Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (551 page)

We walked about the village, which is old and ugly; small, irregular streets, contriving to be intricate, though there are few of them; mean houses, joining to each other. We saw, in the principal one, the parliament house in which Edward I. gave a Charter, or allowed rights of some kind to his Welsh subjects. The ancient part of its wall is entirely distinguishable from what has since been built upon it.

Thence we set out to walk along the embankment, although the sky looked very threatening. The wind, however, was so strong, and had such a full sweep at us, on the top of the bank, that we decided on taking a path that led from it across the moor. But we soon had cause to repent of this; for, which way soever we turned, we found ourselves cut off by a ditch or a little stream; so that here we were, fairly astray on Rhyddlan moor, the old battle-field of the Saxons and Britons, and across which, I suppose, the fiddlers and mountebanks had marched to the relief of the Earl of Chester. Anon, too, it began to shower; and it was only after various leaps and scramblings that we made our way to a large farm-house, and took shelter under a cart-shed. The back of the house to which we gained access was very dirty and ill-kept; some dirty children peeped at us as we approached, and nobody had the civility to ask us in; so we took advantage of the first cessation of the shower to resume our way. We were shortly overtaken by a very intelligent-looking and civil man, who seemed to have come from Rhyddlan, and said he was going to Rhyl. We followed his guidance over stiles and along hedge-row paths which we never could have threaded rightly by ourselves.

By and by our kind guide had to stop at an intermediate farm; but he gave us full directions how to proceed, and we went on till it began to shower again pretty briskly, and we took refuge in a little bit of old stone cottage, which, small as it was, had a greater antiquity than any mansion in America. The door was open, and as we approached, we saw several children gazing at us; and their mother, a pleasant-looking woman, who seemed rather astounded at the visit that was about to befall her, tried to draw a tattered curtain over a part of her interior, which she fancied even less fit to be seen than the rest. To say the truth, the house was not at all better than a pigsty; and while we sat there, a pig came familiarly to the door, thrust in his snout, and seemed surprised that he should be driven away, instead of being admitted as one of the family. The floor was of brick; there was no ceiling, but only the peaked gable overhead. The room was kitchen, parlor, and, I suppose, bedroom for the whole family; at all events, there was only the tattered curtain between us and the sleeping accommodations. The good woman either could not or would not speak a word of English, only laughing when S —
 
— - said, “Dim Sassenach?” but she was kind and hospitable, and found a chair for each of us. She had been making some bread, and the dough was on the dresser. Life with these people is reduced to its simplest elements. It is only a pity that they cannot or do not choose to keep themselves cleaner. Poverty, except in cities, need not be squalid. When the shower abated a little, we gave all the pennies we had to the children, and set forth again. By the by, there were several colored prints stuck up against the walls, and there was a clock ticking in a corner and some paper-hangings pinned upon the slanting roof.

It began to rain again before we arrived at Rhyl, and we were driven into a small tavern. After staying there awhile, we set forth between the drops; but the rain fell still heavier, so that we were pretty well damped before we got to our lodgings. After dinner, I took the rail for Chester and Rock Park, and S —
 
— - and the children and maid followed the next day.

September 22d. — I dined on Wednesday evening at Mr. John Heywood's, Norris Green. Mr. Mouckton Mimes and lady were of the company. Mr. Mimes is a very agreeable, kindly man, resembling Longfellow a good deal in personal appearance; and he promotes, by his genial manners, the same pleasant intercourse which is so easily established with Longfellow. He is said to be a very kind patron of literary men, and to do a great deal of good among young and neglected people of that class. He is considered one of the best conversationists at present in society: it may very well be so; his style of talking being very simple and natural, anything but obtrusive, so that you might enjoy its agreeableness without suspecting it. He introduced me to his wife (a daughter of Lord Crewe), with whom and himself I had a good deal of talk. Mr. Milnes told me that he owns the land in Yorkshire, whence some of the pilgrims of the Mayflower emigrated to Plymouth, and that Elder Brewster was the Postmaster of the village. . . . He also said that in the next voyage of the Mayflower, after she carried the Pilgrims, she was employed in transporting a cargo of slaves from Africa, — to the West Indies, I suppose. This is a queer fact, and would be nuts for the Southerners.

Mem. — An American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair, — from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country.

September 26th. — On Saturday evening my wife and I went to a soiree given by the Mayor and Mrs. Lloyd at the Town Hall to receive the Earl of Harrowby. It was quite brilliant, the public rooms being really magnificent, and adorned for the occasion with a large collection of pictures, belonging to Mr. Naylor. They were mostly, if not entirely, of modern artists, — of Turner, Wilkie, Landseer, and others of the best English painters. Turner's seemed too ethereal to have been done by mortal hands.

The British Scientific Association being now in session here, many distinguished strangers were present.

September 29th. — Mr. Monekton Milnes called on me at the Consulate day before yesterday. He is pleasant and sensible. Speaking of American politicians, I remarked that they were seldom anything but politicians, and had no literary or other culture beyond their own calling. He said the case was the same in England, and instanced Sir —
 
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— , who once called on him for information when an appeal had been made to him respecting two literary gentlemen. Sir —
 
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— had never heard the names of either of these gentlemen, and applied to Mr. Milnes as being somewhat conversant with the literary class, to know whether they were distinguished and what were their claims. The names of the two literary men were James Sheridan Knowles and Alfred Tennyson.

October 5th. — Yesterday I was present at a dejeuner on board the James Barnes, on occasion of her coming under the British flag, having been built for the Messrs. Barnes by Donald McKay of Boston. She is a splendid vessel, and magnificently fitted up, though not with consummate taste. It would be worth while that ornamental architects and upholsterers should study this branch of art, since the ship-builders seem willing to expend a good deal of money on it. In fact, I do not see that there is anywhere else so much encouragement to the exercise of ornamental art. I saw nothing to criticise in the solid and useful details of the ship; the ventilation, in particular, being free and abundant, so that the hundreds of passengers who will have their berths between decks, and at a still lower depth, will have good air and enough of it.

There were four or five hundred persons, principally Liverpool merchants and their wives, invited to the dejeuner; and the tables were spread between decks, the berths for passengers not being yet put in. There was not quite light enough to make the scene cheerful, it being an overcast day; and, indeed, there was an English plainness in the arrangement of the festal room, which might have been better exchanged for the flowery American taste, which I have just been criticising. With flowers, and the arrangement of flags, we should have made something very pretty of the space between decks; but there was nothing to hide the fact that in a few days hence there would be crowded berths and sea-sick steerage passengers where we were now feasting. The cheer was very good, — cold fowl and meats; cold pies of foreign manufacture very rich, and of mysterious composition; and champagne in plenty, with other wines for those who liked them.

I sat between two ladies, one of them Mrs. —
 
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— , a pleasant young woman, who, I believe, is of American provincial nativity, and whom I therefore regarded as half a countrywoman. We talked a good deal together, and I confided to her my annoyance at the prospect of being called up to answer a toast; but she did not pity me at all, though she felt, much alarm about her husband, Captain —
 
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— , who was in the same predicament. Seriously, it is the most awful part of my official duty, — this necessity of making dinner-speeches at the Mayor's, and other public or semi-public tables. However, my neighborhood to Mrs. —
 
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— was good for me, inasmuch as by laughing over the matter with her came to regard it in a light and ludicrous way; and so, when the time actually came, I stood up with a careless dare-devil feeling. The chairman toasted the president immediately after the Queen, and did me the honor to speak of myself in a most flattering manner, something like this: “Great by his position under the Republic, — greater still, I am bold to say, in the Republic of letters!” I made no reply at all to this; in truth, I forgot all about it when I began to speak, and merely thanked the company in behalf of the President, and my countrymen, and made a few remarks with no very decided point to them. However, they cheered and applauded, and I took advantage of the applause to sit down, and Mrs. —
 
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— informed me that I had succeeded admirably. It was no success at all, to be sure; neither was it a failure, for I had aimed at nothing, and I had exactly hit it. But after sitting down, I was conscious of an enjoyment in speaking to a public assembly, and felt as if I should like to rise again. It is something like being under fire, — a sort of excitement, not exactly pleasure, but more piquant than most pleasures. I have felt this before, in the same circumstances; but, while on my legs, my impulse is to get through with my remarks and sit down again as quickly as possible. The next speech, I think, was by Rev. Dr. —
 
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— , the celebrated Arctic gentleman, in reply to a toast complimentary to the clergy. He turned aside from the matter in hand, to express his kind feelings towards America, where he said he had been most hospitably received, especially at Cambridge University. He also made allusions to me, and I suppose it would have been no more than civil in me to have answered with a speech in acknowledgment, but I did not choose to make another venture, so merely thanked him across the corner of the table, for he sat near me. He is a venerable-looking, white-haired gentleman, tall and slender, with a pale, intelligent, kindly face.

Other speeches were made; but from beginning to end there was not one breath of eloquence, nor even one neat sentence; and I rather think that Englishmen would purposely avoid eloquence or neatness in after-dinner speeches. It seems to be no part of their object. Yet any Englishman almost, much more generally than Americans, will stand up and talk on in a plain way, uttering one rough, ragged, and shapeless sentence after another, and will have expressed himself sensibly, though in a very rude manner, before he sits down. And this is quite satisfactory to his audience, who, indeed, are rather prejudiced against the man who speaks too glibly.

The guests began to depart shortly after three o'clock. This morning I have seen two reports of my little speech, — one exceedingly incorrect; another pretty exact, but not much to my taste, for I seem to have left out everything that would have been fittest to say.

October 6th. — The people, for several days, have been in the utmost anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation about Sebastopol, — and all England, and Europe to boot, have been fooled by the belief that it had fallen. This, however, now turns out to be incorrect; and the public visage is somewhat grim, in consequence. I am glad of it. In spite of his actual sympathies, it is impossible for a true American to be otherwise than glad. Success makes an Englishman intolerable; and, already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous conclusion of the war, The Times had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never love England till she sues to us for help, and, in the mean time, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all parties. An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper conception of himself. It is rather touching to an observer to see how much the universal heart is in this matter, — to see the merchants gathering round the telegraphic messages, posted on the pillars of the Exchange news-room, the people in the street who cannot afford to buy a paper clustering round the windows of the news-offices, where a copy is pinned up, — the groups of corporals and sergeants at the recruiting rendezvous, with a newspaper in the midst of them and all earnest and sombre, and feeling like one man together, whatever their rank. I seem to myself like a spy or a traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they look at me in full confidence of sympathy. Their heart “knoweth its own bitterness,” and as for me, being a stranger and all alien, I “intermeddle not with their joy.”

October 9th. — My ancestor left England in 1630. I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and twenty-three years, leaving England just emerging from the feudal system, and finding it, on my return, on the verge of republicanism. It brings the two far-separated points of time very closely together, to view the matter thus.