"I doubt whether any of your family have since been equal to your old
Puritan great-grandfather" (or "done anything to equal your old Puritan
grandfather"). With this something to the effect that we had done
nothing in America since Cromwell's Revolution, equal to it in importance
or of any importance.
Then a great rage came over me, and I remember _very_ distinctly that
there flashed through my mind in a second the reflection, "Now, if I have
to call you a d---d old fool for saying that, I _will_; but I'll be even
with you." When as quickly the following inspiration came, which I
uttered, and I suspect somewhat energetically:--
"Mr. Carlyle, I think that my brother, Henry Leland, who got the wound
from which he died standing by my side in the war of the rebellion,
fighting against slavery, was worth ten of my old Puritan ancestors; at
least, he died in a ten times better cause. And" (here my old "Indian"
was up and I let it out) "allow me to say, Mr. Carlyle, that I think that
in all matters of historical criticism you are principally influenced by
the merely melodramatic and theatrical."
Here Mr. Carlyle, looking utterly amazed and startled, though not at all
angry, said, for the first time, in broad Scotch--
"Whot's _thot_ ye say?"
"I say, Mr. Carlyle," I exclaimed with rising wrath, "that I consider
that in all historical judgments you are influenced only by the
melodramatic and theatrical."
A grim smile as of admiration came over the stern old face. Whether he
really felt the justice of the hit I know not, but he was evidently
pleased at the manner in which it was delivered, and it was with a deeply
reflective and not displeased air that he replied, still in Scotch--
"Na, na, I'm nae _thot_."
It was the terrier who had ferociously attacked the lion, and the lion
was charmed. From that instant he was courteous, companionable, and
affable, and talked as if we had been long acquainted, and as if he liked
me. It occurred to me that the resemblance of Carlyle to my father
during the row was appalling, the difference being that my father _never_
gave in. It would have been an awful sight to see and a sound to hear if
the two could have "discussed" some subject on which they were equally
informed--say the American tariff or slavery.
After a while Mr. Froude the historian came in, and we all went out
together for a walk in the Park. Pausing on the bridge, Mr. Carlyle
called my attention to the very rural English character of a part of the
scenery in the distance, where a church-spire rises over ranges of tree-
tops. I observed that the smoke of a gypsy fire and a tent by a hedge
was all that was needed. Then we began to talk about gypsies, and I told
Mr. Carlyle that I could talk Romany, and ran on with some reminiscences,
whereat, as I now recall, though I did not note it then, his amusement at
or interest in me seemed to be much increased, as if I had unexpectedly
turned out to be something a little out of the ordinary line of tourist
interviewers; and truly in those days Romany ryes were not so common as
they now are. Then Mr. Carlyle himself told a story, how his father--if
I remember rightly--had once lent a large sum to or trusted a gypsy in
some extraordinary manner. It befell in after days that the lender was
himself in sore straits, when the gypsy took him by night to a hut, and
digging up or lifting the _hard-stane_ or hearth-stone, took out a bag of
guineas, which he transferred to his benefactor.
We parted, and this was the only time I ever conversed with Mr. Carlyle,
though I saw him subsequently on more than one occasion. He sent word
specially by Mr. Conway to me that he would be pleased to have me call
again; but "once bitten twice shy," and I had not so much enjoyed my call
as to wish to repeat it. But I believe that what Mr. Carlyle absolutely
needed above all things on earth was somebody to put on the gloves with
him metaphorically about once a day, and give and take a few thumping
blows; nor do I believe that he would have shrunk from a tussle _a la
Choctaw_, with biting, gouging, tomahawk and scalper, for he had an
uncommonly _dour_ look about the eyes, and must have been a magnificent
fighter when once roused. But though I had not his vast genius nor wit,
I had the great advantage of having often had very severe differences
with my father, who was, I believe, as much Carlyled by Nature as Carlyle
himself, if not more so, whereas it is morally impossible that the Sage
of Chelsea could ever have found any one like himself to train under. But
to Carlyle people in conversation requires constant practice with a
master--_consuetudine quotidiana cum aliquo congredi_--and he had for so
long a time knocked everybody down without meeting the least resistance,
that victory had palled upon him, and he had, so to speak, "vinegared" on
himself. With somebody to "sass him back," Carlyle would have been cured
of the dyspepsia, and have lived twenty years longer.
Carlyle's was and ever will be one of the greatest names in English
literature, and it is very amusing to observe how the gossip-makers, who
judge of genius by tittle-tattle and petty personal defects, have
condemned him _in toto_ because he was not an angel to a dame who was
certainly a bit of a _diablesse_. Thus I find in a late very popular
collection the remark that--
"It is curious to note in the 'Life and Correspondence of Lord Houghton'
the high estimation in which Carlyle was held by him. His regard and
admiration cannot but seem exaggerated, now that we know so much of the
Chelsea philosopher's real character."
This is _quite_ the moral old lady, who used to think that Raphael was a
good painter "till she read all about that nasty Fornarina."
There was another hard old character with whom I became acquainted in
those days, and one who, though not a Carlyle, still, like him, exercised
in a peculiar way a great influence on English literature. This was
George Borrow. I was in the habit of reading a great deal in the British
Museum, where he also came, and there I was introduced to him.
He was busy with a venerable-looking volume in old Irish and made the
remark to me that he did not believe there was a man living who could
read old Irish with ease (which I now observe to myself was "fished" out
of Sir W. Betham). We discussed several gypsy words and phrases. I met
him in the same place several times. He was a tall, large, fine-looking
man, who must have been handsome in his youth. I knew at the time in
London a Mr. Kerrison, who had been as a very young man, probably in the
Twenties, very intimate with Borrow. He told me that one night Borrow
acted very wildly, whooping and vociferating so as to cause the police to
follow him, and after a long run led them to the edge of the Thames, "and
there they thought they had him." But he plunged boldly into the water
and swam in his clothes to the opposite shore, and so escaped.
"For he fled o'er to t'other side,
And so they could not find him;
He swam across the flowing tide,
And never looked behind him."
About this time (1826?) George Borrow published a small book of poems
which is now extremely rare. I have a copy of it. In it there is a
lyric in which, with his usual effrontery, he describes a very clever,
tall, handsome, accomplished man, who knows many languages and who can
drink a pint of rum, ending with the remark that he himself was this
admirable person. As Heine was in England at this time, it is not
improbable that he met with this poem; but in any case, there is a
resemblance between it and one of his own in the _Buch der Lieder_, which
runs thus:--
"Brave man, he got me the food I ate,
His kindness and care I can never forget,
Yet I cannot kiss him, though other folk can,
For I myself am this excellent man!"
It came to pass that after a while I wrote my book on "The English
Gypsies and their Language," and sent a note to Mr. Borrow in which I
asked permission to dedicate it to him. I sent it to the care of Mr.
Murray, who subsequently assured me that Mr. Borrow had actually received
it. Now Mr. Borrow had written thirty years before some sketches and
fragments on the same subject, which would, I am very certain, have
remained unpublished to this day but for me. He received my note on
Saturday--never answered it--and on Monday morning advertised in all the
journals his own forthcoming work on the same subject.
Now, what is sincere truth is, that when I learned this I laughed. I
thought very little of my own work, and if Mr. Borrow had only told me
that it was in the way of his I would have withdrawn it at once, and that
with right goodwill, for I had so great a respect for the Nestor of
gypsyism that I would have been very glad to have gratified him with such
a small sacrifice. But it was not in him to suspect or imagine so much
common decency in any human heart, and so he craftily, and to my great
delight and satisfaction, "got ahead" of me. For, to tell the truth of
truth, I was pleased to my soul that I had caused him to make and publish
the work.
I have said too hastily that it was written thirty years before. What I
believe is, that Mr. Borrow had by him a vocabulary, and a few loose
sketches, which he pitchforked together, but that the book itself was
made and cemented into one with additions for the first time after he
received my note. He was not, take him altogether, over-scrupulous. Sir
Patrick Colquhoun told me that once when he was at Constantinople, Mr.
Borrow came there, and gave it out that he was a marvellous Oriental
scholar. But there was great scepticism on this subject at the Legation,
and one day at the _table-d'hote_, where the great writer and divers
young diplomatists dined, two who were seated on either side of Borrow
began to talk in Arabic, speaking to him, the result being that he was
obliged to confess that he not only did not understand what they were
saying, but did not even know what the language was. Then he was tried
in Modern Greek, with the same result. The truth was that he knew a
great deal, but did all in his power to make the world believe it was far
more--like the African king, or the English prime minister, who, the
longer his shirts were made, insisted on having the higher collars, until
the former trailed on the ground and the latter rose above the top of his
head--"when they came home from the wash!"
What I admire in Borrow to such a degree that before it his faults or
failings seem very trifling, is his absolutely vigorous, marvellously
varied originality, based on direct familiarity with Nature, but guided
and cultured by the study of natural, simple writers, such as Defoe and
Smollett. I think that the "interest" in or rather sympathy for gypsies,
in his case as in mine, came not from their being curious or dramatic
beings, but because they are so much a part of free life, of out-of-doors
Nature; so associated with sheltered nooks among rocks and trees, the
hedgerow and birds, river-sides, and wild roads. Borrow's heart was
large and true as regarded English rural life; there was a place in it
for everything which was of the open air and freshly beautiful. He was
not a view-hunter of "bits," trained according to Ruskin and the
_deliberate_ word-painting of a thousand novels and Victorian picturesque
poems; but he often brings us nearer to Nature than they do, not by
photography, but by casually letting fall a word or trait, by which we
realise not only her form but her soul. Herein he was like Washington
Irving, who gives us the impression of a writer who was deeply inspired
with calm sweet sunny views of Nature, yet in whose writings literal
description is so rarely introduced, that it is a marvel how much the
single buttercup lights up the landscape for a quarter of a mile, when a
thousand would produce no effect whatever. This may have possibly been
art in Irving--art of the most subtle kind--but in Borrow it was
instinct, and hardly intentional. In this respect he was superior even
to Whitman.
And here I would say, apropos of Carlyle, Tennyson, Irving, Borrow,
Whitman, and some others whom I have met, that with such men in only one
or two interviews, one covers more ground and establishes more intimacy
than with the great majority of folk whom we meet and converse with
hundreds of times. Which fact has been set forth by Wieland in his work
on Democritus or the Abderites so ingeniously, as people expressed it a
century ago, or so cleverly, as we now say, or so sympathetically, as an
Italian would say, that my pen fails to utter the thoughts which arise in
me compared to what he has written.
When the summer came, or on the 1st of August, we started on a grand tour
about England. First we went to Salisbury. I was deeply interested in
the Cathedral there, because it is possibly the only great Gothic
structure of the kind in Europe which was completed in a single style
during a single reign. Stonehenge was to me even more remarkable,
because it is more mysterious. Its stupendous barbarism or archaic
character, involving a whole lost cycle of ideas, contrasts so strangely
with the advanced architectural skill displayed in the cutting and
fitting of the vast blocks, that the whole seems to be a mighty paradox.
This was the work of many thousands of men--of very well directed labour
under the supervision of architects who could draw and measure skilfully
with a grand sense of _proportion_ or symmetry, who had, however, not
attained to ornament--a thing without parallel in humanity. This is
absolutely bewildering, as is the utter want of all indication as to its
real purpose. The old British tradition that the stones were brought by
magic from Africa, coupled with what Sir John Lubbock and others declare
as to similar remains on the North African coast, suggest something, but
what that was remains to be discovered. Men have, however, developed
great works of the massive and simple order in poetry, as well as in
architecture. The Nibelungen Lied is a Stonehenge. There are in it only
one or two similes or decorations. "Simplicity is its sole ornament."
From Salisbury we went to Wells. The cathedrals of England form the
pages of a vast work in which there is written the history of a paradox
or enigma as marvellous as that of Stonehenge; and it is this--that the
farther back we go, even into a really barbarous age, almost to the time
when Roman culture had died and the mediaeval had not begun, the more
exquisite are the proportions of buildings, the higher their tone, and,
as in the case of Early and Decorated English, the more beautiful their
ornament. That is to say, that exactly in the time when, according to
all our modern teaching and ideas, there should have been _no_
architectural art, it was most admirably developed, while, on the
contrary, in this end of the nineteenth century, when theory, criticism,
learning, and science abound, it is in its lowest and most depraved
state, its highest flights aiming at nothing better than cheap imitation
of old examples. The age which produced the Romanesque architecture,
whether in northern Italy, along the Rhine as the Lombard, or in France
and England as Norman, was extremely barbarous, bloody, and illiterate;
and yet in the noblest and grandest conceptions of architectural art it
surpassed all the genius of this our time as the sun surpasses a star.
While we _know_ that man has advanced, it still remains true that the
history of architecture alone for the past thousand years indicates a
steady retrogression and decay in art, and this constitutes the
stupendous paradox to which I have alluded. But Milton has fully
explained to us that when the devils in hell built the first great temple
or palace--Pandemonium--they achieved the greatest work of architecture
ever seen!
York Cathedral made on me a hundred times deeper and more sympathetic
impression than St. Peter's of Rome. There is a grandeur of unity and a
sense of a single cultus in it which the Renaissance never reached in
anything. Even from the days of Orcagna there is an element of mixed
motives and incoherence in the best of Italian architecture and
sculpture. It requires colour to effect that which Norman or Gothic art
could produce more grandly and impressively with _shade_ alone. It is
the difference between a garden and a forest. This is shown in the
glorious mediaeval _grisaille_ windows, in which such art proves its
absolute perfection. While I was looking at these in rapt admiration, an
American friend who did not lack a certain degree of culture asked me if
I did not find in them a great want of colour!
I made in York the acquaintance of a youth named Carr, son of a former
high sheriff, who, by the way, showed us very great hospitality whenever
we visited the city. This young man had read Labarthe and other writers
on archaeology, and was enthusiastic in finding relics of the olden time.
He took me into a great many private houses. I visited every church, and
indeed saw far more than do the great majority of even the most inquiring
visitors. The Shambles was then and is still perhaps one of the most
curious specimens of a small mediaeval street in the world. I felt as if
I could pass a life in the museum and churches, and I did, in fact, years
after, remain there, very busy, for three weeks, sketching innumerable
corbels, gargoyles, goblins, arches, weather-worn saints and sinners. And
in the Cathedral I found the original of the maid in the garden a-hanging
out the clothes. She is a fair sinner, and the blackbird is a demon
volatile, who, having lighted on her shoulder, snaps her by the nose to
get her soul. The motive often occurs in Gothic sculpture.
We may trace it back--_vide_ the "Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers" of
Amelia B. Edwards (whom I have also met at an Oriental Congress)--to
Roman Harpies and the Egyptian _Ba_, depicted in the "Book of the Dead"
or the "Egyptian Bible."