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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:—
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‘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!
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