their visible language like music. He appeared to be exceedingly
appreciative of whatever was passing among those who surrounded him, and
especially of the vicissitudes in the consciousness of the person to
whom he happened to be addressing himself at the moment. I felt that no
effect upon my mind of what he uttered, no emotion, however transitory,
in myself, escaped his notice, though not from any positive vigilance on
his part, but because his faculty of observation was so penetrative and
delicate; and to say the truth, it a little confused me to discern
always a ripple on his mobile face, responsive to any slightest breeze
that passed over the inner reservoir of my sentiments, and seemed thence
to extend to a similar reservoir within himself. On matters of feeling,
and within a certain depth, you might spare yourself the trouble of
utterance, because he already knew what you wanted to say, and perhaps a
little more than you would have spoken. His figure was full of gentle
movement, though, somehow, without disturbing its quietude; and as he
talked, he kept folding his hands nervously, and betokened in many ways
a fine and immediate sensibility, quick to feel pleasure or pain, though
scarcely capable, I should imagine, of a passionate experience in either
direction. There was not an English trait in him from head to foot,
morally, intellectually, or physically. Beef, ale, or stout, brandy or
port-wine, entered not at all into his composition. In his earlier life,
he appears to have given evidences of courage and sturdy principle, and
of a tendency to fling himself into the rough struggle of humanity on
the liberal side. It would be taking too much upon myself to affirm that
this was merely a projection of his fancy world into the actual, and
that he never could have hit a downright blow, and was altogether an
unsuitable person to receive one. I beheld him not in his armor, but in
his peacefulest robes. Nevertheless, drawing my conclusion merely from
what I saw, it would have occurred to me that his main deficiency was a
lack of grit. Though anything but a timid man, the combative and
defensive elements were not prominently developed in his character, and
could have been made available only when he put an unnatural force upon
his instincts. It was on this account, and also because of the fineness
of his nature generally, that the English appreciated him no better, and
left this sweet and delicate poet poor, and with scanty laurels, in his
declining age.
It was not, I think, from his American blood that Leigh Hunt derived
either his amiability or his peaceful inclinations; at least, I do not
see how we can reasonably claim the former quality as a national
characteristic, though the latter might have been fairly inherited from
his ancestors on the mother's side, who were Pennsylvania Quakers. But
the kind of excellence that distinguished him--his fineness, subtilty,
and grace--was that which the richest cultivation has heretofore tended
to develop in the happier examples of American genius, and which (though
I say it a little reluctantly) is perhaps what our future intellectual
advancement may make general among us. His person, at all events, was
thoroughly American, and of the best type, as were likewise his manners;
for we are the best as well as the worst mannered people in the world.
Leigh Hunt loved dearly to be praised. That is to say, he desired
sympathy as a flower seeks sunshine, and perhaps profited by it as much
in the richer depth of coloring that it imparted to his ideas. In
response to all that we ventured to express about his writings (and, for
my part, I went quite to the extent of my conscience, which was a long
way, and there left the matter to a lady and a young girl, who happily
were with me), his face shone, and he manifested great delight, with a
perfect, and yet delicate, frankness, for which I loved him. He could
not tell us, he said, the happiness that such appreciation gave him; it
always took him by surprise, he remarked, for--perhaps because he
cleaned his own boots, and performed other little ordinary offices for
himself--he never had been conscious of anything wonderful in his own
person. And then he smiled, making himself and all the poor little
parlor about him beautiful thereby. It is usually the hardest thing in
the world to praise a man to his face; but Leigh Hunt received the
incense with such gracious satisfaction (feeling it to be sympathy, not
vulgar praise), that the only difficulty was to keep the enthusiasm of
the moment within the limit of permanent opinion. A storm had suddenly
come up while we were talking; the rain poured, the lightning flashed,
and the thunder broke; but I hope, and have great pleasure in believing,
that it was a sunny hour for Leigh Hunt. Nevertheless, it was not to my
voice that he most favorably inclined his ear, but to those of my
companions. Women are the fit ministers at such a shrine.
He must have suffered keenly in his lifetime, and enjoyed keenly,
keeping his emotions so much upon the surface as he seemed to do, and
convenient for everybody to play upon. Being of a cheerful temperament,
happiness had probably the upper-hand. His was a light, mildly joyous
nature, gentle, graceful, yet seldom attaining to that deepest grace
which results from power; for beauty, like woman, its human
representative, dallies with the gentle, but yields its consummate favor
only to the strong. I imagine that Leigh Hunt may have been more
beautiful when I met him, both in person and character, than in his
earlier days. As a young man, I could conceive of his being finical in
certain moods, but not now, when the gravity of age shed a venerable
grace about him. I rejoiced to hear him say that he was favored with
most confident and cheering anticipations in respect to a future life;
and there were abundant proofs, throughout our interview, of an
unrepining spirit, resignation, quiet relinquishment of the worldly
benefits that were denied him, thankful enjoyment of whatever he had to
enjoy, and piety, and hope shining onward into the dusk,--all of which
gave a reverential cast to the feeling with which we parted from him. I
wish that he could have had one full draught of prosperity before he
died. As a matter of artistic propriety, it would have been delightful
to see him inhabiting a beautiful house of his own, in an Italian
climate, with all sorts of elaborate upholstery and minute elegances
about him, and a succession of tender and lovely women to praise his
sweet poetry from morning to night. I hardly know whether it is my
fault, or the effect of a weakness in Leigh Hunt's character, that I
should be sensible of a regret of this nature, when, at the same time, I
sincerely believe that he has found an infinity of better things in the
world whither he has gone.
At our leave-taking he grasped me warmly by both hands, and seemed as
much interested in our whole party as if he had known us for years. All
this was genuine feeling, a quick, luxuriant growth out of his heart,
which was a soil for flower-seeds of rich and rare varieties, not
acorns, but a true heart, nevertheless. Several years afterwards I met
him for the last time at a London dinner-party, looking sadly broken
down by infirmities; and my final recollection of the beautiful old man
presents him arm in arm with, nay, if I mistake not, partly embraced and
supported by, another beloved and honored poet, whose minstrel-name,
since he has a week-day one for his personal occasions, I will venture
to speak. It was Barry Cornwall, whose kind introduction had first made
me known to Leigh Hunt.[13]
[13] Barry Cornwall, Mr. Procter, called on me a week or more ago, but I
happened not to be in the office. Saturday last he called again, and as
I had crossed to Rock Park he followed me thither. A plain,
middle-sized, English-looking gentleman, elderly, with short white hair,
and particularly quiet in his manners. He talks in a somewhat low tone
without emphasis, scarcely distinct.... His head has a good outline, and
would look well in marble. I liked him very well. He talked
unaffectedly, showing an author's regard to his reputation, and was
evidently pleased to hear of his American celebrity. He said that in his
younger days he was a scientific pugilist, and once took a journey to
have a sparring encounter with the Game-Chicken. Certainly no one would
have looked for a pugilist in this subdued old gentleman. He is now
Commissioner of Lunacy, and makes periodical circuits through the
country, attending to the business of his office. He is slightly deaf,
and this may be the cause of his unaccented utterance,--owing to his not
being able to regulate his voice exactly by his own ear.... He is a good
man, and much better expressed by his real name, Procter, than by his
poetical one, Barry Cornwall.... He took my hand in both of his at
parting....--I. 498.
XI.
OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY
Becoming an inhabitant of a great English town, I often turned aside
from the prosperous thoroughfares (where the edifices, the shops, and
the bustling crowd differed not so much from scenes with which I was
familiar in my own country), and went designedly astray among precincts
that reminded me of some of Dickens's grimiest pages. There I caught
glimpses of a people and a mode of life that were comparatively new to
my observation, a sort of sombre phantasmagoric spectacle, exceedingly
undelightful to behold, yet involving a singular interest and even
fascination in its ugliness.
Dirt, one would fancy, is plenty enough all over the world, being the
symbolic accompaniment of the foul incrustation which began to settle
over and bedim all earthly things as soon as Eve had bitten the apple;
ever since which hapless epoch, her daughters have chiefly been engaged
in a desperate and unavailing struggle to get rid of it. But the dirt of
a poverty-stricken English street is a monstrosity unknown on our side
of the Atlantic. It reigns supreme within its own limits, and is
inconceivable everywhere beyond them. We enjoy the great advantage, that
the brightness and dryness of our atmosphere keep everything clean that
the sun shines upon, converting the larger portion of our impurities
into transitory dust which the next wind can sweep away, in contrast
with the damp, adhesive grime that incorporates itself with all surfaces
(unless continually and painfully cleansed) in the chill moisture of the
English air. Then the all-pervading smoke of the city, abundantly
intermingled with the sable snow-flakes of bituminous coal, hovering
overhead, descending, and alighting on pavements and rich architectural
fronts, on the snowy muslin of the ladies, and the gentlemen's starched
collars and shirt-bosoms, invests even the better streets in a
half-mourning garb. It is beyond the resources of Wealth to keep the
smut away from its premises or its own fingers' ends; and as for
Poverty, it surrenders itself to the dark influence without a struggle.
Along with disastrous circumstances, pinching need, adversity so
lengthened out as to constitute the rule of life, there comes a certain
chill depression of the spirits which seems especially to shudder at
cold water. In view of so wretched a state of things, we accept the
ancient Deluge not merely as an insulated phenomenon, but as a
periodical necessity, and acknowledge that nothing less than such a
general washing-day could suffice to cleanse the slovenly old world of
its moral and material dirt.
Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are numerous in the
vicinity of these poor streets, and are set off with the magnificence of
gilded door-posts, tarnished by contact with the unclean customers who
haunt there. Ragged children come thither with old shaving-mugs, or
broken-nosed teapots, or any such make-shift receptacle, to get a little
poison or madness for their parents, who deserve no better requital at
their hands for having engendered them. Inconceivably sluttish women
enter at noonday and stand at the counter among boon-companions of both
sexes, stirring up misery and jollity in a bumper together, and quaffing
off the mixture with a relish. As for the men, they lounge there
continually, drinking till they are drunken,--drinking as long as they
have a halfpenny left,--and then, as it seemed to me, waiting for a
sixpenny miracle to be wrought in their pockets so as to enable them to
be drunken again. Most of these establishments have a significant
advertisement of "Beds," doubtless for the accommodation of their
customers in the interval between one intoxication and the next. I never
could find it in my heart, however, utterly to condemn these sad
revelers, and should certainly wait till I had some better consolation
to offer before depriving them of their dram of gin, though death itself
were in the glass; for methought their poor souls needed such fiery
stimulant to lift them a little way out of the smothering squalor of
both their outward and interior life, giving them glimpses and
suggestions, even if bewildering ones, of a spiritual existence that
limited their present misery. The temperance-reformers unquestionably
derive their commission from the Divine Beneficence, but have never been
taken fully into its counsels. All may not be lost, though those good
men fail.
Pawnbrokers' establishments--distinguished by the mystic symbol of the
three golden balls,--were conveniently accessible; though what personal
property these wretched people could possess, capable of being estimated
in silver or copper, so as to afford a basis for a loan, was a problem
that still perplexes me. Old clothesmen, likewise, dwelt hard by, and
hung out ancient garments to dangle in the wind. There were butchers'
shops, too, of a class adapted to the neighborhood, presenting no such
generously fattened carcasses as Englishmen love to gaze at in the
market, no stupendous halves of mighty beeves, no dead hogs, or muttons
ornamented with carved bas-reliefs of fat on their ribs and shoulders,
in a peculiarly British style of art,--not these, but bits and gobbets
of lean meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and stringy morsels,
bare bones smitten away from joints by the cleaver; tripe, liver,
bullocks' feet, or whatever else was cheapest and divisible into the
smallest lots. I am afraid that even such delicacies came to many of
their tables hardly oftener than Christmas. In the windows of other
little shops you saw half a dozen wizened herrings; some eggs in a
basket, looking so dingily antique that your imagination smelt them;
fly-speckled biscuits, segments of a hungry cheese, pipes and papers of
tobacco. Now and then a sturdy milk-woman passed by with a wooden yoke
over her shoulders, supporting a pail on either side, filled with a
whitish fluid, the composition of which was water and chalk and the milk
of a sickly cow, who gave the best she had, poor thing! but could
scarcely make it rich or wholesome, spending her life in some close
city-nook and pasturing on strange food. I have seen, once or twice, a
donkey coming into one of these streets with panniers full of
vegetables, and departing with a return cargo of what looked like
rubbish and street-sweepings. No other commerce seemed to exist, except,
possibly, a girl might offer you a pair of stockings or a worked collar,
or a man whisper something mysterious about wonderfully cheap cigars.
And yet I remember seeing female hucksters in those regions, with their
wares on the edge of the sidewalk and their own seats right in the
carriage-way, pretending to sell half-decayed oranges and apples, toffy,
Ormskirk cakes, combs, and cheap jewelry, the coarsest kind of crockery,
and little plates of oysters,--knitting patiently all day long, and
removing their undiminished stock in trade at nightfall. All
indispensable importations from other quarters of the town were on a
remarkably diminutive scale: for example, the wealthier inhabitants
purchased their coal by the wheelbarrow-load, and the poorer ones by the
peck-measure. It was a curious and melancholy spectacle, when an
overladen coal-cart happened to pass through the street and drop a
handful or two of its burden in the mud, to see half a dozen women and
children scrambling for the treasure-trove, like a flock of hens and
chickens gobbling up some spilt corn. In this connection I may as well
mention a commodity of boiled snails (for such they appeared to me,
though probably a marine production) which used to be peddled from door
to door, piping hot, as an article of cheap nutriment.
The population of these dismal abodes appeared to consider the sidewalks
and middle of the street as their common hall. In a drama of low life,
the unity of place might be arranged rigidly according to the classic
rule, and the street be the one locality in which every scene and
incident should occur. Courtship, quarrels, plot and counterplot,
conspiracies for robbery and murder, family difficulties or
agreements,--all such matters, I doubt not, are constantly discussed or
transacted in this sky-roofed saloon, so regally hung with its sombre
canopy of coal-smoke. Whatever the disadvantages of the English climate,
the only comfortable or wholesome part of life, for the city poor, must
be spent in the open air. The stifled and squalid rooms where they lie
down at night, whole families and neighborhoods together, or sulkily
elbow one another in the daytime, when a settled rain drives them within
doors, are worse horrors than it is worth while (without a practical
object in view) to admit into one's imagination. No wonder that they
creep forth from the foul mystery of their interiors, stumble down from
their garrets, or scramble up out of their cellars, on the upper step of
which you may see the grimy housewife, before the shower is ended,
letting the raindrops gutter down her visage; while her children (an
impish progeny of cavernous recesses below the common sphere of
humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that they know of
personal purification in the nearest mud-puddle. It might almost make a
man doubt the existence of his own soul, to observe how Nature has
flung these little wretches into the street and left them there, so
evidently regarding them as nothing worth, and how all mankind acquiesce
in the great mother's estimate of her offspring. For, if they are to
have no immortality, what superior claim can I assert for mine? And how
difficult to believe that anything so precious as a germ of immortal
growth can have been buried under this dirt-heap, plunged into this
cesspool of misery and vice! As often as I beheld the scene, it affected
me with surprise and loathsome interest, much resembling, though in a
far intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a boy, I used to turn
over a plank or an old log that had long lain on the damp ground, and
found a vivacious multitude of unclean and devilish-looking insects
scampering to and fro beneath it. Without an infinite faith, there
seemed as much prospect of a blessed futurity for those hideous bugs and
many-footed worms as for these brethren of our humanity and co-heirs of
all our heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a mystery! Slowly, slowly, as
after groping at the bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope
struggles upward to the surface, bearing the half-drowned body of a
child along with it, and heaving it aloft for its life, and my own life,
and all our lives. Unless these slime-clogged nostrils can be made
capable of inhaling celestial air, I know not how the purest and most
intellectual of us can reasonably expect ever to taste a breath of it.
The whole question of eternity is staked there. If a single one of those
helpless little ones be lost, the world is lost!
The women and children greatly preponderate in such places; the men
probably wandering abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner and a
drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better
follow out their cat-like rambles through the dark. Here are women with
young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, tanned and blear-eyed
with the smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,--it
being too precious for its warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some
of them sit on the doorsteps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms
which we will glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all
womanhood, because the fairest spectacle is here the foulest. Yet
motherhood, in these dark abodes, is strangely identical with what we
have all known it to be in the happiest homes. Nothing, as I remember,
smote me with more grief and pity (all the more poignant because
perplexingly entangled with an inclination to smile) than to hear a
gaunt and ragged mother priding herself on the pretty ways of her ragged
and skinny infant, just as a young matron might, when she invites her
lady friends to admire her plump, white-robed darling in the nursery.
Indeed, no womanly characteristic seemed to have altogether perished out
of these poor souls. It was the very same creature whose tender torments
make the rapture of our young days, whom we love, cherish, and protect,
and rely upon in life and death, and whom we delight to see beautify her
beauty with rich robes and set it off with jewels, though now
fantastically masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit for her to
handle. I recognized her, over and over again, in the groups round a
doorstep or in the descent of a cellar, chatting with prodigious
earnestness about intangible trifles, laughing for a little jest,
sympathizing at almost the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and
another's shadow; wise, simple, sly, and patient, yet easily perturbed,
and breaking into small feminine ebullitions of spite, wrath, and
jealousy, tornadoes of a moment, such as vary the social atmosphere of
her silken-skirted sisters, though smothered into propriety by dint of a
well-bred habit. Not that there was an absolute deficiency of
good-breeding, even here. It often surprised me to witness a courtesy
and deference among these ragged folks, which, having seen it, I did not
thoroughly believe in, wondering whence it should have come. I am
persuaded, however, that there were laws of intercourse which they never
violated,--a code of the cellar, the garret, the common staircase, the
doorstep, and the pavement, which, perhaps, had as deep a foundation in
natural fitness as the code of the drawing-room.
Yet again I doubt whether I may not have been uttering folly in the last
two sentences, when I reflect how rude and rough these specimens of
feminine character generally were. They had a readiness with their hands
that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines in Fielding's
novels. For example, I have seen a woman meet a man in the street, and,
for no reason perceptible to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and
cuff his ears,--an infliction which he bore with exemplary patience,
only snatching the very earliest opportunity to take to his heels. Where
a sharp tongue will not serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness
of their finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocabulary of vituperative
words in a resounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist. All
English people, I imagine, are influenced in a far greater degree than
ourselves by this simple and honest tendency, in cases of disagreement,
to batter one another's persons; and whoever has seen a crowd of English
ladies (for instance, at the door of the Sistine Chapel, in Holy Week)
will be satisfied that their belligerent propensities are kept in
abeyance only by a merciless rigor on the part of society. It requires a
vast deal of refinement to spiritualize their large physical endowments.
Such being the case with the delicate ornaments of the drawing-room, it
is less to be wondered at that women who live mostly in the open air,
amid the coarsest kind of companionship and occupation, should carry on
the intercourse of life with a freedom unknown to any class of American
females, though still, I am resolved to think, compatible with a
generous breadth of natural propriety. It shocked me, at first, to see
them (of all ages, even elderly, as well as infants that could just
toddle across the street alone) going about in the mud and mire, or
through the dusky snow and slosh of a severe week in winter, with
petticoats high uplifted above bare, red feet and legs; but I was
comforted by observing that both shoes and stockings generally
reappeared with better weather, having been thriftily kept out of the
damp for the convenience of dry feet within doors. Their hardihood was
wonderful, and their strength greater than could have been expected from
such spare diet as they probably lived upon. I have seen them carrying
on their heads great burdens under which they walked as freely as if
they were fashionable bonnets; or sometimes the burden was huge enough
almost to cover the whole person, looked at from behind,--as in Tuscan
villages you may see the girls coming in from the country with great
bundles of green twigs upon their backs, so that they resemble
locomotive masses of verdure and fragrance. But these poor English women
seemed to be laden with rubbish, incongruous and indescribable, such as
bones and rags, the sweepings of the house and of the street, a
merchandise gathered up from what poverty itself had thrown away, a heap
of filthy stuff analogous to Christian's bundle of sin.