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

It would be misleading to say, however, that my father was not
interested in his consulate work; there was a practical side in him
which took hold of the business in man-fashion, and transacted it so
efficiently as to leave no room for criticism, and nobody can produce
voluntary effects without feelng in himself a reaction from them. He
had occasion to look into the privacy of many human hearts, to pity
them and advise them, and from such services and insights he no doubt
obtained a residue of wisdom which might be applied to his own
ulterior uses. These were indirect and incidental issues; but from the
consulate qua consulate Hawthorne was radically alien, and when he
quitted it, he carried away with him no taint or trace of it. As he
says in his remarks upon the subject, he soon came to doubt whether it
were actually himself who had been the incumbent of the office at all.

But Providence does not deny manna to man in his extremity, and to my
father it came in the shape of a few English friends, and in
occasional escapes from the office into the outside England where,
after the centuries of separation, he found so much with which he
could still feel profoundly akin. His most constant friendly visitor
was Henry A. Bright, a university man, the son of a wealthy local
merchant, who sent ships to Australia, and was related (as most
agreeable Englishmen are--though there are shining exceptions) to the
aristocratic class. Bright, at this time, could not have been over
thirty years of age; he was intensely English, though his slender
figure and mental vivacity might make him seem near to the
conventional American type. But through him, as through an open
window, Hawthorne was enabled to see far into the very heart of
England. Bright not merely knew England; he was England, and England
at its best, and therefore also at its most insular and prejudiced. It
was unspeakably satisfying and agreeable to encounter a man at once so
uncompromising and so amiable, so wrong-headed (from the American
point of view) and so right-hearted. He was drawn to my father as
iron is drawn to the magnet; on every outward point they fought each
other like the knight errants of old, while agreeing inwardly, beneath
the surface of things, as few friends are able to agree. Each admired
the other's onslaughts and his prowess, and, by way of testifying his
admiration, strove to excel himself in his counter attacks. The debate
was always beginning, and in the nature of things it could never end;
the effect of their blows was only to hammer each the other more
firmly into his previous convictions. Probably all the things that
are English and all the things that are American never before or since
received such full and trenchant exposition as was given them by
Hawthorne and by Bright. The whole subject of monarchy and aristocracy
as against republicanism and democracy was threshed out to the last
kernel by champions each of whom was thoroughly qualified to vindicate
his cause. Each, constrained by the stress of battle to analyze and
expound his beliefs more punctually than ever before, thereby
convinced himself while leaving his adversary undaunted; and, of
course, both were right. For this world is so constituted that two
things incompatible in outward manifestation may in their roots be one
and the same, and equally appeal to the suffrages of honest men.
England and America are healthy and vigorous in proportion as they
differ from each other, and a morbid and vicious tendency in either is
noticeable the moment either begins to take a leaf from the other's
book. My father and Bright could not have been the lifelong friends
that they were had either of them yielded his point or stooped to
compromise.

Apart from political matters, and such social themes as were nearly
allied to them, the two friends had many points of agreement and
sympathy. Bright had from the first been an ardent and intelligent
admirer of the romancer's writings, and though they might often differ
in their estimates of individual works, they were in hearty accord as
to the principles which underlie all literature and art. Upon matters
relating to society, my father was more apt to accept theories which
Bright might propound than to permit of their being illustrated in his
own person; he would admit, for example, that a consul ought to mingle
socially with the people to whom he was accredited; but when it came
to getting him out to dinner, in evening dress and with a speech in
prospect, obstacles started up like the armed progeny of the Dragon's
Teeth. For, though no one enjoyed real society more than he did, he
was ardently averse from conversing as an official with persons
between whom and himself as a man there could be little sympathy.
Almost as much, too, did he dislike to meet the polite world merely on
the basis of the books that he had written, which his entertainers
were bound to praise whether or not they had read or comprehended
them, and to whose well-meant but inexpert eulogies he must constantly
respond with the threadbare and pathetic phrase, "I'm glad you liked
it." Bright, of course, insisted that fame and position carried
obligations which must be met, and he was constantly laying plots to
inveigle or surprise his friend into compliance. He often succeeded,
but he failed quite as frequently, so that, as a Mrs. Malaprop might
have said, Hawthorne as a social lion was a rara avis, from first to
last. The foible of artificial, as distinguished from spontaneous,
society is that it so seldom achieves simple human relations.

Another chief friend of his was Francis Bennoch. England would never
have seemed "our old home" to my father, without the presence and
companionship of these two men. Both had literary leanings, both were
genial, true, and faithful; but in other respects they were widely
dissimilar. Bright was of the pure Saxon type; Bennoch represented
Great Britain at large; there were mingled in him English, Irish, and
Scotch ancestry. In himself he was a superb specimen of a human being;
broad-shouldered, straight, and vigorous, massive but active, with a
mellow, joyful voice, an inimitable brogue, sparkling black eyes full
of hearty sunshine and kindness, a broad and high forehead over bushy
brows, and black, wavy hair. He bubbled over with high spirits, humor,
and poetry, being, indeed, a poet in achievement, with a printed and
bound volume to show for it--songs, lyrics, and narrative poems,
composed in the spirit of Burns and Scott. He was at this time one of
the handsomest men in England, with a great heart, warmer than any
summer England ever knew, and a soul of ardor and courage, which sent
through his face continual flashes of sympathy and fellowship. One
naturally thought and spoke of him in superlatives; he was the
kindest, joiliest, most hospitable, most generous and chivalrous of
men, and his affection and admiration for my father were also of the
superlative kind. He had made a fortune in the wool business, and had
an office in Wood Street, London; but his affairs permitted him to
make frequent excursions to Liverpool, and to act as his American
friend's guide and cicerone to many places in England which would
otherwise have been unknown to him. My father enjoyed these trips
immensely; Bennoch's companionship gave the right keynote and
atmosphere to the sights they saw. A real Englishman owns his country,
and does the honors of it to a visitor as if it were his private
estate. Discussions of politics and of the principles of government
never arose between these two, as they did between my father and
Bright; for Bennoch, though one of the most loyal and enthusiastic of
her Majesty's subjects, and full of traditional respect for the
British nobility, was by nature broadly democratic, and met every man
as an equal and a brother. One often finds this contradiction in
Englishmen; but it is such logically only. A man born to the
traditions of monarchy and aristocracy accepts them as the natural
background of his ideas, just as the English landscape is the setting
of his house and park; he will vindicate them if assailed; but
ordinarily they do not consciously affect his mental activities, and
he will talk good republicanism without being aware of it. The
monarchy is a decoration, a sentiment, a habit; as a matter of fact,
England is more democratic in many essentials than we have as yet
learned how to be. Bennoch was not a university man, and lacked the
historical consciousness that Bright so assiduously cultivated; he
lived by feeling and intuition more than by deliberate intellectual
judgments. He was emotional; tears would start to his eyes at a touch
of pathos or pity, as readily as the laughter of a moment before. So
lovable, gallant, honest, boyish a man is seldom born into this modern
world-boyish as only the manliest men can be. He died thirty years
after the time I write of, the same fresh and ardent character as
ever, and loving and serving Hawthorne's children for Hawthorne's
sake. I shall have occasion to mention him hereafter; but I have dwelt
upon him here, both because he made it forever impossible for any one
who knew him well to do other than love the land which could breed
such a man, and because, for the American Hawthorne, he was as a
hospitable gate-way through which the England of his dreams and
imaginings was entered upon as a concrete and delightful reality.

With Bright and Bennoch on his right hand and on his left, then, my
father began his English experience. The two are frequently mentioned
in his English journals, and Bennoch figures as one of the subordinate
characters in the posthumous romance called Doctor Grimshawe's Secret.
It is but a sketch of him, however, and considerably modified from the
brilliant and energetic reality. Meanwhile the consul began to
accustom himself to the routine of the consulate, and his family,
leaving the sombre respectability of the Waterloo Hotel, moved, first,
to the hospitable boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, and afterwards to a
private dwelling in Rock Park, Rock Ferry, on the opposite side of the
Mersey, where we were destined to dwell for several years. They were
years full of events very trifling in themselves, but so utterly
different from everything American as to stamp themselves upon the
attention and the memory. It is the trifling things that tell, and
give character to nations; extraordinary things may occur anywhere,
and possess little national flavor. In another chapter I will attempt
some portrayal of this English life of fifty years since.

VI

Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--Varieties of
equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming peril--Being dragged to
the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and hopelessness of
destitution--Villages rooted in the landscape--Evanescence of the
spiritual and survival of the material--"Of Bebbington the holy
peak"--The Old Yew of Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and
afternoon tea--An East-Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in
the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to Longfellow--Real
breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-pugilist--Clean-cut, cold,
gentle, dry--A respectable female atheist--The tragedy of the red
ants--Voluptuous struggles--A psalm of praise.

In a country whose ruling principle is caste, it might be expected
that the line of cleavage between the upper and the lower grades would
be punctually observed. It is assumed that democracy levels and
aristocracy distinguishes and separates. My father was not long in
remarking, however, that there was a freedom of intercourse between
the patrician and the plebeian--between people of all orders--such as
did not exist in America. And the fact, once perceived, was not
difficult of explanation. In a monarchy of a thousand years'
standing, every individual knows his place in the social scale and
never thinks of leaving it. He represents a fixed function or element
in the general organism, and holds to it as a matter of course, just
as, in the human body, the body does not aspire to be the head, nor
the liver or heart to take the place of lungs or stomach. The laborer
looks back upon an ancestry of laborers; the shopkeeper has been a
shopkeeper for unnumbered generations; the artisan on the bench to-day
does the same work that his father and grandfathers did before him;
the noble inherits his acres as inevitably as the sun rises, and sits
in the House of Lords by immemorial usage and privilege. Social
position all along the line being thus anchored in the nature of
things, as it were, there is no anxiety on any one's part as to
maintaining his status. He is secure where he is, and nothing and
nobody can change him. There is no individual striving to rise nor
fear to fall. Consequently there can and must be entire freedom of
mutual conversation; the marquis with a revenue of half a million a
year meets as an equal his gardener who gets ten pounds a month, and
the tailor in his measuring-room offers a glass of sherry to his noble
patron who comes to him for a new coat. Each is at his ease,
conscious that he performs a use and fills a place which no one else
can fill or perform, and that nothing else matters. The population is
a vast mutual-benefit association, without envy on the one side or
contempt on the other. And social existence moves as smoothly as a
well-oiled and adjusted machine.

This agreeable condition is impossible in a democracy--at all events,
in a democracy like ours, which is based upon the assumption that all
men are equal. Nevertheless, we are on the right track, and the
English are on the wrong one; for the agreeable English system
obstructs the insensible infiltration of fresh material into old
forms, which is essential to the continued health of the latter; while
the democracy, on the other hand, will gradually learn that it is just
as honorable and desirable to be a good shoemaker, for example, as a
good millionaire; that human life, in short, is a complex of countless
different uses, each one of which is as important on its own plane as
any of the others. But the intermediate period is undeniably irksome.

So my father noticed, not without a certain satisfaction, that even
beggars, in England, are not looked down upon, and that their rights,
such as they are, are recognized. In the steamboat waiting-room at
Rock Ferry, and in the boats themselves, he saw tramps and mendicants
take the best place at the fire or on the companion-way without rebuke
and without consciousness of presumption, and he saw the landlord of a
hotel, with a fortune of six hundred thousand pounds, wait at table as
deferentially as any footman in his employ. He was struck by the
contentment with which, in winter, women went barefoot in the streets,
and by the unpretentious composure with which the common herd, on
holidays, disported themselves in public, not seeking to disguise
their native vulgarity and shabbiness. At the same time, he could not
help a misgiving that the portentous inequality between rich and poor
must finally breed disaster; the secluded luxury of the rich was too
strongly contrasted with the desperate needs of the poor. This
contrast was very marked in England fifty years ago, and was
comparatively unknown in our own country--though to-day we can hardly
lay to our souls the nattering unction of such a difference. The rage
for wealth has done for us in a generation what caste did for England
in a thousand years.

My father, when opportunity offered, was always finding himself among
the poor and their dwellings; he had to be dragged to the rich, though
among them, too, he found, when brought in contact with them, many
interesting points of dissimilarity from ourselves. His office as
consul naturally took him often to the police courts, where
magistrates passed upon the squalid cases cited before them, and in
the consulate itself he saw specimens enough of human crime and
misery. He visited the poor-house and the insane asylum, he was
approached by swindlers of all types, and often he went to fairs and
other resorts of public out-door amusement and watched the unwashed
populace at its play. Beggars followed him on the streets, awaited him
in their chosen coigns of vantage on the corners, or haunted him on
the ferry-boat that took him each day from his home to his office.
Wherever he encountered the forsaken of fortune, he found food for
sympathy, and, in spite of assurances that he was only encouraging
mendicancy, he often gave them money. It was hard for him to believe
that there could be abject poverty where there was work for all, and
the appeal of man in want to man in plenty was too strong for him
easily to resist it. He liked the very frankness of vulgarity and
hopeless destitution of these people, and was appalled by the
simplicity with which they accepted things as they were. There was no
restlessness, as in America--no protest against fate. It was harrowing
enough to see conditions so miserable; it was intolerable to see them
acquiesced in by the victims as inevitable. He learned, after a
while, to harden himself somewhat against manifest imposition; but the
refusal to give cost him quite as much in discomfort as giving did in
purse.

The country villages and cottages, however, afforded him compensating
pleasure. In the neighborhood of Rock Ferry, on the shore of the
Mersey opposite from Liverpool, there were two or three ancient little
settlements which he loved to visit. The thatched and whitewashed
cottages, with their tiny gardens of hollyhocks and marigolds, seemed
like parts of the framework of the land; the passage of centuries only
served to weld them more firmly in their places. The villages were
massed together, each in a small space, instead of being dispread
loosely over a township, as in his native New England, and enduring
stone and plaster took the place of timber and shingles. But the
churches, small and fabulously ancient, affected him most. He placed
his hand on stones which had been set in place before William the
Conqueror landed in England, and this physical survival seemed to
bring into his actual presence the long succession of all the
intervening ages. These structures, still so solid and serviceable,
had witnessed the passing of the entire procession of English history;
all the mighty men and events of her career had come and gone while
they remained unscathed. Under his feet were the graves of the unknown
dead; within the narrow precincts he inhaled that strange, antique
odor of mortality that made him feel as if he were breathing the air
of long-dead centuries. This apparent evanescence of the spiritual
attested by the survival of the material is one of the most singular
and impressive of sensations; it takes history out of the realm of the
mind, and brings it into sensible manifestation. It is almost as
affecting as if the very figures of departed actors of former ages
were to reappear and rub shoulders with us of today, and cast their
shadows in the contemporary sunshine.

On most of these walks in the neighborhood of Rock Ferry I was my
father's companion, but, though my legs could march beside his, my
mental-equipment could not participate in his meditations. He would
occasionally make some half-playful, imaginative remark, calculated to
help me realize the situation that was so vividly present to
himself. His thoughts, however deep, were always ready to break into
playfulness outwardly. We often walked through the village of
Bebbington, whose church had a high stone steeple, nearly to the
summit of which the ancient ivy had clambered. And as it came in view
he would always say, in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of
Scott's narrative poems, which he was at that time reading aloud to
us, "There is of Bebbington the holy peak!" To which I would as
constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington the holy spire,' father!"--being
offended by his use of a word so unmusical as peak. He would only
smile and trudge onward. He was somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to
check in his son any tendency towards mere poetical sentiment; his own
imaginative faculty was rooted in common-sense, and he knew the value
of the latter in curbing undue excursions into the fanciful and
transcendental.

In Eastham, on the village green, stood an old yew-tree which, six
centuries before, had been traditionally called The Old Yew of
Eastham, and was probably at least coeval with the village itself,
which was one of the oldest in England. It was of enormous girth, and
was still in leaf; but nothing but the bark was left of the great
trunk; all the wood had decayed away so long ago that the memory of
man held no record of it. There was a great conical gap in one side,
like an open door, and it was my custom--as it had doubtless been that
of innumerable children of ages gone--to enter this door and "play
house" in the spacious interior. Meanwhile my father would seat
himself on the twisted roots without, and let his thoughts drift back
to the time when this huge hulk had first cast a slender shadow over
the greensward of primitive, Saxon England. It was a massive tree
before the Domesday Book was begun; Chaucer would not be heard of for
four hundred years to come; and where was Shakespeare? What was
suspected of America? Yet here was this venerable vegetable, still
with life enough left in it, perhaps, to see the end of English
monarchy. The yew was a fact; but the ghosts were the reality, after
all.

These obscure village antiquities, which had no special history
attaching to them, were in a way more impressive than the great ruins
of England, which had formed the scene and background of famous
events. The latter had become conventional sights, which the tourist
felt bound to inspect under the voluble and exasperating guidance of a
professional showman; and this malice-prepense sort of interest and
picturesqueness always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a
little. It is the unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes
home closest to the heart. The things told of in history books are
hackneyed, and they partake of the unreality inherent in the
descriptions of the writers. But the unrecorded things are virgin, and
enter into our most private sympathies and realization. My father
viewed and duly admired the great castles, palaces, and cathedrals of
England; but he loved the old villages and their appurtenances, and
could dream dreams more moving under the shadow of Eastham Yew than in
Westminster Abbey itself.

The historic houses and country-seats which were still inhabited were
still more difficult to get in touch with from the historic point of
view; the present dazzled the past out of sight. One was told who
built this facade, who added that wing, who was imprisoned in yonder
tower; where Queen Elizabeth slept, and the foot of what martyr
imprinted the Bloody Footstep on the threshold.

But you listened to these tales over a cup of tea in the drawing-room,
or between the soup and the roast beef at the dinner-table, and they
were not convincing. How were these ruddy-cheeked, full-bodied,
hospitable personages who sat about you to be held compatible with the
romantic periods and characters that they described? The duck and the
green pease, the plum-pudding and the port, the white neck-cloths and
the bare necks were too immediate and potent. In many cases, too, the
denizens of the ancient houses were not lineal descendants of the
original founders; they were interlopers, by purchase or otherwise. In
themselves they were kind and agreeable, their manners were excellent,
they helped one to comprehend the England of the passing moment; but
they only clipped the wings of imagination and retrospect. It was only
after an interval of some years that Hawthorne was able so far to
recover from the effect of their obtrusive existence as to be able to
see through them and beyond them to the splendid and gloomy vistas in
front of which they were grouped.

Yet England, past and present, rich and poor, real and ideal, did
somehow enter into him and become a part of his permanent
consciousness, and he liked it better than anything else he had known.
Even the social life, though he came to it under some compulsion,
rewarded him in the long run. One of the first personal invitations
was to the country-seat of the Brights, where he met the family and
relatives of his friend Henry Bright. Bright's father was a
remarkable figure; he resembled an East-Indian more than an
Englishman. He was dark, slender, courteous, and vivid; in long
after-years I saw Brahmins like him in India. I would liken him to a
rajah, except that rajahs of his age are commonly become gross and
heavy from indulgence, whereas he had an almost ascetic aspect. His
manners were singularly soft and caressing; he courted his wife, when
he returned each day from business, as if they were still in their
honeymoon, and his conduct towards all who surrounded him was
similarly polished. He did not in the least resemble his Saxon son;
and for my part, looking at him from the primitive boy stand-point, I
never suspected that he was related to my father's young friend. He
had made a fortune in colonial trade, and may possibly have been born
in India. At this juncture the dealings of his firm were chiefly with
Australia, and the largest merchant steamship then in the world had
just been built for them, and Hawthorne was invited to the launching.
For a British merchant prince such an occasion could not but be of
supreme importance and pride. Mr. Bright's Oriental visage was
radiant; his white hair seemed to shine with an added lustre; the
reserve of the Englishman was forgotten, and he showed the excitement
and emotion that he felt. There was a distinguished company on the
great deck to witness his triumph and congratulate him upon it. All
went well; at the appointed signal the retaining obstructions were cut
away, and the mighty vessel began its descent into the waiting river.
A lady of his family smashed a bottle of wine over the graceful bows.
For a few moments there was a majestic, sweeping movement downward;
then, of a sudden, it was checked. It was as if a great life had been
quenched at the instant when its heart first began to throb. A murmur
of dismay ran through the assemblage; but it was in the face of Mr.
Bright that the full tragedy of the disaster was displayed. Never was
seen a swifter change from the highest exultation to the depths of
consternation. The color left his cheeks; heavy lines appeared about
his handsome mouth; his eyes became fixed, and seemed to sink into his
head; his erect figure drooped like that of one who has received a
mortal blow. It was only that the ship had stuck in the deep mud of
the river bottom; but all ship-owners are superstitious, and the old
man foreboded the worst. The ship was floated again some days later;
but the omens were fulfilled; she was lost on her first voyage. I do
not remember seeing Mr. Bright after this event, but I know he never
again was the same man as before.

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