A paddle-wheel ocean-liner—The hens, the cow, and the
carpenter—W. D. Ticknor—Our first Englishman—An
aristocratic acrobat—Speech that beggars eulogy—The boots
of great travellers—Complimentary cannon—The last
infirmity of noble republican minds—The golden promise: the
spiritual fulfilment—Fatuous serenity—Past and future—The
coquetry of chalk cliffs—Two kinds of imagination—The
thirsty island—Gloomy English comforts—Systematic
geniality—A standing puzzle—The respirator—Scamps, fools,
mendicants, and desperadoes—The wrongs of sailor-men—"Is
this myself?"—"Profoundly akin"—Henry Bright—Charm of
insular prejudice—No stooping to compromise—The battle
against dinner—"I'm glad you liked it!"—An English-,
Irish-, and Scotchman—An Englishman owns his country—A
contradiction in Englishmen—A hospitable gateway—Years of
memorable trifles.
The steamship Niagara was, in 1853, a favorable specimen of nautical architecture; the Cunard Company had then been in existence rather less than a score of years, and had already established its reputation for safety and convenience. But, with the exception of the red smoke-stack with the black ring round the top, there was little similarity between the boat that took us to England and the mammoths that do that service for travellers now adays. The Niagara was about two hundred and fifty feet long, and was propelled by paddle-wheels, upon the summits of whose curving altitudes we were permitted to climb in calm weather. The interior decorations were neat and pretty, but had nothing of the palatial and aesthetic gorgeousness which educates us in these later ages. The company of passengers was so small that a single cow, housed in a pen on deck, sufficed for their needs in the way of milk, and there were still left alive and pecking contentedly about their coop a number of fowls, after we had eaten all we could of their brethren at the ten dinners that were served during the voyage. The crew, from the captain down, were all able seamen, friendly and companionable, and not so numerous but that it was easy to make their individual acquaintance. The most engaging friend of the small people was the carpenter, who had his shop on deck, and from whom I acquired that passion for the profession which every normal boy ought to have, and from the practice of which I derived deep enjoyment and many bloody thumbs and fingers for ten years afterwards.
But we had companionship historically at least more edifying. William D. Ticknor, the senior partner of my father's publishers, was the only figure familiar at the outset. He was one of the most amiable of men, with thick whiskers all round his face and spectacles shining over his kindly eyes; a sturdy, thick-set personage, active in movement and genial in conversation. It was James T. Fields who usually made the trips to England; but on this occasion Fields got no farther than the wharf, where the last object visible was his comely and smiling countenance as he waved his adieux. Conspicuous among the group on the after-deck, as we glided out of the smooth harbor of Boston, was an urbane and dignified gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age, with a clean-shaven mouth and chin, finely moulded, and with what Tennyson would call an educated whisker, short and gray, defining the region in front of and below his ears. He spoke deliberately, and in language carefully and yet easily chosen, with intonations singularly distinct and agreeable, giving its full value to every word. This was our first native Englishman; no less a personage than Mr. Crampton, in fact, the British Minister, who was on his way to Halifax. He had fine, calm, quietly observant eyes, which were pleasantly employed in contemplating the beauty of that summer seascape—an opalescent ocean, and islands slumbering in the July haze. Near him stood a light-built, tall, athletic individual, also obviously English, but thirty years younger; full, also, of artistic appreciation; this was Field Talfourd, who was an artist, and many things besides; a man proficient in all forms of culture. His features were high and refined, and, without being handsome, irresistibly attractive. He turned out to be a delightful playmate for the children, and astonished them and the rest of the company by surprising gymnastic feats in the rigging. The speech of these two Britishers gave the untravelled American a new appreciation of the beauty and significance of the English language. Not all Englishmen speak good English, but when they do, they beggar eulogy.
[IMAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR]
George Silsbee was likewise of our party; he was an American of the Brahman type, a child of Cambridge and Boston, a man of means, and an indefatigable traveller. He had the delicate health and physique of the American student of those days, when out-door life and games made no part of our scholastic curricula. He may have been forty years old, slight and frail, with a thin, clean-shaven face and pallid complexion, but full of mind and sensibility. We do not heed travellers now, and I am inclined to think they are less worth heeding than they used to be. It is so easy to see the world in these latter days that few persons see it to any purpose even when they go through the motions of doing so. But to hear George Bradford or Silsbee talk of England, France, and Italy, in the fifties, was a liberal education, and I used sometimes to stare fascinated at the boots of these wayfarers, admiring them for the wondrous places in which they had trodden. Silsbee travelled with his artistic and historic consciousness all on board, and had so much to say that he never was able to say it all.
But to my father himself were accorded the honors of the captain's table, and for him were fired the salutes of cannon which thundered us out of Boston Harbor and into Halifax. These compliments, however, were paid to him not as a man of letters, but as a political representative of his country, and, let a man be as renowned as he will on his personal account, he will still find it convenient, in order to secure smooth and agreeable conditions on his way through the world, to supplement that distinction with recommendations from the State Department. Respect for rank is the last infirmity even of noble republican minds, and it oils the wheels of the progress of those who possess it. An American widow of my later acquaintance, a lady of two marriageable daughters and small social pretensions in her own country, toured Europe with success and distinction, getting all the best accommodations and profoundest obeisances by the simple device of placing the word "Lady" before her modest signature in the hotel registers. She was a lady, of course, and had a right so to style herself, and if snobbish persons chose to read into the word more than it literally meant, that was not Mrs. Green's affair.
American commerce still existed in 1853, and the Liverpool consulate was supposed to have more money in it than any other office in the gift of the administration. As a matter of fact, several of my father's predecessors had retired from their tenure of office with something handsome (pecuniarily speaking) to their credit; whether the means by which it had been acquired were as handsome is another question. Be that as it may, Congress, soon after my father's accession, passed a law cutting down the profits about three-fourths, and he was obliged to practise the strictest economy during his residence abroad in order to come home with a few thousand dollars in his pocket. Nevertheless, the dignity, in the official sense, of this consular post was considerable, and it brought him, in combination with his literary fame, a good deal more attention in England than he well knew what to do with. But, in one way or another, he also made friends there who remained to the end among the dearest of his life and more than countervailed all the time and energy wasted on the Philistines.
The Atlantic, all the way across, with the exception of one brief emotional disturbance between lunch and dinner-time, wore a smile of fatuous serenity. The sun shone; the vast pond-surface oilily undulated, or lay in absolute flatness, or at most defiled under our eyes in endless squadrons of low-riding crests. My mother, whose last experience of sea-ways had been the voyage to Cuba, in which the ship was all but lost in a series of hurricanes, was captivated by this soft behavior, and enjoyed the whole of it as much, almost, as her husband, who expanded and drank in delight like a plant in the rain. But, in truth, these must have been blessed hours for them both. Behind them lay nearly eleven years of married life, spent in narrow outward circumstances, lightened only towards the last by the promise of some relaxation from strain, during which they had found their happiness in each other, and in the wise and tender care of their children, and in the converse of chosen friends. They had filled their minds with knowledge concerning the beauties and interests of foreign lands, with but a slender expectation of ever beholding them with bodily sight, but none the less well prepared to understand and appreciate them should the opportunity arrive. And now, suddenly, it had arrived, and they were on the way to the regions of their dreams, with the prospect of comparative affluence added. They had nearly twelve years of earthly sojourn together before them, the afternoon sunshine to be clouded a little near the close by the husband's failing health, but glorified more and more by mutual love, and enriched with memories of all that had before been unfulfilled imaginings. This voyage eastward was the space of contemplation between the two periods, and the balm of its tranquillity well symbolized the peace of soul and mind with which they awaited what the horizons were to disclose.
The right way to approach England for the first time is not by the west coast, but by the south, as Julius Caesar did, beckoned on by the ghostly, pallid cliffs that seem to lift themselves like battlements against the invader. It is historically open to question whether there would have been any Roman occupation, or any Saxon or Norman one either, for that matter, but for the coquetry of those chalk cliffs. An adventurer, sighting the low and marshy shores of Lancashire, and muddying his prows in the yellow waters of the Mersey, would be apt to think that such a land were a good place to avoid. But the race of adventurers has long since died out, and their place is occupied by the wide-flying cormorants of commerce, to whom mud flats and rock deserts present elysian beauties, provided only there be profit in them. One kind of imagination has been superseded by another, and both are necessary to the full exploitation of this remarkable globe that we inhabit.
But even the level capes of Lancashire were alluring to eyes that saw England, our venerable mother, loom behind them, with her thousand years' pageantry of warfare and civilization. The egregious little island is a thirsty place; the land drinks rain as assiduously as do its inhabitants beer and other liquors. Heavy mists and clouds enveloped it as we drew near, and ushered us up the Mersey into a brown omnipresence of rain. The broad, clear sunshine of the Atlantic was left behind, and we stood on wet decks and were transported to sloppy wharfs by means of a rain-sodden and abominably smoking little tug-boat—as the way was fifty years ago. Liverpool was a gray-stone labyrinth open to the deluge, and its inhabitants went to and fro with umbrellas over their heads and black respirators over their mouths, looking as if such were their normal plight—as, indeed, it was. Much of this was not needed to quench the enthusiasm of the children. The Waterloo Hotel, to which, by advice of friends, we were driven, seemed by its very name to carry out the idea of saturation, which the activities of nature so insistently conveyed. It was intensely discomfortable, and though the inside of the hotel was well supplied with gloomy English comforts, and the solemn meals were administered with a ceremonious gravity that suggested their being preliminaries to funerals, yet it was hard to be light-hearted. The open-grate coal fires were the most welcome feature of this summer season, and no doubt the wine list offered the best available substitute for sunlight; but we had not been trained to avail ourselves of it. We drank water, which certainly appeared an idle proceeding in such a climate. In Liverpool, however, or in its suburbs, we were to live for the better part of four years, and we must make the best of it. And there is in English people, when rightly approached, a steady and systematic geniality that not only makes handsome amends for their weather, but also accounts for the otherwise singular fact that the country is inhabited at all. A people with a smaller fund of interior warmth could not have endured it. The French talk about conquering England, but they could not hold it if they did, and it is one of the standing puzzles of history how the Romans, an Italian race, were able to maintain themselves under these skies during four centuries. It may be objected that the present English population is not indigenous to the island; but they are the survival of the fittest and toughest selected from many aspirants. Nor can it be doubted that the British hunger for empire in all parts of the world is due to nothing so much as to their anxiety to have a plausible pretext for living elsewhere than at home.
My father took the rain, as he took everything that could not be helped, philosophically, and it seemed to do him no harm; indeed, his health was uniformly good all through his English residence. It did not suit so well my mother, who was constitutionally delicate in the lungs; she was soon obliged to adopt the English respirator, and finally was driven to take refuge for the greater part of a year in Lisbon and Madeira, returning only a little before the departure of the family for Italy in 1858. But there must have been in him an ancestral power of resistance still effective after more than two centuries of transplantation; he grew ruddy and robust while facing the mist and mirk, and inhaling the smoky moisture that did service for air. Nor was his health impaired by the long hours in the daily consulate—a grimy little room barely five paces from end to end, with its dusty windows so hemmed in by taller buildings that even had there been any sunshine to make the attempt, it could never have succeeded in effecting an entrance through them. Here, from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, he dealt with all varieties of scamps and mendicants, fools and desperadoes, and all the tribe of piratical cutthroats which in those days constituted a large part of the merchant marine. Calamity, imbecility, and rascality were his constant companions in that dingy little den; and the gloomy and sooty skies without but faintly pictured the moral atmosphere which they exhaled; he entered deeply into all their affairs, projects, and complaints, feeling their troubles, probably, at least as keenly as they did themselves, and yet he came out of it all with clear eyes and a sound digestion. I presume the fact may have been that he unconsciously regarded the whole affair somewhat as we do a drama in a theatre; it works upon our sensibilities, and yet we do not believe that it is real. There was nothing in the experience germane to his proper life; it could not become a part of him, and therefore its posture towards him remained inveterately objective. The only feature of it that quickened a responsive chord in him was the revelation of the intolerable condition of the sailors in many of our ships, and upon these abuses he enlarged in his communications to Washington. Improvements were made in consequence of his remonstrances; but the American merchant service had already begun its downward career, and it is only very lately, owing to causes which are too novel and peculiar to be intelligently discussed as yet, that our flag is once more promising to compete against that of England.
It would be misleading to say, however, that my father was not interested in his consulate work; there was a practical side in him which took hold of the business in man-fashion, and transacted it so efficiently as to leave no room for criticism, and nobody can produce voluntary effects without feeling in himself a reaction from them. He had occasion to look into the privacy of many human hearts, to pity them and advise them, and from such services and insights he no doubt obtained a residue of wisdom which might be applied to his own ulterior uses. These were indirect and incidental issues; but from the consulate qua consulate Hawthorne was radically alien, and when he quitted it, he carried away with him no taint or trace of it. As he says in his remarks upon the subject, he soon came to doubt whether it were actually himself who had been the incumbent of the office at all.
But Providence does not deny manna to man in his extremity, and to my father it came in the shape of a few English friends, and in occasional escapes from the office into the outside England where, after the centuries of separation, he found so much with which he could still feel profoundly akin. His most constant friendly visitor was Henry A. Bright, a university man, the son of a wealthy local merchant, who sent ships to Australia, and was related (as most agreeable Englishmen are—though there are shining exceptions) to the aristocratic class. Bright, at this time, could not have been over thirty years of age; he was intensely English, though his slender figure and mental vivacity might make him seem near to the conventional American type. But through him, as through an open window, Hawthorne was enabled to see far into the very heart of England. Bright not merely knew England; he was England, and England at its best, and therefore also at its most insular and prejudiced. It was unspeakably satisfying and agreeable to encounter a man at once so uncompromising and so amiable, so wrong-headed (from the American point of view) and so right-hearted. He was drawn to my father as iron is drawn to the magnet; on every outward point they fought each other like the knight errants of old, while agreeing inwardly, beneath the surface of things, as few friends are able to agree. Each admired the other's onslaughts and his prowess, and, by way of testifying his admiration, strove to excel himself in his counter attacks. The debate was always beginning, and in the nature of things it could never end; the effect of their blows was only to hammer each the other more firmly into his previous convictions. Probably all the things that are English and all the things that are American never before or since received such full and trenchant exposition as was given them by Hawthorne and by Bright. The whole subject of monarchy and aristocracy as against republicanism and democracy was threshed out to the last kernel by champions each of whom was thoroughly qualified to vindicate his cause. Each, constrained by the stress of battle to analyze and expound his beliefs more punctually than ever before, thereby convinced himself while leaving his adversary undaunted; and, of course, both were right. For this world is so constituted that two things incompatible in outward manifestation may in their roots be one and the same, and equally appeal to the suffrages of honest men. England and America are healthy and vigorous in proportion as they differ from each other, and a morbid and vicious tendency in either is noticeable the moment either begins to take a leaf from the other's book. My father and Bright could not have been the lifelong friends that they were had either of them yielded his point or stooped to compromise.
Apart from political matters, and such social themes as were nearly allied to them, the two friends had many points of agreement and sympathy. Bright had from the first been an ardent and intelligent admirer of the romancer's writings, and though they might often differ in their estimates of individual works, they were in hearty accord as to the principles which underlie all literature and art. Upon matters relating to society, my father was more apt to accept theories which Bright might propound than to permit of their being illustrated in his own person; he would admit, for example, that a consul ought to mingle socially with the people to whom he was accredited; but when it came to getting him out to dinner, in evening dress and with a speech in prospect, obstacles started up like the armed progeny of the Dragon's Teeth. For, though no one enjoyed real society more than he did, he was ardently averse from conversing as an official with persons between whom and himself as a man there could be little sympathy. Almost as much, too, did he dislike to meet the polite world merely on the basis of the books that he had written, which his entertainers were bound to praise whether or not they had read or comprehended them, and to whose well-meant but inexpert eulogies he must constantly respond with the threadbare and pathetic phrase, "I'm glad you liked it." Bright, of course, insisted that fame and position carried obligations which must be met, and he was constantly laying plots to inveigle or surprise his friend into compliance. He often succeeded, but he failed quite as frequently, so that, as a Mrs. Malaprop might have said, Hawthorne as a social lion was a rara avis, from first to last. The foible of artificial, as distinguished from spontaneous, society is that it so seldom achieves simple human relations.
Another chief friend of his was Francis Bennoch. England would never have seemed "our old home" to my father, without the presence and companionship of these two men. Both had literary leanings, both were genial, true, and faithful; but in other respects they were widely dissimilar. Bright was of the pure Saxon type; Bennoch represented Great Britain at large; there were mingled in him English, Irish, and Scotch ancestry. In himself he was a superb specimen of a human being; broad-shouldered, straight, and vigorous, massive but active, with a mellow, joyful voice, an inimitable brogue, sparkling black eyes full of hearty sunshine and kindness, a broad and high forehead over bushy brows, and black, wavy hair. He bubbled over with high spirits, humor, and poetry, being, indeed, a poet in achievement, with a printed and bound volume to show for it—songs, lyrics, and narrative poems, composed in the spirit of Burns and Scott. He was at this time one of the handsomest men in England, with a great heart, warmer than any summer England ever knew, and a soul of ardor and courage, which sent through his face continual flashes of sympathy and fellowship. One naturally thought and spoke of him in superlatives; he was the kindest, jolliest, most hospitable, most generous and chivalrous of men, and his affection and admiration for my father were also of the superlative kind. He had made a fortune in the wool business, and had an office in Wood Street, London; but his affairs permitted him to make frequent excursions to Liverpool, and to act as his American friend's guide and cicerone to many places in England which would otherwise have been unknown to him. My father enjoyed these trips immensely; Bennoch's companionship gave the right keynote and atmosphere to the sights they saw. A real Englishman owns his country, and does the honors of it to a visitor as if it were his private estate. Discussions of politics and of the principles of government never arose between these two, as they did between my father and Bright; for Bennoch, though one of the most loyal and enthusiastic of her Majesty's subjects, and full of traditional respect for the British nobility, was by nature broadly democratic, and met every man as an equal and a brother. One often finds this contradiction in Englishmen; but it is such logically only. A man born to the traditions of monarchy and aristocracy accepts them as the natural background of his ideas, just as the English landscape is the setting of his house and park; he will vindicate them if assailed; but ordinarily they do not consciously affect his mental activities, and he will talk good republicanism without being aware of it. The monarchy is a decoration, a sentiment, a habit; as a matter of fact, England is more democratic in many essentials than we have as yet learned how to be. Bennoch was not a university man, and lacked the historical consciousness that Bright so assiduously cultivated; he lived by feeling and intuition more than by deliberate intellectual judgments. He was emotional; tears would start to his eyes at a touch of pathos or pity, as readily as the laughter of a moment before. So lovable, gallant, honest, boyish a man is seldom born into this modern world-boyish as only the manliest men can be. He died thirty years after the time I write of, the same fresh and ardent character as ever, and loving and serving Hawthorne's children for Hawthorne's sake. I shall have occasion to mention him hereafter; but I have dwelt upon him here, both because he made it forever impossible for any one who knew him well to do other than love the land which could breed such a man, and because, for the American Hawthorne, he was as a hospitable gate-way through which the England of his dreams and imaginings was entered upon as a concrete and delightful reality.
With Bright and Bennoch on his right hand and on his left, then, my father began his English experience. The two are frequently mentioned in his English journals, and Bennoch figures as one of the subordinate characters in the posthumous romance called Doctor Grimshawe's Secret. It is but a sketch of him, however, and considerably modified from the brilliant and energetic reality. Meanwhile the consul began to accustom himself to the routine of the consulate, and his family, leaving the sombre respectability of the Waterloo Hotel, moved, first, to the hospitable boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, and afterwards to a private dwelling in Rock Park, Rock Ferry, on the opposite side of the Mersey, where we were destined to dwell for several years. They were years full of events very trifling in themselves, but so utterly different from everything American as to stamp themselves upon the attention and the memory. It is the trifling things that tell, and give character to nations; extraordinary things may occur anywhere, and possess little national flavor. In another chapter I will attempt some portrayal of this English life of fifty years since.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg