Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--
The average man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--
Shielded by rose-leaves of culture and refinement--The
English middle class--Prejudice, complacency, and Burke's
Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or Browning--Satisfaction
in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp, winding,
verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of
individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff-dwelling--"The
Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgiliance--A division in
the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and
card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry--
Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the
cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr.
Squarey and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of
jolly.
That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality than
any other with which we became conversant while in England. With the
exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only experience
vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time we lived in
lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The boarding-houses of England
are like other boarding-houses; the hotels, or inns, in the middle of
the last century, were for the most part plain and homely compared with
what we have latterly been used to; but the English lodging-house system
had peculiarities. You enjoyed independence, but you paid for it with
inconveniences. The owner of the house furnished you with nothing except
the house, with its dingy beds, chairs, tables, and carpets. Everything
else necessary to existence you got for yourself. You made your own
contracts with butcher, baker, and grocer. You did your own firing and
lighting. Your sole conversation with the owner was over the weekly bill
for the rooms. You might cater to yourself to the tune of the prince or
of the pauper, as your means or your inclination suggested, but you
must do it upon the background of the same dingy rooms. Dingy or not so
dingy, the rooms, of course, never fitted you; they were a Procrustes
bed, always incompatible, in one way or in another, with the proportions
which nature had bestowed upon you. You wondered, in your misanthropic
moments, whether there ever was or could be any one whom English
lodgings would exactly fit. Probably they were designed for the average
man, a person, as we all know, who exists only in the imagination of
statisticians. And if the environment shows the man, one cannot help
rejoicing that there is so little likelihood of one's forming the
average man's acquaintance.
There was nothing peculiar about rented houses in England beyond the
innate peculiarities attaching to them as English. If the house were
unfurnished, and you had leisure to pick and choose, you might suit
yourself tolerably well, always with the proviso that things English
could be suitable to the foreigner. And certainly, in the 1850's, the
English commanded living conditions more desirable, on the whole, than
Americans did. They understood comfort, as distinct from luxury--a pitch
of civilization to which we are even now but just attaining. There
was not then, and until the millennium there will probably never be,
anything else in the world which so ministered to physical ease and
general satisfaction as did the conditions of life among the English
upper classes. Kublai Khan, in Xanadu, never devised a pleasure-dome so
alluring to mere human nature-especially the English variety of it--as
was afforded by an English nobleman's country-seat. Tennyson's Palace
of Art is very good in poetry, but in real life the most imaginative and
energetic real-estate dealer could not have got so good a price for it
as would gladly have been paid for the dwelling of, for example,
the Duke of Westminster. "How many gardeners have you got?" asked an
American Minister of the duke of the period, after meeting a fresh
gardener, during a long afternoon stroll through the grounds, at each
new turn of the path. "Oh, I don't know--I fancy about forty," replied
the duke, somewhat taken aback by this demand for precise information
concerning the facts of his own establishment, which, until that moment,
he probably supposed had been attended to by Providence. And really,
the machinery of life in such a place is so hidden, it is so nearly
automatic, that one might easily believe it to be operated according to
some law of nature. The servants are (or were) so well trained, they did
their jobs so well, that you were conscious only of their being done;
you never saw them a-doing. The thought happened to cross your mind, of
a morning, that you would like to take a drive at eleven o'clock; you
were not aware that you had mentioned the matter; but at eleven o'clock
the carriage was, somehow, at the door. At dinner, the dishes appeared
and disappeared, the courses succeeded one another, invisibly, or as if
by mere fiat of the will; you must be very wide-awake to catch a footman
or butler meddling with the matter. You went up to the bedroom to change
your dress; you came down with it changed; but only by an effort could
you recall the fact that a viewless but supremely efficient valet had
been concerned in the transaction. The coal fire in the grate needed
poking; you glanced away for a moment; when you looked at the fire again
it had been poked--had, to all appearance, poked itself. And so in all
relations; to desire was to get; to picture a condition was to realize
it. You were shielded on every side by rose-leaves of culture and
refinement; all you had to do was to allow your mind to lapse from
one conception to another, and then, lifting your languorous eyelids,
behold! there you were--as Mr. James would say.
But I set out to tell not of noblemen's country-seats, but of Rock
Park. Rock Park was one of the typical abodes of the English respectable
middle-class, and the English middle-class, respectable, or not
altogether respectable, is the substance of England. Not until you have
felt and smelt and tasted that do you know what England really is.
Fifty years ago, the people in question were dull, ignorant, material,
selfish, prejudiced, conventional; they were hospitable, on conventional
lines; they were affable and even social, so long as you did not awaken
their prejudices; they were confidential and communicative, if you
conceded at the outset that England was the best of all countries and
the English the leading nation of the world. They read a newspaper
resembling in every particular themselves; usually several of them
united in a subscription to a single copy, which passed solemnly from
hand to hand. They were slow and methodical, never taking short-cuts
across lots; but they were punctual; they knew their own business and
business associates, their circle of relatives, their dwelling and
social place, and Burke's Peerage; but they knew nothing else. In a
group of intelligent persons of this degree, question was raised, once
upon a time, of two English poets; but not one of the group had heard
of either; the poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. This may
seem merely absurd or apocryphal; but consider the terrible power of
concentration which it implies! And consider the effect which the impact
against such a clay wall must make upon a man and an American like my
father!
Well, the very surprise and novelty of the adventure amused and
interested him, and even won a good deal upon his sympathies. He loved
the solid earth as well as the sky above it, and he was glad of the
assurance that this people existed, though he might be devoutly thankful
that two hundred years of America had opened so impassable a gulf
between him and them. Indeed, the very fact of that impassability may
have made his intercourse with them the easier--at any rate, on
his side. On their side, they regarded him with a dim but always
self-complacent curiosity; had he not been a consul, they would probably
not have regarded him at all. Of course they--the Rock Park sort of
people--had never read his books; literary cultivation was not to
be found in England lower down than the gentleman class. My father,
therefore, was never obliged to say, "I'm glad you liked it" to them.
And that relief, of itself, must have served as a substantial bond of
fellowship.
Rock Park, as I remember it, was a damp, winding, verdurous street,
protected at each end by a small granite lodge, and studded throughout
its length with stuccoed villas. The villas were mended-on to each other
(as one of the children expressed it) two and two; they had front yards
filled with ornamental shrubbery, and gardens at the back, an acre or
two in extent; they were fenced in with iron pickets, and there were
gates to the driveways, on which the children swung. Every normal child
supposes that gates are made for no other purpose. The trees were not
large, but there were many of them, and they were thick with leaves.
There was a damp, arboreal smell everywhere, mingled with the finer
perfume of flowers and of the hawthorns and yellow laburnums. Flowers,
especially purple English violets, grew profusely in the gardens, and
gooseberry-bushes, bearing immense gooseberries such as our climate
does not nourish. There were also armies of garden--snails, handsome
gasteropods, which were of great interest to me; for I was entering,
at this period, upon a passionate pursuit of natural history. For many
years I supposed that the odor of the violets proceeded from snails, and
to this day I always associate snails with violets, or vice versa. Una,
Rose, and I were given each a section of a garden-bed for our own; I
cultivated mine so assiduously that it became quite a deep hole; but I
do not recall that anything ever grew in it. The soil was a very rich
loam, and ceaseless diligence must have been required in me to keep it
barren.
Gray skies, frequent showers, a cool or semi-chilly mildness, varied
every little while by the intrusion of a yellow fog from Liverpool,
over the river--such was the climate of Rock Park. There were occasional
passages of sunshine; but never, that I recollect, an entire day of it.
The stucco of the villas was streaked with green dampness, and peeling
off here and there. I suspect that the fashion of castellated, stuccoed
villas may have been set in the eighteenth century by Horace Walpole
when he built that marvellous edifice known as Strawberry Hill. I first
saw that achievement twenty years after the time of which I now write,
and recognized in it, as I thought, the parent of my former Rock Park
home and of innumerable of the latter's kindred. Strawberry Hill is
sprawling and vast, the progeny are liliputian, but the family likeness
is striking. The idea is to build something which shall seem to be all
that it is not. The gray-white stucco pretends to be stone, and the
lines of the stone courses are carefully painted on the roughened
surface; but nobody, since Horace's time, could ever have been deceived
by them. The castellated additions and ornamentation are all bogus, of
the cheapest and vulgarest sort. It is singular that a people so sincere
and solid as the English are supposed to be should adopt this fashion
for their dwellings. But then they are used to follow conventions and
adopt fashions set them by those whom they esteem to be their betters,
without thought, or activity of individual conscience. It is rather
matter for wonder, remembering what rascals and humbugs many of their
"betters" have been, that middle-class England is not more of a whited
sepulchre than it is. I do not mean to cast any reflections upon the
admirable and beguiling Horace; but he was a highly civilized person,
and had a brother named Robert, and perhaps solid sincerity should not
be expected from such a combination.
Our villa, within, was close and comfortable enough, for its era
and degree; but the furniture was ponderous and ugly to the point of
nightmare. The chairs, tables, and sofas wore the semblance of solid
mahogany, twisted and tortured in a futile struggle to achieve elegance;
the carvings, or mouldings, were screwed or glued on, and the lines of
structure, intended to charm the eye, accomplished only the discomfort
of the body. The dining-table was like a plateau; the sideboard
resembled a cliff-dwelling. The carpets were of the Brussels ilk:
acanthus-leaves and roses and dahlias wreathed in inextricable
convolutions, glowing with the brightest and most uncompromising
hues. The lace curtains were imitation lace; the damask curtains
were imitation damask. The bedsteads.... But this is not a History of
England. After all, we were snug and comfortable. On the walls were
portraits of the family whose house this was; by name, Campbell; the
house-painter, or wood-grainer, one would suppose, had a leaning towards
this branch of art. I never saw the originals of these portraits, but,
upon the assumption that they had been faithfully interpreted by the
artist, I used to think, in my childish folly, that the refrain of the
old song, "The Campbells are Coming," was meant as a phrase or threat to
frighten people. Who would not have run upon such an announcement? As
I have already made one confession in these pages not reflecting credit
upon myself, I may as well make another now. Just thirty years after
the events I am describing, somebody wrote to me from Rock Park, stating
that the local inhabitants were desirous of putting up on the house
which Hawthorne had occupied there a marble or bronze slab, recording
the fact for the benefit of pilgrims. The committee, however, did not
know which of three or four houses was the right one, and the writer
enclosed photographs of them all, and requested me to put a cross over
our former habitation. Now, all the houses in Rock Park had been turned
out of the same mould, and I knew no more than my interrogator which was
which. But I reflected that the committee had been put to trouble and
expense for photographs, postage-stamps, and what not, and that all that
was really wanted was something to be sentimental over. So, rather than
disappoint them, I resorted to a kind of sortes Virgillana; I shut my
eyes, turned round thrice, and made a mark at hazard on the line of
photographs. The chances against my having hit it right were only four
to one; the committee were satisfied, the pilgrims have been made happy,
and it is difficult to see where harm has been done. Nevertheless, the
matter has weighed somewhat on my conscience ever since, and I am glad
to have thus lightened myself of it. What would one better do in such
circumstances? Is history written in this way?
The custom of our family in America had been to take all our meals
together; but in England the elders take lunch at noon, tea at four or
five, and dinner at seven or eight, while the children dine at noon and
sup at six. This arrangement was adopted in Rock Park. My father used to
leave home for the consulate at nine, and return--unless kept away by an
official or social engagement--at five or six. There was appointed
for us children a nurse or governess, to oversee and administer our
supplies; our father and mother dining, with such guests as might happen
to be present, late in the evening. We were sometimes allowed to come in
at dessert, to eat a few nuts and raisins and exhibit our infantile good
manners. This domestic separation was a matter of much speculation and
curiosity to our immature minds; we used to haunt the hall through which
the servants carried the dishes, smoking and fragrant, from the kitchen
to the dining-room, and once in a while the too-indulgent creatures
would allow us to steal something. How ravishingly delicious things thus
acquired taste! And we, fancying, of course, that they must be not less
delicious for the folks at table, used to marvel how they could ever
bear to leave off eating. The dinners were certainly rather elaborate
compared with the archaic repasts of Salem or of Concord; but they were
as far inferior in grandeur and interminableness to the astonishing
banquets at which, in some great houses, our father and mother were
present. Consider, for example, this dinner, in no way remarkable among
such functions, at the Hollands's, about this time. There were twelve
persons at table. The service was of solid silver; two enormous covers
were on the table before the soup was served; being removed, they
revealed turbot and fried fish. Then followed boiled turkey and
roast goose, and between them innumerable smaller dishes, including
chicken-pies, ragouts, cutlets, fricasees, tongue, and ham, all being
placed in their silver receptacles on the table; on the sideboard was
a vast round of boiled beef, as a precaution against famine. With the
sweets were served grouse and pheasants; there were five kinds of wine,
not including the champagne, which was consumed as a collateral all
the way along. The pudding which followed these trifles was an heroic
compound, which Gargantua might have flinched from; then came the nuts
and raisins, then the coffee, then the whiskey and brandy. There were
people in England, half a century ago, who ate this sort of dinners six
or seven times a week, and thought nothing of it. They actually ate and
drank them--did not merely glance at them and shake their heads. The
ancient Scandinavians, Gauls, Saxons, and Normans, of whom they were
descendants, could not have done more. One cannot help respecting such
prodigious trencher-men and women, or wonder that the poverty-stricken
class were ill-fed. Dinner in England had become a very different thing
when I lived there twenty years later, and though port and Madeira were
generally on the table, the only man whom I saw habitually drink them
was Robert Browning! Possibly this is the reason the British got such a
thrashing in South Africa the other day.
After dinner at Rock Park--or, if it were to be a late affair,
before--we would have family prayers, in which the servants joined. This
was in deference to English custom; not that we were irreligious, but we
had not before been accustomed to express our religious feelings in just
that manner. All being grouped in a semicircle, my father would open the
Bible and read a chapter; then he would take a prayer-book containing
thirty or forty well-considered addresses to the Almighty, and everybody
would kneel down and cover their eyes with their hands. The "Amen"
having been reached, and echoed by every one, all would rise to their
former positions, and the servants would file out of the room. It
must have been somewhat of an effort for my father to go through
this ceremony; but I think he did it, not only for the reason above
mentioned, but also because he thought it right that his children
should have the opportunity of gaining whatever religious sentiment such
proceedings might inculcate. But I do not think that he had much faith
in the practice as an English institution. Indeed, he has somewhere
written that the English "bring themselves no nearer to God when they
pray than when they play cards."
[IMAGE: ROBERT BROWNING]
I understood long afterwards, as I did not at the time, how closely my
father and mother studied in all things the welfare and cultivation of
their children. They were not formal or oppressive about it; all went
pleasantly and with seeming spontaneity, as if in accordance with our
own desire; but we were wisely and needfully guided. We were never sent
to school during our seven years in Europe; but either we were taught
our lessons by our parents at home or by governesses. In addition to the
constant walks which I took with my father, he encouraged me to join
a cricket club in the Park, and sent me to Huguenin's gymnasium in
Liverpool, to the Cornwallis swimming-baths, and to a dancing-academy
kept by a highly ornamental Frenchman, and he bought me an enormous
steel hoop, and set me racing after it at headlong speed. Nor did he
neglect to stimulate us in the imaginative and aesthetic side. From the
date of our settlement in England to the end of his life, he read aloud
to us in the evenings many of the classics of literature. Spenser's The
Faerie Queene, the Don Quixote of Cervantes, the poems and novels of
Scott, Grimm's and Andersen's Fairy Tales, much of Defoe and Swift,
Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake field, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (he
himself was very fond of that poem), and many other things, and I cannot
overestimate the good they did me. His talks to me during our walks
gave me, under the guise of pleasantry, not so much specific information
concerning things (though that was not wanting), but--character; that
is, the questions he put to me, the remarks and comments he made, the
stories he told, were all calculated to give me a high idea of human
duties and aspirations; to encourage generosity, charity, courage,
patriotism, and independence. From the reading of The Faerie Queene and
of Don Quixote I conceived a vehement infatuation for mediaeval chivalry
and knight-errantry; I adopted the motto of the order, "Be faithful,
brave, and true in deed and word"; and I indulged in waking dreams of
heroic adventures in quest of fair renown, and to succor the oppressed.
All this he encouraged and abetted, though always, too, with a sort
of twinkle of the eye, lest I should take myself too seriously and wax
priggish. He permitted me to have a breastplate and a helmet with a
golden dragon crest (made by our nurse out of pasteboard covered with
tinsel-paper), and he bought me a real steel sword with a brass hilt
wrought in open-work; I used to spend hours polishing it, and picturing
to myself the giants and ogres I would slay with it. Finally--with that
humorous arching of the eyebrow of his--he bade me kneel down, and with
my sword smote me on the shoulder, and dubbed me knight, saying, "Rise
up, Sir Julian!" It was worth many set moral homilies to me. He knew the
advantage of leading a boy to regard the practice of boyish and manly
virtues not as a burden but as a privilege and boon, and of making
the boy's own conscience his judge. His handling of the matter was,
of course, modified so as to reach the inner springs of my particular
nature and temperament, which he thoroughly understood. Withal, he
never failed to hold up to ridicule anything showing a tendency to the
sentimental; he would test me on this point in various ways, and always
betrayed pleasure when he found me quick to detect the sentimental or
mawkish taint in literature or life. I breathed a manly, robust, and
bracing atmosphere in his company, and when I reflect upon what were
my proclivities to folly during this impressionable period, I thank my
stars for such a father.
There was abundant quiet and seclusion in Rock Park, and had my father
been able to do any writing, he could hardly have found a retreat more
suitable. The tradesmen called early at the houses in the Park, their
wagon-wheels making no sound upon the unpaved street, and the two
policemen, who lived in the stone lodges, kept the place free from
beggars and peddlers. These policemen, pacing slowly along in their
uniforms, rigid and dignified, had quite an imposing aspect, and it was
some time before we children discovered that they were only men, after
all. Each had a wife and children, who filled to overflowing the tiny
habitations; when their blue coats and steel-framed hats were off, they
were quite humble persons; one of them eked out his official salary by
mending shoes. After following with awe the progress along the sidewalk
of the officer of public order, stalking with solemn and measured gait,
and touching his hat, with a hand encased in a snow-white cotton glove,
to such of the denizens of the Park as he might encounter, it was
quite like a fairy-tale transformation to see him squatting in soiled
shirt-sleeves on his cobbler's bench, drawing waxed thread through holes
in a boot-sole. I once saw one of them, of a Sunday afternoon, standing
at ease in the doorway of his lodge, clad in an old sack-coat which I
recognized as having been my father's. I am constitutionally reverent
of law and order; but the revelation of the domestic lives of these
policemen gave me an insight, which I have never since lost, into the
profound truth that the man and the officer are twain.
There were perhaps twenty families living in the Park, of whom we became
acquainted with two only; the people who lived next door to us (whose
name I have forgotten), and Mr. and Mrs. Squarey, who dwelt higher up
the street. The people next door had two boys of about my own age, with
whom I played cricket, and it was from the back windows of their house
that I saw for the first time an exhibition of fireworks in their
garden; I remember that when, just before the show began, they put out
the lamp in the room, I asked to have it relighted, in order that
I might see the as yet unexperienced wonder. There are folks who go
hunting for the sun with a lantern.
Mr. Squarey was tall and stiff of figure, with a singularly square
countenance, with a short whisker on each side of it; but spiritually he
was most affable and obliging; so was his wife; but as she was short and
globular, my father was wont to refer to her, in the privacy of domestic
intercourse, as Mrs. Roundey. They were profuse in invitations to go
with us to places--to Chester, to the Welsh show-places, and so forth;
and although I think my father and mother would rather have gone alone,
they felt constrained to accept these suggestions. It was in their
company, at all events, that I first saw Chester "Rows"; and also,
from some coign of vantage on those delightful old walls, an English
horse-race, with jockeys in silk caps and jackets tinted like the
rainbow. Mr. Squarey's demeanor towards my sisters and myself was
like that of the benevolent tutor in Sandford and Merton, with which
excellent work we were very conversant at that time; as, likewise, with
Edgeworth's Parents' Assistant, and with still another engaging volume
called, I think, the Budget of something; at any rate, it had two or
three little boys and girls in it, who were anxious to acquire useful
and curious information on many subjects, which was afforded them
in generous measure by their highly cultivated elders. Such
flower-garlanded instruction was the best specifically juvenile
literature which those primitive ages afforded. "Pray, mamma, why does
the sun rise in the east instead of in the west?" "Pray, papa, why was
King Alfred called 'The Good'?" Mrs. Markham's History of England was
constructed upon the same artless principle. What a distance we have
travelled since then!
But it was a good and happy life in Rock Park, and I think our father
and mother enjoyed it almost as much as we children did. They were
meeting people many of whom were delightful--I shall try to paint the
portraits of some of them in the next chapter--and they were seeing
towns and castles and places of historic and picturesque interest; and
my father was earning more money than ever before, though less than a
quarter as much as he would have earned had not Congress, soon after his
accession to office, cut down the emoluments. This was England; the
Old Home, and the Old World, for the understanding of which they had
prepared themselves all their lives previous. My father once said, "If
England were all the world, it would still have been worth while for the
Creator to have made it." The children were radiantly content with their
lot; and it is on record that the little boy once remarked, "I don't
remember when I came down from heaven; but I'm glad I happened to
tumble into so good a family." The same individual, rolling on the
floor in excess of mirth over some childish comicality, panted out, "Oh,
mamma, my ball of jolly is so big I can't breathe!" The ball of jolly
became a household word for years thereafter. It was well nourished in
those days.