Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

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Richard Monckton Milnes, who was afterwards Lord Houghton, was greatly
attracted towards my father, who liked him; but circumstances
prevented their seeing much of each other. Milnes was then forty-five
years old; he was a Cambridge man, and intimate with Tennyson, Hallam,
and other men of literary mark, and he was himself a minor poet, and
warm in the cause of literature. During his parliamentary career, in
1837, he was instrumental in passing the copyright act. He had
travelled in Greece and Italy in his twenties; was fond of society,
and society of him. A more urbane and attractive English gentleman did
not exist; everything that a civilized man could care for was at his
disposal, and he made the most of his opportunities. His manners were
quiet and cordial, with a touch of romance and poetry mingling with
the man-of-the-world tone in his conversation, and he was quite an
emotional man. I have more than once seen tears in his eyes and heard
a sob in his voice when matters that touched his heart or imagination
were discussed. There was, indeed, a vein of sadness and pessimism in
Milnes, though only his intimates were aware of it; it was the
pessimism of a man who has too much leisure for intellectual analysis
and not enough actual work to do to keep him occupied. It lent a fine
flavor of irony to some of his conversation. He was liberal in
politics and liberal in his attitude towards life in general; but
there was not force enough in him, or, at any rate, not stimulus
enough, to lift him to distinction. Some of his poems, however,
betrayed a deep and radical vein of thought. He was of middle
height, well made, light built, with a large and well-formed head and
wavy, dark hair. His likeness to Longfellow was marked, though he was
hardly so handsome a man; but the type of head and face was the
same--the forehead and brain well developed, the lower parts of the
countenance small and refined, though sensuous. His eyes were dark,
brilliant, and expressive. He, like the old poet Rogers, made a
feature of giving breakfasts to chosen friends, and as he had the
whole social world to choose from, and unfailing good taste, his
breakfasts were well worth attending. They were real breakfasts--so
far as the hour was concerned--not lunches or early dinners in
masquerade; but wine was served at them, and Milnes was very
hospitable and had an Anacreontic or Omar touch in him. To breakfast
with him, therefore, meant--unless you were singularly abstemious and
strong-minded--to discount the remaining meals of the day. But the
amount of good cheer that an Englishman can carry and seem not
obscured by it surprises an American. A bottle or so of hock of a
morning will make most Americans feel that business, for the rest of
that day, is an iridescent dream; but an Englishman does not seem to
be burdened by it--at any rate, he did not fifty years ago.

[IMAGE: RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES]

Another hearty companion was Bryan Waller Procter, who, for literary
uses, anagrammed his name into Barry Cornwall, and made it famous,
fifty years ago, as that of the best song-writer in contemporary
England. But he had made a literary reputation before the epoch of his
songs; there were four or five dramatic and narrative poems to his
credit published during the first quarter of the last century. Procter
was, indeed, already a veteran in 1854, having been born in 1787, and
bred to the bar, to which he was admitted in 1831. But he spent the
active thirty years of his life in the discharge of that function
which seems often sought by respectable Englishmen-commissioner of
lunacy. He sent my father a small volume containing the Songs, and
some fragments; they fully deserved their reputation. The fragments
were mostly scraps of dramatic dialogue, of which one at least sticks
in my memory:

"She was a princess; but she fell; and now Her shame goes blushing
down a line of kings."

As I recollect him, he may have looked like a commissioner of lunacy,
but he did not look like a poet; he was rather undersized, with a
compact head and a solemn face, and the quietest, most unobtrusive
bearing imaginable. He was a well-made little man, and he lived to a
great age, dying some time in the seventies, at the age of
eighty-seven. He told my father that after leaving Harrow School he
was distinguished in athletics, and for a time sparred in public with
some professional bruiser. He had been a school-mate of Byron and Sir
Robert Peel, and had known Lamb, Kean, and the other lights of that
generation. He was a most likeable and remunerative companion. His
wife, who survived him (living, I think, to be over ninety), was a
woman of intellect and charm, and she retained her attractiveness to
the end of her life. There are poets who are consumed early by their
own fires, and others who are gently warmed by them beyond the common
span of human existence, and Barry Cornwall was one of these, and
transmitted his faculty, through sympathetic affection, to his wife.

Of renown not less than the song-writer's was the metaphysical
theologian, James Martineau, then in the Liverpool epoch of his
career. He was a clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry character, with a
somewhat Emersonian cast of countenance, but with the Emersonian
humanity and humility left out. Like Emerson, he had ascended a
Unitarian pulpit, but, unlike Emerson, he stayed there long after what
he was pleased to regard as his convictions had ceased to possess even
a Unitarian degree of religious quality. He was always apostolic in
his manner, and his utterances were ex cathedra, and yet his whole
long life was a story of changing views on the subjects he had chosen
to be the theme of his career.

He was the great opponent of orthodoxy in his day, yet he led his
followers to no goal more explicit than might be surmised from a study
of Kant and Hegel. He was, however, sincere in his devotion to the
will-o'-the-wisp that he conceived to be the truth, and he was
courageous enough to admit that he never satisfied himself. There was
chilly and austere attraction about the man; he was so elevated and
superior that one could hardly help believing that he must know
something of value, and this illusion was the easier because he did
know so much in the way of scholarly learning. My father felt respect
for his character, but was bored by his metaphysics--a form of
intellectual athletics which he had exhausted while still a young man.
James's sister Harriet was also of the company. She was so deaf as to
be obliged to use an ear-trumpet, and she was as positive in her views
(which had become avowedly atheistic) as her brother, and whenever any
one began to utter anything with which she disagreed, she silenced him
by the simple expedient of dropping the ear-trumpet. In herself, she
was an agreeable old lady; but she seldom let her opinions rest long
enough for one to get at her on the merely human side, and she
cultivated a retired life, partly on account of her deafness, partly
because her opinions made society shy of her, and partly because she
did not think society worth her time and attention. She was a good
woman, with a mind of exceptional caliber, but the world admired more
than it desired her.

As a relief from the consideration of these exalted personages, I am
disposed to relate a tragic anecdote about our friend Henry Bright.
Early in our Rock Ferry residence he came to dine with us--or I rather
think it was to supper. At any rate, it was an informal occasion, and
the children were admitted to table. My mother had in the cupboard
a jar of excellent raspberry jam, and she brought it forth for the
delectation of our guest. He partook of it liberally, and said he had
never eaten any jam so good; it had a particular tang to it, he
declared, which outdid his best recollections of all previous
raspberry jam from his boyhood up. While he was in the midst of these
rhapsodies, and still consuming their subject with enthusiasm, my
mother, who had taken some of the jam on her own plate, suddenly made
a ghastly discovery. The jam-pot had been for several days standing in
the cupboard with its top off, or ajar, and an innumerable colony of
almost microscopic red ants had discovered it, and launched themselves
fervently upon it and into it; it had held them fast in its sweet but
fatal embrace, and other myriads had followed their fellows into the
same delicious and destructive abyss. What the precise color of the
ants may have been before they became incorporate with the jam is not
known; but as the case was, they could be distinguished from it only
by their voluptuous struggles in its controlling stickiness. Only the
keenest eye could discern them, and the eyes of Henry Bright were
among the most near-sighted in England. Besides, according to his
custom, he was talking with the utmost volubility all the time.

What was to be done? My father and mother stealthily exchanged an
awful look, and the question was settled. It was too late to recall
the ants which our friend had devoured by tens of thousands. It
seemed not probable that, were he kept in ignorance of his
predicament, they would do him any serious bodily injury; whereas,
were he enlightened, imagination might get in her fatal work.
Accordingly, a rigorous silence upon the subject was maintained, and
the dear innocent actually devoured nearly that whole potful of red
ants, accompanying the meal with a continual psalm of praise of their
exquisite flavor; and never till the day of his death did he suspect
what the secret of that flavor was. I believe the Chinese eat ants and
regard them as a luxury. Very likely they are right; but at that
period of my boyhood I had not heard of this, and then and often
afterwards did I meditate with misgivings upon the predicament of
Henry Bright's stomach after his banquet.

VII

Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--The average
man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--Shielded by rose-leaves of
culture and refinement--The English middle class--Prejudice,
complacency, and Burke's Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or
Browning--Satisfaction in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A
damp, winding, verdurous street--The parent of stucco
villas--Inactivity of individual conscience--A plateau and a
cliff-dwelling--"The Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgiliance--A
division in the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and
card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry--
Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the cobbler--
A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr. Squarey and Mrs.
Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of jolly.

That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality
than any other with which we became conversant while in England. With
the exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only
experience vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time
we lived in lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The
boarding-houses of England are like other boarding-houses; the hotels,
or inns, in the middle of the last century, were for the most part
plain and homely compared with what we have latterly been used to; but
the English lodging-house system had peculiarities. You enjoyed
independence, but you paid for it with inconveniences. The owner of
the house furnished you with nothing except the house, with its dingy
beds, chairs, tables, and carpets. Everything else necessary to
existence you got for yourself. You made your own contracts with
butcher, baker, and grocer. You did your own firing and lighting.
Your sole conversation with the owner was over the weekly bill for the
rooms. You might cater to yourself to the tune of the prince or of the
pauper, as your means or your inclination suggested, but you must do
it upon the background of the same dingy rooms. Dingy or not so dingy,
the rooms, of course, never fitted you; they were a Procrustes bed,
always incompatible, in one way or in another, with the proportions
which nature had bestowed upon you. You wondered, in your misanthropic
moments, whether there ever was or could be any one whom English
lodgings would exactly fit. Probably they were designed for the
average man, a person, as we all know, who exists only in the
imagination of statisticians. And if the environment shows the man,
one cannot help rejoicing that there is so little likelihood of one's
forming the average man's acquaintance.

There was nothing peculiar about rented houses in England beyond the
innate peculiarities attaching to them as English. If the house were
unfurnished, and you had leisure to pick and choose, you might suit
yourself tolerably well, always with the proviso that things English
could be suitable to the foreigner. And certainly, in the 1850's, the
English commanded living conditions more desirable, on the whole, than
Americans did. They understood comfort, as distinct from luxury--a
pitch of civilization to which we are even now but just attaining.
There was not then, and until the millennium there will probably never
be, anything else in the world which so ministered to physical ease
and general satisfaction as did the conditions of life among the
English upper classes. Kublai Khan, in Xanadu, never devised a
pleasure-dome so alluring to mere human nature-especially the English
variety of it--as was afforded by an English nobleman's country-seat.
Tennyson's Palace of Art is very good in poetry, but in real life the
most imaginative and energetic real-estate dealer could not have got
so good a price for it as would gladly have been paid for the dwelling
of, for example, the Duke of Westminster. "How many gardeners have you
got?" asked an American Minister of the duke of the period, after
meeting a fresh gardener, during a long afternoon stroll through the
grounds, at each new turn of the path. "Oh, I don't know--I fancy
about forty," replied the duke, somewhat taken aback by this demand
for precise information concerning the facts of his own establishment,
which, until that moment, he probably supposed had been attended to by
Providence. And really, the machinery of life in such a place is so
hidden, it is so nearly automatic, that one might easily believe it to
be operated according to some law of nature. The servants are (or
were) so well trained, they did their jobs so well, that you were
conscious only of their being done; you never saw them a-doing. The
thought happened to cross your mind, of a morning, that you would like
to take a drive at eleven o'clock; you were not aware that you had
mentioned the matter; but at eleven o'clock the carriage was, somehow,
at the door. At dinner, the dishes appeared and disappeared, the
courses succeeded one another, invisibly, or as if by mere fiat of the
will; you must be very wide-awake to catch a footman or butler
meddling with the matter. You went up to the bedroom to change your
dress; you came down with it changed; but only by an effort could you
recall the fact that a viewless but supremely efficient valet had been
concerned in the transaction. The coal fire in the grate needed
poking; you glanced away for a moment; when you looked at the fire
again it had been poked--had, to all appearance, poked itself. And so
in all relations; to desire was to get; to picture a condition was to
realize it. You were shielded on every side by rose-leaves of culture
and refinement; all you had to do was to allow your mind to lapse from
one conception to another, and then, lifting your languorous eyelids,
behold! there you were--as Mr. James would say.

But I set out to tell not of noblemen's country-seats, but of Rock
Park. Rock Park was one of the typical abodes of the English
respectable middle-class, and the English middle-class, respectable,
or not altogether respectable, is the substance of England. Not until
you have felt and smelt and tasted that do you know what England
really is. Fifty years ago, the people in question were dull,
ignorant, material, selfish, prejudiced, conventional; they were
hospitable, on conventional lines; they were affable and even social,
so long as you did not awaken their prejudices; they were confidential
and communicative, if you conceded at the outset that England was the
best of all countries and the English the leading nation of the world.
They read a newspaper resembling in every particular themselves;
usually several of them united in a subscription to a single copy,
which passed solemnly from hand to hand. They were slow and
methodical, never taking short-cuts across lots; but they were
punctual; they knew their own business and business associates, their
circle of relatives, their dwelling and social place, and Burke's
Peerage; but they knew nothing else. In a group of intelligent persons
of this degree, question was raised, once upon a time, of two English
poets; but not one of the group had heard of either; the poets were
Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. This may seem merely absurd or
apocryphal; but consider the terrible power of concentration which it
implies! And consider the effect which the impact against such a clay
wall must make upon a man and an American like my father!

Well, the very surprise and novelty of the adventure amused and
interested him, and even won a good deal upon his sympathies. He loved
the solid earth as well as the sky above it, and he was glad of the
assurance that this people existed, though he might be devoutly
thankful that two hundred years of America had opened so impassable a
gulf between him and them. Indeed, the very fact of that impassability
may have made his intercourse with them the easier--at any rate, on
his side. On their side, they regarded him with a dim but always
self-complacent curiosity; had he not been a consul, they would
probably not have regarded him at all. Of course they--the Rock Park
sort of people--had never read his books; literary cultivation was not
to be found in England lower down than the gentleman class. My father,
therefore, was never obliged to say, "I'm glad you liked it" to them.
And that relief, of itself, must have served as a substantial bond of
fellowship.

Rock Park, as I remember it, was a damp, winding, verdurous street,
protected at each end by a small granite lodge, and studded throughout
its length with stuccoed villas. The villas were mended-on to each
other (as one of the children expressed it) two and two; they had
front yards filled with ornamental shrubbery, and gardens at the back,
an acre or two in extent; they were fenced in with iron pickets, and
there were gates to the driveways, on which the children swung. Every
normal child supposes that gates are made for no other purpose. The
trees were not large, but there were many of them, and they were thick
with leaves. There was a damp, arboreal smell everywhere, mingled with
the finer perfume of flowers and of the hawthorns and yellow
laburnums. Flowers, especially purple English violets, grew profusely
in the gardens, and gooseberry-bushes, bearing immense gooseberries
such as our climate does not nourish. There were also armies of
garden--snails, handsome gasteropods, which were of great interest to
me; for I was entering, at this period, upon a passionate pursuit of
natural history. For many years I supposed that the odor of the
violets proceeded from snails, and to this day I always associate
snails with violets, or vice versa. Una, Rose, and I were given each a
section of a garden-bed for our own; I cultivated mine so assiduously
that it became quite a deep hole; but I do not recall that anything
ever grew in it. The soil was a very rich loam, and ceaseless
diligence must have been required in me to keep it barren.

Gray skies, frequent showers, a cool or semi-chilly mildness, varied
every little while by the intrusion of a yellow fog from Liverpool,
over the river--such was the climate of Rock Park. There were
occasional passages of sunshine; but never, that I recollect, an
entire day of it. The stucco of the villas was streaked with green
dampness, and peeling off here and there. I suspect that the fashion
of castellated, stuccoed villas may have been set in the eighteenth
century by Horace Walpole when he built that marvellous edifice known
as Strawberry Hill. I first saw that achievement twenty years after
the time of which I now write, and recognized in it, as I thought, the
parent of my former Rock Park home and of innumerable of the latter's
kindred. Strawberry Hill is sprawling and vast, the progeny are
liliputian, but the family likeness is striking. The idea is to build
something which shall seem to be all that it is not. The gray-white
stucco pretends to be stone, and the lines of the stone courses are
carefully painted on the roughened surface; but nobody, since Horace's
time, could ever have been deceived by them. The castellated additions
and ornamentation are all bogus, of the cheapest and vulgarest sort.
It is singular that a people so sincere and solid as the English are
supposed to be should adopt this fashion for their dwellings. But then
they are used to follow conventions and adopt fashions set them by
those whom they esteem to be their betters, without thought, or
activity of individual conscience. It is rather matter for wonder,
remembering what rascals and humbugs many of their "betters" have
been, that middle-class England is not more of a whited sepulchre than
it is. I do not mean to cast any reflections upon the admirable and
beguiling Horace; but he was a highly civilized person, and had a
brother named Robert, and perhaps solid sincerity should not be
expected from such a combination.

Our villa, within, was close and comfortable enough, for its era and
degree; but the furniture was ponderous and ugly to the point of
nightmare. The chairs, tables, and sofas wore the semblance of solid
mahogany, twisted and tortured in a futile struggle to achieve
elegance; the carvings, or mouldings, were screwed or glued on, and
the lines of structure, intended to charm the eye, accomplished only
the discomfort of the body. The dining-table was like a plateau; the
sideboard resembled a cliff-dwelling. The carpets were of the Brussels
ilk: acanthus-leaves and roses and dahlias wreathed in inextricable
convolutions, glowing with the brightest and most uncompromising hues.
The lace curtains were imitation lace; the damask curtains were
imitation damask. The bedsteads. ... But this is not a History of
England. After all, we were snug and comfortable. On the walls were
portraits of the family whose house this was; by name, Campbell; the
house-painter, or wood-grainer, one would suppose, had a leaning
towards this branch of art. I never saw the originals of these
portraits, but, upon the assumption that they had been faithfully
interpreted by the artist, I used to think, in my childish folly, that
the refrain of the old song, "The Campbells are Coming," was meant as
a phrase or threat to frighten people. Who would not have run upon
such an announcement? As I have already made one confession in these
pages not reflecting credit upon myself, I may as well make another
now. Just thirty years after the events I am describing, somebody
wrote to me from Rock Park, stating that the local inhabitants were
desirous of putting up on the house which Hawthorne had occupied there
a marble or bronze slab, recording the fact for the benefit of
pilgrims. The committee, however, did not know which of three or four
houses was the right one, and the writer enclosed photographs of them
all, and requested me to put a cross over our former habitation. Now,
all the houses in Rock Park had been turned out of the same mould, and
I knew no more than my interrogator which was which. But I reflected
that the committee had been put to trouble and expense for
photographs, postage-stamps, and what not, and that all that was
really wanted was something to be sentimental over. So, rather than
disappoint them, I resorted to a kind of sortes Virgillana; I shut my
eyes, turned round thrice, and made a mark at hazard on the line of
photographs. The chances against my having hit it right were only
four to one; the committee were satisfied, the pilgrims have been made
happy, and it is difficult to see where harm has been done.
Nevertheless, the matter has weighed somewhat on my conscience ever
since, and I am glad to have thus lightened myself of it. What would
one better do in such circumstances? Is history written in this way?

The custom of our family in America had been to take all our meals
together; but in England the elders take lunch at noon, tea at four or
five, and dinner at seven or eight, while the children dine at noon
and sup at six. This arrangement was adopted in Rock Park. My father
used to leave home for the consulate at nine, and return--unless kept
away by an official or social engagement--at five or six. There was
appointed for us children a nurse or governess, to oversee and
administer our supplies; our father and mother dining, with such
guests as might happen to be present, late in the evening. We were
sometimes allowed to come in at dessert, to eat a few nuts and raisins
and exhibit our infantile good manners. This domestic separation was a
matter of much speculation arid curiosity to our immature minds; we
used to haunt the hall through which the servants carried the dishes,
smoking and fragrant, from the kitchen to the dining-room, and once in
a while the too-indulgent creatures would allow us to steal something.
How ravishingly delicious things thus acquired taste! And we,
fancying, of course, that they must be not less delicious for the
folks at table, used to marvel how they could ever bear to leave off
eating. The dinners were certainly rather elaborate compared with the
archaic repasts of Salem or of Concord; but they were as far inferior
in grandeur and interminableness to the astonishing banquets at which,
in some great houses, our father and mother were present. Consider,
for example, this dinner, in no way remarkable among such functions,
at the Hollands's, about this time. There were twelve persons at
table. The service was of solid silver; two enormous covers were on
the table before the soup was served; being removed, they revealed
turbot and fried fish. Then followed boiled turkey and roast goose,
and between them innumerable smaller dishes, including chicken-pies,
ragouts, cutlets, fricasees, tongue, and ham, all being placed in
their silver receptacles on the table; on the sideboard was a vast
round of boiled beef, as a precaution against famine. With the sweets
were served grouse and pheasants; there were five kinds of wine, not
including the champagne, which was consumed as a collateral all the
way along. The pudding which followed these trifles was an heroic
compound, which Gargantua might have flinched from; then came the nuts
and raisins, then the coffee, then the whiskey and brandy. There were
people in England, half a century ago, who ate this sort of dinners
six or seven times a week, and thought nothing of it. They actually
ate and drank them--did not merely glance at them and shake their
heads. The ancient Scandinavians, Gauls, Saxons, and Normans, of whom
they were descendants, could not have done more. One cannot help
respecting such prodigious trencher-men and women, or wonder that the
poverty-stricken class were ill-fed. Dinner in England had become a
very different thing when I lived there twenty years later, and though
port and Madeira were generally on the table, the only man whom I saw
habitually drink them was Robert Browning! Possibly this is the reason
the British got such a thrashing in South Africa the other day.

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