Winter Sunshine Part 9

I do not contemn it. To the natural historian it is good. It is a return to first principles again after so much art, and culture, and lying, and chauvinisme, and shows these old civilizations in no danger of, becoming effete yet. It is like the h.e.l.l of fire beneath our feet, which the geologists tell us is the life of the globe. Were it not for it, who would not at times despair of the French character? As long as this fiery core remains, I shall believe France capable of recovering from any disaster to her arms. The "mortal ripening" of the nation is stayed.

The English and Germans, on the other hand, are saved by great breadth and heartiness, and a const.i.tutional tendency to coa.r.s.eness of fibre which art and civilization abate very little. What is to save us in this country, I wonder, who have not the French regency and fire, nor the Teutonic heartiness and vis inertiae, and who are already in danger of refining or attenuating into a high-heeled, shortjawed, genteel race, with more brains than stomach, and more address than character?

IV. FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK

I had imagined that the next best thing to seeing England would be to see Scotland; but, as this latter pleasure was denied me, certainly the next best thing was seeing Scotland's greatest son. Carlyle has been so constantly and perhaps justly represented as a stormy and wrathful person, brewing bitter denunciation for America and Americans, that I cannot forbear to mention the sweet and genial mood in which we found him,--a gentle and affectionate grandfather, with his delicious Scotch brogue and rich, melodious talk, overflowing with reminiscences of his earlier life, of Scott and Goethe and Edinburgh, and other men and places he had known. Learning that I was especially interested in birds, he discoursed of the lark and the nightingale and the mavis, framing his remarks about them in some episode of his personal experience, and investing their songs with the double charm of his description and his adventure.

"It is only geese who get plucked there," said my companion after we had left,--a man who had known Carlyle intimately for many years; "silly persons who have no veneration for the great man, and come to convert him or to change his convictions upon subjects to which he has devoted a lifetime of profound thought and meditation. With such persons he has no patience."

Carlyle had just returned from Scotland, where he had spent the summer.

The Scotch hills and mountains, he said, had an ancient, mournful look, as if the weight of immeasurable time had settled down upon them. Their look was in Ossian,--his spirit reflected theirs; and as I gazed upon the venerable man before me, and noted his homely and rugged yet profound and melancholy expression, I knew that their look was upon him also, and that a greater than Ossian had been nursed amid those lonely hills. Few men in literature have felt the burden of the world, the weight of the inexorable conscience, as has Carlyle, or drawn such fresh inspiration from that source. However we may differ from him (and almost in self-defense one must differ from a man of such intense and overweening personality), it must yet be admitted that he habitually speaks out of that primitive silence and solitude in which only the heroic soul dwells. Certainly not in contemporary British literature is there another writer whose bowstring has such a tw.a.n.g.

I left London in the early part of November, and turned my face westward, going leisurely through England and Wales, and stringing upon my thread a few of the famous places, as Oxford, Stratford, Warwick, Birmingham, Chester, and taking a last look at the benign land. The weather was fair; I was yoked to no companion, and was apparently the only tourist on that route. The field occupations drew my eye as usual.

They were very simple, and consisted mainly of the gathering of root crops. I saw no building of fences, or of houses or barns, and no draining or improving of any kind worth mentioning, these things having all been done long ago. Speaking of barns reminds me that I do not remember to have seen a building of this kind while in England, much less a group or cl.u.s.ter of them as at home; hay and grain being always stacked, and the mildness of the climate rendering a protection of this kind unnecessary for the cattle and sheep. In contrast, America may be called the country of barns and outbuildings:--

"Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns,"

as Walt Whitman apostrophizes the Union.

I missed also many familiar features in the autumn fields,--those given to our landscape by Indian corn, for instance, the tent-like stouts, the shucks, the rustling blades, the ripe pumpkins strewing the field; for, notwithstanding England is such a garden, our corn does not flourish there. I saw no buckwheat either, the red stubble and little squat figures of the upright sheaves of which are so noticeable in our farming districts at this season. Neither did I see, any gathering of apples, or orchards from which to gather them. "As sure as there are apples in Herefords.h.i.+re" seems to be a proverb in England; yet it is very certain that the orchard is not the inst.i.tution anywhere in Britain that it is in this country, or so prominent a feature in the landscape. The native apples are inferior in size and quality, and are sold by the pound. Pears were more abundant at the fruit stands, and were of superior excellence and very cheap.

I hope it will not be set down to any egotism of mine, but rather to the effect upon an ardent pilgrim of the a.s.sociations of the place and its renown in literature, that all my experience at Stratford seems worthy of recording, and to be invested with a sort of poetical interest,--even the fact that I walked up from the station with a handsome young countrywoman who had chanced to occupy a seat in the same compartment of the car with me from Warwick, and who, learning the nature of my visit, volunteered to show me the Red Horse Inn, as her course led her that way. We walked mostly in the middle of the street, with our umbrellas hoisted, for it was raining slightly, while a boy whom we found lying in wait for such a chance trudged along in advance of us with my luggage.

At the Red Horse the pilgrim is in no danger of having the charm and the poetical atmosphere with which he has surrounded himself dispelled, but rather enhanced and deepened, especially if he has the luck I had, to find few other guests, and to fall into the hands of one of those simple, strawberry-like English housemaids, who gives him a cozy, snug little parlor all to himself, as was the luck of Irving also; who answers his every summons, and looks into his eyes with the simplicity and directness of a child; who could step from no page but that of Scott or the divine William himself; who puts the "coals" on your grate with her own hands, and, when you ask for a lunch, spreads the cloth on one end of the table while you sit reading or writing at the other, and places before you a whole haunch of delicious cold mutton, with bread and homebrewed ale, and requests you to help yourself; who, when bedtime arrives, lights you up to a clean, sweet chamber, with a high-canopied bed hung with snow-white curtains; who calls you in the morning, and makes ready your breakfast while you sit with your feet on the fender before the blazing grate; and to whom you pay your reckoning on leaving, having escaped entirely all the barrenness and publicity of hotel life, and had all the privacy and quiet of home without any of its cares or interruptions. And this, let me say here, is the great charm of the characteristic English inn; it has a domestic, homelike air. "Taking mine ease at mine inn" has a real significance in England.

You can take your ease and more; you can take real solid comfort. In the first place, there is no bar-room, and consequently no loafers or pimps, or fumes of tobacco or whiskey; then there is no landlord or proprietor or hotel clerk to lord it over you. The host, if there is such a person, has a way of keeping himself in the background, or absolutely out of sight, that is entirely admirable. You are monarch of all you survey. You are not made to feel that it is in some one else's house you are staying, and that you must court the master for his favor. It is your house, you are the master, and you have only to enjoy your own.

In the gray, misty afternoon, I walked out over the Avon, like all English streams full to its gra.s.sy brim, and its current betrayed only by a floating leaf or feather, and along English fields and roads, and noted the familiar sights and sounds and smells of autumn. The spire of the church where Shakespeare lies buried shot up stately and tall from the banks of the Avon, a little removed from the village; and the church itself, more like a cathedral in size and beauty, was also visible above the trees. Thitherward I soon bent my steps, and while I was lingering among the graves*, reading the names and dates so many centuries old, and surveying the gray and weather-worn exterior of the church, the slow tolling of the bell announced a funeral. Upon such a stage, and amid such surroundings, with all this past for a background, the shadowy figure of the peerless bard towering over all, the incident of the moment had a strange interest to me, and I looked about for the funeral cortege. Presently a group of three or four figures appeared at the head of the avenue of limes, the foremost of them a woman, bearing an infant's coffin under her arm, wrapped in a white sheet. The clerk and s.e.xton, with their robes on, went out to meet them, and conducted them into the church, where the service proper to such occasions was read, after which the coffin was taken out as it was brought in, and lowered into the grave. It was the smallest funeral I ever saw, and my effort to play the part of a sympathizing public by hovering in the background, I fear, was only an intrusion after all.

[* Footnote: In England the church always stands in the midst of the graveyard, and hence can be approached only on foot. People it seems, never go to church in carriages or wagons, but on foot, along paths and lanes.]

Having loitered to my heart's content amid the stillness of the old church, and paced to and fro above the ill.u.s.trious dead, I set out, with the sun about an hour high, to see the house of Anne Hathaway at Shottery, shunning the highway and following a path that followed hedge-rows, crossed meadows and pastures, skirted turnip-fields and cabbage-patches, to a quaint gathering of low thatched houses,--a little village of farmers and laborers, about a mile from Stratford. At the gate in front of the house a boy was. .h.i.tching a little gray donkey, almost hidden beneath two immense panniers filled with coa.r.s.e hay.

"Whose house is this?" inquired I, not being quite able to make out the name.

"Hann' Ataway's 'ouse," said he.

So I took a good look at Anne's house,--a homely, human-looking habitation, with its old oak beams and thatched roof,--but did not go in, as Mrs. Baker, who was eying me from the door, evidently hoped I would, but chose rather to walk past it and up the slight rise of ground beyond, where I paused and looked out over the fields, just lit up by the setting sun. Returning, I stepped into the Shakespeare Tavern, a little, homely wayside place on a street, or more like a path, apart from the main road, and the good dame brought me some "home-brewed," which I drank sitting by a rude table on a rude bench in a small, low room, with a stone floor and an immense chimney. The coals burned cheerily, and the crane and hooks in the fireplace called up visions of my earliest childhood. Apparently the house and the surroundings, and the atmosphere of the place and the ways of the people, were what they were three hundred years ago. It was all sweet and good, and I enjoyed it hugely, and was much refreshed.

Crossing the fields in the gloaming, I came up with some children, each with a tin bucket of milk, threading their way toward Stratford. The little girl, a child ten years old, having a larger bucket than the rest, was obliged to set down her burden every few rods and rest; so I lent her a helping hand. I thought her prattle, in that broad but musical patois, and along these old hedge-rows, the most delicious I ever heard. She said they came to Shottery for milk because it was much better than they got at Stratford. In America they had a cow of their own. Had she lived in America, then? "Oh, yes, four years," and the stream of her talk was fuller at once. But I hardly recognized even the name of my own country in her innocent prattle; it seemed like a land of fable,--all had a remote mythological air, and I pressed my inquiries as if I was hearing of this strange land for the first time.

She had an uncle still living in the "States of Hoio," but exactly where her father had lived was not so clear. In the States somewhere, and in "Ogden's Valley." There was a lake there that had salt in it, and not far off was the sea. "In America," she said, and she gave such a sweet and novel tw.a.n.g to her words, "we had a cow of our own, and two horses and a wagon and a dog." "Yes," joined in her little brother, "and nice chickens and a goose." "But," continued the sister, "we owns none o' them here. In America 'most everybody owned their houses, and we could 'a' owned a house if we had stayid."

"What made you leave America?" I inquired.

"'Cause me father wanted to see his friends."

"Did your mother want to come back?"

"No, me mother wanted to stay in America."

"Is food as plenty here,--do you have as much to eat as in the States?"

"Oh, yes, and more. The first year we were in America we could not get enough to eat."

"But you do not get meat very often here, do you?"

"Quite often,"--not so confidently.

"How often?"

"Well, sometimes we has pig's liver in the week time, and we allers has meat of a Sunday; we likes meat."

Here we emerged from the fields into the highway, and the happy children went their way and I mine.

In the evening, as I was strolling about the town, a poor, crippled, half-witted fellow came jerking himself across the street after me and offered himself as a guide.

"I'm the Teller what showed Artemus Ward around when he was here.

You've heerd on me, I expect? Not? Why, he characterized me in 'Punch,' he did. He asked me if Shakespeare took all the wit out of Stratford? And this is what I said to him: 'No, he left some for me.'"

But not wis.h.i.+ng to be guided just then, I bought the poor fellow off with a few pence, and kept on my way.

Stratford is a quiet old place, and seems mainly the abode of simple common folk. One sees no marked signs of either poverty or riches. It is situated in a beautiful expanse of rich, rolling farming country, but bears little resemblance to a rural town in America: not a tree, not a spear of gra.s.s; the houses packed close together and crowded up on the street, the older ones presenting their gables and showing their structure of oak beams. English oak seems incapable of decay even when exposed to the weather, while indoors it takes three or four centuries to give it its best polish and hue.

I took my last view of Stratford quite early of a bright Sunday morning, when the ground was white with a dense h.o.a.r-frost. The great church, as I approached it, loomed up under the sun through a bank of blue mist. The Avon was like gla.s.s, with little wraiths of vapor clinging here and there to its surface. Two white swans stood on its banks in front of the church, and, without regarding the mirror that so drew my eye, preened their plumage; while, farther up, a piebald cow reached down for some gra.s.s under the brink where the frost had not settled, and a piebald cow in the river reached up for the same morsel.

Rooks and crows and jackdaws were noisy in the trees overhead and about the church spire. I stood a long while musing upon the scene.

At the birthplace of the poet, the keeper, an elderly woman, s.h.i.+vered with cold as she showed me about. The primitive, home-made appearance of things, the stone floor much worn and broken, the rude oak beams and doors, the leaden sash with the little window-panes scratched full of names, among others that of Walter Scott, the great chimneys where quite a family could literally sit in the chimney corner, were what I expected to see, and looked very human and good. It is impossible to a.s.sociate anything but sterling qualities and simple, healthful characters with these early English birthplaces. They are nests built with faithfulness and affection, and through them one seems to get a glimpse of devouter, st.u.r.dier times.

From Stratford I went back to Warwick, thence to Birmingham, thence to Shrewsbury, thence to Chester, the old Roman camp, thence to Holyhead, being intent on getting a glimpse of Wales and the Welsh, and maybe taking a tramp up Snowdon or some of his congeners, for my legs literally ached for a mountain climb, a certain set of muscles being so long unused. In the course of my journeyings, I tried each cla.s.s or compartment of the cars, first, second, and third, and found but little choice. The difference is simply in the upholstering, and, if you are provided with a good shawl or wrap-up, you need not be particular about that. In the first, the floor is carpeted and the seats substantially upholstered, usually in blue woolen cloth; in the second, the seat alone is cus.h.i.+oned; and in the third, you sit on a bare bench. But all cla.s.ses go by the same train, and often in the same car, or carriage, as they say here. In the first cla.s.s travel the real and the shoddy n.o.bility and Americans; in the second, commercial and professional men; and in the third, the same, with such of the peasantry and humbler cla.s.ses as travel by rail. The only annoyance I experienced in the third cla.s.s arose from the freedom with which the smokers, always largely in the majority, indulged in their favorite pastime. (I perceive there is one advantage in being a smoker: you are never at a loss for something to do,--you can smoke.)

At Chester I stopped overnight, selecting my hotel for its name, the "Green Dragon." It was Sunday night, and the only street scene my rambles afforded was quite a large gathering of persons on a corner, listening, apparently with indifference or curiosity, to an ignorant, hot-headed street preacher. "Now I am going to tell you something you will not like to hear, something that will make you angry. I know it will. It is this: I expect to go to heaven. I am perfectly confident I shall go there. I know you do not like that." But why his hearers should not like that did not appear. For my part, I thought, for the good of all concerned, the sooner he went the better.

In the morning, I mounted the wall in front of the cathedral, and, with a very lively feeling of wonder and astonishment, walked completely around the town on top of it, a distance of about two miles. The wall, being in places as high as the houses, afforded some interesting views into attics, chambers, and back yards. I envied the citizens such a delightful promenade ground, full of variety and interest. Just the right distance, too, for a brisk turn to get up an appet.i.te, or for a leisurely stroll to tone down a dinner; while as a place for chance meetings of happy lovers, or to get away from one's companions if the flame must burn in secret and in silence, it is unsurpa.s.sed. I occasionally met or pa.s.sed other pedestrians, but noticed that it required a brisk pace to lessen the distance between myself and an attractive girlish figure a few hundred feet in advance of me. The railroad cuts across one corner of the town, piercing the walls with two very carefully constructed archways. Indeed, the people are very choice of the wall, and one sees posted notices of the city authorities offering a reward for any one detected in injuring it. It has stood now some seven or eight centuries, and from appearances is good for one or two more. There are several towers on the wall, from one of which some English king, over two hundred years ago, witnessed the defeat of his army on Rowton Moor. But when I was there, though the sun was s.h.i.+ning, the atmosphere was so loaded with smoke that I could not catch even a glimpse of the moor where the battle took place. There is a gateway through the wall on each of the four sides, and this slender and beautiful but blackened and worn span, as if to afford a transit from the chamber windows on one side of the street to those of the other, is the first glimpse the traveler gets of the wall. The gates beneath the arches have entirely disappeared. The ancient and carved oak fronts of the buildings on the main street, and the inclosed sidewalk that ran through the second stories of the shops and stores, were not less strange and novel to me. The sidewalk was like a gentle upheaval in its swervings and undulations, or like a walk through the woods, the oaken posts and braces on the outside answering for the trees, and the prospect ahead for the vista.

The ride along the coast of Wales was crowded with novelty and interest,--the sea on one side and the mountains on the other,--the latter bleak and heathery in the foreground, but cloud-capped and snow-white in the distance. The afternoon was dark and lowering, and just before entering Conway we had a very striking view. A turn in the road suddenly brought us to where we looked through a black framework of heathery hills, and beheld Snowdon and his chiefs apparently with the full rigors of winter upon them. It was so satisfying that I lost at once my desire to tramp up them. I barely had time to turn from the mountains to get a view of Conway Castle, one of the largest and most impressive ruins I saw. The train cuts close to the great round tower, and plunges through the wall of gray, shelving stone into the bluff beyond, giving the traveler only time to glance and marvel.

About the only glimpse I got of the Welsh character was on this route.

At one of the stations, Abergele I think, a fresh, blooming young woman got into our compartment, occupied by myself and two commercial travelers (bag-men, or, as we say, "drummers"), and, before she could take her seat, was complimented by one of them on her good looks.

Feeling in a measure responsible for the honor and good-breeding of the compartment, I could hardly conceal my embarra.s.sment; but the young Abergeless herself did not seem to take it amiss, and when presently the jolly bag-man addressed his conversation to her, replied beseemingly and good-naturedly. As she arose to leave the car at her destination, a few stations beyond, he said "he thought it a pity that such a sweet, pretty girl should leave us so soon," and seizing her hand the audacious rascal actually solicited a kiss. I expected this would be the one drop too much, and that we should have a scene, and began to regard myself in the light of an avenger of an insulted Welsh beauty, when my heroine paused, and I believe actually deliberated whether or not to comply before two spectators! Certain it is that she yielded the highwayman her hand, and, bidding him a gentle good-night in Welsh, smilingly and blus.h.i.+ngly left the car. "Ah," said the villain, "these Welsh girls are capital; I know them like a book, and have had many a lark with them."

At Holyhead I got another glimpse of the Welsh. I had booked for Dublin, and having several hours on my hands of a dark, threatening night before the departure of the steamer, I sallied out in the old town tilted up against the side of the hill, in the most adventurous spirit I could summon, threading my way through the dark, deserted streets, pausing for a moment in front of a small house with closed doors and closely, shuttered windows, where I heard suppressed voices, the monotonous sc.r.a.ping of a fiddle, and a lively shuffling of feet, and pa.s.sing on finally entered, drawn by the musical strains, a quaint old place, where a blind harper, seated in the corner of a rude kind of coffee and sitting room, was playing on a harp. I liked the atmosphere of the place, so primitive and wholesome, and was quite willing to have my attention drawn off from the increasing storm without, and from the bitter cup which I knew the Irish sea was preparing for me. The harper presently struck up a livelier strain, when two Welsh girls, who were chatting before the grate, one of them as dumpy as a bag of meal and the other slender and tall, stepped into the middle of the floor and began to dance to the delicious music, a Welsh mechanic and myself drinking our ale and looking on approvingly. After a while the pleasant, modest-looking bar-maid, whom I had seen behind the beer-levers as I entered, came in, and, after looking on for a moment, was persuaded to lay down her sewing and join in the dance. Then there came in a sandy-haired Welshman, who could speak and understand only his native dialect, and finding his neighbors affiliating with an Englishman, as he supposed, and trying to speak the hateful tongue, proceeded to berate them sharply (for it appears the Welsh are still jealous of the English); but when they explained to him that I was not an Englishman, but an American, and had already twice stood the beer all around (at an outlay of sixpence), he subsided into a sulky silence, and regarded me intently.

About eleven o'clock a policeman paused at the door, and intimated that it was time the house was shut up and the music stopped, and to outward appearances his friendly warning was complied with; but the harp still discoursed in a minor key, and a light tripping and shuffling of responsive feet might occasionally have been heard for an hour later.

When I arose to go, it was with a feeling of regret that I could not see more of this simple and social people, with whom I at once felt that "touch of nature" which "makes the whole world kin," and my leave-taking was warm and hearty accordingly.

Through the wind and the darkness I threaded my way to the wharf, and in less than two hours afterward was a most penitent voyager, and fitfully joining in that doleful gastriloquial chorus that so often goes up from the cabins of those Channel steamers.

I hardly know why I went to Ireland, except it was to indulge the few drops of Irish blood in my veins, and maybe also with a view to shorten my sea voyage by a day. I also felt a desire to see one or two literary men there, and in this sense my journey was eminently gratifying; but so far from shortening my voyage by a day, it lengthened it by three days, that being the time it took me to recover from the effects of it; and as to the tie of blood, I think it must nearly all have run out, for I felt but few congenital throbs while in Ireland.