Bot-S: Vol 5: The Classics

Whilst the rights of all
as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in
property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another
owns a county. This accident, depending, primarily, on the skill and

POLITICS 241

virtue of the parties, of whicli there is every degree, and secondarily,
on patrimony, falls unequally, and its rights, of course, are unequal.
Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed
on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framed
on the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, who has flocks and
herds, wishes them looked after by an officer on the frontiers, lest
the Midianites shall drive them off, and pays a tax to that end. Jacob
has no flocks or herds, and no fear of the Midianites, and pays no tax
to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and Jacob should have equal
rights to elect the officer, who is to defend their persons, but that
Laban and not Jacob, should elect the officer who is to guard the
sheep and cattle. And, if question arise whether additional officers or
watch-towers should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and
those who must sell part of their herds to buy protection for the rest,
judge better of this, and with more right, than Jacob, who, because
he is a youth and a traveller, eats their bread and not his own ?

In the earliest society the proprietors made their own wealth, and
so long as it comes to the owners in the direct way, no other opinion
would arise in any equitable community, than that property should
make the law for property, and persons the law for persons.

But property passes through donation or inheritance to those who
do not create it. Gift, in one case, makes it as i eally the new owner's,
as labor made it the first owner's, in the other case, of patrimony, the
law makes an ownership, which will be valid in each man's view
according to the estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity.

It was not, however, found easy to embody the readily admitted
principle, that property should make law for property, and persons
for persons: since persons and property mixed themselves in every
transaction. At last it seems settled, that the rightful distinction was,
that the proprietors should have more elective franchise than non-
proprietors, on the Spartan principle of "calling that which is just,
equal; not that which is equal, just."

That principle no longer looks so self evident as it appeared in
former times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much
weight had not been allowed in the laws, to property, and such a
structure given to our usages, as allowed the rich to encroach on the
poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly, because there is an instinc-

242 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

tive sense, however obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole con-
stitution of property, on its present tenures, is injurious, and its
influence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly, the only
interest for the consideration of the State, is persons; that property
will always follow persons; that the highest end of government is
the culture of men : and if men can be educated, the institutions will
share their improvement, and the moral sentiment will write the
law of the land.

If it be not easy to setde the equity of this question, the peril is less
when we take note of our natural defences. We are kept by better
guards than the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly elect.
Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons.
The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and states-
men, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their
own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. With such an ignor-
ant and deceivable majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that
there are limitations beyond which the folly and ambition of
governors cannot go. Things have their laws, as well as men; and
things refuse to be trifled with. Property will be protected. Corn
will not grow, unless it is planted and manured; but the farmer
will not plant or hoe it, unless the chances are a hundred to one,
that he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms, persons and
property must and will have their just sway. They exert their power,
as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound of earth never
so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid, convert it
to gas; it will always weigh a pound: it will always attract and resist
other matter, by the full virtue of one pound weight; — and the attri-
butes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under
any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force, — if not overtly,
then covertly; if not for the law, then against it; with right, or by
might.

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as
persons are organs of moral or supernatural force. Under the domin-
ion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil
freedom, or the religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no
longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent
on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of stat-

POLITICS 243

ists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their
means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and
the French have done.

In like manner, to every particle of property belongs its own attrac-
tion. A cent is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or
other commodity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man.
It is so much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land.
The law may do what it will with the owner of property, its just
power will still attach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say,
that all shall have power except the owners of property: they shall
have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property wiU, year
after year, write every statute that respects property. The non-
proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish
to do, the whole power of property will do, either through the law,
or else in defiance of it. Of course, I speak of all the property, not
merely of the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as fre-
quently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which exceeds
their accumulations. Every man owns something, if it is only a cow,
or a wheelbarrow, or his arms, and so has that property to dispose of.

The same necessity which secures the rights of person and prop-
erty against the malignity or folly of the magistrate, determines the
form and methods of governing, which are proper to each nation,
and to its habit of thought, and nowise transferable to other states of
society. In this country, we are very vain of our political institutions,
which are singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of
living men, from the character and condition of the people, which
they still express with sufficient fidehty, — and we ostentatiously pre-
fer them to any other in history. They are not better, but only fitter
for us. We may be wise in asserting the advantage in modern times
of the democratic form, but to other states of society, in which
rehgion consecrated the monarchical, that and not this was expedient.
Democracy is better for us, because the religious sentiment of the
present time accords better with it. Born democrats, we are nowise
qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers living in the
monarchical idea, was also relatively right. But our institutions,
though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemp-
tion from the practical defects which have discredited other forms.

244 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too
well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure
conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified
cunning, intimating that the State is a trick ?

The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear in
the parties into which each State divides itself of opponents and de-
fenders of the administration of the government. Parties are also
founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble
aims than the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse
in their origin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We
might as wisely reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a poUtical
party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account
of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which
they find themselves. Our quarrel with them begins, when they quit
this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and, obeying
personal considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and
defence of points, nowise belonging to their system. A party is per-
petually corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the association
from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same character to their lead-
ers. They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses
which they direct. Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance,
and not of principle; as, the planting interest in conflict with the
commercial; the party of capitalists, and that of operatives; parties
which are identical in their moral character, and which can easily
change ground with each other, in the support of many of their
measures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party of free-
trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of cap-
ital punishment, degenerate into personalities, or would inspire
enthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties in this country (which
may be cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) is, that
they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to
which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in
the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to
the commonwealth. Of the two great parties, which, at this hour,
almost share the nation between them, I should say, that, one has the
best cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher,
the poet, or the religious man will, of course, wish to cast his vote

POLITICS 245

with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the aboUtion
of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every man-
ner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and
power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called
popular party propose to him as representatives of these liberalities.
They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democ-
racy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American
radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not loving, it has no
ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and
selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of
the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is
timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it
aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous
policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster
rehgion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate
the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.
From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to
expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the
resources of the nation.

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are not at
the mercy of any waves of chance. In the strife of ferocious parties,
human nature always finds itself cherished, as the children of the
convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral senti-
ment as other children. Citizens of feudal states are alarmed at our
democratic institutions lapsing into anarchy; and the older and
more cautious among ourselves are learning from Europeans to
look with some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our
license of construing the Constitution and in the despotism of public
opinion, we have no anchor; and one foreign observer thinks he has
found the safeguard in the sanctity of Marriage among us; and an-
other thinks he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames ex-
pressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a
monarchy and a republic, saying, "that a monarchy is a merchant-
man, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to
the bottom; whilst a repubUc is a raft, which would never sink, but
then your feet are always in water." No forms can have any danger-
ous importance, whilst we are befriended by the laws of things.

246 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It makes no diflerence how many tons weight of atmosphere presses
on our heads, so long as the same pressure resists it within the lungs.
Augment the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as
long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two poles, of two
forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and each force by its
own activity develops the other. Wild liberty develops iron con-
science. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupe-
fies conscience. "Lynch-law" prevails only where there is greater
hardihood and self-subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot be a
permanency: everybody's interest requires that it should not exist,
and only justice satisfies all.

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines
through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as charac-
teristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the
codes of nations would be a transcript of the common conscience.
Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men. Reason
for one is seen to be reason for another, and for every other. There
is a middle measure which satisfies all parties, be they never so many,
or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction for his
simplest claims and deeds in decisions of his own mind, which he
calls Truth and HoHness. In these decisions all the citizens find a
perfect agreement, and only in these; not in what is good to eat, good
to wear, good use of time, or what amount of land, or of public aid,
each is entitled to claim. This truth and justice men presently en-
deavor to make application of, to the measuring of land, the appor-
tionment of service, the protection of life and property. Their first
endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. Yet absolute right is the
first governor; or, every government is an impure theocracy. The
idea, after which each community is aiming to make and mend its
law, is, the will of the wise man. The wise man, it cannot find in
nature, and it makes awkward but earnest efforts to secure his
government by contrivance; as, by causing the entire people to give
their voices on every measure; or, by a double choice to get the rep-
resentation of the whole; or, by a selection of the best citizens; or, to
secure the advantages of efficiency and internal peace, by confiding
the government to one, who may himself select his agents. All forms
of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all

POLITICS 247

dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist,
perfect where there is only one man.

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the
character of his fellows. My right and my wrong, is their right and
their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what
is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work
together for a time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion
over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him
also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may
have so much more skill or strength than he, that he cannot express
adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a Ue both
him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption: it
must be executed by a practical lie, namely, by force. This undertak-
ing for another, is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the
governments of the world. It is the same thing in numbers, as in a
pair, only not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a great dif-
ference between my setting myself down to a self-control, and my
going to make somebody else act after my views: but when a quarter
of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too
much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity
of their command. Therefore, all public ends look vague and quix-
otic beside private ones. For, any laws but those which men make
for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in the place of my
child, and we stand in one thought, and see that things are thus or
thus, that perception is law for him and me. We are both there, both
act. But if, without carrying him into the thought, I look over into
his plot, and guessing how it is with him, ordain this or that, he will
never obey me. This is the history of governments, — one man does
something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be
acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that
a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but
as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men
are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on govern-
ment! Everywhere they think they get their money's worth, except
for these.

Hence, the less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws,
and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal

248 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Government, is, the influence o£ private character, the growth of the
Individual; the reappearance of the principal to supersede the proxy;
the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government,
is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things
tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions,
go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach
unto this coronation, of her king. To educate the wise man, the State
exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires.
The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise
man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too
well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage
ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has
not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book,
for he is the law-giver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is
at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots
through him and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for
he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto
him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select
and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh
to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only
at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society
the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as
the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its
presence is hardly yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it;
the Annual Register is silent; in the Conversations' Lexicon, it is not
set down; the President's Message, the Queen's Speech, have not
mentioned it; and yet it is never nothing. Every thought which
genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world. The gladia-
tors in the lists of power feel, through all their frocks of force and
simulation, the presence of worth. I think the very strife of trade
and ambition are confession of this divinity; and successes in those
fields are the poor amends, the fig-leaf with which the shamed soul
attempts to hide its nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in
all quarters. It is because we know how much is due from us that
we are impatient to show some petty talent as a substitute for worth.

POLITICS 249

We are haunted by a conscience of this right to grandeur of char-
acter, and are false to it. But each of us has some talent, can do
somewhat useful, or graceful, or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative.
That we do, as an apology to others and to ourselves, for not reaching
the mark of a good and equal life. But it does not satisfy us, whilst
we thrust it on the notice of our companions. It may throw dust
in their eyes, but does not smooth our own brow, or give us the
tranquillity of the strong when we walk abroad. We do penance as
we go. Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we are constrained to
reflect on our splendid moment, with a certain humiliation, as some-
what too fine, and not as one act of many acts, a fair expression of
our permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet in society with
a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, "I am not all here." Sen-
ators and presidents have cUmbed so high with pain enough, not
because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for
real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This con-
spicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a
poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they can. Like one class
of forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail : climb they
must or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that he could
enter into strict relations with the best persons, and make life serene
around him by the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he
afford to circumvent the favor of the caucus and the press, and covert
relations so hollow and pompous, as those of a politician? Surely
nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere.

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and
leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his
own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe,
whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this
direction has been very marked in modern history. Much has been
blind and discreditable, but the nature of the revolution is not
affected by the vices of the revolters; for this is a purely moral force.
It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It sep-
arates the individual from all party, and unites him, at the same time,
to the race. It promises a recognition of higher rights than those of
personal freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to

250 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of
love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not im-
agine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every tender
protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conven-
tions: nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit
of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end. Are
our methods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless ? Could
not a nation of friends even devise better ways ? On the other hand,
let not the most conservative and timid fear anything from a prema-
ture surrender of the bayonet, and the system of force. For, accord-
ing to the order of nature, which is quite superior to our Vidll, it
stands thus; there will always be a government of force, where men
are selfish; and when they are pure enough to abjure the code of
force, they will be wise enough to see how these public ends of the
post-office, of the highway, of commerce, and the exchange of prop-
erty, of museums and libraries, of institutions of art and science, can
be answered.

We Hve in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute
to governments founded on force. There is not, among the most
religious and instructed men of the most reUgious and civil nations,
a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity
of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without
artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private
citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint
of a jail or a confiscadon. What is strange too, there never was in any
man sufficient faith in the power of recdtude, to inspire him with the
broad design of renovating the State on the principle of right and
love. AU those who have pretended this design, have been partial
reformers, and have admitted in some manner the supremacy of the
bad State. I do not call to mind a single human being who has
steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his
own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius and full of fate as
they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air-pictures. If the
individual who exhibits them, dare to think them practicable, he
disgusts scholars and churchmen; and men of talent, and women of
superior sentiments, cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does

POLITICS 251

nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this
enthusiasm, and there are now men, — if indeed I can speak in the
plural number, — more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing
with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make
it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings
might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest senti-
ments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS

A Lecture Read Before the Society in Amory Hall on
Sunday, March 3, 1844.

WHOEVER has had opportunity of acquaintance with soci-
ety in New England during the last twenty-five years, with
those middle and with those leading sections that may
constitute any just representation of the character and aim of the
community, will have been struck with the great activity of thought
and experimenting. His attention must be commanded by the signs
that the Church or religious party is falling from the church nominal,
and is appearing in temperance and non-resistance societies, in
movements of abolitionists and of socialists, and in very significant
assembUes, called Sabbath and Bible Conventions — composed of ul-
traists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meet-
ing to call in question the authority of the Sabbath, of the priesthood,
and of the church. In these movements nothing was more remark-
able than the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit of
protest and of detachment drove the members of these Conventions
to bear testimony against the church, and immediately afterward to
declare their discontent with these Conventions, their independence
of their colleagues, and their impatience of the methods whereby
they were working. They defied each other, like a congress of
kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that
made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the sal-
vation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to
farming; and another, that no man should buy or sell: that the
use of money was the cardinal evil; another, that the mischief was
in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleav-
ened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in
vain urged by the housewife, that God made yeast as well as dough,
and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation; that

254 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain and makes
it more palatable and more digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat,
and will die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these in-
cessant advances of thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels!
Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures
in farming, and the tyranny of man over brute nature; these abuses
polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the plow and the
horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded,
and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not
carry him. Even the insect world was to be defended — that had been
too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms,
slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay. With
these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mes-
merism, of phrenology and their wonderful theories of the Christian
miracles! Others assailed particular vocations, as that of the lawyer,
that of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the
scholar. Others attacked the institution of marriage, as the fountain
of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the worrying of
churches and meetings for public worship; and the fertile forms of
antinomianism among the elder puritans seemed to have their match
in the plenty of the new harvest of reform.

With this din of opinion and debate, there was a keener scrutiny
of institutions and domestic life than any we had known, there was
sincere protesting against existing evils, there were changes of em-
ployment dictated by conscience. No doubt, there was plentiful
vaporing, and cases of back-sliding might occur. But in each of
these movements emerged a good result, a tendency to the adoption
of simpler methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency of the private
man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius of the age, what
happened in one instance, when a church censured and threatened
to excommunicate one of its members on account of the somewhat
hostile part to the church which his conscience led him to take in
the anti-slavery business; the threatened individual immediately ex-
communicated the church in a public and formal process. This has
been several times repeated: it was excellent when it was done the
first time, but, of course, loses all value when it is copied. Every
project in the history of reform, no matter how violent and surpris-

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 255

ing, is good when it is the dictate of man's genius and constitution,
but very dull and suspicious when adopted from another. It is right
and beautiful in any man to say: "I will take this coat, or this book,
or this measure of corn of yours" — in whom we see the act to be
original, and to flow from the whole spirit and faith of him; for
then that taking will have a giving as free and divine; but we are
very easily disposed to resist the same generosity of speech, when we
miss originaUty and truth to character in it.

There was in all the practical activities of New England, for the
last quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences
from the social organization. There is observable throughout, the
contest between mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady
tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reli-
ance on spiritual facts.

In politics, for example, it is easy to see the progress of dissent.
The country is full of rebellion; the country is full of kings. Hands
off! let there be no control and no interference in the administration
of the affairs of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doc-
trine and of the party of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that
experiment, in the face of what appear incontestable facts. I confess
the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me that I can
seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in its columns,
"The world is governed too much." So the country is frequently
affording solitary examples of resistance to the government, soUtary
nullifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights: nay, who
have reserved all their rights; who reply to the assessor, and to the
clerk of court, that they do not know the State; and embarrass the
courts of law, by non-juring, and the commander-in-chief of the
militia, by non-resistance.

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in civil,
festive, neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, prying, consci-
entious criticism broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me
the money with which I bought my coat ? Why should professional
labor and that of the counting-house be paid so disproportionately
to the labor of the porter and wood-sawyer ? This whole business of
Trade causes me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations
between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of

256 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I
pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be
put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a
benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had
a right to those aids and services which each ask of the other. Am I
not too protected a person? Is there not a wide disparity between
the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister?
Am I not defrauded of my best culture in the loss of those gym-
nastics which manual labor and the emergencies of poverty consti-
tute ? I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions
of society; I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect
myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and
luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for the
reform of Education. The popular education has been taxed with a
want of truth and nature. It was complained that an education to
things was not given. We are students of words: we are shut up in
schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years,
and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and
do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our
eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we
cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of day by the sun.
It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a
cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was, to
teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old
English rule was, "All summer in the fields, and all winter in the
study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish
or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not
be painful to his friends and fellow men. The lessons of science
should be experimental also. The sight of the planet through a
telescope is worth all the course on astronomy: the shock of the
electric spark in the elbow outvalues all the theories; the taste of
the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than
volumes of chemistry.

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it fixed on our
scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The ancient languages.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 257

with great beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius,
which draw, and always will draw, certain likeminded men — Greek
men, and Roman men — in all countries, to their study; but by a
wonderful drowsiness of usage, they had exacted the study of all
men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict
relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and the
Mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of activity
in physical science. These things became stereotyped as education,
as the manner of men is. But the Good Spirit never cared for the
colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Latin,
Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high and dry
on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other matters at
other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges
this warfare against common sense still goes on. Four, or six, or
ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he
leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books
for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at
our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who at forty
years still read Greek can all be counted on your hand. I never met
with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato.

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country
should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to noth-
ing? What was the consequence? Some intelligent person said or
thought: "Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, and
not words of reason ? If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never
use it to come at their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine.
Conjuring is gone out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating
and go straight to affairs." So they jumped the Greek and Latin,
and read law, medicine or sermons without it. To the astonishment
of all, the self-made men took even ground at once with the oldest
of the regular graduates, and in a few months the most conservative
circles of Boston and New York had quite forgotten who of their
gownsmen was college-bred and who was not.

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation and in
the rudest democratical movements, through all the petulance and
all the puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous and

258 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

arrive at short methods, urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the
human spirit is equal to all energies, alone, and that man is more
often injured than helped by the means he uses.

I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indi-
cation of growing trust in the private, self-supplied powers of the
individual, to be the affirmative principle of the recent philosophy;
and that it is feeling its own profound truth and is reaching forward
at this very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that
in this, as in every period of intellectual activity, there has been a
noise of denial and protest; much was to be resisted, much was to
be got rid of by those who were reared in the old, before they could
begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his
removal of rubbish — and that makes the offensiveness of the class.
They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They
lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they ex-
pend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity
and power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two or
twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that
the man be in his senses.

The criticism and attack on institutions which we have witnessed
has made one thing plain, that society gains nothing while a man,
not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he
has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or
narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting
result.

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the
establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make
a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting
it by a total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection.
Do you think there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no
part of society or of life better than any other part. All our things
are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our insti-
tutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage is
no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social customs.
Do you complain of the laws of Property ? It is a pedantry to give
such importance to them. Can we not play the game of life with
these counters as well as with those, in the institution of property

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 259

as well as out of it ? Let into it the new and renewing principle of
love, and property will be universality. No one gives the impression
of superiority to the institution, which he must give who will reform
it. It makes no difference what you say, you must make me feel
that you are aloof from it, by your natural and supernatural advan-
tages, do easily see to the end of it — do see how man can do with-
out it. Now all men are on one side. No man deserves to be heard
against property. Only Love, only an Idea, is against property, as
we hold it.

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor waste all my time
in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false
statement, I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out?
The street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house,
or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the
lie. When we see an eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special
reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your
one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amid the rags of
a beggar.

In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of
abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, alike in
one place and in another — wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul
finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new
quality of character it shall put forth, it shall abrogate that old
condition, law or school in which it stands, before the law of its
own mind.

If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the other defect
was their reliance on Association. Doubts such as those I have inti-
mated drove many good persons to agitate the questions of social
reform. But the revolt against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of
aristocracy, and the inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear possible
to individuals; and to do battle against numbers, they armed them-
selves with numbers, and against concert, they relied on new concert.

Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier,
and of Owen, three communities have already been formed in Massa-
chusetts on kindred plans, and many more in the country at large.
They aim to give every member a share in the manual labor, and
to give an equal reward to labor and to talent; and to unite a liberal

26o RALPH WALDO EMERSON

culture with an education to labor. The scheme offers, by the
economies of associated labor and expense, to make every member
rich, on the same amount of property that in separate families would
leave every member poor. These new associations are composed o£
men and women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may easily
be questioned whether such a community will draw, except in its
beginnings, the able and the good; whether those who have energy
will not prefer their chance of superiority and power in the world
to the humble certainties of the Association; whether such a retreat
does not promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and
failed, rather than a field to the strong; and whether the members
will not necessarily be fractions of men, because each finds that he
cannot enter it without some compromise. Friendship and associa-
tion are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the
human race, banded for some catholic object. Yes, excellent, but
remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in
his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles
or multiplies himself, but in the hour in which he mortgages him-
self to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature
of one.

But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such,
concert appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you
have failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. Our housekeep-
ing is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community,
might be. Many of us have differed in opinion, and we could find
no man who could make the truth plain, but possibly a college or
an ecclesiastical council might. I have not been able either to per-
suade my brother, or to prevail on myself, to disuse the traffic or the
potation of brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might
effectually restrain us. The candidate my party votes for is not to be
trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest in the Senate, for we can
bring public opinion to bear on him. Thus concert was the specific
in all cases. But concert is neither better nor worse, neither more
nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world
cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood,
or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there be
one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 26 1

for the first time possible, because the force which moves the world
is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding whatever
quantities of a different kind. What is the use of the concert of
the false and the disunited? There can be no concert in two where
there is no concert in one. When the individual is not individual,
but is dual; when his thoughts look one way and his actions another;
when his faith is traversed by his habits, when his will, enUghtened
by reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows,
and with the other backs water, what concert can be?

I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The world
is awaking to the idea of union, and these experiments show what
it is thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will live and com-
municate, and plow, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal
power, when once they are united, as in a celebrated experiment;
by expiration and respiration exacdy together, four persons lift a
heavy man from the ground by the little finger only, and without
sense of weight. But this union must be inward and not one of the
covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods they use.
The union is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated. It is the
union of friends who Uve in different streets or towns. Each man,
if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and
diminished of his proportion, and the stricter the union the smaller
and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone to recognize in every
hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the
works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all the work
will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government will
be adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in
actual individualism.

I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man,
which the heart is preaching in these days, and which engages more
regard from the consideration that the speculations of one generation
are the history of the next following.

In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke of the
deadness of its details. But it is open to graver criticism than the
palsy of its members, it is a system of despair. The disease with
which the human mind now labors is want of faith. Men do not
believe in a power of education. We do not think we can speak to

262 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high
aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many
frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a
hospital of incurables. A man of good sense but of htde faith, whose
compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there,
said to me "that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches
and other public amusements go on." I am afraid the remark is too
honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant,
"If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I
notice, too, that the ground on which eminent public servants urge
the claims of popular education is fear: "This country is filling up
with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them
to keep them from our throats." We do not believe that any educa-
tion, any system of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever
give depth of insight to a superficial mind. Having settled ourselves
into this infidelity, our skill is expended to procure alleviations,
diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual skill, his
tongue with languages, his body with inoffensive and comely man-
ners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and inner
death we cannot avert. Is it strange that society should be devoured
by a secret melancholy, which breaks through all its smiles and all
its gayety and games?

But even one step further our infidelity has gone. It appears that
some doubt is felt by good and wise men whether really the happi-
ness and probity of men is increased by the culture of the mind in
those disciplines to which we give the name of education. Un-
happily, too, the doubt comes from scholars, from persons who
have tried these methods. In their experience, the scholar was not
raised by the sacred thoughts among which he dwelt, but used them
to selfish ends. He was a profane person and became a showman,
turning his gifts to a marketable use and not to his own sustenance
and growth. It was found that the intellect could be independently
developed, that is, in separation from the man, as any single organ
can be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. A canine appetite
for knowledge was generated, which must still be fed, but was never
satisfied, and this knowledge not being directed on action, never took
the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom it

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 263

entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, the power
of speech, the power of poetry, of Uterary art, but it did not bring
him to peace, or to beneficence.

When the hterary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange
that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.
What remedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go
up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend,
there the whole aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of
our education, and of our educated men. I do not believe that the
differences of opinion and character in men are organic. I do not
recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise, a permanent
class of skeptics, or a class of conservatives, or of malignants, or of
materialists. I do not believe in two classes. You remember the
story of the poor woman who importuned King Philip of Macedon
to grant her justice, which Philip refused; the woman exclaimed, "I
appeal;" the king, astonished, asked to whom she appealed: the
woman replied, "from Philip drunk to Philip sober." The text will
suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but in man in
two moods — in Philip drunk and PhiUp sober. I think, according to
the good-hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soul is deprived
of truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is, but by a
supposed necessity, which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of
sight. The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-
days of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow
scanning of a man's biography, that we are not so wedded to our
paltry performances of every kind, but that every man has at
intervals the grace to scorn his performances in comparing them
with his belief of what he should do, that he puts himself on the
side of his enemies, listening gladly to what they say of him, and
accusing himself of the same things.

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which de-
grades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and
short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the
Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic minster, the German
anthem, when they are ended, the master casts behind him. How
sinks the song in the waves of melody which the universe pours
over his soul! Before that gracious Infinite, out of which he drew

264 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

these few strokes, how mean they look, though the praises of the
world attend them. From the triumphs of his art, he turns with
desire to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With silent
joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses all which
his hands have done, all which human hands have ever done.

Well, we are all children of genius, the children of virtue, and
feel their inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man some-
times a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are
least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conserva-
tives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or
aged; in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience
have been aroused; when they hear music or when they read poetry
they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that could be
collected in England, Old or New, let a powerful and stimulating
intellect, a man of great heart and mind act on them, and very
quickly these frozen conservators will yield to the friendly influence,
these hopeless will begin to hope, these haters will begin to love,
these immovable statues will begin to spin and revolve. I cannot
help recalling the fine anecdote which Warton relates of Bishop
Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave England with his plan
of planting the gospel among the American savages. "Lord Bathurst
told me that the members of the Scriblerus Club being met at his
house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his
guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the
many lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in his turn,
and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating
force of eloquence and enthusiasm that they were struck dumb,
and after some pause, rose up all together with earnestness, exclaim-
ing: 'Let us set out with him immediately.' " Men in all ways are
better than they seem. They like flattery for the moment, but they
know the truth for their own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps
us from trusting them, and speaking to them rude truth. They re-
sent your honesty for an instant, they will thank you for it always.
What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and
flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out
of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts
and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghost-like through the

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 265

world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of
reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so — by this
manlike love of truth — those excesses and errors into which souls
of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the
poverty at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world.
They know the speed with which they come straight through the
thin masquerade, and conceive a disgust at the indigence of nature:
Rousseau, Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron — and I could
easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, who drive their
steeds so hard in the violence of living to forget its illusion: they
would know the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The heroes of
ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alex-
ander, CjEsar, have treated life and fortune as a game to be well and
skilfully played, but the stake not to be so valued, but that any time,
it could be held as a trifle light as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just
before the battle of Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian priest
concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit the army,
the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show him those mysterious
sources.

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the
preference, namely, which each man gives to the society of superiors
over that of his equals. All that a man has will he give for right
relations with his mates. All that he has will he give for an erect
demeanor in every company and on each occasion. He aims at such
things as his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, his
talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all
men's sight as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, of
a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his profession; naval and
military honor, a general's commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal
coronet, the laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledg-
ment of eminent merit, have this lustre for each candidate, that they
enable him to walk erect and unshamed, in the presence of some per-
sons, before whom he felt himself inferior. Having raised himself
to this rank, having established his equality with class after class,
of those with whom he would live well, he still finds certain others,
before whom he cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat
fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage

266 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

o£ him. Is his ambition pure ? then will his laurels and his possessions
seem worthless; instead of avoiding these men who make his fine
gold dim, he will cast all behind him, and seek their society only,
woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, until he
shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant
talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul which
gives the He to all things will tell none. His constitution will not
mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high and unmatch-
able in the presence of any man, if the secret oracles whose whisper
makes the sweetness and dignity of his life, do here withdraw and
accompany him no longer, it is time to undervalue what he has
valued, to dispossess himself of what he has acquired, and with
Caesar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and
say: "All these will I relinquish, if you will show me the fountains
of the Nile." Dear to us are those who love us — the swift moments
we spend with them are the compensation for a great deal of misery;
they enlarge our life; but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy,
for they add another life; they build a heaven before us, whereof we
had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the
recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted perform-
ances.

As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society,
wishes to be convicted of his error, and to come to himself, so he
wishes that the same healing should not stop in his thought, but
should penetrate his will or active power. The selfish man suffers
more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness with-
holds some important benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted
to some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present fear
the transalpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom may
be broken up like fragments of ice, melted and carried away in
the great stream of good will. Do you ask my aid? I also wish to
be a benefactor. I wish more to be a benefactor and servant than you
wish to be served by me, and surely the greatest good fortune that
could befall me is precisely to be so moved by you that I should say,
"Take me and all mine, and use me and mine freely to your ends!"
for I could not say it, otherwise than because a great enlargement had
come to my heart and mind, which made me superior to my fortunes.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 267

Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our little properties,
house and land, office and money, for the bread which they have in
our experience yielded us, although we confess that our being does
not flow through them. We desire to be made great, we desire to
be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to stream,
and make our existence a benefit. If, therefore, we start objections
to your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of
the race, understand well, that it is because we wish to drive you to
drive us into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted.
We are haunted with a belief that you have a secret, which it would
highliest advantage us to learn; we would force you to impart it to
us, though it should bring us to prison, or to worse extremity.

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover
of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The
entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy
and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could
it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet.
It has had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man's
innocence and his real liking of his neighbor, have kept it a dead
letter. I remember standing at the polls one day, and when the
anger of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces
of the independent electors, and a good man at my side looking on
the people, remarked, "I am satisfied that the largest part of these
men on either side mean to vote right." I suppose considerate ob-
servers, looking at the masses of men in their blameless, and in their
equivocal actions, will assent that in spite of selfishness and frivolity
the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The
reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid
to your benevolent design, is in you; he refuses to accept you as a
bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels
that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.

If it were worth while to run into details this general doctrine of
the latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it would be easy to adduce
illustration in particulars of a man's equality to the church, of his
equality to the state, and of his equality to every other man. It is
yet in all men's memory, that a few years ago the liberal churches
complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name

200 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of Christian. I think the complaint was confession: a religious
church would not complain. A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or
Swedenborg, is not irritated by wanting the sanction of the church,
but the church feels the accusation of his presence and belief.

It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets, to make
it appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation.
The man whose part is taken, and who does not wait for society
in anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel. The
familiar experiment, called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a
capillary column of water balances the ocean, is the symbol of the
relation of one man to the whole family of men. The wise Dandini,
on hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes read,
"judged them to be great men every way, excepting that they
were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws, which to
second and authorize, true virtue must abate very much of its origi-
nal vigor."

And as a man is equal to the church, and equal to the state, so he
is equal to every other man. The disparities of power in men are
superficial; and all frank and searching conversation, in which a
man lays himself open to his brother, apprizes each of their radical
unity. When two persons sit and converse in thoroughly good un-
derstanding, the remark is sure to be made. See how we have dis-
puted about words! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as every
man knows among his friends, converse with the most commanding
poetic genius, I think, it would appear that there was no inequahty
such as men fancy between them; that a perfect understanding, a
like receiving, a hke perceiving, abolished differences, and the poet
would confess that his creative imagination gave him no deep ad-
vantage, but only the superficial one, that he could express himself,
and the other could not; that his advantage was a knack, which
might impose on indolent men, but could not impose on lovers of
truth; for they know the tax of talent, or, what a price of greatness
the power of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conviction
of the purest men that the net amount of man and man does not
much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in
some faculty. His want of skill in other directions has added to his
fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 269

yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hinderance operates as a
concentration of his force.

These and the Hke experiences intimate that man stands in strict
connection with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power
over and behind us, and we are the channels of its communications.
We seek to say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits,
which contradicts what we say. We would persuade our fellow
to this or that; another self within our eyes dissuades him. That
which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces
and our words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the
enemy, and he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. We
exclaim, "There's a traitor in the house!" but at last it appears that
he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This open channel to the
highest life is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so
tenacious, that although I have never expressed the truth, and al-
though I have never heard the expression of it from any other, I
know that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer
your questions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the
question. What is the operation we call Providence? There lies the
unspoken thing, present, omnipresent. Every time we converse, we
seek to translate it into speech, but whether we hit or whether we
miss we have the fact. Every discourse is an approximate answer;
but it is of small consequence that we do not get it into verbs and
nouns, while it abides for contemplation forever.

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves
good in time, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and
events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connec-
tion with a higher life, with the man within man; shall destroy
distrust by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten methods, shall
not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive
and beautiful, which works over our heads and under our feet.
Pitiless, it avails itself of our success, when we obey it, and of our
ruin, when we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else
the word justice would have no meaning: they believe that the
best is the true; that right is done at last; or chaos would come. It
rewards actions after their nature and not after the design of the
agent. "Work," it saith to man, "in every hour, paid or unpaid, see

270 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward: whether
thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing epics, so only
it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a
reward to these senses as well as to the thought: no matter, how
often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well
done, is to have done it."

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see
how this high will prevails without an exception or an interval, he
settles himself into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of
gravity, that every stone will fall where it is due; the good globe is
faithful, and carries us securely through the celestial spaces, anxious
or resigned; we need not interfere to help it on, and he will learn,
one day, the mild lesson they teach, that our own orbit is all our
task, and we need not assist the administration of the universe. Do
not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the unfounded
pretensions and the false reputation of certain men of standing.
They are laboring harder to set the town right concerning them-
selves, and will certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your
criticism on the insufficiency of this or that teacher or experimenter,
and he will have demonstrated his insufficiency to all men's eyes.
In like manner, let a man fall into the divine circuits, and he is
enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only liberating influence.
We wish to escape from subjection, and a sense of inferiority — and
we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat grass, we
refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience to
his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to
him, does an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the
hand out of all the wards of the prison.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are,
is cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspira-
tions. The life of man is the true romance, which, when it is
valiantly conducted, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any
fiction. All around us, what powers are wrapped up under the
coarse mattings of custom, and all wonder prevented. It is so
wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes,
that it does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he
should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS T]l

wise and the unwise; the latter wonders at what is unusual, the
wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the heart which has re-
ceived so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit
other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently,
and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the
past?

WORSHIP

(i860)

This is he, who felled by foes,

Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows:

He to captivity was sold,

But him no prison-bars would hold:

Though they sealed him in a rock.

Mountain chains he can unlock:

Thrown to lions for their meat.

The crouching lion kissed his feet:

Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,

But arched o'er him an honoring vault.

This is he men miscall Fate,

Threading dark ways, arriving late.

But ever coming in time to crown

The truth, and hurl wrongdoers down.

He is the oldest, and best known.

More near than aught thou call'st thy own,

Yet, greeted in another's eyes.

Disconcerts with glad surprise.

This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers,

Floods with blessings unawares.

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line.

Severing righdy his from thine,

Which is human, which divine.

SOME of my friends have complained, when the preceding
papers were read, that we discussed Fate, Power, and Wealth,
on too low a platform; gave too much line to the evil spirit
of the times; too many cakes to Cerberus; that we ran Cud worth's
risk of making, by excess of candor, the argument of atheism so
strong, that he could not answer it. I have no fears of being forced
in my own despite to play, as we say, the devil's attorney. I have
no infirmity of faith; no belief that it is of much importance what
I or any man may say: I am sure that a certain truth will be said
through me, though I should be dumb, or though I should try to

273

274 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

say the reverse. Nor do I fear skepticism for any good soul, A just
thinker will allow full swing to his skepticism. I dip my pen in the
blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot. I
have no sympathy with a poor man I knew, who, when suicides
abounded, told me he dared not look at his razor. We are of
different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to
be at heart on the side of truth.

I see not why we should give ourselves such sanctified airs. If
the Divine Providence has hid from men neither disease, nor de-
formity, nor corrupt society, but has stated itself out in passions, in
war, in trade, in the love of power and pleasure, in hunger and
need, in tyrannies, literatures, and arts, — let us not be so nice that
we cannot write these facts down coarsely as they stand, or doubt
but there is a counter-statement as ponderous, which we can arrive
at, and which, being put, will make all square. The solar system has
no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty
is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by
leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade,
which the doctrine of Faith cannot downweigh. The strength of
that principle is not measured in ounces and pounds: it tyrannizes
at the centre of Nature. We may well give skepticism as much line
as we can. The spirit will return, and fill us. It drives the drivers.
It counterbalances any accumulations of power.

"Heaven kindly gave our blood a moral flow."

We are born loyal. The whole creation is made of hooks and eyes,
of bitumen, of sticking-plaster, and whether your community is
made in Jerusalem or in California, of saints or of wreckers, it
coheres in a perfect ball. Men as naturally make a state, or a church,
as caterpillars a web. If they were more refined, it would be less
formal, it would be nervous, like that of the shakers, who, from
long habit of thinking and feeling together, it is said, are affected
in the same way, at the same time, to work and to play, and aa
they go with perfect sympathy to their tasks in the field or shop,
so are they inclined for a ride or a journey at the same instant, and
the horses come up with the family carriage unbespoken to the
door.

WORSHIP 275

We are born believing, A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples.
A self-poise belongs to every particle; and a rectitude to every mind,
and is the Nemesis and protector of every society. I and my neigh-
bors have been bred in the notion, that, unless we came soon to
some good church, — Calvinism, or Behmenism, or Romanism, or
Mormonism, — there would be a universal thaw and dissolution. No
Isaiah or Jeremy has arrived. Nothing can exceed the anarchy that
has followed in our skies. The stern old faiths have all pulverized.
'Tis a whole population of gendemen and ladies out in search of
religions. 'Tis as flat anarchy in our ecclesiastic realms, as that which
existed in Massachusetts, in the Revolution, or which prevails now
on the slope of the Rocky Mountains or Pike's Peak. Yet we make
shift to Uve. Men are loyal. Nature has self-poise in all her works;
certain proportions in which oxygen and azote combine, and, not
less a harmony in faculties, a fitness in the spring and the regu-
lator.

The decline of the influence of Calvin, or Fenelon, or Wesley, or
Channing, need give us no uneasiness. The builder of heaven has
not so ill constructed his creature as that the religion, that is, the
public nature, should fall out: the public and the private element,
like north and south, like inside and outside, like centrifugal and
centripetal, adhere to every soul, and cannot be subdued, except the
soul is dissipated. God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins
of churches and religions.

In the last chapters, we treated some particulars of the question of
culture. But the whole state of man is a state of culture; and its
flowering and completion may be described as Religion, or Worship.
There is always some religion, some hope and fear extended into
the invisible, — from the blind boding which nails a horseshoe to the
mast or the threshold, up to the song of the Elders in the Apocalypse.
But the religion cannot rise above the state of the votary. Heaven
always bears some propordon to earth. The god of the cannibals
will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants
a merchant. In all ages, souls out of time, extraordinary, prophedc,
are born, who are rather related to the system of the world, than to
their particular age and locality. These announce absolute truths,
which, with whatever reverence received, are speedily dragged down

276 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

into a savage interpretation. The interior tribes of our Indians, and
some of the Pacific islanders, flog their gods, when things take an
unfavorable turn. The Greek poets did not hesitate to let lose their
petulant wit on their deities also. Laomedon, in his anger at Nep-
tune and Apollo, who had built Troy for him, and demanded their
price, does not hesitate to menace them that he will cut their ears
oflF.^ Among our Norse forefathers. King Olaf's mode of converting
Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals on his
belly, which burst asunder. "Wilt thou now, Eyvind, believe in
Christ?" asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another argument was an
adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand, who re-
fused to believe.

Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified European culture, —
the grafted or meliorated tree in a crab forest. And to marry a
pagan wife or husband, was to marry Beast, and voluntarily to take a
step backwards towards the baboon.

"Hengist had verament
A daughter both fair and gent,
But she was heathen Sarazine,
And Vortigern for love fine
Her took to fere and to wife,
And was cursed in all his life;
For he let Christian wed heathen,
And mixed our blood as flesh and mathen."^

What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew from the pagan
sources, Richard of Devizes's chronicle of Richard I.'s crusade, in
the twelfth century, may show. King Richard taunts God with
forsaking him: "O fie! O how unwilling should I be to forsake thee,
in so forlorn and dreadful a position, were I thy lord and advocate,
as thou art mine. In sooth, my standards will in future be despised,
not through my fault, but through thine: in sooth, not through any
cowardice of my warfare, art thou thyself, my king and my God
conquered, this day, and not Richard thy vassal." The religion of
the early English poets is anomalous, so devout and so blasphemous,
in the same breath. Such is Chaucer's extraordinary confusion of
heaven and earth in the picture of Dido.

1 Iliad, Book xxi, 1. 455- ^ Moths or worms.

WORSHIP 277

"She was so fair,
So young, so lusty, with her eyen glad.
That if that God that heaven and earthe made
Would have a love for beauty and goodness,
And womanhede, truth, and seemliness.
Whom should he loven but this lady sweet?
There n' is no woman to him half so meet."

With these grossnesses, we complacently compare our own taste
and decorum. We think and speak with more temperance and
gradation, — but is not indiflerentism as bad as superstition?

We live in a transition period, when the old faiths which com-
forted nations, and not only so, but made nations, seem to have
spent their force. I do not find the religions of men at this moment
very creditable to them, but either childish and insignificant, or
unmanly and effeminating. The fatal trait is the divorce between
religion and morality. Here are know-nothing religions, or churches
that proscribe intellect; scortatory religions; slave-holding and slave-
trading religions; and, even in the decent populations, idolatries
wherein the whiteness of the ritual covers scarlet indulgence. The
lover of the old religion complains that our contemporaries, scholars
as well as merchants, succumb to a great despair, — have corrupted
into a timorous conservatism, and believe in nothing. In our large
cities, the population is godless, materialized, — no bond, no fellow-
feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts,
fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on,
— so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are gained,
it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and
not any worthy purpose. There is no faith in the intellectual, none
in the moral universe. There is faith in chemistry, in meat, and
wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine, galvanic bat-
tery, turbine-wheels, sewing machines, and in public opinion, but
not in divine causes. A silent revolution has loosed the tension of
the old religious sects, and, in place of the gravity and permanence
of those societies of opinion, they run into freak and extravagance.
In creeds never was such levity; witness the heathenisms in Chris-
tianity, the periodic "revivals," the Millennium mathematics, the pea-
cock ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maundering of Mor-
mons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the deliration of rappings, the rat

278 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

and mouse revelation, thumps in table-drawers, and black art. The
architecture, the music, the prayer, partake of the madness: the arts
sink into shift and make-believe. Not knowing what to do, we ape
our ancestors; the churches stagger backward to the mummeries of
the dark ages. By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the
Christian traditions have lost their hold. The dogma of the mystic
offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as
a moral teacher, 'tis impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his
personality; and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sub-
limity of the moral laws. From this change, and in the momentary
absence of any religious genius that could offset the immense ma-
terial activity, there is a feeling that reUgion is gone. When Paul
Leroux offered his article "Dieu" to the conductor of a leading
French journal, he replied, "La question de Dieu manque d'ac-
tualite."

In Italy, Mr. Gladstone said of the late King of Naples, "it has
been a proverb, that he has erected the negation of God into a system
of government." In this country, the like stupefaction was in the
air, and the phrase "higher law" became a political jibe. What proof
of infidelity, like the toleration and propagandism of slavery ? What,
like the direction of education? What, like the facility of conver-
sion.'' What, like the externality of churches that once sucked the
roots of right and wrong, and now have perished away till they
are a speck of whitewash on the wall? What proof of skepticism
like the base rate at which the highest mental and moral gifts are
held? Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any
American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad col-
lision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the
best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone
far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a
line person to, is, to drown him to save his board.

Another scar of this skepticism is the distrust in human virtue.
It is beheved by well-dressed proprietors that there is no more virtue
than they possess; that the solid portion of society exist for the arts
of comfort : that life is an affair to put somewhat between the upper
and lower mandibles. How prompt the suggestion of a low motive!
Certain patriots in England devoted themselves for years to creating

WORSHIP 279

a public opinion that should break down the corn-laws and establish
free trade. "Well," says the man in the street, "Cobden got a stipend
out of it." Kossuth fled hither across the ocean to try if he could
rouse the New World to a sympathy with European liberty. "Aye,"
says New York, "he made a handsome thing of it, enough to make
him comfortable for life."

See what allowance vice finds in the respectable and well-condi-
tioned class. If a pickpocket intrude into the society of gendemen,
they exert what moral force they have, and he finds himself uncom-
fortable, and glad to get away. But if an adventurer go through all
the forms, procure himself to be elected to a post of trust, as of
senator, or president, — though by the same arts as we detest in the
house-thief, — the same gendemen who agree to discountenance the
private rogue, will be forward to show civiHdes and marks of respect
to the public one: and no amount of evidence of his crimes will
prevent them giving him ovations, complimentary dinners, opening
their own houses to him, and priding themselves on his acquaint-
ance. We were not deceived by the professions of the private ad-
venttu-er, — the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted
our spoons; but we appeal to the sanctified preamble of the messages
and proclamations of the pubhc sinner, as the proof of sincerity. It
must be that they who pay this homage have said to themselves. On
the whole, we don't know about this that you call honesty; a bird
in the hand is better.

Even well-disposed, good sort of people are touched with the
same infidelity, and for brave, straightforward acdon, use half-
measures and compromises. Forgetful that a little measure is a great
error, forgetful that a wise mechanic uses a sharp tool, they go on
choosing the dead men of routine. But the official men can in
nowise help you in any quesdon of to-day, they deriving entirely
from the old dead things. Only those can help in counsel or conduct
who did not make a party pledge to defend this or that, but who
were appointed by God Almighty, before they came into the world,
to stand for this which they uphold.

It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the leading men is
a vice general throughout American society. But the multitude of
the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health. In spite of

28o RALPH WALDO EMERSON

our imbecility and terrors, and "universal decay of religion," &c. &c.,
the moral sense reappears to-day with the same morning newness
that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You
say, there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather,
there is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of his
superlative effects. The religion of the cultivated class now, to be
sure, consists in an avoidance of acts and engagements which it was
once their religion to assume. But this avoidance will yield spon-
taneous forms in their due hour. There is a principle which is the
basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve,
a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very
peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do;
not to work, but to be worked upon; and to this homage there is
a consent of all thoughtful and just men in all ages and conditions.
To this sentiment belong vast and sudden enlargements of power.
'Tis remarkable that our faith in ecstasy consists with total inex-
perience of it. It is the order of the world to educate with accuracy
the senses and the understanding; and the enginery at work to
draw out these powers in priority, no doubt, has its office. But we
are never without a hint that these powers are mediate and servile,
and that we are one day to deal with real being, — essences with
essences. Even the fury of material activity has some results friendly
to moral health. The energetic action of the times develops indi-
vidualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step
in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative
system. Souls are not saved in bundles. The Spirit saith to the
man, "How is it with thee? thee personally.? is it well? is it ill?
For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training,
— religion of character is so apt to be invaded. Religion must always
be a crab fruit: it cannot be grafted and keep its wild beauty. "I
have seen," said a traveller who had known the extremes of society,
"I have seen human nature in all its forms, it is everywhere the
same, but the wilder it is, the more virtuous."

We say, the old forms of religion decay, and that a skepticism
devastates the community. I do not think it can be cured or stayed
by any modification of theologic creeds, much less by theologic dis-
cipline. The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your

WORSHIP 281

books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.
That which is signified by the words "moral" and "spiritual," is a
lasting essence, and, with whatever illusions we have loaded them,
will certainly bring back the words, age after age, to their ancient
meaning. I know no words that mean so much. In our definitions,
we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true
meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which
works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not exist-
ing. Men talk of "mere morality," — which is much as if one should
say, "poor God, with nobody to help him." I find the omnipresence
and the almightiness in the reaction of every atom in Nature. I can
best indicate by examples those reactions by which every part of
Nature replies to the purpose of the actor, — beneficently to the good,
penally to the bad. Let us replace sentimentahsm by realism, and
dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen
or unseen, pervade and govern.

Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But
a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his neigh-
bor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a
chariot of the sun. What a day dawns, when we have taken to heart
the doctrine of faith! to prefer, as a better investment, being to
doing; being to seeming; logic to rhythm and to display; the year
to the day; the Hfe to the year; character to performance; — and have
come to know, that justice will be done us; and, if our genius is slow,
the term will be long.

'Tis certain that worship stands in some commanding relation to
the health of man, and to his highest powers, so as to be, in some
manner, the source of intellect. All the great ages have been ages of
belief. I mean, when there was any extraordinary power of per-
formance, when great national movements began, when arts ap-
pe^ared, when heroes existed, when poems were made, the human
soul was in earnest, and had fixed its thoughts on spiritual verities,
with as strict a grasp as that of the hands on the sword, or the
pencil, or the trowel. It is true that genius takes its rise out of the
mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet,
are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary
degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm. Thus,

282 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I think, we very slowly admit in another man a higher degree of
moral sentiment than our own, — a finer conscience, more impression-
able, or, which marks minuter degrees; an ear to hear acuter notes
of right and wrong, than we can. I think we listen suspiciously,
and very slowly to any evidence to that point. But, once satisfied of
such superiority, we set no Umit to our expectation of his genius.
For such persons are nearer to the secret of God than others; are
bathed by sweeter waters; they hear notices, they see visions, where
others are vacant. We beUeve that hoHness confers a certain insight,
because not by our private, but by our pubUc force, can we share and
know the nature of things.

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.
Given the equality of two intellects, — which will form the most re-
hable judgments, the good, or the bad hearted? "The heart has its
arguments, with which the understanding is not acquainted." For
the heart is at once aware of the state of health or disease, which is
the controlling state, that is, of sanity or of insanity, prior, of course,
to all question of the ingenuity of arguments, the amount of facts,
or the elegance of rhetoric. So intimate is this alliance of mind and
heart, that talent uniformly sinks with character. The bias of errors
of principle carries away men into perilous courses, as soon as their
will does not control their passion or talent. Hence the extraordinary
blunders, and final wrong head, into which men spoiled by ambition
usually fall. Hence the remedy for all blunders, the cure of bhnd-
ness, the cure of crime, is love. "As much love, so much mind,"
said the Latin proverb. The superiority that has no superior; the
redeemer and instructor of souls, as it is their primal essence, is
love.

The moral must be the measure of health. If your eye is on the
eternal, your intellect will grow, and your opinions and actions will
have a beauty which no learning or combined advantages of other
men can rival. The moment of your loss of faith, and acceptance
of the lucrative standard, will be marked in the pause, or solstice of
genius, the sequent retrogression, and the inevitable loss of attraction
to other minds. The vulgar are sensible of the change in you, and
of your descent, though they clap you on the back, and congratulate
you on your increased common sense.

WORSHIP 283

Our recent culture has been in natural science. We have learned
the manners of the sun and of the moon, of the rivers and the rains,
of the mineral and elemental kingdoms, of plants and animals.
Man has learned to weigh the sun, and its weight neither loses nor
gains. The path of a star, the moment of an ecUpse, can be deter-
mined to the fraction of a second. Well, to him the book of history,
the book of love, the lures of passion, and the commandments of
duty are opened: and the next lesson taught, is, the continuation of
the inflexible law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will, and
of thought; that, if, in sidereal ages, gravity and projection keep
their craft, and the ball never loses its way in its wild path through
space, — a secreter gravitation, a secreter projection, rule not less
tyrannically in human history, and keep the balance of power from
age to age unbroken. For, though the new element of freedom and
an individual has been admitted, yet the primordial atoms are pre-
figured and predetermined to moral issues, are in search of justice,
and ultimate right is done. Religion or worship is the atdtude of
those who see this unity, intimacy, and sincerity; who see that,
against all appearances, the nature of things works for truth and
right forever.

'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of
chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our
eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into
the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we
will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a
perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward. And this appears in a
class of facts which concerns all men, within and above their creeds.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was
somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was
so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men
believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his
father was born to be the father of him and of this deed, and, by
looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter,
but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chem-
istry. The curve of the flight of the moth is preordained, and all
things go by number, rule, and weight.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see.

284 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears;
he does not see, that his son is the son o£ his thoughts and of his
actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and
connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and
always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly, — ^but method,
and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in. As we are,
so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our
fortunes; cant and lying and the attempt to secure a good which does
not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and vain. But, in the
human mind, this tie of fate is made alive. The law is the basis of
the human mind. In us, it is inspiration; out there in Nature, we see
its fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment.

We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of Law, which com-
pares well with any in our Western books. "Law it is, which is
without name, or color, or hands, or feet; which is smallest of the
least, and largest of the large; all, and knowing all things; which
hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet, and seizes
without hands."

If any reader tax me with using vague and traditional phrases, let
me suggest to him, by a few examples, what kind of a trust this is,
and how real. Let me show him that the dice are loaded; that the
colors are fast, because they are the native colors of the fleece; that the
globe is a battery, because every atom is a magnet; and that the police
and sincerity of the Universe are secured by God's delegating his
divinity to every particle; that there is no room for hypocrisy, no
margin for choice.

The countryman leaving his native village, for the first time, and
going abroad, finds all his habits broken up. In a new nation and
language, his sect, as Quaker, or Lutheran, is lost. What! it is not
then necessary to the order and existence of society ? He misses this,
and the commanding eye of his neighborhood, which held him to
decorum. This is the peril of New York, of New Orleans, of Lon-
don, of Paris, to young men. But after a little experience, he makes
the discovery that there are no large cities, — none large enough to
hide in; that the censors of action are as numerous and as near in
Paris, as in Littleton or Portland; that the gossip is as prompt and
vengeful. There is no concealment, and, for each offence, a several

WORSHIP 285

vengeance; that, reaction, or nothing for nothing, or, things are as
broad as they are long, is not a rule for Littleton or Portland, but for
the Universe.

We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue. We are dis-
gusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their
proprieties. The smallest fly will draw blood, and gossip is a weapon
impossible to exclude from the privatest, highest, selectest. Nature
created a police of many ranks. God has delegated himself to a mil-
lion deputies. From these low external penalties, the scale ascends.
Next come the resentments, the fears, which injustice calls out; then,
the false relations in which the offender is put to other men; and the
reaction of his fault on himself, in the solitude and devastation of his
mind.

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits
by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of
opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder
in that state of mind you had, when you made it. If you spend for
show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it
will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of char-
acter, and things themselves are detective. If you follow the suburban
fashion in building a sumptuous-looking house for a little money, it
will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house. There is no privacy
that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized
world. Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real char-
acter, and reveals it by hiding. If a man wish to conceal anything he
carries, those whom he meets know that he conceals somewhat, and
usually know what he conceals. Is it otherwise if there be some belief
or some purpose he would bury in his breast ? 'Tis as hard to hide as
fire. He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man
cannot utter two or three sentences, without disclosing to intelligent
ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether
in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of
ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty. People
seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of
character. We can only see what we are, and if we misbehave we
suspect others. The fame of Shakspeare or of Voltaire, of Thomas a
Kempis, or of Bonaparte, characterizes those who give it. As gas-

286 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects
itself by pitiless publicity.

Each must be armed — not necessarily with musket and pike.
Happy, if, seeing these, he can feel that he has better muskets and
pikes in his energy and constancy. To every creature is his own
weapon, however skilfully concealed from himself, a good while.
His work is sword and shield. Let him accuse none, let him injure
none. The way to mend the bad world, is to create the right world.
Here is a low political economy plotting to cut the throat of foreign
competition, and establish our own; — excluding others by force, or
making war on them; or, by cunning tariffs, giving preference to
worse wares of ours. But the real and lasting victories are those of
peace, and not of war. The way to conquer the foreign artisan, is,
not to kill him, but to beat his work. And the Crystal Palaces and
the World Fairs, with their committees and prizes on all kinds of
industry, are the result of this feeling. The American workman who
strikes ten blows Vi'ith his hammer, whilst the foreign workman only
strikes one, is as really vanquishing that foreigner, as if the blows
were aimed at and told on his person. I look on that man as happy,
who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a
reply, not into the market, not into opinion, not into patronage. In
every variety of human employment, in the mechanical and in the
fine arts, in navigation, in farming, in legislating, there are among
the numbers who do their task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to
pass, and as badly as they dare, — there are the working-men on
whom the burden of the business falls, — those who love work, and
love to see it rightly done, who finish their task for its own sake;
and the state and the world is happy, that has the most of such
finishers. The world will always do justice at last to such finishers:
it cannot otherwise. He who has acquired the ability, may wait
securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know
that it will not loiter. Men talk as if victory were something
fortunate. Work is victory. Wherever work is done, victory is
obtained. There is no chance, and no blanks. You want but one
verdict: if you have your own, you are secure of the rest. And yet, if
witnesses are wanted, witnesses are near. There was never a man
born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the

WORSHIP 287

world with him, who deUght in his faculty, and report it. I cannot
see without awe, that no man thinks alone, and no man acts alone,
but the divine assessors who came up with him into life, — now imder
one disguise, now under another, — like a police in citizens' clothes,
walk with him, step for step, through all the kingdom of time.

This reaction, this sincerity is the property of all things. To make
oiu" word or act sublime, we must make it real. It is our system that
counts, not the single word or imsupported action. Use what lan-
guage you will, you can never say anything but what you are. What
I am, and what I think, is conveyed to you, in spite of my efforts
to hold it back. What I am has been secretly conveyed from me to
another, whilst I was vainly making up my mind to tell him it. He
has heard from me what I never spoke.

As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and some-
what less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress of the
character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a
decreasing faith in propositions. Young people admire talents, and
particular excellences. As we grow older, we value total powers
and effects, as the spirit, or quality of the man. We have another
sight, and a new standard; an insight which disregards what is
done for the eye, and pierces to the doer; an ear which hears not
what men say, but hears what they do not say.

There was a wise, devout man who is called, in the Catholic
Church, St. Philip Neri, of whom many anecdotes touching his
discernment and benevolence are told at Naples and Rome. Among
the nuns in a convent not far from Rome, one had appeared, who
laid claim to certain rare gifts of inspiration and prophecy, and the
abbess advised the Holy Father, at Rome, of the wonderful powers
shown by her novice. The Pope did not well know what to make
of these new claims, and Philip coming in from a journey, one day,
he consulted him. Philip undertook to visit the nun, and ascertain
her character. He threw himself on his mule, all travel-soiled as he
was, and hastened through the mud and mire to the distant convent.
He told the abbess the wishes of his Holiness, and begged her to
summon the nun without delay. The nun was sent for, and, as soon
as she came into the apartment, PhiUp stretched out his leg all
bespattered with mud, and desired her to draw off his boots. The

288 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

young nun, who had become the object of much attention and
respect, drew back with anger, and refused the office: PhiUp ran out
of doors, mounted his mule, and returned instantly to the Pope;
"Give yourself no uneasiness. Holy Father, any longer: here is no
miracle, for here is no humility."

We need not much mind what people please to say, but what they
must say; what their natures say, though their busy, artful Yankee
understandings try to hold back, and choke that word, and to
articulate something different. If we will sit quiedy, — what they
ought to say is said, with their will, or against their will. We do not
care for you, let us pretend what we will: — we are always looking
through you to the dim dictator behind you. Whilst your habit or
whim chatters, we civilly and impatiendy wait until that wise
superior shall speak again. Even children are not deceived by the
false reasons which their parents give in answer to their questions,
whether touching natural facts, or religion, or persons. When the
parent, instead of thinking how it really is, puts them off with a
traditional or a hypocriucal answer, the children perceive that it is
traditional or hypocridcal. To a sound constitution the defect of
another is at once manifest: and the marks of it are only concealed
from us by our own dislocation. An anatomical observer remarks,
that the sympathies of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, tell at last on
the face, and on all its features. Not only does our beauty waste,
but it leaves word how it went to waste. Physiognomy and phre-
nology are not new sciences, but declarations of the soul that it is
aware of certain new sources of informadon. And now sciences of
broader scope are starting up behind these. And so for ourselves, it
is really of little importance what blunders in statement we make,
so only we make no wilful departures from the truth. How a man's
truth comes to mind, long after we have forgotten all his words!
How it comes to us in silent hours, that truth is our only armor in
all passages of life and death! Wit is cheap, and anger is cheap;
but if you cannot argue or explain yourself to the other party, cleave
to the truth against me, against thee, and you gain a station from
which you cannot be dislodged. The other party will forget the
words that you spoke, but the part you took continues to plead for
you.

WORSHIP 289

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle w^hich life offers me?
I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings me so many
problems, will bring the answers also in due time. Very rich, very
potent, very cheerful Giver that he is, he shall have it all his own
way, for me. Why should I give up my thought, because I cannot
answer an objection to it? Consider only, whether it remains in my
life the same it was. That only which we have within, can we see
without. If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there
is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.
He only is rightly immortal, to whom all things are immortal. I
have read somewhere, that none is accomplished, so long as any are
incomplete; that the happiness of one cannot consist with the misery
of any other.

The Buddhists say, "No seed will die;" every seed will grow.
Where is the service which can escape its remuneration? What is
vulgar, and the essence of all vulgarity, but the avarice of reward?
'Tis the difference of artisan and artist, of talent and genius, of
sinner and saint. The man whose eyes are nailed not on the nature
of his act, but on the wages, whether it be money, or office, or fame, —
is almost equally low. He is great, whose eyes are opened to see that
the reward of actions cannot be escaped, because he is transformed
into his action, and taketh its nature, which bears its own fruit, like
every other tree. A great man cannot be hindered of the effect of
his act, because it is immediate. The genius of life is friendly to
the noble, and in the dark brings them friends from far. Fear
God, and where you go, men shall think they walk in hallowed
cathedrals.

And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the
human being, love, humiHty, faith, as being also the intimacy of
Divinity in the atoms; and that, as soon as the man is right, assur-
ances and provisions emanate from the interior of his body and his
mind; as, when flowers reach their ripeness, incense exhales from
them, and as a beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet
by the averaged emanations from all its rocks and soils.

Thus man is made equal to every event. He can face danger for
the right. A poor, tender, painful body, he can run into flame or
bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide. He feels the insurance

290 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

of a just employment. I am not afraid of accident, as long as I am in
my place. It is strange that superior persons should not feel that
they have some better resistance against cholera, than avoiding
green peas and salads. Life is hardly respectable, — is it ? if it has no
generous guaranteeing task, no duties or affections, that constitute
a necessity of existing. Every man's task is his Ufe-preserver. The
conviction that his work is dear to God and cannot be spared,
defends him. The lightning-rod that disarms the cloud of its threat
is his body in its duty. A high aim reacts on the means, on the
days, on the organs of the body. A high aim is curative, as w^ell as
arnica. "Napoleon," says Goethe, "visited those sick of the plague,
in order to prove that the man who could banish fear, could van-
quish the plague also; and he was right. 'Tis incredible what force
the will has in such cases: it penetrates the body, and puts it in a
state of activity, which repels all hurtful influences; whilst fear
invites them."

It is related of William of Orange, that, whilst he was besieging
a town on the continent, a gentleman sent to him on public business
came to his camp, and learning that the King was before the walls,
he ventured to go where he was. He found him directing the
operation of his gunners, and, having explained his errand, and
received his answer, the King said, "Do you not know, sir, that
every moment you spend here is at the risk of your life?" "I run
no more risk," replied the gentleman, "than your Majesty." "Yes,"
said the King, "but my duty brings me here, and yours does not."
In a few minutes, a cannon-baU fell on the spot, and the gentleman
was killed.

Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his early
instinct, under the guidance of a deeper instinct. He learns to
welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is the prosperity of the
great. He learns the greatness of humility. He shall work in the
dark, work against failure, pain, and ill-will. If he is insulted, he
can be insulted; all his affair is not to insult. Hafiz writes,

"At the last day, men shall wear
On their heads the dust,
As ensign and as ornament
Of their lowly trust."

WORSHIP 291

The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin
which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whip
of the driver, the slave shall feel his equaUty with saints and heroes.
In the greatest destitution and calamity, it surprises man with a
feeling of elasticity which makes nothing of loss.

I recall some traits of a remarkable person whose life and discourse
betrayed many inspirations of this sentiment. Benedict was always
great in the present time. He had hoarded nothing from the past,
neither in his cabinets, neither in his memory. He had no designs
on the future, neither for what he should do to men, nor for what
men should do for him. He said, "I am never beaten until I know
that I am beaten. I meet powerful brutal people to whom I have no
skill to reply. They think they have defeated me. It is so pubUshed
in society, in the journals: I am defeated in this fashion, in all
men's sight, perhaps on a dozen different lines. My ledger may show
that I am in debt, cannot yet make my ends meet, and vanquish the
enemy so. My race may not be prospering: we are sick, ugly, obscure,
unpopular. My children may be worsted. I seem to fail in my
friends and clients, too. That is to say, in all the encounters that
have yet chanced, I have not been weaponed for that particular occa-
sion, and have been historically beaten; and yet, I know, all the time,
that I have never been beaten; have never yet fought, shall certainly
fight, when my hour comes, and shall beat." "A man," says the
Vishnu Sarma, "who having well compared his own strength or
weakness with that of others, after all doth not know the difference,
is easily overcome by his enemies."

"I spent," he said, "ten months in the country. Thick-starred
Orion was my only companion. Wherever a squirrel or a bee can
go with security, I can go. I ate whatever was set before me, I
touched ivy and dogwood. When I went abroad, I kept company
with every man on the road, for I knew that my evil and my good
did not come from these, but from the Spirit, whose servant I was.
For I could not stoop to be a circumstance, as they did, who put their
life into their fortune and their company. I would not degrade my-
self by casting about in my memory for a thought, nor by waiting
for one. If the thought come, I would give it entertainment. It
should, as it ought, go into my hands and feet; but if it come not

292 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

spontaneously, it comes not rightly at all. If it can spare me, I am
sure I can spare it. It shall be the same with my friends. I will never
woo the loveliest. I will not ask any friendship or favor. When I
come to my own, we shall both know it. Nothing will be to be
asked or to be granted." Benedict went out to seek his friend, and
met him on the way; but he expressed no surprise at any coinci-
dences. On the other hand, if he called at the door of his friend, and
he was not at home, he did not go again; concluding that he had
misinterpreted the intimations.

He had the whim not to make an apology to the same individual
whom he had wronged. For this, he said, was a piece of personal
vanity; but he would correct his conduct in that respect in which he
had faulted, to the next person he should meet. Thus, he said,
universal justice was satisfied.

Mira came to ask what she should do with the poor Genesee
woman who had hired herself to work for her, at a shilling a day,
and, now sickening, was like to be bedridden on her hands. Should
she keep her, or should she dismiss her? But Benedict said, "Why
ask.? One thing will clear itself as the thing to be done, and not
another, when the hour comes. Is it a question, whether to put her
into the street? Just as much whether to thrust the little Jenny on
your arm into the street. The milk and meal you give the beggar,
will fatten Jenny. Thrust the woman out, and you thrust your babe
out of doors, whether it so seem to you or not."

In the Shakers, so called, I find one piece of belief, in the doctrine
which they faithfully hold, that encourages them to open their doors
to every wayfaring man who proposes to come among them; for,
they say, the Spirit will presently manifest to the man himself, and
to the society, what manner of person he is, and whether he belongs
among them. They do not receive him, they do not reject him. And
not in vain have they worn their clay coat, and drudged in their
fields, and shuffled in their Bruin dance, from year to year, if they
have truly learned thus much wisdom.

Honor him whose life is perpetual victory; him, who, by sympathy
with the invisible and real, finds support in labor, instead of praise;
who does not shine, and would rather not. With eyes open, he makes
the choice of virtue, which outrages the virtuous; of religion, which

WORSHIP 293

churches stop their discords to burn and exterminate; for the highest
virtue is always against the law.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. Talent
and success interest me but moderately. The great class, they who
affect our imagination, the men who could not make their hands
meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas, —
they suggest what they cannot execute. They speak to the ages,
and are heard from afar. The Spirit does not love cripples and mal-
formations. If there ever was a good man, be certain, there was
another, and will be more.

And so in relation to that future hour, that spectre clothed with
beauty at our curtain by night, at our table by day, — the apprehen-
sion, the assurance of a coming change. The race of mankind have
always offered at least this implied thanks for the gift of existence, —
namely, the terror of its being taken away; the insatiable curiosity
and appetite for its continuation. The whole revelation that is vouch-
safed us, is, the gentle trust, which, in our experience we find, will
cover also with flowers the slopes of this chasm.

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is
so well, that it is sure it will be well. It asks no questions of the
Supreme Power. The son of Antiochus asked his father, when he
would join battle? "Dost thou fear," replied the King, "that thou
only in all the army wilt not hear the trumpet?" 'Tis a higher thing
to confide, that, if it is best we should Uve, we shall live, — 'tis higher
to have this conviction, than to have the lease of indefinite centuries
and millenniums and sons. Higher than the question of our dura-
tion is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such
as are fit for it, and he who would be a great soul in future, must be
a great soul now. It is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend,
that is, on any man's experience but our own. It must be proved,
if at all, from our own activity and designs, which imply an inter-
minable future for their play.

What is called religion effeminates and demoralizes. Such as you
are, the gods themselves could not help you. Men are too often unfit
to live, from their obvious inequality to their own necessities, or,
they suffer from politics, or bad neighbors, or from sickness, and
they would gladly know that they were to be dismissed from the

294 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

duties of life. But the wise instinct asks, "How will death help
them?" These are not dismissed when they die. You shall not wish
for death out of pusillanimity. The weight of the Universe is pressed
down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his task.
The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is per-
formance. You must do your work, before you shall be released.
And as far as it is a question of fact respecting the government of the
Universe, Marcus Antoninus summed the whole in a word, "It is
pleasant to die, if there be gods; and sad to live, if there be none."

And so I think that the last lesson of life, the choral song which
rises from all elements and all angels, is, a voluntary obedience, a
necessitated freedom. Man is made of the same atoms as the world
is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny.
When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws
himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge,
what the stones do by structure. The religion which is to guide and
fulfil the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intel-
lectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science.
"There are two things," said Mahomet, "which I abhor, the learned
in his infidelities, and the fool in his devotions." Our times are
impatient of both, and specially of the last. Let us have nothing now
which is not its own evidence. There is surely enough for the heart
and imagination in the religion itself. Let us not be pestered with
assertions and half-truths, with emotions and snuffle.

There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold
and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics
of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms or
psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams
and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough
gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern
and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home to his central
solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him
know that much of the time he must have himself to his friend.
He shall expect no cooperation, he shall walk with no companion.
The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, the superpersonal
Heart, — he shall repose alone on that. He needs only his own verdict.
No good fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The Laws

WORSHIP 295

are his consolers, the good Laws themselves are aHve, they know if
he have kept them, they animate him with the leading of great duty,
and an endless horizon. Honor and fortune exist to him who always
recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the
presence of high causes.

BEAUTY

(i860)

THE spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our
books approach very slowly the things we most wish to
know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far
off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all
names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace
and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his
weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on
his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who
builds his house in them? What effect on the race that inhabits a
granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could
teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn coun-
cil, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his
record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not
in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin
or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes
or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante
or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole
distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he
gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow,
unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of
his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the
system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and
he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders
and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of
its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as
well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces,
but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one
element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was
in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The ten-

297

298 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

ant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which
we lavish so many years, are not finahties, and man, when his pow-
ers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light
into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the
pouring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by
the pompous figures of the astronomer.

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap
and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements
pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of
the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood:
they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured
by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt
to the centre of the Copernican system. 'Tis curious that we only
believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert any
more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us. A deep
man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes
that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil
eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal; that love can exalt
talent; can overcome all odds. From a great heart secret magnetisms
flow incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble
utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen, and dep-
recate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his money
value, — his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange, easily
convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music and wine.

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into
Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through
the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the
sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth
should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies,
chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where
they found us. The invention is of use to the inventor, of question-
able help to any other. The formulas of science are like the papers
in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science
in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love
and moral purpose. There's a revenge for this inhumanity. What
manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He
says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is.

BEAUTY 299

The collector has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has lost
weight and humor. He has got all snakes and lizards in his phials,
but science has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle.
Our reUance on the physician is a kind o£ despair of oiu-selves. The
clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of spiritual
health. Macready thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing.
An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding in the forest saw a herd of
elk sporting. "See how happy," he said, "these browsing elks are!
Why should not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples,
also amuse themselves?" Returning home, he imparted this reflec-
tion to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred the sover-
eignty on him, saying, "Prince, administer this empire for seven
days: at the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death."
At the end of the seventh day, the king inquired "From what cause
hast thou become so emaciated?" He answered, "From the horror
of death." The monarch rejoined: "Live, my child, and be wise.
Thou hast ceased to take recreation, saying to thyself, in seven days
I shall be put to death. These priests in the temple incessantly medi-
tate on death; how can they enter into healthful diversions?" But
the men of science or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of
their pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the
merchant, dedicate themselves to their own details, and do not
come out men of more force. Have they divination, grand aims,
hospitality of soul, and the equality to any event, which we
demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, of the
chicane?

No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superi-
orities; and, though we are aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has
fascination for us only through its relation to him, or, as it is rooted
in the mind. At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred
years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, post mortem
science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps
some sparks from it may yet light a conflagration in the other;
Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of form, and
our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These
are facts of a science which we study without book, whose teachers
and subjects are always near us.

300 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge
in this direction belongs to the chapter of pathology. The crowd in
the street oftener furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers:
but they all prove the transparency. Every spirit makes its house;
and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.
But not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and
goodness. The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls,
"the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-
bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth
and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known
company that escort us through life, — we know how these forms
thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire and enlarge us.

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the
world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties;
as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of
brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at
birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes
seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they
governed; — on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man,
mixed with his substance. They thought the same genius, at the
death of its ward, entered a new-born child, and they pretended to
guess the pilot, by the sailing of the ship. We recognize obscurely
the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that
every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure
our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we
take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are
sure and beautiful. On the other side, everybody knows people who
appear beridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress
us with the air of free agency. They know it too, and peep with
their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we
pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would
roll up, the little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they
would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to be far
off, since the first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity.
Thought is the pent air-ball which can rive the planet, and the

BEAUTY 301

beauty which certain objects have for him, is the friendly fire which
expands the thought, and acquaints the prisoner that hberty and
power await him.

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of
the foundations of things. Goethe said, "The beautiful is a mani-
festation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance,
had been forever concealed from us." And the working of this
deep instinct makes all the excitement — much of it superficial and
absurd enough — about works of art, which leads armies of vain
travellers every year to Italy, Greece and Egypt. Every man values
every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his pos-
sessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as
only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast
as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt
a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a few of its qualities.
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous
parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all
things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring
quality, and the most ascending quality. We say, love is blind, and
the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his eyes. Blind:
— yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-
sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks,
and only that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was painted
lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the fact, that one was
all limbs, and the other, all eyes. In the true mythology. Love is an
immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we
express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the
young soul.

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature
have a new charm for us in our perception, that not one ornament
was added for ornament, but is a sign of some better health, or more
excellent action. Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human
figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is only an in-
vitation from what belongs to us. 'Tis a law of botany, that in plants,
the same virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest appli-

302 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

cation, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in tHe construction
of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end is
an increase of beauty.

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of
antique and of Pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth all the research,
— namely, that all beauty must be organic; that outside embeUish-
ment is deformity. It is the soundness of the bones that ultimates
itself in a peach-bloom complexion: health of constitution that makes
the sparkle and the power of the eye. 'Tis the adjustment of the
size and of the joining of the sockets of the skeleton, that gives grace
of outline and the finer grace of movement. The cat and the deer
cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master can never teach
a badly built man to walk well. The tint of the flower proceeds from
its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its existence.
Hence our taste in building rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows
the original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters and columns that
support nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly
to show themselves. Every necessary or organic action pleases the
beholder. A man leading a horse to water, a farmer sowing seed,
the labors of haymakers in the field, the carpenter building a ship,
the smith at his forge, or, whatever useful labor, is becoming to the
wise eye. But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are
ships on the sea! but ships in the theatre, — or ships kept for pictur-
esque effect on Virginia Water, by George IV., and men hired to
stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour! — What a dijEference
in effect between a battalion of troops marching to action, and one
of our independent companies on a holiday ! In the midst of a mili-
tary show, and a festal procession gay with banners, I saw a boy
seize an old tin pan that lay rusting under a wall, and poising it on
the top of a stick, he set it turning, and made it describe the most
elegant imaginable curves, and drew away attention from the deco-
rated procession by this startling beauty.

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that
Venus was born of the foam of the sea. Nothing interests us which
is stark or bounded, but only what streams with Hfe, what is in att
or endeavor to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or
a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been com-

BEAUTY 303

municated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become
tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transi-
tion, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any
fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long nose, a
sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse of the flowing, and there-
fore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form
can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The interruption of
equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry,
and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the
charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and the loco-
motion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover con-
tinually in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular,
but by gradual and curving movements. I have been told by persons
of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of
gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only
a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a culti-
vated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This fact
suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in our own modes.
It is necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the
ear by an intermediate note or two to the accord again: and many
a good experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed,
fails, only because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian
milliner who dresses the world from her imperious boudoir will
know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind,
and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the
just gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and
how much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly
claimed by progressive parties, may easily come to be conceded with-
out question, if this rule be observed. Thus the circumstances may be
easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes,
legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most naturally in the world,
if only it come by degrees. To this streaming or flowing belongs the
beauty that all circular movement has; as, the circulation of waters,
the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion of planets, the
annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and,
if we follow it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward
action, is the argument for the immortality.

304 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose, —
Beauty rides on a lion. Beauty rests on necessities. The hne o£ beauty
is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that
angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or
the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength, with the least
weight. "It is the purgation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo.
There is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a
compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of color
or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful arrangement,
and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can be
spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of
columns. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power,
and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters
in the simplest way.

Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai. In all
design, art lies in making your object prominent, but there is a prior
art in choosing objects that are prominent. The fine arts have noth-
ing casual, but spring from the instincts of the nations that created
them.

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house that I
know, I have noticed a block of spermaceti lying about closets and
mantel-pieces, for twenty years together, simply because the tallow-
man gave it the form of a rabbit; and, I suppose, it may continue
to be lugged about unchanged for a century. Let an artist scrawl
a few lines or figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of paper
is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and glazed,
and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for
centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a news-
paper, and the human race take charge of them that they shall not
perish.

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a beauti-
ful form strikes the fancy of men, and is copied and reproduced
without end. How many copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo,
the Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the
Temple of Vesta? These are objects of tenderness to all. In our
cities, an ugly building is soon removed, and is never repeated, but
any beautiful building is copied and improved upon, so that all

BEAUTY 305

masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable
forms, whilst the ugly ones die out.

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows
or forerunners of that beauty which reaches its perfection in the
human form. All men are its lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates
joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted to it. It reaches its
height in woman. "To Eve," say the Mahometans, "God gave two-
thirds of all beauty." A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming
her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence, in all
whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must go with it,
since a certain serenity is essential, but we love its reproofs and
superiorities. Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she
often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems
to say, "Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better
kind of a man than any I yet behold." French memoires of the
fifteenth century celebrate the name of Pauline de Viguiere, a virtu-
ous and accomplished maiden, who so fired the enthusiasm of her
contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of her
native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to
compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at least twice a week,
and, as often as she showed herself, the crowd was dangerous to
life. Not less, in England, in the last century, was the fame of the
Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton;
and Maria, the Earl of Coventry. Walpole says, "the concourse was
so great, when the Duchess of Hamilton was presented at court, on
Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered
on chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their doors
to see them get into their chairs; and people go early to get places
at the theatres, when it is known they will be there." "Such crowds,"
he adds, elsewhere, "flock to see the Duchess of Hamilton, that seven
hundred people sat up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire,
to see her get into her post-chaise next morning."

But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of
Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamil-
ton? We all know this magic very well, or can divine it. It does
not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long. Women
stand related to beautiful Nature around us, and the enamored youth

306 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and
the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words
and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious
student. They refine and clear his mind; teach him to put a pleasing
method into what is dry and difficult. We talk to them, and wish
to be listened to; we fear to fatigue them, and acquire a faciUty of
expression which passes from conversation into habit of style.

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort
of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau had an ugly face on a handsome
ground; and we see faces every day which have a good type, but
have been marred in the casting: a proof that we are all entitled to
beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the
laws, — as every lily and every rose is well. But our bodies do not
fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus, short legs, which con-
strain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult and
contumely to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at per-
petual disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level
of mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose coun-
tenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen under water. Saadi
describes a schoolmaster "so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him
would derange the ecstasies of the orthodox." Faces are rarely true
to any ideal type, but are a record in sculpture of a thousand anec-
dotes of whim and folly. Portrait painters say that most faces and
forms are irregular and unsymmetrical; have one eye blue, and one
gray; the nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another;
the hair unequally distributed, etc. The man is physically as well
as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally
from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by
this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods: and we can pardon
pride, when a woman possesses such a figure, that wherever she
stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a por-
trait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. And yet — it is
not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace
is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. Abbe
Menage said of the President Le Bailleul, "that he was fit for noth-
ing but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram intimates that

BEAUTY 307

the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but when
the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored. And petulant
old gentlemen, who have chanced to suffer some intolerable weari-
ness from pretty people, or who have seen cut flowers to some pro-
fusion, or who see, after a world of pains have been successfully
taken for the costume, how the least mistake in sentiment takes all
the beauty out of your clothes, — affirm, that the secret of ugliness
consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities
shine. If command, eloquence, art, or invention, exist in the most
deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please and
raise esteem and wonder higher. The great orator was an emaciated,
insignificant person, but he was all brain. Cardinal De Retz says
of De Bouillon, "With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the per-
spicacity of an eagle." It was said of Hooke, the friend of Newton,
"he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in England."
"Since I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behooves that I be bold."
Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us,
"was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with
pimples, and of high blood, and long." Those who have ruled
human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not hand-
some men. If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom,
can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals,
can subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of
mankind, can enlarge knowledge, 'tis no matter whether his nose
is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose
at all; whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are ampu-
tated; his deformities will come to be reckoned ornamental, and
advantageous on the whole. This is the triumph of expression,
degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly
and intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the
thought of passing our lives with them insupportable. There are
faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of
thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are.
When the delicious beauty of hneaments loses its power, it is because
a more delicious beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable
form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before.

308 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Still, "it was for beauty that the world was made." The lives of the
Italian artists, who established a despotism of genius amidst the
dukes and kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal
men in all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own.
If a man can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as shall draw
and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and
inscrutable meaning; — if a man can build a plain cottage with such
symmetry, as to make all the fine palaces look cheap and vulgar;
can take such advantage of Nature, that all her powers serve him;
making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain
for his water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the deco-
rations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.

The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing,
is only a burst of beauty for a few years or a few months, at the
perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly declines. But we remain
lovers of it, only transferring our interest to interior excellence. And
it is not only admirable in singular and salient talents, but also in
the world of manners.

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty,
graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagi-
nation, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still
escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be
handled. Proclus says, "it swims on the light of forms." It is prop-
erly not in the form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts possession,
and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the
north star, would it be as beautiful ? The sea is lovely, but when we
bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagina-
tion and senses cannot be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth
rightly speaks of "a light that never was on sea or land," meaning,
that it was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his
country-women, that

— "half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die."

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cos-
mical quality, or, a power to suggest relation to the whole world,
and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural
feature, — sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone, — has in it some-

BEAUTY 309

what which is not private, but universal, speaks of that central benefit
which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen
men and women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and manners,
which is not of their person and family, but of a humane, catholic,
and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a
largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain
grandeur, like time and justice.

The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of
every thing into every other thing. Facts which had never before left
their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries.
My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors
and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect,
and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a
double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my stove
and pepper-pot a false bottom! I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I
did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle,
and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in per-
ceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no
bare fact or event can ever give. There are no days in life so
memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagina-
tion.

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the
spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of
morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and
whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and
night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful ob-
ject, there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as
much into form bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon,
as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed
the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the
mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another,
has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing
its deep holdings in the frame of things.

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature
or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the
fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners,
or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divin-

310 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

ity, in his approaches, Ufts away mountains of obstruction, and deigns
to draw a truer Une, which the mind knows and owns. This is that
haughty force of beauty, "vis sttperba formce," which the poets praise,
— under calm and precise outHne, the immeasurable and divine:
Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique
sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and the beauty ever in
proportion to the depth of thought. Gross and obscure natures, how-
ever decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor
to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of
truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who has shared
with us the moral sentiment, — her locks must appear to us sublime.
Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable
sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye,
up through fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the
human face and form, signs and tokens of thought and character
in manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of the intellect. Wherever
we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse
in his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on
which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to
the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude and early
expressions of an all-dissolving Unity, — the first stair on the scale to
the temple of the Mind.

ENGLISH TRAITS

CONTENTS

PAGE

First Visit to England 315

Voyage to England 326

Land 331

Race 336

Ability 352

Manners 366

Truth 373

Character 379

Cockayne 387

Wealth 392

Aristocracy 402

Universities 415

Religion 423

Literature 432

The "Times" 447

Stonehenge 453

Personal 462

Result 466

Speech at Manchester 471

ENGLISH TRAITS

(1856)

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 Sun-
day morning; there were few people in the streets; and I remember
the pleasure of that first walk on English ground, with my com-
panion, 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 travellers' criti-
cism, 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 jour-
nals, 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.

315

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The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to hve 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 beHef, 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 im-
patient 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

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 317

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 arrange-
ment 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 courte-
ous, 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 impu-
tation 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, Raffaelle; 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

3l8 ENGLISH TRAITS

with reciting half a dozen hexameter Hnes of JuUus Caesar's! — from
Donatus, he said. He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was
necessary, and undervalued Burke, and undervalued Socrates; desig-
nated 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 with-
out 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 subUme 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 Eng-
lish 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; usu-
ally 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
unforgetable.

From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, and
wrote a note to Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my respects

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 319

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 Uni-
tarianism perfectly well, because he had once been a Unitarian, ahd
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 tetra\ism, and much more,
of which I only caught this, "that the will was that by which a

320 ENGLISH TRAITS

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, stand-
ing, 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 any-
thing 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 pic-
ture-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;

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 321

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 skilful 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 hold-
ing 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 dis-
course. "Blackwood's" was the "sand magazine;" "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

322 ENGLISH TRAITS

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 his-
tory. 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 Stew-
art'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

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 323

without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country. There we
sat down, and talked of the immortaUty 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 super-
ficial 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 cogniz-
ance, but whether there are offences of which the law does not take
cognizance. Sin is what he fears, and how society is to escape with-
out 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,"

324 ENGLISH TRAITS

he said, "in America some vulgarity in manner, but that's not im-
portant. That comes of the pioneer state of things. But I fear they
are too much given to the making of money; and secondly to poli-
tics; 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 gentle-
men, — 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 Con-
gress of stealing spoons!" He was against taking off the tax on news-
papers 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 vis-
ited 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 ardcles 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 prom-
ised to look at it again. Carlyle, he said, wrote most obscurely. He

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 325

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 thou-
sands 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 writ-
ing them. He had just returned from a visit to Stafia, and within
three days had made three sonnets on Fingal's Cave, and was com-
posing 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 re-
ceived 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 «rrj^ia es aei, good to-day
and good forever. He cited the sonnet, "On the feelings of a

326 ENGLISH TRAITS

high-minded Spaniard" which he preferred to any other (I so under-
stood him), and the "Two Voices"; and quoted with evident pleas-
ure, 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 en-
closure 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 wilHng 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. Oif
his own beat, his opinions were of no value. It is not very rare
to find persons loving sympathy and ease, who expiate their de-
parture from the common in one direction by their conformity in
every other.

CHAPTER II

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND

The occasion of my second visit to England was an invitation from
some Mechanics' Institutes in Lancashire and Yorkshire, which sepa-
rately are organized much in the same way as our New England
Lyceums, but, in 1847, had been linked into a "Union," which
embraced twenty or thirty towns and cities, and presently extended
into the middle counties, and northward into Scotland. I was
invited, on liberal terms, to read a series of lectures in them all. The
request was urged with every kind suggestion, and every assurance
of aid and comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND 327

sequel, amply redeemed their word. The remuneration was equiva-
lent to the fees at that time paid in this country for the like services.
At all events, it was sufficient to cover any travelling expenses, and
the proposal offered an excellent opportunity of seeing the interior
of England and Scotland, by means of a home, and a committee of
intelligent friends, awaiting me in every town. I did not go very
willingly. I am not a good traveller, nor have I found that long
journeys yield a fair share of reasonable hours. But the invitadon
was repeated and pressed at a moment of more leisure, and when I
was a little spent by some unusual studies. I wanted a change and
a tonic, and England was proposed to me. Besides, there were at
least, the dread attraction and salutary influences of the sea. So
I took my berth in the packet-ship Washington Irving, and sailed
from Boston on Tuesday, 5th October, 1847.

On Friday, at noon, we had only made one hundred and thirty-
four miles. A nimble Indian would have swum as far; but the
captain affirmed that the ship would show us in time all her paces,
and we crept along through the floating drift of boards, logs, and
chips, which the rivers of Maine and New Brunswick pour into
the sea after a freshet.

At last, on Sunday night, after doing one day's work in four, the
storm came, the winds blew, and we flew before a north-wester,
which strained every rope and sail. The good ship darts through the
water all day, all night, like a fish, quivering with speed, gliding
through liquid leagues, sliding from horizon to horizon. She has
passed Cape Sable; she has reached the Banks; the land-birds are
left; gulls, haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive, and hover around;
no fishermen; she has passed the Banks; left five sail behind her,
far on the edge of the west at sundown, which were far east of us at
morn, — though they say at sea a stern chase is a long race, — and still
we fly for our lives. The shortest sea-line from Boston to Liverpool
is 2850 miles. This a steamer keeps, and saves 150 miles. A sailing
ship can never go in a shorter line than 3000, and usually it is much
longer. Our good master keeps his kites up to the last moment,
studding-sails alow and aloft, and, by incessant straight steering,
never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the law of the ship, —
watch on watch, for advantage and for life. Since the ship was built,

328 ENGLISH TRAITS

it seems, the master never slept but in his day-clothes whilst on.
board. "There are many advantages," says Saadi, "in sea-voyaging,
but security is not one of them." Yet in hurrying over these abysses,
whatever dangers we are running into, we are certainly running out
of the risks of hundreds of miles every day, which have their own
chances of squall, collision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold, and thunder.
Hour for hour, the risk on a steamboat is greater; but the speed is
safety, or, twelve days of danger, instead of twenty-four. Our ship
was registered 750 tons, and weighed perhaps, with all her freight,
1500 tons. The mainmast, from the deck to the top-button, measured
115 feet; the length of the deck, from stem to stern, 155. It is
impossible not to personify a ship; everybody does, in everything
they say: — she behaves well; she minds her rudder; she swims like a
duck; she runs her nose into the water; she looks into a port. Then
that wonderful esprit de corps, by which we adopt into our self-love
everything we touch, makes us all champions of her sailing qualities.

The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one week she has made
1467 miles, and now, at night, seems to hear the steamer behind her,
which left Boston to-day at two, has mended her speed, and is flying
before the gray south wind eleven and a half knots the hour. The
sea-fire shines in her wake, and far around wherever a wave breaks.
I read the hour, ph. 45', on my watch by this Hght. Near the equator,
you can read small print by it; and the mate describes the phosphoric
insects, when taken up in a pail, as shaped like a Carolina potato.

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes and
olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise, and odor are not to be
dispensed with. The floor of your room is sloped at an angle of
twenty or thirty degrees, and I waked every morning with the belief
that some one was tipping up my berth. Nobody likes to be treated
ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of the house, rolled
over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis, and stewing oil. We get used
to these annoyances at last, but the dread of the sea remains longer.
The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-
shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in
ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is
rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery? In
our graveyards we scoop a pit, but this aggressive water opens mile-

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND 329

wide pits and chasms, and makes a mouthful of a fleet. To the
geologist, the sea is the only firmament; the land is in perpetual flux
and change, now blown up like a tumor, now sunk in a chasm,
and the registered observations of a few hundred years find it in a
perpetual tilt, rising and falling. The sea keeps its old level; and
'tis no wonder that the history of our race is so recent, if the roar
of the ocean is silencing our traditions. A rising of the sea, such as
has been observed, say an inch in a century, from east to west on the
land, will bury all the towns, monuments, bones, and knowledge
of mankind, steadily and insensibly. If it is capable of these great
and secular mischiefs, it is quite as ready at private and local damage;
and of this no landsman seems so fearful as the seaman. Such dis-
comfort and such danger as the narratives of the captain and mate
disclose are bad enough as the costly fee we pay for entrance to
Europe; but the wonder is always new that any sane man can be
a sailor. And here, on the second day of our voyage, stepped out a
Uttle boy in his shirt-sleeves, who had hid himself, whilst the ship
was in port, in the bread-closet, having no money, and wishing to
go to England. The sailors have dressed him in Guernsey frock,
with a knife in his belt, and he is cHmbing nimbly about after them,
"likes the work first-rate, and, if the captain will take him, means
now to come back again in the ship." The mate avers that this is
the history of all sailors; nine out of ten are runaway boys; and adds
that all of them are sick of the sea, but stay in it out of pride. Jack
has a life of risks, incessant abuse, and the worst pay. It is a little
better with the mate, and not very much better with the captain.
A hundred dollars a month is reckoned high pay. If sailors were
contented, if they had not resolved again and again not to go to
sea any more, I should respect them.

Of course, the inconveniences and terrors of the sea are not of any
account to those whose minds are preoccupied. The water-laws,
arctic frost, the mountain, the mine, only shatter cockneyism; every
noble activity makes room for itself. A great mind is a good sailor,
as a great heart is. And the sea is not slow in disclosing inestimable
secrets to a good naturalist.

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal
study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and

330 ENGLISH TRAITS

taverns steal from the best economist. Classics which at home are
drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the
transom of a merchant brig. I remember that some of the happiest
and most valuable hours I have owed to books, passed many years
ago, on shipboard. The worst impediment I have found at sea is the
want of light in the cabin.

We found on board the usual cabin library: Basil Hall, Dumas,
Dickens, Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were our sea-gods. Among the
passengers, there was some variety of talent and profession; we
exchanged our experiences, and all learned something. The busiest
talk with leisure and convenience at sea, and sometimes a memorable
fact turns up, which you have long had a vacant niche for, and seize
with the joy of a collector. But, under the best conditions, a voyage
is one of the severest tests to try a man. A college examination is
nothing to it. Sea-days are long, — these lack-lustre, joyless days
which whistled over us; but they were few, — only fifteen, as the
captain counted, sixteen according to me. Reckoned from the time
when we left soundings, our speed was such that the captain drew
the line of his course in red ink on his chart, for the encouragement
or envy of future navigators.

It has been said that the King of England would consult his
dignity by giving audience to foreign ambassadors in the cabin of a
man-of-war. And I think the white path of an Atlantic ship the
right avenue to the palace front of this seafaring people, who for
hundreds of years claimed the strict sovereignty of the sea, and
exacted toll and the striking sail from the ships of all other peoples.
When their privilege was disputed by the Dutch and other junior
marines, on the plea that you could never anchor on the same wave,
or hold property in what was always flowing, the English did not
stick to claim the channel, or bottom of all the main. "As if," said
they, "we contended for the drops of the sea, and not for its situation,
or the bed of those waters. The sea is bounded by his majesty's
empire."

As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This was inevitably the
British side. In every man's thought arises now a new system, Eng-
lish sentiments, English loves and fears, English history and social
modes. Yesterday, every passenger had measured the speed of the

ship by watching the bubbles over the ship's bulwarks. To-day,
instead of bubbles, we measure by Kinsale, Cork, Waterford, and
Ardraore. There lay the green shore of Ireland, Uke some coast of
plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the
curse of eight hundred years we could not discern.

CHAPTER III

Alfieri thought Italy and England the only countries worth living
in; the former, because there nature vindicates her rights, and
triumphs over the evils inflicted by the governments; the latter,
because art conquers nature, and transforms a rude, ungenial land
into a paradise of comfort and plenty. England is a garden. Under
an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they
appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a plough. The
solidity of the structures that compose the towns speaks the industry
of ages. Nothing is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the sea
itself feel the hand of a master. The long habitation of a powerful
and ingenious race has turned every rood of land to its best use, has
found all the capabilities, the arable soil, the quarriable rock, the
highways, the byways, the fords, the navigable waters; and the new
arts of intercourse meet you everywhere; so that England is a huge
phalanstery, where all that man wants is provided within the
precinct. Cushioned and comforted in every manner, the traveller
rides as on a cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers and towns,
through mountains, in tunnels of three or four miles, at near twice
the speed of our trains; and reads quietly the Times newspaper,
which, by its immense correspondence and reporting, seems to
have machinized the rest of the world for his occasion.

The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, Why England
is England ? What are the elements of that power which the English
hold over other nations? If there be one test of national genius
universally accepted, it is success; and if there be one successful
country in the universe for the last millennium, that country is
England.

332 ENGLISH TRAITS

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of actual
nations; and an American has more reasons than another to draw
him to Britain. In all that is done or begun by the Americans towards
right thinking or practice, we are met by a civilization already
settled and overpowering. The culture of the day, the thoughts and
aims of men, are English thoughts and aims. A nation considerable
for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, in the last centuries,
obtained the ascendant, and stamped the knowledge, activity, and
power of mankind with its impress. Those who resist it do not feel
it or obey it less. The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English.
The Turk and Chinese also are making awkward efforts to be
English. The practical common-sense of modern society, the utili-
tarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, rehgion take, is the
natural genius of the British mind. The influence of France is a
constituent of modern civility, but not enough opposed to the English
for the most wholesome effect. The American is only the continua-
tion of the English genius into new conditions, more or less
propitious.

See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, every
biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still English history
and manners. So that a sensible Englishman once said to me, "As
long as you do not grant us copyright, we shall have the teaching
of you."

But we have the same difficulty in making a social or moral
estimate of England, as the sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try
some cause which has agitated the whole community, and on which
everybody finds himself an interested party. Officers, jurors, judges
have all taken sides. England has inoculated all nations with her
civilization, intelligence, and tastes; and, to resist the tyranny and
prepossession of the British element, a serious man must aid himself,
by comparing with it the civilizations of the farthest east and west,
the old Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal standard, if
only by means of the very impatience which English forms are sure
to awaken in independent minds.

Besides, if we will visit London, the present time is the best time,
as some signs portend that it has reached its highest point. It is
observed that the English interest us a little less within a few years;

LAND 333

and hence the impression that the British power has culminated,
is in solstice, or already declining.

As soon as you enter England, which with Wales, is no larger than
the State of Georgia,' this little land stretches by an illusion to the
dimensions of an empire. The innumerable details, the crowded
succession of towns, cities, cathedrals, castles, and great and decorated
estates, the number and power of the trades and guilds, the military
strength and splendor, the multitudes of rich and remarkable people,
the servants and equipages, — all these catching the eye, and never
allowing it to pause, hide all boundaries by the impression of mag-
nificence and endless wealth.

I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and that object
indispensably to be seen, — ^Yes, to see England well needs a hundred
years; for, what they told me was the merit of Sir John Soane's
Museum, in London, — that it was well packed and well saved, — ■
is the merit of England; — it is stuffed full, in all corners and crevices,
with towns, towers, churches, villas, palaces, hospitals, and charity-
houses. In the history of art it is a long way from a cromlech to
York minster; yet all the intermediate steps may still be traced in
this all-preserving island.

The territory has a singular perfection. The climate is warmer
by many degrees than it is entitled to by latitude. Neither hot nor
cold, there is no hour in the whole year when one cannot work.
Here is no winter, but such days as we have in Massachusetts in
November, a temperature which makes no exhausting demand on
human strength, but allows the attainment of the largest stature.
Charles the Second said, "it invited men abroad more days in the
year and more hours in the day than another country." Then Eng-
land has all the materials of a working country except wood. The
constant rain, — a rain with every tide in some parts of the island, —
keeps its multitude of rivers full, and brings agricultural production
up to the highest point. It has plenty of water, of stone, of potter's
clay, of coal, of salt, and of iron. The land naturally abounds with
game; immense heaths and downs are paved with quails, grouse, and
woodcock, and the shores are animated by water birds. The rivers
and the surrounding sea spawn with fish; there are salmon for the

'Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equivalent for the area of Scotland.

334 ENGLISH TRAITS

rich, and sprats and herrings for the poor. In the northern lochs
the herring are in innumerable shoals; at one season, the country
people say, the lakes contain one part water and two parts fish.

The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is the darkness
of its sky. The night and day are too nearly of a color. It strains
the eyes to read and to write. Add the coal smoke. In the manufac-
turing towns, the fine soot or blackj darken the day, give white
sheep the color of black sheep, discolor the human saliva, contami-
nate the air, poison many plants, and corrode the monuments and
buildings.

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and some-
times justifies the epigram on the climate by an English wit, "in a
fine day, looking up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one."
A gentleman in Liverpool told me that he found he could do without
a fire in his parlor about one day in the year. It is, however, pre-
tended that the enormous consumption of coal in the island is also
felt in modifying the general climate.

Factitious climate, factitious position. England resembles a ship
in its shape, and, if it were one, its best admiral could not have
worked it, or anchored it in a more judicious or effective posidon.
Sir John Herschel said, "London was the centre of the terrene globe."
The shopkeeping nation, to use a shop word, has a good stand. The
old Venetians pleased themselves with the flattery that Venice was in
45°, midway between the poles and the line; as if that were an
imperial centrality. Long of old, the Greeks fancied Delphi the
navel of the earth, in their favorite mode of fabling the earth to be
an animal. The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have
seen a kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Phila-
delphia was in the same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same
belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was
drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure,
under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But when
carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow
failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals.

But England is anchored at the side of Europe, and right in the
heart of the modern world. The sea, which, according to Virgil's
famous line, divided the poor Britons utterly from the world, proved

LAND 335

to be the ring of marriage with all nations. It is not down in the
books, — it is written only in the geologic strata, — that fortunate day
when a wave of the German Ocean burst the old isthmus which
joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and gave to this fragment of
Europe its impregnable sea wall, cutting off an island of eight
hundred miles in length, with an irregular breadth reaching to
three hundred miles; a territory large enough for independence
enriched with every seed of national power, so near, that it can see
the harvests of the continent; and so far, that who would cross the
strait must be an expert mariner, ready for tempests. As America,
Europe, and Asia he, these Britons have precisely the best commercial
position in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for all the
goods they can manufacture. And to make these advantages avail,
the river Thames must dig its spacious oudet to the sea from the
heart of the kingdom, giving road and landing to innumerable
ships, and all the conveniency to trade, that a people so skilful and
sufficient in economizing water-front by docks, warehouses, and
lighters required. When James the First declared his purpose of
punishing London by removing his Court, the Lord Mayor replied,
"that, in removing his royal presence from his lieges, they hoped
he would leave them the Thames."

In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of Europe, having
plain, forest, marsh, river, seashore; mines in Cornwall; caves in
Matlock and Derbyshire; dehcious landscape in Dovedale, delicious
sea-view at Tor Bay, Highlands in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales;
and, in Westmoreland and Cumberland, a pocket Switzerland, in
which the lakes and mountains are on a sufficient scale to fill the eye
and touch the imagination. It is a nation conveniently small. Fonte-
nelle thought that nature had sometimes a litde affectation; and
there is such an artificial completeness in this nation of artificers, as
if there were a design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger
Birmingham. Nature held counsel with herself, and said, "My
Romans are gone. To build my new empire, I will choose a rude
race, all masculine, with brutish strength. I will not grudge a com-
petition of the roughest males. Let buffalo gore buffalo and the
pasture to the strongest! For I have work that requires the best will
and sinew. Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow, to

336 ENGLISH TRAITS

keep that will alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin the people from
others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give them
markets on every side. Long time I will keep them on their feet,
by poverty, border-wars, seafaring, sea-risks, and the stimulus of
gain. An island, — but not so large, the people not so many, as to
glut the great markets and depress one another, but proportioned
to the size of Europe and the continents."

With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil influence
radiate. It is a singular coincidence to this geographic centrality,
the spiritual centrality, which Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the
people. "For the English nation, the best of them are in the centre
of all Christians, because they have interior intellectual light. This
appears conspicuously in the spiritual world. This light they derive
from the liberty of speaking and writing, and thereby of thinking."

CHAPTER IV

An ingenious anatomist has written a book* to prove that races
are imperishable, but nations are pliant political constructions, easily
changed or destroyed. But this writer did not found his assumed
races on any necessary law, disclosing their ideal or metaphysical
necessity; nor did he, on the other hand, count with precision the
existing races, and settle the true bounds; a point of nicety, and the
popular test of the theory. The individuals at the extremes of diver-
gence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to the lapdog.
Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you
cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends. Hence every
writer makes a different count. Blumenbach reckons five races;
Humboldt three; and Mr. Pickering, who lately, in our Exploring
Expedition, thinks he saw all kinds of men that can be on the planet,
makes eleven.

The British Empire is reckoned to contain 222,000,000 souls, —
perhaps a fifth of the population of the globe; and to comprise a
territory of 5,000,000 square miles. So far have British people pre-
^The Races, a Fragment. By Robert Knox. London, 1850.

RACE 337

dominated. Perhaps forty of these millions are of British stock.
Add the United States of America, which reckon, exclusive of
slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a territory of 3,000,000 square miles,
and in which the foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly
assimilated, and you have a population of English descent and
language of 60,000,000, and governing a population of 245,000,000
souls.

The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a half mil-
hons in the home countries. What makes this census important is
the quality of the units that compose it. They are free forcible men,
in a country where life is safe, and has reached the greatest value.
They give the bias to the current age; and that, not by chance or by
mass, but by their character, and by the number of individuals among
them of personal ability. It has been denied that the English have
genius. Be it as it may, men of vast intellect have been born on their
soil, and they have made or applied the principal inventions. They
have sound bodies, and supreme endurance in war and in labor.
The spawning force of the race has sufficed to the colonization of
great parts of the world; yet it remains to be seen whether they can
make good the exodus of millions from Great Britain, amounting,
in 1852, to more than a thousand a day. They have assimilating force,
since they are imitated by their foreign subjects; and they are still
aggressive and propagandist, enlarging the dominion of their arts
and liberty. Their laws are hospitable, and slavery does not exist
under them. V/hat oppression exists is incidental and temporary;
their success is not sudden or fortunate, but they have maintained
constancy and self-equality for many ages.

Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause ? Men hear
gladly of the power of blood or race. Everybody likes to know that
his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth,
as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but
to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.

We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like that law of
physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or essential organ is found
in one healthy individual, the same part or organ may be found in or
near the same place in its congener; and we look to find in the son
every mental and moral property that existed in the ancestor. In

338 ENGLISH TRAITS

race, it is not the broad shoulders, or htheness, or stature that give
advantage, but a symmetry that reaches as far as to the wit. Then
the miracle and renown begin. Then first we care to examine the
pedigree, and copy heedf ully the training, — what food they ate, what
nursing, school, and exercises they had, which resulted in this
mother-wit, delicacy of thought, and robust wisdom. How came
such men as King Alfred, and Roger Bacon, WiUiam of Wykeham,
Walter Raleigh, Phihp Sidney, Isaac Newton, WiUiam Shakspeare,
George Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane, to
exist here ? What made these delicate natures ? was it the air ? was it
the sea? was it the parentage? For it is certain that these men are
samples of their contemporaries. The hearing ear is always found
close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter
anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around
him.

It is a race, is it not ? that puts the hundred miUions of India under
the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails
much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are CathoUcs,
and aU Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and
Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence
Ln the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has
preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro
is of appalhng importance. The French in Canada, cut o£E from
all intercourse with the parent people, have held their national traits.
I chanced to read Tacitus "on the Manners of the Germans," not
long since, in Missouri, and the heart of IlUnois, and I found abun-
dant points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian
forest, and our Hoosiers, Suc\ers, and Badgers of the American
woods.

But whilst race works immortally to keep its own, it is resisted
by other forces. Civilization is a reagent, and eats away the old traits.
The Arabs of to-day are the Arabs of Pharaoh; but the Briton of
to-day is a very different person from Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each
religious sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a
face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An EngUshman will pick
out a dissenter by his manners. Trades and professions carve their
own lines on face and form. Certain circumstances of English Ufe

RACE 339

are not less eflfective; as, personal liberty; plenty of food; good ale
and mutton; open market, or good wages for every kind of labor?
high bribes to talent and skill; the island life, or the million oppor-
tunities and outlets for expanding and misplaced talent; readiness
of combination among themselves for politics or for business; strikes;
and sense of superiority founded on habit, of victory in labor and in
war; and the appetite for superiority grows by feeding.

It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race. Credence is a
main element. 'Tis said that the views of nature held by any people
determine all their institutions. Whatever influences add to mental
or moral faculty take men out of nationality, as out of other condi-
tions, and make the national life a culpable compromise.

These limitations of the formidable doctrine of race suggest others
which threaten to undermine it, as not sufficiently based. The fixity
or inconvertibleness of races as we see them is a weak argument for
the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is
a point to the duration in which nature has wrought. Any the least
and solitariest fact in our natural history, such as the melioration
of fruits and of animal stocks, has the worth of a power in the
opportunity of geologic periods. Moreover, though we flatter the
self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our
experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange
resemblances meet us everywhere. It need not puzzle us that
Malay and Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar, should
mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human
form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that
some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas.

The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth, a jelly, or a
straight worm. As the scale mounts, the organizations become
complex. We are piqued with pure descent, but nature loves inocu-
lation. A child blends in his face the faces of both parents, and some
feature from every ancestor whose face hangs on the wall. The best
nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as effecting
a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer of nations.

The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. Every-
thing English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The
language is mixed; the names of men are of different nations, —

340 ENGLISH TRAITS

three languages, three or four nations; — the currents of thought
are counter: contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and
dead conservatism; worldwide enterprise, and devoted use and wont;
aggressive freedom and hospitable law, with bitter class-legislation;
a people scattered by their wars and affairs over the face of the
whole earth, and homesick to a man; a country of extremes, — dukes
and chartists. Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers; noth-
ing can be praised in it without damning exceptions, and nothing
denounced without salvos of cordial praise.

Neither do this people appear to be of one stem; but collectively a
better race than any from which they are derived. Nor is it easy
to trace it home to its original seats. Who can call by right names
what races are in Britain? Who can trace them historically? Who
can discriminate them anatomically, or metaphysically?

In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction on the historical
question of race, and, — come of whatever disputable ancestry, — the
indisputable Englishman before me, himself very well marked, and
nowhere else to be found, — I fancied I could leave quite aside the
choice of a tribe as his lineal progenitors. Defoe said in his wrath,
"the Englishman was the mud of all races." I incline to the belief
that, as water, lime, and sand make mortar, so certain temperaments
marry well, and, by well-managed contrarieties, develop as drastic
a character as the English. On the whole, it is not so much a history
of one or of certain tribes of Saxons, or Frisians, coming from one
place, and genetically identical, as it is an anthology of temperaments
out of them all. Certain temperaments suit the sky and soil of
England, say eight or ten or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred
pear trees, eight or ten suit the soil of an orchard, and thrive, whilst
all the unadapted temperaments die out.

The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nation-
alities, that there needs sea-room and land-room to unfold the
varieties of talent and character. Perhaps the ocean serves as a gal-
vanic battery to distribute acids at one pole, and alkalies at the
other. So England tends to accumulate her liberals in America, and
her conservatives at London. The Scandinavians in her race still
hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton
in the blood hugs the homestead still.

RACE 341

Again, as if to intensate the influences that are not of race, what
we think of when we talk of Enghsh traits really narrows itself to
a small district. It excludes Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales, and
reduces itself at last to London, that is, to those who come and go
thither. The portraits that hang on the walls in the Academy Exhi-
bition at London, the figures in Punch's drawings of the public men,
or of the club-houses, the prints in the shop windows, are distinctive
English, and not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish; but 'tis a
very restricted nationality. As you go north into the manufacturing
and agricultural districts, and to the population that never travels,
as you go into Yorkshire, as you enter Scotland, the world's English-
man is no longer found. In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all
grandeur of mien and manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness
appear; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked, and a
coarseness of manners; and, among the intellectual, is the insanity
of dialectics. In Ireland are the same climate and soil as in England,
but less food, no right relation to the land, political dependence,
small tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race.

These queries concerning ancestry and blood may be well allowed,
for there is no prosperity that seems more to depend on the kind of
man than British prosperity. Only a hardy and wise people could
have made this small territory great. We say, in a regatta or yacht-
race, that if the boats are anywhere nearly matched, it is the man that
wins. Put the best sailing master into either boat, and he will win.

Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of unbroken traditions,
though vague, and losing themselves in fable. The traditions have
got footing, and refused to be disturbed. The kitchen-clock is more
convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category,
as we do by the Linnaean classification, for convenience, and not as
exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the
best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as
precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.

I found plenty of well-marked English types, the ruddy com-
plexion, fair and plump, robust men, with faces cut like a die, and
a strong island speech and accent; a Norman type, with a com-
placency that belongs to that constitution. Others, who might be
Americans, for anything that appeared in their complexion or form:

342 ENGLISH TRAITS

and their speech was much less marked, and their thought much
less bound. We will call them Saxons. Then the Roman has im-
planted his dark complexion in the trinity or quaternity of bloods.

1. The sources from which tradition derives their stock are mainly
three. And, first, they are of the oldest blood of the world, — the
Celtic. Some peoples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the
Greeks ? where the Etrurians ? where the Romans ? But the Celts or
Sidonides are an old family, of whose beginning there is no memory,
and their end is likely to be still more remote in the future; for they
have endurance and productiveness. They planted Britain, and gave
to the seas and mountains names which are poems, and imitate the
pure voices of nature. They are favorably remembered in the oldest
records of Europe. They had no violent feudal tenure, but the hus-
bandman owned the land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly
culture, and a sublime creed. They have a hidden and precarious
genius. They made the best popular literature of the Middle Ages
in the songs of Merlin and the tender and delicious mythology of
Arthur.

2. The English come mainly from the Germans, whom the Rom-
ans found hard to conquer in two hundred and ten years, — say, im-
possible to conquer, — when one remembers the long sequel; a people
about whom, in the old empire, the rumor ran, there was never any
that meddled with them that repented it not.

3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of Narbonnese Gaul,
looked out of a window, and saw a fleet of Northmen cruising in
the Mediterranean. They even entered the port of the town where he
was, causing no small alarm and sudden manning and arming of
his galleys. As they put out to sea again, the emperor gazed long
after them, his eyes bathed in tears. "I am tormented with sorrow,"
he said, "when I foresee the evils they will bring on my posterity."
There was reason for these Xerxes' tears. The men who have built a
ship and invented the rig, — cordage, sail, compass, and pump, — ^the
working in and out of port, have acquired much more than a ship.
Now arm them, and every shore is at their mercy. For, if they have
not numerical superiority where they anchor they have only to sail
a mile or two to find it. Bonaparte's art of war, namely of concen-

RACE 343

trating force on the point of attack, must always be theirs who have
the choice of the battle-ground. Of course they come into the fight
from a higher ground of power than the land-nations; and can en-
gage them on shore with a victorious advantage in the retreat. As
soon as the shores are sufficiently peopled to make piracy a losing
business, the same skill and courage are ready for the service of trade.
The HeimskringlaJ or Sagas of the Kings of Norway, collected
by Snorro Sturleson, is the lUad and Odyssey of English history. Its
portraits, Uke Homer's, are strongly individuaHzed. The Sagas de-
scribe a monarchical republic like Sparta. The government disappears
before the importance of citizens. In Norway, no Persian masses
fight and perish to aggrandize a king, but the actors are bonders or
landholders, every one of whom is named and personally and patro-
nymically described, as the king's friend and companion. A sparse
population gives this high worth to every man. Individuals are
often noticed as very handsome persons, which trait only brings the
story nearer to the English race. Then the solid material interest
predominates, so dear to English understanding, wherein the associ-
ation is logical, between merit and land. The heroes of the Sagas
are not the knights of South Europe. No vaporing of France and
Spain has corrupted them. They are substantial farmers, whom the
rough times have forced to defend their properties. They have
weapons which they use in a determined manner, by no means for
chivalry, but for their acres. They are people considerably advanced
in rural arts, living amphibiously on a rough coast, and drawing
half their food from the sea, and half from the land. They have
herds of cows, and malt, wheat, bacon, butter, and cheese. They
fish in the fiord, and hunt the deer. A king among these farmers
has a varying power, sometimes not exceeding the authority of a
sheriff. A king was maintained much as, in some of our country
districts, a winter schoolmaster is quartered, a week here, a week
there, and a fortnight on the next farm, — on all the farmers in rota-
tion. This the king calls going into guest-quarters; and it was the
only way in which, in a poor country, a poor king, with many re-
tainers, could be kept alive, when he leaves his own farm to collect
his dues through the kingdom.

* Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq. London, 1844.

344 ENGLISH TRAITS

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good
sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But they have a
singular turn for homicide; their chief end of man is to murder, or
to be murdered; oars, scythes, harpoons, crowbars, peatknives, and
hayforks are tools valued by them all the more for their charming
aptitude for assassinations. A pair of kings, after dinner, will divert
themselves by thrusting each his sword through the other's body,
as did Yngve and Alf. Another pair ride out on a morning for a
frolic, and, finding no weapon near, will take the bits out of their
horses' mouths, and crush each other's heads with them, as did
Alric and Eric. The sight of a tent-cord or a cloak-string puts them
on hanging somebody, a wife, or a husband, or, best of all, a king.
If a farmer has so much as a hayfork, he sticks it into a King Dag.
King Ingiald finds it vastly amusing to burn up half a dozen kings
in a hall, after getting them drunk. Never was poor gentleman so
surfeited with life, so furious to be rid of it, as the Northman. If he
cannot pick any other quarrel, he will get himself comfortably gored
by a bull's horns, like Egil, or slain by a landslide, like the agricul-
tural King Onund. Odin died in his bed, in Sweden; but it was
a proverb of ill condition, to die the death of old age. King Hake
of Sweden cuts and slashes in battle, as long as he can stand, then
orders his war-ship, loaded with his dead men and their weapons,
to be taken out to sea, the tiller shipped, and the sails spread; being
left alone, he sets fire to some tarwood, and lies down contented on
deck. The wind blew off the land, the ship flew burning in clear
flame, out between the islets into the ocean, and there was the right
end of King Hake.

The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical; the later are of a
noble strain. History rarely yields us better passages than the con-
versation between King Sigurd the Crusader and King Eystein, his
brother, on their respective merits, — one, the soldier, and the other,
a lover of the arts of peace.

But the reader of the Norman history must steel himself by hold-
ing fast the remote compensations which result from animal vigor.
As the old fossil world shows that the first steps of reducing the chaos
were confided to saurians and other huge and horrible animals, so

RACE 345

the foundations of the new civiHty were to be laid by the most
savage men.

The Normans came out of France into England worse men than
they went into it, one hundred and sixty years before. They had
lost their own language, and learned the Romance or barbarous
Latin of the Gauls; and had acquired, with the language, all the
vices it had names for. The conquest has obtained in the chronicles
the name of the "memory of sorrow." Twenty thousand thieves
landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were
greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates.
They were all alike, they took everything they could carry, they
burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything Eng-
lish was wrought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion
of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing
boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster
conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the
swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally
resembled.

England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the tenth and
eleventh centuries, and was the receptacle into which all the mettle
of that strenuous population was poured. The continued draught
of the best men in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to these piratical
expeditions, exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears much
fruit when young, and these have been second-rate powers ever since.
The power of the race migrated, and left Norway void. King Olaf
said, "When King Harold, my father, went westward to England,
the chosen men in Norway followed him: but Norway was so
emptied then, that such men have not since been to find in the
country, nor especially such a leader as King Harold was for wis-
dom and bravery."

It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, in 1801, the British
government sent Nelson to bombard the Danish forts in the Sound;
and, in 1807, Lord Cathcart, at Copenhagen, took the entire Danish
fleet, as it lay in the basins, and all the equipments from the Arsenal,
and carried them to England. Konghelle, the town where the kings
of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were wont to meet, is now rented
to a private English gentleman for a hunting ground.

346 ENGLISH TRAITS

It took many generations to trim, and comb, and f)er£ume the
first boat-load of Norse pirates into royal highnesses and most noble
Knights of the Garter: but every sparkle of ornament dates back to
the Norse boat. There will be time enough to mellow this strength
into civility and religion. It is a medical fact that the children of the
bhnd see; the children of felons have a healthy conscience. Many a
mean, dastardly boy is, at the age of puberty, transformed in a
serious and generous youth.

The mildness of the following ages has not quite effaced these
traits of Odin; as the rudiment of a structure matured in the tiger
is said to be still found unabsorbed in the Caucasian man. The
nation has a tough, acrid, animal nature, which centuries of church-
ing and civihzing have not been able to sweeten. Alfieri said, "The
crimes of Italy were the proof of the superiority of the stock;" and
one may say of England that this watch moves on a splinter of
adamant. The English uncultured are a brutal nation. The crimes
recorded in their calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way
of cold malignity. Dear to the English heart is a fair standup fight.
The brutality of the manners in the lower class appears in the boxing,
bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of executions, and in the readiness
for a set-to in the streets, delightful to the English of all classes. The
costermongers of London streets hold cowardice in loathing: — "We
must work our lists well; we are all handy with our fists." The
pubhc schools are charged with being bear-gardens of brutal strength,
and are liked by the people for that cause. The fagging is a trait
of the same quality. Medwin, in the Life of Shelley, relates that,
at a military school, they rolled up a young man in a snowball, and
left him so in his room, while the other cadets went to church; —
and crippled him for life. They have retained impressment, deck-
flogging, army-flogging, and school-flogging. Such is the ferocity of
the army discipline, that a soldier sentenced to flogging, sometimes
prays that his sentence may be commuted to death. Flogging, ban-
ished from the armies of Western Europe, remains here by the sanc-
tion of the Duke of Wellington. The right of the husband to sell
the wife has been retained down to our times. The Jews have been
the favorite victims of royal and popular persecution. Henry III.
mortgaged all the Jews in the kingdom to his brother, the Earl

RACE 347

of Cornwall, as security for money which he borrowed. The torture
of criminals, and the rack for extorting evidence, were slowly dis-
used. Of the criminal statutes, Sir Samuel Romilly said, "I have
examined the codes of all nations, and ours is the worst, and worthy
of the Anthropophagi." In the last session, the House of Commons
was hstening to details of flogging and torture pracdsed in the jails.

As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a hardy people
into it, they could not help becoming the sailors and factors of the
globe. From childhood, they dabbled in water, they swum hke
fishes, their playthings were boats. In the case of the shifvmoney,
the judges delivered it for law, that "England being an island, the
very midland shires therein are all to be accounted maritime;" and
Fuller adds, "the genius even of landlocked coundes driving the
nadves with a maritime dexterity." As early as the conquest, it is
remarked in explanation of the wealth of England, that its merchants
trade to all countries.

The EngHsh, at the present day, have great vigor of body and
endurance. Other countrymen look sHght and undersized beside
them, and invalids. They are bigger men than the Americans. I sup-
pose a hundred English taken at random out of the street, would
weigh a fourth more than so many Americans. Yet, I am told, the
skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy and handsome; at
least, the whole bust is well formed; and there is a tendency to stout
and powerful frames. I remarked the stoutness, on my first landing
at Liverpool; porter, drayman, coachman, guard, — ^what substantial,
respectable, grandfatherly figures, with costume and manners to
suit. The American has arrived at the old mansion-house, and finds
himself among uncles, aunts, and grandsires. The pictures on the
chimney-tiles of his nursery were pictures of these people. Here they
are in the identical costumes and air which so took him.

It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky, and the women
have that disadvantage, — few tall, slender figures of flowing shapes,
but stunted and thickset persons. The French say that the EngUsh
women have two left hands. But, in all ages, they are a handsome
race. The bronze monuments of crusaders lying cross-legged, in
the Temple Church at London, and those in Worcester and in Salis-
bury Cathedrals, which are seven hundred years old, are of the same

34^ ENGLISH TRAITS

type as the best youthful heads of men now in England; — please by
beauty of the same character, an expression blending good nature,
valor, and refinement, and, mainly, by that uncorrupt youth in the
face of manhood, which is daily seen in the streets of London.

Both branches of the Scandinavian race are distinguished for
beauty. The anecdote of the handsome captives which Saint Gregory
found at Rome, a. d. 600, is matched by the testimony of the Norman
chroniclers, five centuries later, who wondered at the beauty and
long flowing hair of the young Enghsh captives. Meantime, the
Heimskringla has frequent occasion to speak of the personal beauty
of its heroes. When it is considered what humanity, what resources
of mental and moral power, the traits of the blond race betoken, — its
accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch, wherein the old
mineral force shall be subjugated at last by humanity, and shall
plough in its furrow henceforward. It is not a final race, once a crab
always a crab, but a race with a future.

On the Enghsh face are combined decision and nerve, with the
fair complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid aspect. Hence the
love of truth, hence the sensibility, the fine perception, and poetic
construction. The fair Saxon man, with open front, and honest
meaning, domestic, affectionate, is not the wood out of which can-
nibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made, but he is moulded for law,
lawful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of children, for colleges,
churches, charities, and colonies.

They are rather manly than warlike. When the war is over, the
mask falls from the affectionate and domestic tastes, which make
them women in kindness. This union of qualities is fabled in their
national legend of Beauty and the Beast, or long before, in the Greek
legend of Hermaphrodite. The two sexes are co-present in the Eng-
lish mind. I apply to Britannia, queen of seas and colonies, the
words in which her latest novelist portrays his heroine: "She is as
mild as she is game, and as game as she is mild." The English de-
light in the antagonism which combines in one person the extremes
of courage and tenderness. Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his
love to Lord Collingwood, and, like an innocent schoolboy that goes
to bed, says, "Kiss me. Hardy," and turns to sleep. Lord Colling-
wood, his comrade, was of a nature the most affectionate and

RACE 349

domestic. Admiral Rodney's figure approached to delicacy and
effeminacy, and he declared himself very sensible to fear, which he
surmounted only by considerations of honor and public duty. Claren-
don says, the Duke of Buckingham was so modest and gentle, that
some courtiers attempted to put affronts on him, until they found
that this modesty and effeminacy was only a mask for the most
terrible determination. And Sir James Parry said, the other day, of
Sir John FrankUn, that, "if he found Wellington Sound open, he
explored it; for he was a man who never turned his back on a danger,
yet of that tenderness, that he would not brush away a mosquito."
Even for their highwaymen the same virtue is claimed, and Robin
Hood comes described to us as mitissimus prcedonum, the gentlest
thief. But they know where their wardogs lie. Cromwell, Blake,
Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson, and Wellington are not to be trifled
with, and the brutal strength which hes at the bottom of society,
the animal ferocity of the quays and cockpits, the bullies of the
costermongers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials, and Spitalfields, they
know how to wake up.

They have a vigorous health, and last well into middle and old
age. The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear
skin, a peachbloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over
the island. They use a plentiful and nutritious diet. The operative
cannot subsist on water-cresses. Beef, mutton, wheatbread, and malt-
liquors are universal among the first-class laborers. Good feeding
is a chief point of national pride among the vulgar, and, in their
caricatures, they represent the Frenchman as a poor, starved body.
It is curious that Tacitus found the English beer already in use
among the Germans: "They make from barley or wheat a drink
corrupted into some resemblance to wine." Lord Chief Justice For-
tescue, in Henry VI.'s time, says, "The inhabitants of England drink
no water, unless at certain times, on a religious score, and by way
of penance." The extremes of poverty and ascetic penance, it would
seem, never reach cold water in England. Wood, the antiquary, in
describing the poverty and maceration of Father Lacey, an English
Jesuit, does not deny him beer. He says, "His bed was under a
thatching, and the way to it up a ladder; his fare was coarse; his
drink, of a penny a gawn, or gallon."

350 ENGLISH TRAITS

They have more constitutional energy than any other people.
They think, with Henri Quatre, that manly exercises are the founda-
tion of that elevation of mind w^hich gives one nature ascendant
over another; or, with the Arabs, that the days spent in the chase
are not counted in the length of life. They box, run, shoot, ride,
row, and sail from pole to pole. They eat, and drink, and live jolly
in the open air, putting a bar of solid sleep between day and day.
They walk and ride as fast as they can, their head bent forward,
as if urged on some pressing affair. The French say that Englishmen
in the street always walk straight before them, like mad dogs. Men
and women walk with infatuation. As soon as he can handle a gun,
hunting is the fine art of every Englishman of condition. They are
the most voracious people of prey that ever existed. Every season
turns out the aristocracy into the country, to shoot and fish. The
more vigorous run out of the island to Europe, to America, to Asia,
to Africa, and Australia, to hunt with fury by gun, by trap, by har-
poon, by lasso; with dog, with horse, with elephant, or with drome-
dary, all the game that is in nature. These men have written the
game-books of all countries, as Hawker, Scrope, Murray, Herbert,
Maxwell, Gumming, and a host of travellers. The people at home
are addicted to boxing, running, leaping, and rowing matches.

I suppose, the dogs and horses must be thanked for the fact that
the men have muscles almost as tough and supple as their own. If
in every efficient man there is first a fine animal, in the English race
it is of the best breed, a wealthy, juicy, broad-chested creature,
steeped in ale and good cheer, and a little overloaded by his flesh.
Men of animal nature rely, like animals, on their instincts. The
Enghshman associates well with dogs and horses. His attachment
to the horse arises from the courage and address required to manage
it. The horse finds out who is afraid of it, and does not disguise
its opinion. Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians like the
company of horses better than the company of professors. I suppose
the horses are better company for them. The horse has more uses
than Buflon noted. If you go into the streets, every driver in 'bus
or dray is a bully, and, if I wanted a good troop of soldiers I should
recruit among the stables. Add a certain degree of refinement to

RACE 351

the vivacity of these riders, and you obtain the precise quality which
makes the men and women of poUte society formidable.

They come honestly by their horsemanship, with Hengst and
Horsa for their Saxon founders. The other branch of their race
had been Tartar nomads. The horse was all their wealth. The chil-
dren were fed on mares' milk. The pastures of Tartary were still
remembered by the tenacious practice of the Norsemen to eat horse-
flesh at religious feasts. In the Danish invasions, the marauders
seized upon horses where they landed, and were at once converted
into a body of expert cavalry.

At one time this skill seems to have declined. Two centuries ago
the English horse never performed any eminent service beyond the
seas; and the reason assigned was that the genius of the English
hath always more inclined them to foot-service, as pure and proper
manhood, without any mixture; whilst, in a victory on horseback,
the credit ought to be divided betwixt the man and his horse. But
in two hundred years a change has taken place. Now, they boast
that they understand horses better than any people in the world, and
that their horses are become their second selves.

"William the Conqueror being," says Camden, "better affected to
beasts than to men, imposed heavy fines and punishments on those
that should meddle with his game." The Saxon Chronicle says,
"He loved the tall deer as if he were their father." And rich Eng-
lishmen have followed his example, according to their abiHty, ever
since, in encroaching on the tillage and commons with their game-
preserves. It is a proverb in England that it is safer to shoot a man
than a hare. The severity of the game-laws certainly indicates an
extravagant sympathy of the nation with horses and hunters. The
gentlemen are always on horseback, and have brought horses to an
ideal perfection, — the English racer is a factitious breed. A score or
two of mounted gentlemen may frequently be seen running like
centaurs down a hill nearly as steep as the roof of a house. Every
inn-room is lined with pictures of races; telegraphs communicate,
every hour, tidings of the heats from Newmarket and Ascot: and
the House of Commons adjourns over the "Derby Day."

352 ENGLISH TRAITS

CHAPTER V

The Saxon and the Northman are both Scandinavians, History
does not allow us to fix the limits of the application of these names
with any accuracy; but from the residence of a portion of these
people in France, and from some effect of that powerful soil on
their blood and manners, the Norman has come popularly to repre-
sent in England the aristocratic, — and the Saxon the democratic
principle. And though, I doubt not, the nobles are of both tribes,
and the workers of both, yet we are forced to use the names a little
mythically, one to represent the worker, and the other the enjoyer.

The island was a prize for the best race. Each of the dominant
races tried its fortune in turn. The Phoenician, the Celt, and the
Goth had already got in. The Roman came, but in the very day
when his fortune culminated. He looked in the eyes of a new people
that was to supplant his own. He disembarked his legions, erected
his camps and towers, — presently he heard bad news from Italy, and
worse and worse, every year; at last, he made a handsome compli-
ment of roads and walls, and departed. But the Saxon seriously
settled in the land, builded, tilled, fished, and traded, with German
truth and adhesiveness. The Dane came, and divided with him.
Last of all, the Norman, or French-Dane, arrived, and formally con-
quered, harried, and ruled the kingdom. A century later, it came
out that the Saxon had the most bottom and longevity, had managed
to make the victor speak the language and accept the law and usage
of the victim; forced the baron to dictate Saxon terms to Norman
kings; and, step by step, got all the essential securities of civil liberty
invented and confirmed. The genius of the race and the genius
of the place conspired to this effect. The island is lucrative to free
labor, but not worth possession on other terms. The race was so
intellectual, that a feudal or military tenure could not last longer
than the war. The power of the Saxon-Danes so thoroughly beaten
in the war that the name of English and villein were synonymous,
yet so vivacious as to extort charters from the kings, stood on the
strong personality of these people. Sense and economy must rule in

ABILITY 353

a world which is made of sense and economy, and the banker, widi
his seven per cent, drives the earl out of his castle. A nobility of
soldiers cannot keep down a commonalty of shrewd scientific per-
sons. What signifies a pedigree of a hundred links, against a cotton-
spinner with steam in his mill; or, against a company of broad-
shouldered Liverpool merchants, for whom Stephenson and Brunei
are contriving locomotives and a tubular bridge?

These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They have the taste for
toil, a distaste for pleasure or repose, and the telescopic appreciation
of distant gain. They are the wealthmakers, — and by dint of mental
faculty, which has its own conditions. The Saxon works after liking,
or, only for himself; and to set him at work, and to begin to draw
his monstrous values out of barren Britain, all dishonor, fret, and
barrier must be removed, and then his energies begin to play.

The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by Trolls, — a kind
of goblin men, with vast power of work and skilful production, —
divine stevedores, carpenters, reapers, smiths, and masons, swift to
reward every kindness done them, with gifts of gold and silver. In
all English history, this dream comes to pass. Certain Trolls or
working brains, under the names of Alfred, Bede, Caxton, Bracton,
Camden, Drake, Selden, Dugdale, Newton, Gibbon, Brindley, Watt,
Wedgwood, dwell in the troll-mounts of Britain, and turn the sweat
of their face to power and renown.

If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody landed on this spell-
bound island with impunity. The enchantments of barren shingle
and rough weather transformed every adventurer into a laborer.
Each vagabond that arrived bent his neck to the yoke of gain, or
found the air too tense for him. The strong survived, the weaker
went to the ground. Even the pleasure-hunters and sots of England
are of a tougher texture. A hard temperature had been formed by
Saxon and Saxon-Dane, and such of these French or Normans as
could reach it were naturalized in every sense.

All the admirable expedients or means hit upon in England must
be looked at as growths or irresistible offshoots of the expanding
mind of the race. A man of that brain thinks and acts thus; and
his neighbor, being afflicted with the same kind of brain, though he
is rich, and called a baron, or a duke, thinks the same thing, and is

354 ENGLISH TRAITS

ready to allow the justice of the thought and act in his retainer or
tenant, though sorely against his baronial or ducal will.

The island was renowned in antiquity for its breed of mastiffs, so
fierce that, when their teeth were set, you must cut their heads off
to part them. The man was like his dog. The people have that
nervous bilious temperament, which is known by medical men to
resist every means employed to make its possessor subservient to the
will of others. The English game is main force to main force, the
planting of foot to foot, fair play and open field, — a rough tug with-
out trick or dodging, till one or both come to pieces. King Ethel-
wald spoke the language of his race, when he planted himself at
Wimborne, and said, "he would do one of two things, or there Hve,
or there lie." They hate craft and subtlety. They neither poison, nor
waylay, nor assassinate; and when they have pounded each other
to a poultice, they will shake hands and be friends for the remainder
of their lives.

You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, at country fairs,
at the hustings, and in Parliament. No artifice, no breach of truth
and plain dealing, — not so much as secret ballot, is sufifered in the
island. In ParUament, the tactics of the opposition is to resist every
step of the government, by a pitiless attack: and in a bargain, no
prospect of advantage is so dear to the merchant, as the thought of
being tricked is mortifying.

Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles and James who won the
sea-fight of Scanderoon, was a model Englishman in his day. "His
person was handsome and gigantic, he had so graceful elocution
and noble address that, had he been dropt out of the clouds in any
part of the world, he would have made himself respected: he was
skilled in six tongues, and master of arts and arms."^ Sir Kenelm
wrote a book, "Of Bodies and of Souls," in which he propounds
that "Syllogisms do breed or rather are all the variety of man's life.
They are the steps by which we walk in all our businesses. Man,
as he is man, doth nothing else but weave such chains. Whatsoever
he doth, swarving from this work, he doth as deficient from the
nature of man: and, if he do aught beyond this, by breaking out into
divers sorts of exterior actions, he findeth, nevertheless, in this linked

^ Antony Wood.

ABILITY 355

sequel of simple discourses, the art, the cause, the rule, the bounds,
and the model of it."^

There spoke the genius of the English people. There is a necessity
on them to be logical. They would hardly greet the good that did
not logically fall, — as if it excluded their own merit, or shook their
understandings. They are jealous of minds that have much facility
of association, from an instinctive fear that the seeing many relations
to their thought might impair this serial continuity and lucrative
concentration. They are impatient of genius, or of minds addicted
to contemplation, and cannot conceal their contempt for saUies of
thought, however lawful, whose steps they cannot count by their
wonted rule. Neither do they reckon better a syllogism that ends in
syllogism. For they have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is a logic
that brings salt to soup, hammer to nail, oar to boat, the logic of
cooks, carpenters, and chemists, following the sequence of nature,
and one on which words make no impression. Their mind is not
dazzled by its own means, but locked and bolted to results. They
love men who, like Samuel Johnson, a doctor in the schools, would
jump out of his syllogism the instant his major proposition was in
danger, to save that, at all hazards. The practical vision is spacious,
and they can hold many threads without entangling them. All the
steps they orderly take; but with the high logic of never confounding
the minor and major proposition; keeping their eye on their aim, in
all the complicity and delay incident to the several series of means
they employ. There is room in their minds for this and that, — a
science of degrees. In the courts, the independence of the judges and
the loyalty of the suitors are equally excellent. In Parliament, they
have hit on that capital invention of freedom, a constitutional oppo-
sition. And when courts and Parliament are both deaf, the plaintiff
is not silenced. Calm, patient, his weapon of defence from year to
year is the obstinate reproduction of the grievance with calculations
and estimates. But, meantime, he is drawing numbers and money
to his opinion, resolved that if all remedy fails, right of revolution
is at the bottom of his charter-box. They are bound to see their
measure carried, and stick to it through ages of defeat.

Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice enters, not

^ Man's Soule, p. 29.

356 ENGLISH TRAITS

so apparent in other races, — a belief in the existence of two sides,
and the resolution to see fair play. There is on every question an
appeal from the assertion of the parties to the proof of what is as-
serted. They are impious in their scepticism of a theory, but kiss
the dust before a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a boxer
in the ring, is it a candidate on the hustings, — the universe of Eng-
lishmen will suspend their judgment until the trial can be had. They
are not to be led by a phrase, they want a working plan, a working
machine, a working constitution, and will sit out the trial, and abide
by the issue, and reject all preconceived theories. In politics they
put blunt questions, which must be answered; who is to pay the
taxes.? what will you do for trade.? what for corn.? what for the

spmner

This singular fairness and its results strike the French with sur-
prise. Philip de Commines says, "Now, in my opinion, among all
the sovereignties I know in the world, that in which the public good
is best attended to, and the least violence exercised on the people,
is that of England." Life is safe, and personal rights; and what is
freedom, without security ? whilst, in France, "fraternity," "equality,"
and "indivisible unity," are names for assassination. Montesquieu
said "England is the freest country in the world. If a man in Eng-
land had as many enemies as hairs on his head, no harm would
happen to him."

Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their realistic logic
or coupling of means to ends, have given them the leadership of
the modern world. Montesquieu said, "No people have true com-
mon sense but those who are born in England." This common sense
is a perception of all the conditions of our earthly existence, of laws
that can be stated, and of laws that cannot be stated, or that are
learned only by practice, in which allowance for friction is made.
They are impious in their scepticism of theory, and in high depart-
ments they are cramped and sterile. But the unconditional surrender
to facts, and the choice of means to reach their ends, are as admirable
as with ants and bees.

The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They love the lever,
the screw, and pulley, the Flanders draught-horse, the water-fall,
wind-mills, tide-mills; the sea and the wind to bear their freight

ABILITY 357

ships. More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among
their crown jewels, they prize that dull pebble which is wiser than
a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and
whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are
steam and galvanism. They are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at
the coarse; not good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron-masters,
colliers, wool-combers, and tanners in Europe. They apply them-
selves to agriculture, to draining, to resisting encroachments of sea,
wind, travelling sands, cold and wet subsoil; to fishery, to manufac-
ture of indispensable staples, — salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass,
pottery, and brick, — to bees and silkworms; — and by their steady
combinations they succeed. A manufacturer sits down to dinner in
a suit of clothes which was wool on a sheep's back at sunrise. You
dine with a gentleman on venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, poultry,
mushrooms, and pine-apples, all the growth of his estate. They are
neat husbands for ordering all their tools pertaining to house and
field. All are well kept. There is no want and no waste. They study
use and fitness in their building, in the order of their dwellings,
and in their dress. The Frenchman invented the ruffle, the English-
man added the shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible coat but-
toned to the chin, of rough but solid and lasting texture. If he is
a lord, he dresses a little worse than a commoner. They have diffused
the taste for plain substantial hats, shoes, and coats through Europe.
They think him the best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his
use that you cannot notice or remember to describe it.

They secure the essentials in their diet, in their arts, and manu-
factures. Every article of cutlery shows, in its shape, thought and
long experience of workmen. They put the expense in the right
place, as, in their sea-steamers, in the solidity of the machinery and
the strength of the boat. The admirable equipment of their arctic
ships carries London to the pole. They build roads, aqueducts, warm
and ventilate houses. And they have impressed their directness and
practical habit on modern civilization.

In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody breaks who ought
not to break; and that, if he do not make trade everything, it will
make him nothing; and acts on this belief. The spirit of system,
attention to details, and the subordination of details, or the not

358 ENGLISH TRAITS

driving things too finely (which is charged on the Germans), con-
stitute that despatch of business which makes the mercantile power
of England.

In war, the Enghshman looks to his means. He is of the opinion
of Civilis, his German ancestor, whom Tacitus reports as holding
"that the gods are on the side of the strongest;" — a sentence which
Bonaparte unconsciously translated, when he said, "that he had
noticed, that Providence always favored the heaviest battalion."
Their military science propounds that if the weight of the advancing
column is greater than that of the resisting, the latter is destroyed.
Therefore Wellington, when he came to the army in Spain, had
every man weighed, first with accoutrements, and then without; be-
lieving that the force of an army depended on the weight and power
of the individual soldiers, in spite of cannon. Lord Palmerston told
the House of Commons that more care is taken of the health and
comfort of English troops than of any other troops in the world,
and that hence the English can put more men into the rank, on the
day of action, on the field of battle, than any other army. Before
the bombardment of the Danish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent
day after day, himself in the boats, on the exhausting service of
sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin's celebrated manoeuvre of
breaking the line of sea-battle, and Nelson's feat of doubling, or
stationing his ships one on the outer bow, and another on the outer
quarter of each of the enemy's, were only translations into naval
tactics of Bonaparte's rule of concentration. Lord Collingwood
was accustomed to tell his men that, if they could fire three well-
directed broadsides in five minutes, no vessel could resist them;
and, from constant practice, they came to do it in three minutes
and a half.

But conscious that no race of better men exists, they rely most on
the simplest means; and do not like ponderous and difficult tactics,
but delight to bring the affair hand to hand, where the victory lies
with the strength, courage, and endurance of the individual com-
batants. They adopt every improvement in rig, in motor, in weapons,
but they fundamentally believe that the best stratagem in naval war
is to lay your ship close alongside of the enemy's ship, and bring all
your guns to bear on him, until you or he go to the bottom. This

ABILITY 359

is the old fashion, which never goes out of fashion, neither in nor
out of England.

It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious sentiment, and
never any whim that they will shed their blood for; but usually
property, and right measured by property, that breeds revolution.
They have no Indian taste for a tomahawk-dance, no French taste
for a badge or a proclamation. The Englishman is peaceably mind-
ing his business, and earning his day's wages. But if you offer to lay
hand on his day's wages, on his cow, or his right in common, or his
shop, he will fight to the Judgment. Magna-charta, jury-trial, habeas-
corpus, star-chamber, ship-money. Popery, Plymouth-colony, Amer-
ican Revolution, are all questions involving a yeoman's right to his
dinner, and, except as touching that, would not have lashed the
British nation to rage and revolt.

Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of order, and of calcula-
tion, it must be owned they are capable of larger views; but the
indulgence is expensive to them, cost great crises, or accumulations
of mental power. In common the horse works best with blinders.
Nothing is more in the line of English thought, than our unvar-
nished Connecticut question, "Pray, sir, how do you get your living
when you are at home?" — The questions of freedom, of taxation, of
privilege, are money questions. Heavy fellows, steeped in beer and
fleshpots, they are hard of hearing and dim of sight. Their drowsy
minds need to be flagellated by war and trade and politics and
persecution. They cannot well read a principle, except by the light
of fagots and of burning towns.

Tacitus says of the Germans, "Powerful only in sudden efforts,
they are impatient of toil and labor." This highly destined race, if
it had not somewhere added the chamber of patience to its brain,
would not have built London. I know not from which of the tribes
and temperaments that went to the composition of the people this
tenacity was supplied, but they cHnch every nail they drive. They
had no running for luck, and no immoderate speed. They spend
largely on their fabric, and await the slow return. Their leather lies
tanning seven years in the vat. At Rogers's mills, in Sheffield, where
I was shown the process of making a razor and a penknife, I was
told there is no luck in making good steel; that they make no mis-

360 ENGLISH TRAITS

takes, every blade in the hundred and in the thousand is good. And
that is characteristic of all their work, — no more is attempted than
is done.

When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard,he is told that
"nobody is permitted to remain here, unless he understand some art,
and excel in it all other men." The same question is still put to the
posterity of Thor. A nation of laborers, every man is trained to
some one art or detail, and aims at perfection in that; not content
unless he has something in which he thinks he surpasses all other
men. He would rather not do anything at all, than not do it well.
I suppose no people have such thoroughness; — from the highest to
the lowest, every man meaning to be master of his art.

"To show capacity," a Frenchman described as the end of a speech
in debate: "No," said an Englishman, "but to set your shoulder at
the wheel, — to advance the business." Sir Samuel Romilly refused
to speak in popular assemblies, confining himself to the House of
Commons, where a measure can be carried by a speech. The busi-
ness of the House of Commons is conducted by a few persons, but
these are hard-worked. Sir Robert Peel "knew the Blue Books by
heart." His colleagues and rivals carry Hansard in their heads. The
high civil and legal offices are not beds of ease, but posts which exact
frightful amounts of mental labor. Many of our great leaders, like
Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Romilly, are soon worked to death. They
are excellent judges in England of a good worker, and when they
find one like Clarendon, Sir Philip Warwick, Sir William Coventry,
Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel, or Russell,
there is nothing too good or too high for him.

They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a public aim. Private
persons exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian researches, the same
pertinacity as the nation showed in the coalitions in which it yoked
Europe against the empire of Bonaparte, one after the other defeated,
and still renewed, until the sixth hurled him from his seat.

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his father, who
had made the catalogue of the stars of the northern hemisphere,
expatriated himself for years at the Cape of Good Hope, finished
his inventory of the southern heaven, came home, and redacted it
in eight years more; — a work whose value does not begin until

ABILITY 361

thirty years have elapsed, and thenceforward a record to all ages
of the highest import. The Admiralty sent out the Arctic expedi-
tions year after year, in search of Sir John Franklin, until, at last,
they have threaded their way through polar pack and Behring's
Straits, and solved the geographical problem. Lord Elgin, at Athens,
saw the imminent ruin of the Greek remains, set up his scaffoldings,
in spite of epigrams, and, after five years' labor to collect them,
got his marbles on shipboard. The ship struck a rock, and went
to the bottom. He had them all fished up, by divers, at a vast
expense, and brought to London : not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli,
and Canova, and all good heads in all the world, were to be his
applauders. In the same spirit were the excavation and research by
Sir Charles Fellowes, for the Xanthian monument; and of Layard,
for his Nineveh sculptures.

The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, a London
extended into every man's mind, though he live in Van Dieman's
Land or Capetown. Faithful performance of what is undertaken to
be performed, they honor in themselves, and exact in others, as cer-
tificate of equality with themselves. The modern world is theirs.
They have made and make it day by day. The commercial relations
of the world are so intimately drawn to London, that every dollar
on earth contributes to the strength of the English government.
And if all the wealth in the planet should perish by war or deluge,
they know themselves competent to replace it.

They have approved their Saxon blood, by their sea-going qual-
ities; their descent from Odin's smiths, by their hereditary skill in
working in iron; their British birth, by husbandry and immense
wheat harvests; and justified their occupancy of the centre of habit-
able land, by their supreme ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They
have tilled, builded, forged, spun, and woven. They have made the
island a thoroughfare; and London a shop, a law-court, a record-
office, and scientific bureau, inviting to strangers; a sanctuary to
refugees of every political and religious opinion; and such a city,
that almost every active man, in any nation, finds himself, at one
time or other, forced to visit it.

In every path of practical activity, they have gone even with the
best. There is no secret of war, in which they have not shown

362 ENGLISH TRAITS

mastery. The steam-chamber of Watt, the locomotive of Stephenson,
the cotton-mule of Roberts, perform the labor of the world. There
is no department of Uterature, of science, or of useful art, in which
they have not produced a first-rate book. It is England, whose
opinion is waited for on the merit of a new invention, an improved
science. And in the complications of the trade and politics of their
vast empire, they have been equal to every exigency, with counsel
and with conduct. Is it their luck, or is it in the chambers of their
brain, — ^it is their commercial advantage, that whatever light appears
in better method or happy invention, breaks out in their race. They
are a family to which a destiny attaches, and the Banshee has sworn
that a male heir shall never be wanting. They have a wealth of men
to fill important posts, and the vigilance of party criticism insures the
selection of a competent person.

A proof of the energy of the British people, is the highly artificial
construction of the whole fabric. The cHmate and geography, I
said, were factitious, as if the hands of man had arranged the
conditions. The same character pervades the whole kingdom. Bacon
said, "Rome was a state not subject to paradoxes;" but England sub-
sists by antagonisms and contradictions. The foundations of its
greatness are the rolling waves; and, from first to last, it is a museum
of anomalies. This foggy and rainy country furnishes the world with
astronomical observations. Its short rivers do not afford water-power,
but the land shakes under the thunder of the mills. There is no
gold mine of any importance, but there is more gold in England
than in all other countries. It is too far north for the culture of
the vine, but the wines of all countries are in its docks. The French
Comte de Lauraguais said, "No fruit ripens in England but a baked
apple;" but oranges and pine-apples are as cheap in London as in
the Mediterranean. The Mark-Lane Express or the Custom House
Returns bear out to the letter the vaunt of Pope,

"Let India boast her palms, nor envy we
The weeping amber nor the spicy tree,
While, by our oaks those precious loads are borne,
And realms commanded which those trees adorn."

The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full of artificial breeds.
The agriculturist Bakewell created sheep and cows and horses to

ABILITY 363

order, and breeds in which everything was omitted but what is
economical. The cow is sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his sirloin.
Stall-feeding makes sperm-mills of the cattle, and converts the stable
to a chemical factory. The rivers, lakes, and ponds, too much fished,
or obstructed by factories, are artificially filled with the eggs of
salmon, turbot, and herring.

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are
unhealthy and too barren to pay rent. By cylindrical tiles, and gutta-
percha tubes, five miUions of acres of bad land have been drained
and put on equality with the best, for rape-culture and grass. The
climate too, which was already believed to have become milder and
drier by the enormous consumption of coal, is so far reached by this
new action, that fogs and storms are said to disappear. In due course,
all England will be drained, and rise a second time out of the waters.
The latest step was to call in the aid of steam to agriculture. Steam
is almost an Englishman. I do not know but they will send him
to Parliament next, to make laws. He weaves, forges, saws, pounds,
fans, and now he must pump, grind, dig, and plough for the farmer.
The markets created by the manufacturing population have erected
agriculture into a great thriving and spending industry. The value
of the houses in Britain is equal to the value of the soil. Artificial
aids of all kinds are cheaper than the natural resources. No man
can afford to walk, when the parliamentary-train carries him for a
penny a mile. Gas-burners are cheaper than daylight in numberless
floors in the cities. All the houses in London buy their water. The
English trade does not exist for the exportation of native products,
but on its manufactures, or the making well everything which is ill
made elsewhere. They make ponchos for the Mexican, bandannas
for the Hindoo, ginseng for the Chinese, beads for the Indian, laces
for the Flemings, telescopes for astronomers, cannons for kings.

The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece and Italy
to be placed within the reach of every manufacturing populadon.
They caused to be translated from foreign languages and illustrated
by elaborate drawings, the most approved works of Munich, Berlin,
and Paris. They have ransacked Italy to find new forms, to add a
grace to the products of their looms, their potteries, and their found-
ries. 3 See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. G6. New York, 1853.

364 ENGLISH TRAITS

The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social system.
Their law is a network of fictions. Their property, a scrip or cer-
tificate of right to interest on money that no man ever saw. Their
social classes are made by statute. Their ratios of power and represen-
tation are historical and legal. The last Reform bill took away
political power from a mound, a ruin, and a stone-wall, whilst Bir-
mingham and Manchester, whose mills paid for the wars of Europe,
had no representative. Purity in the elective Parliament is secured
by the purchase of seats.* Foreign power is kept by armed colonies;
power at home, by a standing army of police. The pauper lives better
than the free laborer; the thief better than the pauper; and the
transported felon better than the one under imprisonment. The
crimes are factitious, as smuggling, poaching, non-conformity, her-
esy, and treason. Better, they say in England, kill a man than a hare.
The sovereignty of the seas is maintained by the impressment of
seamen. "The impressment of seamen," said Lord Eldon, "is the
life of our navy." Solvency is maintained by means of the national
debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can
I pay you?" For the administration of justice. Sir Samuel Romilly's
expedient for clearing the arrears of business in Chancery, was, the
Chancellor's staying away entirely from his court. Their system of
education is factitious. The Universities galvanize dead languages
into a semblance of life. Their church is artificial. The manners and
customs of society are artificial; — made up men with made up man-
ners; — and thus, the whole is Birminghamized, and we have a nation
whose existence is a work of art; — a cold, barren, almost arctic isle,
being made the most fruitful, luxurious, and imperial land in the
whole earth.

Man in England submits to be a product of political economy.
On a bleak moor, a mill is built, a banking-house is opened, and men
come in, as water in a sluice-way, and towns and cities rise. Man is
made as a Birmingham button. The rapid doubling of the popula-
tion dates from Watt's steam-engine. A landlord, who owns a prov-
ince, says, "The tenantry are unprofitable; let me have sheep." He
unroofs the houses, and ships the population to America. The nation

■•sir S. Romilly, purest of English patriots, decided that the only independent mode
of entering Parliament was to buy a seat, and he bought Horsham.

ABILITY 365

is accustomed to the instantaneous creation of wealth. It is the
maxim of their economists, "that the greater part in value of the
wealth now existing in England has been produced by human hands
within the last twelve months." Meantime three or four days' rain
will reduce hundreds to starving in London.

One secret of their power is their mutual good understanding.
Not only good minds are born among them, but, all the people have
good minds. Every nation has yielded some good wit, if, as has
chanced to many tribes, only one. But the intellectual organization
of the English admits a communicableness of knowledge and ideas
among them all. An electric touch by any of their national ideas,
melts them into one family, and brings the hoards of power which
their individuality is always hiving, into use and play for all. Is it
the smallness of the country, or is it the pride and affection of
race, — they have solidarity, or responsibleness, and trust in each
other.

Their minds, Uke wool, admit of a dye which is more lasting than
the cloth. They embrace their cause with more tenacity than their
life. Though not military, yet every common subject by the poll is
fit to make a soldier of. These private reserved mute family-men
can adopt a public end with all their heat, and this strength of
affection makes the romance of their heroes. The difference of rank
does not divide the national heart. The Danish poet Ohlenschlager
complains that who writes in Danish writes to two hundred readers.
In Germany, there is one speech for the learned, and another for the
masses, to that extent that, it is said, no sentiment or phrase from
the works of any great German writer is ever heard among the lower
classes. But in England, the language of the noble is the language of
the poor. In Parliament, in pulpits, in theatres, when the speakers
rise to thought and passion, the language becomes idiomatic; the
people in the street best understand the best words. And their
language seems drawn from the Bible, the common law, and the
works of Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns,
and Scott. The island has produced two or three of the greatest
men that ever existed, but they were not solitary in their own time.
Men quickly embodied what Newton found out, in Greenwich ob-
servatories, and practical navigation. The boys know all that Hutton

366 ENGLISH TRAITS

knew o£ strata, or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-vessels; and
these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So what is invented
or known in agriculture, or in trade, or in war, or in art, or in litera-
ture, and antiquities. A great ability, not amassed on a few giants,
but poured into the general mind, so that each of them could at a
pinch stand in the shoes of the other; and they are more bound in
character, than differenced in ability or in rank. The laborer is a
possible lord. The lord is a possible basket-maker. Every man
carries the English system in his brain, knows what is confided to
him, and does therein the best he can. The chancellor carries Eng-
land on his mace, the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the smith
on his hammer, the cook in the bowl of his spoon; the postilion
cracks his whip for England, and the sailor times his oars to "God
save the King!" The very felons have their pride in each other's
English stanchness. In politics and in war, they hold together as by
hooks of steel. The charm in Nelson's history is the unselfish great-
ness; the assurance of being supported to the uttermost by those
whom he supports to the uttermost. Whilst they are some ages
ahead of the rest of the world in the art of living; whilst in some
directions they do not represent the modern spirit, but constitute it,
— this vanguard of civility and power they coldly hold, marching in
phalanx, lock-step, foot after foot, file after file of heroes, ten thou-
sand deep.

CHAPTER VI

I FIND the Enghshman to be him of all men who stands firmest
in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses,
mettle and bottom. On the day of my arrival at Liverpool, a gentle-
man, in describing to me the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, happened
to say, "Lord Clarendon has pluck like a cock, and will fight till
he dies;" and what I heard first I heard last, and the one thing the
English value is pluck. The cabmen have it; the merchants have
it; the bishops have it; the women have it; the journals have it; the
Times newspaper, they say, is the pluckiest thing in England, and
Sydney Smith had made it a proverb that little Lord John Russell,

MANNERS 367

the minister, would take the command of the Channel fleet to-
morrow.

They require you to dare to be of your own opinion, and they
hate the practical cowards who cannot in affairs answer directly
yes or no. They dare to displease, nay, they will let you break all
the commandments, if you do it natively, and with spirit. You must
be somebody; then you may do this or that, as you will.

Machinery has been appUed to all work, and carried to such per-
fection, that little is left for the men but to mind the engines and
feed the furnaces. But the machines require punctual service, and,
as they never tire, they prove too much for their tenders. Mines,
forges, mills, breweries, railroads, steam-pump, steam-plough, drill
of regiments, drill of police, rule of court, and shop-rule have
operated to give a mechanical regularity to all the habit and action
of men. A terrible machine has possessed itself of the ground, the
air, the men and women, and hardly even thought is free.

The mechanical might and organization requires in the people
constitution and answering spirits: and he who goes among them
must have some weight of metal. At last, you take your hint from
the fury of life you find, and say, one thing is plain, this is no country
for fainthearted people: don't creep about diffidently; make up your
mind; take your own course, and you shall find respect and fur-
therance.

It requires, men say, a good constitution to travel in Spain. I say
as much of England, for other cause, simply on account of the vigor
and brawn of the people. Nothing but the most serious business
could give one any counterweight to these Baresarks, though they
were only to order eggs and muffins for their breakfast. The Eng-
lishman speaks with all his body. His elocution is stomachic, — as
the American's is labial. The Englishman is very petulant and pre-
cise about his accommodation at inns, and on the roads; a quiddle
about his toast and his chop, and every species of convenience, and
loud and pungent in his expressions of impatience at any neglect.
His vivacity betrays itself, at all points, in his manners, in his respira-
tion, and the inarticulate noises he makes in clearing the throat; —
all significant of burly strength. He has stamina; he can take the
initiative in emergencies. He has that aplomb, which results from a

368 ENGLISH TRAITS

good adjustment of the moral and physical nature, and the obedience
of all the powers to the will; as if the axes of his eyes were united to
his backbone, and only moved with the trunk.

This vigor appears in the incuriosity, and stony neglect, each of
every other. Each man walks, eats, drinks, shaves, dresses, gesticu-
lates, and, in every manner, acts and suffers without reference to
the bystanders, in his own fashion, only careful not to interfere
with them, or annoy them; not that he is trained to neglect the eyes
of his neighbors, — he is really occupied with his own affair, and
does not think of them. Every man in this poHshed country consults
only his convenience, as much as a solitary pioneer in Wisconsin. I
know not where any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and
no man gives himself any concern with it. An Englishman walks
in a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella like a walking-stick;
wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands on his head, and no
remark is made. And as he has been doing this for several genera-
tions, it is now in the blood.

In short, every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe,
tranquil, incommunicable. In a company of strangers, you would
think him deaf; his eyes never wander from his table and news-
paper. He is never betrayed into any curiosity or unbecoming
emotion. They have all been trained in one severe school of man-
ners, and never put off the harness. He does not give his hand.
He does not let you meet his eye. It is almost an affront to look a
man in the face, without being introduced. In mixed or in select
companies they do not introduce persons; so that a presentation is
a circumstance as valid as a contract. Introductions are sacraments.
He withholds his name. At the hotel, he is hardly willing to whisper
it to the clerk at the book-office. If he give you his private address
on a card, it is like an avowal of friendship; and his bearing, on
being introduced, is cold, even though he is seeking your acquaint-
ance, and is studying how he shall serve you.

It was an odd proof of this impressive energy that, in my lectures,
I hesitated to read and threw out for its impertinence many a dis-
paraging phrase, which I had been accustomed to spin, about poor,
thin, unable mortals; — so much had the fine physique and the per-
sonal vigor of this robust race worked on my imagination.

MANNERS 369

I happened to arrive in England at the moment of a commercial
crisis. But it was evident that, let who will fail, England will not.
These people have sat here a thousand years, and here will continue
to sit. They will not break up, or arrive at any desperate revolution,
like their neighbors; for they have as much energy, as much conti-
nence of character as they ever had. The power and possession
which surround them are their own creation, and they exert the
same commanding industry at this moment.

They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal, loving routine,
and conventional ways; loving truth and religion, to be sure, but
inexorable on points of form. All the world praises the comfort and
private appointments of an English inn, and of English households.
You are sure of neatness and of personal decorum. A Frenchman
may possibly be clean; an Englishman is conscientiously clean. A
certain order and complete propriety is found in his dress and in his
belongings.

Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him in doors when-
ever he is at rest, and being of an affectionate and loyal temper, he
dearly loves his house. If he is rich, he buys a demesne and builds
a hall; if he is in middle condition, he spares no expense on his
house. Without, it is all planted: within, it is wainscoted, carved,
curtained, hung with pictures, and filled with good furniture. 'Tis
a passion which survives all others, to deck and improve it. Hither
he brings all that is rare and costly, and with the national tendency
to sit fast in the same spot for many generations, it comes to be, in
the course of time, a museum of heirlooms, gifts, and trophies of the
adventures and exploits of the family. He is very fond of silver
plate, and, though he have no gallery of portraits of his ancestors,
he has of their punch-bowls and porringers. Incredible amounts of
plate are found in good houses, and the poorest have some spoon or
saucepan, gift of a godmother, saved out of better times.

An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to
age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied
by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have
seen attaching the two Siamese. England produces under favorable
conditions of ease and culture the finest women in the world. And,
as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and

370 ENGLISH TRAITS

refine them. Nothing can be more deUcate without being fantastical,
nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the
courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes. The song of 1596 says,
"The wife of every Englishman is counted blest." The sentiment
of Imogen in Cymbeline is copied from English nature; and not
less the Portia of Brutus, the Kate Percy, and the Desdemona. The
romance does not exceed the height of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy
Hutchinson, or in Lady Russell, or even as one discerns through the
plain prose of Pepys's Diary, the sacred habit of an English wife.
Sir Samuel Romilly could not bear the death of his wife. Every
class has its noble and tender examples.

Domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch
wide and high. The motive and end of their trade and empire is to
guard the independence and privacy of their homes. Nothing so
much marks their manners as the concentration on their household
ties. This domesticity is carried into court and camp. Wellington
governed India and Spain and his own troops, and fought batdes
like a good family-man, paid his debts, and, though general of an
army in Spain, could not stir abroad for fear of public creditors. This
taste for house and parish merits has of course its doting and foolish
side. Mr. Cobbett attributes the huge popularity of Perceval, prime
minister in 1810, to the fact that he was wont to go to church, every
Sunday, with a large quarto gilt prayer-book under one arm, his
wife hanging on the other, and followed by a long brood of children.

They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and
mace, sceptre and crown. The Middle Ages still lurk in the streets
of London. The Knights of the Bath take oath to defend injured
ladies; the gold-sdck-in-waiting survives. They repeated the cere-
monies of the eleventh century in the coronation of the present
Queen. A hereditary tenure is natural to them. Offices, farms, trades,
and tradidons descend so. Their leases run for a hundred and a
thousand years. Terms of service and partnership are lifelong, or
are inherited. "Holdship has been with me," said Lord Eldon,
"eight-and-twenty years, knows all my business and books." Antiq-
uity of usage is sanction enough. Wordsworth says of the small
freeholders of Westmoreland, "Many of these humble sons of the
hills had a consciousness that the land which they tilled had for

MANNERS 371

more than five hundred years been possessed by men o£ the same
name and blood." The ship-carpenter in the public yards, my lord's
gardener and porter, have been there for more than a hundred years,
grandfather, father, and son.

The English power resides also in their dislike of change. They
have difficulty in bringing their reason to act, and on all occasions
use their memory first. As soon as they have rid themselves of some
grievance, and settled the better practice, they make haste to fix it as
a finality, and never wish to hear of alteration more.

Every Englishman is an embryonic chancellor: his instinct is to
search for a precedent. The favorite phrase of their law is, "a custom
whereof the memory of man runneth not back to the contrary." The
barons say, "Nolumus mutari;" and the cockneys stifle the curiosity
of the foreigner on the reason of any practice, with "Lord, sir, it was
always so." They hate innovation. Bacon told them. Time was the
right reformer; Chatham, that "confidence was a plant of slow
growth;" Canning, to "advance with the times;" and Wellington,
that "habit was ten times nature." All their statesmen learn the
irresistibility of the tide of custom and have invented many fine
phrases to cover this slowness of perception, and prehensiHty of tail.

A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it
represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish of the
men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex. After
the spire and the spines are formed, or, with the formation, a juice
exudes, and a hard enamel varnishes every part. The keeping of
the proprieties is as indispensable as clean linen. No merit quite
countervails the want of this, whilst this sometimes stands in lieu of
all. " 'Tis in bad taste" is the most formidable word an Englishman
can pronounce. But this japan costs them dear. There is a prose in
certain Englishmen, which exceeds in wooden deadness all rivalry
with other countrymen. There is a knell in the conceit and exter-
nality of their voice, which seems to say. Leave all hope behind. In
this Gibraltar of propriety mediocrity gets intrenched, and consol-
idated, and founded in adamant. An Englishman of fashion is like
one of those souvenirs, bound in gold vellum, enriched with deUcate
engravings, on thick hot-pressed paper, fit for the hands of ladies and
princes, but with nothing in it worth reading or remembering.

372 ENGLISH TRAITS

A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. When Thal-
berg, the pianist, was one evening performing before the Queen, at
Windsor, in a private party, the Queen accompanied him with her
voice. The circumstance took air, and all England shuddered from
sea to sea. The indecorum was never repeated. Cold, repressive
manners prevail. No enthusiasm is permitted, except at the opera.
They avoid everything marked. They require a tone of voice that
excites no attention in the room. Sir Philip Sidney is one of the
patron saints of England, of whom Wotton said, "His wit was the
measure of congruity."

Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They keep to
the other extreme of low tone in dress and manners. They avoid
pretension, and go right to the heart of the thing. They hate non-
sense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expression; they use a studied
plainness. Even Brummel, their fop, was marked by the severest
simplicity in dress. They value themselves on the absence of every-
thing theatrical in the public business, and on conciseness and going
to the point, in private affairs.

In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury,
but the dinner, is the capital institution. It is the mode of doing
honor to a stranger, to invite him to eat, — and has been for many
hundred years. "And they think," says the Venetian traveller of
1500, "no greater honor can be conferred or received than to invite
others to eat with them, or to be invited themselves, and they would
sooner give five or six ducats to provide an entertainment for a
person, than a groat to assist him in any distress."^ It is reserved to
the end of the day, the family-hour being generally six, in London,
and, if any company is expected, one or two hours later. Every one
dresses for dinner, in his own house, or in another man's. The guests
are expected to arrive within half an hour of the time fixed by card
of invitation, and nothing but death or mutilation is permitted to
detain them. The English dinner is precisely the model on which
our own are constructed in the Atlantic cities. The company sit one
or two hours before the ladies leave the table. The gentlemen remain
over their wine an hour longer, and rejoin the ladies in the drawing-
room, and take coffee. The dress-dinner generates a talent of

I "Relation of England." Printed by the Camden Society.

TRUTH 373

table-talk which reaches great perfection: the stories are so good,
that one is sure they must have been often told before, to have got
such happy turns. Hither come all manner of clever projects, bits
of popular science, of practical invention, of miscellaneous humor;
pohtical, literary, and personal news; railroads, horses, diamonds,
agriculture, horticulture, pisciculture, and wine.

English stories, bon-mots, and the recorded table-talk of their wits,
are as good as the best of the French. In America we are apt scholars,
but have not yet attained the same perfection: for the range of
nations from which London draws, and the steep contrasts of con-
dition, create the picturesque in society, as broken country makes
picturesque landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes a prairie
lameness ; and secondly, because the usage of a dress-dinner every
day at dark has a tendency to hive and produce to advantage every-
thing good. Much attrition has worn every sentence into a bullet.
Also one meets now and then with polished men who know every-
thing, have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite
superior to letters and science. What could they not, if only they
would.?

CHAPTER VII

The Teutonic tribes have a national singleness of heart, which
contrasts with the Latin races. The German name has a proverbial
significance of sincerity and honest meaning. The arts bear testi-
mony to it. The faces of clergy and laity in old sculptures and illu-
minated missals are charged with earnest belief. Add to this heredi-
tary rectitude, the punctuality and precise dealing which commerce
creates, and you have the English truth and credit. The government
stricdy performs its engagements. The subjects do not understand
trifling on its part. When any breach of promise occurred, in the
old days of prerogative, it was resented by the people as an intolerable
grievance. And, in modern times, any slipperiness in the government
in political faith, or any repudiation or crookedness in matters of
finance, would bring the whole nation to a committee of inquiry
and reform. Private men keep their promises, never so trivial. Down

374 ENGLISH TRAITS

goes the flying word on the tablets, and is indeUble as Domesday
Book.

Their practical power rests on their national sincerity. Veracity
derives from instinct, and marks superiority in organization. Nature
has endowed some animals with cunning, as a compensation for
strength withheld; but it has provoked the malice of all others, as if
avengers of pubhc wrong. In the nobler kinds, where strength could
be afforded, her races are loyal to truth, as truth is the foundation of
the social state. Beasts that make no truce with man, do not break
faith with each other. 'Tis said that the wolf, who makes a cache
of his prey, and brings his fellows with him to the spot, if, on
digging, it is not found, is instantly and unresistingly torn in pieces.
English veracity seems to result on a sounder animal structure, as if
they could afford it. They are blunt in saying what they think,
sparing of promises, and they require plain-dealing of others. We
will not have to do with a man in a mask. Let us know the truth.
Draw a straight line, hit whom and where it will. Alfred, whom the
affection of the nation makes the type of their race, is called by his
friend Asser, the truth-speaker; Alueredus veridicus. Geoffrey of
Monmouth says of King Aurelius, uncle of Arthur, that "above all
things he hated a lie." The Northman Guttorm said to King Olaf,
"It is royal work to fulfil royal words." The mottoes of their families
are monitory proverbs, as, Fare fac, — Say, do, — of the Fairfaxes; Say
and seal, of the house of Fiennes; Vero nil verius, of the De Veres.
To be king of their word, is their pride. When they unmask cant,
they say, "The English of this is)' &c.; and to give the lie is the
extreme insult. The phrase of the lowest of the people is "honor-
bright," and their vulgar praise, "His word is as good as his bond."
They hate shuffling and equivocation, and the cause is damaged in
the public opinion, on which any paltering can be fixed. Even Lord
Chesterfield, with his French breeding, when he came to define a
gendeman, declared that truth made his distincdon: and nothing
ever spoken by him would find so hearty a suffrage from his nation.
The Duke of Wellington, who had the best right to say so, advises
the French General Kellermann, that he may rely on the parole of
an EngUsh officer. The English, of all classes, value themselves
on this trait, as distinguishing them from the French, who, in the

TRUTH 375

popular belief, are more polite than true. An Englishman under-
states, avoids the superlative, checks himself in compliments, alleging
that in the French language one cannot speak without lying.

They love reality in wealth, power, hospitality, and do not easily
learn to make a show, and take the world as it goes. They are not
fond of ornaments, and if they wear them, they must be gems. They
read gladly in old Fuller, that a lady, in the reign of Elizabeth,
"would have as patiendy digested a lie, as the wearing of false
stones or pendants of counterfeit pearl." They have the earth-
hunger, or preference for property in land, which is said to mark the
Teutonic nations. They build of stone: public and private buildings
are massive and durable. In comparing their ships' houses and public
offices with the American, it is commonly said that they spend a
pound where we spend a dollar. Plain rich clothes, plain rich equip-
age, plain rich finish throughout their house and belongings, mark
the English truth.

They confide in each other, — English believes in English. The
French feel the superiority of this probity. The Englishman is not
springing a trap for his admiration, but is honestly minding his
business. The Frenchman is vain. Madame de Stael says that the
English irritated Napoleon, mainly, because they have found out how
to unite success with honesty. She was not aware how wide an appli-
cation her foreign readers would give to the remark. Wellington dis-
covered the ruin of Bonaparte's affairs, by his own probity. He
augured ill of the empire, as soon as he saw that it was mendacious,
and lived by war. If war do not bring in its sequel new trade,
better agriculture and manufactures, but only games, fireworks and
spectacles, — no prosperity could support it; much less, a nation
decimated for conscripts, and out of pocket, like France. So he
drudged for years on his military works at Lisbon, and from this
base at last extended his gigantic lines to Waterloo, believing in his
countrymen and their syllogisms above all the rhodomontade of
Europe.

At a St. George's festival, in Montreal, where I happened to be a
guest, since my return home, I observed that the chairman compli-
mented his compatriots, by saying, "they confided that wherever
they met an Englishman, they found a man who would speak the

37^ ENGLISH TRAITS

truth." And one cannot think this festival fruitless, if, all over the
world, on the 23d of April, wherever two or three English are
found, they meet to encourage each other in the nationality of
veracity.

In the power of saying rude truth, sometimes in the lion's mouth,
no men surpass them. On the king's birthday, when each bishop was
expected to offer the king a purse of gold, Latimer gave Henry VIII.
a copy of the Vulgate, with a mark at the passage, "Whoremongers
and adulterers God will judge;" and they so honor stoutness in each
other, that the king passed it over. They are tenacious of their belief,
and cannot easily change their opinions to suit the hour. They are
like ships with too much head on to come quickly about, nor
will prosperity or even adversity be allowed to shake their
habitual view of conduct. Whilst I was in London, M. Guizot
arrived there on his escape from Paris, in February 1848. Many
private friends called on him. His name was immediately proposed
as an honorary member of the Athenaeum. M. Guizot was black-
balled. Certainly, they knew the distinction of his name. But the
Englishman is not fickle. He had really made up his mind, now for
years as he read his newspaper, to hate and despise M. Guizot; and
the altered position of the man as an illustrious exile, and a guest in
the country, make no difference to him, as they would instantly, to
an American.

They require the same adherence, thorough conviction and reality
in public men. It is the want of character which makes the low
reputation of the Irish members. "See them," they said, "one
hundred and twenty-seven all voting like sheep, never proposing
anything, and all but four voting the income tax," — which was an
ill-judged concession of the Government, relieving Irish property
from the burdens charged on English.

They have a horror of adventurers in or out of Parliament. The
ruling passion of Englishmen, in these days, is a terror of humbug.
In the same proportion, they value honesty, stoutness, and adherence
to your own. They like a man committed to his objects. They hate
the French, as frivolous; they hate the Irish, as aimless; they hate
the Germans, as professors. In February, 1848, they said, Look, the
French king and his party fell for want of a shot; they had not

TRUTH l^'J

conscience to shoot, so entirely was the pith and heart of monarchy
eaten out."

They attack their own politicians every day, on the same grounds,
as adventurers. They love stoutness in standing for your right, in
declining money or promotion that costs any concession. The bar-
rister refuses the silk gown of Queen's Counsel, if his junior have it
one day earlier. Lord CoUingwood would not accept his medal for
victory on 14th February, 1797, if he did not receive one for victory
on ist June, 1794; and the long withholden medal was accorded.
When Castlereagh dissuaded Lord Wellington from going to the
king's levee, until the unpopular Cintra business had been explained,
he replied, "You furnish me a reason for going. I will go to this, or
I will never go to a king's levee." The radical mob at Oxford cried
after the tory Lord Eldon, "There's old Eldon; cheer him; he never
ratted." They have given the parliamentary nickname of Trimmers
to the timeservers, whom English character does not love.'-

They are very liable in their politics to extraordinary delusions,
thus, to believe what stands recorded in the gravest books, that the
movement of 10 April, 1848, was urged or assisted by foreigners:
which, to be sure, is paralleled by the democratic whimsy in this
country, which I have noticed to be shared by men sane on other
points, that the English are at the bottom of the agitation of slavery
in American politics: and then again to the French popular legends
on the subject of perfidious Albion. But suspicion will make fools of
nations as of citizens.

A slow temperament makes them less rapid and ready than other
countrymen, and has given occasion to the observation, that English
wit comes afterwards, — which the French denote as esprit d'escalier.
This dulness makes their attachment to home, and their adherence
in all foreign countries to home habits. The Englishman who visits
Mount Etna, will carry his teakettle to the top. The old Italian
author of the "Relation of England" (in 1500) says, "I have it on the

'It is an unlucky moment to remember these sparkles of solitary virtue in the
face of the honors lately paid in England to the Emperor Louis Napoleon. I am
sure that no Englishman whom I had the happiness to know consented, when the
aristocracy and the commons of London cringed like a Neapolitan rabble, before
a successful thief. But — how to resist one step, though odious, in a linked series of
state necessities? — Governments must always learn too late, that the use of dishonest
agents is as ruinous for nations as for single men.

378 ENGLISH TRAITS

best information, that, when the war is actually raging most furi-
ously, they will seek for good eating, and all their other comforts,
without thinking what harm might befall them." Then their eyes
seem to be set at the bottom of a tunnel, and they affirm the one small
fact they know, with the best faith in the world that nothing else
exists. And, as their own belief in guineas is perfect, they readily, on
all occasions, apply the pecuniary argument as final. Thus when the
Rochester rappings began to be heard of in England, a man deposited
;^ioo in a sealed box in the Dublin Bank, and then advertised in the
newspapers to all somnambulists, mesmerizers, and others, that
whoever could tell him the number of his note, should have the
money. He let it lie there six months, the newspapers now and
then, at his instance, stimulating the attention of the adepts; but none
could ever tell him; and he said, "Now let me never be bothered
more with this proven lie." It is told of a good Sir John, that he
heard a case stated by counsel, and made up his mind; then the
counsel for the other side taking their turn to speak, he found
himself so unsettled and perplexed, that he exclaimed, "So help me
God! I will never listen to evidence again." Any number of delight-
ful examples of this EngHsh stolidity are the anecdotes of Europe. I
knew a very worthy man, — a magistrate, I believe he was, in the
town of Derby, — who went to the opera, to see Malibran. In one
scene, the heroine was to rush across a ruined bridge. Mr. B. arose,
and mildly yet firmly called the attention of the audience and the
performers to the fact that, in his judgment, the bridge was unsafe!
This English stolidity contrasts with French wit and tact. The
French, it is commonly said, have greatly more influence in Europe
than the English. What influence the English have is by brute force
of wealth and power; that of the French by affinity and talent. The
Italian is subtle, the Spaniard treacherous: tortures, it was said, could
never wrest from an Egyptian the confession of a secret. None of
these traits belong to the EngUshman. His choler and conceit force
everything out. Defoe, who knew his countrymen well, says of them,

"In close intrigue, their faculty's but weak.
For generally whate'er they know, they speak.
And often their own counsels undermine
By mere infirmity without design;

CHARACTER 379

From whence, the learned say, it doth proceed,
That English treasons never can succeed;
For they're so open-hearted, you may know
Their own most secret thoughts, and others' too."

CHAPTER VIII

CHARACTER

The English race are reputed morose. I do not know that they
have sadder brows than their neighbors of northern climates. They
are sad by comparison with the singing and dancing nations: not
sadder, but slow and staid, as finding their joys at home. They, too,
believe that where there is no enjoyment of life, there can be no
vigor and art in speech or thought: that your merry heart goes all the
way, your sad one tires in a mile. This trait of gloom has been fixed
on them by French travellers, who from Froissart, Voltaire, Le Sage,
Mirabeau, down to the lively journalists of the jeuilletons, have spent
their wit on the solemnity of their neighbors. The French say, gay
conversation is unknown in their island. The Englishman finds no
relief from reflection, except in reflection. When he wishes for
amusement, he goes to work. His hilarity is like an attack of fever.
Religion, the theatre, and the reading the books of his country, all
feed and increase his natural melancholy. The police does not inter-
fere with public diversions. It thinks itself bound in duty to respect
the pleasures and rare gayety of this inconsolable nation; and their
well-known courage is entirely attributable to their disgust of life.

I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few words have
obtained this reputation. As compared with the Americans, I think
them cheerful and contented. Young people in this country are much
more prone to melancholy. The English have a mild aspect, and a
ringing, cheerful voice. They are large natured, and not so easily
amused as the southerners, and are among them as grown people
among children, requiring war, or trade, or engineering, or science,
instead of frivolous games. They are proud and private, and, even if
disposed to recreation, will avoid an open garden. They sported
sadly; Us s'amusaient tristement, selon la coututne de leur pays, said
Froissart; and I suppose never nation built their party-walls so thick,

380 ENGLISH TRAITS

or their garden-fences so high. Meat and wine produce no eflFect on
them: they are just as cold, quiet and composed at the end, as at the
beginning of dinner.

The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six or seven
hundred years; and a kind of pride in bad pubHc spealiing is noted in
the House of Commons, as if they were willing to show that they
did not live by their tongues, or thought they spoke well enough if
they had the tone of gentlemen. In mixed company they shut their
mouths. A Yorkshire mill-owner told me he had ridden more than
once all the way from London to Leeds, in the first-class carriage,
with the same persons, and no word exchanged. The club-houses
were established to cultivate social habits, and it is rare that more
than two eat together, and oftenest one eats alone. Was it, then, a
stroke of humor in the serious Swedenborg, or was it only his pitiless
logic, that made him shut up the EngHsh souls in a heaven by them-
selves ?

They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic, and stubborn,
— and as mild, sweet, and sensible. The truth is, they have great
range and variety of character. Commerce sends abroad multitudes
of different classes. The choleric Welshman, the fervid Scot, the
bilious resident in the East or West Indies, are wide of the perfect
behavior of the educated and dignified man of family. So is the burly
farmer; so is the country 'squire, with his narrow and violent life.
In every inn is the Commercial-Room, in which "travellers," or bag-
men who carry patterns, and solicit orders for the manufacturers,
are wont to be entertained. It easily happens that this class should
characterize England to the foreigner, who meets them on the road
and at every public house, whilst the gentry avoid the taverns, or
seclude themselves whilst in them.

But these classes are the right English stock, and may fairly show
the national qualities before yet art and education have dealt with
them. They are good lovers, good haters, slow but obstinate
admirers, and in all things very much steeped in their temperament,
hke men hardly awaked from deep sleep which they enjoy. Their
habits and instincts cleave to nature. They are of the earth, earthy;
and of the sea, as the sea-kinds, attached to it for what it yields them,
and not from any sentiment. They are full of coarse strength, rude

CHARACTER 38 1

exercise, butcher's meat, and sound sleep; and suspect any poetic
insinuation, or any hint for the conduct o£ Ufe which reflects on this
animal existence, as if somebody were fumbling at the umbilical
cord, and might stop their supplies. They doubt a man's sound judg-
ment if he does not eat with appetite, and shake their heads if he is
particularly chaste. Take them as they come, you shall find in the
common people a surly indifference, sometimes gruffness and ill
temper; and, in minds of more power, magazines of inexhaustible
war, challenging

"The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland."

They are headstrong believers and defenders of their opinion, and
not less resolute in maintaining their whim and perversity. Heze-
kiah Woodward wrote a book against the Lord's Prayer. And one
can believe that Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy, having pre-
dicted from the stars the hour of his death, slipped the knot himself
round his own neck, not to falsify his horoscope.

Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness: they have extreme
difficulty to run away, and will die game. Wellington said of the
young coxcombs of the Life-Guards, delicately brought up, "But the
puppies fight well;" and Nelson said of his sailors, "They really mind
shot no more than peas." Of absolute stoutness no nation has more
or better examples. They are good at storming redoubts, at boarding
frigates, at dying in the last ditch, or any desperate service which has
daylight and honor in it; but not, I think, at enduring the rack, or
any passive obedience, like jumping off a castle-roof at the word of a
czar. Being both vascular and highly organized, so as to be very
sensible of pain; and intellectual, so as to see reason and glory in a
matter.

Of that constitutional force, which yields the supplies of the day,
they have the more than enough, the excess which creates courage
on fortitude, genius in poetry, invention in mechanics, enterprise
in trade, magnificence in wealth, splendor in ceremonies, petulance
and projects in youth. The young men have a rude health which
runs into peccant humors. They drink brandy like water, cannot
expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swim-

382 ENGLISH TRAITS

ming, and fencing, and run into absurd frolics with the gravity of
the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner
of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no
pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with
poisoned creases; swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon
Upas; taste every poison; buy every secret; at Naples, they put St.
Januarius's blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the
"winking Virgin," to know why she winks; measure with an English
footrule every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish caaba, every
Holy of hoUes; translate and send to Bentley the arcanum bribed
and buUied away from shuddering Bramins; and measure their own
strength by the terror they cause. These travellers are of every class,
the best and the worst; and it may easily happen that those of rudest
behavior are taken notice of and remembered. The Saxon melan-
choly in the vulgar rich and poor appears as gushes of ill-humor,
which every check exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. There
are multitudes of rude young English who have the self-sufficiency
and bluntness of their nation, and who, with their disdain of the
rest of mankind, and with this indigestion and choler, have made the
English traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and oifensive manners.
It was no bad description of the Briton generically, what was said
two hundred years ago, of one particular Oxford scholar: "He was
a very bold man, uttered anything that came into his mind, not only
among his companions, but in public coffee-houses, and would often
speak his mind of particular persons then accidentally present, with-
out examining the company he was in; for which he was often repri-
manded, and several times threatened to be kicked and beaten."

The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal article in
the bill of social rights, that every man has a right to his own ears.
No man can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibil-
ities of a pubhc room, or to put upon the company with the loud
statement of his crotchets or personalities.

But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of nations are
written, and however derived, whether a happier tribe or mixture of
tribes, the air, or what circumstance, that mixed for them the golden
mean of temperament, — here exists the best stock in the world,
broad-fronted, broad-bottomed, best for depth, range, and equability,

CHARACTER 383

men of aplomb and reserves, great range and many moods, strong
instincts, yet apt for culture; war-class as well as clerks; earls and
tradesmen; wise minority, as well as foolish majority; abysmal
temperament, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on which no sun-
shine settles; alternated with a common sense and humanity which
hold them fast to every piece of cheerful duty; making this tempera-
ment a sea to which all storms are superficial; a race to which their
fortunes flow, as if they alone had the elastic organization at once
fine and robust enough for dominion; as if the burly, inexpressive,
now mute and contumacious, now fierce and sharp-tongued dragon,
which once made the island light with his fiery breath, had be-
queathed his ferocity to his conqueror. They hide virtues under
vices, or the semblance of them. It is the misshapen hairy Scandina-
vian troll again, who lifts the cart out of the mire, or "threshes the
corn that ten day-laborers could not end," but it is done in the dark,
and with muttered maledictions. He is a churl with a soft place in
his heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to
help you at a pinch. He says no, and serves you, and your thanks
disgust him. Here was lately a cross-grained miser, odd and ugly,
resembling in countenance the portrait of Punch, with the laugh left
out; rich by his own industry; sulking in a lonely house; who never
gave a dinner to any man, and disdained all courtesies; yet as true a
worshipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed, and profusely
pouring over the cold mind of his countrymen creations of grace and
truth, removing the reproach of sterility from English art, catching
from their savage climate every fine hint, and importing into their
galleries every tint and trait of sunnier cities and skies; making an era
in painting; and, when he saw that the splendor of one of his pictures
in the Exhibition dimmed his rival's that hung next it, secretly took
a brush and blackened his own.

They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws to peck at.
They have that phlegm or staidness, which it is a compliment to dis-
turb. "Great men," said Aristotle, "are always of a nature originally
melancholy." 'Tis the habit of a mind which attaches to abstrac-
tions with a passion which gives vast results. They dare to displease,
they do not speak to expectation. They like the sayers of No, better
than the sayers of Yes. Each of them has an opinion which he feels

384 ENGLISH TRAITS

it becomes him to express all the more that it differs from yours.
They are meditating opposition. This gravity is inseparable from
minds of great resources.

There is an English hero superior to the French, the German, the
Italian, or the Greek. When he is brought to the strife with fate, he
sacrifices a richer material possession, and on more purely meta-
physical grounds. He is there with his own consent, face to face with
fortune, which he defies. On deliberate choice, and from grounds
of character, he has elected his part to live and die for, and dies with
grandeur. This race has added new elements to humanity, and has
a deeper root in the world.

They have great range of scale, from ferocity to exquisite refine-
ment. With larger scale, they have great retrieving power. After
running each tendency to an extreme, they try another tack with
equal heat. More intellectual than other races, when they live with
other races, they do not take their language, but bestow their own.
They subsidize other nations, and are not subsidized. They proselyte,
and are not proselyted. They assimilate other races to themselves,
and are not assimilated. The English did not calculate the conquest
of the Indies. It fell to their character. So they administer in different
parts of the world, the codes of every empire and race; in Canada,
old French law; in the Mauritius, the Code Napoleon; in the West
Indies, the edicts of the Spanish Cortes; in the East Indies, the Laws
of Menu; in the Isle of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing; at the Cape
of Good Hope, of the old Netherlands; and in the Ionian Islands, the
Pandects of Justinian.

They are very conscious of their advantageous position in history.
England is the lawgiver, the patron, the instructor, the ally. Com-
pare the tone of the French and of the English press : the first queru-
lous, captious, sensitive about English opinion; the English press is
never timorous about French opinion, but arrogant and contemp-
tuous.

They are testy and headstrong through an excess of will and bias;
churlish as men sometimes please to be who do not forget a debt,
who ask no favors, and who will do what they like with their own.
With education and intercourse, these asperities wear off, and leave
the good will pure. If anatomy is reformed according to national

CHARACTER 385

tendencies, I suppose, the spleen will hereafter be found in the
Englishman, not found in the American, and differencing the one
from the other. I anticipate another anatomical discovery, that this
organ will be found to be cortical and caducous, that they are super-
ficially morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein differing from Rome
and the Latin nations. Nothing savage, nothing mean, resides in the
English heart. They are subject to panics of credulity and of rage,
but the temper of the nation, however disturbed, settles itself soon
and easily, as, in this temperate zone, the sky after whatever storms
clears again, and serenity is its normal condition.

A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception as the
curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first
deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice
as people who wear well, or hide their strength. To understand the
power of performance that is in their finest wits, in the patient New-
ton, or in the versatile transcendent poets, or in the Dugdales,
Gibbons, Hallams, Eldons, and Peels, one should see how English
day-laborers hold out. High and low, they are of an unctuous
texture. There is an adipocere in their constitution, as if they had oil
also for their mental wheels, and could perform vast amounts of
work without damaging themselves.

Even the scale of expense on which people live, and to which
scholars and professional men conform, proves the tension of their
muscle, when vast numbers are found who can each lift this
enormous load. I might even add, their daily feasts argue a savage
vigor of body.

No nation was ever so rich in able men; "gentlemen," as Charles
I. said of Strafford, "whose abilities might make a prince rather
afraid than ashamed in the greatest affairs of state;" men of such
temper that, like Baron Vere, "had one seen him returning from a
victory, he would by his silence have suspected that he had lost the
day; and, had he beheld him in a retreat, he would have collected
him a conqueror by the cheerfulness of his spirit,"^

The following passage from the Heimskringla might almost stand
as a portrait of the modern Englishman: — "Haldor was very stout
and strong, and remarkably handsome in appearances. King Harold

1 Fuller. Worthies of England.

386 ENGLISH TRAITS

gave him this testimony, that he, among all his men, cared least
about doubtful circumstances, whether they betokened danger or
pleasure; for, whatever turned up, he was never in higher nor in
lower spirits, never slept less nor more on account of them, nor ate
nor drank but according to his custom. Haldor was not a man of
many words, but short in conversation, told his opinion bluntly, and
was obstinate and hard : and this could not please the king, who had
many clever people about him, zealous in his service. Haldor
remained a short time with the king, and then came to Iceland,
where he took up his abode in Hiardaholt, and dwelt in that farm
to a very advanced age."^

The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffing.
The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets
all its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath,
but has a long memory, and, in its hottest heat, a register and rule.

Half their strength they put not forth. They are capable of a
sublime resolution, and if hereafter the war of races, often predicted,
and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism
and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the
English civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their
floating castles, and find a new home and a second millennium of
power in their colonies.

The stability of England is the security of the modern world. If
the English race were as mutable as the French, what reliance? But
the English stand for liberty. The conservative, money-loving, lord-
loving English are yet liberty-loving; and so freedom is safe: for
they have more personal force than any other people. The nation
always resist the immoral action of their government. They think
humanely on the affairs of France, of Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary,
of Schleswig-Holstein, though overborne by the statecraft of the
rulers at last.

Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent bias,
which, though not less potent, is masked, as the tribe spreads its
activity into colonies, commerce, codes, arts, letters? The early
history shows it, as the musician plays the air which he proceeds to
conceal in a tempest of variations. In Alfred, in the Northmen, one

2 Heimskringla, Laing's translation, vol. iii., p. 37.

COCKAYNE 387

may read the genius of the EngUsh society, namely, that private Ufe
is the place of honor. Glory, a career, and ambition, words familiar
to the longitude of Paris, are seldom heard in English speech. Nelson
wrote from their hearts his homely telegraph, "England expects every
man to do his duty."

For actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or to appease
diseased or inflamed talent, the army and navy may be entered (the
worst boys doing well in the navy) ; and the civil service, in depart-
ments where serious official work is done; and they hold in esteem
the barrister engaged in the severer studies of the law. But the calm,
sound, and most British Briton shrinks from public life, as charla-
tanism, and respects an economy founded on agriculture, coal-mines,
manufactures, or trade, which secures an independence through
the creation of real values.

They wish neither to command nor obey, but to be kings in their
own houses. They are intellectual and deeply enjoy literature; they
like well to have the world served up to them in books, maps,
models, and every mode of exact information, and, though not
creators in art, they value its refinement. They are ready for leisure,
can direct and fill their own day, nor need so much as others the
constraint of a necessity. But the history of the nation discloses, at
every turn, this original predilection for private independence, and,
however this incUnation may have been disturbed by the bribes with
which their vast colonial power has warped men out of orbit, the
inclination endures, and forms and reforms the laws, letters, manners,
and occupations. They choose that welfare which is compatible with
the commonwealth, knowing that such alone is stable; as wise mer-
chants prefer investments in the three per cents.

CHAPTER IX

COCKAYNE

The EngUsh are a nation of humorists. Individual right is pushed
to the uttermost bound compatible with public order. Property is so
perfect, that it seems the craft of that race, and not to exist elsewhere.
The king cannot step on an acre which the peasant refuses to sell.

388 ENGLISH TRAITS

A testator endows a dog or a rookery, and Europe cannot interfere
with his absurdity. Every individual has his particular way of living,
which he pushes to folly, and the decided sympathy of his com-
patriots is engaged to back up Mr. Crump's whim by statutes, and
chancellors, and horse-guards. There is no freak so ridiculous but
some Englishman has attempted to immortalize by money and law.
British citizenship is as omnipotent as Roman was. Mr. Cockayne is
very sensible of this. The pursy man means by freedom the right
to do as he pleases, and does wrong in order to feel his freedom,
and makes a conscience of persisting in it.

He is intensely patriotic, for his country is so small. His confidence
in the power and performance of his nation makes him provokingly
incurious about other nations. He dislikes foreigners. Swedenborg,
who lived much in England, notes "the simiHtude of minds among
the English, in consequence of which they contract familiarity with
friends who are of that nation, and seldom with others: and they
regard foreigners, as one looking through a telescope from the top
of a palace regards those who dwell or wander about out of the
city." A much older traveller, the Venetian who wrote the "Relation
of England,"^ in 1500, says: — "The English are great lovers of them-
selves, and of everything belonging to them. They think that there
are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England;
and, whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that he
looks like an Englishman, and it is a great pity he should not be an
Englishman; and whenever they partake of any delicacy with a
foreigner, they ask him whether such a thing is made in his country."
When he adds epithets of praise, his climax is "so English"; and
when he wishes to pay you the highest compliment, he says, I should
not know you from an Englishman. France is, by its natural con-
trast, a kind of black-board on which English character draws its
own traits in chalk. This arrogance habitually exhibits itself in
allusions to the French. I suppose that all men of English blood in
America, Europe, or Asia, have a secret feeling of joy that they are
not French natives. Mr. Coleridge is said to have given public thanks
to God, at the close of a lecture, that he had defended him from being
able to utter a single sentence in the French language. I have found
^Printed by the Camden Society.

COCKJVYNE 389

that Englishmen have such a good opinion of England, that the
ordinary phrases, in all good society, of postponing or disparaging
one's own things in talking with a stranger are seriously mistaken
by them for an insuppressible homage to the merits of their nation;
and the New Yorker or Pennsylvanian who modesdy laments the
disadvantage of a new country, log huts, and savages, is surprised by
the instant and unfeigned commiseration of the whole company,
who plainly account all the world out of England a heap of rubbish.

The same insular limitation pinches his foreign politics. He sticks
to his traditions and usages, and, so help him God! he will force his
island by-laws down the throat of great countries, like India, China,
Canada, Australia, and not only so, but impose Wapping on the
Congress of Vienna, and trample down all nationalities with his
taxed boots. Lord Chatham goes for liberty, and no taxation without
representation; — for that is British law; but not a hobnail shall they
dare make in America, but buy their nails in England, — for that
also is British law; and the fact that British commerce was to be
re-created by the independence of America took them all by surprise.

In short, I am afraid that English nature is so rank and aggressive
as to be a Httle incompatible with every other. The world is not wide
enough for two.

But, beyond this nationality, it must be admitted, the island offers
a daily worship to the old Norse god Brage, celebrated among our
Scandinavian forefathers, for his eloquence and majestic air. The
English have a steady courage, that fits them for great attempts and
endurance: they have also a petty courage, through which every
man delights in showing himself for what he is, and in doing what
he can; so that, in all companies, each of them has too good an opin-
ion of himself to imitate anybody. He hides no defect of his form,
features, dress, connection, or birthplace, for he thinks every circum-
stance belonging to him comes recommended to you. If one of them
have a bald, or a red, or a green head, or bow legs, or a scar, or mark,
or a paunch, or a squeaking or a raven voice, he has persuaded
himself that there is something modish and becoming in it, and that
it sits well on him.

But nature makes nothing in vain, and this Httle superfluity of self-
regard in the English brain is one of the secrets of their power and

390 ENGLISH TRAITS

history. For, it sets every man on being and doing what he really is
and can. It takes away a dodging, skulking, secondary air, and
encourages a frank and manly bearing, so that each man makes the
most of himself, and loses no opportunity for want of pushing. A
man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the
world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he
makes hght of them, so will other men. We all find in these a con-
venient metre of character, since a little man would be ruined by the
vexation. I remember a shrewd politician, in one of our western
cities, told me, "that he had known several successful statesmen made
by their foible." And another, an ex-governor of IlHnois, said to me,
"If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest;
but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and
down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries."

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously
expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out,
and hold him to it. Their culture generally enables the travelled
English to avoid any ridiculous extremes of this self-pleasing, and to
give it an agreeable air. Then the natural disposition is fostered by
the respect which they find entertained in the world for English
ability. It was said of Louis XIV., that his gait and air were becom-
ing enough in so great a monarch, yet would have been ridiculous
in another man; so the prestige of the English name warrants a
certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or Belgian could not
carry. At all events, they feel themselves at liberty to assume the
most extraordinary tone on the subject of English merits.

An English lady on the Rhine, hearing a German speaking of her
party as foreigners, exclaimed, "No, we are not foreigners; we are
English; it is you that are foreigners." They tell you daily, in Lon-
don, the story of the Frenchman and Englishman who quarrelled.
Both were unwilling to fight, but their companions put them up to
it; at last, it was agreed that they should fight alone, in the dark,
and with pistols: the candles were put out, and the EngHshman, to
make sure not to hit anybody, fired up the chimney, and brought
down the Frenchman. They have no curiosity about foreigners, and
answer any information you may volunteer with "Oh, oh!" until the
informant makes up his mind that they shall die in their ignorance

COCKAYNE 391

for any help he will ofJer. There are really no limits to this conceit,
though brighter men among them make painful efforts to be candid.

The habit of brag runs through all classes, from the Times news-
paper through politicians and poets, through Wordsworth, Carlyle,
Mill, and Sydney Smith, down to the boys of Eton. In the gravest
treatise on political economy, in a philosophical essay, in books of
science, one is surprised by the most innocent exhibition of unflinch-
ing nationality. In a tract on Corn, a most amiable and accomplished
gentleman writes thus: — "Though Britain, according to Bishop
Berkeley's idea, were surrounded by a wall of brass ten thousand
cubits in height, still she would as far excel the rest of the globe in
riches, as she now does, both in this secondary quality, and in the
more important ones of freedom, virtue, and science."^

The Enghsh dislike the American structure of society, whilst yet
trade, mills, public education, and chartism are doing what they can
to create in England the same social condition. America is the
paradise of the economists; is the favorable exception invariably
quoted to the rules of ruin; but when he speaks directly of the
Americans, the islander forgets his philosophy, and remembers his
disparaging anecdotes.

But this childish patriotism costs something, like all narrowness.
The English sway of their colonies has no root of kindness. They
govern by their arts and ability; they are more just than kind; and,
whenever an abatement of their power is felt, they have not concil-
iated the affection on which to rely.

Coarse local distinctions, as those of nation, province, or town, are
useful in the absence of real ones; but we must not insist on these
accidental Hnes. Individual traits are always triumphing over
national ones. There is no fence in metaphysics discriminating
Greek, or English, or Spanish science, ^sop, and Montaigne, Cer-
vantes, and Saadi are men of the world; and to wave our own flag at
the dinner-table or in the University, is to carry the boisterous dulness
of a fire-club into a polite circle. Nature and destiny are always on
the watch for our follies. Nature trips us up when we strut; and
there are curious examples in history on this very point of national
pride.

^ William Spence.

392 ENGLISH TRAITS

George o£ Cappadocia, born at Epiphania in Cilicia, was a low
parasite, who got a lucrative contract to supply the army with bacon.
A rogue and informer, he got rich, and was forced to run from
justice. He saved his money, embraced Arianism, collected a library,
and got promoted by a faction to the episcopal throne of Alexandria.
When Julian came, a.d. 361, George was dragged to prison; the
prison was burst open by the mob, and George was lynched, as he
deserved. And this precious knave became, in good time. Saint
George of England, patron of chivalry, emblem of victory and
civility, and the pride of the best blood of the modern world.

Strange, that the solid truth-speaking Briton should derive from an
impostor. Strange, that the New World should have no better luck,
— that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Ves-
pucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who went out, in 1499, a subaltern
with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate
in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to
supplant Columbus, and baptize half the earth with his own dis-
honest name. Thus nobody can throw stones. We are equally badly
off in our founders; and the false pickle-dealer is an offset to the
false bacon-seller.

CHAPTER X

There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to
wealth. In America, there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits
the evidences of large property, as if, after all, it needed apology.
But the EngUshman has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a
final certificate. A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls; —
if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes, and coach
and horses ? How can a man be a gentleman without a pipe of wine ?

Haydon says, "There is a fierce resolution to make every man
live according to the means he possesses." There is a mixture of
religion in it. They are under the Jewish law, and read with sonorous
emphasis that their days shall be long in the land, they shall have
sons and daughters, flocks and herds, wine and oil. In exact propor-

WEALTH 393

tion, is the reproach of poverty. They do not wish to be represented
except by opulent men. An EngHshman who has lost his fortune, is
said to have died of a broken heart. The last term of insult is, "a
beggar." Nelson said, "The want of fortune is a crime which I
can never get over." Sydney Smith said, "Poverty is infamous in
England." And one of their recent writers speaks, in reference to a
private and scholastic life, of "the grave moral deterioration which
follows an empty exchequer." You shall find this sentiment, if not
so frankly put, yet deeply impHed, in the novels and romances of the
present century, and not only in these, but in biography, and in the
votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the preaching, and in the
table-talk.

I was lately turning over Wood's AthencE Oxonienses, and look-
ing naturally for another standard in a chronicle of the scholars of
Oxford for two hundred years. But I found the two disgraces in that,
as in most English books, are, first, disloyalty to Church and State,
and, second, to be born poor, or to come to poverty. A natural fruit
of England is the brutal political economy. Malthus finds no cover
laid at nature's table for the laborer's son. In 1809, the majority in
Parliament expressed itself by the language of Mr. Fuller in the
House of Commons, "If you do not like the country, damn you, you
can leave it." When Sir S. Romilly proposed his bill forbidding
parish officers to bind children apprentices at a greater distance than
forty miles from their home, Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said,
"Though in the higher ranks, to cultivate family affections was a
good thing, 'twas not so among the lower orders. Better take them
away from those who might deprave them. And it was highly inju-
rious to trade to stop binding to manufactures, as it must raise the
price of labor, and of manufactured goods."

The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled only by the
respect for wealth. It is at once the pride of art of the Saxon, as he is
a wealth-maker, and his passion for independence. The Englishman
believes that every man must take care of himself, and has himself to
thank, if he do not mend his condition. To pay their debts is their
national point of honor. From the Exchequer and the East India
House to the huckster's shop, everything prospers, because it is
solvent. The British armies are solvent, and pay for what they take.

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The British Empire is solvent; for, in spite of the huge national debt,
the valuation mounts. During the war from 1789 to 1815, whilst
they complained that they were taxed within an inch of their lives,
and, by dint of enormous taxes, were subsidizing all the continent
against France, the English were growing rich every year faster than
any people ever grew before. It is their maxim, that the weight of
taxes must be calculated not by what is taken, but by what is left.
Solvency is in the ideas and mechanism of an Englishman. The
Crystal Palace is not considered honest until it pays; — no matter how
much convenience, beauty, or eclat, it must be self-supporting. They
are contented with slower steamers, as long as they know the swifter
boats lose money. They proceed logically by the double method of
labor and thrift. Every household exhibits an exact economy, and
nothing of that uncalculated headlong expenditure which families
use in America. If they cannot pay, they do not buy; for they have
no presumption of better fortunes next year, as our people have;
and they say without shame, I cannot afford it. Gentlemen do not
hesitate to ride in the second-class cars, or in the second cabin. An
economist, or a man who can proportion his means and his ambition,
or bring the year round with expenditure which expresses his char-
acter, without embarrassing one day of his future, is already a master
of life, and a freeman. Lord Burleigh writes to his son, "that one
ought never to devote more than two-thirds of his income to the
ordinary expenses of life, since the extraordinary will be certain to
absorb the other third."

The ambition to create value evokes every kind of ability, govern-
ment becomes a manufacturing corporation, and every house a mill.
The headlong bias to utility will let no talent lie in a napkin, — if
possible, will teach spiders to weave silk stockings. An Englishman,
while he eats and drinks no more, or not much more, than another
man, labors three times as many hours in the course of a year as any
other European; or his life as a workman is three lives. He works
fast. Everything in England is at a quick pace. They have rein-
forced their own productivity by the creation of that marvellous
machinery which differences this age from any other age.

'Tis a curious chapter in modern history, the growth of the
machine-shop. Six hundred years ago Roger Bacon explained the

WEALTH 395

precession of the equinoxes, the consequent necessity of the reform
of the calendar; measured the length of the year, invented gunpow-
der; and announced (as if looking from his lofty cell, over five
centuries, into ours), "that machines can be constructed to drive ships
more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do; nor would they
need anything but a pilot to steer them. Carriages also might be
constructed to move with an incredible speed, without the aid of any
animal. Finally, it would not be impossible to make machines which,
by means of a suit of wings, should fly in the air in the manner of
birds." But the secret slept with Bacon. The six hundred years have
not yet fulfilled his words. Two centuries ago the sawing of timber
was done by hand; the carriage wheels ran on wooden axles; the
land was tilled by wooden ploughs. And it was to Htde purpose
that they had pit-coal, or that looms were improved, unless Watt
and Stephenson had taught them to work force-pumps and power-
looms by steam. The great strides were all taken within the last
hundred years. The Life of Sir Robert Peel, who died the other day,
the model Englishman, very properly has for a frontispiece a draw-
ing of the spinning-jenny, which wove the web of his fortunes. Har-
greaves invented the spinning-jenny, and died in a workhouse.
Arkwright improved the invention; and the machine dispensed with
the work of ninety-nine men: that is, one spinner could do as much
work as one hundred had done before. The loom was improved
further. But the men would sometimes strike for wages, and com-
bine against the masters, and, about 1829-30, much fear was felt, lest
the trade would be drawn away by these interruptions, and the
emigration of the spinners to Belgium and the United States. Iron
and steel are very obedient. Whether it were not possible to make
a spinner that would not rebel, nor mutter, nor scowl, nor strike for
wages, nor emigrate ? At the solicitation of the masters, after a mob
and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts, of Manchester, undertook to
create this peaceful fellow, instead of the quarrelsome fellow God
had made. After a few trials he succeeded, and in 1830 procured a
patent for his self-acting mule; a creation the delight of mill-owners,
and "destined," they said, "to restore order among the industrious
classes;" a machine requiring only a child's hand to piece the broken
yarns. As Arkwright had destroyed domestic spinning, so Roberts

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destroyed the factory spinner. The power of machinery in Great
Britain, in mills, has been computed to be equal to 600,000,000 men,
one man being able by the aid of steam to do the work which
required two hundred and fifty men to accomplish fifty years ago.
The production has been commensurate. England already had this
laborious race, rich soil, water, wood, coal, iron, and favorable
climate. Eight hundred years ago commerce had made it rich, and
it was recorded, "England is the richest of all the northern nations."
The Norman historians recite that, "in 1067, William carried with
him into Normandy, from England, more gold and silver than had
ever before been seen in Gaul." But when to this labor and trade
and these native resources was added this goblin of steam, with his
myriad arms, never tired, working night and day everlastingly, the
amassing of property has run out of all figures. It makes the motor
of the last ninety years. The steampipe has added to her population
and wealth the equivalent of four or five Englands. Forty thousand
ships are entered in Lloyd's lists. The yield of wheat has gone on
from 2,000,000 quarters in the time of the Stuarts, to 13,000,000 in
1854. A thousand million of pounds sterling are said to compose the
floating money of commerce. In 1848 Lord John Russell stated that
the people of this country had laid out ,^300,000,000 of capital in
railways in the last four years. But a better measure than these
sounding figures is the estimate that there is wealth enough in
England to support the entire population in idleness for one year.

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels, roads, loco-
motives, telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar to a millionth of an
inch. Steam twines huge cannon into wreaths, as easily as it braids
straw, and vies with the volcanic forces which twisted the strata. It
can clothe shingle mountains with ship-oaks, make sword-blades that
will cut gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it can plant forests, and bring
rain after three thousand years. Already it is ruddering the balloon,
and the next war will be fought in the air. But another machine
more potent in England than steam, is the Bank. It votes an issue of
bills, population is stimulated, and cities rise; it refuses loans, and
emigration empties the country; trade sinks; revolutions break out;
kings are dethroned. By these new agents our social system is
moulded. By dint of steam and of money, war and commerce are

WEALTH 397

changed. Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie
does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where
we will. Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will live
under. Money makes place for them. The telegraph is a limp-band
that will hold the Fenris-wolf of war. For now that a telegraph
line runs through France and Europe, from London, every message
it transmits makes stronger by one thread the band which war will
have to cut.

The introduction of these elements gives new resources to existing
proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that the state depends on the
House of Lords, but the engineer sees that every stroke of the steam-
piston gives value to the duke's land, fills it with tenants; doubles,
quadruples, centuples the duke's capital, and creates new measures
and new necessities for the culture of his children. Of course, it
draws the nobility into the competition as stockholders in the mine,
the canal, the railway, in the application of steam to agriculture, and
sometimes into trade. But it also introduces large classes into the
same competition; the old energy of the Norse race arms itself with
these magnificent powers; new men prove an overmatch for the
land-owner, and the mill buys out the castle. Scandinavian Thor,
who once forged his bolts in icy Hecla and built galleys by lonely
fiords, in England has advanced with the times, has shorn his beard,
enters Parliament, sits down at a desk in the India House, and lends
Miollnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.

The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety years is a main
fact in modern history. The wealth of London determines prices
all over the globe. All things precious, or useful, or amusing, or
intoxicating, are sucked into this commerce and floated to London.
Some English private fortunes reach, and some exceed, a million of
dollars a year, A hundred thousand palaces adorn the island. All
that can feed the senses and passions, all that can succor the talent,
or arm the hands, of the intelligent middle class, who never spare
in what they buy for their own consumption; all that can aid science,
gratify taste, or soothe comfort, is in open market. Whatever is
excellent and beautiful in civil, rural, or ecclesiastic architecture; in
fountain, garden, or grounds; the English noble crosses sea and land
to see and to copy at home. The taste and science of thirty peaceful

398 ENGLISH TRAITS

generations; the gardens which Evelyn planted; the temples and
pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren built; the
wood that Gibbons carved; the taste of foreign and domestic artists,
Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton, are in the vast auction,
and the hereditary principle heaps on the owner of to-day the bene-
fit of ages of owners. The present possessors are to the full as absolute
as any of their fathers, in choosing and procuring what they Hke.
This comfort and splendor, the breadth of lake and mountain,
tillage, pasture, and park, sumptuous castle and modern villa, — all
consist with perfect order. They have no revolutions; no horse-
guards dictating to the crown; no Parisian poissardes and barricades;
no mob: but drowsy habitude, daily dress-dinners, wine, and ale, and
beer, and gin, and sleep.

With this power of creation, and this passion for independence,
property has reached an ideal perfection. It is felt and treated as the
national life-blood. The laws are framed to give property the secur-
est possible basis, and the provisions to lock and transmit it have
exercised the cunningest heads in a profession which never admits a
fool. The rights of property nothing but felony and treason can
override. The house is a castle which the king cannot enter. The
Bank is a strong box to which the king has no key. Whatever surly
sweetness possession can give, is tested in England to the dregs.
Vested rights are awful things, and absolute possession gives the
smallest freeholder identity of interest with the duke. High stone
fences and padlocked garden-gates announce the absolute will of
the owner to be alone. Every whim of exaggerated egotism is put
into stone and iron, into silver and gold, with costly deliberation and
detail.

An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes to establish
some claim to put her park paling a rod forward into his grounds,
so as to get a coachway, and save her a mile to the avenue. Instantly
he transforms his paUng into stone-masonry, solid as the walls of
Cuma, and all Europe cannot prevail on him to sell or compound
for an inch of the land. They deUght in a freak as the proof of their
sovereign freedom. Sir Edward Boynton, at Spic Park, at Caden-
ham, on a precipice of incomparable prospect, built a house like a
long barn, which had not a window on the prospect side. Strawberry

WEALTH 399

Hill of Horace Walpole, Fonthill Abbey of Mr. Beckford, were
freaks; and Newstead Abbey became one in the hands of Lord
Byron.

But the proudest result of this creation has been the great and
refined forces it has put at the disposal of the private citizen. In the
social world, an Englishman to-day has the best lot. He is a king
in a plain coat. He goes with the most powerful protection, keeps the
best company, is armed by the best education, is seconded by wealth;
and his English name and accidents are like a flourish of trumpets
announcing him. This, with his quiet style of manners, gives him
the power of a sovereign, without the inconveniences which belong
to that rank. I must prefer the condition of an English gendeman of
the better class, to that of any potentate in Europe, — whether for
travel, or for opportunity of society, or for access to means of science
or study, or for mere comfort and easy healthy relation to people at
home.

Such as we have seen is the wealth of England, a mighty mass,
and made good in whatever details we care to explore. The cause
and spring of it is the wealth of temperament in the people. The
wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature. Her worthies are ever
surrounded by as good men as themselves; each is a captain a
hundred strong, and that wealth of men is represented again in the
faculty of each individual, — that he has waste strength, power to
spare. The English are so rich, and seem to have established a tap-
root in the bowels of the planet, because they are constitutionally
fertile and creative.

But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have
them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the
hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret
of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required
function in the work of the world. But it is found that the machine
unmans the user. What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general
power. There should be temperance in making cloth, as well as in
eating. A man should not be a silk-worm, nor a nation a tent of
caterpillars. The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the
Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester spinner, — far on the
way to be spiders and needles. The incessant repetition of the same

400 ENGLISH TRAITS

hand-work dwarfs the man, robs him of his strength, wit, and versa-
tihty, to make a pin-poHsher, a buckle-maker, or any other specialty;
and presently, in a change of industry, whole towns are sacrificed like
ant-hills, when the fashion of shoe-strings supersedes buckles, when
cotton takes the place of linen, or railways of turnpikes, or when
commons are inclosed by landlords. Then society is admonished of
the mischief of the division of labor, and that the best political
economy is care and culture of men ; for, in these crises, all are ruined
except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new
choice and the application of their talent to new labor. Then again
come in new calamities. England is aghast at the disclosure of her
fraud in the adulteration of food, of drugs, and of almost every
fabric in her mills and shops; finding that milk will not nourish, nor
sugar sweeten, nor bread satisfy, nor pepper bite the tongue, nor glue
stick. In true England all is false and forged. This too is the reaction
of machinery, but of the larger machinery of commerce. 'Tis not,
I suppose, want of probity, so much as the tyranny of trade, which
necessitates a perpetual competition of underselling, and that again
a perpetual deterioration of the fabric.

The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanageable, and
flies away with the aeronaut. Steam, from the first, hissed and
screamed to warn him; it was dreadful with its explosion, and
crushed the engineer. The machinist has wrought and watched,
engineers and firemen without number have been sacrificed in learn-
ing to tame and guide the monster. But harder still it has proved to
resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors
and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Robinson, and their Parlia-
ments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, and
went to their graves in the belief that they were enriching the
country which they were impoverishing. They congratulated each
other on ruinous expedients. It is rare to find a merchant who knows
why a crisis occurs in trade, why prices rise or fall, or who knows the
mischief of paper money. In the culmination of national prosperity,
in the annexation of countries; building of ships, depots, towns; in
the influx of tons of gold and silver; amid the chuckle of chancellors
and financiers, it was found that bread rose to famine prices, that the
yeoman was forced to sell his cow and pig, his tools, and his acre of

WEALTH 401

land; and the dreadful barometer of the poor-rates was touching the
point of ruin. The poor-rate was sucking in the solvent classes, and
forcing an exodus of farmers and mechanics. What befalls from
the violence of financial crisis, befalls daily in the violence of artificial
legislation.

Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounteous, and aug-
menting. But the question recurs, does she take the step beyond,
namely, to the wise use, in view of the supreme wealth of nations?
We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with
their surplus capital. And, in view of these injuries, some compen-
sation has been attempted in England. A part of the money earned
returns to the brain to buy schools, libraries, bishops, astronomers,
chemists, and artists with; and a part to repair the wrongs of this
intemperate weaving, by hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics' Insti-
tutes, public grounds, and other charities and amenities. But the
antidotes are frightfully inadequate, and the evil requires a deeper
cure, which time and a simpler social organization must supply. At
present, she does not rule her wealth. She is simply a good England,
but no divinity, or wise and instructed soul. She too is in the stream
of fate, one victim more in a common catastrophe.

But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of greatness to be
held as the chief offender. England must be held responsible for
the despotism of expense. Her prosperity, the splendor which so
much manhood and talent and perseverance has thrown upon vulgar
aims, is the very argument of materialism. Her success strengthens
the hands of base wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty and
wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the conquest of letters and
arts; when English success has grown out of the very renunciation of
principles, and the dedication to outsides? A civility of trifles, of
money and expense, an erudition of sensation takes place, and the
putting as many impediments as we can, between the man and his
objects. Hardly the bravest among them have the manliness to resist
it successfully. Hence, it has come that not the aims of a manly life,
but the means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is that which
is to be considered by a youth in England, emerging from his mi-
nority. A large family is reckoned a misfortune. And it is a con-
solation in the death of the young, that a source of expense is closed.

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CHAPTER XI

ARISTOCRACY

The feudal character of the English state, now that it is getting
obsolete, glares a little, in contrast with the democratic tendencies.
The inequality of power and property shocks republican nerves.
Palaces, halls, villas, walled parks, all over England, rival the splen-
dor of royal seats. Many of the halls, like Haddon, or Kedleston,
are beautiful desolations. The proprietor never saw them, or never
lived in them. Primogeniture built these sumptuous piles, and, I
suppose, it is the sentiment of every traveller, as it was mine, 'Twas
well to come ere these were gone. Primogeniture is a cardinal rule
of English property and institutions. Laws, customs, manners, the
very persons and faces, affirm it.

The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of the people is loyal.
The estates, names, and manners of the nobles flatter the fancy of
the people, and conciliate the necessary support. In spite of broken
faith, stolen charters, and the devastation of society by the profligacy
of the court, we take sides as we read for the loyal England and
King Charles's "return to his right" with his Cavaliers, — knowing
what a heartless trifler he is, and what a crew of God-forsaken rob-
bers they are. The people of England knew as much. But the fair
idea of a settled government connecting itself with heraldic names,
with the written and oral history of Europe, and, at last, with the
Hebrew religion, and the oldest traditions of the world, was too
pleasing a vision to be shattered by a few offensive realities, and the
politics of shoemakers and costermongers. The hopes of the com-
moners take the same direction with the interest of the patricians.
Every man who becomes rich buys land, and does what he can to
fortify the nobility, into which he hopes to rise. The Anglican clergy
are identified with the aristocracy. Time and law have made the
joining and moulding perfect in every part. The Cathedrals, the
Universities, the national music, the popular romances, conspire to
uphold the heraldry, which the current politics of the day are sap-
ping. The taste of the people is conservative. They are proud of the
castles, and of the language and symbol of chivalry. Even the word

ARISTOCRACY 403

lord is the luckiest style that is used in any language to designate a
patrician. The superior education and manners of the nobles recom-
mend them to the country.

The Norwegian pirate got what he could, and held it for his
eldest son. The Norman noble, who was the Norwegian pirate bap-
tized, did Hkewise. There was this advantage of western over ori-
ental nobiUty, that this was recruited from below. English history
is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let
him come in. Of course, the terms of admission to this club are
hard and high. The selfishness of the nobles comes in aid of the
interest of the nation to require signal merit. Piracy and war gave
place to trade, politics, and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; the
law-lord to the merchant and the mill-owner; but the privilege was
kept, whilst the means of obtaining it were changed.

The foundations of these families lie deep in Norwegian exploits
by sea, and Saxon sturdiness on land. All nobility in its beginnings
was somebody's natural superiority. The things these English have
done were not done without peril of life, nor without wisdom and
conduct; and the first hands, it may be presumed, were often chal-
lenged to show their right to their honors, or yield them to better
men. "He that will be a head, let him be a bridge," said the Welsh
chief Benegridran, when he carried all his men over the river on his
back. "He shall have the book," said the mother of Alfred, "who
can read it;" and Alfred won it by that title: and I make no doubt
that feudal tenure was no sinecure, but baron, knight, and tenant
often had their memories refreshed, in regard to the service by which
they held their lands. The De Veres, Bohuns, Mowbrays, and Plan-
tagenets were not addicted to contemplation. The Middle Age
adorned itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of Richard
Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the Emperor told Henry V. that no
Christian king had such another knight for wisdom, nurture, and
manhood, and caused him to be named, "Father of curtesie." "Our
success in France," says the historian, "lived and died with him." '

The war-lord earned his honors, and no donation of land was
large, as long as it brought the duty of protecting it, hour by hour,
against a terrible enemy. In France and in England, the nobles were,

^ Fuller's Worthies, II., p. 472.

404 ENGLISH TRAITS

down to a late day, born and bred to war: and the duel, which in
peace still held them to the risks of war, diminished the envy that,
in trading and studious nations, would else have pried into their
title. They were looked on as men who played high for a great stake.

Great estates are not sinecures, if they are to be kept great. A
creative economy is the fuel of magnificence. In the same line of
Warwick, the successor next but one to Beauchamp, was the stout
earl of Henry VI. and Edward IV. Few esteemed themselves in
the mode, whose heads were not adorned with the black ragged
staff, his badge. At his house in London, six oxen were daily eaten
at a breakfast; and every tavern was full of his meat; and who had
any acquaintance in his family, should have as much boiled and
roast as he could carry on a long dagger.

The new age brings new qualities into request, the virtues of
pirates gave way to those of planters, merchants, senators, and schol-
ars. Comity, social talent, and fine manners, no doubt, have had
their part also. I have met somewhere with a historiette, which,
whether more or less true in its particulars, carries a general truth.
"How came the Duke of Bedford by his great landed estates? His
ancestor having travelled on the continent, a lively, pleasant man,
became the companion of a foreign prince wrecked on the Dorset-
shire coast, where Mr. Russell lived. The prince recommended him
to Henry VIII., who, liking his company, gave him a large share
of the plundered church lands."

The pretence is that the noble is of unbroken descent from the
Norman, and has never worked for eight hundred years. But the
fact is otherwise. Where is Bohun ? where is De Vere ? The lawyer,
the farmer, the silkmercer lies perdu under the coronet, and winks
to the antiquary to say nothing; especially skilful lawyers, nobody's
sons, who did some piece of work at a nice moment for government,
and were rewarded with ermine.

The national tastes of the English do not lead them to the Hfe of
the courtier, but to secure the comfort and independence of their
homes. The aristocracy are marked by their predilection for country-
life. They are called the county-families. They have often no resi-
dence in London, and only go thither a short time, during the
season, to see the opera; but they concentrate the love and labor of

ARISTOCRACY 405

many generations on the building, planting, and decoration of their
homesteads. Some of them are too old and too proud to wear titles,
or, as Sheridan said to Coke, "disdain to hide their head in a coro-
net"; and some curious examples are cited to show the stability of
English families. Their proverb is that, fifty miles from London, a
family will last a hundred years; at a hundred miles, two hundred
years; and so on; but I doubt that steam, the enemy of time, as well
as of space, will disturb these ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton says
of the first Duke of Buckingham, "He was born at Brookeby in
Leicestershire, where his ancestors had chiefly continued about the
space of four hundred years, rather without obscurity, than with any
great lustre." ^ Wraxall says that, in 1781, Lord Surrey, afterwards
Duke of Norfolk, told him that when the year 1783 should arrive,
he meant to give a grand festival to all the descendants of the body
of Jockey of Norfolk, to mark the day when the dukedom should
have remained three hundred years in their house, since its creation
by Richard IIL Pepys tells us, in writing of an Earl Oxford, in 1666,
that the honor had now remained in that name and blood six hun-
dred years.

This long descent of famiUes and this cleaving through ages to
the same spot of ground captivates the imagination. It has too a
connection with the names of the towns and districts of the country.

The names are excellent, — an atmosphere of legendary melody
spread over the land. Older than all epics and histories, which clothe
a nation, this under-shirt sits close to the body. What history too,
and what stores of primitive and savage observation, it infolds!
Cambridge is the bridge of the Cam; Sheffield the field of the river
Sheaf; Leicester the castra or camp of the Lear or Leir (now Soar) ;
Rochdale, of the Roch; Exeter or Excester, the castra of the Ex;
Exmouth, Dartmouth, Sidmouth, Teignmouth, the mouths of the
Ex, Dart, Sid, and Teign rivers. Waltham is strong town; RadcUfle
is red cliff; and so on: — a sincerity and use in naming very striking
to an American, whose country is whitewashed all over by unmean-
ing names, the cast-off clothes of the country from which its emi-
grants came; or named at a pinch from a psalm-tune. But the
English are those "barbarians" of Jamblichus, who "are stable in

^Reliquis Wottonianz, p. 208.

406 ENGLISH TRAITS

their manners, and firmly continue to employ the same words, which
also are dear to the gods."

'Tis an old sneer, that the Irish peerage drew their names from
playbooks. The English lords do not call their lands after their own
names, but call themselves after their lands, as if the man represented
the country that bred him; and they rightly wear the token of the
glebe that gave them birth; suggesting that the tie is not cut, but
that there in London, — the crags of Argyle, the kail of Cornwall, the
downs of Devon, the iron of Wales, the clays of Stafford, are neither
forgetting nor forgotten, but know the man who was born by them,
and who, like the long line of his fathers, has carried that crag, that
shore, dale, fen, or woodland, in his blood and manners. It has, too,
the advantage of suggesting responsibleness. A susceptible man could
not wear a name which represented in a strict sense a city or a county
of England, without hearing in it a challenge to duty and honor.

The predilection of the patricians for residence in the country,
combined with the degree of liberty possessed by the peasant, makes
the safety of the English hall. Mirabeau wrote prophetically from
England, in 1784, "If revolution break out in France, I tremble for
the aristocracy: their chateaux will be reduced to ashes, and their
blood spilt in torrents. The English tenant would defend his lord
to the last extremity." The English go to their estates for grandeur.
The French live at court, and exile themselves to their estates for
economy. As they do not mean to live with their tenants, they do
not conciliate them, but wring from them the last sous. Evelyn
writes from Blois, in 1644, "The wolves are here in such numbers,
that they often come and take children out of the streets: yet will
not the Duke, who is sovereign here, permit them to be destroyed."

In evidence of the wealth amassed by ancient families, the traveller
is shown the palaces in Piccadilly, Burlington House, Devonshire
House, Lansdowne House in Berkshire Square, and, lower down in
the city, a few noble houses which still withstand in all their ampli-
tude the encroachment of streets. The Duke of Bedford includes
or included a mile square in the heart of London, where the British
Museum, once Montague House, now stands, and the land occupied
by Woburn Square, Bedford Square, Russell Square. The Marquis
of Westminster built within a few years the series of squares called

ARISTOCRACY 407

Belgravia. Stafford House is the noblest palace in London. Nor-
thumberland House holds its place by Charing Cross. Chesterfield
House remains in Audley Street. Sion House and Holland House are
in the suburbs. But most of the historical houses are masked or lost
in the modern uses to which trade or charity has converted them.
A multitude of town palaces contain inestimable galleries of art.

In the country, the size of private estates is more impressive. From
Barnard Castle I rode on the highway twenty-three miles from High
Force, a fall of the Tees, towards Darlington, past Raby Castle,
through the estate of the Duke of Cleveland. The Marquis of Bread-
albane rides out of his house a hundred miles in a straight line to the
sea, on his own property. The Duke of Sutherland owns the county
of Sutherland, stretching across Scotland from sea to sea. The Duke
of Devonshire, besides his other estates, owns 96,000 acres in the
County of Derby. The Duke of Richmond has 40,000 acres at Good-
wood, and 300,000 at Gordon Casde. The Duke of Norfolk's park
in Sussex is fifteen miles in circuit. An agriculturist bought lately
the island of Lewes, in Hebrides, containing 500,000 acres. The
possessions of the Earl of Lonsdale gave him eight seats in Parlia-
ment. This is the Heptarchy again: and before the Reform of 1832,
one hundred and fifty-four persons sent three hundred and seven
members to Parliament. The borough-mongers governed England.

These large domains are growing larger. The great estates are
absorbing the small freeholds. In 1786, the soil of England was
owned by 250,000 corporations and proprietors; and, in 1822, by
32,000. These broad estates find room in this narrow island. All
over England, scattered at short intervals among ship-yards, mills,
mines, and forges, are the paradises of the nobles, where the Uvelong
repose and refinement are heightened by the contrast with the roar
of industry and necessity, out of which you have stepped aside.

I was surprised to observe the very small attendance usually in the
House of Lords. Out of 573 peers, on ordinary days, only twenty or
thirty. Where are they ? I asked. "At home on their estates, devoured
by ennui, or in the Alps, or up the Rhine, in the Harz Mountains,
or in Egypt, or in India, on the Ghauts." But, with such interests
at stake, how can these men afford to neglect them? "Oh," rephed
my friend, "why should they work for themselves, when every man

408 ENGLISH TRAITS

in England works for them, and will suffer before they come to
harm?" The hardest radical instantly uncovers, and changes his
tone to a lord. It was remarked, on the loth April, 1848 (the day
of the Chartist demonstration), that the upper classes were, for the
first time, actively interesting themselves in their own defence, and
men of rank were sworn special constables, with the rest. "Besides,
why need they sit out the debate ? Has not the Duke of Wellington,
at this moment, their proxies, — the proxies of fifty peers in his
pocket, to vote for them, if there be an emergency?"

It is however true, that the existence of the House of Peers as a
branch of the government entitles them to fill half the Cabinet; and
their weight of property and station gives them a virtual nomination
of the other half; whilst they have their share in the subordinate
offices, as a school of training. This monopoly of political power
has given them their intellectual and social eminence in Europe. A
few law lords and a few political lords take the brunt of public
business. In the army, the nobility fill a large part of the high com-
missions, and give to these a tone of expense and splendor, and also
of exclusiveness. They have borne their full share of duty and danger
in this service; and there are few noble families which have not paid
in some of their members, the debt of Hfe or limb, in the sacrifices
of the Russian war. For the rest, the nobility have the lead in mat-
ters of state, and of expense; in questions of taste, in social usages,
in convivial and domestic hospitalities. In general, all that is required
of them is to sit securely, to preside at public meetings, to counte-
nance charities, and to give the example of that decorum so dear to
the British heart.

If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what service this class
have rendered ? — uses appear, or they would have perished long ago.
Some of these are easily enumerated, others more subtle make a part
of unconscious history. Their institution is one step in the progress
of society. For a race yields a nobility in some form, however we
name the lords, as surely as it yields women.

The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, born
to wealth and power, who have run through every country, and
kept in every country the best company, have seen every secret of art
and nature, and, when men of any ability or ambition, have been

ARISTOCRACY 409

consulted in the conduct of every important action. You cannot
wield great agencies without lending yourself to them, and, when
it happens that the spirit of the earl meets his rank and duties, we
have the best examples of behavior. Power of any kind readily
appears in the manners; and beneficent power, le talent de bien faire,
gives a majesty which cannot be concealed or resisted.

These people seem to gain as much as they lose by their position.
They survey society as from the top of St. Paul's, and, if they never
hear plain truth from men, they see the best of everything, in every
kind, and they see things so grouped and amassed as to infer easily
the sum and genius, instead of tedious particularities. Their good
behavior deserves all its fame, and they have that simplicity, and that
air of repose, which are the finest ornament of greatness.

The upper classes have only birth, say the people here, and not
thoughts. Yes, but they have manners, and 'tis wonderful how much
talent runs into manners: — nowhere and never so much as in Eng-
land. They have the sense of superiority, the absence of all the
ambitious effort which disgusts in the aspiring classes, a pure tone
of thought and feeling, and the power of command, among their
other luxuries, the presence of the most accomplished men in their
festive meetings.

Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. They wear the laws as
ornaments, and walk by their faith in their painted May-Fair, as if
among the forms of gods. The economist of 1855 who asks, of what
use are the lords? may learn of Franklin to ask, of what use is a
baby? They have been a social church proper to inspire sentiments
mutually honoring the lover and the loved. Politeness is the ritual
of society, as prayers are of the church; a school of manners, and
a gentle blessing to the age in which it grew. 'Tis a romance adorn-
ing English life with a larger horizon; a midway heaven, fulfilling
to their sense their fairy tales and poetry. This, just as far as the
breeding of the nobleman really made him brave, handsome, ac-
complished, and great-hearted.

On general grounds, whatever tends to form manners, or to finish
men, has a great value. Every one who has tasted the delight of
friendship, will respect every social guard which our manners can
establish, tending to secure from the intrusion of frivolous and dis-

410 ENGLISH TRAITS

tasteful people. The jealousy of every class to guard itself, is a
testimony to the reality they have found in life. When a man once
knows that he has done justice to himself, let him dismiss all terrors
of aristocracy as superstitions, so far as he is concerned. He who
keeps the door of a mine, whether of cobalt, or mercury, or nickel,
or plumbago, securely knows that the world cannot do without him.
Everybody who is real is open and ready for that which is also real.

Besides, these are they who make England that strong-box and
museimi it is; who gather and protect works of art, dragged from
amidst burning cities and revolutionary countries, and brought
hither out of all the world. I look with respect at houses six, seven,
eight hundred, or, like Warwick Casde, nine hundred years old. I
pardoned high park-fences, when I saw that, besides does and
pheasants, these have preserved Arundel marbles, Townley galleries,
Howard and Spenserian libraries, Warwick and Portland vases,
Saxon manuscripts, monastic architectures, millennial trees, and
breeds of cattle elsewhere extinct. In these manors, after the frenzy
of war and destruction subsides a little, the antiquary finds the
frailest Roman jar, or crumbling Egyptian mummy-case, without
so much as a new layer of dust, keeping the series of history un-
broken, and waiting for its interpreter, who is sure to arrive. These
lords are the treasurers and librarians of mankind, engaged by their
pride and wealth to this function.

Yet there were other works for British dukes to do. George
Loudon, Quintinye, Evelyn, had taught them to make gardens.
Arthur Young, Bakewell, and Mechi have made them agricultural.
Scotland was a camp until the day of Culloden. The Dukes of Athol,
Sutherland, Buccleugh, and the Marquis of Breadalbane have intro-
duced the rape-culture, the sheep-farm, wheat, drainage, the planta-
tion of forests, the artificial replenishment of lakes and ponds with
fish, the renting of game-preserves. Against the cry of the old ten-
antry, and the sympathetic cry of the EngUsh press, they have rooted
out and planted anew, and now six millions of people live, and live
better, on the same land that fed three millions.

The Enghsh barons, in every period, have been brave and great,
after the estimate and opinion of their times. The grand old halls
scattered up and down in England are dumb vouchers to the state

ARISTOCRACY 4I I

and broad hospitality of their ancient lords. Shakespeare's portraits
of good duke Humphrey, of Warwick, of Northumberland, of
Talbot, were drawn in strict consonance with the traditions. A
sketch of the Earl of Shrewsbury, from the pen of Queen Elizabeth's
Archbishop Parker;^ Lord Herbert Cherbury's autobiography; the
letters and essays of Sir Philip Sidney; the anecdotes preserved by
the antiquaries Fuller and Collins; some glimpses at the interiors of
noble houses, which we owe to Pepys and Evelyn; the details which
Ben Jonson's masques (performed at Kenilworth, Althorpe, Belvoir,
and other noble houses) record or suggest; down to Aubrey's pas-
sages of the life of Hobbes in the house of the Earl of Devon, are
favorable pictures of a romantic style of manners. Penshurst still
shines for us, and its Christmas revels, "where logs not burn, but
men." At Wilton House the "Arcadia" was written, amidst conver-
sations with Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, a man of no vulgar mind,
as his own poems declare him. I must hold Ludlow Castle an
honest house, for which Milton's "Comus" was written, and the
company nobly bred which performed it with knowledge and sym-
pathy. In the roll of nobles are found poets, philosophers, chemists,
astronomers, also men of solid virtues and of lofty sentiments; often
they have been the friends and patrons of genius and learning and
especially of the fine arts; and at this moment almost every great
house has its sumptuous picture-gallery.

Of course, there is another side to this gorgeous show. Every
victory was the defeat of a party only less worthy. Castles are
proud things, but 'tis safest to be outside of them. War is a foul
game, and yet war is not the worst part of aristocratic history. In
later times, when the baron, educated only for war, with his brains
paralyzed by his stomach, found himself idle at home, he grew fat
and wanton, and a sorry brute. Grammont, Pepys, and Evelyn show
the kennels to which the king and court went in quest of pleasure.
Prostitutes taken from the theatres were made duchesses, their bas-
tards dukes and earls. "The young men sat uppermost, the old
serious lords were out of favor." The discourse that the king's
companions had with him was "poor and frothy." No man who
valued his head might do what these pot-companions familiarly

^Dibdin's Literary Reminiscences, vol. i, xii.

412 ENGLISH TRAITS

did with the king. In logical sequence of these dignified revels,
Pepys can tell the beggarly shifts to which the king was reduced,
who could not find paper at his council table, and "no handkerchers"
in his wardrobe, "and but three bands to his neck," and the linen-
draper and the stationer were out of pocket, and refusing to trust
him, and the baker will not bring bread any longer. Meantime the
English Channel was swept and Lxjndon threatened by the Dutch
fleet, manned, too, by English sailors, who, having been cheated of
their pay for years by the king, enlisted with the enemy.

The Selwyn correspondence, in the reign of George III., discloses
a rottenness in the aristocracy which threatened to decompose the
state. The sycophancy and sale of votes and honor for place and
tide; lewdness, gaming, smugghng, bribery, and cheating; the sneer
at the childish indiscretion of quarrelling with ten thousand a year;
the want of ideas; the splendor of the tides, and the apathy of the
nation, are instructive, and make the reader pause and explore the
firm bounds which confined these vices to a handful of rich men.
In the reign of the Fourth George things do not seem to have
mended, and the rotten debauchee let down from a window by an
inclined plane into his coach to take the air, was a scandal to Europe
which the ill fame of his queen and of his family did nothing to
retrieve.

Under the present reign, the perfect decorum of the Court is
thought to have put a check on the gross vices of the aristocracy;
yet gaming, racing, drinking, and mistresses bring them down, and
the democrat can sdll gather scandals if he will. Dismal anecdotes
abound, verifying the gossip of the last generation of dukes served
by bailiffs, with all their plate in pawn; of great lords living by the
showing of their houses; and of an old man wheeled in his chair
from room to room, whilst his chambers are exhibited to the visitor
for money; of ruined dukes and earls living in exile for debt. The
historic names of the Buckinghams, Beauforts, Marlboroughs, and
Hertfords have gained no new lustre, and now and then darker
scandals break out, ominous as the new chapters added under the
Orleans dynasty to the "Causes Celehres" in France. Even peers
who are men of worth and pubHc spirit are overtaken and embar-
rassed by their vast expense. The respectable Duke of Devonshire,

ARISTOCRACY 413

willing to be the Mscenas and Lucullus of his island, is reported to
have said that he cannot live at Chatsworth but one month in the
year. Their many houses eat them up. They cannot sell them, be-
cause they are entailed. They will not let them for pride's sake, but
keep them empty, aired, and the grounds mown and dressed, at a
cost of four or five thousand pounds a year. The spending is for a
great part in servants, in many houses exceeding a hundred.

Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, which, because
it squanders such vast power of benefit, has the mischief of crime.
"They might be little Providences on earth," said my friend, "and
they are, for the most part, jockeys and fops." Campbell says, "Ac-
quaintance with the nobiUty, I could never keep up. It requires a
life of idleness, dressing, and attendance on their parties." I suppose,
too, that a feeling of self-respect is driving cultivated men out of
this society, as if the noble were slow to receive the lessons of the
times, and had not learned to disguise his pride of place. A man of
wit, who is also one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion, con-
fessed to his friend that he could not enter their houses without
being made to feel that they were great lords, and he a low plebeian.
With the tribe of artistes, including the musical tribe, the patrician
morgue keeps no terms, but excludes them. When Julia Grisi and
Mario sang at the houses of the Duke of Wellington and other
grandees, a cord was stretched between the singer and the company.

When every noble was a soldier, they were carefully bred to great
personal prowess. The education of a soldier is a simpler affair than
that of an earl in the nineteenth century. And this was very seriously
pursued; they were expert in every species of equitation, to the most
dangerous practices, and this down to the accession of William of
Orange. But graver men appear to have trained their sons for civil
affairs. Elizabeth extended her thought to the future; and Sir Philip
Sidney in his letter to his brother, and Milton and Evelyn, gave plain
and hearty counsel. Already, too, the English noble and squire
were preparing for the career of the country-gentleman, and his
peaceable expense. They went from city to city, learning receipts
to make perfumes, sweet powders, pomanders, antidotes, gathering
seeds, gems, coins, and divers curiosities, preparing for a private life
thereafter, in which they should take pleasure in these recreations.

414 ENGLISH TRAITS

All advantages given to absolve the young patrician from intellec-
tual labor are of course mistaken. "In the university, noblemen are
exempted from the public exercises for the degree, &c., by which
they attain a degree called honorary. At the same time, the fees
they have to pay for matriculation, and on all other occasions, are
much higher." * Fuller records "the observation of foreigners, that
Englishmen, by making their children gentlemen, before they are
men, cause they are so seldom wise men." This cockering justifies
Dr. Johnson's bitter apology for primogeniture, "that it makes but
one fool in a family."

The revolution in society has reached this class. The great powers
of industrial art have no exclusion of name or blood. The tools
of our time, namely, steam, ships, printing, money, and popular
education, belong to those who can handle them: and their effect
has been that advantages once confined to men of family are now
open to the whole middle class. The road that grandeur levels for
his coach, toil can travel in his cart.

This is more manifest every day, but I think it is true throughout
English history. English history, wisely read, is the vindication of
the brain of that people. Here, at last, were climate and condition
friendly to the working faculty. Who now will work and dare, shall
rule. This is the charter, or the chartism, which fogs, and seas, and
rains proclaimed, — that intellect and personal force should make the
law; that industry and administrative talent should administer; that
work should wear the crown. I know that not this, but something
else, is pretended. The fiction with which the noble and the by-
stander equally please themselves is that the former is of unbroken
descent from the Norman, and so has never worked for eight
hundred years. All the families are new, but the name is old, and
they have made a covenant with their memories not to disturb it.
But the analysis of the peerage and gentry shows the rapid decay
and extinction of old families, the continual recruiting of these from
new blood. The doors, though ostentatiously guarded, are really
open, and hence the power of the bribe. All the barriers to rank
only whet the thirst, and enhance the prize. "Now," said Nelson,
when clearing for battle, "a peerage, or Westminster Abbey!" "I

* Huber. History of English Universities.

UNIVERSITIES 415

have no illusion left," said Sydney Smith, "but the Archbishop of
Canterbury." "The lawyers," said Burke, "are only birds of passage
in this House of Commons," and then added, with a new figure,
"they have their best bower anchor in the House of Lords."

Another stride that has been taken appears in the perishing of
heraldry. Whilst the privileges of nobility are passing to the middle
class, the badge is discredited, and the titles of lordship are getting
musty and cumbersome. I wonder that sensible men have not been
already impatient of them. They belong, with wigs, powder, and
scarlet coats, to an earlier age, and may be advantageously consigned,
with paint and tattoo, to the dignitaries of Australia and Polynesia.

A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred into
their society with manners, ability, and the gifts of fortune, are every
day confronting the peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping
them, as often, in the race of honor and influence. That cultivated
class is large and ever enlarging. It is computed that, with tides and
without, there are seventy thousand of these people coming and
going in London, who make up what is called high society. They
cannot shut their eyes to the fact that an untitled nobility possess all
the power without the inconveniences that belong to rank, and the
rich Englishman goes over the world at the present day, drawing
more than all the advantages which the strongest of his kings could
command.

CHAPTER XII

uNrvERsrriES

Of British universities, Cambridge has the most illustrious names
on its list. At the present day, too, it has the advantage of Oxford,
counting in its alumni a greater number of distinguished scholars.
I regret that I had but a single day wherein to see King's College
Chapel, the beautiful lawns and gardens of the colleges, and a few
of its gownsmen. ^

But I availed myself of some repeated invitations to Oxford, where
I had introductions to Dr. Daubeny, Professor of Botany, and to
the Regius Professor of Divinity, as well as to a valued friend, a

4l6 ENGLISH TRAITS

fellow of Oriel, and went thither on the last day of March, 1848. I
was the guest of my friend in Oriel, was housed close upon that
college, and I lived on college hospitalities.

My new friends showed me their cloisters, the Bodleian Library,
the Randolph Gallery, Merton Hall, and the rest. I saw several faith-
ful high-minded young men, some of them in the mood of making
sacrifices for peace of mind, — a topic, of course, on which I had no
counsel to offer. Their affectionate and gregarious ways reminded
me at once of the habits of our Cambridge men, though I imputed
to these English an advantage in their secure and polished manners.
The halls are rich with oaken wainscoting and ceiling. The pictures
of the founders hang from the walls; the tables glitter with plate.
A youth came forward to the upper table, and pronounced the an-
cient form of grace before meals, which, I suppose, has been in use
here for ages, Benedictus benedicat; benedicitur , benedicatur.

It is a curious proof of the English use and wont, or of their good
nature, that these young men are locked up every night at nine
o'clock, and the porter at each hall is required to give the name of
any belated student who is admitted after that hour. Still more
descriptive is the fact that out of twelve hundred young men, com-
prising the most spirited of the aristocracy, a duel has never occurred.

Oxford is old, even in England, and conservative. Its foundations
date from Alfred, and even from Arthur, if, as is alleged, the Pheryllt
of the Druids had a seminary here. In the reign of Edward I., it is
pretended, here were thirty thousand students; and nineteen most
noble foundations were then established. Chaucer found it as firm
as if it had always stood; and it is, in British story, rich with great
names, the school of the island, and the link of England to the
learned of Europe. Hither came Erasmus, with delight, in 1497.
Albericus Gentilis, in 1580, was relieved and maintained by the uni-
versity. Albert Alaskie, a noble Polonian, Prince of Sirad, who vis-
ited England to admire the wisdom of Queen Elizabeth, was enter-
tained with stage-plays in the Refectory of Christ Church, in 1583.
Isaac Casaubon, coming from Henri Quatre of France, by invita-
tion of James I., was admitted to Christ's College, in July, 1613. I
saw the Ashmolean Museum, whither Elias Ashmole, in 1682, sent
twelve cart-loads of rarities. Here indeed was the Olympia of all

UNIVERSITIES 417

Anthony Wood's and Aubrey's games and heroes, and every inch of
ground has its lustre. For Wood's Athena Oxonienses, or calender
of the writers of Oxford for two hundred years, is a lively record of
English manners and merits, and as much a national monument as
Purchas's Pilgrims or Hansard's Register. On every side, Oxford
is redolent of age and authority. Its gates shut of themselves against
modern innovation. It is still governed by the statutes of Archbishop
Laud. The books in Merton Library are still chained to the wall.
Here, on August 27, 1660, John Milton's Pro Populo Anglicano
Defensio and Iconoclastes were committed to the flames. I saw the
school-court or quadrangle, where, in 1683, the Convocation caused
the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes to be publicly burnt. I do not
know whether this learned body have yet heard of the declaration
of American Independence, or whether the Ptolemaic astronomy
does not still hold its ground against the novelties of Copernicus.

As many sons, almost so many benefactors. It is usual for a noble-
man, or indeed for almost every wealthy student, on quitting college,
to leave behind him some article of plate; and gifts of all values,
from a hall, or a fellowship, or a library, down to a picture or a
spoon, are continually accruing, in the course of a century. My
friend Doctor J. gave me the following anecdote. In Sir Thomas
Lawrence's collection at London, were the cartoons of Raphael and
Michel Angelo. This inestimable prize was offered to Oxford Uni-
versity for seven thousand pounds. The offer was accepted, and
the committee charged with the affair had collected three thousand
pounds, when among other friends, they called on Lord Eldon.
Instead of a hundred pounds, he surprised them by putting down
his name for three thousand pounds. They told him, they should
now very easily raise the remainder. "No," he said, "your men
have probably already contributed all they can spare; I can as well
give the rest;" and he withdrew his cheque for three thousand, and
wrote four thousand pounds. I saw the whole collection in April,
1848.

In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed me the manuscript
Plato, of the date of a.d. 896, brought by Dr. Clarke from Egypt; a
manuscript Virgil, of the same century; the first Bible printed at
Mentz, (I believe in 1450) ; and a duphcate of the same, which had

41 8 ENGLISH TRAITS

been deficient in about twenty leaves at the end. But one day, being
in Venice, he bought a room full of books and manuscripts, — every
scrap and fragment, — ^for four thousand louis d'ors, and had the
doors locked and sealed by the consul. On proceeding, afterwards,
to examine his purchase, he found the twenty deficient pages of his
Mentz Bible, in perfect order; brought them to Oxford, with the
rest of his purchase, and placed them in the volume; but has too
much awe for the Providence that appears in bibliography also, to
suffer the reunited parts to be re-bound. The oldest building here
is two hundred years younger than the frail manuscript brought by
Dr. Clarke from Egypt. No candle or fire is ever lighted in the
Bodleian. Its catalogue is the standard catalogue on the desk of
every library in Oxford. In each several college, they underscore in
red ink on this catalogue the titles of books contained in the library
of that college, — the theory being that the Bodleian has all books.
This rich library spent during the last year (1847) for the purchase
of books ^^1668.

The logical English train a scholar as they train an engineer.
Oxford is a Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet, and Shef-
field grinds steel. They know the use of a tutor, as they know the
use of a horse; and they draw the greatest amount of benefit out of
both. The reading men are kept by hard walking, hard riding, and
measured eating and drinking, at the top of their condition, and
two days before the examination, do no work, but lounge, ride, or
run, to be fresh on the college doomsday. Seven years' residence is
the theoretic period for a master's degree. In point of fact, it has
long been three years' residence, and four years more of standing.
This "three years" is about twenty-one months in all.^

"The whole expense," says Professor Sewel, "of ordinary college
tuition at Oxford is about sixteen guineas a year." But this plausible
statement may deceive a reader unacquainted with the fact that the
principal teaching relied on is private tuition. And the expenses of
private tuition are reckoned at from ^50 to /70 a year, or $1000
for the whole course of three years and a half. At Cambridge $750
a year is economical, and $1500 not extravagant.^

The number of students and of residents, the dignity of the author-
' Huber, ii, p. 304. ^BfJsted: Five Years at an English University.

UNIVERSITIES 419

ities, the value of the foundations, the history and the architecture,
the known sympathy of entire Britain in what is done there, justify
a dedication to study in the undergraduate, such as cannot easily
be in America, where his college is half suspected by the Freshman
to be insignificant in the scale beside trade and politics. Oxford is
a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank
with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular pro-
motion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the
unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.

This aristocracy, of course, repairs its own losses; fills places, as
they fall vacant, from the body of students. The number of fellow-
ships at Oxford is 540, averaging ;^200 a year, with lodging and diet
at the college. If a young American, loving learning, and hindered
by poverty, were offered a home, a table, the walks, and the library,
in one of these academical palaces, and a thousand dollars a year
as long as he chose to remain a bachelor, he would dance for joy.
Yet these young men thus happily placed, and paid to read, are
impatient of their few checks, and many of them preparing to resign
their fellowships. They shuddered at the prospect of dying a Fellow,
and they pointed out to me a paralytic old man, who was assisted
into the hall. As the number of undergraduates at Oxford is only
about 1200 or 1300, and many of these are never competitors, the
chance of a fellowship is very great. The income of the nineteen
colleges is conjectured at ;ri5o,ooo a year.

The effect of this drill is the radical knowledge of Greek and
Latin, and of mathematics, and the solidity and taste of English
criticism. Whatever luck there may be in this or that award, an
Eton captain can write Latin longs and shorts, can turn the Court-
Guide into hexameters, and it is certain that a Senior Classic can
quote correctly from the Corpus Poetarum, and is critically learned
in all the humanities. Greek erudition exists on the Isis and Cam,
whether the Maud man or the Brazen Nose man be properly ranked
or not; the atmosphere is loaded with Greek learning; the whole
river has reached a certain height, and kills all that growth of weeds
which this Castahan water kills. The English nature takes culture
kindly. So Milton thought. It refines the Norseman. Access to
the Greek mind Hfts his standard of taste. He has enough to think

420 ENGLISH TRAITS

of, and, unless of an impulsive nature, is indisposed from writing
or speaking, by the fulness of his mind, and the new severity of
his taste. The great silent crowd of thorough-bred Grecians always
known to be around him, the English writer cannot ignore. They
prune his orations, and point his pen. Hence, the style and tone of
English journalism. The men have learned accuracy and compre-
hension, logic, and pace, or speed of working. They have bottom,
endurance, wind. When born with good constitutions, they make
those eupeptic studying-mills, the cast-iron men, the dura ilia, whose
powers of performance compare with ours, as the steam-hammer
with the music-box; — Cokes, Mansfields, Seldens, and Bentleys, and
when it happens that a superior brain puts a rider on this admirable
horse, we obtain those masters of the world who combine the highest
energy in affairs, with a supreme culture.

It is contended by those who have been bred at Eton, Harrow,
Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sentiment within each of
those schools is high-toned and manly; that in their playgrounds,
courage is universally admired, meanness despised, manly feehngs
and generous conduct are encouraged: that an unwritten code of
honor deals to the spoiled child of rank, and to the child of upstart
wealth, an even-handed justice, purges their nonsense out of both,
and does all that can be done to make them gentlemen.

Again, at the universities, it is urged that all goes to form what
England values as the flower of its national life, — a well-educated
gentleman. The German Huber, in describing to his countrymen
the attributes of an English gentleman, frankly admits that, "in
Germany, we have nothing of the kind. A gentleman must possess
a political character, an independent and public position, or, at least,
the right of assuming it. He must have average opulence, either of
his own, or in his family. He should also have bodily activity and
strength, unattainable by our sedentary life in public offices. The
race of English gentlemen presents an appearance of manly vigor
and form, not elsewhere to be found among an equal number of
persons. No other nation produces the stock. And, in England, it
has deteriorated. The university is a decided presumption in any
man's favor. And so eminent are the members that a glance at
the calendars will show that in all the world one cannot be in better

UNIVERSITIES 421

company than on the books of one of the larger Oxford or Cam-
bridge colleges." '

These seminaries are finishing schools for the upper classes, and
not for the poor. The useful is exploded. The definition of a
public school is "a school which excludes all that could fit a man
for standing behind a counter." *

No doubt, the foundations have been perverted. Oxford, which
equals in wealth several of the smaller European states, shuts up
the lectureships which were made "pubUc for all men thereunto to
have concourse"; mis-spends the revenues bestowed for such youths
"as should be most meet for towardness, poverty, and painfulness";
there is gross favoritism; many chairs and many fellowships are
made beds of ease; and 'tis likely that the university will know how
to resist and make inoperative the terrors of parliamentary inquiry;
no doubt, their learning is grown obsolete; — but Oxford also has its
merits, and I found here also proof of the national fidelity and thor-
oughness. Such knowledge as they prize they possess and impart.
Whether in course or by indirection, whether by a cramming tutor
or by examiners with prizes and foundation scholarships, education
according to the English notion of it is arrived at. I looked over the
Examination Papers of the year 1848, for the various scholarships
and fellowships, the Lusby, the Hertford, the Dean-Ireland, and the
University (copies of which were kindly given me by a Greek pro-
fessor), containing the tasks which many competitors had victori-
ously performed, and I believed they would prove too severe tests
for the candidates for a Bachelor's degree in Yale or Harvard. And,
in general, here was proof of a more searching study in the appointed
directions, and the knowledge pretended to be conveyed was con-
veyed. Oxford sends out yearly twenty or thirty very able men, and
three or four hundred well-educated men.

The diet and rough exercise secure a certain amount of old Norse
power. A fop will fight, and, in exigent circumstances, will play
the manly part. In seeing these youths, I believed I saw already an
advantage in vigor and color and general habit, over their con-
temporaries in American colleges. No doubt much of the power

3 Huber: History of the English Universities. Newman's translation.
*See Bristed: Five Years in an English University. New York, 1852.

422 ENGLISH TRAITS

and brilliancy of the reading-men is merely constitutional or hy-
gienic. With a hardier habit and resolute gymnastics, with five miles
more walking, or five ounces less eating, or with a saddle and gallop
of twenty miles a day, with skating and rowing-matches, the Amer-
ican would arrive at as robust exegesis and cheery and hilarious tone.
I should readily concede these advantages, which it would be easy
to acquire, if I did not find also that they read better than we, and
write better.

English wealth, falling on their school and university training,
makes a systematic reading of the best authors, and to the end of a
knowledge how the things whereof they treat really stand: whilst
pamphleteer or journalist reading for an argument for a party, or
reading to write, or, at all events, for some by-end imposed on them,
must read meanly and fragmentarily. Charles I. said that he under-
stood English law as well as a gentleman ought to understand it.

Then they have access to books; the rich libraries collected at
every one of many thousands of houses, give an advantage not to
be attained by a youth in this country, when one thinks how much
more and better may be learned by a scholar who, immediately on
hearing of a book, can consult it, than by one who is on the quest
for years, and reads inferior books because he cannot find the best.

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to
a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men
teaches the art of omission and selection.

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and
using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and
monasteries persecute youthful saints. Yet we all send our sons to
college, and, though he be a genius, he must take his chance. The
university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to
the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity. Oxford is a library,
and the professors must be librarians. And I should as soon think
of quarrelling with the janitor for not magnifying his office by hostile
sallies into the street like the Governor of Kertch or Kinburn, as of
quarrelling with the professors for not admiring the young neologists
who pluck the beards of Euclid and Aristode, or for attempting
themselves to fill their vacant shelves as original writers.

It is easy to carp at college, and the college, if we will wait for it.

RELIGION 423

will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer
a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, pre-
carious, eccentric, and darkHng. England is the land of mixture and
surprise, and when you have setded it that the universities are mori-
bund, out comes a poetic influence from the heart of Oxford, to
mould the opinions of cities, to build their houses as simply as birds
their nests, to give veracity to art, and charm mankind, as an appeal
to moral order always must. But besides this restorative genius, the
best poetry of England of this age, in the old forms, comes from two
graduates of Cambridge.

CHAPTER XIII

No people, at the present day, can be explained by their national
rehgion. They do not feel responsible for it; it Hes far outside of
them. Their loyalty to truth, and their labor and expenditure rest
on real foundations, and not on a national church. An English life,
it is evident, does not grow out of the Athanasian creed, or the
Articles, or the Eucharist. It is with religion as with marriage. A
youth marries in haste; afterward, when his mind is opened to the
reason of the conduct of life, he is asked what he thinks of the
institution of marriage, and of the right relations of the sexes? "I
should have much to say," he might reply, "if the question were
open, but I have a wife and children, and all question is closed for
me." In the barbarous days of a nation, some cultus is formed or
imported; altars are built, tithes are paid, priests ordained. The
education and expenditure of the country take that direction, and
when wealth, refinement, great men, and ties to the world super-
vene, its prudent men say, why fight against Fate, or lift these
absurdities which are now mountainous? Better find some niche
or crevice in this mountain of stone which religious ages have quar-
ried and carved, wherein to bestow yourself, than attempt anything
ridiculously and dangerously above your strength, like removing it.

In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes say, as to-day, in
front of Dundee Church tower, which is eight hundred years old.

424 ENGLISH TRAITS

"This was built by another and a better race than any that now look
on it." And, plainly, there has been great power of sentiment at
work in this island, of which these buildings are the proofs: as
volcanic basalts show the work of fire which has been extinguished
for ages. England felt the full heat of the Christianity which fer-
mented Europe, and drew, like the chemistry of fire, a firm line
between barbarism and culture. The power of the religious senti-
ment put an end to human sacrifices, checked appetite, inspired the
crusades, inspired resistance to tyrants, inspired self-respect, set
bounds to serfdom and slavery, founded liberty, created the religious
architecture, — ^York, Newstead, Westminster, Fountains Abbey,
Ripon, Beverly, and Dundee, — works to which the key is lost, with
the sentiment which created them; inspired the English Bible, the
liturgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of Richard of Devizes.
The priest translated the Vulgate, and translated the sanctities of
old hagiology into English virtues on English ground. It was a
certain affirmative or aggressive state of the Caucasian races. Man
awoke, refreshed by the sleep of ages. The violence of the northern
savages exasperated Christianity into power. It lived by the love of
the people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted two hundred and fifty serfs,
whom he found attached to the soil. The clergy obtained respite
from labor for the boor on the Sabbath, and on church festivals.
"The lord who compelled his boor to labor between sunset on Satur-
day and sunset on Sunday, forfeited him altogether." The priest
came out of the people, and sympathized with his class. The church
was the mediator, check, and democratic principle in Europe.
Latimer, WicHffe, Arundel, Cobham, Antony Parsons, Sir Harry
Vane, George Fox, Penn, Bunyan, are the democrats, as well as
the saints, of their times. The Catholic church, thrown on this toil-
ing, serious people, has made in fourteen centuries a massive system,
close fitted to the manners and genius of the country, at once do-
mestical and stately. In the long time, it has blended with everything
in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves through a zodiac
of feasts and fasts, names every day of the year, every town and
market and headland and monument, and has coupled itself with
the almanac, that no court can be held, no field ploughed, no horse
shod, without some leave from the church. All maxims of prudence,

RELIGION 425

or shop, or farm, are fixed and dated by the church. Hence, its
strength in the agricultural districts. The distribution of land into
parishes enforces a church sanction to every civil privilege; and the
gradation of the clergy, — prelates for the rich, and curates for the
poor, — vi'ith the fact that a classical education has been secured to
the clergyman, makes them "the link which unites the sequestered
peasantry with the intellectual advancement of the age." ^

The Enghsh church has many certificates to show of humble
effective service in humanizing the people, in cheering and refining
men, feeding, heaUng, and educating. It has the seal of martyrs and
confessors; the noblest books; a sublime architecture; a ritual marked
by the same secular merits, nothing cheap or purchasable.

From this slow-grown church important reactions proceed; much
for culture, much for giving a direction to the nation's affection and
will to-day. The carved and pictured chapel, — its entire surface ani-
mated with image and emblem, — made the parish-church a sort of
book and Bible to the people's eye.

Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a service in the ver-
nacular tongue, it was the tutor and university of the people. In
York minster, on the day of the enthronization of the new arch-
bishop, I heard the service of evening prayer read and chanted in
the choir. It was strange to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal
of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of the world, read with cir-
cumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th January, 1848, to the
decorous English audience, just fresh from the Times newspaper
and their wine; and listening with all the devotion of national pride.
That was binding old and new to some purpose. The reverence for
the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history
of the world been preserved, and is preserved. Here in England
every day a chapter of Genesis, and a leader in the Times.

Another part of the same service on this occasion was not insig-
nificant. Handel's coronation anthem, God save the King, was
played by Dr. Camidge on the organ, with sublime effect. The
minster and the music were made for each other. It was a hint of
the part the church plays as a political engine. From his infancy,
every Englishman is accustomed to hear daily prayers for the Queen,

' Wordsworth.

426 ENGLISH TRAITS

for the royal family and the Parliament, by name; and this lifelong
consecration of these personages cannot be without influence on his
opinions.

The universities, also, are parcel of the ecclesiastical system, and
their first design is to form the clergy. Thus the clergy for a thousand
years have been the scholars of the nation.

The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken order and
tradition of its church; the liturgy, ceremony, architecture; the sober
grace, the good company, the connection with the throne, and with
history, which adorn it. And whilst it endears itself thus to men of
more taste than activity, the stability of the English nation is pas-
sionately enlisted to its support, from its inextricable connection with
the cause of public order, with politics, and with the funds.

Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there must be
probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These minsters
were neither built nor filled by atheists. No church has had more
learned, industrious, or devoted men; plenty of "clerks and bishops,
who, out of their gowns, would turn their backs on no man." ^ Their
architecture still glows with faith in immortality. Heats and genial
periods arrive in history, or shall we say, plentitudes of Divine Pres-
ence, by which high tides are caused in the human spirit, and great
virtues and talents appear, as in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth,
and again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the
nation was full of genius and piety.

But the age of the Wiclifles, Cobhams, Arundels, Beckets; of the
Latimers, Mores, Cranmers; of the Taylors, Leightons, Herberts;
of the Sherlocks, and Butlers, is gone. Silent revolutions in opinion
have made it impossible that men like these should return, or find
a place in their once sacred stalls. The spirit that dwelt in this
church has glided away to animate other activities; and they who
come to the old shrines find apes and players rustling the old gar-
ments.

The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see
on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassa-
dor's chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-

2 Fuller.

RELIGION 427

brushed hat, one cannot help feeUng how much national pride prays
with him, and the reUgion of a gendeman. So far is he from attach-
ing any meaning to the words, that he beUeves himself to have done
almost the generous thing, and that it is very condescending in him
to pray to God. A great duke said, on the occasion of a victory, in
the House of Lords, that he thought the Almighty God had not been
well used by them, and that it would become their magnanimity,
after so great successes, to take order that a proper acknowledgment
be made. It is the church of the gentry; but it is not the church of
the poor. The operatives do not own it, and gendemen lately testified
in the House of Commons that in their lives they never saw a poor
man in a ragged coat inside a church.

The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigorous English
understanding shows how much wit and folly can agree in one
brain. Their reUgion is a quotation; their church is a doll; and any
examination is interdicted with screams of terror. In good com-
pany, you expect them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar; but
they do not: they are the vulgar.

The Enghsh, in common perhaps with Christendom in the nine-
teenth century, do not respect power, but only performance; value
ideas only for an economic result. Wellington esteems a saint only
as far as he can be an army chaplain: — "Mr. BriscoU, by his admir-
able conduct and good sense, got the better of Methodism, which
had appeared among the soldiers, and once among the officers."
They value a philosopher as they value an apothecary who brings
bark or a drench; and inspiration is only some blowpipe, or a finer
mechanical aid.

I suspect that there is in an Englishman's brain a valve that can
be closed at pleasure, as an engineer shuts off steam. The most
sensible and well-informed men possess the power of thinking just
so far as the bishop in religious matters, and as the chancellor of
the exchequer in politics. They talk with courage and logic, and
show you magnificent results, but the same men who have brought
free trade or geology to their present standing, look grave and lofty,
and shut down their valve, as soon as the conversation approaches
the English church. After that, you talk with a box-turtle.

The action of the university, both in what is taught, and in the

428 ENGLISH TRAITS

spirit of the place, is directed more on producing an English gentle-
man, than a saint or a psychologist. It ripens a bishop, and extrudes
a philosopher. I do not know that there is more cabalism in the
Anglican, than in other churches, but the Anglican clergy are identi-
fied with the aristocracy. They say, here, that, if you talk with a
clergyman, you are sure to find him well-bred, informed and candid.
He entertains your thought or your project with sympathy and
praise. But if a second clergyman come in, the sympathy is at an
end: two together are inaccessible to your thought, and, whenever
it comes to action, the clergyman invariably sides with his church.

The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good sense of
its forms, by the manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches is,
"By taste are ye saved." It keeps the old structures in repair, spends
a world of money in music and building; and in buying Pugin, and
architectural literature. It has a general good name for amenity and
mildness. It is not in ordinary a persecuting church; it is not inquisi-
torial, not even inquisitive, is perfectly well-bred, and can shut its
eyes on all proper occasions. If you let it alone, it will let you alone.
But its instinct is hostile to all change in politics, literature, or social
arts. The church has not been the founder of the London University,
of the Mechanics' Institutes, of the Free School, or whatever aims
at diiTusion of knowledge. The Platonists of Oxford are as bitter
against this heresy, as Thomas Taylor.

The doctrine of the Old Testament is the religion of England.
The first leaf of the New Testament it does not open. It believes
in a Providence which does not treat with levity a pound sterling.
They are neither Transcendentalists nor Christians. They put up no
Socratic prayer, much less any saintly prayer for the queen's mind;
ask neither for light nor right, but say bluntly, "Grant her in health
and wealth long to Hve." And one traces this Jewish prayer in all
EngHsh private history, from the prayers of King Richard, in Rich-
ard of Devizes' Chronicle, to those in the diaries of Sir Samuel
Romilly, and of Haydon the painter. "Abroad with my wife," writes
Pepys piously, "the first time that ever I rode in my own coach;
which do make my heart rejoice and praise God, and pray him to
bless it to me, and continue it." The bill for the naturalization of
the Jews (in 1753) was resisted by petitions from all parts of the

RELIGION 429

kingdom, and by petition from the city of London, reprobating this
bill, as, "tending extremely to the dishonor of the Christian religion,
and extremely injurious to the interests and commerce of the king-
dom in general, and of the city of London in particular."

But they have not been able to congeal humanity by act of Parlia-
ment. "The heavens journey still and sojourn not," and arts, wars,
discoveries, and opinion go onward at their own pace. The new
age has new desires, new enemies, new trades, new charities, and
reads the Scriptures with new eyes. The chatter of French politics,
the steam-whistle, the hum of the mill, and the noise of embarking
emigrants had quite put most of the old legends out of mind; so
that when you came to read the liturgy to a modern congregation,
it was almost absurd in its unfitness, and suggested a masquerade
of old costumes.

No chemist has prospered in the attempt to crystalUze a religion.
It is endogenous, like the skin, and other vital organs. A new state-
ment every day. The prophet and apostle knew this, and the non-
conformist confutes the conformists, by quoting the texts they must
allow. It is the condition of a religion, to require religion for its
expositor. Prophet and apostle can only be rightly understood by
prophet and aposde. The statesman knows that the religious element
will not fail, any more than the supply of fibrine and chyle; but it
is in its nature constructive, and will organize such a church as it
wants. The wise legislator will spend on temples, schools, hbraries,
colleges, but will shun the enriching of priests. If, in any manner,
he can leave the election and paying of the priest to the people, he
will do well. Like the Quakers, he may resist the separation of a
class of priests, and create opportunity and expectation in the society,
to run to meet natural endowment, in this kind. But, when wealth
accrues to chaplaincy, a bishopric, or rectorship, it requires moneyed
men for its stewards, who will give it another direction than to the
mystics of their day. Of course, money will do after its kind, and,
will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to
whom it was bequeathed. The class certain to be excluded from all
preferment are the religious, — and driven to other churches; — which
is nature's vis medicatrix.

The curates are ill paid, and the prelates are overpaid. This abuse

430 ENGLISH TRAITS

draws into the church the children of the nobiUty, and other unfit
persons, who have a taste for expense. Thus a bishop is only a
surpliced merchant. Through his lawn, I can see the bright buttons
of the shopman's coat glitter. A wealth like that of Durham makes
almost a premium on felony. Brougham, in a speech in the House
of Commons on the Irish elective franchise, said, "How will the
reverend bishops of the other house be able to express their due
abhorrence of the crime of perjury, who solemnly declare in the
presence of God, that when they are called upon to accept a living,
perhaps of ;(^4000 a year, at that very instant, they are moved by
the Holy Ghost to accept the office and administration thereof, and
for no other reason whatever?" The modes of initiation are more
damaging than custom-house oaths. The Bishop is elected by the
Dean and Prebends of the cathedral. The Queen sends these gentle-
men a conge d'elire, or leave to elect; but also sends them the name
of the person whom they are to elect. They go into the cathedral,
chant and pray, and beseech the Holy Ghost to assist them in their
choice; and, after these invocations, invariably find that the dictates
of the Holy Ghost agree with the recommendations of the Queen.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you
run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other par-
ticulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty
reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and,
on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counter-
feits. Besides, this succumbing has grave penalties. If you take in
a lie, you must take in all that belongs to it. England accepts this
ornamented national church, and it glazes the eyes, bloats the flesh,
gives the voice a stertorous clang, and clouds the understanding of
the receivers.

The English church, undermined by German criticism, had noth-
ing left but tradition, and was led logically back to Romanism. But
that was an element which only hot heads could breathe: in view
of the educated class, generally, it was not a fact to front the sun;
and the alienation of such men from the church became complete.

Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. Religious persons are driven
out of the Established Church into sects, which instantly rise to
credit, and hold the Establishment in check. Nature has sharper

RELIGION 43 1

remedies, also. The English, abhorring change in all things, abhor-
ring it most in matters of religion, cling to the last rag of form, and
are dreadfully given to cant. The EngUsh (and I wish it were
confined to them, but 'tis a taint in the Anglo-Saxon blood in both
hemispheres), the English and the Americans cant beyond all other
nations. The French relinquish all that industry to them. What is
so odious as the polite bows to God, in our books and newspapers?
The popular press is flagitious in the exact measure of its sancti-
mony, and the religion of the day is a theatrical Sinai, where the
thunders are supplied by the property-man. The fanaticism and
hypocrisy create satire. Punch finds an inexhaustible material. Dick-
ens writes novels on Exeter-Hall humanity. Thackeray exposes the
heartless high life. Nature revenges herself more summarily by the
heathenism of the lower classes. Lord Shaftesbury calls the poor
thieves together, and reads sermons to them, and they call it "gas."
George Borrow summons the Gypsies to hear his discourse on the
Hebrews in Egypt, and reads to them the Apostles' Creed in Rom-
any. "When I had concluded," he says, "I looked around me. The
features of the assembly were twisted, and the eyes of all turned
upon me with a frightful squint: not an individual present but
squinted; the genteel Pepa, the good-humored Chicharona, the Cos-
dami, all squinted: the Gypsy jockey squinted worst of all."

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing
left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and
reads fatal interrogations in his eyes, he has no resource but to take
wine with him. False position introduces cant, perjury, simony, and
ever a lower class of mind and character into the clergy : and, when
the hierarchy is afraid of science and education, afraid of piety,
afraid of tradition, and afraid of theology, there is nothing left but
to quit a church which is no longer one.

But the religion of England, — is it the Established Church? no;
is it the sects? no; they are only perpetuations of some private man's
dissent, and are to the Established Church as cabs are to a coach,
cheaper and more convenient, but really the same thing. Where
dwells the reHgion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion,
or thought, or gesture. They do not dwell or stay at all. Electricity
cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monu-

432 ENGLISH TRAITS

ment, or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and
keep it fixed, as the EngUsh do with their things, forevermore; it
is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise,
a secret, which perplexes them, and puts them out. Yet, if religion
be the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil,
souffrtr de tout le monde et ne faire souffrir personne, that divine
secret has existed in England from the days of Alfred to those of
Romilly, of Clarkson, and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands
who have no fame.

CHAPTER XIV

LITERATURE

A STRONG common-sense, which it is not easy to unseat or disturb,
marks the English mind for a thousand years: a rude strength newly
applied to thought, as of sailors and soldiers who had lately learned
to read. They have no fancy, and never are surprised into a covert or
witty word, such as pleased the Athenians and Italians, and was
convertible into a fable not long after; but they delight in strong
earthly expression, not mistakable, coarsely true to the human
body, and, though spoken among princes, equally fit and welcome to
the mob. This homeUness, veracity, and plain style appear in the
earliest extant works, and in the latest. It imports into songs and
ballads the smell of the earth, the breath of cattle, and, like a Dutch
painter, seeks a household charm, though by pails and pans. They
ask their constitutional utility in verse. The kail and herrings are
never out of sight. The poet nimbly recovers himself from every
sally of the imagination. The English muse loves the farmyard, the
lane, and market. She says, with De Stael, "I tramp in the mire with
wooden shoes, whenever they would force me into the clouds."
For, the Englishman has accurate perceptions; takes hold of things
by the right end, and there is no slipperiness in his grasp. He loves
the axe, the spade, the oar, the gun, the steam-pipe: he has built the
engine he uses. He is materialist, economical, mercantile. He must
be treated with sincerity and reality, with muffins, and not the
promise of muffins; and prefers his hot chop, with perfect security

LITERATURE 433

and convenience in the eating of it, to the chances of the amplest and
Frenchiest bill of fare, engraved on embossed paper. When he is
intellectual, and a poet or a philosopher, he carries the same hard
truth and the same keen machinery into the mental sphere. His
mind must stand on a fact. He will not be baffled, or catch at clouds,
but the mind must have a symbol palpable and resisting. What he
relishes in Dante is the vice-like tenacity with which he holds a
mental image before the eyes, as if it were a scutcheon painted on a
shield. Byron "liked something craggy to break his mind upon."
A taste for plain strong speech, what is called a biblical style, marks
the English. It is in Alfred, and the Saxon Chronicle, and in the
Sagas of the Northmen. Latimer was homely. Hobbes was perfect
in the "noble vulgar speech." Donne, Bunyan, Milton, Taylor,
Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, Cotton, and the translators wrote it. How
realistic or materialistic in treatment of his subject is Swift. He
describes his fictitious persons, as if for the police. Defoe has no
insecurity or choice. Hudibras has the same hard mentality, — keep-
ing the truth at once to the senses, and to the intellect.

It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer's hard painting of his Canter-
bury pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton,
in their loftiest ascents, have this national grip and exactitude of
mind. This mental materialism makes the value of English trans-
cendental genius; in these writers, and in Herbert, Henry More,
Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxon materialism and nar-
rowness, exalted into the sphere of intellect, makes the very genius
of Shakspeare and Milton. When it reaches the pure element, it
treads the clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its elevations,
materialistic, its poetry is common-sense inspired; or iron raised to
white heat.

The marriage of the two qualities is in their speech. It is a tacit
rule of the language to make the frame or skeleton of Saxon words,
and, when elevation or ornament is sought, to interweave Roman;,
but sparingly; nor is a sentence made of Roman words alone, with-
out loss of strength. The children and laborers use the Saxon
unmixed. The Latin unmixed is abandoned to the colleges and
Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the English island; and, in their
dialect, the male principle is the Saxon; the female, the Latin; and

434 ENGLISH TRAITS

they are combined in every discourse. A good writer, if he has
indulged in a Roman roundness, makes haste to chasten and nerve
his period by English monosyllables.

When the Gothic nations came into Europe, they found it lighted
with the sun and moon of Hebrew and of Greek genius. The tablets
of their brain, long kept in the dark, were finely sensible to the
double glory. To the images from this twin source (of Christianity
and art), the mind became fruitful as by the incubation of the Holy
Ghost. The English mind flowered in every faculty. The common-
sense was surprised and inspired. For two centuries, England was
philosophic, religious, poetic. The mental furniture seemed of larger
scale; the memory capacious like the storehouse of the rains; the
ardor and endurance of study; the boldness and facility of their
mental construction; their fancy, and imagination, and easy spanning
of vast distances of thought; the enterprise or accosting of new sub-
jects; and, generally, the easy exertion of power, astonish, like the
legendary feats of Guy of Warwick. The union of Saxon precision
and Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the perfect example, is
shared in less degree by the writers of two centuries. I find not only
the great masters out of all rivalry and reach, but the whole writing
of the time charged with a mascuHne force and freedom.

There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor, and closeness to the
matter in hand, even in the second and third class of writers; and, I
think, in the common style of the people, as one finds it in the
citation of wills, letters, and public documents, in proverbs, and
forms of speech. The more hearty and sturdy expression may indi-
cate that the savageness of the Norseman was not all gone. Their
dynamic brains hurled off their words, as the revolving stone hurls
off scraps of grit. I could cite from the seventeenth century sentences
and phrases of edge not to be matched in the nineteenth. Their
poets by simple force of mind equalized themselves with the accumu-
lated science of ours. The country gentlemen had a posset or drink
they called October; and the poets, as if by this hint, knew how to
distil the whole season into their autumnal verses: and, as nature,
to pique the more, sometimes works up deformities into beauty, in
some rare Aspasia, or Cleopatra; and, as the Greek art wrought
many a vase or column, in which too long, or too lithe, or nodes, or

UTERATURE 435

pits and flaws, are made a beauty o£; so these were so quick and
vital, that they could charm and enrich by mean and vulgar objects.

A man must think that age well taught and thoughtful, by which
masques and poems, like those of Ben Jonson, full of heroic senti-
ment in a manly style, were received with favor. The unique fact in
literary history, the unsurprised reception of Shakspeare; — the recep-
tion proved by his making his fortune; and the apathy proved by
the absence of all contemporary panegyric, — seems to demonstrate an
elevation in the mind of the people. Judge of the splendor of a
nation, by the insignificance of great individuals in it. The manner
in which they learned Greek and Latin, before our modern facilities
were yet ready, without dictionaries, grammars, or indexes, by
lectures of a professor, followed by their own searchings, — required
a more robust memory, and cooperation of all the faculties; and
their scholars, Camden, Usher, Selden, Mede, Gataker, Hooker,
Taylor, Burton, Bendey, Brian Walton, acquired the soUdity and
method of engineers.

The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. Their minds
loved analogy; were cognizant of resemblances, and cHmbers on the
staircase of unity. 'Tis a very old strife between those who elect to
see identity, and those who elect to see discrepances; and it renews
itself in Britain. The poets, of course, are of one part; the men of the
world, of the other. But Britain had many disciples of Plato; — More,
Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne,
Spenser, Chapman, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berkeley,
Jeremy Taylor.

Lord Bacon has the EngHsh duality. His centuries of observations,
on useful science, and his experiments, I suppose, were worth noth-
ing. One hint of Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one
who had a talent for experiment, was worth all his lifetime of
exquisite trifles. But he drinks of a diviner stream, and marks the
influx of idealism into England. Where that goes, is poetry, health,
and progress. The rules of its genesis or its diffusion are not known.
That knowledge, if we had it, would supersede all that we call
science of the mind. It seems an affair of race, or of meta-chemistry;
— the vital point being, — how far the sense of unity, or instinct of
seeking resemblances, predominated. For, wherever the mind takes

436 ENGLISH TRAITS

a step, it is, to put itself at one with a larger class, discerned beyond
the lesser class with which it has been conversant. Hence all poetry
and all affirmative action come.

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the analogists, of the
idealists, or (as we popularly say, naming from the best example)
Platonists. Whoever discredits analogy, and requires heaps of facts,
before any theories can be attempted, has no poetic power, and noth-
ing original or beautiful will be produced by him. Locke is as surely
the influx of decomposition and of prose, as Bacon and the Platonists
of growth. The Platonic is the poetic tendency; the so-called scien-
tific is the negadve and poisonous. 'Tis quite certain that Spenser,
Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth will be Platonists; and that the dull
men will be Lockists. Then politics and commerce will absorb from
the educated class men of talents without genius, precisely because
such have no resistance.

Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, required, in his map
of the mind, first of all, universality, or prima philosophia, the recep-
tacle for all such profitable observations and axioms as fall not within
the compass of any of the special parts of philosophy, but are more
common, and of a higher stage. He held this element essential : it is
never out of mind: he never spares rebukes for such as neglect it;
beUeving that no perfect discovery can be made in a flat or level, but
you must ascend to a higher science. "If any man thinketh philos-
ophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not consider that
all professions are from thence served and supplied, and this I take to
be a great cause that has hindered the progression of learning,
because these fundamental knowledges have been studied but in
passage." He explained himself by giving various quaint examples
of the summary or common laws, of which each science has its own
illustration. He complains that "he finds this part of learning very
deficient, the profounder sort of wits drawing a bucket now and
then for their own use, but the spring-head unvisited. This was
the dry light which did scorch and offend most men's watery
natures." Plato had signified the same sense, when he said, "All
the great arts require a subde and speculative research into the law
of nature, since loftiness of thought and perfect mastery over every
subject seem to be derived from some such source as this. This

LITERATURE 437

Pericles had, in addition to a great natural genius. For, meeting
with Anaxagoras, who was a person of this kind, he attached
himself to him, and nourished himself with subHme speculations on
the absolute intelligence; and imported thence into the oratorical
art whatever could be useful to it."

A few generalizations always circulate in the world, whose authors
we do not rightly know, which astonish, and appear to be avenues to
vast kingdoms of thought, and these are in the world constants,
like the Copernican and Newtonian theories in physics. In England,
these may be traced usually to Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or Hooker,
even to Van Helmont and Behmen, and do all have a kind of filial
retrospect to Plato and the Greeks. Of this kind is Lord Bacon's
sentence, that "nature is commanded by obeying her;" his doctrine
of poetry, which "accommodates the shows of things to the desires
of the mind," or the Zoroastrian definition of poetry, mystical, yet
exact, "apparent pictures of unapparent natures;" Spenser's creed,
that "soul is form, and doth the body make;" the theory of Berkeley,
that we have no certain assurance of the existence of matter; Doctor
Samuel Clarke's argument for theism from the nature of space and
time; Harrington's political rule that power must rest on land, —
a rule which requires to be liberally interpreted; the theory of
Swedenborg, so cosmically applied by him, that the man makes his
heaven and hell; Hegel's study of civil history, as the conflict of
ideas and the victory of the deeper thought; the identity-philosophy
of Schelling, couched in the statement that "all difference is quantita-
tive." So the very announcement of the theory of gravitation, of
Kepler's three harmonic laws, and even of Dalton's doctrine of
definite proportions, finds a sudden response in the mind, which
remains a superior evidence to empirical demonstrations. I cite
these generalizations, some of which are more recent, merely to
indicate a class. Not these particulars, but the mental plane or the
atmosphere from which they emanate, was the home and element
of the writers and readers in what we loosely call the Elizabethan
age (say, in literary history, the period from 1575 to 1625), yet a
period almost short enough to justify Ben Jonson's remark on Lord
Bacon: "About this time, and within his view, were born all the
wits that could honor a nation, or help study."

43^ ENGLISH TRAITS

Such richness of genius had not existed more than once before.
These heights could not be maintained. As we find stumps of vast
trees in our exhausted soils, and have received traditions of their
ancient fertiHty to tillage, so history reckons epochs in which the
intellect of famed races became effete. So it fared with English
genius. These heights were followed by a meanness, and a descent
of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation.
Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the
type of philosophy, and his "understanding" the measure, in all
nations, of the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty
sides of Parnassus, on which they had once walked with echoing
steps, and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers of thought
fell into neglect. The later English want the faculty of Plato and
Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes by an insight of general
laws so deep that the rule is deduced with equal precision from few
subjects or from one, as from multitudes of lives. Shakspeare is
supreme in that, as in all the great mental energies. The Germans
generalize: the English cannot interpret the German mind. German
science comprehends the English. The absence of the faculty in Eng-
land is shown by the timidity which accumulates mountains of facts,
as a bad general wants myriads of men and miles of redoubts, to
compensate the inspirations of courage and conduct.

The English shrink from a generalization. "They do not look
abroad into universality, or they draw only a bucket-full at the
fountain of the First Philosophy for their occasion, and do not go to
the spring-head." Bacon, who said this, is almost unique among his
countrymen in that faculty, at least among the prose-writers. Milton,
who was the stair or high table-land to let down the English genius
from the summits of Shakspeare, used this privilege sometimes in
poetry, more rarely in prose. For a long interval afterwards, it is not
found. Burke was addicted to generalizing, but his was a shorter
Hne; as his thoughts have less depth, they have less compass. Hume's
abstractions are not deep or wise. He owes his fame to one keen
observation, that no copula had been detected between any cause and
effect, either in physics or in thought; that the term cause and
effect was loosely or gratuitously applied to what we know only as
consecutive, not at all as causal. Doctor Johnson's written abstrac-

LITERATURE 439

tions have little value: the tone of feeling in them makes their chief
worth.

Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has written the history
of European literature for three centuries, — a performance of great
ambition, inasmuch as a judgment was to be attempted on every
book. But his eye does not reach to the ideal standards: the verdicts
are all dated from London: all new thought must be cast into the
old moulds. The expansive element which creates literature is
steadily denied. Plato is resisted, and his school. Hallam is vmi*
formly polite, but with deficient sympathy; writes with resolute
generosity, but is unconscious of the deep worth which lies in the
mysdcs, and which often outvalues as a seed of power and a source
of revolution all the correct writers and shining reputations of their
day. He passes in silence, or dismisses with a kind of contempt, the
profounder masters: a lover of ideas is not only uncongenial, but
uninteUigible. Hallam inspires respect by his knowledge and fideUty,
by his manifest love of good books, and he lifts himself to own
better than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare, and better than
Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in Hallam, or in the firmer
intellectual nerve of Mackintosh, one still finds the same type of
English genius. It is wise and rich, but it Uves on its capital. It is
retrospective. How can it discern and hail the new forms that are
looming up on the horizon, — new and gigantic thoughts which
cannot dress themselves out of any old wardrobe of the past ?

The essays, the fiction, and the poetry of the day have the like
municipal limits. Dickens, with preternatural apprehension of the
language, of the manners, and the varieties of street life, with pathos
and laughter, with patriotic and still enlarging generosity, writes
London tracts. He is a painter of English details, like Hogarth;
local and temporary in his tints and style, and local in his aims.
Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional ability, is distin-
guished for his reverence of intellect as a temporality, and appeals
to the worldly ambition of the student. His romances tend to
fan these low flames. Their novelists despair of the heart. Thackeray
finds that God has made no allowance for the poor thing in his uni-
verse; — more's the pity, he thinks; — but 'tis not for us to be wiser:
we must renounce ideals, and accept London.

440 ENGLISH TRAITS

The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the EngUsh
governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches that good means
good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; that the glory of
modern philosophy is its direction on "fruit"; to yield economical
inventions; and that its merit is to avoid ideas, and to avoid morals.
He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy, in
its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from
theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the
making a better sick chair and a better wine- whey for an invalid; —
this not ironically, but in good faith; — that "solid advantage," as
he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. The
eminent benefit of astronomy is the better navigation it creates to
enable the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the
London grocer. It was a curious result, in which the civility and
religion of England for a thousand years ends in denying morals,
and reducing the intellect to a saucepan.

The critic hides his scepticism under the English cant of practical.
To convince the reason, to touch the conscience, is romantic pre-
tension. The fine arts fall to the ground. Beauty, except as luxurious
commodity, does not exist. It is very certain, I may say in passing,
that if Lord Bacon had been only the sensualist his critic pretends,
he would never have acquired the fame which now entitles him to
this patronage. It is because he had imagination, the leisures of
the spirit, and basked in an element of contemplation out of all
modern English atmospheric gauges, that he is impressive to the
imaginations of men, and has become a potentate not to be ignored.
Sir David Brewster sees the high place of Bacon without finding
Newton indebted to him, and thinks it a mistake. Bacon occupies
it by specific gravity or levity, not by any feat he did, or by any
tutoring, more or less, of Newton, &c., but an effect of the same
cause which showed itself more pronounced afterwards in Hooke,
Boyle, and Halley.

Coleridge, a catholic mind with a hunger for ideas, with eyes
looking before and after to the highest bards and sages, and who
wrote and spoke the only high criticism in his time, — is one of those
who save England from the reproach of no longer possessing the
capacity to appreciate what rarest wit the island has yielded. Yet the

LITERATURE 44 1

misfortune of his life, his vast attempts but most inadequate per-
formings, faiUng to accomphsh any one masterpiece, seems to mark
the closing of an era. Even in him, the traditional Englishman was
too strong for the philosopher, and he fell into accommodations:
and, as Burke had striven to idealize the English State, so Coleridge
"narrowed his mind" in the attempt to reconcile the Gothic rule
and dogma of the Anghcan Church with eternal ideas. But for
Coleridge, and a lurking taciturn minority, uttering itself in occa-
sional criticism, oftener in private discourse, one would say that in
Germany and in America is the best mind in England rightly
respected. It is the surest sign of national decay, when the Bramins
can no longer read or understand the Braminical philosophy.

In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed all this material-
ism, Carlyle was driven by his disgust at the pettiness and the cant,
into the preaching of Fate. In comparison with all this rottenness,
any check, any cleansing, though by fire, seemed desirable and beauti-
ful. He saw little difference in the gladiators, or the "causes" for
which they combated; the one comfort was that they were all going
speedily into the abyss together: And his imagination, finding no
nutriment in any creation, avenged itself by celebrating the majestic
beauty of the laws of decay. The necessities of mental structure force
all minds into a few categories, and where impatience of the tricks
of men makes Nemesis amiable, and builds altars to the negative
Deity, the inevitable recoil is to heroism or the gallantry of the
private heart, which decks its immolation with glory, in the unequal
combat of will against fate.

Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier,
and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to metaphysics and
to physiology a native vigor, with a catholic perception of relations,
equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the
invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long
Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking
what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality. If his
mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit is larger,
and the return is not yet: but a master should inspire a confidence
that he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present studies
always the same high place.

442 ENGLISH TRAITS

It would be easy to add exceptions to the limitary tone of English
thought, and much more easy to adduce examples of excellence in
particular veins: and if, going out of the region of dogma, we pass
into that of general culture, there is no end of the graces and
amenities, wit, sensibihty, and erudition, of the learned class. But
the artificial succor which marks all English performance, appears
in letters also: much of their aesthetic production is antiquarian and
manufactured, and literary reputations have been achieved by for-
cible men, whose relation to literature was purely accidental, but
who were driven by tastes and modes they found in vogue into their
several careers. So, at this moment, every ambitious young man
studies geology: so members of Parliament are made, and church-
men.

The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted on the
national mind. They are incapable of an inutility, and respect the
five mechanic powers even in their song. The voice of their modern
muse has a slight hint of the steam-whistle, and the poem is created
as an ornament and finish of their monarchy, and by no means as
the bird of a new morning which forgets the past world in the full
enjoyment of that which is forming. They are with difficulty ideal;
they are the most conditioned men, as if, having the best conditions,
they could not bring themselves to forfeit them. Every one of
them is a thousand years old, and lives by his memory: and when
you say this, they accept it as praise.

Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, statistics,
tabulation, and engineering, and even what is called philosophy and
letters is mechanical in its structure, as if inspiration had ceased,
as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy,
existed any more. The tone of colleges, and of scholars and of literary
society, has this mortal air. I seem to walk on a marble floor, where
nothing will grow. They exert every variety of talent on a lower
ground, and may be said to live and act in a sub-mind. They have
lost all commanding views in literature, philosophy, and science. A
good Englishman shuts himself out of three-fourths of his mind,
and confines himself to one-fourth. He has learning, good sense,
power of labor, and logic: but a faith in the laws of the mind like
that of Archimedes; a belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that

LITERATURE 443

experience must follow and not lead the laws of the mind; a devo-
tion to the theory of politics, like that of Hooker, and Milton, and
Harrington, the modern English mind repudiates.

I fear the same fault Hes in their science, since they have known
how to make it repulsive, and bereave nature of its charm; — though
perhaps the complaint flies wider, and the vice attaches to many
more than to British physicists. The eye of the naturalist must have
a scope hke nature itself, a susceptibihty to all impressions, aUve to
the heart as well as to the logic of creation. But English science puts
humanity to the door. It wants the connection which is the test
of genius. The science is false by not being poetic. It isolates the
reptile or mollusk it assumes to explain; whilst reptile or mollusk
only exists in system, in relation. The poet only sees it as an inevi-
table step in the path of the Creator. But, in England, one hermit
finds this fact, and another finds that, and lives and dies ignorant of
its value. There are great exceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas;
perhaps of Robert Brown, the botanist; and of Richard Owen, who
has imported into Britain the German homologies, and enriched
science with contributions of his own, adding sometimes the divina-
tion of the old masters to the unbroken power of labor in the
English mind. But for the most part, the natural science in England
is out of its loyal alliance with morals, and is as void of imagination
and free play of thought, as conveyancing. It stands in strong con-
trast with the genius of the Germans, those semi-Greeks, who love
analogy, and, by means of their height of view, preserve their
enthusiasm, and think for Europe.

No hope, no sublime augury, cheers the student, no secure striding
from experiment onward to a foreseen law, but only a casual dipping
here and there, like diggers in California "prospecting for a placer"
that will pay. A horizon of brass of the diameter of his umbrella shuts
down around his senses. Squalid contentment with conventions,
satire at the names of philosophy and religion, parochial and shop-
till politics, and idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of life and spirit.
As they trample on nationaHties to reproduce London and London-
ers in Europe and Asia, so they fear the hostiUty of ideas, of poetry,
of reUgion, — ^ghosts which they cannot lay; — and, having attempted
to domesticate and dress the Blessed Soul itself in English broad-

444 ENGLISH TRAITS

cloth and gaiters, they are tormented with fear that herein lurks a
force that will sweep their system away. The artists say, "Nature
puts them out;" the scholars have become un-ideal. They parry
earnest speech with banter and levity; they laugh you down, or they
change the subject. "The fact is," say they, over their wine, "all
that about liberty, and so forth, is gone by; it won't do any longer."
The practical and comfortable oppress them with inexorable claims,
and the smallest fraction of power remains for heroism and poetry.
No poet dares murmur of beauty out of the precinct of his rhymes.
No priest dares hint at a Providence which does not respect English
utility. The island is a roaring volcano of fate, of material values,
of tariffs, and laws of repression, glutted markets, and low prices.

In the absence of the highest aims, of the pure love of knowledge,
and the surrender to nature, there is the suppression of the imagina-
tion, the priapism of the senses and the understanding; we have the
factitious instead of the natural; tasteless expense, arts of comfort,
and the rewarding as an illustrious inventor whosoever will con-
trive one impediment more to interpose between the man and his
objects.

Thus poetry is degraded, and made ornamental. Pope and his
school wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake. What did Walter
Scott write without stint? a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland.
And the Hbraries of verses they print have this Birmingham charac-
ter. How many volumes of well-bred metre we must gingle through,
before we can be filled, taught, renewed! We want the miraculous;
the beauty which we can manufacture at no mill, — can give no
account of; the beauty of which Chaucer and Chapman had the
secret. The poetry of course is low and prosaic; only now and then,
as in Wordsworth, conscientious; or in Byron, passional, or in Ten-
nyson, factitious. But if I should count the poets who have con-
tributed to the bible of existing England sentences of guidance and
consolation which are still glowing and effective, — how few! Shall
I find my heavenly bread in the reigning poets? Where is great
design in modern English poetry? The English have lost sight of
the fact that poetry exists to speak the spiritual law, and that no
wealth of description or of fancy is yet essentially new, and out of
the limits of prose, until this condition is reached. Therefore the

LITERATURE 445

grave old poets, like the Greek artists, heeded their designs, and less
considered the finish. It was their office to lead to the divine sources,
out of which all this, and much more, readily springs; and, if this
religion is in the poetry, it raises us to some purpose, and we can
well afford some staidness, or hardness, or want of popular tune in
the verses.

The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of Wordsworth.
He had no master but nature and solitude. "He wrote a poem,"
says Landor, "without the aid of war." His verse is the voice of
sanity in a worldly and ambitious age. One regrets that his tempera-
ment was not more liquid and musical. He has written longer than
he was inspired. But for the rest, he has no competitor.

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Wordsworth
wanted. There is no finer ear, nor more command of the keys of
language. Color, Hke the dawn, flows over the horizon from his
pencil, in waves so rich that we do not miss the central form.
Through all his refinements, too, he has reached the public, — a cer-
tificate of good sense and general power, since he who aspires to be
the English poet must be as large as London, not in the same kind
as London, but in his own kind. But he wants a subject, and climbs
no mount of vision to bring its secrets to the people. He contents
himself with describing the Englishman as he is, and proposes no
better. There are all degrees in poetry, and we must be thankful
for every beautiful talent. But it is only a first success, when the ear
is gained. The best office of the best poets has been to show how low
and uninspired was their general style, and that only once or twice
they have struck the high chord.

That expansiveness which is the essence of the poetic element, they
have not. It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, who said, "Let us be
crowned with roses, let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome
old roof of heaven into new forms." A stanza of the song of nature
the Oxonian has no ear for, and he does not value the salient and
curative influence of intellectual action, studious of truth, without a
by-end.

By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistible taste for Oriental-
ism in Britain. For a self-conceited modish life, made up of trifles,
clinging to a corporeal civilization, hating ideas, there is no remedy

446 ENGLISH TRAITS

like the Oriental largeness. That astonishes and disconcerts English
decorum. For once there is thunder it never heard, Ught it never
saw, and power which trifles with time and space. I am not sur-
prised, then, to find an Englishman like Warren Hastings, who had
been struck with the grand style of thinking in the Indian writings,
deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen, while offering them a
translation of the Bhagvat. "Might I, an unlettered man, venture to
prescribe bounds to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in
estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from the
ancient or modern Uterature of Europe, all references to such senti-
ments or manners as are become the standards of propriety for
opinion and action in our modes, and, equally, all appeals to our
revealed tenets of religion and moral duty." ^ He goes on to bespeak
indulgence to "ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste, and passages
elevated to a tract of sublimity into which our habits of judgment
will find it difficult to pursue them."

Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies in the English
race, which seems to make any recoil possible; in other words, there
is at all times a minority of profound minds existing in the nation,
capable of appreciating every soaring of intellect and every hint of
tendency. While the constructive talent seems dwarfed and super-
ficial, the criticism is often in the noblest tone, and suggests the
presence of the invisible gods. I can well beheve what I have often
heard, that there are two nations in England; but it is not the Poor
and the Rich; nor is it the Normans and Saxons; nor the Celt and
the Goth. These are each always becoming the other; for Robert
Owen does not exaggerate the power of circumstance. But the two
complexions, or two styles of mind, — the perceptive class, and the
practical finality class, — are ever in counterpoise, interacting mutu-
ally; one in hopeless minorities; the other, in huge masses; one
studious, contemplative, experimenting: the other, the ungrateful
pupil, scornful of the source, whilst availing itself of the knowledge
for gain; these two nations, of genius and of animal force, though
the first consist of only a dozen souls, and the second of twenty
millions, forever by their discord and their accord yield the power
of the EngHsh State.

' Preface to Wilkins's Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta.

THE TIMES 447

CHAPTER XV

THE "times"

The power of the newspaper is familiar in America, and in ac-
cordance with our pohtical system. In England, it stands in antag-
onism with the feudal institutions, and it is all the more beneficent
succor against the secretive tendencies of a monarchy. The cele-
brated Lord Somers "knew of no good law proposed and passed in
his time, to which the public papers had not directed his attention."
There is no corner and no night. A relentless inquisition drags every
secret to the day, turns the glare of this solar microscope on every
malfaisance, so as to make the public a more terrible spy than any
foreigner; and no weakness can be taken advantage of by an enemy,
since the whole people are already forewarned. Thus England rids
herself of those incrustations which have been the ruin of old states.
Of course, this inspection is feared. No antique privilege, no com-
fortable monopoly, but sees surely that its days are counted; the
people are familiarized with the reason of reform, and, one by one,
take away every argument of the obstructives. "So your grace likes
the comfort of reading the newspapers," said Lord Mansfield to the
Duke of Northumberland; "mark my words; you and I shall not
live to see it, but this young gentleman (Lord Eldon) may, or it
may be a little later; but a little sooner or later, these newspapers
will most assuredly write the dukes of Northumberland out of their
titles and possessions, and the country out of its king." The tendency
in England towards social and political institutions like those of
America, is inevitable, and the ability of its journals is the driving
force.

England is full of manly, clever, well-bred men who possess the
talent of writing off-hand pungent paragraphs, expressing with clear-
ness and courage their opinion on any person or performance.
Valuable or not, it is a skill that is rarely found, out of the EngUsh
journals. The English do this, as they write poetry, as they ride
and box, by being educated to it. Hundreds of clever Praeds, and
Freres and Froudes, and Hoods, and Hooks, and Maginns, and
Mills, and Macaulays, make poems or short essays for a journal, as

44^ ENGLISH TRAITS

they make speeches in ParUament and on the hustings, or as they
shoot and ride. It is a quite accidental and arbitrary direction of their
general abihty. Rude health and spirits, an Oxford education, and
the habits of' society are implied, but not a ray of genius. It comes
of the crowded state of the professions, the violent interest which
all men take in politics, the facility of experimenting in the journals,
and high pay.

The most conspicuous result of this talent is the "Times" news-
paper. No power in England is more felt, more feared, or more
obeyed. What you read in the morning in that journal, you shall
hear in the evening in all society. It has ears everywhere, and its
information is earliest, completest, and surest. It has risen, year by
year, and victory by victory, to its present authority. I asked one of
its old contributors, whether it had once been abler than it is now ?
"Never," he said; "these are its palmiest days." It has shown those
qualities which are dear to Englishmen, unflinching adherence to
its objects, prodigal intellectual ability, and a towering assurance,
backed by the perfect organization in its printing-house, and its
world-wide network of correspondence and reports. It has its own
history and famous trophies. In 1820, it adopted the cause of Queen
Caroline, and carried it against the king. It adopted a poor-law
system, and almost alone lifted it through. When Lord Brougham
was in power, it decided against him, and pulled him down. It
declared war against Ireland, and conquered it. It adopted the
League against the Corn Laws, and, when Cobden had begun to
despair, it announced his triumph. It denounced and discredited
the French Republic of 1848, and checked every sympathy with it
in England, until it had enrolled 200,000 special constables to watch
the Chartists, and make them ridiculous on the loth April. It first
denounced and then adopted the new French Empire, and urged
the French Alliance and its results. It has entered into each munic-
ipal, literary, and social question, almost with a controlling voice.
It has done bold and seasonable service in exposing frauds which
threatened the commercial community. Meantime, it attacks its
rivals by perfecting its printing machinery, and will drive them out
of circulation: for the only limit to the circulation of the "Times"
is the impossibility of printing copies fast enough; since a daily

THE TIMES 449

paper can only be new and seasonable for a few hours. It will kill
all but that paper which is diametrically in opposition; since many
papers, first and last, have Uved by their attacks on the leading
journal.

The late Mr. Walter was printer of the "Times," and had gradu-
ally arranged the whole materiel of it in perfect system. It is told
that when he demanded a small share in the proprietary, and was
refused, he said, "As you please, gendemen; and you may take
away the 'Times' from this office, when you will; I shall pubUsh the
'New Times,' next Monday morning." The proprietors, who had
already complained that his charges for printing were excessive,
found that they were in his power, and gave him whatever he
wished.

I went one day with a good friend to the "Times" office, which
was entered through a pretty garden-yard, in Printing-House Square.
We walked with some circumspection, as if we were entering a
powder-mill; but the door was opened by a mild old woman, and,
by dint of some transmission of cards, we were at last conducted into
the parlor of Mr. Morris, a very gentle person, with no hostile ap-
pearances. The statistics are now quite out of date, but I remember
he told us that the daily printing was then 35,000 copies; that on
the 1st March, 1848, the greatest number ever printed, — 54,000 were
issued; that since February, the daily circulation had increased by
8,000 copies. The old press they were then using printed five or six
thousand sheets per hour; the new machine, for which they were
then building an engine, would print twelve thousand per hour.
Our entertainer confided us to a courteous assistant to show us the
establishment, in which, I think, they employed a hundred and
twenty men. I remember I saw the reporters' room, in which they
redact their hasty stenographs, but the editor's room, and who is in
it, I did not see, though I shared the curiosity of mankind respect-
ing it.

The staff of the "Times" has always been made up of able men.
Old Walter, Sterling, Bacon, Barnes, Alsiger, Horace Twiss, Jones
Loyd, John Oxenford, Mr. Moseley, Mr. Bailey, have contributed to
its renown in their special departments. But it has never wanted
the first pens for occasional assistance. Its private information is

450 ENGLISH TRAITS

inexplicable, and recalls the stories of Fouche's police, whose om-
niscience made it beUeved that the Empress Josephine must be in
his pay. It has mercantile and political correspondents in every
foreign city; and its expresses outrun the despatches of the govern-
ment. One hears anecdotes of the rise of its servants, as of the func-
tionaries of tlie India House. I was told of the dexterity of one of
its reporters, who, finding himself, on one occasion, where the
magistrates had stricdy forbidden reporters, put his hands into his
coat-pocket, and with pencil in one hand, and tablet in the other,
did his work.

The influence of this journal is a recognized power in Europe,
and, of course, none is more conscious of it than its conductors. The
tone of its articles has often been the occasion of comment from the
official organs of the continental courts, and sometimes the ground
of diplomadc complaint. What would the "Times" say? is a terror
in Paris, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Copenhagen, and in Nepaul. Its con-
summate discretion and success exhibit the English skill of combina-
tion. The daily paper is the work of many hands, chiefly, it is said,
of young men recently from the University, and perhaps reading
law in chambers in London. Hence the academic elegance, and
classic allusion, which adorn its columns. Hence, too, the heat and
gallantry of its onset. But the steadiness of the aim suggests the
behef that this fire is directed and fed by older engineers; as if per-
sons of exact information, and with settled views of policy, supplied
the writers with the basis of fact, and the object to be attained, and
availed themselves of their younger energy and eloquence to plead
the cause. Both the council and the execudve departments gain by
this division. Of two men of equal ability, the one who does not
write, but keeps his eye on the course of pubhc affairs, will have the
higher judicial wisdom. But the parts are kept in concert; all the
articles appear to proceed from a single will. The "Times" never
disapproves of what itself has said, or cripples itself by apology for
the absence of the editor, or the indiscretion of him who held the
pen. It speaks out bluff and bold, and sdcks to what it says. It draws
from any number of learned and skilful contributors; but a more
learned and skilful person supervises, corrects, and coordinates. Of
this closet, the secret does not transpire. No writer is suffered to

THE TIMES 451

claim the authorship of any paper; everything good, from whatever
quarter, comes out editorially; and thus, by making the paper every-
thing, and those who write it nothing, the character and the awe
of the journal gain.

The English like it for its complete information. A statement
of fact in the "Times" is as reliable as a citation from Hansard. Then,
they like its independence; they do not know, when they take it up,
what their paper is going to say: but, above all, for the nationality
and confidence of its tone. It thinks for them all; it is their under-
standing and day's ideal daguerreotyped. When I see them reading
its columns, they seem to me becoming every moment more British.
It has the national courage, not rash and petulant, but considerate
and determined. No dignity or wealth is a shield from its assault.
It attacks a duke as readily as a policeman, and with the most pro-
voking airs of condescension. It makes rude work with the Board
of Admiralty. The Bench of Bishops is still less safe. One Bishop
fares badly for his rapacity, and another for his bigotry, and a third
for his courtliness. It addresses occasionally a hint to Majesty itself,
and sometimes a hint which is taken. There is an air of freedom
even in their advertising columns, which speaks well for England
to a foreigner. On the days when I arrived in London in 1847, I
read among the daily announcements, one offering a reward of fifty
pounds to any person who would put a nobleman, described by name
and title, late a member of Parliament, into any county jail in Eng-
land, he having been convicted of obtaining money under false
pretences.

Was never such arrogancy as the tone of this paper. Every slip
of an Oxonian or Cantabrigian who writes his first leader, assumes
that we subdued the earth before we sat down to write this particular
"Times." One would think, the world was on its knees to the
"Times" Office for its daily breakfast. But this arrogance is calcu-
lated. Who would care for it if it "surmised," or "dared to confess,"
or "ventured to predict," &c. No; it is so, and so it shall be.

The morality and patriotism of the "Times" claims only to be
representative, and by no means ideal. It gives the argument, not
of the majority, but of the commanding class. Its editors know bet-
ter than to defend Russia, or Austria, or English vested rights, on

452 ENGLISH TRAITS

abstract grounds. But they give a voice to the class who, at the
moment, take the lead; and they have an instinct for finding where
the power now Hes, which is eternally shifting its banks. Sympa-
thizing with and speaking for the class that rules the hour, yet being
apprised of every ground-swell, every Chartist resolution, every
Church squabble, every strike in the mills, they detect the first
tremblings of change. They watch the hard and bitter struggles
of the authors of each liberal movement, year by year, — watching
them only to taunt and obstruct them, — until, at last, when they see
that these have established their fact, that power is on the point of
passing to them, — they strike in, with the voice of a monarch,
astonish those whom they succor, as much as those whom they desert,
and make victory sure. Of course, the aspirants see that the "Times"
is one of the goods of fortune, not to be won but by winning their
cause.

"Punch" is equally an expression of English good sense, as the
"London Times." It is the comic version of the same sense. Many
of its caricatures are equal to the best pamphlets, and will convey
to the eye in an instant the popular view which was taken of each
turn of public affairs. Its sketches are usually made by masterly
hands, and sometimes with genius; the delight of every class, because
uniformly guided by that taste which is tyrannical in England. It
is a new trait of the nineteenth century that the wit and humor of
England, as in Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold, Dickens, Thack-
eray, Hood, have taken the direction of humanity and freedom.

The "Times," like every important institution, shows the way to a
better. It is a living index of the colossal British power. Its existence
honors the people who dare to print all they know, dare to know all
the facts, and do not wish to be flattered by hiding the extent of
the public disaster. There is always safety in valor. I wish I could
add that this journal aspired to deserve the power it wields, by
guidance of the public sentiment to the right. It is usually pretended,
in Parliament and elsewhere, that the English press has a high tone,
— which it has not. It has an imperial tone as of a powerful and
independent nation. But as with other empires, its tone is prone to
be official, and even officinal. The "Times" shares all the limitations
of the governing classes, and wishes never to be in a minority. If

STONEHENGE 453

only it dared to cleave to the right, to show the right to be the only
expedient, and feed its batteries from the central heart of humanity,
it might not have so many men of rank among its contributors, but
genius would be its cordial and invincible ally; it might now and
then bear the brunt of formidable combinations, but no journal is
ruined by wise courage. It would be the natural leader of British
reform; its proud function, that of being the voice of Europe, the
defender of the exile and patriot against despots, would be more
effectually discharged; it would have the authority which is claimed
for that dream of good men not yet come to pass, an International
Congress; and the least of its victories would be to give to England
a new millennium of beneficent power.

CHAPTER XVI

STONEHENGE

It had been agreed between my friend Mr. C. and me, that before
I left England we should make an excursion together to Stonehenge,
which neither of us had seen; and the project pleased my fancy
with the double attraction of the monument and the companion. It
seemed a bringing together of extreme points, to visit the oldest
religious monument in Britain, in company with her latest thinker,
and one whose influence may be traced in every contemporary book.
I was glad to sum up a little my experiences, and to exchange a few
reasonable words on the aspects of England, with a man on whose
genius I set a very high value, and who had as much penetration,
and as severe a theory of duty, as any person in it. On Friday, 7th
July, we took the South Western Railway through Hampshire to
Salisbury, where we found a carriage to convey us to Amesbury.
The fine weather and my friend's local knowledge of Hampshire,
in which he is wont to spend a part of every summer, made the
way short. There was much to say, too, of the travelling Americans,
and their usual objects in London. I thought it natural that they
should give some time to works of art collected here, which they
cannot find at home, and a litde to scientific clubs and museums,
which at this moment, make London very attractive. But my phil-

454 ENGLISH TRAITS

osopher was not contented. Art and "high art" is a favorite target
for his wit. "Yes, Kunst is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller
wasted a great deal of good time on it:" — and he thinks he dis-
covers that old Goethe found this out, and, in his later writings,
changed his tone. As soon as men begin to talk of art, architecture,
and antiquities, nothing good comes of it. He wishes to go through
the British Museum in silence, and thinks a sincere man will see
something, and say nothing. In these days, he thought, it would
become an architect to consult only the grim necessity, and say, "I
can build you a coffin for such dead persons as you are, and for
such dead purposes as you have, but you shall have no ornament.'*
For the science, he had, if possible, even less tolerance, and com-
pared the savans of Somerset House to the boy who asked Confucius
"how many stars in the sky?" Confucius replied, "he minded things
near him:" then said the boy, "how many hairs are there in your
eyebrows?" Confucius said, "he didn't know and didn't care."

Still speaking of the Americans, C. complained that they dislike
the coldness and exclusiveness of the English, and run away to
France, and go with their countrymen, and are amused, instead of
manfully staying in London, and confronting Englishmen, and
acquiring their culture, who really have much to teach them.

I told C. that I was easily dazzled, and was accustomed to concede
readily all that an Englishman would ask; I saw everywhere in
the country proofs of sense and spirit, and success of every sort:
I like the people: they are as good as they are handsome; they have
everything, and can do everything: but meantime, I surely know
that, as soon as I return to Massachusetts, I shall lapse at once into
the feeling, which the geography of America inevitably inspires,
that we play the game with immense advantage; that there and not
here is the seat and centre of the British race: and that no skill or
activity can long compete with the prodigious natural advantages
of that country, in the hands of the same race; and that England,
an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other
parents, to be strong only in her children. But this was a proposition
which no Englishman of whatever condition can easily entertain.

We left the train at SaUsbury, and took a carriage to Amesbury,
passing by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the

STONEHENGE 455

town which sent two members to Parliament, — now, not a hut; —
and, arriving at Amesbury, stopped at the George Inn. After dinner,
we walked to Salisbury Plain. On the broad downs, under the gray
sky, not a house was visible, nothing but Stonehenge, which looked
like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide expanse, — Stonehenge and
the barrows, — which rose like green bosses about the plain, and a few
hayricks. On the top of a mountain, the old temple would not be
more impressive. Far and wide a few shepherds with their flocks
sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It looked
as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval
temple were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the
old egg out of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history
had proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter
of a hundred feet, and enclosing a second and third colonnade
within. We walked round the stones, and clambered over them, to
wont ourselves with their strange aspect and groupings, and found
a nook sheltered from the wind among them, where C. Hghted his
cigar. It was pleasant to see that just this simplest o£ all simple
structures, — two upright stones and a lintel laid across, — had long
outstood all later churches, and all history, and were like what is
most permanent on the face of the planet: these, and the barrows, —
mere mounds (of which there are a hundred and sixty within a
circle of three miles about Stonehenge), like the same mound on
the plain of Troy, which still makes good to the passing mariner
on Hellespont the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles. With-
in the enclosure, grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, wild
thyme, daisy, meadowsweet, goldenrod, thisde, and the carpeting
grass. Over us, larks were soaring and singing, — as my friend said,
"the larks which were hatched last year, and the wind which was
hatched many thousand years ago." We counted and measured
by paces the biggest stones, and soon knew as much as any man
can suddenly know of the inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four
stones, and there were once probably one hundred and sixty. The
temple is circular, and uncovered, and the situation fixed astronom-
ically, — the grand entrances here, and at Abury, being placed exactly
northeast, "as all the gates o£ the old cavern temples are." How
came the stones here? for these sarsens, or Druidical sandstones, are

456 ENGLISH TRAITS

not found in this neighborhood. The sacrificial stone, as it is called,
is the only one in all these blocks, that can resist the action of fire,
and as I read in the books, must have been brought one hundred
and fifty miles.

On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist's
hammer and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle
are of granite. I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's
Cambridge Museum of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to
maintain that some cleverer elephants or mylodonta had borne off
and laid these rocks one on another. Only the good beasts must
have known how to cut a well- wrought tenon and mortise, and to
smooth the surface of some of the stones. The chief mystery is that
any mystery should have been allowed to settle on so remarkable
a monument, in a country on which all the muses have kept their
eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not yet too late to learn
much more than is known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that
exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its
choice of objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge, or Choir Gaur
to the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh.
Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity of its plan, and its good
preservation, is as if new and recent; and, a thousand years hence,
men will thank this age for the accurate history it will yet eliminate.
We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at
the uncanny stones. The old sphinx put our petty differences of
nationaUty out of sight. To these conscious stones we two pilgrims
were alike known and near. We could equally well revere their old
British meaning. My philosopher was subdued and gentle. In this
quiet house of destiny, he happened to say, "I plant cypresses wher-
ever I go, and if I am in search of pain, I cannot go wrong." The
spot, the gray blocks, and their rude order, which refuses to be
disposed of, suggested to him the flight of ages, and the succession
of religions. The old times of England impress C. much: he reads
litde, he says, in these last years, but "Acta Sanctorum," the fifty-
three volumes of which are in the "London Library." He finds all
English history therein. He can see, as he reads, the old saint of

STONEHENGE 457

lona sitting there, and writing, a man to men. The Acta Sanctorum
show plainly that the men of those times believed in God, and in
the immortality of the soul, as their abbeys and cathedrals testify:
now, even the puritanism is all gone. London is pagan. He fancied
that greater men had lived in England, than any of her writers;
and, in fact, about the time when those writers appeared, the last
of these were already gone.

We left the mound in the twilight, with the design to return the
next morning, and coming back two miles to our inn, we were met
by little showers, and late as it was, men and women were out at-
tempting to protect their spread windrows. The grass grows rank
and dark in the showery England. At the inn, there was only milk
for one cup of tea. When we called for more, the girl brought us
three drops. My friend was annoyed who stood for the credit of an
English inn, and still more, the next morning, by the dogcart, sole
procurable vehicle, in which we were to be sent to Wilton. I engaged
the local antiquary, Mr. Brown, to go with us to Stonehenge, on our
way, and show us what he knew of the "astronomical" and "sacri-
ficial" stones. I stood on the last, and he pointed to the upright, or
rather, inclined stone, called the "astronomical," and bade me notice
that its top ranged with the sky-line. "Yes." Very well. Now, at
the summer solstice, the sun rises exactly over the top of that stone,
and, at the Druidical temple at Abury, there is also an astronomical
stone in the same relative positions.

In the silence of tradition, this one relation to science becomes an
important clew; but we were content to leave the problem with the
rocks. Was this the "Giants' Dance" which Merlin brought from
Killaraus, in Ireland, to be Uther Pendragon's monument to the
British nobles whom Hengist slaughtered here, as Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth relates ? or was it a Roman work, as Inigo Jones explained to
King James; or identical in design and style with the East Indian
temples of the sun; as Davies in the Celtic Researches maintains?
Of all the writers, Stukeley is the best. The heroic antiquary,
charmed with the geometric perfections of his ruin, connects it with
the oldest monuments and religion of the world, and, with the
courage of his tribe, does not stick to say, "the Deity who made

458 ENGLISH TRAITS

the world by the scheme of Stonehenge." He finds that the cursus^
on Salisbury Plain stretches across the downs, like a line of latitude
upon the globe, and the meridian line of Stonehenge passes exactly
through the middle of this curstis. But here is the high point of the
theory: the Druids had the magnet; laid their courses by it; their
cardinal points in Stonehenge, Ambresbury, and elsewhere, which
vary a litde from true east, and west, followed the variations of the
compass. The Druids were Phoenicians. The name of the magnet
is lapis Heradeus, and Hercules was the god of the Phoenicians.
Hercules, in the legend, drew his bow at the sun, and the sun-god
gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean. What
was this, but a compass-box? This cup or little boat, in which the
magnet was made to float on water, and so show the north, was
probably its first form, before it was suspended on a pin. But science
was an arcanum, and, as Britain was a Phoenician secret, so they
kept their compass a secret, and it was lost with the Tyrian com-
merce. The golden fleece, again, of Jason, was the compass, — a bit
of loadstone, easily supposed to be the only one in the world, and
therefore naturally awakening the cupidity and ambition of the
young heroes of a maritime nation to join in an expedition to obtain
possession of this wise stone. Hence the fable that the ship Argo
was loquacious and oracular. There is also some curious coincidence
in the names. Apollodorus makes Magnes the son of /Eolus, who
married Nats. On hints like these, Stukeley builds again the grand
colonnade into historic harmony, and computing backward by the
known variadons of the compass, bravely assigns the year 406 before
Christ for the date of the temple.

For the difficulty of handling and carrying stones of this size, the
like is done in all cities, every day, with no other aid than horse
power. I chanced to see a year ago men at work on the substructure
of a house in Bowdoin Square, in Boston, swinging a block of granite
the size of the largest of the Stonehenge columns with an ordinary
derrick. The men were common masons, with paddies to help, nor

' Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue and a cttrsus. The avenue is a
narrow road of raised earth, extending 594 yards in a straight line from the grand
entrance, then dividing into two branches, which led, severally, to a row of
barrows; and to the ctirsus, — an artificially formed flat tract of ground. This is half
a mile northeast from Stonehenge, bounded by banks and ditches, 3,036 yards long,
by no broad.

STONEHENGE 459

did they diink they were doing anything remarkable. I suppose,
there were as good men a thousand years ago. And we wonder how
Stonehenge was built and forgotten. After spending half an hour
on the spot, we set forth in our dogcart over the downs for Wilton,
C. not suppressing some threats and evil omens on the proprietors,
for keeping these broad plains a wretched sheep-walk, when so many
thousands of English men were hungry and wanted labor. But I
heard afterwards that it is not an economy to cultivate this land,
which only yields one crop on being broken up, and is then spoiled.

We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall,— the renowned seat of
the Earls of Pembroke, a house known to Shakspeare and Massinger,
the frequent home of Sir Philip Sidney, where he wrote the Arcadia;
where he conversed with Lord Brooke, a man of deep thought, and
a poet, who caused to be engraved on his tombstone, "Here lies
Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney." It
is now the property of the Earl of Pembroke, and the residence of
his brother, Sidney Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble specimen
of English manor-hall. My friend had a letter from Mr. Herbert
to his housekeeper, and the house was shown. The state drawing-
room is a double cube, 30 feet high, by 30 feet wide, by 60 feet long:
the adjoining room is a single cube, of 30 feet every way. Although
these apartments and the long library were full of good family por-
traits, Vandykes and others, and though there were some good pic-
tures, and a quadrangle cloister full of antique and modern statuary,
— to which C, catalogue in hand, did all too much justice, — ^yet the
eye was still drawn to the windows, to a magnificent lawn, on which
grew the finest cedars in England. I had not seen more charming
grounds. We went out, and walked over the estate. We crossed a
bridge built by Inigo Jones over a stream, of which the gardener
did not know the name (Qu. Alph?), watched the deer; cUmbed
to the lonely sculptured summer house, on a hill backed by a wood;
came down into the Italian garden, and into a French pavilion,
garnished with French busts; and so again to the house, where we
found a table laid for us with bread, meats, peaches, grapes, and
wine.

On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for Salisbury. The
Cathedral, which was finished 600 years ago, has even a spruce and

460 ENGLISH TRAITS

modern air, and its spire is the highest in England. I know not why,
but I had been more struck with one o£ no fame at Coventry, which
rises 300 feet from the ground, with the lightness of a mullein-plant,
and not at all implicated with the church. Salisbury is now esteemed
the culmination of the Gothic art in England, as the buttresses are
fully unmasked, and honestly detailed from the sides of the pile.
The interior of the Cathedral is obstructed by the organ in the
middle, acting like a screen. I know not why in real architecture
the hunger of the eye for length of line is so rarely gratified. The
rule of art is that a colonnade is more beautiful the longer it is,
and that ad infinitum. And the nave of a church is seldom so long
that it need be divided by a screen.

We loitered in the church, outside the choir, whilst service was
said. Whilst we listened to the organ, my friend remarked, the
music is good, and yet not quite religious, but somewhat as if a
monk were panting to some fine Queen of Heaven. C. was unwill-
ing, and we did not ask to have the choir shown us, but returned to
our inn, after seeing another old church of the place. We passed in
the train Clarendon Park, but could see little but the edge of a
wood, though C. had wished to pay closer attention to the birth-
place of the Decrees of Clarendon. At Bishopstoke we stopped, and
found Mr. H., who received us in his carriage, and took us to his
house at Bishops Waltham.

On Sunday, we had much discourse on a very rainy day. My
friends asked whether there were any Americans? — any with an
American idea, — any theory of the right future of that country?
Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor con-
gress, neither of presidents nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of such
as would make of America another Europe. I thought only of the
simplest and purest minds; I said, "Certainly yes; — but those who
hold it are fanatics of a dream which I should hardly care to relate
to your English ears, to which it might be only ridiculous, — and yet
it is the only true." So I opened the dogma of no-government and
non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the fun, and pro-
cured a kind of hearing for it. I said, it is true that I have never
seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth,
and yet it is plain to me that no less valor than this can command

STONEHENGE 461

my respect. I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar musket-
worship, — though great men be musket-worshippers; — and 'tis cer-
tain, as God liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the
law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution. I fancied
that one or two of my anecdotes made some impression on C, and
I insisted that the manifest absurdity of the view to English feasi-
bility could make no difference to a gentleman; that as to our secure
tenure of our mutton-chop and spinage in London or in Boston,
the soul might quote Talleyrand, "Monsieur, je n'en vols pas la
necessite."' As I had thus taken in the conversation the saint's part,
when dinner was announced, C. refused to go out before me, — "he
was altogether too wicked." I planted my back against the wall,
and our host wittily rescued us from the dilemma, by saying, he
was the wickedest, and would walk out first, then C. followed, and
I went last.

On the way to Winchester, whither our host accompanied us in
the afternoon, my friends asked many questions respecting Amer-
ican landscape, forests, houses, — my house, for example. It is not
easy to answer these queries well. There I thought, in America,
lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, almost conscious, too much by
half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, hke
the rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night, steeped in
dews and rains, which it loves; and on it man seems not able to
make much impression. There, in that great sloven continent, in
high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide, sky skirted prairie, still
sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since driven
away from the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of
England. And, in England, I am quite too sensible of this. Every
one is on his good behavior, and must be dressed for dinner at six.
So I put off my friends with very inadequate details, as best I could.

Just before entering Winchester, we stopped at the Church of
Saint Cross, .and, after looking through the quaint antiquity, we
demanded a piece of bread and a draught of beer, which the founder,
Henry de Blois, in 1136, commanded should be given to every one
who should ask it at the gate. We had both, from the old couple
who take care of the church. Some twenty people, every day, they

2 "Mais, Monseigneur, il faut que fexiste."

462 ENGLISH TRAITS

said, make the same demand. This hospitality of seven hundred
years' standing did not hinder C. from pronouncing a malediction
on the priest who receives ;^2ooo a year, that were meant for the
poor, and spends a pittance on this small beer and crumbs.

In the Cathedral I was gratified, at least by the ample dimensions.
The length of line exceeds that of any other English church; being
556 feet by 250 in breadth of transept. I think I prefer this church
to all I have seen, except Westminster and York. Here was Canute
buried, and here Alfred the Great was crowned and buried, and
here the Saxon kings: and, later, in his own church, William of
Wykeham. It is very old : part of the crypt into which we went down
and saw the Saxon and Norman arches of the old church on which
the present stands, was built fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago.
Sharon Turner says, "Alfred was buried at Winchester, in the Abbey
he had founded there, but his remains were removed by Henry I.
to the new Abbey in the meadows at Hyde, on the northern quarter
of the city, and laid under the high altar. The building was de-
stroyed at the Reformation, and what is left of Alfred's body now
lies covered by modern buildings, or buried in the ruins of the old."^
William of Wykeham's shrine tomb was unlocked for us, and C.
took hold of the recumbent statue's marble hands, and patted them
affectionately, for he rightly values the brave man who built Wind-
sor, and this Cathedral, and the School here, and New College at
Oxford. But it was growing late in the afternoon. Slowly we left
the old house, and parting with our host, we took the train for
London.

CHAPTER XVII

PERSONAL

In these comments on an old journey now revised after seven busy
years have much changed men and things in England, I have ab-
stained from reference to persons, except in the last chapter, and in
one or two cases where the fame of the parties seemed to have given
the public a property in all that concerned them. I must further
allow myself a few notices, if only as an acknowledgment of debts
that cannot be paid. My journeys were cheered by so much kindness

^ History o£ the Anglo-Saxons, I., 599.

PERSONAL 463

from new friends, that my impression of the island is bright with
agreeable memories both of public societies and of households: and,
what is nowhere better found than in England, a cultivated person
fitly surrounded by a happy home, "with honor, love, obedience,
troops of friends," is of all institutions the best. At the landing in
Liverpool, I found my Manchester correspondent awaiting me, a
gendeman whose kind reception was followed by a train of friendly
and effective attentions which never rested whilst I remained in
the country. A man of sense and of letters, the editor of a powerful
local journal, he added to solid virtues an infinite sweetness and
bonhommie. There seemed a pool of honey about his heart which
lubricated all his speech and action with fine jets of mead. An
equal good fortune attended many later accidents of my journey,
until the sincerity of English kindness ceased to surprise. My visit
fell in the fortunate days when Mr. Bancroft was the American
Minister in London, and at his house, or through his good offices,
I had easy access to excellent persons and to privileged places. At
the house of Mr. Carlyle, I met persons eminent in society and in
letters. The privileges of the Athenaeum and of the Reform Clubs
were hospitably opened to me, and I found much advantage in the
circles of the "Geologic," the "Antiquarian," and the "Royal Soci-
eties." Every day in London gave me new opportunities of meeting
men and women who give splendor to society. I saw Rogers,
Hallam, Macaulay, Milnes, Milman, Barry Cornwall, Dickens,
Thackeray, Tennyson, Leigh Hunt, D'Israeli, Helps, Wilkinson,
Bailey, Kenyon, and Forster: the younger poets, Clough, Arnold,
and Patmore; and, among the men of science, Robert Brown, Owen,
Sedgwick, Faraday, Buckland, Lyell, De la Beche, Hooker, Car-
penter, Babbage, and Edward Forbes. It was my privilege also to
converse with Miss Baillie, with Lady Morgan, with Mrs. Jameson,
and Mrs. Somerville. A finer hospitality made many private houses
not less known and dear. It is not in distinguished circles that
wisdom and elevated characters are usually found, or, if found, not
confined thereto; and my recollections of the best hours go back to
private conversations in different parts of the kingdom, with persons
little known. Nor am I insensible to the courtesy which frankly
opened to me some noble mansions, if I do not adorn my page with

464 ENGLISH TRAITS

their names. Among the privileges of London, I recall with pleasure
two or three signal days, one at Kew, where Sir William Hooker
showed me all the riches of the vast botanic garden; one at the
Museum, where Sir Charles Fellowes explained in detail the history
of his Ionic trophy-monument; and still another, on which Mr.
Owen accompanied my countryman Mr. H. and myself through the
Hunterian Museum.

The like frank hospitality, bent on real service, I found among
the great and the humble, wherever I went; in Birmingham, in
Oxford, in Leicester, in Nottingham, in Sheffield, in Manchester,
in Liverpool. At Edinburgh, through the kindness of Dr. Samuel
Brown, I made the acquaintance of De Quincey, of Lord Jeffrey,
of Wilson, of Mrs. Crowe, of the Messrs. Chambers, and of a man
of high character and genius, the short-lived painter, David Scott.

At Ambleside, in March, 1848, I was for a couple of days the
guest of Miss Martineau, then newly returned from her Egyptian
tour. On Sunday afternoon I accompanied her to Rydal Mount.
And as I have recorded a visit to Wordsworth, many years before,
I must not forget this second interview. We found Mr. Wordsworth
asleep on the sofa. He was at first silent and indisposed, as an old
man suddenly waked, before he had ended his nap; but soon became
full of talk on the French news. He was nationally bitter on the
French: bitter on Scotchmen, too. No Scotchman, he said, can
write English. He detailed the two models, on one or the other of
which all the sentences of the historian Robertson are framed. Nor
could Jeffrey nor the Edinburgh Reviewers write English, nor can
. . . , who is a pest to the English tongue. Incidentally he added,
Gibbon cannot write English. The Edinburgh Review wrote what
would tell and what would sell. It had however changed the tone
of its literary criticism from the time when a certain letter was
written to the editor by Coleridge. Mrs. W. had the editor's answer
in her possession. Tennyson he thinks a right poetic genius, though
with some affectation. He had thought an elder brother of Tenny-
son at first the better poet, but must now reckon Alfred the true one.
... In speaking of I know not what style, he said, "to be sure, it
was the manner, but then you know the matter always comes out
of the manner." . . . He thought Rio Janeiro the best place in the

PERSONAL 465

world for a great capital city, . . . We talked of English national
character, I told him, it was not creditable that no one in all the
country knew anything of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, whilst in
every American hbrary his translations are found. I said, if Plato's
RepubUc were published in England as a new book to-day, do you
think it would find any readers ? — he confessed, it would not : "And
yet," he added after a pause, with that complacency which never
deserts a true-born Englishman, "and yet we have embodied it all,"
His opinions of French, English, Irish, and Scotch seemed rashly
formuhzed from Utde anecdotes of what had befallen himself and
members of his family, in a diligence or stagecoach. His face some-
times lighted up, but his conversation was not marked by special
force or elevation. Yet perhaps it is a high compliment to the
cultivation of the EngHsh generally, when we find such a man not
distinguished. He had a healthy look, with a weather-beaten face,
his face corrugated, especially the large nose-
Miss Martineau, who lived near him, praised him to me not for
his poetry, but for thrift and economy; for having afforded to his
country-neighbors an example of a modest household, where com-
fort and culture were secured without any display. She said that,
in his early housekeeping at the cottage where he first lived, he was
accustomed to offer his friends bread and plainest fare: if they
wanted anything more, they must pay him for their board. It was
the rule of the house. I replied that it evinced EngUsh pluck more
than any anecdote I knew. A gendeman in the neighborhood told
the story of Walter Scott's staying once for a week with Words-
worth, and slipping out every day under pretence of a walk, to the
Swan Inn, for a cold cut and porter; and one day passing with
Wordsworth the inn, he was betrayed by the landlord's asking him
if he had come for his porter. Of course, this trait would have
another look in London, and there you will hear from different
literary men that Wordsworth had no personal friend, that he was
not amiable, that he was parsimonious, &c. Landor, always generous,
says that he never praised anybody, A gentleman in London showed
me a watch that once belonged to Milton, whose initials are en-
graved on its face. He said, he once showed this to Wordsworth,
who took it in one hand, then drew out his own watch, and held it

466 ENGLISH TRAITS

up with the other, before the company, but no one making the
expected remark, he put back his own in silence. I do not attach
much importance to the disparagement of Wordsworth among
London scholars. Who reads him well will know that in following
the strong bent of his genius, he was careless of the many, careless
also of the few, self-assured that he should "create the taste by which
he is to be enjoyed." He lived long enough to witness the revolution
he had wrought, and "to see what he foresaw." There are torpid
places in his mind, there is something hard and sterile in his poetry,
want of grace and variety, want of due catholicity and cosmopolitan
scope: he had conformities to English politics and traditions; he
had egotistic puerilities in the choice and treatment of his subjects;
but let us say of him that, alone in his time, he treated the human
mind well, and with an absolute trust. His adherence to his poetic
creed rested on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortality is the
high-water mark which the intellect has reached in this age. New
means were employed, and new realms added to the empire of the
muse, by his courage.

CHAPTER XVIII

England is the best of actual nations. It is no ideal framework,
it is an old pile built in different ages, with repairs, additions, and
makeshifts; but you see the poor best you have got. London is the
epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day. Broad-fronted, broad-
bottomed Teutons, they stand in soHd phalanx foursquare to the
points of compass; they constitute the modern world, they have
earned their vantage-ground, and held it through ages of adverse
possession. They are well marked and differing from other leading
races. England is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is not
so public in its bias; private life is its place of honor. Truth in
private life, untruth in public, marks these home-loving men. Their
political conduct is not decided by general views, but by internal
intrigues and personal and family interest. They cannot readily see
beyond England. The history of Rome and Greece, when written
by their scholars, degenerates into English party pamphlets. They

RESULT 467

cannot see beyond England, nor in England can they transcend the
interests of the governing classes. "English principles" mean a pri-
mary regard to the interests of property. England, Scodand, and
Ireland combine to check the colonies. England and Scotland com-
bine to check Irish manufactures and trade. England rallies at
home to check Scodand. In England, the strong classes check the
weaker. In the home population of near thirty millions, there are
but one million voters. The Church punishes dissent, punishes edu-
cation. Down to a late day, marriages performed by dissenters were
illegal. A bitter class-legislation gives power to those who are rich
enough to buy a law. The game-laws are a proverb of oppression.
Pauperism incrusts and clogs the state, and in hard times becomes
hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was diluted. Multitudes lived
miserably by shell-fish and sea-ware. In cities, the children are
trained to beg, until they shall be old enough to rob. Men and
women were convicted of poisoning scores of children for burial-
fees. In Irish districts, men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose
sunk, the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal
form. During the Australian emigration, multitudes were rejected
by the commissioners as being too emaciated for useful colonists.
During the Russian war, few of those that offered as recruits were
found up to the medical standard, though it had been reduced.

The foreign policy of England, though ambitious and lavish of
money, has not often been generous or just. It has a principal regard
to the interest of trade, checked however by the aristocratic bias
of the ambassador, which usually puts him in sympathy with the
continental Courts. It sanctioned the partition of Poland, it betrayed
Genoa, Sicily, Parga, Greece, Turkey, Rome, and Hungary.

Some public regards they have. They have abolished slavery in
the West Indies, and put an end to human sacrifices in the East.
At home they have a certain statute hospitality. England keeps
open doors, as a trading country must, to all nations. It is one of
their fixed ideas, and wrathfuUy supported by their laws in unbroken
sequence for a thousand years. In Magna Charta it was ordained
that all "merchants shall have safe and secure conduct to go out and
come into England, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land
as by water, to buy and sell by the ancient allowed customs, without

468 ENGLISH TRAITS

any evil toll, except in time of war, or when they shall be of any
nation at war with us." It is a statute and obliged hospitality, and
peremptorily maintained. But this shop-rule had one magnificent
effect. It extends its cold unalterable courtesy to political exiles of
every opinion, and is a fact which might give additional light to
that portion of the planet seen from the farthest star. But this
perfunctory hospitality puts no sweetness into their unaccommo-
dating manners, no check on that puissant nationality which makes
their existence incompatible with all that is not English.

What we must say about a nation is a superficial dealing with
symptoms. We cannot go deep enough into the biography of the
spirit who never throws himself entire into one hero, but delegates
his energy in parts or spasms to vicious and defective individuals.
But the wealth of the source is seen in the plenitude of English
nature. What variety of power and talent; what facility and plente-
ousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; what a
proud chivalry is indicated in "CoUins's Peerage," through eight
hundred years! What dignity resting on what reality and stoutness!
What courage in war, what sinew in labor, what cunning workmen,
what inventors and engineers, what seamen and pilots, what clerks
and scholars! No one man and no few men can represent them.
It is a people of myriad personahties. Their many-headedness is
owing to the advantageous position of the middle class, who are
always the source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty of
their aesthetic production. As they are many-headed, so they are
many-nationed: their colonization annexes archipelagoes and conti-
nents, and their speech seems destined to be the universal language
of men. I have noted the reserve of power in the English tem-
perament. In the island, they never let out all the length of all
the reins, there is no Berserkir rage, no abandonment or ecstasy of
will or intellect, like that of the Arabs in the time of Mahomet, or
like that which intoxicated France in 1789. But who would see the
uncoiling of that tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-hus-
banded forces, must follow the swarms which, pouring now for
two hundred years from the British islands, have sailed, and rode,
and traded, and planted, through all climates, mainly following the
belt of empire, the temperate zones, carrying the Saxon seed, with

RESULT 469

its instinct for liberty and law, for arts and for thought, — acquiring
under some skies a more electric energy than the native air allows, —
to the conquest of the globe. Their colonial policy, obeying the
necessities of a vast empire, has become Hberal. Canada and Aus-
tralia have been contented with substantial independence. They are
expiating the wrongs of India, by benefits; first, in works for the
irrigation of the peninsula, and roads and telegraphs; and secondly,
in the instruction of the people, to qualify them for self-government,
when the British power shall be finally called home.

Their mind is in a state of arrested development, — a divine cripple
like Vulcan; a blind savant like Huber and Sanderson. They do not
occupy themselves on matters of general and lasting import, but on
a corporeal civilization, on goods that perish in the using. But they
read with good intent, and what they learn they incarnate. The
English mind turns every abstraction it can receive into a portable
utensil, or a working institution. Such is their tenacity, and such
their practical turn, that they hold all they gain. Hence we say
that only the English race can be trusted with freedom, — freedom
which is double-edged and dangerous to any but the wise and robust.
The English designate the kingdoms emulous of free institutions,
as the sentimental nations. Their culture is not an outside varnish,
but is thorough and secular in families and the race. They are
oppressive with their temperament, and all the more that they are
refined. I have sometimes seen them walk with my countrymen
when I was forced to allow them every advantage, and their com-
panions seemed bags of bones.

There is cramp limitation in their habit of thought, sleepy routine,
and a tortoise's instinct to hold hard to the ground with his claws,
lest he should be thrown on his back. There is a drag of inertia
which resists reform in every shape; — law-reform, army-reform, ex-
tension of suffrage, Jewish franchise, Catholic emancipation, — the
abolition of slavery, of impressment, penal code, and entails. They
praise this drag, under the formula that it is the excellence of the
British constitution, that no law can anticipate the public opinion.
These poor tortoises must hold hard, for they feel no wings sprout-
ing at their shoulders. Yet somewhat divine warms at their heart,
and waits a happier hour. It hides in their sturdy will. "Will,"

470 ENGLISH TRAITS

said the old philosophy, "is the measure of power," and personaUty
is the token of this race. Quid vult valde vult. What they do they
do with a will. You cannot account for their success by their Chris-
tianity, commerce, charter, common law. Parliament, or letters, but
by the contumacious sharp-tongued energy of English naturel, with
a poise impossible to disturb, which makes all these its instruments.
They are slow and reticent, and are like a dull good horse which lets
every nag pass him, but with whip and spur will run down every
racer in the field. They are right in their feehng, though wrong
in their speculation.

The feudal system survives in the steep inequality of property
and privilege, in the limited franchise, in the social barriers which
confine patronage and promotion to a caste, and still more in the
submissive ideas pervading these people. The fagging of the schools
is repeated in the social classes. An Englishman shows no mercy to
those below him in the social scale, as he looks for none from those
above him: any forbearance from his superiors surprises him, and
they suffer in his good opinion. But the feudal system can be seen
with less pain on large historical grounds. It was pleaded in miti-
gation of the rotten borough, that it worked well, that substantial
justice was done. Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, Sheridan,
Romilly, or whatever national man, were by this means sent to
Parliament, when their return by large constituencies would have
been doubtful. So now we say that the right measures of England
are the men it bred; that it has yielded more able men in five
hundred years than any other nation; and, though we must not
play Providence, and balance the chances of producing ten great
men against the comfort of ten thousand mean men, yet retrospec-
tively we may strike the balance, and prefer one Alfred, one Shaks-
peare, one Milton, one Sidney, one Raleigh, one Wellington, to a
million foolish democrats.

The American system is more democratic, more humane; yet the
American people do not yield better or more able men, or more
inventions or books or benefits, than the English. Congress is not
wiser or better than Parhament. France has abolished its suffocating
old regime, but is not recently marked by any more wisdom or
virtue.

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER 47 1

The power of performance has not been exceeded, — the creation
of value. The EngHsh have given importance to individuals, a prin-
cipal end and fruit of every society. Every man is allowed and en-
couraged to be what he is, and is guarded in the indulgence of
his whim. "Magna Charta," said Rushworth, "is such a fellow that
he will have no sovereign." By this general activity, and by this
sacredness of individuals, they have in seven hundred years evolved
the principles of freedom. It is the land of patriots, martyrs, sages,
and bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged should wash
it away, it will be remembered as an island famous for immortal
laws, for the announcements of original right which make the stone
tables of Uberty.

CHAPTER XIX

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER

A FEW days after my arrival at Manchester, in November, 1847,
the Manchester Athenaeum gave its annual Banquet in the Free-
Trade Hall. With other guests, I was invited to be present, and to
address the company. In looking over recently a newspaper-report
of my remarks, I incline to reprint it, as fitly expressing the feeling
with which I entered England, and which agrees well enough with
the more deliberate results of better acquaintance recorded in the
foregoing pages. Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, presided, and
opened the meeting with a speech. He was followed by Mr. Cobden,
Lord Brackley, and others, among whom was Mr. Cruikshank,
one of the contributors to "Punch." Mr. Dickens's letter of apology
for his absence was read. Mr. Jerrold, who had been announced,
did not appear. On being introduced to the meeting, I said: —

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: It is pleasant to me to meet this
great and brilliant company, and doubly pleasant to see the faces
of so many distinguished persons on this platform. But I have
known all these persons already. When I was at home, they were
as near to me as they are to you. The arguments of the League and
its leader are known to all the friends of free trade. The gayeties
and genius, the political, the social, the parietal wit of "Punch" go
duly every fortnight to every boy and girl in Boston and New York.

472 ENGLISH TRAITS

Sir, when I came to sea, I found the "History of Europe" ' on the
ship's cabin table, the property of the captain; — a sort of programme
or play-bill to tell the sea-faring New Englander what he shall find
on his landing here. And as for Dombey, sir, there is no land where
paper exists to print on, where it is not found; no man who can
read, that does not read it, and, if he cannot, he finds some charitable
pair of eyes that can, and hears it.

But these things are not for me to say; these compliments, though
true, would better come from one who felt and understood these
merits more. I am not here to exchange civilities with you, but
rather to speak of that which I am sure interests these gentlemen more
than their own praises; of that which is good in holidays and
working-days, the same in one century and in another century.
That which lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish
to see England, is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race, — its com-
manding sense of right and wrong, — the love and devotion to that, —
this is the imperial trait, which arms them with the sceptre of the
globe. It is this which lies at the foundation of that aristocratic
character, which certainly wanders into strange vagaries, so that its
origin is often lost sight of, but which, if it should lose this, would
find itself paralyzed; and in trade, and in the mechanic's shop,
gives that honesty in performance, that thoroughness and solidity
of work, which is a national characteristic. This conscience is one
element, and the other is that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship,
that homage of man to man, running through all classes, — the
electing of worthy persons to a certain fraternity, to acts of kindness
and warm and stanch support, from year to year, from youth to
age, — which is alike lovely and honorable to those who render and
•■hose who receive it; — which stands in strong contrast with the
superficial attachments of other races, their excessive courtesy, and
short-lived connection.

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though
it be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday except as it
celebrates real and not pretended joys; and I think it just, in this
time of gloom and commercial disaster, of aflSiction and beggary in

' By Sir A. Alison.

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER 473

these districts, that, on these very accounts I speak of, you should
not fail to keep your literary anniversary. I seem to hear you say
that, for all that is come and gone yet, we will not reduce by one
chaplet or one oak leaf the braveries of our annual feast. For I must
tell you, I was given to understand in my childhood that the British
island from which my forefathers came, was no lotus-garden, no
paradise of serene sky and roses and music and merriment all the
year round, no, but a cold foggy mournful country, where nothing
grew well in the open air, but robust men and virtuous women, and
these of a wonderful fibre and endurance; that their best parts were
slowly revealed; their virtues did not come out until they quarrelled:
they did not strike twelve the first time; good lovers, good haters,
and you could know little about them till you had seen them long,
and little good of them till you had seen them in action; that in
prosperity they were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they
were grand. Is it not true, sir, that the wise ancients did not praise
the ship parting with flying colors from the port, but only that
brave sailer which came back with torn sheets and battered sides,
stript of her banners, but having ridden out the storm? And so,
gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, with the posses-
sions, honors, and trophies, and also with the infirmities, of a
thousand years gathering around her, irretrievably committed as she
now is to many old customs which cannot be suddenly changed;
pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new and all incalculable
modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing populations, — I see
her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has
seen dark days before; — indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees
a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and
calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. I see
her in her old age, not decrepit, but young, and still daring to believe
in her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, All hail!
mother of nations, mother of heroes, with strength still equal to the
time; still wise to entertain and swift to execute the policy which the
mind and heart of mankind requires in the present hour, and thus
only hospitable to the foreigner, and truly a home to the thoughtful
and generous who are born in the soil. So be it! so let it be! If it be

474 ENGLISH TRAITS

not so, if the courage o£ England goes with the chances of a com-
mercial crisis, I will go back to the capes of Massachusetts, and my
own Indian stream, and say to my countrymen, the old race are
all gone, and the elasticity and hope of mankind must henceforth
remain on the Alleghany ranges, or nowhere.

Vol 5: The Classics - Part 2