Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (758 page)

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.

VII

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?