Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> Hawthorne and His Circle

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At length we turned off towards the north, and by-and-by were entering
a huge building of gray stone, with tall pillars in front of it, which
my father told me was the British Museum. What a place for a boy!
Endless halls of statues; enormous saloons filled with glass-cases of
shells; cases of innumerable birds; acres of butterflies and other
insects; strange objects which I did not understand--magic globes of
shining crystal, enormous masses of iron which were said to have
fallen from the sky; vases and jewels; and finally, at the farther end
of a corridor, a small door, softly opening, disclosed a circular room
of stupendous proportions, domed above, the curving walls filled with
myriads of books. In the centre was a circular arrangement of desks,
and in the midst of these an elderly man, like a garden-spider in his
web; but it was his duty to feed, not devour, the human flies who sat
or walked to and fro with literary meat gathered from all over the
world. It was my first vision of a great library.

Another time we went--all of us, I think--to the Tower of London. I
vibrated with joy at the spectacle of the array of figures in armor,
and picked out, a score of times, the suit I would most gladly choose
to put on. Here were St. George, King Arthur, Sir Scudamour, Sir
Lancelot--all but their living faces and their knightly deeds! Then I
found myself immured in dungeons with walls twenty feet thick,
darksome and low-browed, with tiny windows, and some of them bearing
on their stones strange inscriptions, cut there by captives who were
nevermore to issue thence, save to the block. Here the great Raleigh
had been confined; here, the lovable, rash-tempered Essex; here, the
noble Sir Henry Vane, who had once trod the rocky coast of my own New
England. Everywhere stood on the watch or paced about the Beef-eaters
in their brilliant fifteenth-century motley. I have never since then
passed the portals of the Tower, nor seen again the incomparable gleam
of the Koh-i-noor--if it were, indeed, the Koh-i-noor that I saw, and
not a glass model foisted on my innocence.

Again, I followed my father down many flights of steps, into the
bowels of the earth; but there were lights there, and presently we
passed through a sort of turnstile, and saw lengthening out before us
two endless open tubes, of diameter twice or thrice the height of a
man, with people walking in them, and disappearing in their
interminable perspective. We, too, entered and began to traverse them,
and after we had proceeded about half-way my father told me that the
river Thames was flowing over our heads, with its ships on its
surface, and its fishes, and its bottom of mud and gravel--under all
these this illuminated corridor, with ourselves breathing and seeing
and walking therein. Would we ever again behold the upper world and
the sky? The atmosphere was not pleasant, and I was glad to find
myself climbing up another flight of stairs and emerging on the other
side of the river, which we had crossed on foot, dry-shod.

Of the famous personages of this epoch I did not see much; only I
remember that a woman who seemed taller than common, dressed in a dark
silk gown, and moving with a certain air of composure, as if she knew
she was right, and yet meant to be considerate of others; whose
features were plain, and whose voice had a resonance and modulation
unlike other voices, was spoken of in my hearing as bearing a name
which I had heard often, and which had a glamour for my boyish
imagination--Jenny Lind. There also rises before me the dark,
courteous visage and urbane figure of Monckton Milnes; but there was
something more and better than mere courtesy and urbanity about him;
the inner luminousness, I suppose, of what was nearly genius, and
would have been altogether that but for the swaddling-clothes of rank
and society which hampered it. My father thought him like Longfellow;
but there was an English materialism about Milnes from which the
American poet was free. Henry James told me long afterwards a comical
tale of how, being left to browse in Mimes's library one afternoon, he
strayed into an alcove of pretty and inviting volumes, in sweet
bindings, mellowed by age, and was presently terrified by the
discovery that he was enmeshed in the toils of what bibliophiles term,
I think, "Facetiae"--of which Milnes had a collection unmatched among
private book-owners. Milnes's social method was The Breakfast, which
he employed constantly, and nothing could be more agreeable--in
England; we cannot acclimate it here, because we work in the
afternoon. Of Miss Bacon, of the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare theory, I saw
nothing, but heard much, for a time, in our family circle; my father
seemed to have little doubt of her insanity, and absolute certainty of
the despotic attitude she adopted towards her supporters, which was
far more intolerable than the rancor which she visited on those who
disregarded her monomaniacal convictions. My mother, out of pure
compassion, I believe, for the isolated and tragic situation in which
the poor woman had placed herself, tried with all her might to read
the book and believe the theory; she would take up the mass of
manuscript night after night, and wade through it with that truly
saintlike self-abnegation which characterized her, occasionally, too,
reading out a passage which struck her. The result was that she could
not bring herself to disbelieve in Shakespeare, but she conceived a
higher admiration than ever of Bacon; and that, too, was
characteristic of her.

We made several incursions into the surrounding country. One was to
Newstead, where, from the talkative landlady of the hotel, we heard
endless stories about Byron and his wife; this was before Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe published her well-intended but preposterous volume
about the poet. Then we visited Oxford, and were shown about by the
mayor of the town, and by Mr. S. C. Hall, and were at one moment
bathed in the light emanating from Lady Waldegrave, of which interview
my father, in his private note-book, speaks thus: "Lady Waldegrave
appeared; whereupon Mr. Speirs (the mayor) instantly was transfigured
and transformed--like the English snob he is, worthy man--and looked
humbler than he does in the presence of his Maker, and so respectful
and so blest that it was pleasant to behold him. Nevertheless, she is
but a brummagem kind of countess, after all, being the daughter of
Braham, the famous singer, and married first to an illegitimate son of
an Earl Waldegrave--not to the legitimate son and possessor of the
title (who was her first love)--and after the death of these two to
the present old Mr. Harcourt. She is still in her summer, even if it
be waning, a lady of fresh complexion and light hair, a Jewish nose
(to which her descent entitles her), a kind and generous expression of
face, but an officer-like figure and bearing. There seems to be a
peculiarity of manner, a lack of simplicity, a self-consciousness,
which I suspect would not have been seen in a lady born to the rank
which she has attained. But, anyhow, she was kind to all of us, and
complimentary to me, and she showed us some curious things which had
formerly made part of Horace Walpole's collection at Twickenham--a
missal, for instance, splendidly bound and beset with jewels, but of
such value as no setting could increase, for it was exquisitely
illuminated by the own hand of Raphael himself! I held the precious
volume in my grasp, though I fancy (and so does my wife) that the
countess scarcely thought it safe out of her own hands. In truth, I
suppose any virtuoso would steal it if he could; and Lady Waldegrave
has reason to look to the safe-keeping of her treasures, as she
exemplified by telling us a story while exhibiting a little silver
case. This once contained a portion of the heart of Louis XII. (how
the devil it was got I know not), and she was showing it one day to
Strickland, Dean of Westminster, when, to her horror and astonishment,
she saw him open the case and swallow the royal heart! Ate ever man
such a morsel before! It was a symptom of insanity in the dean, and I
believe he is since dead, insane." It was after this interview with
the countess that we visited Old Boston, and when my parents told old
Mr. Porter about the missal his jolly eyes took on a far-away
expression, as if he saw himself in the delightful act of purloining
it, "in obedience to a higher law than that which he broke."

The man who, of all writing men, was nearest to my heart in those
years, and long after, was George Borrow, whose book, Lavengro, I had
already begun to read. The publication of this work had made him
famous, though he had written two or three volumes before that, and
was at this very time bringing out its sequel, Romany Rye. But Borrow
was never a hanger-on of British society, and we never saw him. One
day, however, Mr. Martineau turned up, and, the conversation chancing
to turn on Borrow, he said that he and George had been school-mates,
and that the latter's gypsy proclivities had given him a singular
influence over other boys. Finally, he had persuaded half a dozen of
them to run away from the school and lead a life of freedom and
adventure on the roads and lanes of England. To this part of Mr.
Martineau's tale I lent an eager and sympathetic ear; bat the narrator
was lowered in my estimation by the confession that he himself had not
been a member of Borrow's party. He went on to say that the fugitives
had been pursued and captured and brought back to bondage; and upon
Borrow's admitting that he had been the instigator of the adventure,
he was sentenced to be flogged, and that it was on the back of this
very Martineau that he had been "horsed" to undergo the punishment!
Imagine the great, wild, mysterious Borrow mounted upon the ascetic
and precise cleric that was to be, and the pedagogue laying on! My
father asked concerning the accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in
his books, to which Martineau replied that he could not be entirely
depended on; not that he meant to mislead or misrepresent, but his
imagination, or some eccentricity in his mental equipment, caused him
occasionally to depart from literal fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's
imagination brought him much nearer to essential truth than adherence
to what they supposed to be literal facts could bring most men.

One of the most interesting expeditions of this epoch--though I cannot
fix the exact date--was to an old English country-seat, built in the
time of Henry VIII., or earlier, and added to from age to age since
then, until now it presented an irregularity and incongruousness of
plan which rendered it an interminable maze of delight to us children
wandering through it. We were taken in charge by the children of the
family, of whom there were no fewer than fourteen, all boys, with only
twelve years between the eldest and the youngest (some of them being
twins). Hide-and-seek at once suggested itself as the proper game for
the circumstances, but no set game was needed; the house itself was
Hide-and-seek House; you could not go twenty feet without getting
lost, and the walls of many of the rooms had sliding panels, and
passages through the thickness of them, and even staircases, so that
when one of us went into a room there was no predicting where he would
come out. Finally they brought us to a black, oaken door with a great,
black lock on it, and bolts at the top and bottom; it was near the end
of a corridor, in the oldest wing of the building. The door, in
addition to its native massiveness, was studded with great nails, and
there were bands of iron or steel crossing it horizontally. When we
proposed to enter, our friends informed us that this door had been
closed one hundred and eighty years before and had never been opened
since then, and that it had shut in a young woman who, for some
reason, had become very objectionable or dangerous to other persons
concerned. The windows of the room, they added, had been walled up at
the same time; so there this unhappy creature slowly starved to death
in pitch darkness. There, doubtless, within a few feet of where we
stood, lay her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful in the garments she
wore in life. Sometimes, too, by listening long at the key-hole, you
could hear a faint sound, like a human groan; but it was probably
merely the sigh of the draught through the aperture. This story so
horrified me and froze my young blood that the fancies of Mrs.
Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like frivolous chatter beside it.

About the middle of September the Bennochs returned from the
Continent, and we made ready to transfer ourselves to the lodgings in
Southport which had been prepared for us. Bennoch, who was soon to
meet with the crucial calamity of his career, was in abounding
spirits, and he told my father an anecdote of our friend Grace
Greenwood, which is recorded in one of the private note-books.
"Grace, Bennoch says," he writes, "was invited to a private reading of
Shakespeare by Charles Kemble, and she thought it behooved her to
manifest her good taste and depth of feeling by going into hysterics
and finally fainting away upon the floor. Hereupon Charles Kemble
looked up from his book and addressed himself to her sternly and
severely. 'Ma'am,' said he, 'this won't do! Ma'am, you disturb the
company! Ma'am, you expose yourself!'"

This last hit had the desired effect, for poor Grace probably thought
that her drapery had not adjusted itself as it ought, and that perhaps
she was really exposing more of her charms than were good to be
imparted to a mixed company. So she came to herself in a hurry, and,
after a few flutterings, subsided into a decorous listener. Bennoch
says he had this story from an eye-witness, and that he fully believes
it; and I think it not impossible that, betwixt downright humbug and a
morbid exaggeration of her own emotions, Grace may have been betrayed
into this awful fix. I wonder how she survived it!

At Southport we remained from the middle of September to the following
July, 1857. In addition to my aquarium, I was deeply involved in the
ship-building industry, and, the more efficiently to carry out my
designs, was apprenticed to a carpenter, an elderly, shirt-sleeved,
gray-bearded man, who under a stern aspect concealed a warm and
companionable heart. There were boys at the beach who had little
models of cutters and yachts, and I conceived the project of making a
sail-boat for myself. My father seems to have thought that some
practical acquaintance with the use of carpenter's tools would do me
no harm--by adding a knowledge of a handicraft to my other culture--so
he arranged with Mr. Chubbuck that I should attend his work-shop for
instruction. Mr. Chubbuck, accordingly, gave me thorough lessons in
the mysteries of the plane, the spokeshave, the gouge, and the chisel,
and finally presented me with a block of white pine eighteen inches
long and nine wide, and I set to work on my sloop. He oversaw my
labors, but conscientiously abstained from taking a hand in them
himself; the model gradually took shape, and there began to appear a
bluff-bowed, broad-beamed craft, a good deal resembling the French
fishing-boats which I afterwards saw off the harbors of Calais and
Havre. The outside form being done, I entered upon the delightful and
exciting work of hollowing it out with the gouge, narrowly avoiding,
more than once, piercing through from the hold into the outer world.
But the little ship became more buoyant every day, and finally stood
ready for her deck. This I prepared by planing down a bit of plank to
the proper thickness--or thinness--and carefully fitted it into its
place, with companionways fore and aft, covered with hatches made to
slide in grooves. Next, with chisel, spoke-shave, and sand-paper, I
prepared the mast and fitted a top-mast to it, and secured it in its
place with shrouds and stays of fine, waxed fishing-line. The boom
and gaff were then put in place, and Fanny Wrigley (who had aforetime
made my pasteboard armor and helmet) now made me a main-sail,
top-sail, and jib out of the most delicate linen, beautifully hemmed,
and a tiny American flag to hoist to the peak. It only remained to
paint her; I was provided with three delectable cans of oil-paint, and
I gave her a bright-green under-body, a black upper-body, and white
port-holes with a narrow red line running underneath them. Thus
decorated, and with her sails set, she was a splendid object, and the
boys with bought models were depressed with envy, especially when I
called their attention to the stars and stripes. This boat-building
mania of mine had originated while we were at Mrs. Blodgett's, where
the captain of one of the clippers gave me a beautiful model of his
own ship, fully rigged, and perfect in every detail; only it would not
sail, being solid. Concerning his clipper, by-the-way, I once
overheard a bit of dialogue in Mrs. Blodgett's smoking-room between my
captain and another. "Do you mean to say," demanded the latter, "that
you passed the Lightning?" To which my captain replied, in measured
and impressive tones, "I-passed-the-Lightning!" The Lightning, it may
be remarked, was at that time considered the queen of the Atlantic
passage; she had made the trip between Boston and Liverpool in ten
days. But my captain had once shown her his heels, nevertheless. I
wanted to christen my sloop The Sea Eagle, but my father laughed so
much at this name that I gave it up; he suggested The Chub, The
Mud-Pout, and other ignoble titles, which I indignantly rejected, and
what her name finally was I have forgotten. She afforded me immense
happiness.

At Southport we had a queer little governess, Miss Brown, who came to
us highly recommended both as to her personal character and for
ability to instruct us in arithmetic and geometry, geography, English
composition, and the rudiments of French. She was barely five feet in
height, and as thin and dry as an insect; and although her personal
character came up to any eulogium that could be pronounced upon it,
her ignorance of the "branches" specified was, if possible, greater
than our own. She was particularly perplexed by geometry; she aroused
our hilarity by always calling a parallelogram a parallel-O-gram, with
a strong emphasis on the penultimate syllable; and she spent several
days repeating over to herself, with a mystified countenance, the
famous words, "The square of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of
the squares of the two legs." What were legs of a triangle, and how,
if there were any, could they be square? She never solved this enigma;
and although we liked little Miss Brown very much, she speedily lost
all shadow of control over us; we treated her as a sort of inferior
sister, and would never be serious. "English governess" became for us
a synonym for an amiable little nonentity who knew nothing; and I was
surprised to learn, later, from the early works of Miss Rhoda
Broughton, that they could be beautiful and intelligent. Miss Brown
did not outlast our residence in Southport.

From Southport we removed to Manchester, and thence, after exhausting
the exposition, to Leamington, where we spent September and October of
1857. We expected to proceed direct from Leamington to France and
Italy, but we were destined to be delayed in London till January of
1858.

It was in Leamington that we were joined by Ada Shepard. She was a
graduate of Antioch, a men-and-women's college in Ohio, renowned in
its day, when all manner of improvements in the human race were
anticipated from educating the sexes together. Miss Shepard had got a
very thorough education there, so that she knew as much as a
professor, including--what would be of especial service to us--a
knowledge of most of the modern European languages. What seemed, no
doubt, of even more importance to her was her betrothal to her
classmate, Henry Clay Badger; they were to be married on her return to
America. Meanwhile, as a matter of mutual convenience (which rapidly
became mutual pleasure), she was to act as governess of us children
and accompany our travels. Ada (as my father and mother presently
called her) was then about twenty-two years old; she had injured her
constitution--never robust--by addiction to learning, and had
incidentally imbibed from the atmosphere of Antioch all the
women's-rights fads and other advanced opinions of the day. These,
however, affected mainly the region of her intellect; in her nature
she was a simple, affectionate, straightforward American maiden, with
the little weaknesses and foibles appertaining to that estate; and it
was curious to observe the frequent conflicts between these
spontaneous characteristics and her determination to live up to her
acquired views. But she was fresh-hearted and happy then, full of
interest in the wonders and beauties of the Old World; she wrote,
weekly, long, criss-crossed letters, in a running hand, home to
"Clay," the king of men; and periodically received, with an
illuminated countenance, thick letters with an American foreign
postage-stamp on them, which she would shut herself into her chamber
to devour in secret. She was a little over the medium height, with a
blue-eyed face, not beautiful, but gentle and expressive, and wearing
her flaxen hair in long curls on each side of her pale cheeks. She
entered upon her duties as governess with energy and good-will, and we
soon found that an American governess was a very different thing from
an English one (barring the Rhoda Broughton sort). Her special aim at
present was to bring us forward in the French and Italian languages.
We had already, in Manchester, made some acquaintance with the books
of the celebrated Ollendorff; and my father, who knew Latin well, had
taught me something of Latin grammar, which aided me in my Italian
studies. I liked Latin, particularly as he taught it to me, and it
probably amused him, though it must also often have tried his patience
to teach me. I had a certain aptitude for the spirit of the language,
but was much too prone to leap at conclusions in my translations. I
did not like to look out words in the lexicon, and the result was
sometimes queer. Thus, there was a sentence in some Latin author
describing the manner in which the Scythians were wont to perform
their journeys; relays of fresh horses would be provided at fixed
intervals, and thus they were enabled to traverse immense distances at
full speed. The words used were, I think, as follows: "Itaque
conficiunt iter continuo cursu." When I translated these, "So they
came to the end of their journey with continual cursing," I was
astonished to see my father burst into inextinguishable laughter,
falling back in his chair and throwing up his feet in the ebullience
of his mirth. I heard a good deal of that "continual cursing" for some
years after, and I believe the incident prompted me to pay stricter
attention to the dictionary than I might otherwise have done.

However, what with Ollendorff and Miss Shepard, we regarded ourselves,
by the time we were ready to set out for the Continent, as being in
fair condition to ask about trains and to order dinner. My mother,
indeed, had from her youth spoken French and Spanish fluently, but not
Italian; my father, though he read these languages easily enough,
never attained any proficiency in talking them. After he had wound up
his consular affairs, about the first week in October, we left
Leamington and took the train for a few days in London, stopping at
lodgings in Great Russell Street, close to the British Museum.

We were first delayed by friendly concern for the catastrophe which at
this moment befell Mr. Bennoch. He was a wholesale silk merchant, but
his literary and social tendencies had probably led him to trust too
much to the judgment and ability of his partners; at all events, on
his return from Germany he had found the affairs of his establishment
much involved, and he was now gazetted a bankrupt. In the England of
those days bankruptcy was no joke, still less the avenue to fortune
which it is sometimes thought to be in other countries; and a man who
had built up his business during twenty years by conscientious and
honorable work, and who was sensitively proud of his commercial honor,
was for a time almost overwhelmed by the disaster. My father felt the
most tender sympathy and grief for him, and we were additionally
depressed by a report, circumstantially detailed (but which proved to
be unfounded), that Mrs. Bennoch had died in childbirth--they had
never had children. "Troubles," commented my father "(as I myself
have experienced, and many others before me), are a sociable
sisterhood; they love to come hand-in-hand, or sometimes, even, to
come side by side, with long-looked-for and hoped-for good-fortune."
He was doubtless thinking of that dark and bright period when his
mother lay dying in his house in Salem and The Scarlet Letter was
waiting to be born.

A few days later he went by appointment to Bennoch's office in Wood
Street, Cheapside, and I will quote the account of that interview for
the light it casts on the characters of the two friends:

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