. . .
And to-day (Monday, July 23d, I believe) I have finished this most incomplete and unsatisfactory record of what we have done and seen since Wednesday last. I am pretty well convinced that all attempts at describing scenery—especially mountain-scenery—are sheer nonsense. For one thing, the point of view being changed, the whole description which you made up from the previous point of view is immediately falsified. And when you have done your utmost, such items as those setting forth the scene in a play—“a mountainous country; in the distance a cascade tumbling over a precipice; in front a lake; on one side an ivy-covered cottage”—this dry detail brings the matter before one’s mind’s eyes more effectually than all the art of word-painting.
. . .
Perhaps a part of my weariness of the lakes is owing to the hotel-life which we lead. At an English hotel, the traveller feels as if everybody, from the landlord downward, were in a joint and individual purpose of fleecing him; because all the attendants, who come in contact with him, are to be separately considered. So, after paying, in the first instance, a very heavy bill for what would seem to cover the whole indebtedness, there remain divers dues still to be paid, to no trifling amount, to the landlord’s servants—dues not to be ascertained, and which you never even know whether you have properly satisfied. You can know, perhaps, when you have less than satisfied them, by the aspect of the waiter, which I wish I could describe; —not disrespectful, in the slightest degree, but a look of profound surprise, a gaze at the offered coin (which he nevertheless pockets) as if he either did not see it, or did not know it, or could not believe his eyesight;—all this, however, with the most quiet forbearance, a Christian like non-recognition of an unmerited wrong and insult;—and, finally (all in a moment’s space indeed) he quits you and goes about his other business. If you have given too much, too, you are made sensible of your folly by the extra amount of his gratitude, and the bows with which he salutes you from the door-step. But, generally, you cannot very decidedly say whether you have been right or wrong; but, in almost all cases, you decidedly feel that you have been fleeced. Then the living at the best of English hotels (so far as my travels have brought me acquainted with them) deserves but moderate praise, and is especially lacking in variety. Nothing but joints, joints, joints; sometimes, perhaps, a meat-pie, which, if you eat it, weighs upon your conscience with the idea that you have eaten the scraps and rejected relics of other people’s dinners. At the lake-hotels, the fare (with the exception of trout, which are not always fresh, and which one soon tires of, at any rate) is lamb and mutton. We pay like nabobs, and are expected to be content with plain mutton. The English seem to have no conception of better living than this. What must they think of the American hotels!
London, September 1855
Yesterday we walked to the British Museum—Sophia, Julian, and I. A centinel (or two) was on guard before the gateway of this extensive edifice, in Great Russell Street, and there was a porter at the lodge, and, I think, one or two police-men, lounging about; but entrance was free, and we walked in without question. Officials and policemen were likewise scattered about the great entrance-hall; none of whom, however, interfered with us; so we took whatever way we chose, and wandered about the Museum at will. It is a hopeless—and to me, generally, a depressing—business to go through an immense, multifarious show like this (if there were any other like it) glancing at a thousand things, and conscious of some little titillation of mind from them, but really taking in nothing, and getting no good from anything. One need not go beyond the limits of the British Museum to be profoundly accomplished in all branches of science, art, literature; only it would take a lifetime to exhaust it in any one department; but, to see it as we did, and with no prospect of ever seeing it more at leisure, only impressed me with the old apothegm—“Life is short, and Art is long.” The fact is, the world is accumulating too many materials for knowledge. We do not recognize for rubbish what is really rubbish; and under this head might be reckoned almost everything one sees in the British Museum; and as each generation leaves its fragments and potsherds behind it, such will finally be the desperate conclusion of the learned.
We went first among some antique marbles—busts, statues, terminal gods &c—with several of the Roman emperors among them. We saw here the bust whence Haydon took his ugly and ridiculous likeness of Nero;—a foolish thing to do. Julius Caesar was there, too, looking more like a modern old man than any other bust in the series. Perhaps there may be a universality in his face that gives it this independence of race and epoch. We glimpsed along among the old marbles—Elgin, and others—which are esteemed such treasures of art;—the oddest fragments, many of them, smashed by their fall from high places, or by being pounded to pieces by barbarians; or gnawed away by time so that the beautiful statues look like a child’s sugar images, which it has sucked in its mouth; the surface roughened by being rained upon for thousands of years; almost always, a nose knocked off; sometimes, a headless form; a great deficiency of feet and hands;—poor, maimed veterans, in this hospital of incurables. The beauty of the most perfect of them must be rather guessed at, and seen by faith, than with the bodily eye; to look at the corroded faces and forms is like trying to see angels through mist and cloud. I suppose nine-tenths of those, who seem to be enraptured by these fragments, do not really care about them; neither do I. And if I were actually moved, I should doubt whether it were by the statues, or by my own fancy.
We passed, too, through Assyrian saloons, and Egyptian saloons—all full of monstrosities and horrible uglinesses, especially the Egyptian. They were surely an abominable people; and all the innumerable relics that I saw of them, in these saloons, and among the mummies, instead of bringing me closer to them, removed me farther and farther; there being no common ground of sympathy between them and us. Their gigantic statues are certainly very curious. I saw a hand and arm up to the shoulder, fifteen feet in length, and made of some stone that seemed harder and heavier than granite, not having lost its polish in all the rough usage that it has undergone. There was a fist on a still larger scale, almost as big as a hogshead. Hideous, blubber-lipped faces of giants; human shapes with beast-heads on them;—the Egyptians controverted Nature in all things, only using it as a groundwork to depict the unnatural upon. Their mummifying process is a result of this tendency. We saw one very perfect mummy, a priestess, with apparently only one more fold of linen betwixt us and her antique flesh, and this fitting closely to her person, from head to foot, so that we could see the lineaments of her face, and the shape of her bosom and limbs, as perfectly as if quite bare. I judge that she may have been very beautiful in her day, whenever that was. One or two of the poor thing’s toes (her feet were wonderfully small and delicate) protruded from the linen; and, perhaps not having been so perfectly embalmed, the flesh had fallen away, leaving only some little bones. I don’t think this young woman has gained much by not turning to dust in the time of the Pharaohs. We also saw some bones of a king that had been taken out of a pyramid; a very fragmentary skeleton. Among the classic marbles, I peeped into an urn that once contained the ashes of dead people, and the bottom still had an ashy hue. I like this mode of disposing of dead bodies; but it would be still better to burn them and scatter the ashes, instead of hoarding them up—scatter them over wheat-fields or flower-beds.
Besides these antique halls, we wandered through saloons of antediluvian animals, some set up in skeletons, others imprisoned in solid stone; also specimens of still extant animals, birds, reptiles, shells, minerals, the whole circle of human knowledge and guess-work; till I wished that the whole Past might be swept away—and each generation compelled to bury and destroy whatever it had produced, before being permitted to leave the stage. When we quit a house, we are expected to make it clean for the next occupant;—why ought we not to leave a clean world for the coming generation. We did not see the Library, of above half a million of volumes; else I suppose I should have found full occasion to wish that burnt or buried, likew
ise. In truth a greater part of it is as good as buried, so far as any readers are concerned.
Liverpool, March 1856
Yesterday, I lunched on board Captain Russell’s ship, the Princeton. These daily lunches on shipboard might answer very well the purposes of a dinner; being in fact noontide dinners, with (as yesterday) soup, roast mutton, mutton chops, and a maccaroni pudding; a preliminary glass of brandy, and port and sherry wines. There were three elderly Englishmen at table, with white heads—which, I think, is oftener the predicament of elderly heads here, than in America. One of these was a retired Custom House officer, and the other two were connected with shipping in some way. There is a satisfaction in seeing Englishmen eat and drink, they do it so heartily, and on the whole so wisely—trusting so entirely that there is no harm in good beef and mutton, and a reasonable quantity of good liquor; and these three hale and hearty old men, who had acted on this wholesome faith for ever so long, were proofs that it is well, on earth, to live like earthly creatures. In America, what squeamishness, what delicacy, what stomachic apprehensions, would there not be among three stomachs of sixty to seventy years’ experience! I think this failure of American stomachs is partly owing to our ill-usage of our digestive powers, and partly to our want of faith in them.
London, July 1856
Leaving out the illustrious Jenny [Lind], I suspect that I was myself the greatest lion of the evening, for a good many persons sought the felicity of knowing me, and had little or nothing to say, when that honor and happiness was conferred on them. It is surely very wrong and ill-mannered in people to ask for an introduction, unless they are prepared to make talk; it throws too great an expense and trouble on the wretched lion, who is compelled, on the spur of the moment, to concoct a conversible substance out of thin air, perhaps for the twentieth time that evening. On the whole, I am sure I did not say—and I think I did not hear said—one rememberable word, in the course of this evening; though, nevertheless, it was rather an agreeable one. In due season, ices and jellies were handed about; and some ladies and gentlemen—professional, I suspect—were kind enough to sing unintelligible songs, and play on the piano and harp; while, in the rear, people went on with whatever conversation they had in hand. Then came supper; but there were so many people to go into the small supper-room that we could not all crowd thither together; and, coming late, I got nothing but some sponge-cake and a glass of champagne—neither of which I care for. After supper, Mr. Lover sang some Irish songs (his own, in music and words) with rich humorous effect, to which the comicality of his face contributed almost as much as his voice.
London, August 1856
At the Egyptian Hall, or in the same edifice, there is a gallery of pictures, the property of Lord Ward, who allows the public to see them, five days of the week, without any trouble or restriction;—a great kindness on his Lordship’s part, it must be owned. It is a very valuable collection, I presume, containing specimens of many famous old masters; some of the early, stiff and hard pictures by Raphael, and his masters, and fellow pupils—very curious and nowise beautiful; a perfect, sunny glimpse of Venice, by Canaletto; and Saints, and naked women, and scriptural, allegorical, and mythological people, by Titian, Guido, Correggio, and many more names than I can remember. There is likewise a dead Magdalen by Canova, and a Venus by the same, very pretty, and with a vivid light of joyous expression in her face, making her far preferable to that cold little woman of stone, the Venus de Medici; also Powers’s Greek Slave, in which I see little beauty or merit, and two or three other statues. It seems to me time to leave off sculpturing men and women naked; they mean nothing, and might as well bear one name as another, and belong to the same category as the ideal portraits in Books of Beauty, or in the windows of print-shops. The art does not naturally belong to this age; and the exercise of it, I think, had better be confined to the manufacture of marble fireplaces.
Peterborough, May 1857
I have not seen an older-looking town than Peterborough; but there is little that is picturesque about it, except within the precincts of the Cathedral. It was very fortunate for the beauty and antiquity of these precincts, that Henry VIII. did not suffer the monkish edifices of the Abbey to be overthrown and utterly destroyed, as was the case with so many Abbeys, at the Reformation; but, converting the Abbey church into a Cathedral, he seems to have preserved much of the other arrangement of the buildings connected with it. And so it happens that, to this day, we have the massive and stately gateway, with its great pointed arch, still keeping out the world from those who have inherited the habitations of the old monks; for though the gate is never closed, one feels himself in a sacred seclusion, the instant he passes under the archway. And everywhere, there are old houses that appear to have been adapted from the monkish residences, or from their spacious offices, and made into convenient dwellings for ecclesiastics, or vergers, or great or small people connected with the Cathedral; and, with all modern comfort, they still retain much of the quaintness of the elder time—arches, even rows of arcades, pillars, walls beautified with patches of Gothic sculpture, not wilfully put on by modern taste, but lingering from a long past; deep niches, let into the fronts of houses, and occupied by images of saints; a growth of ivy overspreading walls, and just allowing the windows to peep through; so that no novelty, nor anything of our hard, ugly, actual life, comes into these limits, through the defences of the gateway, without being modified and mollified. Except in some of the old colleges of Oxford, I have not seen any other place that impressed me in this way; and the precincts of Peterborough Cathedral have the advantage over even the Oxford colleges, inasmuch as the life is here domestic, that of the family, that of the affections—a natural life, which, one deludes oneself with imagining, may be made into something sweeter and purer in this beautiful spot than anywhere else. Doubtless, the inhabitants find it a stupid and tiresome place enough, and get morbid, and sulky, and heavy, and obtuse of head and heart, with the monotony of their life. But still, I must needs believe that a man with a full mind, and objects to employ his affection, might be very happy here. And perhaps the forms and appliances of human life are never fit to make people happy, until they cease to be used for the purposes for which they were directly intended, and are taken, as it were, in a sidelong application. I mean that the old monks, probably, never enjoyed their own edifices, while they were a part of the actual life of the day, so much as these present inhabitants now enjoy them, when a new use has grown up apart from the original one.
Southport, June 1857
The village of Matlock is situated on the banks of the Derwent, in a delightful little nook among the hills, which rise above it in steeps, and in precipitous crags, and shut out the world so effectually that I wonder how the railway ever found it out. Indeed, it does make its approach to this region through a long tunnel. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, when we arrived; and my present impressions are, that I have never seen anywhere else such exquisite scenery as that which surrounds the village. The street itself, to be sure, is commonplace enough, and hot, dusty, and disagreeable; but if you look above it, or on either side, there are the green hills descending abruptly down, and softened with woods, amid which are seen villas, cottages, castles; and, beyond the river, are a line of crags, perhaps three hundred feet high, clothed with shrubbery, in some parts, from top to bottom, but in other places presenting a sheer precipice of rock, over which tumbles, as it were, a cascade of ivy and creeping plants. It is very beautiful, and, I might almost say, very wild; but yet it has those characteristics of finish, and of being redeemed from nature, and converted into a portion of the adornment of a great garden—which I find in all English scenery. Not that I complain of this; on the contrary, there is nothing that delights an American more in contrast with the roughness and raggedness of his native scenes;—to which, also, he might be glad to return, after a while.
Dumfreies, Scotland, June 1857
There was a footpath through the churchyard sufficiently well-worn to guide us
to the grave of Burns; but soon a woman came behind us, who, it appears, keeps the key of the mausoleum and is privileged to show it to strangers. The monument is a sort of Grecian temple, with pillars, or pilasters, and a dome, covering a space, I suppose, of twenty feet square. It was formerly open to the atmosphere, but its sides are now glazed with large squares, each the size of the whole side of the edifice, of rough glass. The woman unlocked the door, and admitted us into the interior. Inlaid into the floor of the building, is the grave-stone of Burns, the one that was laid over his grave by Jean Armour, before this monument was built. Stuck against the wall of the mausoleum there is a marble statue of Burns at the plough, surprised by a visit from the Genius of Caledonia; not very good, methinks. The plough is better than the man, and the man rather better than the goddess, being somewhat heavy and cloddish, though the woman said that it is certified by an old man of ninety, who knew Burns, to be very like the original. The bones of the poet, and of Jean Armour, and of some of their children, are in the vault over which we stood. The woman (who was intelligent, in her plain way, and very pleasant to talk with) said that the vault was opened, about three weeks ago, when the eldest son of Burns was buried, and that the bones were found, and that the skull of the poet was taken out, and kept for several days by a doctor of the town. It has since been put in a new leaden coffer, and restored to the vault. She told us that there is a daughter surviving of the eldest son, and daughters by the two younger sons; and that there is an illegitimate son (named Robert Burns) and daughter, still extant in Dumfries, by the eldest son, who was a man of disreputable life in his younger days. This son seems to have inherited his father’s failings, with but a shadow of the great qualities that make the world tender of his vices and weaknesses. Seeing his poor, mean dwelling and surroundings, and picturing his outward presentiment from these, one does not so much wonder that the people of his day should have failed to recognize what was immortal in a disreputable, drunken, shabbily clothed and shabbily housed man, consorting with associates of ill reputation, and, as his only ostensible occupation, gauging liquor-casks. It is much easier to know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in marble, than when he comes staggering before you plastered over and besmeared with all the sordidness of his daily life. I only wonder that his honor came so soon; there must have been something very great in his immediate presence to have caused him to seem like a demi-god so soon.
The Portable Hawthorne (Penguin Classics) Page 42
