteristics that belong to his class, and cannot fairly be
accepted as their representative man. Foremost in the roughest of
professions, he was as delicately organized as a woman, and as painfully
sensitive as a poet. More than any other Englishman he won the love and
admiration of his country, but won them through the efficacy of
qualities that are not English, or, at all events, were intensified in
his case and made poignant and powerful by something morbid in the man,
which put him otherwise at cross-purposes with life. He was a man of
genius; and genius in an Englishman (not to cite the good old simile of
a pearl in the oyster) is usually a symptom of a lack of balance in the
general making-up of the character; as we may satisfy ourselves by
running over the list of their poets, for example, and observing how
many of them have been sickly or deformed, and how often their lives
have been darkened by insanity. An ordinary Englishman is the healthiest
and wholesomest of human beings; an extraordinary one is almost always,
in one way or another, a sick man. It was so with Lord Nelson. The
wonderful contrast or relation between his personal qualities, the
position which he held, and the life that he lived, makes him as
interesting a personage as all history has to show; and it is a pity
that Southey's biography--so good in its superficial way, and yet so
inadequate as regards any real delineation of the man--should have taken
the subject out of the hands of some writer endowed with more delicate
appreciation and deeper insight than that genuine Englishman possessed.
But Southey accomplished his own purpose, which, apparently, was to
present his hero as a pattern for England's young midshipmen.
But the English capacity for hero-worship is full to the brim with what
they are able to comprehend of Lord Nelson's character. Adjoining the
Painted Hall is a smaller room, the walls of which are completely and
exclusively adorned with pictures of the great Admiral's exploits. We
see the frail, ardent man in all the most noted events of his career,
from his encounter with a Polar Bear to his death at Trafalgar,
quivering here and there about the room like a blue, lambent flame. No
Briton ever enters that apartment without feeling the beef and ale of
his composition stirred to its depths, and finding himself changed into
a hero for the nonce, however stolid his brain, however tough his heart,
however unexcitable his ordinary mood. To confess the truth, I myself,
though belonging to another parish, have been deeply sensible to the
sublime recollections there aroused, acknowledging that Nelson expressed
his life in a kind of symbolic poetry which I had as much right to
understand as these burly islanders.[7] Cool and critical observer as I
sought to be, I enjoyed their burst of honest indignation when a visitor
(not an American, I am glad to say) thrust his walking-stick almost into
Nelson's face, in one of the pictures, by way of pointing a remark; and
the by-standers immediately glowed like so many hot coals, and would
probably have consumed the offender in their wrath, had he not effected
his retreat. But the most sacred objects of all are two of Nelson's
coats, under separate glass cases. One is that which he wore at the
Battle of the Nile, and it is now sadly injured by moths, which will
quite destroy it in a few years, unless its guardians preserve it as we
do Washington's military suit by occasionally baking it in an oven. The
other is the coat in which he received his death-wound at Trafalgar. On
its breast are sewed three or four stars and orders of knighthood, now
much dimmed by time and damp, but which glittered brightly enough on the
battle-day to draw the fatal aim of a French marksman. The bullet-hole
is visible on the shoulder, as well as a part of the golden tassels of
an epaulet, the rest of which was shot away. Over the coat is laid a
white waistcoat, with a great blood-stain on it, out of which all the
redness has utterly faded, leaving it of a dingy yellow hue, in the
threescore years since that blood gushed out. Yet it was once the
reddest blood in England,--Nelson's blood!
[7] Even the great sailor, Nelson, was unlike his countrymen in the
qualities that constituted him a hero; he was not the perfection of an
Englishman, but a creature of another kind,--sensitive, nervous,
excitable, and really more like a Frenchman.--II. 531.
The hospital stands close adjacent to the town of Greenwich, which will
always retain a kind of festal aspect in my memory, in consequence of my
having first become acquainted with it on Easter Monday. Till a few
years ago, the first three days of Easter were a carnival season in this
old town, during which the idle and disreputable part of London poured
itself into the streets like an inundation of the Thames,--as unclean as
that turbid mixture of the offscourings of the vast city, and
overflowing with its grimy pollution whatever rural innocence, if any,
might be found in the suburban neighborhood. This festivity was called
Greenwich Fair, the final one of which, in an immemorial succession, it
was my fortune to behold.
If I had bethought myself of going through the fair with a note-book and
pencil, jotting down all the prominent objects, I doubt not that the
result might have been a sketch of English life quite as characteristic
and worthy of historical preservation as an account of the Roman
Carnival. Having neglected to do so, I remember little more than a
confusion of unwashed and shabbily dressed people, intermixed with some
smarter figures, but, on the whole, presenting a mobbish appearance such
as we never see in our own country. It taught me to understand why
Shakespeare, in speaking of a crowd, so often alludes to its attribute
of evil odor. The common people of England, I am afraid, have no daily
familiarity with even so necessary a thing as a wash-bowl, not to
mention a bathing-tub. And, furthermore, it is one mighty difference
between them and us, that every man and woman on our side of the water
has a working-day suit and a holiday suit, and is occasionally as fresh
as a rose, whereas, in the good old country, the griminess of his labor
or squalid habits clings forever to the individual, and gets to be a
part of his personal substance. These are broad facts, involving great
corollaries and dependencies. There are really, if you stop to think
about it, few sadder spectacles in the world than a ragged coat, or a
soiled and shabby gown, at a festival.
This unfragrant crowd was exceedingly dense, being welded together, as
it were, in the street through which we strove to make our way. On
either side were oyster-stands, stalls of oranges (a very prevalent
fruit in England, where they give the withered ones a guise of freshness
by boiling them), and booths covered with old sail-cloth, in which the
commodity that most attracted the eye was gilt gingerbread. It was so
completely enveloped in Dutch gilding that I did not at first recognize
an old acquaintance, but wondered what those golden crowns and images
could be. There were likewise drums and other toys for small children,
and a variety of showy and worthless articles for children of a larger
growth; though it perplexed me to imagine who, in such a mob, could have
the innocent taste to desire playthings, or the money to pay for them.
Not that I have a right to accuse the mob, on my own knowledge, of being
any less innocent than a set of cleaner and better dressed people might
have been; for, though one of them stole my pocket-handkerchief, I could
not but consider it fair game, under the circumstances, and was grateful
to the thief for sparing me my purse. They were quiet, civil, and
remarkably good-humored, making due allowance for the national
gruffness; there was no riot, no tumultuous swaying to and fro of the
mass, such as I have often noted in an American crowd; no noise of
voices, except frequent bursts of laughter, hoarse or shrill, and a
widely diffused, inarticulate murmur, resembling nothing so much as the
rumbling of the tide among the arches of London Bridge. What immensely
perplexed me was a sharp, angry sort of rattle, in all quarters, far off
and close at hand, and sometimes right at my own back, where it sounded
as if the stout fabric of my English surtout had been ruthlessly rent in
twain; and everybody's clothes, all over the fair, were evidently being
torn asunder in the same way. By and by, I discovered that this strange
noise was produced by a little instrument called "The Fun of the
Fair,"--a sort of rattle, consisting of a wooden wheel, the cogs of
which turn against a thin slip of wood, and so produce a rasping sound
when drawn smartly against a person's back. The ladies draw their
rattles against the backs of their male friends (and everybody passes
for a friend at Greenwich Fair), and the young men return the compliment
on the broad British backs of the ladies; and all are bound by
immemorial custom to take it in good part and be merry at the joke. As
it was one of my prescribed official duties to give an account of such
mechanical contrivances as might be unknown in my own country, I have
thought it right to be thus particular in describing the Fun of the
Fair.
But this was far from being the sole amusement. There were theatrical
booths, in front of which were pictorial representations of the scenes
to be enacted within; and anon a drummer emerged from one of them,
thumping on a terribly lax drum, and followed by the entire _dramatis
personae_, who ranged themselves on a wooden platform in front of the
theatre. They were dressed in character, but wofully shabby, with very
dingy and wrinkled white tights, threadbare cotton-velvets, crumpled
silks, and crushed muslin, and all the gloss and glory gone out of their
aspect and attire, seen thus in the broad daylight and after a long
series of performances. They sang a song together, and withdrew into the
theatre, whither the public were invited to follow them at the
inconsiderable cost of a penny a ticket. Before another booth stood a
pair of brawny fighting-men, displaying their muscle, and soliciting
patronage for an exhibition of the noble British art of pugilism. There
were pictures of giants, monsters, and outlandish beasts, most
prodigious, to be sure, and worthy of all admiration, unless the artist
had gone incomparably beyond his subject. Jugglers proclaimed aloud the
miracles which they were prepared to work; and posture-makers dislocated
every joint of their bodies and tied their limbs into inextricable
knots, wherever they could find space to spread a little square of
carpet on the ground. In the midst of the confusion, while everybody was
treading on his neighbor's toes, some little boys were very solicitous
to brush your boots. These lads, I believe, are a product of modern
society,--at least, no older than the time of Gay, who celebrates their
origin in his "Trivia;" but in most other respects the scene reminded me
of Bunyan's description of Vanity Fair,--nor is it at all improbable
that the Pilgrim may have been a merry-maker here in his wild youth.
It seemed very singular--though, of course, I immediately classified it
as an English characteristic--to see a great many portable
weighing-machines, the owners of which cried out continually and amain,
"Come, know your weight! Come, come, know your weight to-day! Come, know
your weight!" and a multitude of people, mostly large in the girth, were
moved by this vociferation to sit down in the machines. I know not
whether they valued themselves on their beef, and estimated their
standing as members of society at so much a pound; but I shall set it
down as a national peculiarity, and a symbol of the prevalence of the
earthly over the spiritual element, that Englishmen are wonderfully bent
on knowing how solid and physically ponderous they are.