Books: Our Old Home
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home
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The Master's residence, forming one entire side of the quadrangle, fronts
on the garden, and wears an aspect at once stately and homely. It can
hardly have undergone any perceptible change within three centuries; but
the garden, into which its old windows look, has probably put off a great
many eccentricities and quaintnesses, in the way of cunningly clipped
shrubbery, since the gardener of Queen Elizabeth's reign threw down his
rusty shears and took his departure. The present Master's name is
Harris; he is a descendant of the founder's family, a gentleman of
independent fortune, and a clergyman of the Established Church, as the
regulations of the hospital require him to be. I know not what are his
official emoluments; but, according to an English precedent, an ancient
charitable fund is certain to be held directly for the behoof of those
who administer it, and perhaps incidentally, in a moderate way, for the
nominal beneficiaries; and, in the case before us, the twelve brethren
being so comfortably provided for, the Master is likely to be at least as
comfortable as all the twelve together. Yet I ought not, even in a
distant land, to fling an idle gibe against a gentleman of whom I really
know nothing, except that the people under his charge bear all possible
tokens of being tended and cared for as sedulously as if each of them sat
by a warm fireside of his own, with a daughter bustling round the hearth
to make ready his porridge and his titbits. It is delightful to think of
the good life which a suitable man, in the Master's position, has an
opportunity to lead,--linked to time-honored customs, welded in with an
ancient system, never dreaming of radical change, and bringing all the
mellowness and richness of the past down into these railway-days, which
do not compel him or his community to move a whit quicker than of yore.
Everybody can appreciate the advantages of going ahead; it might be well,
sometimes, to think whether there is not a word or two to be said in
favor of standing still or going to sleep.
From the garden we went into the kitchen, where the fire was burning
hospitably, and diffused a genial warmth far and wide, together with the
fragrance of some old English roast-beef, which, I think, must at that
moment have been done nearly to a turn. The kitchen is a lofty,
spacious, and noble room, partitioned off round the fireplace, by a sort
of semicircular oaken screen, or rather, an arrangement of heavy and
high-backed settles, with an ever-open entrance between them, on either
side of which is the omnipresent image of the Bear and Ragged Staff,
three feet high, and excellently carved in oak, now black with time and
unctuous kitchen-smoke. The ponderous mantel-piece, likewise of carved
oak, towers high towards the dusky ceiling, and extends its mighty
breadth to take in a vast area of hearth, the arch of the fireplace being
positively so immense that I could compare it to nothing but the city
gateway. Above its cavernous opening were crossed two ancient halberds,
the weapons, possibly, of soldiers who had fought under Leicester in the
Low Countries; and elsewhere on the walls were displayed several muskets,
which some of the present inmates of the hospital may have levelled
against the French. Another ornament of the mantel-piece was a square of
silken needlework or embroidery, faded nearly white, but dimly
representing that wearisome Bear and Ragged Staff, which we should hardly
look twice at, only that it was wrought by the fair fingers of poor Amy
Robsart, and beautifully framed in oak from Kenilworth Castle, at the
expense of a Mr. Conner, a countryman of our own. Certainly, no
Englishman would be capable of this little bit of enthusiasm. Finally,
the kitchen-firelight glistens on a splendid display of copper flagons,
all of generous capacity, and one of them about as big as a half-barrel;
the smaller vessels contain the customary allowance of ale, and the
larger one is filled with that foaming liquor on four festive occasions
of the year, and emptied amain by the jolly brotherhood. I should be
glad to see them do it; but it would be an exploit fitter for Queen
Elizabeth's age than these degenerate times.
The kitchen is the social hall of the twelve brethren. In the daytime,
they bring their little messes to be cooked here, and eat them in their
own parlors; but after a certain hour, the great hearth is cleared and
swept, and the old men assemble round its blaze, each with his tankard
and his pipe, and hold high converse through the evening. If the Master
be a fit man for his office, methinks he will sometimes sit down sociably
among them; for there is an elbow-chair by the fireside which it would
not demean his dignity to fill, since it was occupied by King James at
the great festival of nearly three centuries ago. A sip of the ale and a
whiff of the tobacco-pipe would put him in friendly relations with his
venerable household; and then we can fancy him instructing them by pithy
apothegms and religious texts which were first uttered here by some
Catholic priest and have impregnated the atmosphere ever since. If a
joke goes round, it shall be of an elder coinage than Joe Miller's, as
old as Lord Bacon's collection, or as the jest-book that Master Slender
asked for when he lacked small-talk for sweet Anne Page. No news shall
be spoken of later than the drifting ashore, on the northern coast, of
some stern-post or figure-head, a barnacled fragment of one of the great
galleons of the Spanish Armada. What a tremor would pass through the
antique group, if a damp newspaper should suddenly be spread to dry
before the fire! They would feel as if either that printed sheet or they
themselves must be an unreality. What a mysterious awe, if the shriek of
the railway-train, as it reaches the Warwick station, should ever so
faintly invade their ears! Movement of any kind seems inconsistent with
the stability of such an institution. Nevertheless, I trust that the
ages will carry it along with them; because it is such a pleasant kind of
dream for an American to find his way thither, and behold a piece of the
sixteenth century set into our prosaic times, and then to depart, and
think of its arched doorway as a spell-guarded entrance which will never
be accessible or visible to him any more.
Not far from the market-place of Warwick stands the great church of St.
Mary's: a vast edifice, indeed, and almost worthy to be a cathedral.
People who pretend to skill in such matters say that it is in a poor
style of architecture, though designed (or, at least, extensively
restored) by Sir Christopher Wren; but I thought it very striking, with
its wide, high, and elaborate windows, its tall towers, its immense
length, and (for it was long before I outgrew this Americanism, the love
of an old thing merely for the sake of its age) the tinge of gray
antiquity over the whole. Once, while I stood gazing up at the tower,
the clock struck twelve with a very deep intonation, and immediately some
chivies began to play, and kept up their resounding music for five
minutes, as measured by the hand upon the dial. It was a very delightful
harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, and seemed, a not unbecoming
freak of half-sportive fancy in the huge, ancient, and solemn church;
although I have seen an old-fashioned parlor-clock that did precisely the
same thing, in its small way.
The great attraction of this edifice is the Beauchamp (or, as the
English, who delight in vulgarizing their fine old Norman names, call it,
the Beechum) Chapel, where the Earls of Warwick and their kindred have
been buried, from four hundred years back till within a recent period.
It is a stately and very elaborate chapel, with a large window of ancient
painted glass, as perfectly preserved as any that I remember seeing in
England, and remarkably vivid in its colors. Here are several monuments
with marble figures recumbent upon them, representing the Earls in their
knightly armor, and their dames in the ruffs and court-finery of their
day, looking hardly stiffer in stone than they must needs have been in
their starched linen and embroidery. The renowned Earl of Leicester of
Queen Elizabeth's time, the benefactor of the hospital, reclines at full
length on the tablet of one of these tombs, side by side with his
Countess,--not Amy Robsart, but a lady who (unless I have confused the
story with some other mouldy scandal) is said to have avenged poor
Amy's murder by poisoning the Earl himself. Be that as it may, both
figures, and especially the Earl, look like the very types of ancient
Honor and Conjugal Faith. In consideration of his long-enduring
kindness to the twelve brethren, I cannot consent to believe him as
wicked as he is usually depicted; and it seems a marvel, now that so many
well-established historical verdicts have been reversed, why some
enterprising writer does not make out Leicester to have been the pattern
nobleman of his age.
In the centre of the chapel is the magnificent memorial of its founder,
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick in the time of Henry VI. On a richly
ornamented altar-tomb of gray marble lies the bronze figure of a knight
in gilded armor, most admirably executed: for the sculptors of those days
had wonderful skill in their own style, and could make so lifelike an
image of a warrior, in brass or marble, that, if a trumpet were sounded
over his tomb, you would expect him to start up and handle his sword.
The Earl whom we now speak of, however, has slept soundly in spite of a
more serious disturbance than any blast of a trumpet, unless it were the
final one. Some centuries after his death, the floor of the chapel fell
down and broke open the stone coffin in which he was buried; and among
the fragments appeared the anciently entombed Earl of Warwick, with the
color scarcely faded out of his cheeks, his eyes a little sunken, but in
other respects looking as natural as if he had died yesterday. But
exposure to the atmosphere appeared to begin and finish the long-delayed
process of decay in a moment, causing him to vanish like a bubble; so,
that, almost before there had been time to wonder at him, there was
nothing left of the stalwart Earl save his hair. This sole relic the
ladies of Warwick made prize of, and braided it into rings and brooches
for their own adornment; and thus, with a chapel and a ponderous tomb
built on purpose to protect his remains, this great nobleman could not
help being brought untimely to the light of day, nor even keep his
lovelocks on his skull after he had so long done with love. There seems
to be a fatality that disturbs people in their sepulchres, when they have
been over-careful to render them magnificent and impregnable,--as witness
the builders of the Pyramids, and Hadrian, Augustus, and the Scipios, and
most other personages whose mausoleums have been conspicuous enough to
attract the violator; and as for dead men's hair, I have seen a lock of
King Edward the Fourth's, of a reddish-brown color, which perhaps was
once twisted round the delicate forefinger of Mistress Shore.
The direct lineage of the renowned characters that lie buried in this
splendid chapel has long been extinct. The earldom is now held by the
Grevilles, descendants of the Lord Brooke who was slain in the
Parliamentary War; and they have recently (that is to say, within a
century) built a burial-vault on the other side of the church, calculated
(as the sexton assured me, with a nod as if he were pleased) to afford
suitable and respectful accommodation to as many as fourscore coffins.
Thank Heaven, the old man did not call them "CASKETS"!--a vile modern
phrase, which compels a person of sense and good taste to shrink more
disgustfully than ever before from the idea of being buried at all. But
as regards those eighty coffins, only sixteen have as yet been
contributed; and it may be a question with some minds, not merely whether
the Grevilles will hold the earldom of Warwick until the full number
shall be made up, but whether earldoms and all manner of lordships will
not have faded out of England long before those many generations shall
have passed from the castle to the vault. I hope not. A titled and
landed aristocracy, if anywise an evil and an encumbrance, is so only to
the nation which is doomed to bear it on its shoulders; and an American,
whose sole relation to it is to admire its picturesque effect upon
society, ought to be the last man to quarrel with what affords him so
much gratuitous enjoyment. Nevertheless, conservative as England is, and
though I scarce ever found an Englishman who seemed really to desire
change, there was continually a dull sound in my ears as if the old
foundations of things were crumbling away. Some time or other,--by no
irreverent effort of violence, but, rather, in spite of all pious efforts
to uphold a heterogeneous pile of institutions that will have outlasted
their vitality,--at some unexpected moment, there must come a terrible
crash. The sole reason why I should desire it to happen in my day is,
that I might be there to see! But the ruin of my own country is,
perhaps, all that I am destined to witness; and that immense catastrophe
(though I am strong in the faith that there is a national lifetime of a
thousand years in us yet) would serve any man well enough as his final
spectacle on earth.
If the visitor is inclined to carry away any little memorial of Warwick,
he had better go to an Old Curiosity Shop in the High Street, where there
is a vast quantity of obsolete gewgaws, great and small, and many of them
so pretty and ingenious that you wonder how they came to be thrown aside
and forgotten. As regards its minor tastes, the world changes, but does
not improve; it appears to me, indeed, that there have been epochs of far
more exquisite fancy than the present one, in matters of personal
ornament, and such delicate trifles as we put upon a drawing-room table,
a mantel-piece, or a whatnot. The shop in question is near the East
Gate, but is hardly to be found without careful search, being denoted
only by the name of "REDFERN," painted not very conspicuously in the
top-light of the door. Immediately on entering, we find ourselves among
a confusion of old rubbish and valuables, ancient armor, historic
portraits, ebony cabinets inlaid with pearl, tall, ghostly clocks,
hideous old china, dim looking-glasses in frames of tarnished
magnificence,--a thousand objects of strange aspect, and others that
almost frighten you by their likeness in unlikeness to things now in use.
It is impossible to give an idea of the variety of articles, so thickly
strewn about that we can scarcely move without overthrowing some great
curiosity with a crash, or sweeping away some small one hitched to our
sleeves. Three stories of the entire house are crowded in like manner.
The collection, even as we see it exposed to view, must have been got
together at great cost; but the real treasures of the establishment lie
in secret repositories, whence they are not likely to be drawn forth at
an ordinary summons; though, if a gentleman with a competently long purse
should call for them, I doubt not that the signet-ring of Joseph's
friend Pharaoh, or the Duke of Alva's leading-staff, or the dagger that
killed the Duke of Buckingham (all of which I have seen), or any other
almost incredible thing, might make its appearance. Gold snuff-boxes,
antique gems, jewelled goblets, Venetian wine-glasses (which burst when
poison is poured into them, and therefore must not be used for modern
wine-drinking), jasper-handled knives, painted Sevres teacups,--in short,
there are all sorts of things that a virtuoso ransacks the world to
discover.
It would be easier to spend a hundred pounds in Mr. Redfern's shop than
to keep the money in one's pocket; but, for my part, I contented myself
with buying a little old spoon of silver-gilt, and fantastically shaped,
and got it at all the more reasonable rate because there happened to be
no legend attached to it. I could supply any deficiency of that kind at
much less expense than regilding the spoon!
RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN.
From Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon the distance is eight or nine miles,
over a road that seemed to me most beautiful. Not that I can recall any
memorable peculiarities; for the country, most of the way, is a
succession of the gentlest swells and subsidences, affording wide and far
glimpses of champaign scenery here and there, and sinking almost to a
dead level as we draw near Stratford. Any landscape in New England, even
the tamest, has a more striking outline, and besides would have its blue
eyes open in those lakelets that we encounter almost from mile to mile at
home, but of which the Old Country is utterly destitute; or it would
smile in our faces through the medium of the wayside brooks that vanish
under a low stone arch on one side of the road, and sparkle out again on
the other. Neither of these pretty features is often to be found in an
English scene. The charm of the latter consists in the rich verdure of
the fields, in the stately wayside trees and carefully kept plantations
of wood, and in the old and high cultivation that has humanized the very
sods by mingling so much of man's toil and care among them. To an
American there is a kind of sanctity even in an English turnip-field,
when he thinks how long that small square of ground has been known and
recognized as a possession, transmitted from father to son, trodden often
by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery by old
acquaintanceship with civilized eyes. The wildest things in England are
more than half tame. The trees, for instance, whether in hedge-row,
park, or what they call forest, have nothing wild about them. They are
never ragged; there is a certain decorous restraint in the freest
outspread of their branches, though they spread wider than any
self-nurturing tree; they are tall, vigorous, bulky, with a look of
age-long life, and a promise of more years to come, all of which will
bring them into closer kindred with the race of man. Somebody or other
has known them from the sapling upward; and if they endure long enough,
they grow to be traditionally observed and honored, and connected with
the fortunes of old families, till, like Tennyson's Talking Oak, they
babble with a thousand leafy tongues to ears that can understand them.
An American tree, however, if it could grow in fair competition with an
English one of similar species, would probably be the more picturesque
object of the two. The Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape as
those that overhang our village street; and as for the redoubtable
English oak, there is a certain John Bullism in its figure, a compact
rotundity of foliage, a lack of irregular and various outline, that make
it look wonderfully like a gigantic cauliflower. Its leaf, too, is much
smaller than that of most varieties of American oak; nor do I mean to
doubt that the latter, with free leave to grow, reverent care and
cultivation, and immunity from the axe, would live out its centuries as
sturdily as its English brother, and prove far the nobler and more
majestic specimen of a tree at the end of them. Still, however one's
Yankee patriotism may struggle against the admission, it must be owned
that the trees and other objects of an English landscape take hold of the
observer by numberless minute tendrils, as it were, which, look as
closely as we choose, we never find in an American scene. The parasitic
growth is so luxuriant, that the trunk of the tree, so gray and dry in
our climate, is better worth observing than the boughs and foliage; a
verdant messiness coats it all over; so that it looks almost as green as
the leaves; and often, moreover, the stately stem is clustered about,
high upward, with creeping and twining shrubs, the ivy, and sometimes the
mistletoe, close-clinging friends, nurtured by the moisture and never too
fervid sunshine, and supporting themselves by the old tree's abundant
strength. We call it a parasitical vegetation; but, if the phrase imply
any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this beautiful affection and
relationship which exist in England between one order of plants and
another: the strong tree being always ready to give support to the
trailing shrub, lift it to the sun, and feed it out of its own heart,
if it crave such food; and the shrub, on its part, repaying its
foster-father with an ample luxuriance of beauty, and adding Corinthian
grace to the tree's lofty strength. No bitter winter nips these tender
little sympathies, no hot sun burns the life out of them; and therefore
they outlast the longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman permitted,
would bury it in a green grave, when all is over.
Should there be nothing else along the road to look at, an English hedge
might well suffice to occupy the eyes, and, to a depth beyond what he
would suppose, the heart of an American. We often set out hedges in our
own soil, but might as well set out figs or pineapples and expect to
gather fruit of them. Something grows, to be sure, which we choose to
call a hedge; but it lacks the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation
that is accumulated into the English original, in which a botanist would
find a thousand shrubs and gracious herbs that the hedgemaker never
thought of planting there. Among them, growing wild, are many of the
kindred blossoms of the very flowers which our pilgrim fathers brought
from England, for the sake of their simple beauty and homelike
associations, and which we have ever since been cultivating in gardens.
There is not a softer trait to be found in the character of those stern
men than that they should have been sensible of these flower-roots
clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, and have felt the
necessity of bringing them over sea and making them hereditary in the new
land, instead of trusting to what rarer beauty the wilderness might have
in store for them.
Or, if the roadside has no hedge, the ugliest stone fence (such as, in
America, would keep itself bare and unsympathizing till the end of time)
is sure to be covered with the small handiwork of Nature; that careful
mother lets nothing go naked there, and if she cannot provide clothing,
gives at least embroidery. No sooner is the fence built than she adopts
and adorns it as a part of her original plan, treating the hard, uncomely
construction as if it had all along been a favorite idea of her own. A
little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side of the low wall and
clinging fast with its many feet to the rough surface; a tuft of grass
roots itself between two of the stones, where a pinch or two of wayside
dust has been moistened into nutritious soil for it; a small bunch of
fern grows in another crevice; a deep, soft, verdant moss spreads itself
along the top and over all the available inequalities of the fence; and
where nothing else will grow, lichens stick tenaciously to the bare
stones and variegate the monotonous gray with hues of yellow and red.
Finally, a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base of the stone
wall, and takes away the hardness of its outline; and in due time, as the
upshot of these apparently aimless or sportive touches, we recognize that
the beneficent Creator of all things, working through his handmaiden whom
we call Nature, has deigned to mingle a charm of divine gracefulness even
with so earthly an institution as a boundary fence. The clown who
wrought at it little dreamed what fellow-laborer he had.
The English should send us photographs of portions of the trunks of
trees, the tangled and various products of a hedge, and a square foot of
an old wall. They can hardly send anything else so characteristic.
Their artists, especially of the later school, sometimes toil to depict
such subjects, but are apt to stiffen the lithe tendrils in the process.
The poets succeed better, with Tennyson at their head, and often produce
ravishing effects by dint of a tender minuteness of touch, to which the
genius of the soil and climate artfully impels them: for, as regards
grandeur, there are loftier scenes in many countries than the best that
England can show; but, for the picturesqueness of the smallest object
that lies under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like
it anywhere.
In the foregoing paragraphs I have strayed away to a long distance from
the road to Stratford-on-Avon; for I remember no such stone fences as I
have been speaking of in Warwickshire, nor elsewhere in England, except
among the Lakes, or in Yorkshire, and the rough and hilly countries to
the north of it. Hedges there were along my road, however, and broad,
level fields, rustic hamlets, and cottages of ancient date,--from the
roof of one of which the occupant was tearing away the thatch, and
showing what an accumulation of dust, dirt, mouldiness, roots of weeds,
families of mice, swallows' nests, and hordes of insects had been
deposited there since that old straw was new. Estimating its antiquity
from these tokens, Shakespeare himself, in one of his morning rambles out
of his native town, might have seen the thatch laid on; at all events,
the cottage-walls were old enough to have known him as a guest. A few
modern villas were also to be seen, and perhaps there were mansions of
old gentility at no great distance, but hidden among trees; for it is a
point of English pride that such houses seldom allow themselves to be
visible from the high-road. In short, I recollect nothing specially
remarkable along the way, nor in the immediate approach to Stratford; and
yet the picture of that June morning has a glory in my memory, owing
chiefly, I believe, to the charm of the English summer-weather, the
really good days of which are the most delightful that mortal man can
ever hope to be favored with. Such a genial warmth! A little too warm,
it might be, yet only to such a degree as to assure an American (a
certainty to which he seldom attains till attempered to the customary
austerity of an English summer-day) that he was quite warm enough. And
after all, there was an unconquerable freshness in the atmosphere, which
every little movement of a breeze shook over me like a dash of the
ocean-spray. Such days need bring us no other happiness than their own
light and temperature. No doubt, I could not have enjoyed it so
exquisitely, except that there must be still latent in us Western
wanderers (even after an absence of two centuries and more), an
adaptation to the English climate which makes us sensible of a motherly
kindness in its scantiest sunshine, and overflows us with delight at its
more lavish smiles.
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