Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume I Part 12

Under the pavement of the chancel, and back of the altar rail,--at which it was my privilege to kneel while gazing upon this sacred spot,--is the grave of Byron.... Nothing is written on the stone that covers his sepulcher except the simple name of BYRON with the dates of his birth and death, in bra.s.s letters, surrounded by a wreath of leaves in bra.s.s, the gift of the King of Greece; and never did a name seem more stately or a place more hallowed. The dust of the poet reposes between that of his mother on his right hand, and that of his Ada,--"sole daughter of my house and heart,"--on his left. The mother died on August 1, 1811; the daughter, who had by marriage become the Countess of Lovelace, in 1852. "I buried her with my own hands," said the s.e.xton, John Brown, when, after a little time, he rejoined me at the altar-rail. "I told them exactly where he was laid when they wanted to put that bra.s.s on the stone; I remembered it well, for I lowered the coffin of the Countess of Lovelace into this vault, and laid her by her father's side." And when presently we went into the vestry, he produced the Register of Burials and displayed the record of that interment in the following words: "1852. Died at 69 c.u.mberland Pl.

London. Buried December 3. Aged thirty-six.--Curtis Jackson." The Byrons were a short-lived race. The poet himself had just turned thirty-six; his mother was only forty-six when she pa.s.sed away. This name of Curtis Jackson in the register was that of the rector or curate then inc.u.mbent but now departed....

A book has been kept for many years, at the church of Hucknall-Torkard, in which visitors desiring to do so, can write their names. The first book provided for this purpose was an alb.u.m given to the church by the poet, Sir John Bowling, and in that there was a record of visitations during the years from 1825 to 1834.... The catalog of pilgrims to the grave of Byron during the last eighty years is not a long one. The votaries of that poet are far less numerous than those of Shakespeare. Custom has made the visit to Stratford "a property of easiness," and Shakespeare is a safe no less than a rightful object of wors.h.i.+p. The visit to Hucknall-Torkard is neither as easy nor as agreeable. Torkard is neither as easy nor as agreeable.... On the capital of a column near Byron's tomb I saw two moldering wreaths of laurel, which had hung there for several years; one brought by the Bishop of Norwich, the other by the American poet Joaquin Miller. It was good to see them, and especially to see them beside the tablet of white marble which was placed on that church wall to commemorate the poet, and to be her witness in death, by his loving and beloved sister Augusta Mary Leigh,--a name that is the synonym of n.o.ble fidelity, a name that cruel detraction and hideous calumny have done their worst to tarnish. That tablet names him "The Author of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,"

and if the conviction of thoughtful men and women throughout the world can be accepted as an authority, no name in the long annals of English literature is more certain of immortality than the name of Byron. His reputation can afford the absence of all memorial to him in Westminster Abbey,--can endure it, perhaps, better than the English nation can,--and it can endure the neglect and censure of the precinct of Nottingham. That city rejoices in many interesting a.s.sociations, but all that really hallows it for the stranger is its a.s.sociation with the name of Byron. The stranger will look in vain, however, for any adequate sign of his former connection with that place. It is difficult even to find prints or photographs of the Byron shrine, in the shops of Nottingham. [Footnote: Since this paper was written the buildings that flanked the front wall of Hucknall-Torkard churchyard have been removed, the street in front of it has been widened, and the church has been "restored" and considerably altered.--Author's note to the Editor.]

DR. JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE [Footnote: From "Our Old Home." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.]

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Seeking for Dr. Johnson's birthplace, I found it in St. Mary's Square (Lichfield), which is not so much a square as the mere widening of a street. The house is tall and thin, of three stories, with a square front and a roof rising steep and high. On a side-view, the building looks as if it had been cut in two in the midst, there being no slope of the roof on that side. A ladder slanted against the wall, and a painter was giving a livelier hue to the plaster. In a corner-room of the bas.e.m.e.nt, where old Michael Johnson may be supposed to have sold books, is now what we should call a dry-goods store, or, according to the English phrase, a mercer's and haberdasher's shop.

The house has a private entrance on a cross-street, the door being accessible by several much worn stone-steps, which are bordered by an iron bal.u.s.trade. I set my foot on the steps and laid my hand on the bal.u.s.trade, where Johnson's hand and foot must many a time have been, and ascending to the door, I knocked once, and again, and again, and got no admittance.

Going round to the shop-entrance, I tried to open it, but found it as fast bolted as the gate of Paradise. It is mortifying to be so balked in one's little enthusiasms; but looking round in quest of somebody to make inquiries of, I was a good deal consoled by the sight of Dr. Johnson himself, who happened, just at that moment, to be sitting at his ease nearly in the middle of St. Mary's Square, with his face turned toward his father's house.

Of course, it being almost fourscore years since the doctor laid aside his weary bulk of flesh, together with the ponderous melancholy that had so long weighed him down--the intelligent reader will at once comprehend that he was marble in his substance, and seated in a marble chair, on an elevated stone-pedestal. In short, it was a statue, sculptured by Lucas, and placed here in 1838, at the expense of Dr. Law, the reverend chancellor of the Diocese.

The figure is colossal (tho perhaps not much more so than the mountainous doctor himself) and looks down upon the spectator from its pedestal of ten or twelve feet high, with a broad and heavy benignity of aspect, very like in feature to Sir Joshua Reynold's portrait of Johnson, but calmer and sweeter in expression. Several big books are piled up beneath his chair, and, if I mistake not, he holds a volume in his hand, thus blinking forth at the world out of his learned abstraction, owl-like, yet benevolent at heart. The statue is immensely ma.s.sive, a vast ponderosity of stone, not finely spiritualized, nor indeed, fully humanized, but rather resembling a great stone-boulder than a man. You must look with the eyes of faith and sympathy, or possibly, you might lose the human being altogether, and find only a big stone within your mental grasp. On the pedestal are three bas-reliefs. In the first, Johnson is represented as hardly more than a baby, bestriding an old man's shoulders, resting his chin on the bald head which he embraces with his little arms, and listening earnestly to the high-church eloquence of Dr. Sacheverell. In the second tablet, he is seen riding to school on the shoulders of two of his comrades, while another boy supports him in the rear.

The third bas-relief possesses, to my mind, a great deal of pathos, to which my appreciative faculty is probably the more alive, because I have always been profoundly imprest by the incident here commemorated, and long ago tried to tell it for the behoof of childish readers. It shows Johnson in the market-place of Uttoxeter, doing penance for an act of disobedience to his father, committed, fifty years before. He stands bare-headed, a venerable figure, and a countenance extremely sad and wo-begone, with the wind and rain driving hard against him, and thus helping to suggest to the spectator the gloom of his inward state. Some market-people and children gaze awe-stricken into his face, and an aged man and woman, with clapsed and uplifted hands, seem to be praying for him. These latter personages (whose introduction by the artist is none the less effective, because, in queer proximity, there are some commodities of market-day in the shape of living ducks and dead poultry,) I interpreted to represent the spirits of Johnson's father and mother, lending what aid they could to lighten his half-century's burden of remorse.

I had never heard of the above-described piece of sculpture before; it appears to have no reputation as a work of art, nor am I at all positive that it deserves any. For me, however, it did as much as sculpture could under the circ.u.mstances, even if the artist of the Libyan Sibyl had wrought it, by reviving my interest in the st.u.r.dy old Englishman, and particularly by freshening my perception of a wonderful beauty and pathetic tenderness in the incident of the penance.

The next day I left Lichfield for Uttoxeter, on one of the few purely sentimental pilgrimages that I ever undertook, to see the very spot where Johnson had stood. Boswell, I think, speaks of the town (its name is p.r.o.nounced Yuteox'eter) as being about nine miles off from Lichfield, but the county-map would indicate a greater distance; and by rail, pa.s.sing from one line to another, it is as much as eighteen miles. I have always had an idea of old Michael Johnson sending his literay merchandise by carrier's wagon, journeying to Uttoxeter afoot on market-day morning, selling "books" through the busy hours, and returning to Lichfield at night. This could not possibly have been the case.

Arriving at the Uttoxeter station, the first objects that I saw, with a green field or two between them and me, were the tower and gray steeple of a church, rising among red-tiled roofs and a few scattered trees. A very short walk takes you from the station up into the town. It had been my previous impression that the market-place of Uttoxeter lay immediately round about the church; and, if I remember the narrative aright, Johnson, or Boswell in his behalf, describes his father's book-stall as standing in the market-place close beside the sacred edifice.

It is impossible for me to say what changes may have occurred in the topography of the town, during almost a century and a half since Michael Johnson retired from business, and ninety years, at least, since his son's penance was performed. But the church has now merely a street of ordinary width pa.s.sing around it, while the market-place, tho near at hand, neither forms a part of it nor is really contiguous, nor would its throng and bustle be apt to overflow their boundaries and surge against the churchyard and the old gray tower. Nevertheless, a walk of a minute or two brings a person from the center of the market-place to the church-door; and Michael Johnson might very conveniently have located his stall and laid out his literary ware in the corner at the tower's base; better there, indeed, than in the busy center of an agricultural market. But the picturesque arrangement and full impressiveness of the story absolutely require that Johnson shall not have done his penance in a corner, ever so little retired, but shall have been the very nucleus of the crowd--the midmost man of the market-place--a central image of Memory and Remorse, contrasting with and overpowering the petty materialism around him. He himself, having the force to throw vitality and truth into what persons differently const.i.tuted might reckon a mere external ceremony, and an absurd one, would not have failed to see this necessity. I am resolved, therefore, that the true site of Dr. Johnson's penance was in the middle of the market-place.

How strange and stupid it is that tradition should not have marked and kept in mind the very place! How shameful (nothing less than that) that there should be no local memorial of this incident, as beautiful and touching a pa.s.sage as can be cited out of any human life! No inscription of it, almost as sacred as a verse of Scripture on the wall of the church!

No statue of the venerable and ill.u.s.trious penitent in the market-place to throw a wholesome awe over its earthliness, its frauds and petty wrongs of which the benumbed fingers of conscience can make no record, its selfish compet.i.tion of each man with his brother or his neighbor, its traffic of soul-substance for a little worldly gain! Such a statue, if the piety of the people did not raise it, might almost have been expected to grow up out of the pavement of its own accord on the spot that had been watered by the rain that dript from Johnson's garments, mingled with his remorseful tears.