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.
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