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Chapter I - First Visit To EnglandChapter I - First Visit To England
Chapter I - First Visit To England
I have been twice in England. In 1833, on my return from a short tour in
Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed from Boulogne, and landed in London at
the Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning; there were few people in the
streets; and I remember the pleasure of that first walk on English ground,
with my companion, an American artist, from the Tower up through Cheapside and
the Strand, to a house in Russell Square, whither we had been recommended to
good chambers. For the first time for many months we were forced to check the
saucy habit of traveller`s criticism, as we could no longer speak aloud in the
streets without being understood. The shop-signs spoke our language; our
country names were on the door-plates; and the public and private buildings
wore a more native and wonted front.
Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted to the men of
Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh Review, - to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, and
to Scott, Playfair, and De Quincey; and my narrow and desultory reading had
inspired the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, - Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, and the latest and strongest contributor to
the critical journals, Carlyle; and I suppose if I had sifted the reasons that
led me to Europe, when I was ill and was advised to travel, it was mainly the
attraction of these persons. If Goethe had been still living, I might have
wandered into Germany also. Besides those I have named (for Scott was dead),
there was not in Britain the man living whom I cared to behold, unless it were
the Duke of Wellington, whom I afterwards saw at Westminster Abbey, at the
funeral of Wilberforce. The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live
with people who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they
are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to
yours. The conditions of literary success are almost destructive of the best
social power, as they do not leave that frolic liberty which only can
encounter a companion on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure
comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to
life, when you crossed sea and land to play Bo Peep with celebrated scribes.
I have, however, found writers superior to their books, and I cling to my
first belief, that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these
impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having
been met, and a larger horizon.
On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833 I find nothing to publish
in my memoranda of visits to places. But I have copied a few notes I made of
visits to persons, as they respect parties quite too good and too transparent
to the whole world to make it needful to affect any prudery of suppression
about a few hints of those bright personalities.
At Florence, chief among artists I found Horatio Greenough, the American
sculptor. His face was so handsome, and his person so well formed, that he
might be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of his Medora, and the figure
of a colossal Achilles in clay, were idealizations of his own. Greenough was a
superior man, ardent and eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation and
magnanimity. He believed that the Greeks had wrought in schools or
fraternities, - the genius of the master imparting his design to his friends,
and inflaming them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new hand, with
equal heat, continued the work; and so by relays, until it was finished in
every part with equal fire. This was necessary in so refractory a material as
stone; and he thought art would never prosper until we left our shy jealous
ways, and worked in society as they. All his thoughts breathed the same
generosity. He was an accurate and a deep man. He was a votary of the Greeks,
and impatient of Gothic art. His paper on Architecture, published in 1843,
announced in advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on the morality in
architecture, notwithstanding the antagonism in their views of the history of
art. I have a private letter from him, - later, but respecting the same
period, - in which he roughly sketches his own theory. "Here is my theory of
structure: A scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to functions and to
site; an emphasis of features proportioned to their gradated importance in
function; color and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by strictly
organic laws, having a distinct reason for each decision; the entire and
immediate banishment of all make-shift and make-believe."
Greenough brought me, through a common friend, an invitation from Mr.
Landor, who lived at San Domenica di Fiesole. On the 15th May I dined with Mr.
Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his
Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful landscape. I had
inferred from his books, or magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of
Achillean wrath, - an untamable petulance. I do not know whether the
imputation were just or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled
that haughty mind, and he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He praised
the beautiful cyclamen which grows all about Florence; he admired Washington;
talked of Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he
is decided in his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well content to impress,
if possible, his English whim upon the immutable past. No great man ever had a
great son, if Philip and Alexander be not an exception; and Philip he calls
the greater man. In art he loves the Greeks, and in sculpture, them only. He
prefers the Venus to everything else, and, after that, the head of Alexander
in the gallery here. He prefers John of Bologna to Michael Angelo; in
painting, Rafaelle; and shares the growing taste for Perugino and the early
masters. The Greek histories he thought the only good; and after them,
Voltaire`s. I could not make him praise Mackintosh, nor my more recent
friends; Montaigne very cordially, - and Charron also, which seemed
undiscriminating. He thought Degerando indebted to "Lucas on Happiness" and
"Lucas on Holiness"! He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey?
He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I did not fail to go, and
this time with Greenough. He entertained us at once with reciting half a dozen
hexameter lines of Julius Caesar`s! - from Donatus, he said. He glorified Lord
Chesterfield more than was necessary, and undervalued Burke, and undervalued
Socrates; designated as three of the greatest of men, Washington, Phocion, and
Timoleon; much as our pomologists, in their lists, select the three or the six
best pears "for a small orchard"; and did not even omit to remark the similar
termination of their names. "A great man," he said, "should make great
sacrifices, and kill his hundred oxen without knowing whether they would be
consumed by gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat them." I had
visited Professor Amici, who had shown me his microscopes, magnifying (it was
said) two thousand diameters; and I spoke of the uses to which they were
applied. Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, said, "the
sublime was in a grain of dust." I suppose I teased him about recent writers,
but he professed never to have heard of Herschel, not even by name. One room
full of pictures, which he likes to show, especially one piece, standing
before which, he said "he would give fifty guineas to the man that would swear
it was a Domenichino." I was more curious to see his library, but Mr. H_____,
one of the guests, told me that Mr. Landor gives away his books, and has never
more than a dozen at a time in his house.
Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which the English
delight to indulge, as if to signalize their commanding freedom. He has a
wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by
what chance converted to letters, in which there is not a style nor a tint not
known to him, yet with an English appetite for action and heroes. The thing
done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step
forward, is worth more than all the censures. Landor is strangely undervalued
in England; usually ignored; and sometimes savagely attacked in the Reviews.
The criticism may be right, or wrong, and is quickly forgotten; but year after
year the scholar must still go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant
sentences - for wisdom, wit, and indignation that are unforgettable.
From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, and wrote a note to
Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my respects to him. It was near noon.
Mr. Coleridge sent a verbal message, that he was in bed, but if I would call
after one o`clock, he would see me. I returned at one, and he appeared, a
short, thick old man, with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion, leaning
on his cane. He took snuff freely, which presently soiled his cravat and neat
black suit. He asked whether I knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits
and doings when he knew him in Rome; what a master of the Titianesque he was,
&c., &c. He spoke of Dr. Channing. It was an unspeakable misfortune that he
should have turned out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst into a
declamation on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism, - its high
unreasonableness; and taking up Bishop Waterland`s book, which lay on the
table, he read with vehemence two or three pages written by himself in the fly
- leaves, - passages, too, which, I believe, are printed in the "Aids to
Reflection." When he stopped to take breath, I interposed that, "whilst I
highly valued all his explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born
and bred a Unitarian." "Yes," he said, "I supposed so;" and continued as
before. "It was a wonder that after so many ages of unquestioning acquiescence
in the doctrine of St. Paul, - the doctrine of the Trinity, which was also,
according to Philo Judaeus, the doctrine of the Jews before Christ, - this
handful of Priestleians should take on themselves to deny it, &c., &c. He was
very sorry that Dr. Channing. - a man to whom he looked up, - no, to say that
he looked up to him would be to speak falsely; but a man whom he looked at
with so much interest, - should embrace such views. When he saw Dr. Channing,
he had hinted to him that he was afraid he loved Christianity for what was
lovely and excellent, - he loved the good in it, and not the true; and I tell
you, sir, that I have known ten persons who loved the good, for one person who
loved the true; but it is a far greater virtue to love the true for itself
alone, than to love the good for itself alone. He (Coleridge) knew all about
Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had once been a Unitarian, and knew
what quackery it was. He had been called `the rising star of Unitarianism.`"
He went on defining, or rather refining: "The Trinitarian doctrine was
realism; the idea of God was not essential, but super-essential;" talked of
trinism tetrakism, and much more, of which I only caught this, "that the will
was that by which a person is a person; because, if one should push me in the
street, and so I should force the man next me into the kennel, I should at
once exclaim, "I did not do it, sir,` meaning it was not my will." And this
also, "that if you should insist on your faith here in England, and I on mine,
mine would be the hotter side of the fagot."
I took advantage of a pause to say that he had many readers of all
religious opinions in America, and I proceeded to inquire if the "extract"
from the Independent`s pamphlet, in the third volume of the Friend, were a
veritable quotation. He replied that it was really taken from a pamphlet in
his possession, entitled "A Protest of one of the Independents." or something
to that effect. I told him how excellent I thought it, and how much I wished
to see the entire work. "Yes," he said, "the man was a chaos of truths, but
lacked the knowledge that God was a God of order. Yet the passage would no
doubt strike you more in the quotation than in the original, for I have
filtered it."
When I rose to go, he said, "I do not know whether you care about poetry,
but I will repeat some verses I lately made on my baptismal anniversary," and
he recited with strong emphasis, standing, ten or twelve lines, beginning.
"Born unto God in Christ -"
He inquired where I had been travelling; and on learning that I had been
in Malta and Sicily, he compared one island with the other, "repeating what he
had said to the Bishop of London when he returned from that country, that
Sicily was an excellent school of political economy; for, in any town there,
it only needed to ask what the government enacted, and reverse that to know
what ought to be done; it was the most felicitously opposite legislation to
anything good and wise. There were only three things which the government had
brought into that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox, and famine. Whereas,
in Malta, the force of law and mind was seen, in making that barren rock of
semi-Saracen inhabitants the seat of population and plenty." Going out, he
showed me in the next apartment a picture of Allston`s and told me "that
Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to see him, and, glancing, towards
this, said, `Well, you have got a picture!` thinking it the work of an old
master; afterwards, Montague, still talking with his back to the canvas, put
up his hand and touched it, and exclaimed, `By Heaven! this picture is not ten
years old:` - so delicate and skillful was that man`s touch."
I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impossible to recall
the largest part of his discourse, which was often like so many printed
paragraphs in his book, - perhaps the same, - so readily did he fall into
certain commonplaces. As I might have foreseen, the visit was rather a
spectacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my
curiosity. He was old and preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion
and think with him.
From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return, I came from Glasgow
to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from
Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish
of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took
a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery
hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man
from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as
absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if
holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a
cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of
conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident
relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor, which floated
everything he looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the familiar objects
put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and
it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology.
Few were the objects and lonely the man, "not a person to speak to within
sixteen miles except the minister of Dunscore"; so that books inevitably made
his topics.
He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse.
"Blackwood`s" was the "sand magazines;" "Fraser`s" nearer approach to
possibility of life was the "mud magazine"; a piece of road near by that
marked some failed enterprise was the "grave of the last sixpence." When too
much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the
talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining
the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but pig, by great strokes of
judgment, had found out how to let a board down and had foiled him. For all
that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and
he liked Nero`s death "Qualis artifex pereo!" better than most history. He
worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had
inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor`s principle was mere
rebellion, and that he feared was the American principle. The best thing he
knew of that country was that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had
read in Stewart`s book that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the
Boots, he had been shown across the street and had found Mungo in his own
house dining on roast turkey.
We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates;
and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the
splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own reading had been
multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after Robinson
Crusoe, and Robertson`s America an early favorite. Rousseau`s Confessions had
discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he
had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that
language what he wanted.
He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment;
recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great book-sellers for
puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought,
and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.
He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish
abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform.
"Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering
over these moors. My dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread
to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of
acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to
the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the
rich people to attend to them."
We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without
his cap, and down into Wordsworth`s country. There we sat down, and talked of
the immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle`s fault that we talked on that
topic, for he had the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise
itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be
taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that
bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future. "Christ
died on the tree: that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me
together. Time has only a relative existence."
He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar`s
appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from
the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round.
The baker`s boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and
that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it turned
out good men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his
friend, the best mind he knew, whom London had well served.
On the 28th August, I went to Rydal Mount, to pay my respects to Mr.
Wordsworth. His daughters called in their father, a plain, elderly, white -
haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles. He sat down
and talked with great simplicity. He had just returned from a journey. His
health was good, but he had broken a tooth by a fall, when walking with two
lawyers, and had said that he was glad it did not happen forty years ago;
whereupon they had praised his philosophy.
He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his
favorite topic, - that society is being enlightened by a superficial tuition,
out of all proportion to its being restrained by moral culture. Schools do no
good. Tuition is not education. He thinks more of the education of
circumstances than of tuition. `Tis not question whether there are offences of
which the law takes cognizance, but whether there are offences of which the
law does not take cognizance. Sin is what he fears, and how society is to
escape without gravest mischiefs from this source - ? He has even said, what
seemed a paradox, that they needed a civil war in America, to teach the
necessity of knitting the social ties stronger. "There may be," he said, "in
America some vulgarity in manner, but that`s not important. That comes of the
pioneer state of things. But I fear they are too much given to the making of
money; and secondly to politics; that they make political distinction the end,
and not the means. And I fear they lack a class of men of leisure, - in short,
of gentlemen, - to give a tone of honor to the community. I am told that
things are boasted of in the second class of society there, which, in England,
- God knows, are done in England every day, - but would never be spoken of. In
America I wish to know not how many churches or schools, but what newspapers?
My friend, Colonel Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was a year in
America, assures me that the newspapers are atrocious, and accuse members of
Congress of stealing spoons!" He was against taking off the tax on newspapers
in England which the reformers represent as a tax upon knowledge, for this
reason, that they would be inundated with base prints. He said, he talked on
political aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good Americans to
cultivate the moral, the conservative, &c., &c., and never to call into action
the physical strength of the people, as had just now been done in England in
the Reform Bill, - a thing prophesied by Delolme. He alluded once or twice to
his conversation with Dr. Channing, who had recently visited him (laying his
hand on a particular chair in which the Doctor had sat).
The conversation turned on books. Lucretius he esteems a far higher poet
than Virgil: not in his system, which is nothing, but in his power of
illustration. Faith is necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the
foreknowledge of God with human evil. Of Cousin (whose lectures we had all
been reading in Boston), he knew only the name.
I inquired if he had read Carlyle`s critical articles and translations.
He said he thought him sometimes insane. He proceeded to abuse Goethe`s
Wilhelm Meister heartily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It was
like the crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone farther than the
first part; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across the room. I
deprecated this wrath, and said what I could for the better parts of the book;
and he courteously promised to look at it again. Carlyle, he said, wrote most
obscurely. He was clever and deep, but he defied the sympathies of everybody.
Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more clearly, though he had always wished Coleridge
would write more to be understood. He led me out into his garden, and showed
me the gravel walk in which thousands of his lines were composed. His eyes are
much inflamed. This is no loss, except for reading, because he never writes
prose, and of poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his head before
writing them. He had just returned from a visit to Staffa, and within three
days had made three sonnets on Fingal`s Cave, and was composing a fourth when
he was called in to see me. He said, "If you are interested in my verses,
perhaps you will like to hear these lines." I gladly assented; and he
recollected himself for a few moments, and then stood forth and repeated, one
after the other, the three entire sonnets with great animation. I fancied the
second and third more beautiful than his poems are wont to be. The third is
addressed to the flowers, which, he said, especially the ox-eye daisy, are
very abundant on the top of the rock. The second alludes to the name of the
cave, which is "Cave of Music"; the first to the circumstance of its being
visited by the promiscuous company of the steamboat.
This recitation was so unlooked for and surprising, - he, the old
Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a
schoolboy declaiming, - that I at first was near to laugh; but recollecting
myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and he was chanting poems to
me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, and gladly gave myself up to
hear. I told him how much the few printed extracts had quickened the desire to
possess his unpublished poems. He replied, he never was in haste to publish;
partly because he corrected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously
received after printing; but what he had written would be printed, whether he
lived or died. I said "Tintern Abbey" appeared to be the favorite poem with
the public, but more contemplative readers preferred the first books of the
"Excursion," and the Sonnets. He said, "Yes, they are better." He preferred
such of his poems as touched the affections to any others; for whatever is
didactic - what theories of society, and so on - might perish quickly; but
whatever combined a truth with an affection was Ktnua es ael, good to-day
and good forever. He cited the sonnet, "On the feelings of a high-minded
Spaniard" which he preferred to any other (I so understood him), and the "Two
Voices"; and quoted with evident pleasure, the verses addressed "To the
Skylark." In this connection he said of the Newtonian theory that it might yet
be superseded and forgotten; and Dalton`s atomic theory.
When I prepared to depart, he said he wished to show me what a common
person in England could do, and he led me into the enclosure of his clerk, a
young man, to whom he had given this slip of ground, which was laid out, or
its natural capabilities shown, with much taste. He then said he would show me
a better way towards the inn; and he walked a good part of a mile, talking,
and ever and anon stopping short to impress the word or the verse, and finally
parted from me with great kindness, and returned across the fields.
Wordsworth honored himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was very
willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought. To
judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very
English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and
conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were of no value. It is not very
rare to find persons loving sympathy and ease, who expiate their departure
from the common in one direction by their conformity in every other.
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