Books: Our Old Home
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home
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To be frank, however, at the first glance, and to my American eye, they
looked all homely alike, and the chivalry that I suggest is more than I
could have been capable of, at any period of my life. They seemed to be
country-lasses, of sturdy and wholesome aspect, with coarse-grained,
cabbage-rosy cheeks, and, I am willing to suppose, a stout texture of
moral principle, such as would bear a good deal of rough usage without
suffering much detriment. But how unlike the trim little damsels of my
native land! I desire above all things to be courteous; but, since
the plain truth must be told, the soil and climate of England produce
feminine beauty as rarely as they do delicate fruit, and though
admirable specimens of both are to be met with, they are the hot-house
ameliorations of refined society, and apt, moreover, to relapse into the
coarseness of the original stock. The men are manlike, but the women are
not beautiful, though the female Bull be well enough adapted to the male.
To return to the lasses of Greenwich Fair, their charms were few, and
their behavior, perhaps, not altogether commendable; and yet it was
impossible not to feel a degree of faith in their innocent intentions,
with such a half-bashful zest and entire simplicity did they keep up
their part of the game. It put the spectator in good-humor to look at
them, because there was still something of the old Arcadian life, the
secure freedom of the antique age, in their way of surrendering their
lips to strangers, as if there were no evil or impurity in the world. As
for the young men, they were chiefly specimens of the vulgar sediment of
London life, often shabbily genteel, rowdyish, pale, wearing the
unbrushed coat, unshifted linen, and unwashed faces of yesterday, as well
as the haggardness of last night's jollity in a gin-shop. Gathering
their character from these tokens, I wondered whether there were any
reasonable prospect of their fair partners returning to their rustic
homes with as much innocence (whatever were its amount or quality) as
they brought, to Greenwich Fair, in spite of the perilous familiarity
established by Kissing in the Ring.
The manifold disorders resulting from the fair, at which a vast city was
brought into intimate relations with a comparatively rural district, have
at length led to its suppression; this was the very last celebration of
it, and brought to a close the broad-mouthed merriment of many hundred
years. Thus my poor sketch, faint as its colors are, may acquire some
little value in the reader's eyes from the consideration that no observer
of the coming time will ever have an opportunity to give a better. I
should find it difficult to believe, however, that the queer pastime just
described, or any moral mischief to which that and other customs might
pave the way, can have led to the overthrow of Greenwich Fair; for it has
often seemed to me that Englishmen of station and respectability, unless
of a peculiarly philanthropic turn, have neither any faith in the
feminine purity of the lower orders of their countrywomen, nor the
slightest value for it, allowing its possible existence. The distinction
of ranks is so marked, that the English cottage damsel holds a position
somewhat analogous to that of the negro girl in our Southern States.
Hence cones inevitable detriment to the moral condition of those men
themselves, who forget that the humblest woman has a right and a duty to
hold herself in the same sanctity as the highest. The subject cannot
well be discussed in these pages; but I offer it as a serious conviction,
from what I have been able to observe, that the England of to-day is the
unscrupulous old England of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, Humphrey
Clinker and Roderick Random; and in our refined era, just the same as at
that more free-spoken epoch, this singular people has a certain contempt
for any fine-strained purity, any special squeamishness, as they consider
it, on the part of an ingenuous youth. They appear to look upon it as a
suspicious phenomenon in the masculine character.
Nevertheless, I by no means take upon me to affirm that English morality,
as regards the phase here alluded to, is really at a lower point than our
own. Assuredly, I hope so, because, making a higher pretension, or, at
all events, more carefully hiding whatever may be amiss, we are either
better than they, or necessarily a great deal worse. It impressed me
that their open avowal and recognition of immoralities served to throw
the disease to the surface, where it might be more effectually dealt
with, and leave a sacred interior not utterly profaned, instead of
turning its poison back among the inner vitalities of the character, at
the imminent risk of corrupting them all. Be that as it may, these
Englishmen are certainly a franker and simpler people than ourselves,
from peer to peasant; but if we can take it as compensatory on our part
(which I leave to be considered) that they owe those noble and manly
qualities to a coarser grain in their nature, and that, with a finer one
in ours, we shall ultimately acquire a marble polish of which they are
unsusceptible, I believe that this may be the truth.
UP THE THAMES.
The upper portion of Greenwich (where my last article left me loitering)
is a cheerful, comely, old-fashioned town, the peculiarities of which, if
there be any, have passed out of my remembrance. As you descend towards
the Thames, the streets get meaner, and the shabby and sunken houses,
elbowing one another for frontage, bear the sign-boards of beer-shops and
eating-rooms, with especial promises of whitebait and other delicacies in
the fishing line. You observe, also, a frequent announcement of "The
Gardens" in the rear; although, estimating the capacity of the premises
by their external compass, the entire sylvan charm and shadowy seclusion
of such blissful resorts must be limited within a small back-yard. These
places of cheap sustenance and recreation depend for support upon the
innumerable pleasure-parties who come from London Bridge by steamer, at a
fare of a few pence, and who get as enjoyable a meal for a shilling a
head as the Ship Hotel would afford a gentleman for a guinea.
The steamers, which are constantly smoking their pipes up and down the
Thames, offer much the most agreeable mode of getting to London. At
least, it might be exceedingly agreeable, except for the myriad floating
particles of soot from the stove-pipe, and the heavy heat of midsummer
sunshine on the unsheltered deck, or the chill, misty air draught of a
cloudy day, and the spiteful little showers of rain that may spatter down
upon you at any moment, whatever the promise of the sky; besides which
there is some slight inconvenience from the inexhaustible throng of
passengers, who scarcely allow you standing-room, nor so much as a breath
of unappropriated air, and never a chance to sit down. If these
difficulties, added to the possibility of getting your pocket picked,
weigh little with you, the panorama along the shores of the memorable
river, and the incidents and shows of passing life upon its bosom, render
the trip far preferable to the brief yet tiresome shoot along the railway
track. On one such voyage, a regatta of wherries raced past us, and at
once involved every soul on board our steamer in the tremendous
excitement of the struggle. The spectacle was but a moment within our
view, and presented nothing more than a few light skiffs, in each of
which sat a single rower, bare-armed, and with little apparel, save a
shirt and drawers, pale, anxious, with every muscle on the stretch, and
plying his oars in such fashion that the boat skimmed along with the
aerial celerity of a swallow. I wondered at myself for so immediately
catching an interest in the affair, which seemed to contain no very
exalted rivalship of manhood; but, whatever the kind of battle or the
prize of victory, it stirs one's sympathy immensely, and is even awful,
to behold the rare sight of a man thoroughly in earnest, doing his best,
putting forth all there is in him, and staking his very soul (as these
rowers appeared willing to do) on the issue of the contest. It was the
seventy-fourth annual regatta of the Free Watermen of Greenwich, and
announced itself as under the patronage of the Lord Mayor and other
distinguished individuals, at whose expense, I suppose, a prize-boat was
offered to the conqueror, and some small amounts of money to the inferior
competitors.
The aspect of London along the Thanes, below Bridge, as it is called, is
by no means so impressive as it ought to be, considering what peculiar
advantages are offered for the display of grand and stately architecture
by the passage of a river through the midst of a great city. It seems,
indeed, as if the heart of London had been cleft open for the mere
purpose of showing how rotten and drearily mean it had become. The shore
is lined with the shabbiest, blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be
imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that look
ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing more of the world's
metropolis, I might have fancied that it had already experienced the
downfall which I have heard commercial and financial prophets predict for
it, within the century. And the muddy tide of the Thames, reflecting
nothing, and hiding a million of unclean secrets within its breast,--a
sort of guilty conscience, as it were, unwholesome with the rivulets of
sin that constantly flow into it,--is just the dismal stream to glide by
such a city. The surface, to be sure, displays no lack of activity,
being fretted by the passage of a hundred steamers and covered with a
good deal of shipping, but mostly of a clumsier build than I had been
accustomed to see in the Mersey: a fact which I complacently attributed
to the smaller number of American clippers in the Thames, and the less
prevalent influence of American example in refining away the
broad-bottomed capacity of the old Dutch or English models.
About midway between Greenwich and London Bridge, at a rude landing-place
on the left bank of the river, the steamer rings its bell and makes a
momentary pause in front of a large circular structure, where it may be
worth our while to scramble ashore. It indicates the locality of one of
those prodigious practical blunders that would supply John Bull with a
topic of inexhaustible ridicule, if his cousin Jonathan had committed
them, but of which he himself perpetrates ten to our one in the mere
wantonness of wealth that lacks better employment. The circular building
covers the entrance to the Thames Tunnel, and is surmounted by a dome of
glass, so as to throw daylight down into the great depth at which the
passage of the river commences. Descending a wearisome succession of
staircases, we at last find ourselves, still in the broad noon, standing
before a closed door, on opening which we behold the vista of an arched
corridor that extends into everlasting midnight. In these days, when
glass has been applied to so many new purposes, it is a pity that the
architect had not thought of arching portions of his abortive tunnel with
immense blocks of the lucid substance, over which the dusky Thames would
have flowed like a cloud, making the sub-fluvial avenue only a little
gloomier than a street of upper London. At present, it is illuminated at
regular intervals by jets of gas, not very brilliantly, yet with lustre
enough to show the damp plaster of the ceiling and walls, and the massive
stone pavement, the crevices of which are oozy with moisture, not from
the incumbent river, but from hidden springs in the earth's deeper heart.
There are two parallel corridors, with a wall between, for the separate
accommodation of the double throng of foot-passengers, equestrians, and
vehicles of all kinds, which was expected to roll and reverberate
continually through the Tunnel. Only one of them has ever been opened,
and its echoes are but feebly awakened by infrequent footfalls.
Yet there seem to be people who spend their lives here, and who probably
blink like owls, when, once or twice a year, perhaps, they happen to
climb into the sunshine. All along the corridor, which I believe to be a
mile in extent, we see stalls or shops in little alcoves, kept
principally by women; they were of a ripe age, I was glad to observe, and
certainly robbed England of none of its very moderate supply of feminine
loveliness by their deeper than tomb-like interment. As you approach
(and they are so accustomed to the dusky gaslight that they read all your
characteristics afar off), they assail you with hungry entreaties to buy
some of their merchandise, holding forth views of the Tunnel put up in
cases of Derbyshire spar, with a magnifying-glass at one end to make the
vista more effective. They offer you, besides, cheap jewelry, sunny
topazes and resplendent emeralds for sixpence, and diamonds as big as the
Kohi-i-noor at a not much heavier cost, together with a multifarious
trumpery which has died out of the upper world to reappear in this
Tartarean bazaar. That you may fancy yourself still in the realms of the
living, they urge you to partake of cakes, candy, ginger-beer, and such
small refreshment, more suitable, however, for the shadowy appetite of
ghosts than for the sturdy stomachs of Englishmen. The most capacious of
the shops contains a dioramic exhibition of cities and scenes in the
daylight world, with a dreary glimmer of gas among them all; so that they
serve well enough to represent the dim, unsatisfactory remembrances that
dead people might be supposed to retain from their past lives, mixing
them up with the ghastliness of their unsubstantial state. I dwell the
more upon these trifles, and do my best to give them a mockery of
importance, because, if these are nothing, then all this elaborate
contrivance and mighty piece of work has been wrought in vain. The
Englishman has burrowed under the bed of his great river, and set ships
of two or three thousand tons a-rolling over his head, only to provide
new sites for a few old women to sell cakes and ginger-beer!
Yet the conception was a grand one; and though it has proved an absolute
failure, swallowing an immensity of toil and money, with annual returns
hardly sufficient to keep the pavement free from the ooze of subterranean
springs, yet it needs, I presume, only an expenditure three or four (or,
for aught I know, twenty) times as large, to make the enterprise
brilliantly successful. The descent is so great from the bank of the
river to its surface, and the Tunnel dips so profoundly under the river's
bed, that the approaches on either side must commence a long way off, in
order to render the entrance accessible to horsemen or vehicles; so that
the larger part of the cost of the whole affair should have been expended
on its margins. It has turned out a sublime piece of folly; and when the
New-Zealander of distant ages shall have moralized sufficiently among the
ruins of London Bridge, he will bethink himself that somewhere thereabout
was the marvellous Tunnel, the very existence of which will seem to him
as incredible as that of the hanging gardens of Babylon. But the Thames
will long ago have broken through the massive arch, and choked up the
corridors with mud and sand and with the large stones of the structure
itself, intermixed with skeletons of drowned people, the rusty ironwork
of sunken vessels, and the great many such precious and curious things as
a river always contrives to hide in its bosom; the entrance will have
been obliterated, and its very site forgotten beyond the memory of twenty
generations of men, and the whole neighborhood be held a dangerous spot
on account of the malaria; insomuch that the traveller will make but a
brief and careless inquisition for the traces of the old wonder, and will
stake his credit before the public, in some Pacific Monthly of that day,
that the story of it is but a myth, though enriched with a spiritual
profundity which he will proceed to unfold.
Yet it is impossible (for a Yankee, at least) to see so much magnificent
ingenuity thrown away, without trying to endow the unfortunate result
with some kind of use, fulness, though perhaps widely different from the
purpose of its original conception. In former ages, the mile-long
corridors, with their numerous alcoves, might have been utilized as a
series of dungeons, the fittest of all possible receptacles for prisoners
of state. Dethroned monarchs and fallen statesmen would not have needed
to remonstrate against a domicile so spacious, so deeply secluded from
the world's scorn, and so admirably in accordance with their
thenceforward sunless fortunes. An alcove here might have suited Sir
Walter Raleigh better than that darksome hiding-place communicating with
the great chamber in the Tower, pacing from end to end of which he
meditated upon his "History of the World." His track would here have
been straight and narrow, indeed, and would therefore have lacked
somewhat of the freedom that his intellect demanded; and yet the length
to which his footsteps might have travelled forth and retraced themselves
would partly have harmonized his physical movement with the grand curves
and planetary returns of his thought, through cycles of majestic periods.
Having it in his mind to compose the world's history, methinks he could
have asked no better retirement than such a cloister as this, insulated
from all the seductions of mankind and womankind, deep beneath their
mysteries and motives, down into the heart of things, full of personal
reminiscences in order to the comprehensive measurement and verification
of historic records, seeing into the secrets of human nature,--secrets
that daylight never yet revealed to mortal,--but detecting their whole
scope and purport with the infallible eyes of unbroken solitude and
night. And then the shades of the old mighty men might have risen from
their still profounder abodes and joined him in the dim corridor,
treading beside him with an antique stateliness of mien, telling him in
melancholy tones, grand, but always melancholy, of the greater ideas and
purposes which their most renowned performances so imperfectly carried
out, that, magnificent successes in the view of all posterity, they were
but failures to those who planned them. As Raleigh was a navigator, Noah
would have explained to him the peculiarities of construction that made
the ark so seaworthy; as Raleigh was a statesman, Moses would have
discussed with him the principles of laws and government; as Raleigh was
a soldier, Caesar and Hannibal would have held debate in his presence,
with this martial student for their umpire; as Raleigh was a poet, David,
or whatever most illustrious bard he might call up, would have touched
his harp, and made manifest all the true significance of the past by
means of song and the subtle intelligences of music.
Meanwhile, I had forgotten that Sir Walter Raleigh's century knew nothing
of gaslight, and that it would require a prodigious and wasteful
expenditure of tallow-candles to illuminate the Tunnel sufficiently to
discern even a ghost. On this account, however, it would be all the more
suitable place of confinement for a metaphysician, to keep him from
bewildering mankind with his shadowy speculations; and, being shut off
from external converse, the dark corridor would help him to make rich
discoveries in those cavernous regions and mysterious by-paths of the
intellect, which he had so long accustomed himself to explore. But how
would every successive age rejoice in so secure a habitation for its
reformers, and especially for each best and wisest man that happened to
be then alive! He seeks to burn up our whole system of society, under
pretence of purifying it from its abuses! Away with him into the Tunnel,
and let him begin by setting the Thames on fire, if he is able!
If not precisely these, yet akin to these were some of the fantasies that
haunted me as I passed under the river: for the place is suggestive of
such idle and irresponsible stuff by its own abortive character, its lack
of whereabout on upper earth, or any solid foundation of realities.
Could I have looked forward a few years, I might have regretted that
American enterprise had not provided a similar tunnel, under the Hudson
or the Potomac, for the convenience of our National Government in times
hardly yet gone by. It would be delightful to clap up all the enemies of
our peace and Union in the dark together, and there let them abide,
listening to the monotonous roll of the river above their heads, or
perhaps in a state of miraculously suspended animation, until,--be it
after months, years, or centuries,--when the turmoil shall be all over,
the Wrong washed away in blood (since that must needs be the cleansing
fluid), and the Right firmly rooted in the soil which that blood will
have enriched, they might crawl forth again and catch a single glimpse at
their redeemed country, and feel it to be a better land than they
deserve, and die!
I was not sorry when the daylight reached me after a much briefer abode
in the nether regions than, I fear, would await the troublesome
personages just hinted at. Emerging on the Surrey side of the Thames, I
found myself in Rotherhithe, a neighborhood not unfamiliar to the readers
of old books of maritime adventure. There being a ferry hard by the
mouth of the Tunnel, I recrossed the river in the primitive fashion of an
open boat, which the conflict of wind and tide, together with the swash
and swell of the passing steamers, tossed high and low rather
tumultuously. This inquietude of our frail skiff (which, indeed, bobbed
up and down like a cork) so much alarmed an old lady, the only other
passenger, that the boatmen essayed to comfort her. "Never fear,
mother!" grumbled one of them, "we'll make the river as smooth as we can
for you. We'll get a plane, and plane down the waves!" The joke may not
read very brilliantly; but I make bold to record it as the only specimen
that reached my ears of the old, rough water-wit for which the Thames
used to be so celebrated. Passing directly along the line of the sunken
Tunnel, we landed in Wapping, which I should have presupposed to be the
most tarry and pitchy spot on earth, swarming with old salts, and full of
warm, bustling, coarse, homely, and cheerful life. Nevertheless, it
turned out to be a cold and torpid neighborhood, mean, shabby, and
unpicturesque, both as to its buildings and inhabitants: the latter
comprising (so far as was visible to me) not a single unmistakable
sailor, though plenty of land-sharks, who get a half-dishonest livelihood
by business connected with the sea. Ale and spirit vaults (as petty
drinking-establishments are styled in England, pretending to contain vast
cellars full of liquor within the compass of ten feet square above
ground) were particularly abundant, together with apples, oranges, and
oysters, the stalls of fishmongers and butchers, and slop-shops, where
blue jackets and duck trousers swung and capered before the doors.
Everything was on the poorest scale, and the place bore an aspect of
unredeemable decay. From this remote point of London, I strolled
leisurely towards the heart of the city; while the streets, at first
but thinly occupied by man or vehicle, got more and more thronged
with foot-passengers, carts, drays, cabs, and the all-pervading and
all-accommodating omnibus. But I lack courage, and feel that I should
lack perseverance, as the gentlest reader would lack patience, to
undertake a descriptive stroll through London streets; more especially as
there would be a volume ready for the printer before we could reach a
midway resting-place at Charing Cross. It will be the easier course to
step aboard another passing steamer, and continue our trip up the Thames.
The next notable group of objects is an assemblage of ancient walls,
battlements, and turrets, out of the midst of which rises prominently one
great square tower, of a grayish line, bordered with white stone, and
having a small turret at each corner of the roof. This central structure
is the White Tower, and the whole circuit of ramparts and enclosed
edifices constitutes what is known in English history, and still more
widely and impressively in English poetry, as the Tower. A crowd of
rivercraft are generally moored in front of it; but, if we look sharply
at the right moment under the base of the rampart, we may catch a glimpse
of an arched water-entrance, half submerged, past which the Thames glides
as indifferently as if it were the mouth of a city-kennel. Nevertheless,
it is the Traitor's Gate, a dreary kind of triumphal passageway (now
supposed to be shut up and barred forever), through which a multitude of
noble and illustrious personages have entered the Tower and found it a
brief resting-place on their way to heaven. Passing it many times, I
never observed that anybody glanced at this shadowy and ominous
trap-door, save myself. It is well that America exists, if it were only
that her vagrant children may be impressed and affected by the historical
monuments of England in a degree of which the native inhabitants are
evidently incapable. These matters are too familiar, too real, and too
hopelessly built in amongst and mixed up with the common objects and
affairs of life, to be easily susceptible of imaginative coloring in
their minds; and even their poets and romancers feel it a toil, and
almost a delusion, to extract poetic material out of what seems embodied
poetry itself to an American. An Englishman cares nothing about the
Tower, which to us is a haunted castle in dreamland. That honest and
excellent gentleman, the late Mr. G. P. R. James (whose mechanical
ability, one might have supposed, would nourish itself by devouring every
old stone of such a structure), once assured me that he had never in his
life set eyes upon the Tower, though for years an historic novelist in
London.
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