Books: Our Old Home

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home

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Here Lieth the body,

and all the rest of the tender falsehood--beautifully embossed in raised
letters of living green, a bas-relief of velvet moss on the marble slab!
It becomes more legible, under the skyey influences, after the world has
forgotten the deceased, than when it was fresh from the stone-cutter's
hands. It outlives the grief of friends. I first saw an example of this
in Bebbington churchyard, in Cheshire, and thought that Nature must needs
have had a special tenderness for the person (no noted man, however, in
the world's history) so long ago laid beneath that stone, since she took
such wonderful pains to "keep his memory green." Perhaps the proverbial
phrase just quoted may have had its origin in the natural phenomenon here
described.

While we rested ourselves on a horizontal monument, which was elevated
just high enough to be a convenient seat, I observed that one of the
gravestones lay very close to the church,--so close that the droppings of
the eaves would fall upon it. It seemed as if the inmate of that grave
had desired to creep under the church-wall. On closer inspection, we
found an almost illegible epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty made
out this forlorn verse:--

"Poorly lived,
And poorly died,
Poorly buried,
And no one cried."

It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and luckless life,
death, and burial into fewer words, or more impressive ones; at least, we
found them impressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the
inscription by scraping away the lichens from the faintly traced letters.
The grave was on the shady and damp side of the church, endwise towards
it, the head-stone being within about three feet of the foundation-wall;
so that, unless the poor man was a dwarf, he must have been doubled up to
fit him into his final resting-place. No wonder that his epitaph
murmured against so poor a burial as this! His name, as well as I could
make it out, was Treeo,--John Treeo, I think,--and he died in 1810, at
the age of seventy-four. The gravestone is so overgrown with grass and
weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens, and so crumbly with time and
foul weather, that it is questionable whether anybody will ever be at the
trouble of deciphering it again. But there is a quaint and sad kind of
enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree as my pen may do it) the
probabilities of oblivion for poor John Treeo, and asking a little
sympathy for him, half a century after his death, and making him better
and more widely known, at least, than any other slumberer in Lillington
churchyard: he having been, as appearances go, the outcast of them all.

You find similar old churches and villages in all the neighboring
country, at the distance of every two or three miles; and I describe
them, not as being rare, but because they are so common and
characteristic. The village of Whitnash, within twenty minutes' walk of
Leamington, looks as secluded, as rural, and as little disturbed by the
fashions of to-day, as if Dr. Jephson had never developed all those
Parades and Crescents out of his magic well. I used to wonder whether
the inhabitants had ever yet heard of railways, or, at their slow rate of
progress, had even reached the epoch of stage-coaches. As you approach
the village, while it is yet unseen, you observe a tall, overshadowing
canopy of elm-tree tops, beneath which you almost hesitate to follow the
public road, on account of the remoteness that seems to exist between the
precincts of this old-world community and the thronged modern street out
of which you have so recently emerged. Venturing onward, however, you
soon find yourself in the heart of Whitnash, and see an irregular ring of
ancient rustic dwellings surrounding the village-green, on one side of
which stands the church, with its square Norman tower and battlements,
while close adjoining is the vicarage, made picturesque by peaks and
gables. At first glimpse, none of the houses appear to be less than two
or three centuries old, and they are of the ancient, wooden-framed
fashion, with thatched roofs, which give them the air of birds' nests,
thereby assimilating them closely to the simplicity of nature.

The church-tower is mossy and much gnawed by time; it has narrow
loopholes up and down its front and sides, and an arched window over the
low portal, set with small panes of glass, cracked, dim, and irregular,
through which a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight. Some of
those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on the projections
of the architecture. The churchyard is very small, and is encompassed by
a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church itself. In front
of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of incalculable age,
with a vast circumference of trunk, but a very scanty head of foliage;
though its boughs still keep some of the vitality which perhaps was in
its early prime when the Saxon invaders founded Whitnash. A thousand
years is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of a yew. We were
pleasantly startled, however, by discovering an exuberance of more
youthful life than we had thought possible in so old a tree; for the
faces of two children laughed at us out of an opening in the trunk, which
had become hollow with long decay. On one side of the yew stood a
framework of worm-eaten timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled me
exceedingly, till I made it out to be the village-stocks; a public
institution that, in its day, had doubtless hampered many a pair of
shank-bones, now crumbling in the adjacent churchyard. It is not to be
supposed, however, that this old-fashioned mode of punishment is still in
vogue among the good people of Whitnash. The vicar of the parish has
antiquarian propensities, and had probably dragged the stocks out of some
dusty hiding-place, and set them up on their former site as a curiosity.

I disquiet myself in vain with the effort to hit upon some characteristic
feature, or assemblage of features, that shall convey to the reader the
influence of hoar antiquity lingering into the present daylight, as I so
often felt it in these old English scenes. It is only an American who
can feel it; and even he begins to find himself growing insensible to its
effect, after a long residence in England. But while you are still new
in the old country, it thrills you with strange emotion to think that
this little church of Whitnash, humble as it seems, stood for ages under
the Catholic faith, and has not materially changed since Wickcliffe's
days, and that it looked as gray as now in Bloody Mary's time, and that
Cromwell's troopers broke off the stone noses of those same gargoyles
that are now grinning in your face. So, too, with the immemorial
yew-tree: you see its great roots grasping hold of the earth like
gigantic claws, clinging so sturdily that no effort of time can wrench
them away; and there being life in the old tree, you feel all the more as
if a contemporary witness were telling you of the things that have been.
It has lived among men, and been a familiar object to them, and seen them
brought to be christened and married and buried in the neighboring church
and churchyard, through so many centuries, that it knows all about our
race, so far as fifty generations of the Whitnash people can supply such
knowledge.

And, after all, what a weary life it must have been for the old tree!
Tedious beyond imagination! Such, I think, is the final impression on
the mind of an American visitor, when his delight at finding something
permanent begins to yield to his Western love of change, and he becomes
sensible of the heavy air of a spot where the forefathers and foremothers
have grown up together, intermarried, and died, through a long succession
of lives, without any intermixture of new elements, till family features
and character are all run in the same inevitable mould. Life is there
fossilized in its greenest leaf. The man who died yesterday or ever so
long ago walks the village-street to day, and chooses the same wife that
he married a hundred years since, and must be buried again to-morrow
under the same kindred dust that has already covered him half a score of
times. The stone threshold of his cottage is worn away with his
hobnailed footsteps, shuffling over it from the reign of the first
Plantagenet to that of Victoria. Better than this is the lot of our
restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards
"fresh woods and pastures new." Rather than such monotony of sluggish
ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields,
listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray
Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come,--change of place,
social customs, political institutions, modes of worship,--trusting,
that, if all present things shall vanish, they will but make room for
better systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe his life in them,
and to fling them off in turn.

Nevertheless, while an American willingly accepts growth and change as
the law of his own national and private existence, he has a singular
tenderness for the stone-incrusted institutions of the mother-country.
The reason may be (though I should prefer a more generous explanation)
that he recognizes the tendency of these hardened forms to stiffen her
joints and fetter her ankles, in the race and rivalry of improvement. I
hated to see so much as a twig of ivy wrenched away from an old wall in
England. Yet change is at work, even in such a village as Whitnash. At
a subsequent visit, looking more critically at the irregular circle of
dwellings that surround the yew-tree and confront the church, I perceived
that some of the houses must have been built within no long time,
although the thatch, the quaint gables, and the old oaken framework of
the others diffused an air of antiquity over the whole assemblage. The
church itself was undergoing repair and restoration, which is but another
name for change. Masons were making patchwork on the front of the tower,
and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up bricks to strengthen the
side-wall, or possibly to enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional
aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the churchyard, long and
broad, and fifteen feet deep, two thirds of which profundity were
discolored by human decay, and mixed up with crumbly bones. What this
excavation was intended for I could nowise imagine, unless it were the
very pit in which Longfellow bids the "Dead Past bury its Dead," and
Whitnash, of all places in the world, were going to avail itself of our
poet's suggestion. If so, it must needs be confessed that many
picturesque and delightful things would be thrown into the hole, and
covered out of sight forever.

The article which I am writing has taken its own course, and occupied
itself almost wholly with country churches; whereas I had purposed to
attempt a description of some of the many old towns--Warwick, Coventry,
Kenilworth, Stratford-on-Avon--which lie within an easy scope of
Leamington. And still another church presents itself to my remembrance.
It is that of Hatton, on which I stumbled in the course of a forenoon's
ramble, and paused a little while to look at it for the sake of old Dr.
Parr, who was once its vicar. Hatton, so far as I could discover, has no
public-house, no shop, no contiguity of roofs (as in most English
villages, however small), but is merely an ancient neighborhood of
farm-houses, spacious, and standing wide apart, each within its own
precincts, and offering a most comfortable aspect of orchards,
harvest-fields, barns, stacks, and all manner of rural plenty. It seemed
to be a community of old settlers, among whom everything had been going
on prosperously since an epoch beyond the memory of man; and they kept a
certain privacy among themselves, and dwelt on a cross-road, at the
entrance of which was a barred gate, hospitably open, but still
impressing me with a sense of scarcely warrantable intrusion. After all,
in some shady nook of those gentle Warwickshire slopes there may have
been a denser and more populous settlement, styled Hatton, which I never
reached.

Emerging from the by-road, and entering upon one that crossed it at right
angles and led to Warwick, I espied the church of Dr. Parr. Like the
others which I have described, it had a low stone tower, square, and
battlemented at its summit: for all these little churches seem to have
been built on the same model, and nearly at the same measurement, and
have even a greater family-likeness than the cathedrals. As I
approached, the bell of the tower (a remarkably deep-toned bell,
considering how small it was) flung its voice abroad, and told me that it
was noon. The church stands among its graves, a little removed from the
wayside, quite apart from any collection of houses, and with no signs of
vicarage; it is a good deal shadowed by trees, and not wholly destitute
of ivy. The body of the edifice, unfortunately (and it is an outrage
which the English church-wardens are fond of perpetrating), has been
newly covered with a yellowish plaster or wash, so as quite to destroy
the aspect of antiquity, except upon the tower, which wears the dark gray
hue of many centuries. The chancel-window is painted with a
representation of Christ upon the Cross, and all the other windows are
full of painted or stained glass, but none of it ancient, nor (if it be
fair to judge from without of what ought to be seen within) possessing
any of the tender glory that should be the inheritance of this branch of
Art, revived from mediaeval times. I stepped over the graves, and peeped
in at two or three of the windows, and saw the snug interior of the
church glimmering through the many-colored panes, like a show of
commonplace objects under the fantastic influence of a dream: for the
floor was covered with modern pews, very like what we may see in a New
England meeting-house, though, I think, a little more favorable than
those would be to the quiet slumbers of the Hatton farmers and their
families. Those who slept under Dr. Parr's preaching now prolong their
nap, I suppose, in the churchyard round about, and can scarcely have
drawn much spiritual benefit from any truths that he contrived to tell
them in their lifetime. It struck me as a rare example (even where
examples are numerous) of a man utterly misplaced, that this enormous
scholar, great in the classic tongues, and inevitably converting his own
simplest vernacular into a learned language, should have been set up in
this homely pulpit, and ordained to preach salvation to a rustic
audience, to whom it is difficult to imagine how he could ever have
spoken one available word.

Almost always, in visiting such scenes as I have been attempting to
describe, I had a singular sense of having been there before. The
ivy-grown English churches (even that of Bebbington, the first that I
beheld) were quite as familiar to me, when fresh from home, as the old
wooden meeting-house in Salem, which used, on wintry Sabbaths, to be the
frozen purgatory of my childhood. This was a bewildering, yet very
delightful emotion fluttering about me like a faint summer wind, and
filling my imagination with a thousand half-remembrances, which looked as
vivid as sunshine, at a side-glance, but faded quite away whenever I
attempted to grasp and define them. Of course, the explanation of the
mystery was, that history, poetry, and fiction, books of travel, and the
talk of tourists, had given me pretty accurate preconceptions of the
common objects of English scenery, and these, being long ago vivified by
a youthful fancy, had insensibly taken their places among the images of
things actually seen. Yet the illusion was often so powerful, that I
almost doubted whether such airy remembrances might not be a sort of
innate idea, the print of a recollection in some ancestral mind,
transmitted, with fainter and fainter impress through several descents,
to my own. I felt, indeed, like the stalwart progenitor in person,
returning to the hereditary haunts after more than two hundred years, and
finding the church, the hall, the farm-house, the cottage, hardly changed
during his long absence,--the same shady by-paths and hedge-lanes, the
same veiled sky, and green lustre of the lawns and fields,--while his own
affinities for these things, a little obscured by disuse, were reviving
at every step.

An American is not very apt to love the English people, as a whole, on
whatever length of acquaintance. I fancy that they would value our
regard, and even reciprocate it in their ungracious way, if we could give
it to them in spite of all rebuffs; but they are beset by a curious and
inevitable infelicity, which compels them, as it were, to keep up what
they seem to consider a wholesome bitterness of feeling between
themselves and all other nationalities, especially that of America. They
will never confess it; nevertheless, it is as essential a tonic to them
as their bitter ale. Therefore,--and possibly, too, from a similar
narrowness in his own character,--an American seldom feels quite as if he
were at home among the English people. If he do so, he has ceased to be
an American. But it requires no long residence to make him love their
island, and appreciate it as thoroughly as they themselves do. For my
part, I used to wish that we could annex it, transferring their thirty
millions of inhabitants to some convenient wilderness in the great West,
and putting half or a quarter as many of ourselves into their places.
The change would be beneficial to both parties. We, in our dry
atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated,
unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser. John Bull, on the
other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted,
material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries
he will be the earthliest creature that ever the earth saw. Heretofore
Providence has obviated such a result by timely intermixtures of alien
races with the old English stock; so that each successive conquest of
England has proved a victory by the revivification and improvement of its
native manhood. Cannot America and England hit upon some scheme to
secure even greater advantages to both nations?

ABOUT WARWICK.

Between bright, new Leamington, the growth of the present century, and
rusty Warwick, founded by King Cymbeline in the twilight ages, a thousand
years before the mediaeval darkness, there are two roads, either of which
may be measured by a sober-paced pedestrian in less than half an hour.

One of these avenues flows out of the midst of the smart parades and
crescents of the former town,--along by hedges and beneath the shadow of
great elms, past stuccoed Elizabethan villas and wayside alehouses, and
through a hamlet of modern aspect,--and runs straight into the principal
thoroughfare of Warwick. The battlemented turrets of the castle,
embowered half-way up in foliage, and the tall, slender tower of St.
Mary's Church, rising from among clustered roofs, have been visible
almost from the commencement of the walk. Near the entrance of the town
stands St. John's School-House, a picturesque old edifice of stone, with
four peaked gables in a row, alternately plain and ornamented, and wide,
projecting windows, and a spacious and venerable porch, all overgrown
with moss and ivy, and shut in from the world by a high stone fence, not
less mossy than the gabled front. There is an iron gate, through the
rusty open-work of which you see a grassy lawn, and almost expect to meet
the shy, curious eyes of the little boys of past generations, peeping
forth from their infantile antiquity into the strangeness of our present
life. I find a peculiar charm in these long-established English schools,
where the school-boy of to-day sits side by side, as it were, with his
great-grandsire, on the same old benches, and often, I believe, thumbs a
later, but unimproved edition of the same old grammar or arithmetic. The
newfangled notions of a Yankee school-committee would madden many a
pedagogue, and shake down the roof of many a time-honored seat of
learning, in the mother-country.

At this point, however, we will turn back, in order to follow up the
other road from Leamington, which was the one that I loved best to take.
It pursues a straight and level course, bordered by wide gravel-walks and
overhung by the frequent elm, with here a cottage and there a villa, on
one side a wooded plantation, and on the other a rich field of grass or
grain, until, turning at right angles, it brings you to an arched bridge
over the Avon. Its parapet is a balustrade carved out of freestone, into
the soft substance of which a multitude of persons have engraved their
names or initials, many of them now illegible, while others, more deeply
cut, are illuminated with fresh green moss. These tokens indicate a
famous spot; and casting our eyes along the smooth gleam and shadow of
the quiet stream, through a vista of willows that droop on either side
into the water, we behold the gray magnificence of Warwick Castle,
uplifting itself among stately trees, and rearing its turrets high above
their loftiest branches. We can scarcely think the scene real, so
completely do those machicolated towers, the long line of battlements,
the massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct
ideas of the antique time. It might rather seem as if the sleepy river
(being Shakespeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror of his
gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here
many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe
that the image in the tranquil water has all the distinctness of the
actual structure. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever
Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as
plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so perfect, that the upper
vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of
feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in an enchanted river.

A ruinous and ivy-grown bridge, that projects from the bank a little on
the hither side of the castle, has the effect of making the scene appear
more entirely apart from the every-day world, for it ends abruptly in the
middle of the stream,--so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and ladies
of romance should issue from the old walls, they could never tread on
earthly ground, any more than we, approaching from the side of modern
realism, can overleap the gulf between our domain and theirs. Yet, if we
seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done. Crossing the
bridge on which we stand, and passing a little farther on, we come to the
entrance of the castle, abutting on the highway, and hospitably open at
certain hours to all curious pilgrims who choose to disburse half a crown
or so toward the support of the earl's domestics. The sight of that long
series of historic rooms, full of such splendors and rarities as a great
English family necessarily gathers about itself, in its hereditary abode,
and in the lapse of ages, is well worth the money, or ten times as much,
if indeed the value of the spectacle could be reckoned in money's-worth.
But after the attendant has hurried you from end to end of the edifice,
repeating a guide-book by rote, and exorcising each successive hall of
its poetic glamour and witchcraft by the mere tone in which he talks
about it, you will make the doleful discovery that Warwick Castle has
ceased to be a dream. It is better, methinks, to linger on the bridge,
gazing at Caesar's Tower and Guy's Tower in the dim English sunshine
above, and in the placid Avon below, and still keep them as thoughts in
your own mind, than climb to their summits, or touch even a stone of
their actual substance. They will have all the more reality for you, as
stalwart relics of immemorial time, if you are reverent enough to leave
them in the intangible sanctity of a poetic vision.

From the bridge over the Avon, the road passes in front of the
castle-gate, and soon enters the principal street of Warwick, a little
beyond St. John's School-House, already described. Chester itself, most
antique of English towns, can hardly show quainter architectural shapes
than many of the buildings that border this street. They are mostly of
the timber-and-plaster kind, with bowed and decrepit ridge-poles, and a
whole chronology of various patchwork in their walls; their low-browed
doorways open upon a sunken floor; their projecting stories peep, as it
were, over one another's shoulders, and rise into a multiplicity of
peaked gables; they have curious windows, breaking out irregularly all
over the house, some even in the roof, set in their own little peaks,
opening lattice-wise, and furnished with twenty small panes of
lozenge-shaped glass. The architecture of these edifices (a visible
oaken framework, showing the whole skeleton of the house,--as if a man's
bones should be arranged on his outside, and his flesh seen through the
interstices) is often imitated by modern builders, and with sufficiently
picturesque effect. The objection is, that such houses, like all
imitations of bygone styles, have an air of affectation; they do not seem
to be built in earnest; they are no better than playthings, or overgrown
baby-houses, in which nobody should be expected to encounter the serious
realities of either birth or death. Besides, originating nothing, we
leave no fashions for another age to copy, when we ourselves shall have
grown antique.

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