OUR OLD HOME
A Series of English Sketches
By
Nathaniel Hawthorne
To Franklin Pierce,
As a Slight Memorial of a College Friendship, prolonged through Manhood, and retaining all its Vitality in our Autumnal Years,
This Volume is inscribed by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
TO A FRIEND.
I have not asked your consent, my dear General, to the foregoing inscription, because it would have been no inconsiderable disappointment to me had you withheld it; for I have long desired to connect your name with some book of mine, in commemoration of an early friendship that has grown old between two individuals of widely dissimilar pursuits and fortunes. I only wish that the offering were a worthier one than this volume of sketches, which certainly are not of a kind likely to prove interesting to a statesman in retirement, inasmuch as they meddle with no matters of policy or government, and have very little to say about the deeper traits of national character. In their humble way, they belong entirely to aesthetic literature, and can achieve no higher success than to represent to the American reader a few of the external aspects of English scenery and life, especially those that are touched with the antique charm to which our countrymen are more susceptible than are the people among whom it is of native growth.
I once hoped, indeed, that so slight a volume would not be all that I might write. These and other sketches, with which, in a somewhat rougher form than I have given them here, my journal was copiously filled, were intended for the side-scenes and backgrounds and exterior adornment of a work of fiction of which the plan had imperfectly developed itself in my mind, and into which I ambitiously proposed to convey more of various modes of truth than I could have grasped by a direct effort. Of course, I should not mention this abortive project, only that it has been utterly thrown aside and will never now be accomplished. The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as my unwritten Romance. But I have far better hopes for our dear country; and for my individual share of the catastrophe, I afflict myself little, or not at all, and shall easily find room for the abortive work on a certain ideal shelf, where are reposited many other shadowy volumes of mine, more in number, and very much superior in quality, to those which I have succeeded in rendering actual.
To return to these poor Sketches; some of my friends have
told me that they evince an asperity of sentiment towards the English people
which I ought not to feel, and which it is highly inexpedient to express. The charge surprises me, because, if it be
true, I have written from a shallower mood than I supposed. I seldom came into personal relations with an
Englishman without beginning to like him, and feeling my favorable impression
wax stronger with the progress of the acquaintance. I never stood in an English
crowd without being conscious of hereditary sympathies. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that an
American is continually thrown upon his national antagonism by some acrid
quality in the moral atmosphere of
And now farewell, my dear friend; and excuse (if you think it needs any excuse) the freedom with which I thus publicly assert a personal friendship between a private individual and a statesman who has filled what was then the most august position in the world. But I dedicate my book to the Friend, and shall defer a colloquy with the Statesman till some calmer and sunnier hour. Only this let me say, that, with the record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of your character in my deeper consciousness as among the few things that time has left as it found them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful forever to that grand idea of an irrevocable Union, which, as you once told me, was the earliest that your brave father taught you. For other men there may be a choice of paths,--for you, but one; and it rests among my certainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes or apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more deeply heartfelt, or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of personal happiness, than those of FRANKLIN PIERCE.
THE WAYSIDE, July 2, 1863.
CONTENTS:
RECOLLECTIONS
OF A GIFTED WOMAN.
OUTSIDE
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY.
The Consulate of the United States, in my day, was located
in Washington Buildings (a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four stories
high, thus illustriously named in honor of our national establishment), at the
lower corner of Brunswick Street, contiguous to the Gorec Arcade, and in the
neighborhood of scone of the oldest docks.
This was by no means a polite or elegant portion of
Any respectable visitor, if he could make up his mind to elbow a passage among these sea-monsters, was admitted into an outer office, where he found more of the same species, explaining their respective wants or grievances to the Vice-Consul and clerks, while their shipmates awaited their turn outside the door. Passing through this exterior court, the stranger was ushered into an inner privacy, where sat the Consul himself, ready to give personal attention to such peculiarly difficult and more important cases as might demand the exercise of (what we will courteously suppose to be) his own higher judicial or administrative sagacity.
It was an apartment of very moderate size, painted in
imitation of oak, and duskily lighted by two windows looking across a by-street
at the rough brick-side of an immense cotton warehouse, a plainer and uglier
structure than ever was built in America.
On the walls of the room hung a large map of the United States (as they
were, twenty years ago, but seem little likely to be, twenty years hence), and
a similar one of Great Britain, with its territory so provokingly compact, that
we may expect it to sink sooner than sunder.
Farther adornments were some rude engravings of our naval victories in
the War of 1812, together with the Tennessee State House, and a
One truly English object was a barometer hanging on the wall, generally indicating one or another degree of disagreeable weather, and so seldom pointing to Fair, that I began to consider that portion of its circle as made superfluously. The deep chimney, with its grate of bituminous coal, was English too, as was also the chill temperature that sometimes called for a fire at midsummer, and the foggy or smoky atmosphere which often, between November and March, compelled me to set the gas aflame at noonday. I am not aware of omitting anything important in the above descriptive inventory, unless it be some book-shelves filled with octavo volumes of the American Statutes, and a good many pigeon-holes stuffed with dusty communications from former Secretaries of State, and other official documents of similar value, constituting part of the archives of the Consulate, which I might have done my successor a favor by flinging into the coal-grate. Yes; there was one other article demanding prominent notice: the consular copy of the New Testament, bound in black morocco, and greasy, I fear, with a daily succession of perjured kisses; at least, I can hardly hope that all the ten thousand oaths, administered by me between two breaths, to all sorts of people and on all manner of worldly business, were reckoned by the swearer as if taken at his soul's peril.
Such, in short, was the dusky and stifled chamber in which I spent wearily a considerable portion of more than four good years of my existence. At first, to be quite frank with the reader, I looked upon it as not altogether fit to be tenanted by the commercial representative of so great and prosperous a country as the United States then were; and I should speedily have transferred my headquarters to airier and loftier apartments, except for the prudent consideration that my government would have left me thus to support its dignity at my own personal expense. Besides, a long line of distinguished predecessors, of whom the latest is now a gallant general under the Union banner, had found the locality good enough for them; it might certainly be tolerated, therefore, by an individual so little ambitious of external magnificence as myself. So I settled quietly down, striking some of my roots into such soil as I could find, adapting myself to circumstances, and with so much success, that, though from first to last I hated the very sight of the little room, I should yet have felt a singular kind of reluctance in changing it for a better.
Hither, in the course of my incumbency, came a great variety
of visitors, principally Americans, but including almost every other
nationality on earth, especially the distressed and downfallen ones like those
of
As for my countrymen, I grew better acquainted with many of our national characteristics during those four years than in all my preceding life. Whether brought more strikingly out by the contrast with English manners, or that my Yankee friends assumed an extra peculiarity from a sense of defiant patriotism, so it was that their tones, sentiments, and behavior, even their figures and cast of countenance, all seemed chiselled in sharper angles than ever I had imagined them to be at home. It impressed me with an odd idea of having somehow lost the property of my own person, when I occasionally heard one of them speaking of me as "my Consul"! They often came to the Consulate in parties of half a dozen or more, on no business whatever, but merely to subject their public servant to a rigid examination, and see how he was getting on with his duties. These interviews were rather formidable, being characterized by a certain stiffness which I felt to be sufficiently irksome at the moment, though it looks laughable enough in the retrospect. It is my firm belief that these fellow-citizens, possessing a native tendency to organization, generally halted outside of the door to elect a speaker, chairman, or moderator, and thus approached me with all the formalities of a deputation from the American people. After salutations on both sides,--abrupt, awful, and severe on their part, and deprecatory on mine,--and the national ceremony of shaking hands being duly gone through with, the interview proceeded by a series of calm and well-considered questions or remarks from the spokesman (no other of the guests vouchsafing to utter a word), and diplomatic responses from the Consul, who sometimes found the investigation a little more searching than he liked. I flatter myself, however, that, by much practice, I attained considerable skill in this kind of intercourse, the art of which lies in passing off commonplaces for new and valuable truths, and talking trash and emptiness in such a way that a pretty acute auditor might mistake it for something solid. If there be any better method of dealing with such junctures,--when talk is to be created out of nothing, and within the scope of several minds at once, so that you cannot apply yourself to your interlocutor's individuality,--I have not learned it.
Sitting, as it were, in the gateway between the
Among these stray Americans, I met with no other case so
remarkable as that of an old man, who was in the habit of visiting me once in a
few months, and soberly affirmed that he had been wandering about England more
than a quarter of a century (precisely twenty-seven years, I think), and all
the while doing his utmost to get home again.
Herman Melville, in his excellent novel or biography of "Israel
Potter," has an idea somewhat similar to this. The individual now in question was a mild and
patient, but very ragged and pitiable old fellow, shabby beyond description,
lean and hungry-looking, but with a large and somewhat red nose. He made no complaint of his ill-fortune, but
only repeated in a quiet voice, with a pathos of which he was himself evidently
unconscious, "I want to get home to
He appeared to see that he had moved me, but did not attempt
to press his advantage with any new argument, or any varied form of
entreaty. He had but scanty and
scattered thoughts in his gray head, and in the intervals of those, like the
refrain of an old ballad, came in the monotonous burden of his appeal, "If
I could only find myself in
The poor old fellow's story seemed to me almost as worthy of
being chanted in immortal song as that of Odysseus or Evangeline. I took his case into deep consideration, but
dared not incur the moral responsibility of sending him across the sea, at his
age, after so many years of exile, when the very tradition of him had passed
away, to find his friends dead, or forgetful, or irretrievably vanished, and
the whole country become more truly a foreign land to him than England was now,--and
even Ninety-second Street, in the weedlike decay and growth of our localities,
made over anew and grown unrecognizable by his old eyes. That street, so
patiently longed for, had transferred itself to the New Jerusalem, and he must
seek it there, contenting his slow heart, meanwhile, with the smoke-begrimed
thoroughfares of English towns, or the green country lanes and by-paths with
which his wanderings had made him familiar; for doubtless he had a beaten track
and was the "long-remembered beggar" now, with food and a roughly
hospitable greeting ready for him at many a farm-house door, and his choice of
lodging under a score of haystacks. In
I recollect another case, of a more ridiculous order, but
still with a foolish kind of pathos entangled in it, which impresses me now
more forcibly than it did at the moment.
One day, a queer, stupid, good-natured, fat-faced individual came into
my private room, dressed in a sky-blue, cut-away coat and mixed trousers, both
garments worn and shabby, and rather too small for his overgrown bulk. After a little preliminary talk, he turned
out to be a country shopkeeper (from
I never had so satisfactory a perception of a complete booby before in my life; and it caused me to feel kindly towards him, and yet impatient and exasperated on behalf of common-sense, which could not possibly tolerate that such an unimaginable donkey should exist. I laid his absurdity before him in the very plainest terms, but without either exciting his anger or shaking his resolution. "O my dear man," quoth he, with good-natured, placid, simple, and tearful stubbornness, "if you could but enter into my feelings and see the matter from beginning to end as I see it!" To confess the truth, I have since felt that I was hard-hearted to the poor simpleton, and that there was more weight in his remonstrance than I chose to be sensible of, at the time; for, like many men who have been in the habit of making playthings or tools of their imagination and sensibility, I was too rigidly tenacious of what was reasonable in the affairs of real life. And even absurdity has its rights, when, as in this case, it has absorbed a human being's entire nature and purposes. I ought to have transmitted him to Mr. Buchanan, in London, who, being a good-natured old gentleman, and anxious, just then, to gratify the universal Yankee nation, might, for the joke's sake, have got him admittance to the Queen, who had fairly laid herself open to his visit, and has received hundreds of our countrymen on infinitely slighter grounds. But I was inexorable, being turned to flint by the insufferable proximity of a fool, and refused to interfere with his business in any way except to procure him a passage home. I can see his face of mild, ridiculous despair, at this moment, and appreciate, better than I could then, how awfully cruel he must have felt my obduracy to be. For years and years, the idea of an interview with Queen Victoria had haunted his poor foolish mind; and now, when he really stood on English ground, and the palace-door was hanging ajar for him, he was expected to turn brick, a penniless and bamboozled simpleton, merely because an iron-hearted consul refused to lend him thirty shillings (so low had his demand ultimately sunk) to buy a second-class ticket on the rail for London!
He visited the Consulate several times afterwards, subsisting on a pittance that I allowed him in the hope of gradually starving him back to Connecticut, assailing me with the old petition at every opportunity, looking shabbier at every visit, but still thoroughly good-tempered, mildly stubborn, and smiling through his tears, not without a perception of the ludicrousness of his own position. Finally, he disappeared altogether, and whither he had wandered, and whether he ever saw the Queen, or wasted quite away in the endeavor, I never knew; but I remember unfolding the "Times," about that period, with a daily dread of reading an account of a ragged Yankee's attempt to steal into Buckingham Palace, and how he smiled tearfully at his captors and besought them to introduce him to her Majesty. I submit to Mr. Secretary Seward that he ought to make diplomatic remonstrances to the British Ministry, and require them to take such order that the Queen shall not any longer bewilder the wits of our poor compatriots by responding to their epistles and thanking them for their photographs.
One circumstance in the foregoing incident--I mean the
unhappy storekeeper's notion of establishing his claim to an English
estate--was common to a great many other applications, personal or by letter,
with which I was favored by my countrymen.
The cause of this peculiar insanity lies deep in the Anglo-American
heart. After all these bloody wars and
vindictive animosities, we have still an unspeakable yearning towards
Nationally, there has ceased to be any peril of so inauspicious and yet outwardly attractive an amalgamation. But as an individual, the American is often conscious of the deep-rooted sympathies that belong more fitly to times gone by, and feels a blind pathetic tendency to wander back again, which makes itself evident in such wild dreams as I have alluded to above, about English inheritances. A mere coincidence of names (the Yankee one, perhaps, having been assumed by legislative permission), a supposititious pedigree, a silver mug on which an anciently engraved coat-of-arms has been half scrubbed out, a seal with an uncertain crest, an old yellow letter or document in faded ink, the more scantily legible the better,--rubbish of this kind, found in a neglected drawer, has been potent enough to turn the brain of many an honest Republican, especially if assisted by an advertisement for lost heirs, cut out of a British newspaper. There is no estimating or believing, till we come into a position to know it, what foolery lurks latent in the breasts of very sensible people. Remembering such sober extravagances, I should not be at all surprised to find that I am myself guilty of some unsuspected absurdity, that may appear to me the most substantial trait in my character.
I might fill many pages with instances of this diseased
American appetite for English soil. A
respectable-looking woman, well advanced in life, of sour aspect, exceedingly
homely, but decidedly New-Englandish in figure and manners, came to my office
with a great bundle of documents, at the very first glimpse of which I
apprehended something terrible. Nor was I mistaken.
The bundle contained evidences of her indubitable claim to the site on
which Castle Street, the Town Hall, the Exchange, and all the principal
business part of Liverpool have long been situated; and with considerable
peremptoriness, the good lady signified her expectation that I should take
charge of her suit, and prosecute it to judgment; not, however, on the
equitable condition of receiving half the value of the property recovered
(which, in case of complete success, would have made both of us ten or twenty
fold millionaires), but without recompense or reimbursement of legal expenses,
solely as an incident of my official duty.
Another time came two ladies, bearing a letter of emphatic introduction
from his Excellency the Governor of their native State, who testified in most
satisfactory terms to their social respectability. They were claimants of a
great estate in Cheshire, and announced themselves as blood-relatives of Queen
Victoria,--a point, however, which they deemed it expedient to keep in the
background until their territorial rights should be established, apprehending
that the Lord High Chancellor might otherwise be less likely to come to a fair
decision in respect to them, from a probable disinclination to admit new
members into the royal kin. Upon my
honor, I imagine that they had an eye to the possibility of the eventual
succession of one or both of them to the crown of
Another visitor of the same class was a gentleman of refined
manners, handsome figure, and remarkably intellectual aspect. Like many men of an adventurous cast, he had
so quiet a deportment, and such an apparent disinclination to general
sociability, that you would have fancied him moving always along some peaceful
and secluded walk of life. Yet,
literally from his first hour, he had been tossed upon the surges of a most
varied and tumultuous existence, having been born at sea, of American
parentage, but on board of a Spanish vessel, and spending many of the
subsequent years in voyages, travels, and outlandish incidents and
vicissitudes, which, methought, had hardly been paralleled since the days of
Gulliver or De Foe. When his dignified
reserve was overcome, he had the faculty of narrating these adventures with
wonderful eloquence, working up his descriptive sketches with such intuitive
perception of the picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward with a
positively illusive effect, like matters of your own visual experience. In fact, they were so admirably done that I
could never more than half believe them, because the genuine affairs of life
are not apt to transact themselves so artistically. Many of his scenes were laid in the East, and
among those seldom-visited archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean, so that there was
an Oriental fragrance breathing through his talk and
an odor of the
But his best story was about a race of men (if men they were) who seemed so fully to realize Swift's wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my friend was much exercised with psychological speculations whether or no they had any souls. They dwelt in the wilds of Ceylon, like other savage beasts, hairy, and spotted with tufts of fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless (though warlike in their individual bent), tool-less, houseless, language-less, except for a few guttural sounds, hideously dissonant, whereby they held some rudest kind of communication among themselves. They lacked both memory and foresight, and were wholly destitute of government, social institutions, or law or rulership of any description, except the immediate tyranny of the strongest; radically untamable, moreover, save that the people of the country managed to subject a few of the less ferocious and stupid ones to outdoor servitude among their other cattle. They were beastly in almost all their attributes, and that to such a degree that the observer, losing sight of any link betwixt them and manhood, could generally witness their brutalities without greater horror than at those of some disagreeable quadruped in a menagerie. And yet, at times, comparing what were the lowest general traits in his own race with what was highest in these abominable monsters, he found a ghastly similitude that half compelled him to recognize them as human brethren.
After these Gulliverian researches, my agreeable
acquaintance had fallen under the ban of the Dutch government, and had suffered
(this, at least, being matter of fact) nearly two years' imprisonment, with
confiscation of a large amount of property, for which Mr. Belmont, our minister
at the Hague, had just made a peremptory demand of reimbursement and damages.
Meanwhile, since arriving in England on his way to the United States, he had
been providentially led to inquire into the circumstances of his birth on
shipboard, and had discovered that not himself alone, but another baby, had
come into the world during the same voyage of the prolific vessel, and that
there were almost irrefragable reasons for believing that these two children
had been assigned to the wrong mothers. Many reminiscences of his early days
confirmed him in the idea that his nominal parents were aware of the exchange. The family to which he felt authorized to
attribute his lineage was that of a nobleman, in the picture-gallery of whose
country-seat (whence, if I mistake not, our adventurous friend had just
returned) he had discovered a portrait bearing a striking resemblance to himself. As soon as
he should have reported the outrageous action of the Dutch government to
President Pierce and the Secretary of State, and recovered the confiscated
property, he purposed to return to
I had accepted his Oriental fantasies (which, indeed, to do him justice, have been recorded by scientific societies among the genuine phenomena of natural history), not as matters of indubitable credence, but as allowable specimens of an imaginative traveller's vivid coloring and rich embroidery on the coarse texture and dull neutral tints of truth. The English romance was among the latest communications that he intrusted to my private ear; and as soon as I heard the first chapter,--so wonderfully akin to what I might have wrought out of my own head, not unpractised in such figments,--I began to repent having made myself responsible for the future nobleman's passage homeward in the next Collins steamer. Nevertheless, should his English rent-roll fall a little behindhand, his Dutch claim for a hundred thousand dollars was certainly in the hands of our government, and might at least be valuable to the extent of thirty pounds, which I had engaged to pay on his behalf. But I have reason to fear that his Dutch riches turned out to be Dutch gilt, or fairy gold, and his English country-seat a mere castle in the air,--which I exceedingly regret, for he was a delightful companion and a very gentlemanly man.
A Consul, in his position of universal responsibility, the general adviser and helper, sometimes finds himself compelled to assume the guardianship of personages who, in their own sphere, are supposed capable of superintending the highest interests of whole communities. An elderly Irishman, a naturalized citizen, once put the desire and expectation of all our penniless vagabonds into a very suitable phrase, by pathetically entreating me to be a "father to him"; and, simple as I sit scribbling here, I have acted a father's part, not only by scores of such unthrifty old children as himself, but by a progeny of far loftier pretensions. It may be well for persons who are conscious of any radical weakness in their character, any besetting sin, any unlawful propensity, any unhallowed impulse, which (while surrounded with the manifold restraints that protect a man from that treacherous and lifelong enemy, his lower self, in the circle of society where he is at home) they may have succeeded in keeping under the lock and key of strictest propriety,--it may be well for them, before seeking the perilous freedom of a distant land, released from the watchful eyes of neighborhoods and coteries, lightened of that wearisome burden, an immaculate name, and blissfully obscure after years of local prominence,--it may be well for such individuals to know that when they set foot on a foreign shore, the long-imprisoned Evil, scenting a wild license in the unaccustomed atmosphere, is apt to grow riotous in its iron cage. It rattles the rusty barriers with gigantic turbulence, and if there be an infirm joint anywhere in the framework, it breaks madly forth, compressing the mischief of a lifetime into a little space.
A parcel of letters had been accumulating at the Consulate
for two or three weeks, directed to a certain Doctor of Divinity, who had left
The Doctor, however, failed to make his appearance at
dinner-time, or to apologize the next day for his absence; and in the course of
a day or two more, I forgot all about him, concluding that he must have set
forth on his Continental travels, the plan of which he had sketched out at our
interview. But, by and by, I received a
call from the master of the vessel in which he had arrived. He was in some alarm about his passenger,
whose luggage remained on shipboard, but of whom nothing had been heard or seen
since the moment of his departure from the Consulate. We conferred together,
the captain and I, about the expediency of setting the police on the traces (if
any were to be found) of our vanished friend; but it struck me that the good
captain was singularly reticent, and that there was something a little
mysterious in a few points that he hinted at rather than expressed; so that,
scrutinizing the affair carefully, I surmised that the intimacy of life on
shipboard might have taught him more about the reverend gentleman than, for
some reason or other, he deemed it prudent to reveal. At home, in our native country, I would have
looked to the Doctor's personal safety and left his reputation to take care of
itself, knowing that the good fame of a thousand saintly clergymen would amply
dazzle out any lamentable spot on a single brother's character. But in scornful and invidious
Precisely a week after this reverend person's disappearance, there came to my office a tall, middle-aged gentleman in a blue military surtout, braided at the seams, but out at elbows, and as shabby as if the wearer had been bivouacking in it throughout a Crimean campaign. It was buttoned up to the very chin, except where three or four of the buttons were lost; nor was there any glimpse of a white shirt-collar illuminating the rusty black cravat. A grisly mustache was just beginning to roughen the stranger's upper lip. He looked disreputable to the last degree, but still had a ruined air of good society glimmering about him, like a few specks of polish on a swordblade that has lain corroding in a mud-puddle. I took him to be some American marine officer, of dissipated habits, or perhaps a cashiered British major, stumbling into the wrong quarters through the unrectified bewilderment of last night's debauch. He greeted me, however, with polite familiarity, as though we had been previously acquainted; whereupon I drew coldly back (as sensible people naturally do, whether from strangers or former friends, when too evidently at odds with fortune) and requested to know who my visitor might be, and what was his business at the Consulate. "Am I then so changed?" he exclaimed with a vast depth of tragic intonation; and after a little blind and bewildered talk, behold! the truth flashed upon me. It was the Doctor of Divinity! If I had meditated a scene or a coup de theatre, I could not have contrived a more effectual one than by this simple and genuine difficulty of recognition. The poor Divine must have felt that he had lost his personal identity through the misadventures of one little week. And, to say the truth, he did look as if, like Job, on account of his especial sanctity, he had been delivered over to the direst temptations of Satan, and proving weaker than the man of Uz, the Arch Enemy had been empowered to drag him through Tophet, transforming him, in the process, from the most decorous of metropolitan clergymen into the rowdiest and dirtiest of disbanded officers. I never fathomed the mystery of his military costume, but conjectured that a lurking sense of fitness had induced him to exchange his clerical garments for this habit of a sinner; nor can I tell precisely into what pitfall, not more of vice than terrible calamity, he had precipitated himself,--being more than satisfied to know that the outcasts of society can sink no lower than this poor, desecrated wretch had sunk.
The opportunity, I presume, does not often happen to a layman, of administering moral and religious reproof to a Doctor of Divinity; but finding the occasion thrust upon me, and the hereditary Puritan waxing strong in my breast, I deemed it a matter of conscience not to let it pass entirely unimproved. The truth is, I was unspeakably shocked and disgusted. Not, however, that I was then to learn that clergymen are made of the same flesh and blood as other people, and perhaps lack one small safeguard which the rest of us possess, because they are aware of their own peccability, and therefore cannot look up to the clerical class for the proof of the possibility of a pure life on earth, with such reverential confidence as we are prone to do. But I remembered the innocent faith of my boyhood, and the good old silver-headed clergyman, who seemed to me as much a saint then on earth as he is now in heaven, and partly for whose sake, through all these darkening years, I retain a devout, though not intact nor unwavering respect for the entire fraternity. What a hideous wrong, therefore, had the backslider inflicted on his brethren, and still more on me, who much needed whatever fragments of broken reverence (broken, not as concerned religion, but its earthly institutions and professors) it might yet be possible to patch into a sacred image! Should all pulpits and communion-tables have thenceforth a stain upon them, and the guilty one go unrebuked for it? So I spoke to the unhappy man as I never thought myself warranted in speaking to any other mortal, hitting him hard, doing my utmost to find out his vulnerable part, and prick him into the depths of it. And not without more effect than I had dreamed of, or desired!
No doubt, the novelty of the Doctor's reversed position, thus standing up to receive such a fulmination as the clergy have heretofore arrogated the exclusive right of inflicting, might give additional weight and sting to the words which I found utterance for. But there was another reason (which, had I in the least suspected it, would have closed my lips at once) for his feeling morbidly sensitive to the cruel rebuke that I administered. The unfortunate man had come to me, laboring under one of the consequences of his riotous outbreak, in the shape of delirium tremens; he bore a hell within the compass of his own breast, all the torments of which blazed up with tenfold inveteracy when I thus took upon myself the Devil's office of stirring up the red-hot embers. His emotions, as well as the external movement and expression of them by voice, countenance, and gesture, were terribly exaggerated by the tremendous vibration of nerves resulting from the disease. It was the deepest tragedy I ever witnessed. I know sufficiently, from that one experience, how a condemned soul would manifest its agonies; and for the future, if I have anything to do with sinners, I mean to operate upon them through sympathy, and not rebuke. What had I to do with rebuking him? The disease, long latent in his heart, had shown itself in a frightful eruption on the surface of his life. That was all! Is it a thing to scold the sufferer for?
To conclude this wretched story, the poor Doctor of Divinity, having been robbed of all his money in this little airing beyond the limits of propriety, was easily persuaded to give up the intended tour and return to his bereaved flock, who, very probably, were thereafter conscious of an increased unction in his soul-stirring eloquence, without suspecting the awful depths into which their pastor had dived in quest of it. His voice is now silent. I leave it to members of his own profession to decide whether it was better for him thus to sin outright, and so to be let into the miserable secret what manner of man he was, or to have gone through life outwardly unspotted, making the first discovery of his latent evil at the judgment-seat. It has occurred to me that his dire calamity, as both he and I regarded it, might have been the only method by which precisely such a man as himself, and so situated, could be redeemed. He has learned, ere now, how that matter stood.
For a man, with a natural tendency to meddle with other
people's business, there could not possibly be a more congenial sphere than the
Liverpool Consulate. For myself, I had
never been in the habit of feeling that I could sufficiently comprehend any
particular conjunction of circumstances with human character, to justify me in
thrusting in my awkward agency among the intricate and unintelligible machinery
of
All the matters that I have been treating of, however, were
merely incidental, and quite distinct from the real business of the
office. A great part of the wear and
tear of mind and temper resulted from the bad relations between the seamen and
officers of American ships. Scarcely a
morning passed, but that some sailor came to show the marks of his ill-usage on
shipboard. Often, it was a whole crew of
them, each with his broken head or livid bruise, and all testifying with one
voice to a constant series of savage outrages during the voyage; or, it might
be, they laid an accusation of actual murder, perpetrated by the first or
second officers with many blows of steel-knuckles, a rope's end, or a
marline-spike, or by the captain, in the twinkling of an eye, with a shot of
his pistol. Taking the seamen's view of
the case, you would suppose that the gibbet was hungry for the murderers. Listening to the captain's defence, you would
seem to discover that he and his officers were the humanest of mortals, but
were driven to a wholesome severity by the mutinous conduct of the crew, who,
moreover, had themselves slain their comrade in the drunken riot and confusion
of the first day or two after they were shipped. Looked at judicially, there appeared to be no right side to the matter, nor any right side possible in
so thoroughly vicious a system as that of the American mercantile marine. The Consul could do little, except to take
depositions, hold forth the greasy Testament to be profaned anew with perjured
kisses, and, in a few instances of murder or manslaughter, carry the case
before an English magistrate, who generally decided that the evidence was too
contradictory to authorize the transmission of the accused for trial in
The truth is, that the state of affairs was really very horrible, and could be met by no laws at that time (or I presume now) in existence. I once thought of writing a pamphlet on the subject, but quitted the Consulate before finding time to effect my purpose; and all that phase of my life immediately assumed so dreamlike a consistency that I despaired of making it seem solid or tangible to the public. And now it looks distant and dim, like troubles of a century ago. The origin of the evil lay in the character of the seamen, scarcely any of whom were American, but the offscourings and refuse of all the seaports of the world, such stuff as piracy is made of, together with a considerable intermixture of returning emigrants, and a sprinkling of absolutely kidnapped American citizens. Even with such material, the ships were very inadequately manned. The shipmaster found himself upon the deep, with a vast responsibility of property and human life upon his hands, and no means of salvation except by compelling his inefficient and demoralized crew to heavier exertions than could reasonably be required of the same number of able seamen. By law he had been intrusted with no discretion of judicious punishment, he therefore habitually left the whole matter of discipline to his irresponsible mates, men often of scarcely a superior quality to the crew. Hence ensued a great mass of petty outrages, unjustifiable assaults, shameful indignities, and nameless cruelty, demoralizing alike to the perpetrators and the sufferers; these enormities fell into the ocean between the two countries, and could be punished in neither. Many miserable stories come back upon my memory as I write; wrongs that were immense, but for which nobody could be held responsible, and which, indeed, the closer yon looked into them, the more they lost the aspect of wilful misdoing and assumed that of an inevitable calamity. It was the fault of a system, the misfortune of an individual. Be that as it may, however, there will be no possibility of dealing effectually with these troubles as long as we deem it inconsistent with our national dignity or interests to allow the English courts, under such restrictions as may seem fit, a jurisdiction over offences perpetrated on board our vessels in mid-ocean.
In such a life as this, the American shipmaster develops himself into a man of iron energies, dauntless courage, and inexhaustible resource, at the expense, it must be acknowledged, of some of the higher and gentler traits which might do him excellent service in maintaining his authority. The class has deteriorated of late years on account of the narrower field of selection, owing chiefly to the diminution of that excellent body of respectably educated New England seamen, from the flower of whom the officers used to be recruited. Yet I found them, in many cases, very agreeable and intelligent companions, with less nonsense about them than landsmen usually have, eschewers of fine-spun theories, delighting in square and tangible ideas, but occasionally infested with prejudices that stuck to their brains like barnacles to a ship's bottom. I never could flatter myself that I was a general favorite with them. One or two, perhaps, even now, would scarcely meet me on amicable terms. Endowed universally with a great pertinacity of will, they especially disliked the interference of a consul with their management on shipboard; notwithstanding which I thrust in my very limited authority at every available opening, and did the utmost that lay in my power, though with lamentably small effect, towards enforcing a better kind of discipline. They thought, no doubt (and on plausible grounds enough, but scarcely appreciating just that one little grain of hard New England sense, oddly thrown in among the flimsier composition of the Consul's character), that he, a landsman, a bookman, and, as people said of him, a fanciful recluse, could not possibly understand anything of the difficulties or the necessities of a shipmaster's position. But their cold regards were rather acceptable than otherwise, for it is exceedingly awkward to assume a judicial austerity in the morning towards a man with whom you have been hobnobbing over night.
With the technical details of the business of that great
Consulate (for great it then was, though now, I fear, wofully fallen off, and
perhaps never to be revived in anything like its former extent), I did not much
interfere. They could safely be left to
the treatment of two as faithful, upright, and competent subordinates, both
Englishmen, as ever a man was fortunate enough to meet with, in a line of life
altogether new and strange to him. I had
come over with instructions to supply both their places with Americans, but,
possessing a happy faculty of knowing my own interest and the public's, I quietly
kept hold of them, being little inclined to open the consular doors to a spy of
the State Department or an intriguer for my own office. The venerable Vice-Consul, Mr. Pearce, had
witnessed the successive arrivals of a score of newly appointed Consuls, shadowy
and short-lived dignitaries, and carried his reminiscences back to the epoch of
Consul Maury, who was appointed by
A fair amount of common-sense, some acquaintance with the
United States Statutes, an insight into character, a tact of management, a
general knowledge of the world, and a reasonable but not too inveterately
decided preference for his own will and judgment over those of interested
people,--these natural attributes and moderate acquirements will enable a
consul to perform many of his duties respectably, but not to dispense with a
great variety of other qualifications, only attainable by long experience. Yet, I think, few consuls are so well
accomplished. An appointment of whatever
grade, in the diplomatic or consular service of
One great part of a consul's duty, for example, should consist in building up for himself a recognized position in the society where he resides, so that his local influence might be felt in behalf of his own country, and, so far as they are compatible (as they generally are to the utmost extent), for the interests of both nations. The foreign city should know that it has a permanent inhabitant and a hearty well-wisher in him. There are many conjunctures (and one of them is now upon us) where a long-established, honored, and trusted American citizen, holding a public position under our government in such a town as Liverpool, might go far towards swaying and directing the sympathies of the inhabitants. He might throw his own weight into the balance against mischief makers; he might have set his foot on the first little spark of malignant purpose, which the next wind may blow into a national war. But we wilfully give up all advantages of this kind. The position is totally beyond the attainment of an American; there to-day, bristling all over with the porcupine quills of our Republic, and gone to-morrow, just as he is becoming sensible of the broader and more generous patriotism which might almost amalgamate with that of England, without losing an atom of its native force and flavor. In the changes that appear to await us, and some of which, at least, can hardly fail to be for good, let us hope for a reform in this matter.
For myself, as the gentle reader would spare me the trouble of saying, I was not at all the kind of man to grow into such an ideal Consul as I have here suggested. I never in my life desired to be burdened with public influence. I disliked my office from the first, and never came into any good accordance with it. Its dignity, so far as it had any, was an encumbrance; the attentions it drew upon me (such as invitations to Mayor's banquets and public celebrations of all kinds, where, to my horror, I found myself expected to stand up and speak) were--as I may say without incivility or ingratitude, because there is nothing personal in that sort of hospitality--a bore. The official business was irksome, and often painful. There was nothing pleasant about the whole affair, except the emoluments; and even those, never too bountifully reaped, were diminished by more than half in the second or third year of my incumbency. All this being true, I was quite prepared, in advance of the inauguration of Mr. Buchanan, to send in my resignation. When my successor arrived, I drew the long, delightful breath which first made me thoroughly sensible what an unnatural life I had been leading, and compelled me to admire myself for having battled with it so sturdily. The newcomer proved to be a very genial and agreeable gentleman, an F. F. V., and, as he pleasantly acknowledged, a Southern Fire Eater, --an announcement to which I responded, with similar good-humor and self-complacency, by parading my descent from an ancient line of Massachusetts Puritans. Since our brief acquaintanceship, my fire-eating friend has had ample opportunities to banquet on his favorite diet, hot and hot, in the Confederate service. For myself, as soon as I was out of office, the retrospect began to look unreal. I could scarcely believe that it was I,--that figure whom they called a Consul,--but a sort of Double Ganger, who had been permitted to assume my aspect, under which he went through his shadowy duties with a tolerable show of efficiency, while my real self had lain, as regarded my proper mode of being and acting, in a state of suspended animation.
The same sense of illusion still pursues me. There is some mistake in this matter. I have been writing about another man's consular experiences, with which, through some mysterious medium of transmitted ideas, I find myself intimately acquainted, but in which I cannot possibly have had a personal interest. Is it not a dream altogether? The figure of that poor Doctor of Divinity looks wonderfully lifelike; so do those of the Oriental adventurer with the visionary coronet above his brow, and the moonstruck visitor of the Queen, and the poor old wanderer, seeking his native country through English highways and by-ways for almost thirty years; and so would a hundred others that I might summon up with similar distinctness. But were they more than shadows? Surely, I think not. Nor are these present pages a bit of intrusive autobiography. Let not the reader wrong me by supposing it. I never should have written with half such unreserve, had it been a portion of this life congenial with my nature, which I am living now, instead of a series of incidents and characters entirely apart from my own concerns, and on which the qualities personally proper to me could have had no bearing. Almost the only real incidents, as I see them now, were the visits of a young English friend, a scholar and a literary amateur, between whom and myself there sprung up an affectionate, and, I trust, not transitory regard. He used to come and sit or stand by my fireside, talking vivaciously and eloquently with me about literature and life, his own national characteristics and mine, with such kindly endurance of the many rough republicanisms wherewith I assailed him, and such frank and amiable assertion of all sorts of English prejudices and mistakes, that I understood his countrymen infinitely the better for him, and was almost prepared to love the intensest Englishman of them all, for his sake. It would gratify my cherished remembrance of this dear friend, if I could manage, without offending him, or letting the public know it, to introduce his name upon my page. Bright was the illumination of my dusky little apartment, as often as he made his appearance there!
The English sketches which I have been offering to the
public comprise a few of the more external and therefore more readily
manageable things that I took note of, in many escapes from the imprisonment of
my consular servitude.
In the course of several visits and stays of considerable
length we acquired a homelike feeling towards
The modest abode to which I have alluded forms one of a circular range of pretty, moderate-sized, two-story houses, all built on nearly the same plan, and each provided with its little grass-plot, its flowers, its tufts of box trimmed into globes and other fantastic shapes, and its verdant hedges shutting the house in from the common drive and dividing it from its equally cosey neighbors. Coming out of the door, and taking a turn round the circle of sister-dwellings, it is difficult to find your way back by any distinguishing individuality of your own habitation. In the centre of the Circus is a space fenced in with iron railing, a small play-place and sylvan retreat for the children of the precinct, permeated by brief paths through the fresh English grass, and shadowed by various shrubbery; amid which, if you like, you may fancy yourself in a deep seclusion, though probably the mark of eye-shot from the windows of all the surrounding houses. But, in truth, with regard to the rest of the town and the world at large, all abode here is a genuine seclusion; for the ordinary stream of life does not run through this little, quiet pool, and few or none of the inhabitants seem to be troubled with any business or outside activities. I used to set them down as half-pay officers, dowagers of narrow income, elderly maiden ladies, and other people of respectability, but small account, such as hang on the world's skirts rather than actually belong to it. The quiet of the place was seldom disturbed, except by the grocer and butcher, who came to receive orders, or by the cabs, hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which the ladies took an infrequent airing, or the livery-steed which the retired captain sometimes bestrode for a morning ride, or by the red-coated postman who went his rounds twice a day to deliver letters, and again in the evening, ringing a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail. In merely mentioning these slight interruptions of its sluggish stillness, I seem to myself to disturb too much the atmosphere of quiet that brooded over the spot; whereas its impression upon me was, that the world had never found the way hither, or had forgotten it, and that the fortunate inhabitants were the only ones who possessed the spell-word of admittance. Nothing could have suited me better, at the time; for I had been holding a position of public servitude, which imposed upon me (among a great many lighter duties) the ponderous necessity of being universally civil and sociable.
Nevertheless, if a man were seeking the bustle of society,
he might find it more readily in
In its present aspect the town is of no great age. In contrast with the antiquity of many places
in its neighborhood, it has a bright, new face, and seems almost to smile even
amid the sombreness of an English autumn. Nevertheless, it is hundreds upon
hundreds of years old, if we reckon up that sleepy lapse of time during which
it existed as a small village of thatched houses, clustered round a priory; and
it would still have been precisely such a rural village, but for a certain Dr.
Jephson, who lived within the memory of man, and who found out the magic well,
and foresaw what fairy wealth might be made to flow from it. A public garden has been laid out along the
margin of the Leam, and called the
The Jephson Garden is very beautiful, like most other English pleasure-grounds; for, aided by their moist climate and not too fervid sun, the landscape-gardeners excel in converting flat or tame surfaces into attractive scenery, chiefly through the skilful arrangement of trees and shrubbery. An Englishman aims at this effect even in the little patches under the windows of a suburban villa, and achieves it on a larger scale in a tract of many acres. The Garden is shadowed with trees of a fine growth, standing alone, or in dusky groves and dense entanglements, pervaded by woodland paths; and emerging from these pleasant glooms, we come upon a breadth of sunshine, where the greensward--so vividly green that it has a kind of lustre in it--is spotted with beds of gemlike flowers. Rustic chairs and benches are scattered about, some of them ponderously fashioned out of the stumps of obtruncated trees, and others more artfully made with intertwining branches, or perhaps an imitation of such frail handiwork in iron. In a central part of the Garden is an archery-ground, where laughing maidens practise at the butts, generally missing their ostensible mark, but, by the mere grace of their action, sending an unseen shaft into some young man's heart. There is space, moreover, within these precincts, for an artificial lake, with a little green island in the midst of it; both lake and island being the haunt of swans, whose aspect and movement in the water are most beautiful and stately,--most infirm, disjointed, and decrepit, when, unadvisedly, they see fit to emerge, and try to walk upon dry land. In the latter case, they look like a breed of uncommonly ill-contrived geese; and I record the matter here for the sake of the moral,--that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person or thing, unless we behold them in the sphere and circumstances to which they are specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably within a circuit of only a few yards. It seemed to me a sad emblem of the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes go astray, petty in scope, yet large enough to entangle a lifetime, and bewilder us with a weary movement, but no genuine progress.
The Leam,--the "high complectioned
Leam," as Drayton calls it,--after drowsing across the principal street of
the town beneath a handsome bridge, skirts along the margin of the Garden
without any perceptible flow.
Heretofore I had fancied the
The business portion of the town clusters about the banks of
the Leam, and is naturally densest around the well to which the modern
settlement owes its existence. Here are
the commercial inns, the post-office, the furniture-dealers, the iron-mongers,
and all the heavy and homely establishments that connect themselves even with
the airiest modes of human life; while upward from the river, by a long and
gentle ascent, rises the principal street, which is very bright and cheerful in
its physiognomy, and adorned with shop-fronts almost as splendid as those of
London, though on a diminutive scale.
There are likewise side-streets and cross-streets, many of which are
bordered with the beautiful Warwickshire elm, a most unusual kind of adornment
for an English town; and spacious avenues, wide enough to afford room for
stately groves, with foot-paths running beneath the lofty shade, and rooks
cawing and chattering so high in the tree-tops that their voices get musical
before reaching the earth. The houses
are mostly built in blocks and ranges, in which every separate tenement is a
repetition of its fellow, though the architecture of the different ranges is
sufficiently various. Some of them are
almost palatial in size and sumptuousness of arrangement. Then, on the outskirts of the town, there are
detached villas, enclosed within that separate domain of high stone fence and
embowered shrubbery which an Englishman so loves to build and plant around his
abode, presenting to the public only an iron gate, with a gravelled
carriage-drive winding away towards the half-hidden mansion. Whether in street or suburb,