Books: Our Old Home

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26

That important portion of the town is a rather spacious and irregularly
shaped vacuity, surrounded by houses and shops, some of them old, with
red-tiled roofs, others wearing a pretence of newness, but probably as
old in their inner substance as the rest. The people of Uttoxeter seemed
very idle in the warm summer-day, and were scattered in little groups
along the sidewalks, leisurely chatting with one another, and often
turning about to take a deliberate stare at my humble self; insomuch that
I felt as if my genuine sympathy for the illustrious penitent, and my
many reflections about him, must have imbued me with some of his own
singularity of mien. If their great-grandfathers were such redoubtable
starers in the Doctor's day, his penance was no light one. This
curiosity indicates a paucity of visitors to the little town, except for
market purposes, and I question if Uttoxeter ever saw an American before.
The only other thing that greatly impressed me was the abundance of
public-houses, one at every step or two Red Lions, White Harts, Bulls'
Heads, Mitres, Cross Keys, and I know not what besides. These are
probably for the accommodation of the farmers and peasantry of the
neighborhood on market-day, and content themselves with a very meagre
business on other days of the week. At any rate, I was the only guest in
Uttoxeter at the period of my visit, and had but an infinitesimal portion
of patronage to distribute among such a multitude of inns. The reader,
however, will possibly be scandalized to learn what was the first, and,
indeed, the only important affair that I attended to, after coming so far
to indulge a solemn and high emotion, and standing now on the very spot
where my pious errand should have been consummated. I stepped into one
of the rustic hostelries and got my dinner,--bacon and greens, some
mutton-chops, juicier and more delectable than all America could serve up
at the President's table, and a gooseberry pudding; a sufficient meal for
six yeomen, and good enough for a prince, besides a pitcher of foaming
ale, the whole at the pitiful small charge of eighteen-pence!

Dr. Johnson would have forgiven me, for nobody had a heartier faith in
beef and mutton than himself. And as regards my lack of sentiment in
eating my dinner,--it was the wisest thing I had done that day. A
sensible man had better not let himself be betrayed into these attempts
to realize the things which he has dreamed about, and which, when they
cease to be purely ideal in his mind, will have lost the truest of their
truth, the loftiest and profoundest part of their power over his
sympathies. Facts, as we really find them, whatever poetry they may
involve, are covered with a stony excrescence of prose, resembling the
crust on a beautiful sea-shell, and they never show their most delicate
and divinest colors until we shall have dissolved away their grosser
actualities by steeping them long in a powerful menstruum of thought.
And seeking to actualize them again, we do but renew the crust. If this
were otherwise,--if the moral sublimity of a great fact depended in any
degree on its garb of external circumstances, things which change and
decay,--it could not itself be immortal and ubiquitous, and only a brief
point of time and a little neighborhood would be spiritually nourished by
its grandeur and beauty.

Such were a few of the reflections which I mingled with my ale, as I
remember to have seen an old quaffer of that excellent liquor stir up his
cup with a sprig of some bitter and fragrant herb. Meanwhile I found
myself still haunted by a desire to get a definite result out of my visit
to Uttoxeter. The hospitable inn was called the Nag's Head, and standing
beside the market-place, was as likely as any other to have entertained
old Michael Johnson in the days when he used to come hither to sell
books. He, perhaps, had dined on bacon and greens, and drunk his ale,
and smoked his pipe, in the very room where I now sat, which was a low,
ancient room, certainly much older than Queen Anne's time, with a
red-brick floor, and a white-washed ceiling, traversed by bare, rough
beams, the whole in the rudest fashion, but extremely neat. Neither did
it lack ornament, the walls being hung with colored engravings of
prize oxen and other pretty prints, and the mantel-piece adorned with
earthen-ware figures of shepherdesses in the Arcadian taste of long ago.
Michael Johnson's eyes might have rested on that selfsame earthen image,
to examine which more closely I had just crossed the brick pavement of
the room. And, sitting down again, still as I sipped my ale, I glanced
through the open window into the sunny market-place, and wished that I
could honestly fix on one spot rather than another, as likely to have
been the holy site where Johnson stood to do his penance.

How strange and stupid it is that tradition should not have marked and
kept in mind the very place! How shameful (nothing less than that) that
there should be no local memorial of this incident, as beautiful and
touching a passage as can be cited out of any human life! No inscription
of it, almost as sacred as a verse of Scripture on the wall of the
church! No statue of the venerable and illustrious penitent in the
market-place to throw a wholesome awe over its earthliness, its frauds
and petty wrongs of which the benumbed fingers of conscience can make no
record, its selfish competition of each man with his brother or his
neighbor, its traffic of soul-substance for a little worldly gain! Such
a statue, if the piety of the people did not raise it, might almost have
been expected to grow up out of the pavement of its own accord on the
spot that had been watered by the rain that dripped from Johnson's
garments, mingled with his remorseful tears.

Long after my visit to Uttoxeter, I was told that there were individuals
in the town who could have shown me the exact, indubitable spot where
Johnson performed his penance. I was assured, moreover, that sufficient
interest was felt in the subject to have induced certain local
discussions as to the expediency of erecting a memorial. With all
deference to my polite informant, I surmise that there is a mistake, and
decline, without further and precise evidence, giving credit to either of
the above statements. The inhabitants know nothing, as a matter of
general interest, about the penance, and care nothing for the scene of
it. If the clergyman of the parish, for example, had ever heard of it,
would he not have used the theme, time and again, wherewith to work
tenderly and profoundly on the souls committed to his charge? If parents
were familiar with it, would they not teach it to their young ones at the
fireside, both to insure reverence to their own gray hairs, and to
protect the children from such unavailing regrets as Johnson bore upon
his heart for fifty years? If the site were ascertained, would not the
pavement thereabouts be worn with reverential footsteps? Would not every
town-born child be able to direct the pilgrim thither? While waiting at
the station, before my departure, I asked a boy who stood near me,--an
intelligent and gentlemanly lad, twelve or thirteen years old, whom I
should take to be a clergyman's son,--I asked him if he had ever heard
the story of Dr. Johnson, how he stood an hour doing penance near that
church, the spire of which rose before us. The boy stared and
answered,--

"No!'

"Were you born in Uttoxeter?"

"Yes."

I inquired if no circumstance such as I had mentioned was known or talked
about among the inhabitants.

"No," said the boy; "not that I ever heard of."

Just think of the absurd little town, knowing nothing of the only
memorable incident which ever happened within its boundaries since the
old Britons built it, this sad and lovely story, which consecrates the
spot (for I found it holy to my contemplation, again, as soon as it lay
behind me) in the heart of a stranger from three thousand miles over the
sea! It but confirms what I have been saying, that sublime and beautiful
facts are best understood when etherealized by distance.

PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON.

We set out at a little past eleven, and made our first stage to
Manchester. We were by this time sufficiently Anglicized to reckon the
morning a bright and sunny one; although the May sunshine was mingled
with water, as it were, and distempered with a very bitter east-wind.

Lancashire is a dreary county (all, at least, except its hilly portions),
and I have never passed through it without wishing myself anywhere but in
that particular spot where I then happened to be. A few places along our
route were historically interesting; as, for example, Bolton, which was
the scene of many remarkable events in the Parliamentary War, and in the
market-square of which one of the Earls of Derby was beheaded. We saw,
along the wayside, the never-failing green fields, hedges, and other
monotonous features of an ordinary English landscape. There were little
factory villages, too, or larger towns, with their tall chimneys, and
their pennons of black smoke, their ugliness of brick-work, and their
heaps of refuse matter from the furnace, which seems to be the only kind
of stuff which Nature cannot take back to herself and resolve into the
elements, when man has thrown it aside. These hillocks of waste and
effete mineral always disfigure the neighborhood of iron-mongering towns,
and, even after a considerable antiquity, are hardly made decent with a
little grass.

At a quarter to two we left Manchester by the Sheffield and Lincoln
Railway. The scenery grew rather better than that through which we had
hitherto passed, though still by no means very striking; for (except in
the show-districts, such as the Lake country, or Derbyshire) English
scenery is not particularly well worth looking at, considered as a
spectacle or a picture. It has a real, homely charm of its own, no
doubt; and the rich verdure, and the thorough finish added by human art,
are perhaps as attractive to an American eye as any stronger feature
could be. Our journey, however, between Manchester and Sheffield was not
through a rich tract of country, but along a valley walled in by bleak,
ridgy hills extending straight as a rampart, and across black moorlands
with here and there a plantation of trees. Sometimes there were long and
gradual ascents, bleak, windy, and desolate, conveying the very
impression which the reader gets from many passages of Miss Bronte's
novels, and still more from those of her two sisters. Old stone or brick
farm-houses, and, once in a while, an old church-tower, were visible; but
these are almost too common objects to be noticed in an English
landscape.

On a railway, I suspect, what little we do see of the country is seen
quite amiss, because it was never intended to be looked at from any point
of view in that straight line; so that it is like looking at the wrong
side of a piece of tapestry. The old highways and foot-paths were as
natural as brooks and rivulets, and adapted themselves by an inevitable
impulse to the physiognomy of the country; and, furthermore, every object
within view of them had some subtile reference to their curves and
undulations; but the line of a railway is perfectly artificial, and puts
all precedent things at sixes-and-sevens. At any rate, be the cause what
it may, there is seldom anything worth seeing within the scope of a
railway traveller's eye; and if there were, it requires an alert marksman
to take a flying shot at the picturesque.

At one of the stations (it was near a village of ancient aspect, nestling
round a church, on a wide Yorkshire moor) I saw a tall old lady in black,
who seemed to have just alighted from the train. She caught my attention
by a singular movement of the head, not once only, but continually
repeated, and at regular intervals, as if she were making a stern and
solemn protest against some action that developed itself before her eyes,
and were foreboding terrible disaster, if it should be persisted in. Of
course, it was nothing more than a paralytic or nervous affection; yet
one might fancy that it had its origin in some unspeakable wrong,
perpetrated half a lifetime ago in this old gentlewoman's presence,
either against herself or somebody whom she loved still better. Her
features had a wonderful sternness, which, I presume, was caused by her
habitual effort to compose and keep them quiet, and thereby counteract
the tendency to paralytic movement. The slow, regular, and inexorable
character of the motion--her look of force and self-control, which had
the appearance of rendering it voluntary, while yet it was so fateful--
have stamped this poor lady's face and gesture into my memory; so that,
some dark day or other, I am afraid she will reproduce herself in a
dismal romance.

The train stopped a minute or two, to allow the tickets to be taken, just
before entering the Sheffield station, and thence I had a glimpse of the
famous town of razors and penknives, enveloped in a cloud of its own
diffusing. My impressions of it are extremely vague and misty,--or,
rather, smoky: for Sheffield seems to me smokier than Manchester.
Liverpool, or Birmingham,--smokier than all England besides, unless
Newcastle be the exception. It might have been Pluto's own metropolis,
shrouded in sulphurous vapor; and, indeed, our approach to it had been by
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, through a tunnel three miles in
length, quite traversing the breadth and depth of a mountainous hill.

After passing Sheffield, the scenery became softer, gentler, yet more
picturesque. At one point we saw what I believe to be the utmost
northern verge of Sherwood Forest,--not consisting, however, of
thousand-year oaks, extant from Robin Hood's days, but of young and
thriving plantations, which will require a century or two of slow English
growth to give them much breadth of shade. Earl Fitzwilliam's property
lies in this neighborhood, and probably his castle was hidden among some
soft depth of foliage not far off. Farther onward the country grew quite
level around us, whereby I judged that we must now be in Lincolnshire;
and shortly after six o'clock we caught the first glimpse of the
Cathedral towers, though they loomed scarcely huge enough for our
preconceived idea of them. But, as we drew nearer, the great edifice
began to assert itself, making us acknowledge it to be larger than our
receptivity could take in.

At the railway-station we found no cab (it being an unknown vehicle in
Lincoln), but only an omnibus belonging to the Saracen's Head, which the
driver recommended as the best hotel in the city, and took us thither
accordingly. It received us hospitably, and looked comfortable enough;
though, like the hotels of most old English towns, it had a musty
fragrance of antiquity, such as I have smelt in a seldom-opened London
church where the broad-aisle is paved with tombstones. The house was of
an ancient fashion, the entrance into its interior court-yard being
through an arch, in the side of which is the door of the hotel. There
are long corridors, an intricate arrangement of passages, and an
up-and-down meandering of staircases, amid which it would be no marvel to
encounter some forgotten guest who had gone astray a hundred years ago,
and was still seeking for his bedroom while the rest of his generation
were in their graves. There is no exaggerating the confusion of mind
that seizes upon a stranger in the bewildering geography of a great
old-fashioned English inn.

This hotel stands in the principal street of Lincoln, and within a very
short distance of one of the ancient city-gates, which is arched across
the public way, with a smaller arch for foot-passengers on either side;
the whole, a gray, time-gnawn, ponderous, shadowy structure, through the
dark vista of which you look into the Middle Ages. The street is narrow,
and retains many antique peculiarities; though, unquestionably, English
domestic architecture has lost its most impressive features, in the
course of the last century. In this respect, there are finer old towns
than Lincoln: Chester, for instance, and Shrewsbury,--which last is
unusually rich in those quaint and stately edifices where the gentry of
the shire used to make their winter abodes, in a provincial metropolis.
Almost everywhere, nowadays, there is a monotony of modern brick or
stuccoed fronts, hiding houses that are older than ever, but obliterating
the picturesque antiquity of the street.

Between seven and eight o'clock (it being still broad daylight in these
long English days) we set out to pay a preliminary visit to the exterior
of the Cathedral. Passing through the Stone Bow, as the city-gate close
by is called, we ascended a street which grew steeper and narrower as we
advanced, till at last it got to be the steepest street I ever climbed,--
so steep that any carriage, if left to itself, would rattle downward much
faster than it could possibly be drawn up. Being almost the only hill in
Lincolnshire, the inhabitants seem disposed to make the most of it. The
houses on each side had no very remarkable aspect, except one with a
stone portal and carved ornaments, which is now a dwelling-place for
poverty-stricken people, but may have been an aristocratic abode in the
days of the Norman kings, to whom its style of architecture dates back.
This is called the Jewess's House, having been inhabited by a woman of
that faith who was hanged six hundred years ago.

And still the street grew steeper and steeper. Certainly, the Bishop
and clergy of Lincoln ought not to be fat men, but of very spiritual,
saint-like, almost angelic habit, if it be a frequent part of their
ecclesiastical duty to climb this hill; for it is a real penance, and was
probably performed as such, and groaned over accordingly, in monkish
times. Formerly, on the day of his installation, the Bishop used to
ascend the hill barefoot, and was doubtless cheered and invigorated by
looking upward to the grandeur that was to console him for the humility
of his approach. We, likewise, were beckoned onward by glimpses of the
Cathedral towers, and, finally, attaining an open square on the summit,
we saw an old Gothic gateway to the left hand, and another to the right.
The latter had apparently been a part of the exterior defences of the
Cathedral, at a time when the edifice was fortified. The west front rose
behind. We passed through one of the side-arches of the Gothic portal,
and found ourselves in the Cathedral Close, a wide, level space, where
the great old Minster has fair room to sit, looking down on the ancient
structures that surround it, all of which, in former days, were the
habitations of its dignitaries and officers. Some of them are still
occupied as such, though others are in too neglected and dilapidated a
state to seem worthy of so splendid an establishment. Unless it be
Salisbury Close, however (which is incomparably rich as regards the old
residences that belong to it), I remember no more comfortably picturesque
precincts round any other cathedral. But, in truth, almost every
cathedral close, in turn, has seemed to me the loveliest, cosiest,
safest, least wind-shaken, most decorous, and most enjoyable shelter that
ever the thrift and selfishness of mortal man contrived for himself. How
delightful, to combine all this with the service of the temple!

Lincoln Cathedral is built of a yellowish brown-stone, which appears
either to have been largely restored, or else does not assume the hoary,
crumbly surface that gives such a venerable aspect to most of the ancient
churches and castles in England. In many parts, the recent restorations
are quite evident; but other, and much the larger portions, can scarcely
have been touched for centuries: for there are still the gargoyles,
perfect, or with broken noses, as the case may be, but showing that
variety and fertility of grotesque extravagance which no modern imitation
can effect. There are innumerable niches, too, up the whole height of
the towers, above and around the entrance, and all over the walls: most
of them empty, but a few containing the lamentable remnants of headless
saints and angels. It is singular what a native animosity lives in the
human heart against carved images, insomuch that, whether they represent
Christian saint or Pagan deity, all unsophisticated men seize the first
safe opportunity to knock off their heads! In spite of all
dilapidations, however, the effect of the west front of the Cathedral is
still exceedingly rich, being covered from massive base to airy summit
with the minutest details of sculpture and carving: at least, it was so
once; and even now the spiritual impression of its beauty remains so
strong, that we have to look twice to see that much of it has been
obliterated. I have seen a cherry-stone carved all over by a monk, so
minutely that it must have cost him half a lifetime of labor; and this
cathedral-front seems to have been elaborated in a monkish spirit, like
that cherry-stone. Not that the result is in the least petty, but
miraculously grand, and all the more so for the faithful beauty of the
smallest details.

An elderly maid, seeing us looking up at the west front, came to the door
of an adjacent house, and called to inquire if we wished to go into the
Cathedral; but as there would have been a dusky twilight beneath its
roof, like the antiquity that has sheltered itself within, we declined
for the present. So we merely walked round the exterior, and thought it
more beautiful than that of York; though, on recollection, I hardly deem
it so majestic and mighty as that. It is vain to attempt a description,
or seek even to record the feeling which the edifice inspires. It does
not impress the beholder as an inanimate object, but as something that
has a vast, quiet, long-enduring life of its own,--a creation which man
did not build, though in some way or other it is connected with him, and
kindred to human nature. In short, I fall straightway to talking
nonsense, when I try to express my inner sense of this and other
cathedrals.

While we stood in the close, at the eastern end of the Minster, the clock
chimed the quarters; and then Great Tom, who hangs in the Rood Tower,
told us it was eight o'clock, in far the sweetest and mightiest accents
that I ever heard from any bell,--slow, and solemn, and allowing the
profound reverberations of each stroke to die away before the next one
fell. It was still broad daylight in that upper region of the town, and
would be so for some time longer; but the evening atmosphere was getting
sharp and cool. We therefore descended the steep street,--our younger
companion running before us, and gathering such headway that I fully
expected him to break his head against some projecting wall.

In the morning we took a fly (an English term for an exceedingly sluggish
vehicle), and drove up to the Minster by a road rather less steep and
abrupt than the one we had previously climbed. We alighted before the
west front, and sent our charioteer in quest of the verger; but, as he
was not immediately to be found, a young girl let us into the nave. We
found it very grand, it is needless to say, but not so grand, methought,
as the vast nave of York Cathedral, especially beneath the great central
tower of the latter. Unless a writer intends a professedly architectural
description, there is but one set of phrases in which to talk of all the
cathedrals in England and elsewhere. They are alike in their great
features: an acre or two of stone flags for a pavement; rows of vast
columns supporting a vaulted roof at a dusky height; great windows,
sometimes richly bedimmed with ancient or modern stained glass; and an
elaborately carved screen between the nave and chancel, breaking the
vista that might else be of such glorious length, and which is further
choked up by a massive organ.--in spite of which obstructions, you catch
the broad, variegated glimmer of the painted east window, where a hundred
saints wear their robes of transfiguration. Behind the screen are the
carved oaken stalls of the Chapter and Prebendaries, the Bishop's throne,
the pulpit, the altar, and whatever else may furnish out the Holy of
Holies. Nor must we forget the range of chapels (once dedicated to
Catholic saints, but which have now lost their individual consecration),
nor the old monuments of kings, warriors, and prelates, in the
side-aisles of the chancel. In close contiguity to the main body of the
Cathedral is the Chapter-House, which, here at Lincoln, as at Salisbury,
is supported by one central pillar rising from the floor, and putting
forth branches like a tree, to hold up the roof. Adjacent to the
Chapter-House are the cloisters, extending round a quadrangle, and paved
with lettered tombstones, the more antique of which have had their
inscriptions half obliterated by the feet of monks taking their noontide
exercise in these sheltered walks, five hundred years ago. Some of these
old burial-stones, although with ancient crosses engraved upon them, have
been made to serve as memorials to dead people of very recent date.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26