Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--
Varieties of equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming
peril--Being dragged to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and
hopelessness of destitution--Villages rooted in the
landscape--Evanescence of the spiritual and survival of the
material--"Of Bebbington the holy peak"--The Old Yew of
Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and afternoon
tea--An East-Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in
the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to
Longfellow--Real breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-
pugilist--Clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry--A respectable female
atheist--The tragedy of the red ants--Voluptuous struggles--
A psalm of praise.
In a country whose ruling principle is caste, it might be expected that
the line of cleavage between the upper and the lower grades would be
punctually observed. It is assumed that democracy levels and aristocracy
distinguishes and separates. My father was not long in remarking,
however, that there was a freedom of intercourse between the patrician
and the plebeian--between people of all orders--such as did not exist in
America. And the fact, once perceived, was not difficult of explanation.
In a monarchy of a thousand years' standing, every individual knows his
place in the social scale and never thinks of leaving it. He represents
a fixed function or element in the general organism, and holds to it as
a matter of course, just as, in the human body, the body does not aspire
to be the head, nor the liver or heart to take the place of lungs
or stomach. The laborer looks back upon an ancestry of laborers; the
shopkeeper has been a shopkeeper for unnumbered generations; the artisan
on the bench to-day does the same work that his father and grandfathers
did before him; the noble inherits his acres as inevitably as the sun
rises, and sits in the House of Lords by immemorial usage and privilege.
Social position all along the line being thus anchored in the nature
of things, as it were, there is no anxiety on any one's part as to
maintaining his status. He is secure where he is, and nothing and nobody
can change him. There is no individual striving to rise nor fear to
fall. Consequently there can and must be entire freedom of mutual
conversation; the marquis with a revenue of half a million a year meets
as an equal his gardener who gets ten pounds a month, and the tailor
in his measuring-room offers a glass of sherry to his noble patron who
comes to him for a new coat. Each is at his ease, conscious that he
performs a use and fills a place which no one else can fill or perform,
and that nothing else matters. The population is a vast mutual-benefit
association, without envy on the one side or contempt on the other. And
social existence moves as smoothly as a well-oiled and adjusted machine.
This agreeable condition is impossible in a democracy--at all events, in
a democracy like ours, which is based upon the assumption that all men
are equal. Nevertheless, we are on the right track, and the English
are on the wrong one; for the agreeable English system obstructs the
insensible infiltration of fresh material into old forms, which is
essential to the continued health of the latter; while the democracy,
on the other hand, will gradually learn that it is just as honorable and
desirable to be a good shoemaker, for example, as a good millionaire;
that human life, in short, is a complex of countless different uses,
each one of which is as important on its own plane as any of the others.
But the intermediate period is undeniably irksome.
So my father noticed, not without a certain satisfaction, that even
beggars, in England, are not looked down upon, and that their rights,
such as they are, are recognized. In the steamboat waiting-room at Rock
Ferry, and in the boats themselves, he saw tramps and mendicants take
the best place at the fire or on the companion-way without rebuke and
without consciousness of presumption, and he saw the landlord of a
hotel, with a fortune of six hundred thousand pounds, wait at table
as deferentially as any footman in his employ. He was struck by the
contentment with which, in winter, women went barefoot in the streets,
and by the unpretentious composure with which the common herd, on
holidays, disported themselves in public, not seeking to disguise their
native vulgarity and shabbiness. At the same time, he could not help
a misgiving that the portentous inequality between rich and poor must
finally breed disaster; the secluded luxury of the rich was too strongly
contrasted with the desperate needs of the poor. This contrast was very
marked in England fifty years ago, and was comparatively unknown in our
own country--though to-day we can hardly lay to our souls the nattering
unction of such a difference. The rage for wealth has done for us in a
generation what caste did for England in a thousand years.
My father, when opportunity offered, was always finding himself among
the poor and their dwellings; he had to be dragged to the rich, though
among them, too, he found, when brought in contact with them, many
interesting points of dissimilarity from ourselves. His office as consul
naturally took him often to the police courts, where magistrates passed
upon the squalid cases cited before them, and in the consulate itself
he saw specimens enough of human crime and misery. He visited the
poor-house and the insane asylum, he was approached by swindlers of all
types, and often he went to fairs and other resorts of public out-door
amusement and watched the unwashed populace at its play. Beggars
followed him on the streets, awaited him in their chosen coigns of
vantage on the corners, or haunted him on the ferry-boat that took
him each day from his home to his office. Wherever he encountered
the forsaken of fortune, he found food for sympathy, and, in spite of
assurances that he was only encouraging mendicancy, he often gave them
money. It was hard for him to believe that there could be abject poverty
where there was work for all, and the appeal of man in want to man in
plenty was too strong for him easily to resist it. He liked the very
frankness of vulgarity and hopeless destitution of these people, and was
appalled by the simplicity with which they accepted things as they were.
There was no restlessness, as in America--no protest against fate. It
was harrowing enough to see conditions so miserable; it was intolerable
to see them acquiesced in by the victims as inevitable. He learned,
after a while, to harden himself somewhat against manifest imposition;
but the refusal to give cost him quite as much in discomfort as giving
did in purse.
The country villages and cottages, however, afforded him compensating
pleasure. In the neighborhood of Rock Ferry, on the shore of the
Mersey opposite from Liverpool, there were two or three ancient little
settlements which he loved to visit. The thatched and whitewashed
cottages, with their tiny gardens of hollyhocks and marigolds, seemed
like parts of the framework of the land; the passage of centuries only
served to weld them more firmly in their places. The villages were
massed together, each in a small space, instead of being dispread
loosely over a township, as in his native New England, and enduring
stone and plaster took the place of timber and shingles. But the
churches, small and fabulously ancient, affected him most. He placed his
hand on stones which had been set in place before William the Conqueror
landed in England, and this physical survival seemed to bring into his
actual presence the long succession of all the intervening ages. These
structures, still so solid and serviceable, had witnessed the passing of
the entire procession of English history; all the mighty men and events
of her career had come and gone while they remained unscathed. Under his
feet were the graves of the unknown dead; within the narrow precincts he
inhaled that strange, antique odor of mortality that made him feel as
if he were breathing the air of long-dead centuries. This apparent
evanescence of the spiritual attested by the survival of the material is
one of the most singular and impressive of sensations; it takes history
out of the realm of the mind, and brings it into sensible manifestation.
It is almost as affecting as if the very figures of departed actors of
former ages were to reappear and rub shoulders with us of today, and
cast their shadows in the contemporary sunshine.
On most of these walks in the neighborhood of Rock Ferry I was my
father's companion, but, though my legs could march beside his, my
mental-equipment could not participate in his meditations. He would
occasionally make some half-playful, imaginative remark, calculated to
help me realize the situation that was so vividly present to himself.
His thoughts, however deep, were always ready to break into playfulness
outwardly. We often walked through the village of Bebbington, whose
church had a high stone steeple, nearly to the summit of which the
ancient ivy had clambered. And as it came in view he would always say,
in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of Scott's narrative poems,
which he was at that time reading aloud to us, "There is of Bebbington
the holy peak!" To which I would as constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington
the holy spire,' father!"--being offended by his use of a word so
unmusical as peak. He would only smile and trudge onward. He was
somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to check in his son any tendency towards
mere poetical sentiment; his own imaginative faculty was rooted in
common-sense, and he knew the value of the latter in curbing undue
excursions into the fanciful and transcendental.
In Eastham, on the village green, stood an old yew-tree which, six
centuries before, had been traditionally called The Old Yew of Eastham,
and was probably at least coeval with the village itself, which was one
of the oldest in England. It was of enormous girth, and was still in
leaf; but nothing but the bark was left of the great trunk; all the wood
had decayed away so long ago that the memory of man held no record of
it. There was a great conical gap in one side, like an open door, and it
was my custom--as it had doubtless been that of innumerable children of
ages gone--to enter this door and "play house" in the spacious interior.
Meanwhile my father would seat himself on the twisted roots without, and
let his thoughts drift back to the time when this huge hulk had first
cast a slender shadow over the greensward of primitive, Saxon England.
It was a massive tree before the Domesday Book was begun; Chaucer
would not be heard of for four hundred years to come; and where was
Shakespeare? What was suspected of America? Yet here was this venerable
vegetable, still with life enough left in it, perhaps, to see the end of
English monarchy. The yew was a fact; but the ghosts were the reality,
after all.
These obscure village antiquities, which had no special history
attaching to them, were in a way more impressive than the great ruins of
England, which had formed the scene and background of famous events. The
latter had become conventional sights, which the tourist felt bound to
inspect under the voluble and exasperating guidance of a professional
showman; and this malice-prepense sort of interest and picturesqueness
always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a little. It is the
unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes home closest to the
heart. The things told of in history books are hackneyed, and they
partake of the unreality inherent in the descriptions of the writers.
But the unrecorded things are virgin, and enter into our most private
sympathies and realization. My father viewed and duly admired the
great castles, palaces, and cathedrals of England; but he loved the old
villages and their appurtenances, and could dream dreams more moving
under the shadow of Eastham Yew than in Westminster Abbey itself.
The historic houses and country-seats which were still inhabited were
still more difficult to get in touch with from the historic point of
view; the present dazzled the past out of sight. One was told who built
this facade, who added that wing, who was imprisoned in yonder tower;
where Queen Elizabeth slept, and the foot of what martyr imprinted the
Bloody Footstep on the threshold.
But you listened to these tales over a cup of tea in the drawing-room,
or between the soup and the roast beef at the dinner-table, and
they were not convincing. How were these ruddy-cheeked, full-bodied,
hospitable personages who sat about you to be held compatible with the
romantic periods and characters that they described? The duck and the
green pease, the plum-pudding and the port, the white neck-cloths and
the bare necks were too immediate and potent. In many cases, too,
the denizens of the ancient houses were not lineal descendants of the
original founders; they were interlopers, by purchase or otherwise. In
themselves they were kind and agreeable, their manners were excellent,
they helped one to comprehend the England of the passing moment; but
they only clipped the wings of imagination and retrospect. It was
only after an interval of some years that Hawthorne was able so far to
recover from the effect of their obtrusive existence as to be able to
see through them and beyond them to the splendid and gloomy vistas in
front of which they were grouped.
Yet England, past and present, rich and poor, real and ideal, did
somehow enter into him and become a part of his permanent consciousness,
and he liked it better than anything else he had known. Even the social
life, though he came to it under some compulsion, rewarded him in the
long run. One of the first personal invitations was to the country-seat
of the Brights, where he met the family and relatives of his friend
Henry Bright. Bright's father was a remarkable figure; he resembled an
East-Indian more than an Englishman. He was dark, slender, courteous,
and vivid; in long after-years I saw Brahmins like him in India. I would
liken him to a rajah, except that rajahs of his age are commonly become
gross and heavy from indulgence, whereas he had an almost ascetic
aspect. His manners were singularly soft and caressing; he courted his
wife, when he returned each day from business, as if they were still
in their honeymoon, and his conduct towards all who surrounded him was
similarly polished. He did not in the least resemble his Saxon son; and
for my part, looking at him from the primitive boy stand-point, I never
suspected that he was related to my father's young friend. He had made a
fortune in colonial trade, and may possibly have been born in India. At
this juncture the dealings of his firm were chiefly with Australia, and
the largest merchant steamship then in the world had just been built for
them, and Hawthorne was invited to the launching. For a British merchant
prince such an occasion could not but be of supreme importance and
pride. Mr. Bright's Oriental visage was radiant; his white hair seemed
to shine with an added lustre; the reserve of the Englishman was
forgotten, and he showed the excitement and emotion that he felt. There
was a distinguished company on the great deck to witness his triumph
and congratulate him upon it. All went well; at the appointed signal the
retaining obstructions were cut away, and the mighty vessel began its
descent into the waiting river. A lady of his family smashed a bottle
of wine over the graceful bows. For a few moments there was a majestic,
sweeping movement downward; then, of a sudden, it was checked. It was
as if a great life had been quenched at the instant when its heart first
began to throb. A murmur of dismay ran through the assemblage; but it
was in the face of Mr. Bright that the full tragedy of the disaster was
displayed. Never was seen a swifter change from the highest exultation
to the depths of consternation. The color left his cheeks; heavy lines
appeared about his handsome mouth; his eyes became fixed, and seemed to
sink into his head; his erect figure drooped like that of one who has
received a mortal blow. It was only that the ship had stuck in the deep
mud of the river bottom; but all ship-owners are superstitious, and the
old man foreboded the worst. The ship was floated again some days later;
but the omens were fulfilled; she was lost on her first voyage. I do not
remember seeing Mr. Bright after this event, but I know he never again
was the same man as before.
Richard Monckton Milnes, who was afterwards Lord Houghton, was greatly
attracted towards my father, who liked him; but circumstances prevented
their seeing much of each other. Milnes was then forty-five years old;
he was a Cambridge man, and intimate with Tennyson, Hallam, and other
men of literary mark, and he was himself a minor poet, and warm in the
cause of literature. During his parliamentary career, in 1837, he was
instrumental in passing the copyright act. He had travelled in Greece
and Italy in his twenties; was fond of society, and society of him. A
more urbane and attractive English gentleman did not exist; everything
that a civilized man could care for was at his disposal, and he made the
most of his opportunities. His manners were quiet and cordial, with a
touch of romance and poetry mingling with the man-of-the-world tone in
his conversation, and he was quite an emotional man. I have more than
once seen tears in his eyes and heard a sob in his voice when matters
that touched his heart or imagination were discussed. There was, indeed,
a vein of sadness and pessimism in Milnes, though only his intimates
were aware of it; it was the pessimism of a man who has too much leisure
for intellectual analysis and not enough actual work to do to keep him
occupied. It lent a fine flavor of irony to some of his conversation.
He was liberal in politics and liberal in his attitude towards life in
general; but there was not force enough in him, or, at any rate, not
stimulus enough, to lift him to distinction. Some of his poems, however,
betrayed a deep and radical vein of thought. He was of middle height,
well made, light built, with a large and well-formed head and wavy, dark
hair. His likeness to Longfellow was marked, though he was hardly so
handsome a man; but the type of head and face was the same--the forehead
and brain well developed, the lower parts of the countenance small and
refined, though sensuous. His eyes were dark, brilliant, and expressive.
He, like the old poet Rogers, made a feature of giving breakfasts to
chosen friends, and as he had the whole social world to choose from,
and unfailing good taste, his breakfasts were well worth attending. They
were real breakfasts--so far as the hour was concerned--not lunches or
early dinners in masquerade; but wine was served at them, and Milnes
was very hospitable and had an Anacreontic or Omar touch in him.
To breakfast with him, therefore, meant--unless you were singularly
abstemious and strong-minded--to discount the remaining meals of the
day. But the amount of good cheer that an Englishman can carry and seem
not obscured by it surprises an American. A bottle or so of hock of a
morning will make most Americans feel that business, for the rest of
that day, is an iridescent dream; but an Englishman does not seem to be
burdened by it--at any rate, he did not fifty years ago.
[IMAGE: RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES]
Another hearty companion was Bryan Waller Procter, who, for literary
uses, anagrammed his name into Barry Cornwall, and made it famous, fifty
years ago, as that of the best song-writer in contemporary England. But
he had made a literary reputation before the epoch of his songs; there
were four or five dramatic and narrative poems to his credit published
during the first quarter of the last century. Procter was, indeed,
already a veteran in 1854, having been born in 1787, and bred to the
bar, to which he was admitted in 1831. But he spent the active thirty
years of his life in the discharge of that function which seems often
sought by respectable Englishmen-commissioner of lunacy. He sent my
father a small volume containing the Songs, and some fragments; they
fully deserved their reputation. The fragments were mostly scraps of
dramatic dialogue, of which one at least sticks in my memory:
"She was a princess; but she fell; and now Her shame goes blushing down
a line of kings."
As I recollect him, he may have looked like a commissioner of lunacy,
but he did not look like a poet; he was rather undersized, with a
compact head and a solemn face, and the quietest, most unobtrusive
bearing imaginable. He was a well-made little man, and he lived to a
great age, dying some time in the seventies, at the age of eighty-seven.
He told my father that after leaving Harrow School he was distinguished
in athletics, and for a time sparred in public with some professional
bruiser. He had been a school-mate of Byron and Sir Robert Peel, and had
known Lamb, Kean, and the other lights of that generation. He was a most
likeable and remunerative companion. His wife, who survived him (living,
I think, to be over ninety), was a woman of intellect and charm, and she
retained her attractiveness to the end of her life. There are poets who
are consumed early by their own fires, and others who are gently warmed
by them beyond the common span of human existence, and Barry Cornwall
was one of these, and transmitted his faculty, through sympathetic
affection, to his wife.
Of renown not less than the song-writer's was the metaphysical
theologian, James Martineau, then in the Liverpool epoch of his career.
He was a clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry character, with a somewhat
Emersonian cast of countenance, but with the Emersonian humanity and
humility left out. Like Emerson, he had ascended a Unitarian pulpit,
but, unlike Emerson, he stayed there long after what he was pleased to
regard as his convictions had ceased to possess even a Unitarian degree
of religious quality. He was always apostolic in his manner, and his
utterances were ex cathedra, and yet his whole long life was a story
of changing views on the subjects he had chosen to be the theme of his
career.
He was the great opponent of orthodoxy in his day, yet he led his
followers to no goal more explicit than might be surmised from a study
of Kant and Hegel. He was, however, sincere in his devotion to
the will-o'-the-wisp that he conceived to be the truth, and he was
courageous enough to admit that he never satisfied himself. There was
chilly and austere attraction about the man; he was so elevated
and superior that one could hardly help believing that he must know
something of value, and this illusion was the easier because he did know
so much in the way of scholarly learning. My father felt respect for
his character, but was bored by his metaphysics--a form of intellectual
athletics which he had exhausted while still a young man. James's sister
Harriet was also of the company. She was so deaf as to be obliged to use
an ear-trumpet, and she was as positive in her views (which had become
avowedly atheistic) as her brother, and whenever any one began to
utter anything with which she disagreed, she silenced him by the simple
expedient of dropping the ear-trumpet. In herself, she was an agreeable
old lady; but she seldom let her opinions rest long enough for one to
get at her on the merely human side, and she cultivated a retired life,
partly on account of her deafness, partly because her opinions made
society shy of her, and partly because she did not think society worth
her time and attention. She was a good woman, with a mind of exceptional
caliber, but the world admired more than it desired her.
As a relief from the consideration of these exalted personages, I am
disposed to relate a tragic anecdote about our friend Henry Bright.
Early in our Rock Ferry residence he came to dine with us--or I rather
think it was to supper. At any rate, it was an informal occasion, and
the children were admitted to table. My mother had in the cupboard a jar
of excellent raspberry jam, and she brought it forth for the delectation
of our guest. He partook of it liberally, and said he had never eaten
any jam so good; it had a particular tang to it, he declared, which
outdid his best recollections of all previous raspberry jam from his
boyhood up. While he was in the midst of these rhapsodies, and still
consuming their subject with enthusiasm, my mother, who had taken some
of the jam on her own plate, suddenly made a ghastly discovery. The
jam-pot had been for several days standing in the cupboard with its top
off, or ajar, and an innumerable colony of almost microscopic red ants
had discovered it, and launched themselves fervently upon it and into
it; it had held them fast in its sweet but fatal embrace, and other
myriads had followed their fellows into the same delicious and
destructive abyss. What the precise color of the ants may have been
before they became incorporate with the jam is not known; but as the
case was, they could be distinguished from it only by their voluptuous
struggles in its controlling stickiness. Only the keenest eye could
discern them, and the eyes of Henry Bright were among the most
near-sighted in England. Besides, according to his custom, he was
talking with the utmost volubility all the time.
What was to be done? My father and mother stealthily exchanged an awful
look, and the question was settled. It was too late to recall the
ants which our friend had devoured by tens of thousands. It seemed not
probable that, were he kept in ignorance of his predicament, they
would do him any serious bodily injury; whereas, were he enlightened,
imagination might get in her fatal work. Accordingly, a rigorous silence
upon the subject was maintained, and the dear innocent actually devoured
nearly that whole potful of red ants, accompanying the meal with a
continual psalm of praise of their exquisite flavor; and never till the
day of his death did he suspect what the secret of that flavor was. I
believe the Chinese eat ants and regard them as a luxury. Very likely
they are right; but at that period of my boyhood I had not heard of
this, and then and often afterwards did I meditate with misgivings upon
the predicament of Henry Bright's stomach after his banquet.