Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete

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We did not ascend to the galleries and other points of interest aloft,
nor go down into the vaults, where Nelson's sarcophagus is shown, and
many monuments of the old Gothic cathedral, which stood on this site,
before the great fire. They say that these lower regions are comfortably
warm and dry; but as we walked round in front, within the iron railing of
the churchyard, we passed an open door, giving access to the crypt, and
it breathed out a chill like death upon us.

It is pleasant to stand in the centre of the cathedral, and hear the
noise of London, loudest all round this spot,--how it is calmed into a
sound as proper to be heard through the aisles as the tones of its own
organ. If St. Paul's were to be burnt again (having already been bunt
and risen three or four times since the sixth century), I wonder whether
it would ever be rebuilt in the same spot! I doubt whether the city and
the nation are so religious as to consecrate their midmost heart for the
site of a church, where land would be so valuable by the square inch.

Coming from the cathedral, we went through Paternoster Row, and saw Ave
Mary Lane; all this locality appearing to have got its nomenclature from
monkish personages. We now took a cab for the British Museum, but found
this to be one of the days on which strangers are not admitted; so we
slowly walked into Oxford Street, and then strolled homeward, till,
coming to a sort of bazaar, we went in and found a gallery of pictures.
This bazaar proved to be the Pantheon, and the first picture we saw in
the gallery was Haydon's Resurrection of Lazarus,--a great height and
breadth of canvas, right before you as you ascend the stairs. The face
of Lazarus is very awful, and not to be forgotten; it is as true as if
the painter had seen it, or had been himself the resurrected man and felt
it; but the rest of the picture signified nothing, and is vulgar and
disagreeable besides. There are several other pictures by Haydon in this
collection,--the Banishment of Aristides, Nero with his Harp, and the
Conflagration of Rome; but the last is perfectly ridiculous, and all of
them are exceedingly unpleasant. I should be sorry to live in a house
that contained one of them. The best thing of Haydon was a hasty dash of
a sketch for a small, full-length portrait of Wordsworth, sitting on the
crag of a mountain. I doubt whether Wordsworth's likeness has ever been
so poetically brought out. This gallery is altogether of modern
painters, and it seems to be a receptacle for pictures by artists who can
obtain places nowhere else,--at least, I never heard of their names
before. They were very uninteresting, almost without exception, and yet
some of the pictures were done cleverly enough. There is very little
talent in this world, and what there is, it seems to me, is pretty well
known and acknowledged. We don't often stumble upon geniuses in obscure
corners.

Leaving the gallery, we wandered through the rest of the bazaar, which is
devoted to the sale of ladies' finery, jewels, perfumes, children's toys,
and all manner of small and pretty rubbish. . . . . In the evening I
again sallied forth, and lost myself for an hour or two; at last
recognizing my whereabouts in Tottenham Court Road. In such quarters of
London it seems to be the habit of people to take their suppers in the
open air. You see old women at the corners, with kettles of hot water
for tea or coffee; and as I passed a butcher's open shop, he was just
taking out large quantities of boiled beef, smoking hot. Butchers'
stands are remarkable for their profuse expenditure of gas; it belches
forth from the pipes in great flaring jets of flame, uncovered by any
glass, and broadly illuminating the neighborhood. I have not observed
that London ever goes to bed.

September 29th.--Yesterday we walked to the British Museum. A sentinel
or two kept guard before the gateway of this extensive edifice in Great
Russell Street, and there was a porter at the lodge, and one or two
policemen 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 at will. It is a
hopeless, and to me, generally, a depressing business to go through an
immense multifarious show like this, 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, and 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
truth of 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 very many things 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,
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; 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 in raptures about 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, 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, and human shapes with beasts' heads on them. The
Egyptian 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 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,--to scatter them over wheat-fields or flowerbeds.

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 next
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 and buried likewise. In truth, a greater part of it is as good as
buried, so far as any readers are concerned. Leaving the Museum, we
sauntered home. After a little rest, I set out for St. John's Wood, and
arrived thither by dint of repeated inquiries. It is a pretty suburb,
inhabited by people of the middling class. U---- met me joyfully, but
seemed to have had a good time with Mrs. Oakford and her daughter; and,
being pressed to stay to tea, I could not well help it. Before tea I sat
talking with Mrs. Oakford and a friend of hers, Miss Clinch, about the
Americans and the English, especially dwelling on the defects of the
latter,--among which we reckoned a wretched meanness in money
transactions, a lack of any embroidery of honor and liberality in their
dealings, so that they require close watching, or they will be sure to
take you at advantage. I hear this character of them from Americans on
all hands, and my own experience confirms it as far as it goes, not
merely among tradespeople, but among persons who call themselves
gentlefolks. The cause, no doubt, or one cause, lies in the fewer
chances of getting money here, the closer and sharper regulation of all
the modes of life; nothing being left to liberal and gentlemanly
feelings, except fees to servants. They are not gamblers in England, as
we to some extent are; and getting their money painfully, or living
within an accurately known income, they are disinclined to give up so
much as a sixpence that they can possibly get. But the result is, they
are mean in petty things.

By and by Mr. Oakford came in, well soaked with the heaviest shower that
I ever knew in England, which had been rattling on the roof of the little
side room where we sat, and had caught him on the outside of the omnibus.
At a little before eight o'clock I came home with U---- in a cab,--the
gaslight glittering on the wet streets through which we drove, though the
sky was clear overhead.

September 30th.--Yesterday, a little before twelve, we took a cab, and
went to the two Houses of Parliament,--the most immense building,
methinks, that ever was built; and not yet finished, though it has now
been occupied for years. Its exterior lies hugely along the ground, and
its great unfinished tower is still climbing towards the sky; but the
result (unless it be the riverfront, which I have not yet seen) seems not
very impressive. The interior is much more successful. Nothing can be
more magnificent and gravely gorgeous than the Chamber of Peers,--a large
oblong hall, panelled with oak, elaborately carved, to the height of
perhaps twenty feet. Then the balustrade of the gallery runs around the
hall, and above the gallery are six arched windows on each side, richly
painted with historic subjects. The roof is ornamented and gilded, and
everywhere throughout there is embellishment of color and carving on the
broadest scale, and, at the same time, most minute and elaborate; statues
of full size in niches aloft; small heads of kings, no bigger than a
doll; and the oak is carved in all parts of the panelling as faithfully
as they used to do it in Henry VII's time,--as faithfully and with as
good workmanship, but with nothing like the variety and invention which I
saw in the dining-room of Smithell's Hall. There the artist wrought with
his heart and head; but much of this work, I suppose, was done by
machinery. Be that as it may, it is a most noble and splendid apartment,
and, though so fine, there is not a touch of finery; it glistens and
glows with even a sombre magnificence, owing to the rich, deep lines, and
the dim light, bedimmed with rich colors by coming through the painted
windows. In arched recesses, that serve as frames, at each end of the
hall, there are three pictures by modern artists from English history;
and though it was not possible to see them well as pictures, they adorned
and enriched the walls marvellously as architectural embellishments. The
Peers' seats are four rows of long sofas on each side, covered with red
morocco; comfortable seats enough, but not adapted to any other than a
decorously exact position. The woolsack is between these two divisions
of sofas, in the middle passage of the floor,--a great square seat,
covered with scarlet, and with a scarlet cushion set up perpendicularly
for the Chancellor to lean against. In front of the woolsack there is
another still larger ottoman, on which he might be at full length,--for
what purpose intended, I know not. I should take the woolsack to be not
a very comfortable seat, though I suppose it was originally designed to
be the most comfortable one that could be contrived, in view of the
Chancellor's much sitting.

The throne is the first object you see on entering the hall, being close
to the door; a chair of antique form, with a high, peaked back, and a
square canopy above, the whole richly carved and quite covered with
burnished gilding, besides being adorned with rows of rock crystals,--
which seemed to me of rather questionable taste.

It is less elevated above the floor than one imagines it ought to be.
While we were looking at it, I saw two Americans,--Western men, I should
judge,--one of them with a true American slouch, talking to the policeman
in attendance, and describing our Senate Chamber in contrast with the
House of Lords. The policeman smiled and ah-ed, and seemed to make as
courteous and liberal responses as he could. There was quite a mixed
company of spectators, and, I think, other Americans present besides the
above two and ourselves. The Lord Chamberlain's tickets appear to be
distributed with great impartiality. There were two or three women of
the lower middle class, with children or babies in arms, one of whom
lifted up its voice loudly in the House of Peers.

We next, after long contemplating this rich hall, proceeded through
passages and corridors to a great central room, very beautiful, which
seems to be used for purposes of refreshment, and for electric
telegraphs; though I should not suppose this could be its primitive and
ultimate design. Thence we went into the House of Commons, which is
larger than the Chamber of Peers, and much less richly ornamented, though
it would have appeared splendid had it come first in order. The
speaker's chair, if I remember rightly, is loftier and statelier than the
throne itself. Both in this hall and in that of the Lords, we were at
first surprised by the narrow limits within which the great ideas of the
Lords and Commons of England are physically realized; they would seem to
require a vaster space. When we hear of members rising on opposite sides
of the House, we think of them as but dimly discernible to their
opponents, and uplifting their voices, so as to be heard afar; whereas
they sit closely enough to feel each other's spheres, to note all
expression of face, and to give the debate the character of a
conversation. In this view a debate seems a much more earnest and real
thing than as we read it in a newspaper. Think of the debaters meeting
each other's eyes, their faces flushing, their looks interpreting their
words, their speech growing into eloquence, without losing the
genuineness of talk! Yet, in fact, the Chamber of Peers is ninety feet
long and half as broad, and high, and the Chamber of Commons is still
larger.

Thence we went to Westminster Hall, through a gallery with statues on
each side,--beautiful statues too, I thought; seven of them, of which
four were from the times of the civil wars,--Clarendon, Falkland,
Hampden, Selden, Somers, Mansfield, and Walpole. There is room for more
in this corridor, and there are niches for hundreds of their marble
brotherhood throughout the edifice; but I suppose future ages will have
to fill the greater part of them. Yet I cannot help imagining that this
rich and noble edifice has more to do with the past than with the future;
that it is the glory of a declining empire; and that the perfect bloom of
this great stone flower, growing out of the institutions of England,
forbodes that they have nearly lived out their life. It sums up all.
Its beauty and magnificence are made out of ideas that are gone by.

We entered Westminster Hall (which is incorporated into this new edifice,
and forms an integral part of it) through a lofty archway, whence a
double flight of broad steps descends to the stone pavement. After the
elaborate ornament of the rooms we had just been viewing, this venerable
hall looks extremely simple and bare,--a gray stone floor, gray and naked
stone walls, but a roof sufficiently elaborate, its vault being filled
with carved beams and rafters of chestnut, very much admired and wondered
at for the design and arrangement. I think it would have pleased me more
to have seen a clear vaulted roof, instead of this intricacy of wooden
points, by which so much skylight space is lost. They make (be it not
irreverently said) the vast and lofty apartment look like the ideal of an
immense barn. But it is a noble space, and all without the support of a
single pillar. It is about eighty of my paces from the foot of the steps
to the opposite end of the hall, and twenty-seven from side to side; very
high, too, though not quite proportionately to its other dimensions. I
love it for its simplicity and antique nakedness, and deem it worthy to
have been the haunt and home of History through the six centuries since
it was built. I wonder it does not occur to modern ingenuity to make a
scenic representation, in this very hall, of the ancient trials for life
or death, pomps, feasts, coronations, and every great historic incident
in the lives of kings, Parliaments, Protectors, and all illustrious men,
that have occurred here. The whole world cannot show another hall such
as this, so tapestried with recollections of whatever is most striking in
human annals.

Westminster Abbey being just across the street, we went thither from the
hall, and sought out the cloisters, which we had not yet visited. They
are in excellent preservation,--broad walks, canopied with intermingled
arches of gray stone, on which some sort of lichen, or other growth of
ages (which seems, however, to have little or nothing vegetable in it),
has grown. The pavement is entirely made of flat tombstones, inscribed
with half-effaced names of the dead people beneath; and the wall all
round bears the marble tablets which give a fuller record of their
virtues. I think it was from a meditation in these cloisters that
Addison wrote one of his most beautiful pieces in the Spectator. It is a
pity that this old fashion of a cloistered walk is not retained in our
modern edifices; it was so excellent for shelter and for shade during a
thoughtful hour,--this sombre corridor beneath an arched stone roof, with
the central space of richest grass, on which the sun might shine or the
shower fall, while the monk or student paced through the prolonged
archway of his meditations.

As we came out from the cloisters, and walked along by the churchyard of
the Abbey, a woman came begging behind us very earnestly. "A bit of
bread," she said, "and I will give you a thousand blessings! Hunger is
hard to bear. O kind gentleman and kind lady, a penny for a bit of
bread! It is a hard thing that gentlemen and ladies should see poor
people wanting bread, and make no difference whether they are good or
bad." And so she followed us almost all round the Abbey, assailing our
hearts in most plaintive terms, but with no success; for she did it far
too well to be anything but an impostor, and no doubt she had breakfasted
better, and was likely to have a better dinner, than ourselves. And yet
the natural man cries out against the philosophy that rejects beggars.
It is a thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do ourselves
a wrong by hardening our hearts against them. At last, without turning
round, I told her that I should give her nothing,--with some asperity,
doubtless, for the effort to refuse creates a bitterer repulse than is
necessary. She still followed us a little farther, but at last gave it
up, with a deep groan. I could not have performed this act of heroism on
my first arrival from America.

Whether the beggar-woman had invoked curses on us, and Heaven saw fit to
grant some slight response, I know not, but it now began to rain on my
wife's velvet; so I put her and J----- into a cab, and hastened to
ensconce myself in Westminster Abbey while the shower should last.
Poets' Corner has never seemed like a strange place to me; it has been
familiar from the very first; at all events, I cannot now recollect the
previous conception, of which the reality has taken the place. I seem
always to have known that somewhat dim corner, with the bare brown
stone-work of the old edifice aloft, and a window shedding down its light
on the marble busts and tablets, yellow with time, that cover the three
walls of the nook up to a height of about twenty feet. Prior's is the
largest and richest monument. It is observable that the bust and
monument of Congreve are in a distant part of the Abbey. His duchess
probably thought it a degradation to bring a gentleman among the beggarly
poets.

I walked round the aisles, and paced the nave, and came to the conclusion
that Westminster Abbey, both in itself and for the variety and interest
of its monuments, is a thousand times preferable to St. Paul's. There is
as much difference as between a snow-bank and a chimney-corner in their
relation to the human heart. By the by, the monuments and statues in the
Abbey seem all to be carefully dusted.

The shower being over, I walked down into the city, where I called on Mr.
B------ and left S-----'s watch to be examined and put in order. He told
me that he and his brother had lately been laying out and letting a piece
of land at Blackheath, that had been left them by their father, and that
the ground-rent would bring them in two thousand pounds per annum. With
such an independent income, I doubt whether any American would consent to
be anything but a gentleman,--certainly not an operative watchmaker. How
sensible these Englishmen are in some things!

Thence I went at a venture, and lost myself, of course. At one part of
my walk I came upon St. Luke's Hospital, whence I returned to St. Paul's,
and thence along Fleet Street and the Strand. Contiguous to the latter
is Holywell Street,--a narrow lane, filled up with little bookshops and
bookstalls, at some of which I saw sermons and other works of divinity,
old editions of classics, and all such serious matters, while at stalls
and windows close beside them (and, possibly, at the same stalls) there
were books with title-pages displayed, indicating them to be of the most
indecent kind.

October 2d.--Yesterday forenoon I went with J----- into the city to 67
Grace Church Street, to get a bank post-note cashed by Mr. Oakford, and
afterwards to the offices of two lines of steamers, in Moorgate Street
and Leadenhall Street. The city was very much thronged. It is a marvel
what sets so many people a going at all hours of the day. Then it is to
be considered that these are but a small portion of those who are doing
the business of the city; much the larger part being occupied in offices
at desks, in discussions of plans of enterprise, out of sight of the
public, while these earnest hurriers are merely the froth in the pot.

After seeing the steam-officials, we went to London Bridge, which always
swarms with more passengers than any of the streets. Descending the
steps that lead to the level of the Thames, we took passage in a boat
bound up the river to Chelsea, of which there is one starting every ten
minutes, the voyage being of forty minutes' duration. It began to
sprinkle a little just as we started; but after a slight showeriness,
lasting till we had passed Westminster Bridge, the day grew rather
pleasant.