← catalogue

English Traits

by unknown · English · Gutenberg #39862 · 396,995 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of English Traits
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: English Traits

Creator: Ralph Waldo Emerson


        
Release date: May 30, 2012 [eBook #39862]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39862

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH TRAITS ***




Produced by Al Haines.





                            ENGLISH TRAITS.



                                   BY


                          RALPH WALDO EMERSON.




                        NEW AND REVISED EDITION.



                                BOSTON:
                      JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
            Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.
                                 1876.




                       COPYRIGHT, 1856 AND 1876,
                        BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON.



          UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & Co., CAMBRIDGE.



                                  ----




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER I.--FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.
    CHAPTER II.--VOYAGE TO ENGLAND.
    CHAPTER III.--LAND.
    CHAPTER IV.--RACE.
    CHAPTER V.--ABILITY.
    CHAPTER VI.--MANNERS.
    CHAPTER VII.--TRUTH.
    CHAPTER VIII.--CHARACTER.
    CHAPTER IX.--COCKAYNE.
    CHAPTER X.--WEALTH.
    CHAPTER XI.--ARISTOCRACY.
    CHAPTER XII.--UNIVERSITIES.
    CHAPTER XIII.--RELIGION.
    CHAPTER XIV.--LITERATURE.
    CHAPTER XV.--THE "TIMES."
    CHAPTER XVI.--STONEHENGE.
    CHAPTER XVII.--PERSONAL.
    CHAPTER XVIII.--RESULT.

                                  ----




                            ENGLISH TRAITS.




CHAPTER I.--FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.


I have been twice in England.  In 1833, on my return from a short tour
in Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed from Boulogne, and landed in
London at the Tower stairs.  It was a dark Sunday morning; there were
few people in the streets; and I remember the pleasure of that first
walk on English ground, with my companion, an American artist, from the
Tower up through Cheapside and the Strand, to a house in Russell Square,
whither we had been recommended to good chambers.  For the first time
for many months we were forced to check the saucy habit of travellers'
criticism, as we could no longer speak aloud in the streets without
being understood.  The shop-signs spoke our language; our country names
were on the door-plates; and the public and private buildings wore a
more native and wonted front.

Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted to the men of
Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh Review,--to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam,
and to Scott, Playfair, and De Quincey; and my narrow and desultory
reading had inspired the wish to see the faces of three or four
writers,--Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, and the latest and
strongest contributor to the critical journals, Carlyle; and I suppose
if I had sifted the reasons that led me to Europe, when I was ill and
was advised to travel, it was mainly the attraction of these persons.
If Goethe had been still living, I might have wandered into Germany
also. Besides those I have named (for Scott was dead), there was not in
Britain the man living whom I cared to behold, unless it were the Duke
of Wellington, whom I afterwards saw at Westminster Abbey, at the
funeral of Wilberforce.  The young scholar fancies it happiness enough
to live with people who can give an inside to the world; without
reflecting that they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and
cannot apply themselves to yours.  The conditions of literary success
are almost destructive of the best social power, as they do not leave
that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best
terms.  It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in
the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed
sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes.  I have, however,
found writers superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief,
that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments, and
give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and
a larger horizon.

On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833, I find nothing to
publish in my memoranda of visits to places.  But I have copied the few
notes I made of visits to persons, as they respect parties quite too
good and too transparent to the whole world to make it needful to affect
any prudery of suppression about a few hints of those bright
personalities.

At Florence, chief among artists, I found Horatio Greenough, the
American sculptor.  His face was so handsome, and his person so well
formed, that he might be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of his
Medora, and the figure of a colossal Achilles in clay, were
idealizations of his own.  Greenough was a superior man, ardent and
eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation and magnanimity.  He
believed that the Greeks had wrought in schools or fraternities,--the
genius of the master imparting his design to his friends, and inflaming
them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new hand, with equal
heat, continued the work; and so by relays, until it was finished in
every part with equal fire. This was necessary in so refractory a
material as stone; and he thought art would never prosper until we left
our shy jealous ways, and worked in society as they.  All his thoughts
breathed the same generosity.  He was an accurate and a deep man.  He
was a votary of the Greeks, and impatient of Gothic art.  His paper on
Architecture, published in 1843, announced in advance the leading
thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on the _morality_ in architecture,
notwithstanding the antagonism in their views of the history of art.  I
have a private letter from him,--later, but respecting the same
period,--in which he roughly sketches his own theory.  "Here is my
theory of structure: A scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to
functions and to site; an emphasis of features proportioned to their
_gradated_ importance in function; color and ornament to be decided and
arranged and varied by strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason
for each decision; the entire and immediate banishment of all makeshift
and make-believe."

Greenough brought me, through a common friend, an invitation from Mr.
Landor, who lived at San Domenica di Fiesole.  On the 15th May I dined
with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of
pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful
landscape.  I had inferred from his books, or magnified from some
anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath,--an untamable petulance.  I
do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on
this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and he was the most
patient and gentle of hosts.  He praised the beautiful cyclamen which
grows all about Florence; he admired Washington; talked of Wordsworth,
Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher.  To be sure, he is decided in
his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well content to impress, if
possible, his English whim upon the immutable past.  No great man ever
had a great son, if Philip and Alexander be not an exception; and Philip
he calls the greater man.  In art, he loves the Greeks, and in
sculpture, them only.  He prefers the Venus to everything else, and,
after that, the head of Alexander, in the gallery here.  He prefers John
of Bologna to Michel 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 with reciting
half a dozen hexameter lines of Julius Caesar's!--from Donatus, he said.
He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary, and undervalued
Burke, and undervalued Socrates; designated as three of the greatest of
men, Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon; much as our pomologists, in
their lists, select the three or the six best pears "for a small
orchard"; and did not even omit to remark the similar termination of
their names.  "A great man," he said, "should make great sacrifices, and
kill his hundred oxen, without knowing whether they would be consumed by
gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat them."  I had visited
Professor Amici, who had shown me his microscopes, magnifying (it was
said) two thousand diameters; and I spoke of the uses to which they were
applied. Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, said, "the
sublime was in a grain of dust."  I suppose I teased him about recent
writers, but he professed never to have heard of Herschel, _not even by
name_.  One room was 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 Pomenichino."  I was
more curious to see his library, but Mr. H----, one of the guests, told
me that Mr. Landor gives away his books, and has never more than a dozen
at a time in his house.

Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which the English
delight to indulge, as if to signalize their commanding freedom.  He has
a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible, meant for a
soldier, by what chance converted to letters, in which there is not a
style nor a tint not known to him, yet with an English appetite for
action and heroes.  The thing done avails, and not what is said about
it.  An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the
censures. Landor is strangely undervalued in England; usually ignored;
and sometimes savagely attacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be
right or wrong, and is quickly forgotten; but year after year the
scholar must still go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant
sentences,--for wisdom, wit, and indignation that are unforgetable.


From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, and wrote a note to
Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my respects to him.  It was near
noon.  Mr. Coleridge sent a verbal message, that he was in bed, but if I
would call after one o'clock, he would see me.  I returned at one, and
he appeared, a short, thick old man, with bright blue eyes and fine
clear complexion, leaning on his cane.  He took snuff freely, which
presently soiled his cravat and neat black suit.  He asked whether I
knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and doings when he knew him
in Rome; what a master of the Titianesque he was, etc., etc.  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, etc., etc.  He was very sorry that Dr.
Channing,--a man to whom he looked up,--no, to say that he looked _up_
to him would be to speak falsely; but a man whom he looked _at_ with so
much interest,--should embrace such views.  When he saw Dr. Channing, he
had hinted to him that he was afraid he loved Christianity for what was
lovely and excellent,--he loved the good in it, and not the true; and I
tell you, sir, that I have known ten persons who loved the good, for one
person who loved the true; but it is a far greater virtue to love the
true for itself alone, than to love the good for itself alone.  He
(Coleridge) knew all about Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had
once been a Unitarian, and knew what quackery it was.  He had been
called "the rising star of Unitarianism."'  He went on defining, or
rather refining: 'The Trinitarian doctrine was realism; the idea of God
was not essential, but super-essential'; talked of _trinism_ and
_tetrakism_, and much more, of which I only caught this: 'that the will
was that by which a person is a person; because, if one should push me
in the street, and so I should force the man next me into the kennel, I
should at once exclaim, "I did not do it, sir," meaning it was not my
will.'  And this also: 'that if you should insist on your faith here in
England, and I on mine, mine would be the hotter side of the fagot.'

I took advantage of a pause to say, that he had many readers of all
religious opinions in America, and I proceeded to inquire if the
"extract" from the Independent's pamphlet, in the third volume of the
Friend, were a veritable quotation.  He replied that it was really taken
from a pamphlet in his possession, entitled "A Protest of one of the
Independents," or something to that effect. I told him how excellent I
thought it, and how much I wished to see the entire work.  "Yes," he
said, "the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the knowledge that God
was a god of order.  Yet the passage would no doubt strike you more in
the quotation than in the original, for I have filtered it."

When I rose to go, he said, "I do not know whether you care about
poetry, but I will repeat some verses I lately made on my baptismal
anniversary"; and he recited with strong emphasis, standing, ten or
twelve lines, beginning,--

    Born unto God in Christ--


He inquired where I had been travelling; and on learning that I had been
in Malta and Sicily, he compared one island with the other, 'repeating
what he had said to the Bishop of London when he returned from that
country, that Sicily was an excellent school of political economy; for,
in any town there, it only needed to ask what the government enacted,
and reverse _that_ to know what ought to be done; it was the most
felicitously opposite legislation to anything good and wise.  There were
only three things which the government had brought into that garden of
delights, namely, itch, pox, and famine; whereas, in Malta, the force of
law and mind was seen, in making that barren rock of semi-Saracen
inhabitants the seat of population and plenty.'  Going out, he showed me
in the next apartment a picture of Allston's, and told me 'that
Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to see him, and, glancing towards
this, said, "Well, you have got a picture!" thinking it the work of an
old master; afterwards, Montague, still talking with his back to the
canvas, put up his hand and touched it, and exclaimed, "By Heaven! this
picture is not ten years old":--so delicate and 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 Cragenputtock.  It was a farm in
Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant.  No public
coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn.  I
found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar
nourished his mighty heart.  Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author
who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the
world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own
terms what is best in London.  He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like
brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers of
conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with
evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor,
which floated everything he looked upon.  His talk playfully exalting
the familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance
with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was
predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely
the man, "not a person to speak to within sixteen miles except the
minister of Dunscore"; so that books inevitably made his topics.

He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse.
"Blackwood's" was the "sand 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 had spent much time and
contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but
pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board
down, and had foiled him.  For all that, he still thought man the most
plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death, "_Qualis
artifex pereo!_" better than most history.  He worships a man that will
manifest any truth to him.  At one time he had inquired and read a good
deal about America.  Landor's principle was mere rebellion, and _that_
he feared was the American principle.  The best thing he knew of that
country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor.  He had read
in Stewart's book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the
Boots, he had been shown across the street and had found Mungo in his
own house dining on roast turkey.

We talked of books.  Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates;
and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero.  Gibbon he
called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new.  His own
reading had been multifarious.  Tristram Shandy was one of his first
books after Robinson Crusoe, and Robertson's America an early favorite.
Rousseau's Confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce;
and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a
man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted.

He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment;
recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers
for puffing.  Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books
are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.

He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish
abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform.
'Government should direct poor men what to do.  Poor Irish folk come
wandering over these moors.  My dame makes it a rule to give to every
son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house.  But
here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody
to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it.  They burned the
stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.'

We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without
his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country.  There we sat down, and
talked of the immortality of the soul.  It was not Carlyle's fault that
we talked on that topic, for he had the natural disinclination of every
nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place
himself where no step can be taken.  But he was honest and true, and
cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how
every event affects all the future.  'Christ died on the tree: that
built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together.  Time has
only a relative existence.'

He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar's
appreciation.  London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only
from the mass of human beings.  He liked the huge machine.  Each keeps
its own round.  The baker's boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed
hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on
the subject.  But it turned out good men.  He named certain individuals,
especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom
London had well served.


On the 23th August, I went to Rydal Mount, to pay my respects to Mr.
Wordsworth.  His daughters called in their father, a plain, elderly,
white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles.
He sat down, and talked with great simplicity.  He had just returned
from a journey.  His health was good, but he had broken a tooth by a
fall, when walking with two lawyers, and had said, that he was glad it
did not happen forty years ago; whereupon they had praised his
philosophy.

He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his
favorite topic,--that society is being enlightened by a superficial
tuition, out of all proportion to its being restrained by moral culture.
Schools do no good.  Tuition is not education.  He thinks more of the
education of circumstances than of tuition.  'T is not a question
whether there are offences of which the law takes cognizance, but
whether there are offences of which the law does not take cognizance.
Sin is what he fears, and how society is to escape without gravest
mischiefs from this source--?  He has even said, what seemed a paradox,
that they needed a civil war in America, to teach the necessity of
knitting the social ties stronger.  'There may be,' he said, 'in America
some vulgarity in manner, but that 's not important.  That comes of the
pioneer state of things.  But I fear they are too much given to the
making of money; and secondly, to politics; that they make political
distinction the end, and not the means.  And I fear they lack a class of
men of leisure,--in short, of gentlemen,--to give a tone of honor to the
community.  I am told that things are boasted of in the second class of
society there, which, in England,--God knows, are done in England every
day,--but would never be spoken of.  In America I wish to know not how
many churches or schools, but what newspapers?  My friend, Colonel
Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was a year in America, assures me
that the newspapers are atrocious, and accuse members of Congress of
stealing spoons!'  He was against taking off the tax on newspapers in
England, which the reformers represent as a tax upon knowledge, for this
reason, that they would be inundated with base prints.  He said, he
talked on political aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good
Americans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, etc., etc., and
never to call into action the physical strength of the people, as had
just now been done in England in the Reform Bill,--a thing prophesied by
Delolme.  He alluded once or twice to his conversation with Dr.
Channing, who had recently visited him (laying his hand on a particular
chair in which the Doctor had sat).

The conversation turned on books.  Lucretius he esteems a far higher
poet than Virgil: not in his system, which is nothing, but in his power
of illustration.  Faith is necessary to explain anything, and to
reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil.  Of Cousin (whose
lectures we had all been reading in Boston) he knew only the name.

I inquired if he had read Carlyle's critical articles and translations.
He said he thought him sometimes insane. He proceeded to abuse Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister heartily. It was full of all manner of fornication.  It
was like the crossing of flies in the air.  He had never gone further
than the first part; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across
the room.  I deprecated this wrath, and said what I could for the better
parts of the book; and he courteously promised to look at it again.
Carlyle, he said, wrote most obscurely.  He was clever and deep, but he
defied the sympathies of everybody. Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more
clearly, though he had always wished Coleridge would write more to be
understood.  He led me out into his garden, and showed me the
gravel-walk in which thousands of his lines were composed.  His eyes are
much inflamed.  This is no loss, except for reading, because he never
writes prose, and of poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his
head before writing them.  He had just returned from a visit to Staffa,
and within three days had made three sonnets on Fingal's Cave, and was
composing a fourth, when he was called in to see me.  He said, "If you
are interested in my verses, perhaps you will like to hear these lines."
I gladly assented; and he recollected himself for a few moments, and
then stood forth and repeated, one after the other, the three entire
sonnets with great animation.  I fancied the second and third more
beautiful than his poems are wont to be.  The third is addressed to the
flowers, which, he said, especially the ox-eye daisy, are very abundant
on the top of the rock. The second alludes to the name of the cave,
which is "Cave of Music"; the first to the circumstance of its being
visited by the promiscuous company of the steamboat.

This recitation was so unlooked for and surprising,--he, the old
Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a
school-boy declaiming,--that I at first was near to laugh; but
recollecting myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and he was
chanting poems to me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, and
gladly gave myself up to hear.  I told him how much the few printed
extracts had quickened the desire to possess his unpublished poems.  He
replied, he never was in haste to publish; partly, because he corrected
a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously received after
printing; but what he had written would be printed, whether he lived or
died.  I said, "Tintern Abbey" appeared to be the favorite poem with the
public, but more contemplative readers preferred the first books of the
"Excursion," and the Sonnets.  He said, "Yes, they are better."  He
preferred such of his poems as touched the affections, to any others;
for whatever is didactic--what theories of society, and so on--might
perish quickly; but whatever combined a truth with an affection was
[Greek: _chtema es aei_], good to-day and good forever. He cited the
sonnet "On the feelings of a high-minded Spaniard," which he preferred
to any other (I so understood him), and the "Two Voices"; and quoted,
with evident pleasure, the verses addressed "To the Skylark." In this
connection, he said of the Newtonian theory, that it might yet be
superseded and forgotten; and Dalton's atomic theory.

When I prepared to depart, he said he wished to show me what a common
person in England could do, and he led me into the enclosure of his
clerk, a young man, to whom he had given this slip of ground, which was
laid out, or its natural capabilities shown, with much taste. He then
said he would show me a better way towards the inn; and he walked a good
part of a mile, talking, and ever and anon stopping short to impress the
word or the verse, and finally parted from me with great kindness, and
returned across the fields.

Wordsworth honored himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was
very willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard limits of his
thought.  To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of
a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation
by general tameness and conformity.  Off his own beat, his opinions were
of no value.  It is not very rare to find persons loving sympathy and
ease, who expiate their departure from the common in one direction, by
their conformity in every other.




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 separately 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 sequel, amply redeemed their word.
The remuneration was equivalent 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 invitation 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 northwester, 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 2,850 miles.  This a
steamer keeps, and saves 150 miles.  A sailing ship can never go in a
shorter line than 3,000, 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, 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, 1,500 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 du 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 1,467
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, 9h. 45', on my watch by this light.  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 eggshells 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-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 't is 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 discomfort 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
little 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 climbing 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 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 sea-faring 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, English
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 Ardmore.  There lay
the green shore of Ireland, like some coast of plenty.  We could see
towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the curse of eight hundred years
we could not discern.




CHAPTER III.--LAND.


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.

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 utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion,
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
continuation 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;
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,[1] 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 of remarkable people, the servants
and equipages,--all these catching the eye, and never allowing it to
pause, hide all boundaries, by the impression of magnificence and
endless wealth.

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

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 England 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 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 manufacturing towns,
the fine soot or blacks darken the day, give white sheep the color of
black sheep, discolor the human saliva, contaminate the air, poison many
plants, and corrode the monuments and buildings.

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and sometimes
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 pretended, 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 position.  Sir John
Herschel said, "London was the centre of the terrene globs."  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
deg., 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 Philadelphia 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 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 lie, 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 outlet 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, sea-shore; mines in Cornwall; caves in
Matlock and Derbyshire; delicious 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.  Fontenelle thought,
that nature had sometimes a little 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 competition 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 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, sea-faring, 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.--RACE.


An ingenious anatomist has written a book[2] 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 divergence 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 the kinds of men
that can be on the planet, makes eleven.

  [2] The Races, a Fragment.  By Robert Knox.  London: 1830.

The British Empire is reckoned to contain (in 1848) 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
predominated. Perhaps forty of these millions are of British stock.  Add
the United States of America, which reckon (in the same year), 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 millions 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.  What 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 race, it is
not the broad shoulders, or litheness, 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
needfully 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, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac Newton,
William 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 race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions 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 Catholics, and all
Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the
representative principle.  Race is a controlling influence in the Jew,
who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same
character and employments.  Race in the negro is of appalling
importance.  The French in Canada, cut off 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 Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance
between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our _Hoosiers_,
_Suckers_, and _Badgers_ of the American woods.

But whilst race works immortally to keep its own, it is resisted by
other forces.  Civilization is a re-agent, 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 Englishman will pick out a
dissenter by his manners.  Trades and professions carve their own lines
on face and form.  Certain circumstances of English life are not less
effective: 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 opportunities 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.  'T is 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 conditions,
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 Itonian, 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 inoculation.  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.  Everything
English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements.  The language
is mixed; the names of men are of different nations,--three languages,
three or four nations;--the currents of thought are counter:
contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and dead
conservatism; world-wide 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;--nothing 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, Jutes, 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 nationalities,
that there needs sea-room and land-room to unfold the varieties of
talent and character.  Perhaps the ocean serves as a galvanic 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.

Again, as if to intensate the influences that are not of race, what we
think of when we talk of English 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 Exhibition 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 't is 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 Englishman 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 refuse 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 complexion fair
and plump, robust men, with faces cut like a die, and a strong island
speech and accent; a Norman type, with the complacency that belongs to
that constitution.  Others, who might be Americans, for anything that
appeared in their complexion or form: and their speech was much less
marked, and their thought much less bound.  We will call them Saxons.
Then the Roman has implanted 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 husbandman 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 Romans found hard
to conquer in two hundred and ten years,--say, impossible 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 concentrating 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
engage 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 _Heimskringla_,[3] or Sagas of the Kings of Norway, collected by
Snorro Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey of English history.  Its
portraits, like Homer's, are strongly individualized.  The Sagas
describe 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
patronymically 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 association
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 farms in rotation.
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 retainers, could be
kept alive, when he leaves his own farm to collect his dues through the
kingdom.

  [3] Heimskringla.  Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq.  London: 1844.

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, crow-bars, peat-knives, and hay-forks
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
land-slide, like the agricultural 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 tar-wood, 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 conversation
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 holding 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 the
foundations of the new civility 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 English was brought 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 wisdom 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.

It took many generations to trim, and comb, and perfume 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 blind see;
the children of felons have a healthy conscience.  Many a mean,
dastardly boy is, at the age of puberty, transformed into 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 churching and civilizing have
not been able to sweeten.  Alfiori 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 stand-up 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 fists well; we are all handy
with our fists."  The public 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, banished
from the armies of Western Europe, remains here by the sanction 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 of Cornwall, as security for money
which he borrowed.  The torture of criminals, and the rack for extorting
evidence, were slowly disused. 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 (18:18),
the House of Commons was listening to details of flogging and torture
practised 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 like fishes,
their playthings were boats.  In the case of the ship-money, 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 land-locked countries driving the natives 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 English, at the present day, have great vigor of body and endurance.
Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids.
They are bigger men than the Americans.  I suppose 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 shape, but
stunted and thickset persons.  The French say, that the Englishwomen
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 Salisbury Cathedrals, which are
seven hundred years old, are of the same 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 English 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 crab, but a race with a future.

On the English 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 cannibal, 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 English 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 delight 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 school-boy that goes to bed, says, "Kiss me, Hardy,"
and turns to sleep.  Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of a nature the
most affectionate and 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.
Clarendon 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 Edward Parry said of Sir John Franklin, 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
praedonum_, the gentlest thief.  But they know where their war-dogs lie.
Cromwell, Blake, Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson, and Wellington are not to
be trifled with, and the brutal strength which lies at the bottom of
society, the animal ferocity of the quays and cock-pits, 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
peach-bloom 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, wheat-bread, 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 Fortescue 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."

They have more constitutional energy than any other people.  They think,
with Henri Quatre, that manly exercises are the foundation of that
elevation of mind which 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 heads 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 harpoon, by lasso, with clog, with horse, with elephant, or
with dromedary, 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 Englishman
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 Buffon 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 the vivacity of these riders, and
you obtain the precise quality which makes the men and women of polite
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 children 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 other 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 Englishmen have followed his
example, according to their ability, 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.'




CHAPTER V.--ABILITY.


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 represent 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 compliment 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 conquered, 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 a
world which is made of sense and economy, and the banker, with his seven
per cent, drives the earl out of his castle. A nobility of soldiers
cannot keep down a commonalty of shrewd scientific persons.  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 Brunel 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 wealth-makers,--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
temperament 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 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 without trick or dodging, till
one or both come to pieces.  King Ethelwald spoke the language of his
race, when he planted himself at Wimborne, and said, 'he would do one of
two things, or there live, 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 suffered in the island.  In
parliament, 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."[4]  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, lie 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 sequel of simple discourses, the art, the
cause, the rule, the bounds, and the model of it."[5]

  [4] Antony Wood.

  [5] Man's Soule, p. 29.

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 sallies 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.  Their
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 opposition.  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 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 asserted.
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 Englishmen
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 spinner?

This singular fairness and its results strike the French with surprise.
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 England 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 common-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 departments 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 waterfall,
wind-mills, tide-mills; the sea and the wind to bear their
freight-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 themselves to
agriculture, to draining, to resisting encroachments of sea, wind,
travelling sands, cold and wet subsoil; to fishery, to manufacture of
indispensable staples,--salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery,
and brick,--to bees and silk-worms; 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
pineapples, 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 Englishman added the shirt.  The
Englishman wears a sensible coat buttoned 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
manufactures.  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 driving things
too finely (which is charged on the Germans), constitute that despatch
of business, which makes the mercantile power of England.

In war, the Englishman 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; believing 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 ranks, 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 combatants. 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 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 minding 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, American 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
calculation, it must be owned they are capable of larger views; but the
indulgence is expensive to them, costs 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 unvarnished 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 clinch every nail they drive. They have 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 mistakes, 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 business 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 the 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 thirty years have elapsed, and
thenceforward a record to all ages of the highest import.  The Admiralty
sent out the Arctic expeditions 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 certificate 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 qualities;
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 habitable 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 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
literature, 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 climate 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 subsists 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 pineapples 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
order, and breeds in which everything was omitted but what is
economical.  The cow is sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his surloin.
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 millions 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 population.  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 foundries.[6]

  [6] See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. 66, New York, 1853.

The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social system.  Their
law is a network of fictions.  Their property, a scrip or certificate of
right to interest on money that no man ever saw.  Their social classes
are made by statute.  Their ratios of power and representation are
historical and legal.  The last reform-bill took away political power
from a mound, a ruin, and a stone-wall, whilst Birmingham 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.[7]  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, heresy, 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 a 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 manners;--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.

  [7] 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.

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 population dates from
Watt's steam-engine.  A landlord, who owns a province, says, "the
tenantry are unprofitable; let me have sheep."  He unroofs the houses,
and ships the population to America.  The nation 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, like 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 Oehlenschlager 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
observatories, and practical navigation.  The boys knew all that Hutton
knew of 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
literature, 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 England 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 greatness; 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 thousand deep.




CHAPTER VI.--MANNERS.


I find the Englishman 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 gentleman, 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 word is not beautiful, but on the quality they signify by
it the nation is unanimous.  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 Sidney Smith
had made it a proverb, that little Lord John Russell, 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 applied to all work, and carried to such perfection,
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 require 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 faint-hearted
people: don't creep about diffidently; make up your mind; take your own
course, and you shall find respect and furtherance.

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 Englishman speaks with all his
body.  His elocution is stomachic,--as the American's is labial.  The
Englishman is very petulant and precise 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 respiration, 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 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, gesticulates,
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 polished 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 generations, 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 newspaper.  He is
never betrayed into any curiosity or unbecoming emotion.  They have all
been trained in one severe school of manners, 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 acquaintance, 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 disparaging
phrase, which I had been accustomed to spin, about poor, thin, unable
mortals; so much had the fine physique and the personal vigor of this
robust race worked on my imagination.

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 continence 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 whenever 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.  'T is 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 refine them.
Nothing can be more delicate 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 battles 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-stick-in-waiting survives.  They repeated the ceremonies of the
eleventh century in the coronation of the present Queen.  A hereditary
tenure is natural to them.  Offices, farms, trades, and traditions
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."  Antiquity 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 more than five hundred years been possessed by men of 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 prehensility of tail.

A sea-shell 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.  "'T is 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 externality of their voice, which
seems to say, _Leave all hope behind_.  In this Gibraltar of propriety,
mediocrity gets intrenched, and consolidated, and founded in adamant.
An Englishman of fashion is like one of those souvenirs, bound in gold
vellum, enriched with delicate engravings, on thick hot-pressed paper,
fit for the hands of ladies and princes, but with nothing in it worth
reading or remembering.

A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. When Thalberg, 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 nonsense,
sentimentalism, and highflown expression; they use a studied plainness.
Even Brummell their fop was marked by the severest simplicity in dress.
They value themselves on the absence of everything 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."[8]  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 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;
political, literary, and personal news; railroads, horses, diamonds,
agriculture, horticulture, pisciculture, and wine.

  [8] "Relation of England."  Printed by the Caraden Society.

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 condition, create
the picturesque in society, as broken country makes picturesque
landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes a prairie tameness: and
secondly, because the usage of a dress-dinner every day at dark has a
tendency to hive and produce to advantage everything good.  Much
attrition has worn every sentence into a bullet.  Also one meets now and
then with polished men, who know everything, have tried everything, can
do everything, and are quite superior to letters and science.  What
could they not, if only they would?




CHAPTER VII.--TRUTH.


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 testimony to it.  The faces
of clergy and laity in old sculptures and illuminated missals are
charged with earnest belief.  Add to this hereditary rectitude, the
punctuality and precise dealing which commerce creates, and you have the
English truth and credit. The government strictly 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 of 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 goes the flying word on the tablets,
and is indelible 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 public 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. 'T is 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 a writer at the Norman Conquest, 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," etc.; 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 gentleman, declared that truth made his distinction; 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 English officer.  The English, of all classes, value themselves on
this trait, as distinguishing them from the French, who, in the popular
belief, are more polite than true.  An Englishman understates, 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
patiently 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 equipage, 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 application her foreign readers
would give to the remark.  Wellington discovered 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 complimented his
compatriots, by saying, "they confided that wherever they met an
Englishman, they found a man who would speak the 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, 1843.  Many private friends called on him. His name was
immediately proposed as an honorary member to the Athenaeum.  M. Guizot
was blackballed. 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, makes no difference to him, as it 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 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 barrister
refuses the silk gown of Queen's Counsel, if his junior have it one day
earlier.  Lord Collingwood would not accept his medal for victory on
14th February, 1797, if he did not receive one for victory on 1st 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 time-servers, whom
English character does not love.[9]

  [9] 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.

They are very liable in their politics to extraordinary delusions, thus,
to believe what stands recorded in the gravest books, that the movement
of 10th April, 1848, was urged or assisted by foreigners: which, to be
sure, is paralleled by the democratic whimsey 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 best
information, that, when the war is actually raging most furiously, 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 L100 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 delightful
examples of this English 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 Malibrau.  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
Englishman.  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;
    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 _feuilletous_, 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 interfere 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 our 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; _ils
s'amusaient tristement, selon la coutume de leur pays_, said Froissart;
and, I suppose, never nation built their party walls so thick, or their
garden fences so high. Meat and wine produce no effect 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 public speaking 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 English souls
in a heaven by themselves?

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 bagmen 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, like 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 exercise, butcher's
meat, and sound sleep; and suspect any poetic insinuation or any hint
for the conduct of life 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 judgment, 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.  Hezekiah
Woodward wrote a book against the Lord's Prayer.  And one can believe
that Burton the Anatomist of Melancholy, having predicted 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, swimming, 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 foot-rule every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish
caaba, every Holy of holies; translate and send to Bantley the arcanum
bribed and bullied 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 melancholy 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 offensive 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, without examining the company he was
in; for which he was often reprimanded, 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 audibilities of a
public room, or to put upon the company the loud statements 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,
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 sunshine
settles; alternated with a common-sense and humanity which hold them
fast to every piece of cheerful duty; making this temperament 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 bequeathed his ferocity to his
conqueror.  They hide virtues under vices, or the semblance of them.  It
is the misshapen hairy Scandinavian 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, but 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 disturb.
"Great men," said Aristotle, "are always of a nature originally
melancholy."  'T is the habit of a mind which attaches to abstractions
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 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 metaphysical
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 refinement.
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.  Compare
the tone of the French and of the English press: the first querulous,
captious, sensitive, about English opinion; the English press is never
timorous about French opinion, but arrogant and contemptuous.

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
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 superficially
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 Newton, 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."[10]

 [10] Fuller.  Worthies of England.

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 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."[#]

[#] Heimskringla, Laing's translation, Vol. III. p. 37.

The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.
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 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 may read the
genius of the English society, namely, that private life 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 departments
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
charlatanism, 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 or 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 the 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
inclination 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 merchants prefer investments in three
per cents.




CHAPTER IX.--COCKAYNE.


The English 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. 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 compatriots 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 similitude 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,"[11] in 1500, says: "The
English are great lovers of themselves, 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 contrast, a
kind of blackboard 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 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
modestly 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.

 [11] Printed by the Camden Society.

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 little 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 opinion of himself
to imitate anybody.  He hides no defect of his form, features, dress,
connection, or birthplace, for he thinks every circumstance 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 little superfluity of
self-regard in the English brain is one of the secrets of their power
and history.  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 light of them, so will other men.  We
all find in these a convenient meter 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
Illinois, 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 becoming 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 London, 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 Englishman, 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, for any help he will offer.  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_ newspaper
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 unflinching 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."[12]

 [12] William Spence.

The English 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 conciliated 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 lines.  Individual traits are always triumphing over national
ones.  There is no fence in metaphysics discriminating Greek, or
English, or Spanish science.  AEsop and Montaigne, Cervantes 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.

George of 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.
301, 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 Vespucci, 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 dishonest 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.--WEALTH.


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 Englishman
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 sous and daughters, flocks and herds,
wine and oil.  In exact proportion is the reproach of poverty.  They do
not wish to be represented except by opulent men.  An Englishman 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 implied, 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 _Athenae Oxonienses_, and looking
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, 't was not so
among the lower orders.  Better take them away from those who might
deprave them.  And it was highly injurious to trade to stop binding to
manufacturers, 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.  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 that 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 character, 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, government
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 an other
European; or, his life as a workman is three lives.  He works fast.
Everything in England is at a quick pace.  They have reinforced their
own productivity, by the creation of that marvellous machinery which
differences this age from any other age.

'T is a curious chapter in modern history, the growth of the
machine-shop.  Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon explained the
precession of the equinoxes, the consequent necessity of the reform of
the calendar; measured the length of the year, invented gunpowder; 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 little 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, in his day
the model Englishman, very properly has, for a frontispiece, a drawing
of the spinning-jenny, which wove the web of his fortunes.  Hargreaves
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 combine 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 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 steam-pipe 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 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
L300,000,000 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,
locomotives, 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 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 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 benefit of ages of owners.  The present possessors are to
the full as absolute as any of their fathers, in choosing and procuring
what they like.  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 securest 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
tasted 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 paling 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 delight in a freak as the proof of their sovereign
freedom.  Sir Edward Boynton, at Spic Park, at Cadenham, on a precipice
of incomparable prospect, built a house like a long barn, which had not
a window on the prospect side.  Strawberry Hill of Horace Wa

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/39862