Books: Our Old Home
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home
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The Methodists are probably the first and only Englishmen who have
worshipped in the open air since the ancient Britons listened to the
preaching of the Druids; and it reminded me of that old priesthood, to
see certain memorials of their dusky epoch--not religious, however, but
warlike--in the neighborhood of the spot where the Methodist was holding
forth. These were some ancient barrows, beneath or within which are
supposed to be buried the slain of a forgotten or doubtfully remembered
battle, fought on the site of Greenwich Park as long ago as two or three
centuries after the birth of Christ. Whatever may once have been their
height and magnitude, they have now scarcely more prominence in the
actual scene than the battle of which they are the sole monuments retains
in history,--being only a few mounds side by side, elevated a little
above the surface of the ground, ten or twelve feet in diameter, with a
shallow depression in their summits. When one of them was opened, not
long since, no bones, nor armor, nor weapons were discovered, nothing but
some small jewels, and a tuft of hair,--perhaps from the head of a
valiant general, who, dying on the field of his victory, bequeathed this
lock, together with his indestructible fame, to after ages. The hair and
jewels are probably in the British Museum, where the potsherds and
rubbish of innumerable generations make the visitor wish that each
passing century could carry off all its fragments and relics along with
it, instead of adding them to the continually accumulating burden which
human knowledge is compelled to lug upon its back. As for the fame, I
know not what has become of it.
After traversing the Park, we come into the neighborhood of Greenwich
Hospital, and will pass through one of its spacious gateways for the sake
of glancing at an establishment which does more honor to the heart of
England than anything else that I am acquainted with, of a public nature.
It is very seldom that we can be sensible of anything like kindliness in
the acts or relations of such an artificial thing as a National
Government. Our own government, I should conceive, is too much an
abstraction ever to feel any sympathy for its maimed sailors and
soldiers, though it will doubtless do then a severe kind of justice, as
chilling as the touch of steel. But it seemed to me that the Greenwich
pensioners are the petted children of the nation, and that the government
is their dry-nurse, and that the old men themselves have a childlike
consciousness of their position. Very likely, a better sort of life
might have been arranged, and a wiser care bestowed on them; but, such as
it is, it enables them to spend a sluggish, careless, comfortable old
age, grumbling, growling, gruff, as if all the foul weather of their past
years were pent up within them, yet not much more discontented than such
weather-beaten and battle-battered fragments of human kind must
inevitably be. Their home, in its outward form, is on a very magnificent
plan. Its germ was a royal palace, the full expansion of which has
resulted in a series of edifices externally more beautiful than any
English palace that I have seen, consisting of several quadrangles of
stately architecture, united by colonnades and gravel-walks, and
enclosing grassy squares, with statues in the centre, the whole extending
along the Thames. It is built of marble, or very light-colored stone, in
the classic style, with pillars and porticos, which (to my own taste,
and, I fancy, to that of the old sailors) produce but a cold and shivery
effect in the English climate. Had I been the architect, I would have
studied the characters, habits, and predilections of nautical people in
Wapping, Hotherhithe, and the neighborhood of the Tower (places which I
visited in affectionate remembrance of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and
other actual or mythological navigators), and would have built the
hospital in a kind of ethereal similitude to the narrow, dark, ugly, and
inconvenient, but snug and cosey homeliness of the sailor boarding-houses
there. There can be no question that all the above attributes, or enough
of then to satisfy an old sailor's heart, might be reconciled with
architectural beauty and the wholesome contrivances of modern dwellings,
and thus a novel and genuine style of building be given to the world.
But their countrymen meant kindly by the old fellows in assigning them
the ancient royal site where Elizabeth held her court and Charles II.
began to build his palace. So far as the locality went, it was treating
them like so many kings; and, with a discreet abundance of grog, beer,
and tobacco, there was perhaps little more to be accomplished in behalf
of men whose whole previous lives have tended to unfit them for old age.
Their chief discomfort is probably for lack of something to do or think
about. But, judging by the few whom I saw, a listless habit seems to
have crept over them, a dim dreaminess of mood, in which they sit between
asleep and awake, and find the long day wearing towards bedtime without
its having made any distinct record of itself upon their consciousness.
Sitting on stone benches in the sunshine, they subside into slumber, or
nearly so, and start at the approach of footsteps echoing under the
colonnades, ashamed to be caught napping, and rousing themselves in a
hurry, as formerly on the midnight watch at sea. In their brightest
moments, they gather in groups and bore one another with endless
sea-yarns about their voyages under famous admirals, and about gale and
calm, battle and chase, and all that class of incident that has its
sphere on the deck and in the hollow interior of a ship, where their
world has exclusively been. For other pastime, they quarrel among
themselves, comrade with comrade, and perhaps shake paralytic fists in
furrowed faces. If inclined for a little exercise, they can bestir their
wooden legs on the long esplanade that borders by the Thames, criticising
the rig of passing ships, and firing off volleys of malediction at the
steamers, which have made the sea another element than that they used to
be acquainted with. All this is but cold comfort for the evening of
life, yet may compare rather favorably with the preceding portions of it,
comprising little save imprisonment on shipboard, in the course of which
they have been tossed all about the world and caught hardly a glimpse of
it, forgetting what grass and trees are, and never finding out what woman
is, though they may have encountered a painted spectre which they took
for her. A country owes much to human beings whose bodies she has worn
out and whose immortal part she has left undeveloped or debased, as we
tied them here; and having wasted an idle paragraph upon them, let me now
suggest that old men have a kind of susceptibility to moral impressions,
and even (up to an advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which often
appears to come to them after the active time of life is past. The
Greenwich pensioners might prove better subjects for true education now
than in their school-boy days; but then where is the Normal School that
could educate instructors for such a class?
There is a beautiful chapel for the pensioners, in the classic style,
over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at
it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains
me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a
knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the
spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other
limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience,
I seize this opportunity to wreak a lifelong abhorrence upon the poor,
blameless man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an explosion
of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to me in the Athenaeum
Exhibition. Would fire burn it, I wonder?
The principal thing that they have to show you, at Greenwich Hospital, is
the Painted Hall. It is a splendid and spacious room, at least a hundred
feet long and half as high, with a ceiling painted in fresco by Sir James
Thornhill. As a work of art, I presume, this frescoed canopy has little
merit, though it produces an exceedingly rich effect by its brilliant
coloring and as a specimen of magnificent upholstery. The walls of the
grand apartment are entirely covered with pictures, many of them
representing battles and other naval incidents that were once fresher in
the world's memory than now, but chiefly portraits of old admirals,
comprising the whole line of heroes who have trod the quarter-decks of
British ships for more than two hundred years back. Next to a tomb in
Westminster Abbey, which was Nelson's most elevated object of ambition,
it would seem to be the highest need of a naval warrior to have his
portrait hung up in the Painted Hall; but, by dint of victory upon
victory, these illustrious personages have grown to be a mob, and by no
means a very interesting one, so far as regards the character of the
faces here depicted. They are generally commonplace, and often
singularly stolid; and I have observed (both in the Painted Hall and
elsewhere, and not only in portraits, but in the actual presence of such
renowned people as I have caught glimpses of) that the countenances of
heroes are not nearly so impressive as those of statesmen,--except, of
course, in the rare instances where warlike ability has been but the
one-sided manifestation of a profound genius for managing the world's
affairs. Nine tenths of these distinguished admirals, for instance, if
their faces tell truth, must needs have been blockheads, and might have
served better, one would imagine, as wooden figure-heads for their own
ships than to direct any difficult and intricate scheme of action from
the quarter-deck. It is doubtful whether the same kind of men will
hereafter meet with a similar degree of success; for they were victorious
chiefly through the old English hardihood, exercised in a field of which
modern science had not yet got possession. Rough valor has lost
something of its value, since their days, and must continue to sink lower
and lower in the comparative estimate of warlike qualities. In the next
naval war, as between England and France, I would bet, methinks, upon the
Frenchman's head.
It is remarkable, however, that the great naval hero of England--the
greatest, therefore, in the world, and of all time--had none of the
stolid characteristics that belong to his class, and cannot fairly be
accepted as their representative man. Foremost in the roughest of
professions, he was as delicately organized as a woman, and as painfully
sensitive as a poet. More than any other Englishman he won the love and
admiration of his country, but won them through the efficacy of qualities
that are not English, or, at all events, were intensified in his case and
made poignant and powerful by something morbid in the man, which put him
otherwise at cross-purposes with life. He was a man of genius; and
genius in an Englishman (not to cite the good old simile of a pearl in
the oyster) is usually a symptom of a lack of balance in the general
making-up of the character; as we may satisfy ourselves by running over
the list of their poets, for example, and observing how many of them have
been sickly or deformed, and how often their lives have been darkened by
insanity. An ordinary Englishman is the healthiest and wholesomest of
human beings; an extraordinary one is almost always, in one way or
another, a sick man. It was so with Lord Nelson. The wonderful contrast
or relation between his personal qualities, the position which he held,
and the life that he lived, makes him as interesting a personage as all
history has to show; and it is a pity that Southey's biography--so good
in its superficial way, and yet so inadequate as regards any real
delineation of the man--should have taken the subject out of the hands of
some writer endowed with more delicate appreciation and deeper insight
than that genuine Englishman possessed. But Southey accomplished his own
purpose, which, apparently, was to present his hero as a pattern for
England's young midshipmen.
But the English capacity for hero-worship is full to the brim with what
they are able to comprehend of Lord Nelson's character. Adjoining the
Painted Hall is a smaller room, the walls of which are completely and
exclusively adorned with pictures of the great Admiral's exploits. We
see the frail, ardent man in all the most noted events of his career,
from his encounter with a Polar bear to his death at Trafalgar, quivering
here and there about the room like a blue, lambent flame. No Briton ever
enters that apartment without feeling the beef and ale of his composition
stirred to its depths, and finding himself changed into a Hero for the
notice, however stolid his brain, however tough his heart, however
unexcitable his ordinary mood. To confess the truth, I myself, though
belonging to another parish, have been deeply sensible to the sublime
recollections there aroused, acknowledging that Nelson expressed his life
in a kind of symbolic poetry which I had as much right to understand as
these burly islanders. Cool and critical observer as I sought to be, I
enjoyed their burst of honest indignation when a visitor (not an
American, I am glad to say) thrust his walking-stick almost into Nelson's
face, in one of the pictures, by way of pointing a remark; and the
bystanders immediately glowed like so many hot coals, and would probably
have consumed the offender in their wrath, had he not effected his
retreat. But the most sacred objects of all are two of Nelson's coats,
under separate glass cases. One is that which he wore at the Battle of
the Nile, and it is now sadly injured by moths, which will quite destroy
it in a few years, unless its guardians preserve it as we do Washington's
military suit, by occasionally baking it in an oven. The other is the
coat in which he received his death-wound at Trafalgar. On its breast
are sewed three or four stars and orders of knighthood, now much dimmed
by time and damp, but which glittered brightly enough on the battle-day
to draw the fatal aim of a French marksman. The bullet-hole is visible
on the shoulder, as well as a part of the golden tassels of an epaulet,
the rest of which was shot away. Over the coat is laid a white waistcoat
with a great blood-stain on it, out of which all the redness has utterly
faded, leaving it of a dingy yellow line, in the threescore years since
that blood gushed out. Yet it was once the reddest blood in England,--
Nelson's blood!
The hospital stands close adjacent to the town of Greenwich, which will
always retain a kind of festal aspect in my memory, in consequence of my
having first become acquainted with it on Easter Monday. Till a few
years ago, the first three days of Easter were a carnival season in this
old town, during which the idle and disreputable part of London poured
itself into the streets like an inundation of the Thames, as unclean as
that turbid mixture of the offscourings of the vast city, and overflowing
with its grimy pollution whatever rural innocence, if any, might be found
in the suburban neighborhood. This festivity was called Greenwich Fair,
the final one of which, in an immemorial succession, it was my fortune to
behold.
If I had bethought myself of going through the fair with a note-book and
pencil, jotting down all the prominent objects, I doubt not that the
result might have been a sketch of English life quite as characteristic
and worthy of historical preservation as an account of the Roman
Carnival. Having neglected to do so, I remember little more than a
confusion of unwashed and shabbily dressed people, intermixed with some
smarter figures, but, on the whole, presenting a mobbish appearance such
as we never see in our own country. It taught me to understand why
Shakespeare, in speaking of a crowd, so often alludes to its attribute of
evil odor. The common people of England, I am afraid, have no daily
familiarity with even so necessary a thing as a wash-bowl, not to mention
a bathing-tub. And furthermore, it is one mighty difference between
them and us, that every man and woman on our side of the water has a
working-day suit and a holiday suit, and is occasionally as fresh as a
rose, whereas, in the good old country, the griminess of his labor or
squalid habits clings forever to the individual, and gets to be a part of
his personal substance. These are broad facts, involving great
corollaries and dependencies. There are really, if you stop to think
about it, few sadder spectacles in the world than a ragged coat, or a
soiled and shabby gown, at a festival.
This unfragrant crowd was exceedingly dense, being welded together, as it
were, in the street through which we strove to make our way. On either
side were oyster-stands, stalls of oranges (a very prevalent fruit in
England, where they give the withered ones a guise of freshness by
boiling them), and booths covered with old sail-cloth, in which the
commodity that most attracted the eye was gilt gingerbread. It was so
completely enveloped in Dutch gilding that I did not at first recognize
an old acquaintance, but wondered what those golden crowns and images
could be. There were likewise drums and other toys for small children,
and a variety of showy and worthless articles for children of a larger
growth; though it perplexed me to imagine who, in such a mob, could have
the innocent taste to desire playthings, or the money to pay for them.
Not that I have a right to license the mob, on my own knowledge, of being
any less innocent than a set of cleaner and better dressed people might
have been; for, though one of them stole my pocket-handkerchief, I could
not but consider it fair game, under the circumstances, and was grateful
to the thief for sparing me my purse. They were quiet, civil, and
remarkably good-humored, making due allowance for the national gruffness;
there was no riot, no tumultuous swaying to and fro of the mass, such as
I have often noted in an American crowd, no noise of voices, except
frequent bursts of laughter, hoarse or shrill, and a widely diffused,
inarticulate murmur, resembling nothing so much as the rumbling of the
tide among the arches of London Bridge. What immensely perplexed me was
a sharp, angry sort of rattle, in all quarters, far off and close at
hand, and sometimes right at my own back, where it sounded as if the
stout fabric of my English surtout had been ruthlessly rent in twain; and
everybody's clothes, all over the fair, were evidently being torn asunder
in the same way. By and by, I discovered that this strange noise was
produced by a little instrument called "The Fun of the Fair,"--a sort of
rattle, consisting of a wooden wheel, the cogs of which turn against a
thin slip of wood, and so produce a rasping sound when drawn smartly
against a person's back. The ladies draw their rattles against the backs
of their male friends (and everybody passes for a friend at Greenwich
Fair), and the young men return the compliment on the broad British backs
of the ladies; and all are bound by immemorial custom to take it in good
part and be merry at the joke. As it was one of my prescribed official
duties to give an account of such mechanical contrivances as might be
unknown in my own country, I have thought it right to be thus particular
in describing the Fun of the Fair.
But this was far from being the sole amusement. There were theatrical
booths, in front of which were pictorial representations of the scenes to
be enacted within; and anon a drummer emerged from one of them, thumping
on a terribly lax drum, and followed by the entire dramatis personae, who
ranged themselves on a wooden platform in front of the theatre. They
were dressed in character, but wofully shabby, with very dingy and
wrinkled white tights, threadbare cotton-velvets, crumpled silks, and
crushed muslin, and all the gloss and glory gone out of their aspect and
attire, seen thus in the broad daylight and after a long series of
performances. They sang a song together, and withdrew into the theatre,
whither the public were invited to follow them at the inconsiderable cost
of a penny a ticket. Before another booth stood a pair of brawny
fighting-men, displaying their muscle, and soliciting patronage for an
exhibition of the noble British art of pugilism. There were pictures of
giants, monsters, and outlandish beasts, most prodigious, to be sure, and
worthy of all admiration, unless the artist had gone incomparably beyond
his subject. Jugglers proclaimed aloud the miracles which they were
prepared to work; and posture-makers dislocated every joint of their
bodies and tied their limbs into inextricable knots, wherever they could
find space to spread a little square of carpet on the ground. In the
midst of the confusion, while everybody was treading on his neighbor's
toes, some little boys were very solicitous to brush your boots. These
lads, I believe, are a product of modern society,--at least, no older
than the time of Gay, who celebrates their origin in his "Trivia"; but in
most other respects the scene reminded me of Bunyan's description of
Vanity Fair,--nor is it at all improbable that the Pilgrim may have been
a merry-maker here, in his wild youth.
It seemed very singular--though, of course, I immediately classified
it as an English characteristic--to see a great many portable
weighing-machines, the owners of which cried out, continually and
amain, "Come, know your weight! Come, come, know your weight to-day!
Come, know your weight!" and a multitude of people, mostly large in the
girth, were moved by this vociferation to sit down in the machines. I
know not whether they valued themselves on their beef, and estimated
their standing as members of society at so much a pound; but I shall set
it down as a national peculiarity, and a symbol of the prevalence of the
earthly over the spiritual element, that Englishmen are wonderfully bent
on knowing how solid and physically ponderous they are.
On the whole, having an appetite for the brown bread and the tripe and
sausages of life, as well as for its nicer cates and dainties, I enjoyed
the scene, and was amused at the sight of a gruff old Greenwich
pensioner, who, forgetful of the sailor-frolics of his young days, stood
looking with grim disapproval at all these vanities. Thus we squeezed
our way through the mob-jammed town, and emerged into the Park, where,
likewise, we met a great many merry-makers, but with freer space for
their gambols than in the streets. We soon found ourselves the targets
for a cannonade with oranges (most of them in a decayed condition), which
went humming past our ears from the vantage-ground of neighboring
hillocks, sometimes hitting our sacred persons with an inelastic thump.
This was one of the privileged freedoms of the time, and was nowise to be
resented, except by returning the salute. Many persons were running
races, hand in hand, down the declivities, especially that steepest one
on the summit of which stands the world-central Observatory, and (as in
the race of life) the partners were usually male and female, and often
caught a tumble together before reaching the bottom of the hill.
Hereabouts we were pestered and haunted by two young girls, the eldest
not more than thirteen, teasing us to buy matches; and finding no market
for their commodity, the taller one suddenly turned a somerset before our
faces, and rolled heels over head from top to bottom of the hill on which
we stood. Then, scrambling up the acclivity, the topsy-turvy trollop
offered us her matches again, as demurely as if she had never flung aside
her equilibrium; so that, dreading a repetition of the feat, we gave her
sixpence and an admonition, and enjoined her never to do so any more.
The most curious amusement that we witnessed here--or anywhere else,
indeed--was an ancient and hereditary pastime called "Kissing in the
Ring." I shall describe the sport exactly as I saw it, although an
English friend assures me that there are certain ceremonies with a
handkerchief, which make it much more decorous and graceful. A
handkerchief, indeed! There was no such thing in the crowd, except it
were the one which they had just filched out of my pocket. It is one of
the simplest kinds of games, needing little or no practice to make the
player altogether perfect; and the manner of it is this. A ring is
formed (in the present case, it was of large circumference and thickly
gemmed around with faces, mostly on the broad grin), into the centre of
which steps an adventurous youth, and, looking round the circle, selects
whatever maiden may most delight his eye. He presents his hand (which
she is bound to accept), leads her into the centre, salutes her on the
lips, and retires, taking his stand in the expectant circle. The girl,
in her turn, throws a favorable regard on some fortunate young man,
offers her hand to lead him forth, makes him happy with a maidenly kiss,
and withdraws to hide her blushes, if any there be, among the simpering
faces in the ring; while the favored swain loses no time in transferring
her salute to the prettiest and plumpest among the many mouths that are
primming themselves in anticipation. And thus the thing goes on, till
all the festive throng are inwreathed and intertwined into an endless and
inextricable chain of kisses; though, indeed, it smote me with compassion
to reflect that some forlorn pair of lips might be left out, and never
know the triumph of a salute, after throwing aside so many delicate
reserves for the sake of winning it. If the young men had any chivalry,
there was a fair chance to display it by kissing the homeliest damsel in
the circle.
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