|
AT
first sight it appears exceedingly strange that three races, like the
English, Irish, and French, dwelling so near each other, with no vast
difference of country or conditions of climate, yet divided so
distinctly at the heart of their national character, with the unlikeness
so sharply defined in the national features, should ever have had the
same Eastern origin, the same childhood in one family, and slept
unconsciously in the same cradle of the Aryan races. We find it
difficult to quote the natural laws of such a change; it has a look of
the miraculous. We fancy the unlikeness could not have been much
greater if it had come straight from the hand of the Creator. Yet
we have only to turn to America, and we shall see a change of race in
progress such as is likely to result in a transformation quite as
complete.
Mr. Emerson incidentally
remarks that the American is only the continuation of the English genius
under other conditions, more or less propitious. This difference
of conditions, however, may make a world of difference in the outcome,
as the French physiologist is said to have discovered when he shut up
his tadpoles under water, where the usual influence of light could not
operate on them, and found that they did not develop legs and arms and
grow into frogs; their continuation lay in lengthening their
tails and swelling into enormous tadpoles! The continuation
theory is a favourite fallacy of the Yankee mind. By aid of it
they have presumed to stand upon a platform of our past, and 'talk tall
talk' of their grander future, assuring themselves that America
contained all England plus the New World, and that they started yonder
just where the national life left off here! Alas! the English genius
and character did not emigrate intact; and when the branch race was
torn from the ancient tree, it was certain to lose much of its best
life-sap. Then it had to be replanted in a soil not enriched and
humanized, through ages of time, with the ripe sheddings of a fruitful
national life, and had to grow as best it could in an atmosphere that
lacked the nourishment and vital breath of English air. The
American poet Holmes sets the old tree and the old soil in a compact
picture for his countrymen:—
|
‘Hugged
in the clinging billows’ clasp,
From seaweed fringe to mountain heather,
The British oak with rooted grasp
Her slender handful holds together;
With cliffs of white and bowers of green,
And ocean narrowing to caress her,
And hills and threaded streams between,
Our little Mother Isle, God bless her!
‘Beneath each swinging forest bough
Some arm as stout in death reposes—
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow
Her valour’s life-blood runs in roses;
Nay, let our brothers of the West
Write smiling in their florid pages,
One half her soil has walked the rest
In Poets, Heroes, Martyrs, Sages.’ |
For two
thousand years has the English race been taking root, and, by
innumerable fibres, clutching hold of the land as with living
fingers. During a great part of that time Nature has worked
invisibly at the bases of the national character, toiling on in her
quiet, patient way, through storm or silence, to produce the visible
result at last.
The English is a race, with
an internal nature, so to speak, large as is the external nature of the
American continent. How could they possibly continue the genius
there which had here its birthplace and home? In literature, for
example, they were not in the least likely to make their starting-point
the place where Milton and Bacon and Shakspeare had ended. What
literature they have has certainly sprung mainly from the old soil that
still clung to the roots of the national life when it was taken up for
transplanting, and to this day it breathes more of the English earth
than of the Yankee soil, but it shows no continuation of the English
genius. Their new conditions have developed a new character; any
likeness to us that they may have once had has paled and faded away.
In one sense alone could
there be any approach to a continuation; this was in the prodigious
advantages they possessed in all material means at the beginning.
To a great extent they were able to build their immediate success on
foundations which we had laid for them. Our experience of ages did
supply them with tools to their hand, and they stepped into all our
command of the physical forces of nature easily as into ready-made
clothing. In this respect they found the royal road to empire, and
almost started with steam in their race of a national life. They
have had a splendid run. Prosperity has been sudden as some
spontaneous growth of the land, enriching human labour at a miraculous
rate of interest. But the success has not the sweetness of ours;
they have come into their good fortune; ours was earned hardly
by long centuries of toil and painful victory. Our institutions
have grown like the shell and shield of the nation’s inner life,
shaped by it and coloured with it; theirs have been cast, and the
national character has had to conform as best it might. The
largeness of their territory has passed into their language, but it has
not passed into the human nature. This idea of material size has
completely tyrannized over the Yankee mind, and dwarfed some of its
better qualities. We have no hesitation in asserting, that to the
New Englander the greatest thing done by the English—the high-water
mark of all our achievements—is London! No act of national
heroism, no lofty nobleness of character, no work in our literature, no
moral sublimity in our history, affects and overpowers the Yankee mind
as does the enormous size, the omnipresent magnitude of London. It
is the only English thing in the presence of which their assertive
nature is lost in astonishment, and cannot even make a disparaging
comparison: these miles on miles of human habitations, and this roaring
Niagara of multitudinous human life. But they are now in a court
of trial for nations, where size of country, length of land, breadth of
waters, and height of mountains will not count for much, if greatness of
soul be wanting. One human spirit dilating to its full stature may
be of far more avail. Shakspeare knew that by the greatness of
soul, rather than by the size of country, are nations great and
precious, when he sang of England as—
'This
land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.'
Again, the American national life has been spent chiefly on the surface,
in a fury of material activity or the loud raging of political strife,
which stuns and kills in the egg that more delicate spirit of thought
waiting for birth, and dimly dreaming of a life to come. They have
never produced any considerable class of men who dwell apart high on the
mountains, breathe a pure air and send down an influence as of healing
waters to run through the valleys and plains, sweetening and enriching
the lower life of the nation, and making it green and fruitful.
These are the men who in England constitute the party of humanity, and
hold the high places and the towers of defence against any encroachment
of tyranny, whether of Individuals or Mobs. Whatever fights take
place, or party is overthrown in the political arena, the life and
liberty of the nation are safe so long as these high places are held by
such as hold them with us.
Perhaps it is natural for
youth to boast when it first puts on the armour for the battle of life,
individual or national. The sense of power, and the will to
perform, are so strong within it. The sword glitters so pleasantly
to the young eyes—feels so satisfying to the grasp—so sharp to the
touch. Then we have a tendency to vaunt. We are stiller when
we return from victory at the close of some day of Marathon or Waterloo,
with dints on the armour, scars on the limbs, and a great work
done. We are quieter now. We have left our sting
behind. Possibly we might fairly boast a little as we think of one
good stroke in the thick of the fight—one rallying effort that helped
to turn the tide of battle; but we do not boast now; we have wrung the
strength and pride out of great obstacles: we let our deeds speak for
us. They may take the armour and hang it up to brighten other
eyes. They may tell the story to tingle in other ears. Our
boasting days are done.
The New Englanders, on the
other hand, flushed with prosperity, and fond of approbation, are
boastful and at the same time nervously sensitive to criticism. We
are aware of instances in which an honest English criticism—not harsh,
but not sufficiently flattering—has proved fatal to the friendly
feeling of American authors, who cannot stand that which English writers
put up with and live down every day. One cause of poor Edgar Poe’s
Ishmaelitish life amongst his fellow-authors was his love of playing
upon this national weakness. He found they could not swallow
criticism when spoken ever so kindly, and so he gave it to them
bitterly. And, as they had been long accustomed to nothing
stronger than a gentle tickling of each other’s thinskinnedness, they
yelled when his lash fell on them with its hearty smack, and they turned
on him instinctively.
Most people have noticed
how Nature, at certain whimsical moments, will mould human faces,
features, expressions, so queerly comical and quaintly absurd that all
the attempts of caricature fail to match them. Leech, Doyle, and
Cruikshank are outdone any day in the streets of London. In a
similar manner we find there is nothing like Nature for doing justice to
our American friends, and only American nature can give them adequate
representation. When Mr. Dickens drew the sketches of Yankee
character in his 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' they were assailed in America as
gross caricatures, and enjoyed in England as pictures very pleasant to
laugh at, if not exactly to be believed in. Since then we have
learned that the Americans do produce such characters, and perform such
things as cannot be caricatured. The work of the novelist does not
come near enough to that of Nature in quite another direction. We
have heard a whole nation telling the wide world that they 'must be
cracked up,' in just such an attitude as though Hannibal Chollop had
been their model. The two reporters of the Water-toast Gazette,
who described Martin Chuzzlewit, and took him, the one below the
waistcoat, the other above, were eclipsed by the reporters that attended
the Prince of Wales on his American tour. The Young Columbians who
harangued the Water-toast Sympathizers; General Choke, La Fayette,
Kettle, and Jefferson Brick, have reached their summit of the vulgar
sublime in the New York Herald. It does not appear probable at
first sight that any human being should use the greeting of General Fladdock to his friends, the Norrises—'And do I then once again behold
the choicest spirits of my country?' Yet we have it on reliable
authority that when a certain American was introduced to the poet
Longfellow, he struck an attitude, exclaiming, 'And is it possible that
I stand in the presence of the illustrious Mr. Longfellow?' In
Walt Whitman, a 'Rough,' a 'Kosmos,' as he delights to call himself,
America has given a living embodiment to that description of Elijah
Pogram ‘s:—
'A
model man, quite fresh from Nature’s mould. A true-born child of
this free hemisphere! verdant as the mountains of our country;
bright and flowing as our mineral Licks; unspiled by withering
conventionalisms as air our broad and boundless Perearers! Rough
he may be. So air our Barrs. Wild he may be. So air
our Baffalers. But he is a child of Natur’ and a child of
Freedom; and his boastful answer to the Despot and the Tyrant is that
his bright home is in the settin’ sun.'
The New Englanders have many excellences and many faults, both wholly
unlike our own. Of course there is a small minority amongst them
who see how the American institutions give the greatest chance for all
that is big and blatant to usurp attention; but it is difficult to
catch the quiet voice of their protest. They feel sad to know that
the worst American characteristics should so often be accepted as sole
representatives to the world. They trust that somehow or other the
power may yet be evolved which shall work up and refine the raw material
in which America abounds. We take Mr. Emerson to be the exponent
of the thoughts and feelings of this minority. We fancy that but
comparatively few of his countrymen will follow him up into his serener
range of vision. Still, he is very popular as a lecturer in the
New England States, especially with the thinking portion of their women,
which affords one of the pleasantest specimens of the Yankee character.
Carlyle praises Mr. Emerson
because, in such a never-resting locomotive country, he is one of those
rare men who have the invaluable talent of sitting still. But he
has not sat still with his eyes shut, nor merely looked on things with
that 'inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.' Whether he
turns his eyes abroad or fixes them on what passes around him at home,
he can now and again send a glance right to the heart of the
matter. Looking across the dreary flats of the American multitude,
we see him as a man in their midst of pronounced individuality, with
force to resist the tyranny of the majority—with moral courage and
mental vigour enough to withstand the pressure of the crowd.
Although sitting, he seems to us a head and shoulders above the rest,
and we think that what he says of his countrymen, as of us, is worth
listening to. He bears strong testimony that the populations of
the large cities of America are godless and
materialized. Observing the habit of expense, the riot
of the senses, the absence of bonds, clanship, fellow-feeling of all
kinds, in the hotel life of the large Atlantic cities, he fears that
when man or woman is driven to the wall the chances of integrity and
virtue are frightfully diminished; they are becoming a luxury which few
can afford. Pretension, he tells us, is the special foible of
American youth, and there is a restlessness in them which argues want of
character. They run away to other countries because they are not
good in their own, and then hurry back because they pass for nothing in
the new places. An eminent teacher of girls said, ‘The idea of a
girl’s education with us is, whatever qualifies them for going to
Europe;’ and for the consolation of those who are unable to travel,
Holmes wittily promises that ‘good Americans, when they die, go to
Paris.’
Mr. Emerson tells us
emphatically that the education is universal, but the ‘culture is
superficial.’ He perceives that the value of education must be
tested by its power of fostering and bringing forth the elements of
individuality; that the strength of the national character and the
reserve force of Race depend on the hidden amount of individuality there
may he hoarded in the land. To this wealth secreted by nature,
often in strange ways and unexpected places, we have to look when our
resources are most drawn upon and there is a run on the national
strength. When all our methods of culture may fail, this will give
us the right man, the hero, who steps forth and does his work, and seems
a gift direct from God. Mr. Emerson admits that one Alfred, one
Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney, one Raleigh, one Wellington, is
preferable to a million foolish democrats, and reminds his readers that
our communications with the Infinite must be personal; Heaven does not
deal with humanity, or save souls 'in bundles.'
It is our present
purpose, however, more particularly to examine what the New Englanders
have to say of the Old Home. Mr. Emerson goes deepest into the
biography of our national character, as written in the history of our
great Englishmen, and shows a closer acquaintance with the spirit of the
race, as it lives in our literature. Mr. Hawthorne is a much
shallower observer of appearances, and seldom goes beneath the surface
of things except in the expression of his own ill-feeling. Mr.
Emerson is fair in his judgments and frank in his statements. He
looks at the old land with clear, honest eyes, and is ungrudging in his
praise as fearless in his blame. His spirit is large and
magnanimous, but it has not got into the style of his
writing. The sentences in 'English Traits' are crisp to
crackling; yet the book is the best that has been written on its
subject. Mr. Emerson says it would take a hundred years to see
England well. He has evidently found that, to know the English
character well, you must study it for at least a thousand years
back. He tells us that he was given to understand in his childhood
that the British Island, from which his forefathers came, was—
‘no
lotus-garden, no paradise of serene sky and roses and music, and
merriment all the year round, but a cold, foggy, mournful country, where
nothing grew well in the open air but robust men and virtuous women, and
these of a wonderful fibre and endurance; that their best parts were
slowly revealed; their virtues did not come out until they
quarrelled; they did not strike twelve the first time: good lovers,
good haters, and you could know little about them till you had seen them
long, and little good of them till you had seen them in action;
that in prosperity they were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they
were grand.’
Mr. Emerson’s observations of England and the English lead him to the
conclusion that England is the best of actual nations. He finds
the country anchored at the side of Europe—the very heart of the modern
world. For a shop-keeping nation it has the finest position, the
best stand on the planet. Resembling a ship in shape, the most
patriotic of admirals could not have worked it into a more fortuitous
place, or anchored it more judiciously for commanding the watery
highways and the markets of the world. The sea, which Virgil
thought encircled and shut up the poor remote Britons from the rest of
the human family, has proved to be their ring of marriage with all
nations, and the largeness of its horizon has somehow entered into the
life of this little island. England is a model world on a
convenient scale, containing a miniature of Europe and a pocket
Switzerland, a soil of singular perfection, land and waters abounding
with plenty. The place is small, especially to the Yankee
mind, fearful of traversing it at full stride, lest it should overstep
the white chalk cliffs; but there is no bit of earth so closely packed
with every kind of wealth. Below the surface it is so in crammed
with the life of the past—every step of it holding you to read its
pages in the history of art or humanity—and above it is crowded with
the works of the past and the life of the present. To Mr. Emerson’s
eyes the island presents a little bit of Nature’s most felicitous work
in conception, left as a sketch, which has been finished like a perfect
picture by the hand of man. Originally the place was a prize for
the strongest—a fit home of hardy workers and heroic fighters, for the
best men to win: an island, whose chief enchantments were barren
shingle, rough weather, and cloudy skies. Yet many races came to
contend for it, and beat all the weakness out of each other, and leave
to it at last the legacy of their welded strength. Here the widest
extremes have met, and the fiercest antagonisms have clenched
hands. The mixture of a wide range of nationalities has produced a
race that is nobler than any one of those which have gone to the making
of it. The Briton in the blood still hugs the homestead the
Scandinavian listens to the murmurs of the mighty mother, the
ocean. The one spirit yearns wistfully across the blue waters,
with eyes that sparkle for adventure, whilst it is shut up on shore;
the other, when abroad, still turns with eyes of longing and heart that
aches with home-sickness to the little island lying far away. Mr.
Emerson thinks great advantages, in the matter of race, have been given
to the English, as well as in their geographical stand-point. But
they have toiled honestly to win their present position as the most
successful people for the last millennium. Their passion for
utility and their practical commonsense have given them the throne of
the modern world. The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English; the Turk and the Chinese are also making awkward efforts in the same
direction. Those who resist this influence neither feel it nor
obey it any the less. The English, Mr. Emerson says, are free,
forcible men, in a country where life is safe and has reached its
greatest value. They give the bias to the current age, not by
chance, or by mass, but by their character and by the number of
individuals among them of personal ability. They have
supreme endurance in labour and in war. Their success is not
sudden or fortunate, but they have maintained constancy for ages.
Their sense of superiority is founded on their habit of victory.
The nation, he says, has
yet a tough, acrid animal nature, which centuries of civilizing have not
been able to sweeten. The smoothness of following ages has not quite
effaced the stamp of Odin. Dear to the English heart is a fair,
stand-up fight, and a set-to in the streets will always delight the
passers-by. They love fair play, open fighting, a clear deck, and
want no favour. The English game, he avers, is main force to main
force—the planting of foot to foot, a rough tug and no dodging.
They hate all craft and subtlety; and when they have pounded each other
to a poultice, they will shake hands and be friends for the remainder of
their lives. They have extreme difficulty to run away, and will
die game: all fight well, from the costermongers, who learn to ‘work
their fists’ in the streets, up to the young ‘puppies,’ who ‘fought
well’ at Waterloo. They are good at storming redoubts, at
boarding frigates, at dying in the last ditch, on any desperate service
that has daylight and honour in it. But, with all this rough force
and supreme ‘pluck,’ the race, unlike the Roman, is tender as well
as stout of heart—‘as mild as it is game, and game as it is mild’:—
‘The
English,’ Mr. Emerson says, ‘do not wear their heart on their sleeve
for daws to peck at. They hide virtues under vices, or the
semblance of them. It is the misshapen, hairy Scandinavian Troll
again, who lifts the cart out of the mire, or “ threshes the corn that
ten day-labourers could not end,” but it is done in the dark, and with
a muttered malediction. He is a churl with a soft place in his
heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help
you at a pinch. He says no, and serves you, and your thanks
disgust him. There was lately a cross-grained miser, odd and ugly,
resembling in countenance the portrait of Punch with the laugh left out; rich by his own industry, sulking in a lonely house, who never gave a
dinner to any man, and disdained all courtesies, yet as true a
worshipper of beauty in form and colour as ever existed, and profusely
pouring over the cold mind of his countryman creations of grace and
truth, removing the reproach of sterility from English Art, catching
from their savage climate every fine hint, and importing into their
galleries every tint and trait of summer cities and skies; making an
era in painting; and when he saw that the splendour of one of his
pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his rival’s that hung next it,
secretly took a brush and blackened his own.'
No people, Mr. Emerson thinks, have so much thoroughness: they clinch
every nail they drive. They have no running for luck—no
immoderate speed. Conscious that no better race of men exists,
they rely most on the simplest means in war, business, and
mechanics. They do not put too fine a point on matters, but
concentrate the expense and the labour in the right place. They
are bound to see their measure carried, and will stick to it through
ages of defeat. Private persons will exhibit in scientific and
antiquarian researches the very same pertinacity as the nation showed in
the coalitions in which it yoked Europe together against the empire of Buonaparte, and fought on through failure after failure until it
conquered at last.
Mr. Emerson finds the
Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes.
They have in themselves, he says, what they value in their horses-mettle
and bottom. Their practical power rests on their national
sincerity, and their sincerity and veracity appear to result on a
sounder animal structure, as if they could afford it. They dare to
displease, and require you to be of your own opinion! They will
not have to do with a man in a mask; let them know the whole
truth. Say what you mean. Be what you are. Draw the
line straight, hit whom and where you may. The Englishman’s eye
looks full into the face of things, and he grips his weapon or tool by
the handle. He has a supreme eye to facts, a bias toward utility,
and a logic that brings salt to soup, hammer to nail, oar to boat; the
logic of cooks, carpenters, and chemists, following the sequence of
nature, and one on which words make no impression. Mr. Emerson considers
the unconditional surrender of the English mind to facts, and the choice
of means to reach their ends, are as admirable as with ants and bees.
Yet with this one-eyed logic of a Cyclopian kind of character he admits
that the English have a spirit of singular fairness, a belief in the
existence of two sides, and a resolution to see fair play. There is an
appeal from the assertion of the parties to the proof of what is
asserted. The whole universe of Englishmen will suspend their Judgment
until a trial can be had. He also says there is an English hero superior
to the French, the German, the Italian, or the Greek:—
‘The national temper in the civil history
is not flashy or whiffling. The slow deep English mass smoulders with
fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame. The wrath of London
is not French wrath, but has a long memory, and in its hottest heat a
register and a rule. Half of their strength they put not forth.
They
never let out all the length of their reins. But they are capable of a
sublime resolution; and if, hereafter, the war of races, often
predicted and making itself a war of opinion also (a question of
despotism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the
English civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their
floating castles, and find a new home and a second millennium of power
in their colonies. Whoever would see the uncoiling of that tremendous
spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces, must follow the
swarms which, pouring now for two hundred years from the British
Islands, have sailed and traded and fought and colonized through all
climates round the globe.’
One great secret of the English power Mr.
Emerson perceives lies in the mutual good understanding of the race.
Difference of rank does not divide the national heart. An electric touch
by any of our national ideas will melt us all into one family. This we
have proved on many a hard-fought field, where peer and peasant have
stood shoulder to shoulder, and fallen side by side. 'English
believes in English. They have trust in each other. The very felons have
pride in one another’s English staunchness. The people are more bound
in character than differenced in ability and rank.’
Mr. Emerson delights in the English
plainness of speech and dress. An Englishman, he remarks, understates
and avoids the superlative, ‘checks himself in compliment, alleging
that in the French language one cannot speak without lying.' Pretension and vapouring are always distasteful.
‘They keep to the
other extreme of low tone in voice, dress, and manners. They hate
pretence and nonsense and sentimentalism. Plain, rich clothes and
equipage, with plain, rich finish, mark the English truth. Where
ornaments are worn, they must be gems. They dislike everything
theatrical in public life, and anything showy in private. They have no
French taste for a badge. The Lord dresses a little worse than the
Commoner; but the best dress with them is that which is the most
difficult to remember or describe.’
The upper classes have only birth,
say the people across the water. Mr. Emerson replies, Yes, but they have
manners, and it is wonderful how much talent runs into manners; power
of any kind readily appears in the manners, and beneficent power gives a
majesty which cannot be concealed or resisted. The superior education of
the nobles recommends them to the country. They are high-spirited,
active, educated men, born to wealth and power, who have run through
every country, and kept in every country the best company; have seen
every secret of art and Nature. They have the sense of superiority, with
the absence of all the ambitious effort which disgusts in the aspiring
classes; a pure tone of thought and feeling, and the power to command,
among their other luxuries, the presence of the most accomplished men in
their festive meetings. Besides, these are they who make England that
strong-box and museum it is; who gather and protect works of art,
dragged from amidst burning cities and revolutionary countries, and
brought hither out of all the world. These lords, says Mr. Emerson, are
the treasurers and librarians of mankind, engaged by their pride and
wealth to this function; and he pardoned high park-fences, when he
found that besides does and pheasants, these have preserved Arundel
marbles, Townley galleries, Howard and Spenserian libraries, Warwick and
Portland vases, Saxon manuscripts, monastic architecture, millennial
trees, and breeds of cattle elsewhere extinct. Mr. Emerson holds that
some men are born to own, and can animate their possessions. Others
cannot; their owning, is not graceful. They seem to steal their own
dividends. Those should own, who can administer; not they who hoard and
conceal. And he is the rich man in whom the people are rich; whilst he
is the poor man in whom the people are poor. He also perceives, rightly
enough, that the English aristocracy strengthen their hold on the
national heart by making the private life their place of honour. Domesticity is the tap-root which enables the nation to branch wide and
high; and this the nobility, the county-families, carefully cultivate.
They do not give up their country tastes to a town life, nor are their
rural predilections absorbed even by a life spent in the service of the
State. They like to live on their own lands, amongst their people, and
they wisely and frequently exchange the crowds that are not company, and
the talk that is hut a tinkling cymbal, for intercourse with out-of-door
nature, the bursting of blossoms, the singing of birds, the waving of
wheat, the breath of the heather, and the smell of the turnips.
They
seek to renew life at the springs of health, which gives a fresh bloom
to the fireside humanities. The love and labour of generations are spent
on the building, planting, and decorating their homesteads, and the
world has been ransacked to enrich them.
Surveying the England of to-day, Mr.
Emerson is ready, like the rest of us, to under-value the Present.
This
has always been a common failing, or an uncommon virtue, of human
nature. The greatest periods of our history, which to us seem filled
with divine heat and a plenitude of power, have been spoken lightly of
by some that lived in them. Mr. Emerson thinks no ‘sublime augury’
cheers the student of our current literature—no greatness, unless
perhaps in our criticism, which often bespeaks the ‘presence of the
invisible gods.’ Meanwhile, he knows there is always a retrieving
power in the English race. He can see but little life in the Church of
England (he wrote some eight or nine years ago); but he admits it ‘has
many certificates to show of humble, effective service in humanizing the
people, in cheering and refining men—feeding, healing, educating.
It has
the seal of martyrs and confessors; the noblest books; a sublime
architecture; a ritual marked by the same secular merits, nothing cheap
or purchasable.‘ And he holds that, ‘if religion be the doing of all
good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil,—souifrir de tout le
monde et faire soujfrir personne,—that divine secret has existed in
England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson, and of
Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame.’
Mr. Emerson is wrong in supposing that the
English husband has a right to lead the wife to market for sale. He
likewise dwells too strongly perhaps on the fleshly side of the national
character—our love of good feeding and drinking; dips us rather too
deep in beer and flesh-pots, and lays too much stress on the coarseness
of our logic, and the materiality of our success.‘ No people have true
common sense but those who are born in England,’ said Montesquieu.
But
the English common sense is not limited merely to what we call doing
well in the world. It is not confined to drudgery or going to market.
It
has no dread of singularity, and is not nonplussed by finding itself in
novel positions. In short, the total of English common sense contains
something that is lacking in the common sense of other nations. It is
that sort of common sense which is compatible with the greatest
imagination; so that the work of the one looks like the result of the
other inspired and transfigured. Mr. Emerson has a lurking misgiving
that the English are not equally good at making the fine upstroke with
their firm down-stroke, and are wanting in the lively spirit and sparkle
of fancy. But we would remind him that fancy is a much lower mental
faculty, with all its brilliant quickness, than that imagination which,
in its simple sublimity, is apt to look like common sense, and a homely
force for every-day work. Fancy catches the light with its spectrum, and
breaks it into colours. Imagination sees things in the plain, pure,
unbroken light. Fancy plays with illusions, and dallies with likenesses.
Imagination does not care to tell us what things are like; it announces
facts as they are, or uses its metaphor by Identification and not as a
Comparison. The greatest Imagination is the greatest Realist in the high
ranges, just as Common Sense is in the lowest. Indeed, if rightly
considered, the loftiest 'Ideal' (we use this word with reluctance) is
to the great Imagination only the utmost Real.
Again, Mr. Emerson sees the value of
English Individuality, but does not point out that, whilst we produce
the most robust specimens of individuality under the sun, and the
largest number of men who dare to be a minority of one, think just as
they like, and say what they think, even as their forefathers have been
doing for hundreds of years, yet this force, so independent in the
individual, is kept well in hand by an essentially law-abiding,
law-loving spirit. It seldom breaks out at the
wrong time, or in the wrong way. The strong feeling of Nationality
gathers it up, and guides it for the good and glory of the country.
It
can all be repressed within the necessary bounds when England needs, as
a man will draw back a step to strike a fuller blow. And it is this
repression of so much individuality within the bounds of law that puts
so much reserved power into the national character, and gives to its
motions the perfect harmony of restrained strength. It is perfectly true
that we have put more of this individuality into literature than any
other people has done; we possess more of it in common life than any;
and more of it goes to the making of the English than any other race.
But our pre-eminence amongst races and nations lies chiefly in the fact
that these bristling and startling individualities, which keep strangers
at a distance, can be all turned in one direction when the foe is in
front; and the nation of oddities will march into battle as evenly, and
with the oneness of the Macedonian Phalanx; and though the rear-rank man
could step into a leader’s place at a pinch, yet we can keep each man
his position, ruled by a stronger power than ever held the Greek or
Roman shields together.
Mr. Emerson can see that the English are a
people of a myriad personalities, and cannot be represented by the
popular figures of John Bull and John’s bull-dog. He admits that,
after all, what is said about a nation is a superficial dealing with
symptoms. 'We cannot go deep enough into the biography of the spirit who
never throws himself entire into one hero, but delegates his energy in
parts. The wealth of the source is seen in the plenitude of English
nature. What variety of power and talent; what facility and
plenteousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; what
a proud chivalry is indicated in Collins’s Peerage, through eight
hundred years! What dignity resting on what reality and stoutness! What
courage in war, with sinew in labour, what cunning workmen, what
inventors, engineers, seamen, in pilots, clerks, and scholars! No one
man, and no few men, can represent them.' Mr. Hawthorne, on the other
hand, only believes in one John Bull—the popular embodiment of beef and
beer; the bluff, hearty yeoman, with no possible refinement whatever;
the Falstaff-like mountain of
a man, who puts all his weight into his tread—especially if a Yankee’s
tender toes happen to be in the way; with his stomach full of meat, and
pockets full of money; his face in a ruddy glow, like a round, red
harvest-moon, except when mottled, double-chinned, and treble-chinned.
This is his image of the genuine Englishman; and he is sadly oppressed
by the weight and size of it. That which does not come up, or swell out,
to these proportions is not English in his estimation. It is too 'refined,'
and more properly belongs to the American nation. Thus he finds that the
sailor-darling of the English people, Nelson, was no representative of
ours, because he had none of the ponderous respectability, the gross
physique, which are to Mr. Hawthorne the sole sign and symbol of English
nationality. Nelson was delicately organized as a woman, and as
painfully sensitive as a poet; moreover, he had genius which no
Englishman it seems ever possessed, unless he was morbid and maimed, ‘as
we may satisfy ourselves by running over the list of their poets, for
example, and observing how many of them have been sickly or deformed,
and how often their lives have been darkened by insanity.’ The reader
will be sure to see how great is the truth of observation here, and how
apposite the illustration. It is well known that genius never did break
out in our race, except as the result of disease! Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, George Chapman and Walter Scott were remarkably morbid men.
Whilst Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and many other of our great poets,
were undoubtedly insane. Nelson, Mr. Hawthorne says, won the love and
admiration of his country through the efficacy of qualities that are not
English. Precisely so. It never was an English quality to bring your
ship close alongside that of the enemy, and there live or there die—one
must go down before we part! Nor did Nelson understand the national
nature in the least when he made his famous appeal to the sentiment of
duty. He did not belong to us; and he was so successful because so
eminently un-English! Let us see what Mr. Emerson says on this head:—
‘The English delight in the antagonism
which combines in one person the extremes of courage and tenderness.
Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his love to Lord Collingwood, and,
like an innocent schoolboy that goes to bed, says, “ Kiss me, Hardy,”
and turns to sleep. Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of a nature the
most affectionate and domestic. And, Sir James Parry said, the other
day, of Sir John Franklin, that, if he found Wellington Sound open, he
explored it; for he was a man who never turned his back on a danger,
yet of that tenderness that he would not brush away a mosquito.'
But Mr. Hawthorne cannot see the
relationship of Nelson to our race because he was not a big John Bull
kind of man, with a robust personal vigour, and unpolishably rugged.
Nor
does he appear to know that this island has produced many of the most
delicate, yet perfectly healthy, natures that ever breathed an aroma of
womanly sweetness into literature-such as Philip Sidney, George Herbert,
and Spenser, whom we take at random, as diverse illustrations of a far
different sort of Englishmen.
Mr. Hawthorne is blind to the fact that
John Bull’s stoutness lies in the spirit as well as in corporal
substance, and that Nelson, with his small stature and slender form, is
as much an Englishman in spirit as though he had weighed twenty stone;
whilst the slender body of Shelley contained as much English ‘pluck’
as did the large bulk of Dr. Johnson. The truth is that no greater
fallacy obtains than this respecting the typical Englishman. Not that we
wish for a moment to repudiate John Bull, or deny that Mr. Punch’s
portraits have the stamp of authenticity. We admit the groundwork of the
character: let others build as they may upon it! We rejoice in John,
with his sturdy spirit magnificently lodged in plenty of flesh. We like
to see his face across the dinner-table, purple with port, it may be;
or meet him in the farmyard, when the increase of the year has gently
swelled his sense of self-importance, and his genial smile is an
illumination of contentedness. We like the humour of the thing, and are
not concerned to point out that the sum-total of the English character
is not included in the one picture. The type represents certain elements
of the national strength, and it answers to the requirements of the
popular imagination, which expects and demands that all greatness shall
have large physical embodiment. But few of our great Englishmen have
really been formed in this mould. Ben Jonson and Henry VIII. would
almost stand alone. On the other hand, what a number we might name of
Englishmen, true as ever breathed, who were neither of massive form nor
heroic height of stature, and whose greatness could not he measured by
their girth,—from Francis Drake to Nelson, from Milton and Newton to
William Pitt! Let us not be misunderstood. We are not growing ashamed
of our own flesh and blood because Mr. Hawthorne has fallen into an
error. We do not see that souls fatten with our American cousins from
the body’s leanness, and we trust that John Bull may flourish long and
his shadow never grow less. It is what Oxford men term the ‘beefiness
of the fellow’ which has turned the scale of victory in his favour;
enabled him to give the winning stroke with oar or sword in many a close
tug of contest; and when he has thrown his enemy in some last deadly
wrestle, he has fallen on him with double weight. Those observers,
however, who persist in seeing only the coarse, earthy outside of John
Bull are not likely to do justice to that inner sanctuary of the English
nature, where the gentler virtues nestle in dim, shy nooks, and the
tender undergrowths of home feelings and kindly affections are nurtured
and protected by the surrounding strength, or they might possibly see
how many springs of secret sweetness tend to humanize and spiritualise
the ponderous nature of the massive man.
We are charged with being dumb and sombre,
gross and taciturn; each man a living image of our geographical
isolation. But this uninviting exterior shields and shelters much
delicate inner life, and gives it privacy. This kind of character
affords quiet for the mind to brood in, and sufficient depth of soil to
grow the choicest fruits. English nature likes to dwell inside of good
thick walls, that are not easily overlooked, and cannot bear such as are
transparent to the public gaze. It loves a privacy shady and sacred, and
rather prefers to grow prickly externally, for protection. We are
generally shy and shut-up with one another, and particularly so with
strangers. Those, therefore, who judge the Englishman and the English
race from the outside will do about as much justice as we should to
Shakspeare if we could ignore his works, with all their imagery of his
inner life, and remember only the fact that he made all the money he
could in London, and then went back to Stratford to try and make more.
What a genuine John Bull he would have been! The race which has produced
Shakspeare—and he is our sole adequate representative man—may at least
fairly claim to possess as great a range and variety of character as can
be found in his works. But Mr. Hawthorne is not favourably endowed or
fitted to enter the English nature; he acknowledges only one type, and
that, to him, a repulsive one.
He also thinks us a one-eyed people, and
the secret of our success is to be found in our way of shutting the
other, so as to get the most distinct and decided view. In this manner,
we achieve magnificent triumphs without seeing half the obstacles and
difficulties which lie in the way—if we would only keep both eyes open.
He says if General M’Clellan could but have shut his left eye, the
right one would long ago have guided his army into Richmond. But it
appears the Yankee mind cannot thus stultify itself, it is so very
wide-awake; nor could it condescend to stumble into victory; it must
see the way clear, with both eyes open, before it would take advantage
of fortune.
It is interesting to know the kind of man
that he did like, not to say fell in love with. Poor Leigh Hunt, with
his southern weakness of fibre and his amiable simplicities of
character, he found quite delightful. He was a beautiful and venerable
old man—more soft and agreeable in manners than any other Englishman
whom Mr. Hawthorne met. Exceedingly appreciative of American praise,
which he received with face quietly alive, and gentle murmurs of
satisfaction and continual folding of hands! But ‘there was not an
English trait in him from head to foot, morally, intellectually, or
physically. Beef, ale, or stout, brandy or port-wine, entered not at all
into his composition. His person and manners were thoroughly American,
and of the best type.’ We are glad Mr. Hawthorne perceived that this
was not the sort of stuff out of which Englishmen are usually made, nor
the pattern according to which they are cut. This was a man whom the
Yankee could patronize. Now, John Bull cannot stand patronage, either
greasy or grim; he will not have it. Mr. Hawthorne would patronize us
if he could; if we would only allow it. ‘An American,’ he says, ‘is
not very apt to love the English people, as a whole, on whatever length
of acquaintance. I fancy they would value our regard, and even
reciprocate it in their ungracious way, if we could give it to them in
spite of all rebuffs.’ But the national character is not so easily got
over as was Leigh Hunt.
Mr. Hawthorne is almost as much oppressed
in mind with what he elegantly terms the ‘female Bull’ as he is with
the male. The only figure, he tells us, that comes fairly forth to his
mind’s eye out of his life at Leamington is ‘that of a dowager, one
of hundreds whom I used to marvel at in England, who had an awful
ponderosity of frame; not pulpy, like the loose development of our few
fat women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that
(though struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of
her as made up of steaks and sirloins!’ We confess never to have
thought of this when we have looked on those rubicund old English
ladies, so light of heart that they can carry their external weight with
jovial impunity and occupy their proper share of space, like an overflow
of satisfaction; with their eminently delightful old faces, and cheeks
like the summer jenneting and more than its sweetness in their smile.
On
seeing such women, and the young-eyed spirit yet looking out in spite of
age, we have thought of motherhood in its mellowest aspect: we may have
marvelled where the violet nature of the slender girl had gone, but we
never contemplated the jolliest, most solid old dame from the cannibal
point of view! But Mr. Hawthorne, in his ineffable coarseness, cannot
even look on the budding beauty of English girlhood, or the full flower
of English womanhood, without speculating upon the quantity of ‘clay’
that makes up the human form. He cannot get rid of the idea that Bull is
made of beef, and accordingly ‘beef’ enters into all his
calculations, although he sometimes calls it ‘clay.’ He admits being
driven to acknowledge that English ladies, ‘looked at from a lower
point of view, were perhaps a little finer animals’ than the American
women; but ‘it would be a pitiful bargain to give up the ethereal
charm of American beauty in exchange for half a hundred-weight of human
clay.’
If nature refuses to go beyond a pallid
brier-rose kind of beauty, a lily-like delicacy of grace, and cannot
produce the fuller bosom and riper tint, by all means let our friends
set up their lily ideal of womanhood for home admiration, and stick the
faint wild-rose symbol in the national button-bole. Tastes differ, and
we are not so ‘refined’ in ours. We like to see how victorious a
thing is the force of beauty in the full glory of physical health.
We do
not despise the roses that bloom all the winter through, even though an
American taste be apt to deem the deep healthy bloom ‘fitter for a
milkmaid than a lady.’ A Yankee may think that his ‘national
paleness and lean habit of flesh’ may give an advantage in an
æsthetic point of view. We like to feel the radiating health, and to
hear the ring of it in the voice.
Our English women, however, are not all of
the ponderous size that—like America to the Americans—they have to be
embraced at twice. Nor are our types of feminine loveliness all of the
buxom and blooming kind. We, too, have our white lilies of womanhood,
with slim, tall figures, flowing shapes, and faces that have the Greek
fineness of feature. If Mr. Hawthorne had noticed their delicacy of form
and complexion, he might have completed his family picture by calling
these the ‘veal of the female Bull.’ Moreover, the Yankees may pride
themselves on their ‘refinement’ and spareness of flesh, and they
may produce a race of men who shall lack the English sap, hue, and
plumpness; men who shall be lean in look, lanky in limb, and
lantern-jawed, without its following necessarily that these shall be
flashing heroic little Nelsons; workers wiry and tenacious as Pitt;
poets with the delicate nature of Keats, the champagne-sparkle of Praed,
the pathetic wit of Hood, or the beauty of holiness that shines through
the verse of Vaughan. The thinness worn by a soul too keen for its
physical sheath, or the fire of genius making its lamp of the body
diaphanous, may be a different sort of thing from the thinness produced
by a desiccating climate.
We said that Mr. Hawthorne was a shallow
observer. Here are one or two striking illustrations of our meaning.
At
Uttoxeter he asked a boy of some twelve years of age if he had ever
heard of Dr. Johnson’s penance in the Market-place, where he stood
bareheaded in the rain. The boy had never heard of it. Whereupon Mr.
Hawthorne remarks, ‘Just think of the absurd little town knowing
nothing of the only memorable incident which ever happened within its
boundaries since the old Britons built it!’ And this because one
little boy had not heard of the circumstance!
Again, in Greenwich Park, Mr. Hawthorne saw
some of the London ‘unwashed’ disporting themselves, and he infers a
mighty difference betwixt the working-classes of England and America.
He
remarks, ‘Every man and woman on our side of the water has a
working-day suit and a holiday suit, and is occasionally fresh as a rose; whereas in the good old country the grimness of his labour or squalid
habits clings forever to the individual, and gets to be a part of his
personal substance.’ These, he says, are broad (very broad of the
mark) ‘facts, involving great corollaries and dependencies.’ An
inference this about on a par with that of the old gentleman who wrote a
tract on the ‘Falling Sickness amongst the London Rooks!’ At the
Twelve Brethren of Leicester’s Hospital, Mr. Hawthorne finds that a
countryman of his had framed a bit of poor Amy Robsart’s needlework in a
carved piece of oak from Kenilworth Castle; and he says, ‘certainly, no
Englishman would be capable of this little bit of enthusiasm.’ As
if Englishmen had never done not only tenderly graceful acts, but the
most seriously absurd things in their enthusiasm!
Nothing short of the most cheery nature
could have had heart to smile into Mr. Hawthorne’s bitter wintry face
long enough to win a smile of approval in return. Once or twice,
however, we catch a watery sunbeam there for a moment, even in the
presence of English people. He was delighted to find there were women
amongst us who by their dress acknowledged that they were poor, and thus
had the grace of fitness which is not ashamed of being, like the daisy,
one of the commonplaces of Nature. A kind of beauty this, he says, that
will certainly never be found in America, where every girl tries to
dress herself into somebody else. Also he remarks that in England people
can grow old without the weary necessity of seeming younger than they
are. ‘In old English towns Old Age comes forth more cheerfully and
genially into the sunshine than among ourselves, where the rush, stir,
bustle, and irreverent energy of Youth are so preponderant that the poor
forlorn grandsires begin to doubt whether they have a right to breathe
in such a world any longer, and so hide their silvery heads in solitude.’
Mr. Hawthorne seems to have shared somewhat
in the feeling common to New Englanders, of the higher culture and
quieter nature, who tell us of their longings for the ‘Old Home,’
and their love of its special English features. We are acquainted with
New Englanders in whom the Old home feeling is at times inexpressibly
strong. When their life has been more than usually moved down to the
roots of it under the influence of a great sorrow, it has seemed as
though they touched England at that depth, and they have experienced a
‘blind, pathetic tendency’ to wander back to the old place once
more. Having no wish to disparage their own country, they yet feel there
is something in English air and the tender sweetness of the green grass; the lark, singing in the blue sky overhead; our wild flowers, which
seem as the affectionate diminutives used by Nature in her fondest
speech; our field foot-paths that wander and shady lanes that loiter
along their lines of beauty; the homesteads that nestle in the heart of
rural life, and thatched cottages that peep on the wayfarer through
their wreaths of honeysuckle and roses; our grand Gothic cathedrals,
grey old Norman towers, and village church-spires; the long, rich grass
that fattens round the old abbeys, which they cannot find in their own
country. We have heard them say that the only real quiet life seems to
be in England, and the only stillness sacred for the dead to rest in
seems to lie under the mossy stone or daisied mound of an English
country churchyard. Home is not easily extemporised on so vast a scale
as is mapped out in America; and England alone, with her nestling nooks
and old associations and brooding peace, satisfies the finer sense.*
Mr.
Hawthorne confesses that ‘However one’s Yankee patriotism may
struggle against the admission, it must be owned that the trees and
other objects of an English landscape take hold of the observer by
numberless minute tendrils, as it were, which, look as closely as we
choose, we never find in an American scene. Visiting these famous
localities, I hope that I do not compromise my American patriotism by
acknowledging that I was often conscious of a fervent hereditary
attachment to the native soil of our forefathers, and felt it to be our
own “old Home.” ‘ He thinks it a charming country on a very small
scale, wherein Nature works with a pre-Raphaelite minuteness, much
patient affection, and many tender sympathies, her handiwork being
inimitable about the trunks of our trees, a square foot of old wall, and
a yard or two of dense green hedge; a sprig of ivy embroidering an old
boundary-fence, or the mosses taking shape in the cut letters of a name
on a tombstone and keeping some forgotten memory green. On the whole, we
have no doubt that Mr. Hawthorne found England much too good for the
English. For his part, he says, he used to wish they could annex the
island, ‘transferring the thirty millions of inhabitants to some
convenient wilderness in the great West, and putting half or a quarter
as many of ourselves into their places. The change would he beneficial
to both parties. We, in our dry atmosphere, are getting too nervous,
haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be
made grosser. John Bull, on the other hand, has grown bulbous,
long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too
intensely English. In a few more centuries he will be the earthliest
creature that ever the earth saw ‘—unless, we presume, such an
intermixture and amalgamation with our American cousins should take place.
But our little island refuses all such patronage steadily as does the
national character. Besides which, what does Mr. Hawthorne say of our
picturesque foot-paths that go winding from stile to stile, and village
to village, by green hedgerows and park-palings and gurgling brooks and
lonely farmhouses; keeping from age to age their sacred right of way?
‘An American farmer would plough across such a path, and obliterate it
with his hills of potatoes and Indian corn; but here it is protected by
law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably springs up in the
soil along the well-defined footprints of centuries. Old associations
are sure to be fragrant herbs in English nostrils; we pull them up as
weeds.’ So that on the whole, perhaps, it were as well that we should
not be ferried across the Atlantic just yet. We should like to love the
island a little longer, and keep in sanctity many of its immemorial
characteristics.
We find nothing whatever in Mr. Hawthorne’s
English experience to account for his acrimony. He has recorded no proof
that either the country or the national character deserved the
bitterness which he appears to have felt before he came hither, and with
which he has gone grumbling home. He lets out that he seldom came into
personal relations with an Englishman without beginning to like him, and
feeling the favourable impression wax stronger with the progress of the
acquaintance. Again, he confesses that an American in an English house
will ‘soon adopt the opinion that the English are the very kindest
people on the earth, and will retain the idea as long, at least, as he
remains on the inner side of the threshold.’ Once outside, Mr.
Hawthorne opines that the magnetism which attracts within the magic
line, becomes repellent to all beyond. It is very unfair, however, that
because the Yankee contracts into the chilling consciousness of his
national self when he gets outside the circle of genial warmth, welling
humanity, and hearty hospitality, and begins remembering his prejudices,
the English character should be held at fault, and charged with the
blame. The ‘acrid quality’ which Mr. Hawthorne speaks of as being in
the moral atmosphere of England, will, we fear, be found in his own
nature. He met with friends most cordially kind, ‘dear friends,
genial, outspoken, open-hearted Englishmen,’ who represented the
national nature at its best, from the one who made his visit to Oxford
so sunny in memory, to the young friend who
‘used to come and sit or
stand by my fireside, talking vivaciously and eloquently with me about
literature and life, his own national characteristics and mine, with
such kindly endurance of the many rough republicanisms wherewith I
assailed him, and such frank and amiable assertion of all sorts of
English prejudices and mistakes, that I understood his countrymen
infinitely the better for him, and was almost prepared to love the
intensest Englishman of them all for his sake. Bright was the
illumination of my dusky little apartment as often as he made his
appearance there.‘
Strengthened and encouraged by
the potent spirit
of bold John Barleycorn, Mr. Hawthorne felt it in his heart to say that
’the climate of England has been shamefully maligned. Its sulkiness and
asperities are not nearly so offensive as Englishmen tell us (their
climate being the only attribute of their country which they never
overvalue); and the really good summer weather is the very kindest and
sweetest that the world knows.‘
And, before he left England, he
confesses that his taste had begun to deteriorate by acquaintance with
the plumper modelling of female loveliness than it had been his ‘happiness
to know at home,’ although he is firmly resolved to uphold as angels
those American ladies who may be a trifle lacking as women. Whilst
regarding the grace which it appears does at times veil our coarser ‘clay,’
he admits that
‘an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so
pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm
of half blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood
shaded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American
girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment.'
So
that in his experience of English character and climate and home and its
men and women, we find no warrant, we repeat, for the bitterness of Mr.
Hawthorne’s book. Yet, from one end to the other, it is steeped in
vinegar and gall. Something of this may come from the great national
calamity; the ‘Star, Wormwood’ has fallen into the stream of
American life, and turned it into blood for them, and bitterness for us.
And our Yankee friends have exhibited on a national scale the same kind
of character as that which flies at others, bent on distributing the
misfortune that has befallen itself; such as is shown by the husband
who thrashes his wife when his temper may have been crossed; or, to
take it in a more comical aspect, that of the boy, who, having
deservedly received a slap on the head, flings a stone at the first inoffending dog he meets. But there is a root of bitterness in Mr.
Hawthorne that goes deeper than this; it was planted long before the
flag of Secession. This broad fact, palpable throughout the book, could
not he brought to a finer point than in the passage we are about to
quote.
A friend had given Mr. Hawthorne his
suburban residence, with all its conveniences, elegancies, and
snuggeries; its drawing-rooms and library, ‘still warm and bright with
the recollections of the genial presences that we had known there;‘ its
closets, chambers, kitchen, and wine-cellar; its lawn and cosy
garden-nooks, and whatever else makes up the comprehensive idea of an
English home—‘he had transferred it all to us, pilgrims and dusty
wayfarers, that we might rest and take our ease during his summer’s absence on the Continent.’
And Mr.
Hawthorne enjoyed it all, and felt the feeling of home there as he had
felt it nowhere else in this world. The weather, he says, was that of
Paradise itself. He wandered up and down the walks of the delightful
garden, felt the delicious charm of our summer grey skies, the richness
of our verdure; felt that the hunger and thirst for natural beauty
might he satisfied with our grass and green leaves alone; and,
‘conscious
of the triumph of England in this respect, and loyally anxious for the
credit of my own country, it gratified me to observe what trouble and
pains the English gardeners are fain to throw away in producing a few
sour plums and abortive pears and apples; as, for example, in this very
garden where a row of unhappy trees were spread out perfectly flat
against a brick wall, looking as if impaled alive, or crucified, with a
cruel and unattainable purpose of compelling them to produce rich fruit
by torture. For my part I never ate an English fruit, raised in the open
air, that could compare in flavour with a Yankee turnip.’
Mr. Hawthorne is hardly quite right in
saying that not an Englishman of us all ever spared them for the sake of
courtesy or kindness. Yet it would not be of any advantage if we were to
besmear one another all over with butter and honey. He is right in
saying that Americans cannot judge of our susceptibility by their own.
Thick-headed we may be, and it dulls many a blow but we are not quite so
thin-skinned as they are. None of them all ever said harder things of us
than we continually say of ourselves and of each other. Let them abuse
us bitterly as they please (and we shall still find reasonable cause for
self-blame besides any blots that they can hit **), we do not see how
that will help them out of their difficulty, or hasten the decline and
fall of England, which they seem to fancy is coming, and must come.
Mr.
Emerson even appears to think we have seen our best days. He writes:—
‘If we will visit London, the present
time is the best time, as some signs portend that it has reached its highest point.
It is
observed that the English interest us a little less within a few years;
and hence the impression that the British power has culminated, is in
solstice, or already declining.’
Mr. Emerson should have known that, if
England had been declining, the interest of his countrymen could not
have been lessened on that account. What says Mr. Hawthorne on this
subject? ‘At some unexpected moment there must come a terrible crash.
The sole reason why I should desire it to happen in my days is, that I
might be there to see.’ It appears to us exceedingly lucky that
England could not be set on fire easily, as a single building, or the
author of the above atrocious avowal might, when here, have been tempted
to emulate the youth who fired the Ephesian temple. We have no wish to
see the ruin of Mr. Hawthorne’s country, and trust that it may yet he
averted.
Wordsworth told Mr. Emerson, thirty years
ago, that the Americans needed a civil war to teach the necessity of
knitting the social ties stronger; and, whatsoever the result may be,
that war has come. Their character, as well as institutions, is on its
trial. The only real test that has probed it to the heart is now
presented to it. Its qualities, good and bad, are as on the
threshing-floor of fate, where the gathered together flails are beating
fiercely, to separate the wheat from the straw; and the storm-winds are
blowing mightily, to winnow the chaff from the grain. We wish them well
through the purifying process, and hope they may emerge a better nation,
of nobler men, with simpler manners, greater reverence, higher aims, a
loftier tone of honour, and a lower tone of talk-as will inevitably
follow the living of a more unselfish life, and the doing of more
earnest work. And when they shall have passed through their crucial
experiment they will undoubtedly know the English character somewhat
better.
We have not the least consolation for those
who would not mind marching to ruin their own country, if upheld by the
proud thought that England also was doomed to a speedy fall. There is
not the least sign of such a consummation, devoutly as it may be wished.
We never knew John Bull in better health and spirits. Our patriotic
sense has been wonderfully quickened of late years; suffering has drawn
our bonds of union closer. We were never more near being English, that
is, Conservatives to a man. Those who are so cosmopolitan as to admire
and love every country except their own have had a throw which has taken
the breath out of them. The spirit of our people, the sap of the
national life, has of late dwelt less in the branches, and more in the
roots of the tree. There has been little flutter in the leaves above,
but more concentrated vitality in the fibres clinging to the earth
below. This is the meaning of our unanimity and unity. We are able and
happy to assure our American friends that the following words, written
years since by Mr. Emerson, yet apply to us with an added force:—
'I happened to arrive in England at the
moment of a commercial crisis. But it was evident that, let who will
fail, England will not. These people have sat here a thousand years, and
here will continue to sit. They will not break up, or arrive at any
desperate revolution, like their neighbours; for they have as much
energy, as much continence of character, as they ever had.'
'The wise ancients did not praise the
ship parting with flying colours from the port, but only that brave
sailor which came back with torn sheets and battered sides, stripped of
her banners, but having ridden out the storm. And so I feel in regard to
this aged England, with the possessions, honours, and trophies, and also
with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her,
irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot
be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new
and with all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing
populations—I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering
that she has seen dark days before; indeed, with a kind of instinct that
she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle
and calamity she has a secret vigour and a pulse like a cannon. I see
her in her old age, not decrepit but young, and still daring to believe
in her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, —All hail! mother of nations, mother of heroes, with strength still equal to the
time; still wise to entertain and swift to execute the policy which the
mind and heart of mankind requires in the present hour. So be it! so let
it be!
|
