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
Within so trifling a distance of the central spot of all the world
(which, as Americans have at present no centre of their own, we may allow
to be somewhere in the vicinity, we will say, of St. Paul's Cathedral),
it might have seemed natural that I should be tossed about by the
turbulence of the vast London whirlpool. But I had drifted into a still
eddy, where conflicting movements made a repose, and, wearied with a good
deal of uncongenial activity, I found the quiet of my temporary haven
more attractive than anything that the great town could offer. I already
knew London well; that is to say, I had long ago satisfied (so far as it
was capable of satisfaction) that mysterious yearning--the magnetism of
millions of hearts operating upon one--which impels every man's
individuality to mingle itself with the immensest mass of human life
within his scope. Day alter day, at an earlier period, I had trodden the
thronged thoroughfares, the broad, lonely squares, the lanes, alleys, and
strange labyrinthine courts, the parks, the gardens and enclosures of
ancient studious societies, so retired and silent amid the city uproar,
the markets, the foggy streets along the river-side, the bridges,--I had
sought all parts of the metropolis, in short, with an unweariable and
indiscriminating curiosity; until few of the native inhabitants, I fancy,
had turned so many of its corners as myself. These aimless wanderings
(in which my prime purpose and achievement were to lose my way, and
so to find it the more surely) had brought one, at one time or another,
to the sight and actual presence of almost all the objects and renowned
localities that I had read about, and which had made London the
dream-city of my youth. I had found it better than my dream; for there
is nothing else in life comparable (in that species of enjoyment, I mean)
to the thick, heavy, oppressive, sombre delight which an American is
sensible of, hardly knowing whether to call it a pleasure or a pain, in
the atmosphere of London. The result was, that I acquired a home-feeling
there, as nowhere else in the world,--though afterwards I came to have a
somewhat similar sentiment in regard to Rome; and as long as either of
those two great cities shall exist, the cities of the Past and of the
Present, a man's native soil may crumble beneath his feet without leaving
him altogether homeless upon earth.
Thus, having once fully yielded to its influence, I was in a manner
free of the city, and could approach or keep away from it as I pleased.
Hence it happened, that, living within a quarter of an hour's rush of
the London Bridge Terminus, I was oftener tempted to spend a whole
summer-day in our garden than to seek anything new or old, wonderful or
commonplace, beyond its precincts. It was a delightful garden, of no
great extent, but comprising a good many facilities for repose and
enjoyment, such as arbors and garden-seats, shrubbery, flower-beds,
rose-bushes in a profusion of bloom, pinks, poppies, geraniums,
sweet-peas, and a variety of other scarlet, yellow, blue, and purple
blossoms, which I did not trouble myself to recognize individually, yet
had always a vague sense of their beauty about me. The dim sky of
England has a most happy effect on the coloring of flowers, blending
richness with delicacy in the same texture; but in this garden, as
everywhere else, the exuberance of English verdure had a greater charm
than any tropical splendor or diversity of hue. The hunger for natural
beauty might be satisfied with grass and green leaves forever. Conscious
of the triumph of England in this respect, and loyally anxious for the
credit of my own country, it gratified me to observe what trouble and
pains the English gardeners are fain to throw away in producing a few
sour plums and abortive pears and apples,--as, for example, in this very
garden, where a row of unhappy trees were spread out perfectly flat
against a brick wall, looking as if impaled alive, or crucified, with a
cruel and unattainable purpose of compelling them to produce rich fruit
by torture. For my part, I never ate an English fruit, raised in the
open air, that could compare in flavor with a Yankee turnip.
The garden included that prime feature of English domestic scenery, a
lawn. It had been levelled, carefully shorn, and converted into a
bowling-green, on which we sometimes essayed to practise the time-honored
game of bowls, most unskilfully, yet not without a perception that it
involves a very pleasant mixture of exercise and ease, as is the case
with most of the old English pastimes. Our little domain was shut in by
the house on one side, and in other directions by a hedge-fence and a
brick wall, which last was concealed or softened by shrubbery and the
impaled fruit-trees already mentioned. Over all the outer region, beyond
our immediate precincts, there was an abundance of foliage, tossed aloft
from the near or distant trees with which that agreeable suburb is
adorned. The effect was wonderfully sylvan and rural, insomuch that we
might have fancied ourselves in the depths of a wooded seclusion; only
that, at brief intervals, we could hear the galloping sweep of a
railway-train passing within a quarter of a mile, and its discordant
screech, moderated by a little farther distance, as it reached the
Blackheath Station. That harsh, rough sound, seeking me out so
inevitably, was the voice of the great world summoning me forth. I know
not whether I was the more pained or pleased to be thus constantly put in
mind of the neighborhood of London; for, on the one hand, my conscience
stung me a little for reading a book, or playing with children in the
grass, when there were so many better things for an enlightened traveller
to do,--while, at the same time, it gave a deeper delight to my luxurious
idleness, to contrast it with the turmoil which I escaped. On the whole,
however, I do not repent of a single wasted hour, and only wish that I
could have spent twice as many in the same way; for the impression on my
memory is, that I was as happy in that hospitable garden as the English
summer-day was long.
One chief condition of my enjoyment was the weather. Italy has nothing
like it, nor America. There never was such weather except in England,
where, in requital of a vast amount of horrible east-wind between
February and June, and a brown October and black November, and a wet,
chill, sunless winter, there are a few weeks of incomparable summer,
scattered through July and August, and the earlier portion of September,
small in quantity, but exquisite enough to atone for the whole year's
atmospherical delinquencies. After all, the prevalent sombreness may
have brought out those sunny intervals in such high relief, that I see
them, in my recollection, brighter than they really were: a little light
makes a glory for people who live habitually in a gray gloom. The
English, however, do not seem to know how enjoyable the momentary gleams
of their summer are; they call it broiling weather, and hurry to the
seaside with red, perspiring faces, in a state of combustion and
deliquescence; and I have observed that even their cattle have similar
susceptibilities, seeking the deepest shade, or standing midleg deep in
pools and streams to cool themselves, at temperatures which our own cows
would deem little more than barely comfortable. To myself, after the
summer heats of my native land had somewhat effervesced out of my blood
and memory, it was the weather of Paradise itself. It might be a little
too warm; but it was that modest and inestimable superabundance which
constitutes a bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly enough.
During my first year in England, residing in perhaps the most ungenial
part of the kingdom, I could never be quite comfortable without a fire on
the hearth; in the second twelvemonth, beginning to get acclimatized, I
became sensible of an austere friendliness, shy, but sometimes almost
tender, in the veiled, shadowy, seldom smiling summer; and in the
succeeding years,--whether that I had renewed my fibre with English beef
and replenished my blood with English ale, or whatever were the cause,--I
grew content with winter and especially in love with summer, desiring
little more for happiness than merely to breathe and bask. At the
midsummer which we are now speaking of, I must needs confess that the
noontide sun came down more fervently than I found altogether tolerable;
so that I was fain to shift my position with the shadow of the shrubbery,
making myself the movable index of a sundial that reckoned up the hours
of an almost interminable day.
For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your
actual experience is concerned, the English summer-day has positively no
beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is
already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours
of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon
their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is
bedtime again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make
the pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such
season, hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone day
beholds its successor; or, if not quite true of the latitude of London,
it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island, that
To-morrow is born before its Yesterday is dead. They exist together in
the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face
of the ominous infant; and you, though a more mortal, may simultaneously
touch them both with one finger of recollection and another of prophecy.
I cared not how long the day might be, nor how many of them. I had
earned this repose by a long course of irksome toil and perturbation, and
could have been content never to stray out of the limits of that suburban
villa and its garden. If I lacked anything beyond, it would have
satisfied me well enough to dream about it, instead of struggling for its
actual possession. At least, this was the feeling of the moment;
although the transitory, flitting, and irresponsible character of my life
there was perhaps the most enjoyable element of all, as allowing me much
of the comfort of house and home without any sense of their weight upon
my back. The nomadic life has great advantages, if we can find tents
ready pitched for us at every stage.
So much for the interior of our abode,--a spot of deepest quiet, within
reach of the intensest activity. But, even when we stopped beyond our
own gate, we were not shocked with any immediate presence of the great
world. We were dwelling in one of those oases that have grown up (in
comparatively recent years, I believe) on the wide waste of Blackheath,
which otherwise offers a vast extent of unoccupied ground in singular
proximity to the metropolis. As a general thing, the proprietorship of
the soil seems to exist in everybody and nobody; but exclusive rights
have been obtained, here and there, chiefly by men whose daily concerns
link them with London, so that you find their villas or boxes standing
along village streets which have often more of an American aspect than
the elder English settlements. The scene is semi-rural. Ornamental
trees overshadow the sidewalks, and grassy margins border the
wheel-tracks. The houses, to be sure, have certain points of difference
from those of an American village, bearing tokens of architectural
design, though seldom of individual taste; and, as far as possible, they
stand aloof from the street, and separated each from its neighbor by
hedge or fence, in accordance with the careful exclusiveness of the
English character, which impels the occupant, moreover, to cover the
front of his dwelling with as much concealment of shrubbery as his limits
will allow. Through the interstices, you catch glimpses of well-kept
lawns, generally ornamented with flowers, and with what the English call
rock-work, being heaps of ivy-grown stones and fossils, designed for
romantic effect in a small way. Two or three of such village streets as
are here described take a collective name,--as, for instance, Blackheath
Park,--and constitute a kind of community of residents, with gateways,
kept by a policeman, and a semi-privacy, stepping beyond which, you find
yourself on the breezy heath.
On this great, bare, dreary common I often went astray, as I afterwards
did on the Campagna of Rome, and drew the air (tainted with London smoke
though it might be) into my lungs by deep inspirations, with a strange
and unexpected sense of desert freedom. The misty atmosphere helps you
to fancy a remoteness that perhaps does not quite exist. During the
little time that it lasts, the solitude is as impressive as that of a
Western prairie or forest; but soon the railway shriek, a mile or two
away, insists upon informing you of your whereabout; or you recognize in
the distance some landmark that you may have known,--an insulated villa,
perhaps, with its garden-wall around it, or the rudimental street of a
new settlement which is sprouting on this otherwise barren soil. Half a
century ago, the most frequent token of man's beneficent contiguity might
have been a gibbet, and the creak, like a tavern sign, of a murderer
swinging to and fro in irons. Blackheath, with its highwaymen and
footpads, was dangerous in those days; and even now, for aught I know,
the Western prairie may still compare favorably with it as a safe region
to go astray in. When I was acquainted with Blackheath, the ingenious
device of garroting had recently come into fashion; and I can remember,
while crossing those waste places at midnight, and hearing footsteps
behind me, to have been sensibly encouraged by also hearing, not far off,
the clinking hoof-tramp of one of the horse-patrols who do regular duty
there. About sunset, or a little later, was the time when the broad and
somewhat desolate peculiarity of the heath seemed to me to put on its
utmost impressiveness. At that hour, finding myself on elevated ground,
I once had a view of immense London, four or five miles off, with the
vast Dome in the midst, and the towers of the two Houses of Parliament
rising up into the smoky canopy, the thinner substance of which obscured
a mass of things, and hovered about the objects that were most distinctly
visible,--a glorious and sombre picture, dusky, awful, but irresistibly
attractive, like a young man's dream of the great world, foretelling at
that distance a grandeur never to be fully realized.
While I lived in that neighborhood, the tents of two or three sets of
cricket-players were constantly pitched on Blackheath, and matches were
going forward that seemed to involve the honor and credit of communities
or counties, exciting an interest in everybody but myself, who cared not
what part of England might glorify itself at the expense of another. It
is necessary to be born an Englishman, I believe, in order to enjoy this
great national game; at any rate, as a spectacle for an outside observer,
I found it lazy, lingering, tedious, and utterly devoid of pictorial
effects. Choice of other amusements was at hand. Butts for archery were
established, and bows and arrows were to be let, at so many shots for a
penny,--there being abundance of space for a farther flight-shot than any
modern archer can lend to his shaft. Then there was an absurd game of
throwing a stick at crockery-ware, which I have witnessed a hundred
times, and personally engaged in once or twice, without ever having the
satisfaction to see a bit of broken crockery. In other spots you found
donkeys for children to ride, and ponies of a very meek and patient
spirit, on which the Cockney pleasure-seekers of both sexes rode races
and made wonderful displays of horsemanship. By way of refreshment
there was gingerbread (but, as a true patriot, I must pronounce it
greatly interior to our native dainty), and ginger-beer, and probably
stauncher liquor among the booth-keeper's hidden stores. The frequent
railway-trains, as well as the numerous steamers to Greenwich, have made
the vacant portions of Blackheath a play-ground and breathing-place for
the Londoners, readily and very cheaply accessible; so that, in view of
this broader use and enjoyment, I a little grudged the tracts that have
been filched away, so to speak, and individualized by thriving citizens.
One sort of visitors especially interested me: they were schools of
little boys or girls, under the guardianship of their instructors,--
charity schools, as I often surmised from their aspect, collected among
dark alleys and squalid courts; and hither they were brought to spend a
summer afternoon, these pale little progeny of the sunless nooks of
London, who had never known that the sky was any broader than that narrow
and vapory strip above their native lane. I fancied that they took but a
doubtful pleasure, being half affrighted at the wide, empty space
overhead and round about them, finding the air too little medicated with
smoke, soot, and graveyard exhalations, to be breathed with comfort, and
feeling shelterless and lost because grimy London, their slatternly and
disreputable mother, had suffered them to stray out of her arms.
Passing among these holiday people, we come to one of the gateways of
Greenwich Park, opening through an old brick wall. It admits us from the
bare heath into a scene of antique cultivation and woodland ornament,
traversed in all directions by avenues of trees, many of which bear
tokens of a venerable age. These broad and well-kept pathways rise and
decline over the elevations and along the bases of gentle hills which
diversify the whole surface of the Park. The loftiest, and most abrupt
of them (though but of very moderate height) is one of the earth's noted
summits, and may hold up its head with Mont Blanc and Chimborazo, as
being the site of Greenwich Observatory, where, if all nations will
consent to say so, the longitude of our great globe begins. I used to
regulate my watch by the broad dial-plate against the Observatory wall,
and felt it pleasant to be standing at the very centre of Time and Space.
There are lovelier parks than this in the neighborhood of London, richer
scenes of greensward and cultivated trees; and Kensington, especially, in
a summer afternoon, has seemed to me as delightful as any place can or
ought to be, in a world which, some time or other, we must quit. But
Greenwich, too, is beautiful,--a spot where the art of man has conspired
with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel together how
to make a pleasant scene, and the longest liver of the two had faithfully
carried out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an additional charm
of its own, because, to all appearance, it is the people's property and
play-ground in a much more genuine way than the aristocratic resorts in
closer vicinity to the metropolis. It affords one of the instances in
which the monarch's property is actually the people's, and shows how much
more natural is their relation to the sovereign than to the nobility,
which pretends to hold the intervening space between the two: for a
nobleman makes a paradise only for himself, and fills it with his own
pomp and pride; whereas the people are sooner or later the legitimate
inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens create, as now of
Greenwich Park. On Sundays, when the sun shone, and even on those grim
and sombre days when, if it do not actually rain, the English persist in
calling it fine weather, it was too good to see how sturdily the
plebeians trod under their own oaks, and what fulness of simple enjoyment
they evidently found there. They were the people,--not the populace,--
specimens of a class whose Sunday clothes are a distinct kind of garb
from their week-day ones; and this, in England, implies wholesome habits
of life, daily thrift, and a rank above the lowest. I longed to be
acquainted with them, in order to investigate what manner of folks they
were, what sort of households they kept, their politics, their religion,
their tastes, and whether they were as narrow-minded as their betters.
There can be very little doubt of it: an Englishman is English, in
whatever rank of life, though no more intensely so, I should imagine, as
an artisan or petty shopkeeper, than as a member of Parliament.
The English character, as I conceive it, is by no means a very lofty one;
they seem to have a great deal of earth and grimy dust clinging about
them, as was probably the case with the stalwart and quarrelsome people
who sprouted up out of the soil, after Cadmus had sown the dragon's
teeth. And yet, though the individual Englishman is sometimes
preternaturally disagreeable, an observer standing aloof has a sense of
natural kindness towards them in the lump. They adhere closer to the
original simplicity in which mankind was created than we ourselves do;
they love, quarrel, laugh, cry, and turn their actual selves inside out,
with greater freedom than any class of Americans would consider decorous.
It was often so with these holiday folks in Greenwich Park; and,
ridiculous as it may sound, I fancy myself to have caught very
satisfactory glimpses of Arcadian life among the Cockneys there, hardly
beyond the scope of Bow-Bells, picnicking in the grass, uncouthly
gambolling on the broad slopes, or straying in motley groups or by single
pairs of love-making youths and maidens, along the sun-streaked avenues.
Even the omnipresent policemen or park-keepers could not disturb the
beatific impression on my mind. One feature, at all events, of the
Golden Age was to be seen in the herds of deer that encountered you in
the somewhat remoter recesses of the Park, and were readily prevailed
upon to nibble a bit of bread out of your hand. But, though no wrong had
ever been done them, and no horn had sounded nor hound bayed at the heels
of themselves or their antlered progenitors for centuries past, there was
still an apprehensiveness lingering in their hearts; so that a slight
movement of the hand or a step too near would send a whole squadron of
them scampering away, just as a breath scatters the winged seeds of a
dandelion.
The aspect of Greenwich Park, with all those festal people wandering
through it, resembled that of the Borghese Gardens under the walls of
Rome, on a Sunday or Saint's day; but, I am not ashamed to say, it a
little disturbed whatever grim ghost of Puritanic strictness might be
lingering in the sombre depths of a New England heart, among severe and
sunless remembrances of the Sabbaths of childhood, and pangs of remorse
for ill-gotten lessons in the catechism, and for erratic fantasies or
hardly suppressed laughter in the middle of long sermons. Occasionally,
I tried to take the long-hoarded sting out of these compunctious smarts
by attending divine service in the open air. On a cart outside of the
Park-wall (and, if I mistake not, at two or three corners and secluded
spots within the Park itself) a Methodist preacher uplifts his voice and
speedily gathers a congregation, his zeal for whose religious welfare
impels the good man to such earnest vociferation and toilsome gesture
that his perspiring face is quickly in a stew. His inward flame
conspires with the too fervid sun and makes a positive martyr of him,
even in the very exercise of his pious labor; insomuch that he purchases
every atom of spiritual increment to his hearers by loss of his own
corporeal solidity, and, should his discourse last long enough, must
finally exhale before their eyes. If I smile at him, be it understood,
it is not in scorn; he performs his sacred office more acceptably than
many a prelate. These wayside services attract numbers who would not
otherwise listen to prayer, sermon, or hymn, from one year's end to
another, and who, for that very reason, are the auditors most likely to
be moved by the preacher's eloquence. Yonder Greenwich pensioner, too,--
in his costume of three-cornered hat, and old-fashioned, brass-buttoned
blue coat with ample skirts, which makes him look like a contemporary of
Admiral Benbow,--that tough old mariner may hear a word or two which will
go nearer his heart than anything that the chaplain of the Hospital can
be expected to deliver. I always noticed, moreover, that a considerable
proportion of the audience were soldiers, who came hither with a day's
leave from Woolwich,--hardy veterans in aspect, some of whom wore as many
as four or five medals, Crimean or East Indian, on the breasts of their
scarlet coats. The miscellaneous congregation listen with every
appearance of heartfelt interest; and, for my own part, I must frankly
acknowledge that I never found it possible to give five minutes'
attention to any other English preaching: so cold and commonplace are the
homilies that pass for such, under the aged roofs of churches. And as
for cathedrals, the sermon is an exceedingly diminutive and unimportant
part of the religious services,--if, indeed, it be considered a part,--
among the pompous ceremonies, the intonations, and the resounding and
lofty-voiced strains of the choristers. The magnificence of the setting
quite dazzles out what we Puritans look upon as the jewel of the whole
affair; for I presume that it was our forefathers, the Dissenters in
England and America, who gave the sermon its present prominence in the
Sabbath exercises.
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