Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> Hawthorne and His Circle

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

If the Blodgett house, or houses, were unique, so were the Yankee
boarders. The race of our merchant-marine captains disappeared with
their ships, and they will return no more. The loss is irretrievable,
for in many respects they held the ideal of patriotic and energetic
Americanism higher than it is likely to go again. When at sea, in
command of and responsible for their ships and cargoes, they were, no
doubt, upon occasion, despots and slave-drivers; but their crews were
often recruited from among the dregs of men of all nations, who would
interpret kindness as timidity and take an ell where you gave them an
inch. No doubt, too, there were incarnate devils among these
captains--actual monomaniacs of cruelty and viciousness--though none
of these were known at Mrs. Blodgett's. Round her board sat men only
of the manliest sort. They had the handiness and versatility of the
sailor, wide and various knowledge of all quarters of the globe and of
types of mankind, though, to be sure, their investigations did not
proceed far beyond their ports, and you were sometimes more astonished
at what they did not know than at what they did. They had the
self-poise and self-confidence of men who day by day and month by
month hold their lives in their hands, and are practised in finding a
way out of danger and difficulty. They had a code of good manners and
polite behavior which was not highly refined, but contained the sound,
essential elements of courtesy; not expressed in fancy, but honest and
solid. They had great shrewdness, and were capable of really fine
diplomacy, for the school they attended demanded such proficiency.
They had a dry, chuckling humor; a homely philosophy, often mingled
with the queerest superstitions; a racy wit, smacking somewhat, of
course, of the quarter-deck, or even of the forecastle; a seemingly
incongruous sensibility, so that tears easily sprang to their eyes if
the right chord of pathos were touched; a disposition to wear a
high-colored necktie and a broad, gold watch-chain, and to observe a
certain smartness in their boots and their general shore rigging; a
good appetite for good food, and not a little discernment of what was
good; a great and boylike enjoyment of primitive pleasures; a love of
practical jokes and a hearty roar of laughter for hearty fun; a
self-respecting naturalness, which made them gentlemen in substance if
not in all technical details; a pungent contempt for humbug and
artifice, though they might not mind a good, swaggering lie upon
occasion; a robust sense of honor in all matters which were trusted to
their honorable feeling; and, to make an end of this long catalogue, a
practical command of language regarded as a means of expressing and
communicating the essential core of thoughts, though the words might
not always be discoverable in Johnson's dictionary or the grammatical
constructions such as would be warranted by Lindley Murray. They were,
upon the average, good-looking, active, able men, and most of them
were on the sunny side of forty. They were ready to converse on any
subject, but if left to themselves they would choose topics proper to
their calling-ships and shipwrecks, maritime usages of various
countries, of laws of insurance, of sea-rights, of feats of
seamanship, of luck and ill luck, and here and there a little politics
of the old-fashioned, elementary sort. They boasted themselves and
their country not a little, and criticised everybody else, and John
Bull especially, very severely often, but almost always very acutely,
too. They would play euchre and smoke cigars from nine o'clock till
eleven, and would then go to bed and sleep till the breakfast-bell.
Altogether, they were fine company, and they did me much good. Such
were the captains of our merchant marine about the middle of the last
century.

Some of them would bring their wives with them for the voyage;
uniformly rather pretty women, a trifle dressy, somewhat fragile in
appearance, but really sound enough; naive, simple, good souls, loving
their husbands and magnifying them, and taking a vicarious pride in
their ships and sea-craft. The lady-paramount of these, in my
estimation, was the wife of old Captain Howes, the inventor of Howes'
patent rig, which he was at that time perfecting. He would sometimes
invite me up to his room to see the exquisitely finished model which
he had made with his own hands. He was the commodore of the captains,
the oldest, wisest, and most impressive of them; a handsome, massive,
Jovelike old gentleman, with the gentlest and most indulgent manners,
and a straightforward, simple mariner withal. He had ceased to make
voyages, and was settled, for the time being, in Liverpool. Mrs.
Howes seemed, to my boyish apprehension, to be a sort of princess of
exquisite and gracious refinement; I could imagine nothing in feminine
shape more delicate, of more languid grace, of finer patrician
elegance. She was certainly immensely good-natured and indulgent
towards me, and, in the absence of my mother, tried to teach me to be
less of an Orson; she had hands which were true works of art,
flexible, fine-grained, taper-fingered, and lily-white; these she used
very effectively, and would fain have induced me to attempt the
regeneration of my own dirty and ragged little fists. She would
beseech me, also, to part my hair straight, to forbear to soil my
jacket, and even to get my shoes blacked. I was thankful for these
attentions, though I was unable to profit by them. Sometimes, at
table, I would glance up to find her eyes dwelling with mild reproach
upon me; doubtless I was continually perpetrating terrible enormities.
Had she herself been less perfect and immaculate, I might have felt
more hopes of my own amendment; but I felt that I was not in her class
at all, and I gave up at the start. She was a wonderful human
ornament, the despair, I thought, of all pursuit, not to mention
rivalry. Beside the heroic figure of her captain, she looked like a
lily mated with an oak; but they were as happy a pair, and as well
mated, as one could hope to see.

I was, perhaps, more in my proper element among the captains down in
the smoking-room, which was at the back of the house, at the end of
the hallway, on the left. My father sat there foot to foot with them,
played euchre with them, listened to their yarns, laughed at their
jokes, and felt, probably, the spirit of his own old sea-captain
ancestors stirring within him. Some of them were a little shy of his
official position at first, and indeed he was occasionally constrained
to adopt towards one or another of them, in the consulate, a bearing
very different from the easy comradeship of the Blodgett evenings; but
in process of time they came to understand him, and accepted him, on
the human basis, as a friend and brother. My father had the rare
faculty of retaining his dignity without putting it on. No one ever
took liberties with him, and he took none with anybody; yet there was
no trace in his intercourse of stiffness or pose; there did not need
to be, since there was behind his eye that potentiality of
self--protection which renders superfluous all outward demonstration
of personal sanctity. On the other hand, he obviously elevated the
tone of our little society; the stout captains, who feared nothing
else, feared their worser selves in his presence. None of them knew or
cared a straw for his literary genius and its productions; but they
were aware of something in him which they respected as well as liked,
and there was no member of the company who was more popular or
influential.

Without letting me feel that I was the object of special solicitude or
watchfulness, my father knew all that I did, and saw to it that my
time was decently occupied. In addition to the dancing-lessons already
mentioned (in which I became brilliantly proficient, and achieved such
feats in the way of polkas, mazurkas, hornpipes, and Scotch reels as
filled my instructor and myself with pride)--in addition to this, I
was closeted twice a week with a very serious and earnest
drawing-master, who taught me with infinite conscientiousness, and
sighed heavily over the efforts which I submitted to him. The
captains, who were my champions and abettors in all things, might take
in their large hands a drawing of mine and the copy by the master
which had been my model, and say, one to the other, "Well, now, I
couldn't tell which was which--could you?" But the master could tell,
and the certainty of it steeped his soul in constant gloom. I doubt
if he recovered from the pangs I gave him. The fact was, I thought an
hour of dancing with lovely Mary Warren was worth all the art in the
world. Another instructor to whom I brought honor was thick-
shouldered, portly, unctuous M. Huguenin, a Swiss, proprietor
of the once-famous gymnasium which bore his name. He so anointed me
with praise that I waxed indiscreet, and one day, as I was swinging on
the rings, and he was pointing out to some prospective patrons my
extraordinary merits, my grasp relaxed at the wrong moment and I came
sailing earthward from on high. It seemed to me that, like Milton's
Lucifer, "from dawn to eve I fell," M. Huguenin sprinting to intercept
my fall; but I landed on a mat and was little the worse for it. I fear
the prospective patrons were not persuaded, by my performance, of the
expediency of gymnastic training. On the other hand, M. Huguenin
managed to dispose to my father of one of his multum-in-parvo
exercising-machines, on the understanding that it was to be taken back
at half-price on the expiration of our stay in Liverpool; but, when
that time came, M. Huguenin failed to remember having been a party to
any such understanding; so the big framework was boxed up, and finally
was resurrected in Concord, where I labored with it for seven or eight
years more during my home-comings from Harvard.

In the intervals of my other pursuits, I was, at this period, sent
into society. The society at Mrs. Blodgett's was, indeed, all that I
desired; but it was doubtless perceived that it was not all that my
polite development required; my Orsonism was too much indulged. I was
sent alone to Sandheys, the Brights' and Heywoods' place, where I was
moderately ill at ease; and also to the house of a lady in town, who
received a good deal of company, and there I was, at first, acutely
miserable. The formalities of the drawing-room and the elegant
conversation overwhelmed me with the kind of torture which Swedenborg
ascribes to those spirits of the lower orders who are admitted
temporarily into the upper heavens. Unlike these unfortunates,
however, I presently got acclimated; other boys of my age appeared,
and numbers of little girls (Mary Warren among them), and now society
occupied all my thoughts. The lady of the house got up private
theatricals--"Beauty and the Beast" was the play. I was cast for the
parts of the Second Sister and of the Beast; Mary Warren was the
Beauty. I got by heart not only my own lines, but those of all the
other performers and the stage directions. The play was received with
applause, and after it was done the actors were feted; my father was
not present, but he appeared greatly diverted by my account of the
proceedings. He was probably testing me in various ways to see what I
was made of, and whether anything could be made of me. He encouraged
my predilection for natural history by getting me books on conchology
and taking me to museums to study the specimens and make pencil
drawings of them. In these avocations I was also companioned by Frank
Channing, whose specialty was ornithology, and who was making a series
of colored portraits of the birds in the museum, very cleverly done.

[IMAGE: WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855]

Frank was the son of the Rev. William Henry Channing, who was pastor
of a Unitarian church in Liverpool; he had brought his family to
England at about the same time that we came. He was a nephew, I
believe, of the William Ellery Channing who was one of the founders of
American Unitarianism, and the brother, therefore, of the Ellery
Channing of Concord. Frank inherited much of the talent of his family.
He was afterwards sent to Oxford, where he took the highest honors.
All intellectual operations came easy to him. He also showed a strong
proclivity to art, and he was wonderfully clever in all kinds of fine
handwork. He was at this time a tall and very handsome boy, about two
years my senior. He was, like myself, fanatically patriotic, an
American of Americans, and this brought us together in a foreign land;
but, aside from that, I have seldom met a more fascinating companion.
I followed him about with joy and admiration. He used to make for me
tiny little three-masted ships, about six inches long, with all the
rigging complete; they were named after the famous American clippers
of the day, and he painted microscopic American flags to hoist over
the taff-rail. He tried to teach me how to paint in water-colors, but
I responded better to his eloquence regarding the future of our
country. He proved to me by a mathematical demonstration, which I
accepted without in the least understanding it, that in fifty years
New York would be larger and more populous than London at the end of
the same period. This brilliant boy seemed fitted for the highest
career in his native country; his father did not contemplate a
permanent stay in England, and in after years I used to look for his
name in our Senate, or among the occupants of the Supreme Bench. But,
as it turned out, he never revisited America, except for short
periods. His father was induced to remain abroad by the success of his
preaching, and Frank, after his career at Oxford, was overpowered by
the subtle attractions of English culture, and could not separate
himself from the old country. I saw him once while I was at Harvard.
He was an Englishman in all outward respects, and seemed to be so
inwardly likewise. The other day I heard of a Frank Channing in
Parliament; probably the same man. But either the effect upon him of
his voluntary expatriation--his failure to obey at eve the voice
obeyed at prime--or some other cause, has prevented him from ever
doing anything to attract attention, or to appear commensurate with
his radiant promise. Henry James is the only American I know who has
not suffered from adopting England; and even he might have risen
higher than he has done had he overcome his distaste to the external
discomforts of the democracy and cast in his lot with ours.

Frank's father was a tall, intellectual, slender Yankee, endowed with
splendid natural gifts, which he had improved by assiduous
cultivation. In the pulpit he rose to an almost divine eloquence and
passion, and a light would shine over his face as if reflected from
the Holy Spirit itself. My father took a pew in his church, and sent
me to sit in it every Sunday; he never went himself. He was resolved,
I suppose, if there was any religion in me, to afford it an
opportunity to come out. Now, I had a religious reverence for divine
things, but no understanding whatever of dogma of any sort. I never
learned to repeat a creed, far less to comprehend its significance. I
was moved and charmed by Mr. Channing's discourses, but I did not like
to sit in the pew; I did not like "church." I remember nothing of the
purport of any of those sermons; but, oddly enough, I do recall one
preached by a gentleman who united the profession of preacher with
that of medicine; he occupied Channing's pulpit on a certain occasion,
and preached on the text in John xix., 34: "But one of the soldiers
with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came thereout blood and
water." The good doctor, drawing on his physiological erudition,
demonstrated at great length how it was possible that blood should be
mingled with the water, and showed at what precise point in Christ's
body the spear must have entered. I seem to hear again his mellifluous
voice, repeating at the close of each passage of his argument, "And
forthwith came thereout blood-AND WATER!" I did not approve of this
sermon; I was not carried to heaven in the spirit by it, as by
Channing's; but somehow it has stuck in my memory all these
forty-eight years.

Often I stayed for a few days at a time at Channing's house; his wife
was a handsome, delicate, very nervous woman; his daughter Fanny was a
beauty, and became still more beautiful in after years; she was
married, when past her first youth, to Edwin Arnold, author of "The
Light of Asia," and of many rhetorical leading articles in the London
Telegraph. She died a few years ago. They were, all of them, kind to
me. I did the best I could to be a good little boy there; but I
recollect Mrs. Channing's face of sorrow and distress when, one day
at dinner, I upset into my lap my plate, which she had just filled
with Irish stew--one of my best-loved dishes. "Frank never does that,"
she murmured, as she wiped me up; "never-never!" Nobody looked
cheerful, and I never got over that mortification.

XI

Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you marry that
woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--"The worst book anybody
ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I ever saw"--A great deal of the
feminine in Reade--Fire, pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A
philosophical library in itself--Amusing appanage of his own
book--Oily and voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the
os-rotundus sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of
it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had
lived--Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks
through the mind of a third person--A delightful
Irishman--Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole
line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new
sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed--Indomitable
figure, aggressively American--Too much of the elixir of life--A
little strangeness between us--Sunshine will always rest on it.

The central event of 1856 was the return from Lisbon and Madeira of my
mother and sisters. Measuring time, as boys do (very sensibly), not by
the regulated pace of minutes, but by the vast spaces covered by
desire, it appeared to me, for some decades, that they had been absent
in those regions for years--two years at least; and I was astonished
and almost incredulous when dates seemed to prove that the interval
had been six or eight months only. It was long enough.

In the course of the previous spring my father made two or three
little excursions of a few days or a week or so in various directions,
commonly convoyed by Bright or Bennoch, who were most enterprising on
his behalf, feeling much the same sort of ambition to show him all
possible of England and leading English folk that a young housekeeper
feels to show her visiting school-friend her connubial dwelling and
its arrangements, and to take her up in the nursery and exhibit the
children. Had my father improved all his opportunities he would have
seen a great deal, but the consulate would have been administered by
the clerks. He took trips through Scotland and the north of England,
and south to London and the environs; dined at the Milton Club and
elsewhere, visited the Houses of Parliament, spent a day with Martin
Farquhar Tupper, author of Proverbial Philosophy, and still was not
remarkably absent from the dingy little office down by the docks, or
from the euchre games in Mrs. Blodgett's smoking-room. For the most
part, I did not accompany him on these excursions, being occupied in
Liverpool with my pursuit of universal culture; yet not so much
occupied as to prevent me from feeling insolvent while he was away,
and rich as Aladdin when he got back. For his part, he struggled with
low spirits caused by anxiety lest the next mail from Portugal should
bring ill news of the beloved invalid there (instead of the cheerful
news which always did come); his real life was suspended until she
should return. Partings between persons who love each other seem to be
absolute loss of being; but that being revives, with a new spiritual
strength, when all partings are over.

Of the people whom he met on these sallies, I saw some, either then or
later: Disraeli, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Reade, Tom Taylor, Bailey,
the author of that once-famous philosophic poem, "Festus"; Samuel
Carter Hall, and a few more. Disraeli, in 1856, had already been
chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the house, and was to hold
the same offices again two years later. He had written all but two of
his novels, and had married the excellent but not outwardly attractive
lady who did so much to sustain him in his career. At a dinner of
persons eminent in political life, about this juncture, Mr. and Mrs.
Disraeli were present, and also Bernal Osborne, a personage more
remarkable for cleverness and aggressiveness, in the things of
statesmanship, than for political loyalty or for a sense of his
obligations to his associates. This gentleman had drunk a good deal
of wine at dinner, and had sat next to Mrs. Disraeli; when the ladies
had left the table he burst out, with that British brutality which
often passes for wit, "I say, Disraeli, what on earth did you marry
that woman for?" All talk was hushed by this astounding query, and
everybody looked at the sallow and grim figure to whom it was
addressed. Disraeli for some moments played with his wineglass,
apparently unmoved; then he slowly lifted his extraordinary black,
glittering eyes to those of his questioner. "Partly for a reason," he
said, measuring his words in the silence, "which you will never be
capable of understanding--gratitude!" The answer meant much for both
of them; it was never forgotten, and it extinguished the clever and
aggressive personage. It was ill crossing swords with Disraeli.

Douglas Jerrold was at the height of his fame and success in this
year; he died, I think, the year following, at the age of fifty-four.
He was very popular during his later lifetime, but he seems to have
just missed those qualities of the humorist which insure immortality;
he is little more than a name to this generation. He was the son of an
actor, and had himself been on the stage; indeed, he had tried several
things, including a short service as midshipman in his Majesty's navy.
He wrote some two-score plays, and was a contributor to Punch from its
outset; there are several books to his credit; and he edited Lloyd's
Weekly Newspaper, which was first called by his own name. But people
who have read or heard of nothing else of his, have heard of or read
"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures." Douglas Jerrold, however, is by no
means fully pictured by anything which he wrote; his charm and
qualities came out in personal intercourse. Nor does the mere
quotation of his brightnesses do him justice; you had to hear and see
him say them in order to understand them or him. He was rather a short
man, with a short neck and thick shoulders, much bent, and thick,
black hair, turning gray. His features were striking and pleasing; he
had large, clear, prominent, expressive black eyes, and in these eyes,
and in his whimsical, sensitive mouth, he lived and uttered himself.
They took all the bitterness and sting out of whatever he might say.
When he was about to launch one of his witticisms, he fixed his eyes
intently on his interlocutor, as if to call his attention to the good
thing coming, and to ask his enjoyment of it, quite apart from such
application to himself as it might have. It was impossible to meet
this look and to resent whatever might go with it. Thus a friend of
his, who wished to write telling books but could not quite do it, came
to him in haste one day and exclaimed, aggrievedly, "Look here,
Douglas, is this true that was told me--that you said my last book was
the worst I'd ever written?" Douglas gazed earnestly into the flushed
and troubled face, and said, in his softest tones, "Oh no, my dear
fellow, that isn't what I said at all; what I did say was that it was
the worst book anybody ever wrote." Such a retort, so delivered, could
not but placate even an outraged author.

Of Charles Reade my father saw little, and was not impressed by what
he saw; but Reade, writing of him to my sister Una, five-and-twenty
years after, said, "Your father had the most magnificent eye that I
ever saw in a human head." Reade was just past forty at the time he
met my father, and had just published _It Is Never Too Late to
Mend_--the first of his great series of reform novels. Christie
Johnstone and Peg Woffington were very clever, and written with
immense vigor and keenness, but did not give the measure of the man. I
doubt if my father had as yet read any of them; but later he was very
fond of Reade's writings. Certainly he could not but have been moved
by The Cloister and the Hearth, the greatest and most beautiful of all
historical novels. He saw in him only a tall, athletic, light-haired
man with blue eyes. I was more fortunate. I not only came to know
Reade in 1879, but also knew several persons who knew him intimately
and loved and admired him prodigiously; they were all in one story
about him. He was then still tall and athletic, but his wavy hair and
beard were gray; his face was one of the most sensitive men's faces I
ever saw, and his forehead was straight and fine, full of observation
and humor; his eyes were by turns tender and sparkling. There was a
great deal of the feminine in Reade, together with his robust and
aggressive masculinity. The fault of his head was its lack of depth;
there was not much distance from the ear to the nostril, and the
backhead was deficient. It was high above. There was a discord or
incongruity in his nature, which made his life not what could be
called a happy one. He had the impulses of the radical and reformer,
but not the iron or the impassivity which would have enabled him to
endure unmoved the attacks of conservatism and ignorance. He kicked
against the pricks and suffered for it. He was passionate, impatient,
and extreme; but what a lovely, irresistible genius! He was never a
society figure, and withdrew more and more from personal contact with
people; but he kept up to the last the ardor of his attack upon the
abuses of civilization--or what he deemed to be such. He fell into
some errors, but they were as nothing to the good he effected even in
external conditions; and the happiness and benefit he brought to tens
of thousands of readers by the fire, pathos, fun, sweetness,
and--dramatic animation of his stories, and by the nobility and
lovableness of many of the characters drawn in them, are immeasurable,
and will touch us and abide with us again when the welter of the
present transition state has passed. His devotion to the drama injured
his style as a novelist, and also led him to adopt a sort of staccato
manner of construction and statement which sometimes makes us smile.
But upon the ground proper to his genius Reade had no rival. A true
and full biography of him, by a man bold enough and broad enough to
write it, would be a stirring book.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22