Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

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After dinner at Rock Park--or, if it were to be a late affair,
before--we would have family prayers, in which the servants joined.
This was in deference to English custom; not that we were irreligious,
but we had not before been accustomed to express our religious
feelings in just that manner. All being grouped in a semicircle, my
father would open the Bible and read a chapter; then he would take a
prayer-book containing thirty or forty well-considered addresses to
the Almighty, and everybody would kneel down and cover their eyes with
their hands. The "Amen" having been reached, and echoed by every one,
all would rise to their former positions, and the servants would file
out of the room. It must have been somewhat of an effort for my father
to go through this ceremony; but I think he did it, not only for the
reason above mentioned, but also because he thought it right that his
children should have the opportunity of gaining whatever religious
sentiment such proceedings might inculcate. But I do not think that he
had much faith in the practice as an English institution. Indeed, he
has somewhere written that the English "bring themselves no nearer to
God when they pray than when they play cards."

[IMAGE: ROBERT BROWNING]

I understood long afterwards, as I did not at the time, how closely my
father and mother studied in all things the welfare and cultivation of
their children. They were not formal or oppressive about it; all went
pleasantly and with seeming spontaneity, as if in accordance with our
own desire; but we were wisely and needfully guided. We were never
sent to school during our seven years in Europe; but either we were
taught our lessons by our parents at home or by governesses. In
addition to the constant walks which I took with my father, he
encouraged me to join a cricket club in the Park, and sent me to
Huguenin's gymnasium in Liverpool, to the Cornwallis swimming-baths,
and to a dancing-academy kept by a highly ornamental Frenchman, and he
bought me an enormous steel hoop, and set me racing after it at
headlong speed. Nor did he neglect to stimulate us in the imaginative
and aesthetic side. From the date of our settlement in England to the
end of his life, he read aloud to us in the evenings many of the
classics of literature. Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the Don Quixote
of Cervantes, the poems and novels of Scott, Grimm's and Andersen's
Fairy Tales, much of Defoe and Swift, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake field,
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (he himself was very fond of that poem),
and many other things, and I cannot overestimate the good they did me.
His talks to me during our walks gave me, under the guise of
pleasantry, not so much specific information concerning things (though
that was not wanting), but--character; that is, the questions he put
to me, the remarks and comments he made, the stories he told, were all
calculated to give me a high idea of human duties and aspirations; to
encourage generosity, charity, courage, patriotism, and independence.
From the reading of The Faerie Queene and of Don Quixote I conceived a
vehement infatuation for mediaeval chivalry and knight-errantry; I
adopted the motto of the order, "Be faithful, brave, and true in deed
and word"; and I indulged in waking dreams of heroic adventures in
quest of fair renown, and to succor the oppressed. All this he
encouraged and abetted, though always, too, with a sort of twinkle of
the eye, lest I should take myself too seriously and wax priggish. He
permitted me to have a breastplate and a helmet with a golden dragon
crest (made by our nurse out of pasteboard covered with tinsel-paper),
and he bought me a real steel sword with a brass hilt wrought in
open-work; I used to spend hours polishing it, and picturing to myself
the giants and ogres I would slay with it. Finally--with that
humorous arching of the eyebrow of his--he bade me kneel down, and
with my sword smote me on the shoulder, and dubbed me knight, saying,
"Rise up, Sir Julian!" It was worth many set moral homilies to me. He
knew the advantage of leading a boy to regard the practice of boyish
and manly virtues not as a burden but as a privilege and boon, and of
making the boy's own conscience his judge. His handling of the matter
was, of course, modified so as to reach the inner springs of my
particular nature and temperament, which he thoroughly understood.
Withal, he never failed to hold up to ridicule anything showing a
tendency to the sentimental; he would test me on this point in various
ways, and always betrayed pleasure when he found me quick to detect
the sentimental or mawkish taint in literature or life. I breathed a
manly, robust, and bracing atmosphere in his company, and when I
reflect upon what were my proclivities to folly during this
impressionable period, I thank my stars for such a father.

There was abundant quiet and seclusion in Rock Park, and had my father
been able to do any writing, he could hardly have found a retreat more
suitable. The tradesmen called early at the houses in the Park, their
wagon-wheels making no sound upon the unpaved street, and the two
policemen, who lived in the stone lodges, kept the place free from
beggars and peddlers. These policemen, pacing slowly along in their
uniforms, rigid and dignified, had quite an imposing aspect, and it
was some time before we children discovered that they were only men,
after all. Each had a wife and children, who filled to overflowing the
tiny habitations; when their blue coats and steel-framed hats were
off, they were quite humble persons; one of them eked out his official
salary by mending shoes. After following with awe the progress along
the sidewalk of the officer of public order, stalking with solemn and
measured gait, and touching his hat, with a hand encased in a
snow-white cotton glove, to such of the denizens of the Park as he
might encounter, it was quite like a fairy-tale transformation to see
him squatting in soiled shirt-sleeves on his cobbler's bench, drawing
waxed thread through holes in a boot-sole. I once saw one of them, of
a Sunday afternoon, standing at ease in the doorway of his lodge, clad
in an old sack-coat which I recognized as having been my father's. I
am constitutionally reverent of law and order; but the revelation of
the domestic lives of these policemen gave me an insight, which I have
never since lost, into the profound truth that the man and the officer
are twain.

There were perhaps twenty families living in the Park, of whom we
became acquainted with two only; the people who lived next door to us
(whose name I have forgotten), and Mr. and Mrs. Squarey, who dwelt
higher up the street. The people next door had two boys of about my
own age, with whom I played cricket, and it was from the back windows
of their house that I saw for the first time an exhibition of
fireworks in their garden; I remember that when, just before the show
began, they put out the lamp in the room, I asked to have it
relighted, in order that I might see the as yet unexperienced wonder.
There are folks who go hunting for the sun with a lantern.

Mr. Squarey was tall and stiff of figure, with a singularly square
countenance, with a short whisker on each side of it; but spiritually
he was most affable and obliging; so was his wife; but as she was
short and globular, my father was wont to refer to her, in the privacy
of domestic intercourse, as Mrs. Roundey. They were profuse in
invitations to go with us to places--to Chester, to the Welsh
show-places, and so forth; and although I think my father and mother
would rather have gone alone, they felt constrained to accept these
suggestions. It was in their company, at all events, that I first saw
Chester "Rows"; and also, from some coign of vantage on those
delightful old walls, an English horse-race, with jockeys in silk caps
and jackets tinted like the rainbow. Mr. Squarey's demeanor towards my
sisters and myself was like that of the benevolent tutor in Sandford
and Merton, with which excellent work we were very conversant at that
time; as, likewise, with Edgeworth's Parents' Assistant, and with
still another engaging volume called, I think, the Budget of
something; at any rate, it had two or three little boys and girls in
it, who were anxious to acquire useful and curious information on many
subjects, which was afforded them in generous measure by their highly
cultivated elders. Such flower-garlanded instruction was the best
specifically juvenile literature which those primitive ages afforded.
"Pray, mamma, why does the sun rise in the east instead of in the
west?" "Pray, papa, why was King Alfred called 'The Good'?" Mrs.
Markham's History of England was constructed upon the same artless
principle. What a distance we have travelled since then!

But it was a good and happy life in Rock Park, and I think our father
and mother enjoyed it almost as much as we children did. They were
meeting people many of whom were delightful--I shall try to paint the
portraits of some of them in the next chapter--and they were seeing
towns and castles and places of historic and picturesque interest; and
my father was earning more money than ever before, though less than a
quarter as much as he would have earned had not Congress, soon after
his accession to office, cut down the emoluments. This was England;
the Old Home, and the Old World, for the understanding of which they
had prepared themselves all their lives previous. My father once said,
"If England were all the world, it would still have been worth while
for the Creator to have made it." The children were radiantly content
with their lot; and it is on record that the little boy once remarked,
"I don't remember when I carne down from heaven; but I'm glad I
happened to tumble into so good a family." The same individual,
rolling on the floor in excess of mirth over some childish comicality,
panted out, "Oh, mamma, my ball of jolly is so big I can't breathe!"
The ball of jolly became a household word for years thereafter. It
was well nourished in those days.

VIII

Cataclysmic adventures--On the trail of dazzling fortunes--"Lovely,
but reprehensible Madham"--The throne saves the artist--English robin
redbreast--A sad and weary old man--"Most indelicate woman I've ever
known"--Perfectly chaste--Something human stirred dimly--"She loves
me; she loves me!"--The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown--Portentous
and thundering title--Honest English simplicity--"The spirit
lacking"--Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin--A famous and charming
woman of genius--Deep and wide well of human sympathy--The
whooping-cough.

In the spring of 1854 we were visited by John O'Sullivan, his wife and
mother, and a young relative of theirs, Miss Ella Rogers. O'Sullivan
had been appointed Minister to the Court of Portugal, and was on his
way thither. He was a Democrat of old standing; had edited the
Democratic Review in 1837, and had made my father's acquaintance at
that time through soliciting contributions from him; later they became
close friends, and when my sister Una was born, he sent her a silver
cup, and was ever after called "Uncle John" in the family, and, also,
occasionally, "the Count"--a title which, I believe, had some warrant
in his ancestry. For, although an American, Uncle John was born at sea
off the coast of Spain, of an Irish father and a mother of
aristocratic connections or extraction (I am a little uncertain, I
find, on this point); I think her parents were Italian. Uncle John had
all the charming qualities of the nations mentioned, and none of their
objectionable ones; though this is not to say that he was devoid of
tender faults, which were, if anything, more lovable than his virtues.
Beneath a tranquil, comely, and gentle exterior burned all the fire
and romance of the Celt; his faith and enthusiasm in "projects" knew
no bounds; he might be deceived and bankrupted a hundred times, and
would toe the mark the next time with undiminished confidence. He was
continually, and in the quietest way, having the most astonishing and
cataclysmic adventures; he would be blown up, as it were, by a
dynamite explosion, and presently would return from the sky
undisturbed, with only a slight additional sparkle in his soft eyes,
and with the lock of hair that fell gracefully over his forehead only
a trifle disordered. The most courteous and affectionate of men, with
the most yielding and self-effacing manners, he had the spirit of a
paladin, and was afraid of nothing. He would empty his pockets--or if,
as too often happened, they were already empty, he would pledge his
credit to help a friend out of a hole; and, on the other hand, he was
always hot upon the trail of a dazzling fortune, which, like Emerson's
Forerunners, never was overtaken. It would not long have availed him,
had it been otherwise, for never was there a Monte Cristo who lavished
wealth as O'Sullivan habitually did in anticipation, and would
undoubtedly have done in fact had the opportunity been afforded him.
He was gifted with a low, melodious, exquisitely modulated voice, and
a most engaging and winning manner, and when he set out to picture the
simple and easy methods whereby he proposed to make millions, it was
next to impossible to resist him. He was like a beautiful, innocent,
brilliant child, grown up, endowed with an enchanter's wand, which was
forever promising all the kingdoms of the earth to him, but never (as
our modern phrase is) delivered the goods. He regarded my father as a
king of men, and he had, times without number, been on the very edge
of making him, as well as himself, a multifold millionaire. However,
President Pierce did what he could for him by giving him the
Portuguese mission (after first offering it to my father), and
O'Sullivan did excellent work there. But he became
interested--abstractly--in some copper-mines in Spain, which, as he
clearly demonstrated, could be bought for a song, and would pay a
thousand per cent, from the start. Partly to gratify him, and partly
with the hope of at least getting his money back, my father finally,
in 1858 or 1859, advanced him ten thousand dollars to finance the
scheme. I saw the dear old gentleman, a generation later, in New York;
he had the same clear, untroubled, tranquil face as of old; his hair,
though gray, was as thick and graceful as ever; his manner was as
sweet and attractive; but though, in addition to his other
accomplishments, he had become an advanced spiritualist, he had not
yet coined into bullion his golden imagination. He had forgotten the
Spanish copper-mines, and I took care not to remind him of them. Peace
to his generous, ardent, and loving soul!

Uncle John's wife was a good mate for him, in her own way as brilliant
and fascinating as he and with an unalterable belief in her husband's
destiny. She was a tall, slender woman, with kindling eyes, a lovely
smile, and a wonderful richness and vivacity of conversation; nor have
I ever since known so truly witty a woman. But she lacked the
delightful mellowness and tenderness for which Uncle John was so
remarkable. The mother, Madame O'Sullivan, as she was called, was a
type of the finegrained, gently bred aristocrat, every outline
softened and made gracious by the long lapse of years through which
she had lived. She sat like a picture of reverend but still animated
age, with white, delicate lace about her pale cheeks and dark, kindly,
weary eyes, and making a frost-work over her silvery hair. As for Miss
Ella Rogers, it is with some embarrassment that I refer to her;
inasmuch as I fell violently in love with her at first sight, and I
have reason to think that she never fully appreciated or adequately
responded to my passion, though, at the time, I was nearly one-third
of her age--she being five-and-twenty. She was a dark and lively
beauty, thoroughly self-possessed, and versed in social
accomplishments, and gifted with dramatic talent. She afterwards made
a great impression in the court of the Portuguese monarch, and more
than once the King himself chose her as his partner in the ball.
Reports of these gayeties came to my ears; and I found the other day
part of a letter which I addressed to her, remonstrating against these
royal flirtations. It is written in pencil, upon the blue office-paper
of the consulate, and I can recall distinctly the small, indignant boy
and knight-errant, sitting at the desk opposite his hugely diverted
father, and beginning his epistle thus: "Lovely, but reprehensible
Madham!" I suspect that I consulted my father as to the spelling of
the second adjective, for it shows signs of having been overhauled;
but after that my feelings became too strong for me, and the remainder
of the letter is orthographically so eccentric that it was probably
cast aside and a copy made of it. But the rough draught, by some
inconceivable chance, was kept, and turns up now, after half a
century, with a strange thread of pathos woven by time into the
texture of its absurdity. Poor, little, lovely reprehensible Madham!
Her after-career was not a happy one.

These agreeable persons filled our stuccoed villa full, and gave
poignant addition to the quiet, gray beauty of that English spring. A
year or so later, when my mother's health compelled her to escape to a
warmer climate from fog-ridden Liverpool, she went with my sisters to
Lisbon, where the O'Sullivans were by that time established, and spent
several months with them, and saw all the splendors of the naive but
brilliant little court of Dom Pedro V. She brought home a portfolio of
etchings presented to her, and done by his youthful Majesty; which
indicate that his throne, little as he cared for it, preserved him
from the mortification of failing as an artist.

Early in the winter of the following year (1855), Mr. James Buchanan,
appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, found his way to my
father's retreat in Rock Park. The English winter was a mild affair
compared with our recent experiences of the arctic snows of Lenox;
there was no coasting, and not much snow-balling; but we had the
pleasure of making friends with the English robin-redbreast, a most
lovable little creature, who, every morning, hopped confidingly on our
window-sill and took bread-crumbs almost from our hands. The old
American diplomatist and President that was to be (though he
vehemently disclaimed any such possibility) distracted our attention
from robin for a day or two. He had the aspect, perhaps cultivated for
political and democratic purposes, of a Pennsylvania farmer; he was, I
believe, born on a farm in Franklin County, in that State, at the
beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century. He was tall
and ungainly in figure, though he bore himself with a certain security
and dignity; his head was high and thinly covered with gray hair; he
carried it oddly, a little on one side; it was said at the time that
this was due to his having once attempted suicide by cutting his
throat. His visage--heavy, long, and noticeable--had the typical
traits of the American politician of that epoch; his eyes were small,
shrewd, and twinkling; there was a sort of professional candor in his
bearing, but he looked like a sad and weary old man. He talked
somewhat volubly to my father, who kept him going by a question now
and then, as his way generally was with visitors. There was a flavor
of rusticity in his speech; he was not a man of culture or polish,
though unquestionably of great experience of the world. He was dressed
in a wide-skirted coat of black broadcloth, and wore a white choker
put on a little askew. The English, who were prone to be critical of
our representatives, made a good deal of fun of Mr. Buchanan, and told
anecdotes about him which were probably exaggerated or apocryphal. It
was alleged, for example, that, speaking of the indisposition of a
female relative of his, he had observed that it was due to the
severity of the English climate. "She never enjoyed delicate health
at home," he had declared; "in fact, she was always one of the most
indelicate women I've ever known." And it was asserted that he had
been admonished by the Lord High Chamberlain, or by the Gold
Stick-in-Waiting, for expectorating upon the floor of her Majesty's
palace at a levee. Such ribaldries used to be popular in English
mouths concerning American visitors before the war; they were all of
similar tenor. Mrs. Abbott Lawrence was described as having bought a
handsome shawl at a shop on Lord Street, in Liverpool, and to have
walked down that populous thoroughfare with her new purchase on her
shoulders, ignorant that it bore the legend, inscribed on a white
card, which the salesman had neglected to remove, "Perfectly chaste."
The same lady was reported as saying, in asking an invitation to a
ball on behalf of Mrs. Augustus Peabody, of Boston, "I assure you, on
our side of the water, Mrs. Peabody is much more accustomed to grant
favors than to ask them." Such anecdotes seem to bear upon them the
stamp of the British manufacturer. There would not seem to be much
harm in them, yet it is such things that sometimes interfere most
acutely with the entente cordials between nations. We had another
glimpse of Mr. Buchanan, in London, about a year later, and he then
remarked to my mother, indirectly referring to such reports, that the
Queen had treated him very kindly. For the present, he faded from the
Rock Park horizon, and we returned to the robin; nor have I been able
to understand how it happened that he made so distinct an impression
upon my memory. But a child's memory is unaccountable, both in what it
loses and in what it retains.

One Sunday forenoon, when it was not too cold for the young folks to
be swinging on that gate which has been mentioned, and the elders were
in-doors, enjoying the holiday in their own way, we descried an old
gentleman approaching up the winding street. As he drew nearer he
presented rather a shabby, or, at least, rusty appearance. His felt
hat was not so black as it had been; his coat was creased and soiled;
his boots needed a blacking. He swung a cane as he stumped along, and
there was a sort of faded smartness in his bearing and a knowingness
in his grim old visage, indicating some incongruous familiarity with
the manners of the great world. He came to a halt in front of the
house, and, after quizzing it for a moment, went up the steps and beat
a fashionable tattoo with the knocker.

Summoned in-doors soon afterwards, we found this questionable
personage sitting in the drawing-room. His voice was husky, but
modulated to the inflections of polite breeding; he used a good many
small gestures, and grinned often, revealing the yellow remains of his
ancient teeth; he laughed, too, with a hoarse sound in his throat.
There was about him an air of determined cheerfulness and affability,
though between the efforts the light died down in his wrinkled old
eyes and the lines of his face sagged and deepened. He offered to kiss
my sisters, but they drew back; he took my hand in his own large, dry
one with its ragged nails and swollen joints. At length he inveigled
my younger sister to his knee, where she sat gazing unflinchingly and
solemnly into him with that persistence which characterizes little
girls of four or five who are not quite sure of their ground. Her
smooth, pink-and-white cheeks and unwinking eyes contrasted vividly
with his seamed yellowness and blinking grin; for a long time he
coquetted at her, and played peep-bo, without disturbing her gravity,
making humorous side comments to the on-lookers meanwhile. There was a
ragged and disorderly mop of gray hair on his head, which showed very
dingy beside the clear auburn of the child's. One felt a repulsion
from him, and yet, as he chatted and smirked and acted, there was a
sort of fascination in him, too. Some original force and fire of
nature still glowed and flickered in his old carcass; something human
stirred dimly under the crust of self-consciousness and artificiality.
Rose's adamantine seriousness finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon
which he threw up his hands, emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and
exclaimed, "There--there it is! I knew I'd get it; she loves me--she
loves me!" He then permitted her to slip down from his knee and
withdraw to her mother, and resumed the talk which our entrance had
interrupted. It was chiefly about people of whom we youngsters knew
nothing--though our ignorance only argued ourselves unknown, for he
named persons all famous in their day. He had seen George IV.,
Napoleon, Talleyrand, Wellington; he had been intimate with Coleridge,
De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Monk Lewis; he was a sort of elder
brother or deputy uncle to Tennyson, Browning, Dickens; he had quaffed
mountain-dew with Walter Scott and had tramped the moors shoulder to
shoulder with Kit North; the courts of Europe were his familiar
stamping-grounds; he had the nobility and gentry at his finger-ends;
he was privileged, petted, and sought after everywhere; if there were
any august door we wished to enter, any high-placed personage we
desired to approach, any difficult service we wanted rendered, he was
the man to help us to our object. Who, then, was he? He has long been
utterly forgotten; but he was well known, or notorious, during the
first half of the last century; he was such a character as could
flourish only in England. His name was William Jerdan; he was born in
1785, and was now, therefore, about seventy years old. He had started
in life poor, with no family distinction, but with some more or less
useful connections either on the father's or the mother's side. He had
somehow got an English education, and he had pursued his career on the
basis of his native wits, his indomitable effrontery and persistence,
his faculty of familiarity, his indifference to rebuffs, his lack of
shame, conscience, and morality. How he found the means to live nobody
could tell, but he uniformly lived well and had enjoyed the good
things of the world. After maintaining his ground during the first
twenty or thirty years, it had probably been easier for him to forge
along afterwards, for he could impose upon the new generation with his
stories of success in the former one. Uncouth and ugly though he was
by nature, the external polish and trick of good form which he had
acquired, and, no doubt, some inner force of social genius in him, had
influenced men to tolerate and often to like him, and had given him
extraordinary good-fortune with women. He had not only been twice
married, and had many children born in wedlock, but his intrigues and
liaisons had been innumerable, and they had by no means been confined
to the lower ranks of society. That he was a practised liar there can
be no doubt, but he had the long memory which the proverb recommends
to liars, and he was so circumspect that few of his claims and
pretensions lacked solid basis enough to make them pass current in a
hurrying and heedless world. Now, however, in his age, he was wellnigh
at the end of his tether; what we should call his "pull" was losing
its efficiency; he was lapsing to the condition where he would offer
to introduce a man to the Prince of Wales or to Baron Rothschild, and
then ask him for the loan of five pounds--or half a crown, as the case
might be. He was a character for Thackeray. He haunted my father for a
year or two more, and then vanished I know not where.

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