Chapter 17

The whole vast sweep of our surrounding prospect lay answering in a myriad fleeting shades the cloudy process of the tremendous sky. The English heaven is a fit antithesis to the complex English earth. We possess in America the infinite beauty of the blue; England possesses the splendor of combined and animated clouds. Over against us, from our station on the hills, we saw them piled and dissolved, compacted and shifted, blotting the azure with sullen rain-spots, stretching, breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of gray, bursting into a storm of light or melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our way along the rounded summits of these well-grazed heights--mild, breezy inland downs--and descended through long-drawn slopes of fields, green to cottage doors, to where a rural village beckoned us from its seat among the meadows. Close beside it, I admit, the railway shoots fiercely from its tunnel in the hills; and yet there broods upon this charming hamlet an old-time quietude and privacy, which seems to make it a violation of confidence to tell its name so far away. We struck through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its height of hedges; it led us to a superb old farm-house, now jostled by the multiplied lanes and roads which have curtailed its ancient appanage. It stands in stubborn picturesqueness, at the receipt of sad-eyed contemplation and the sufferance of "sketches." I doubt whether out of Nuremberg--or Pompeii!--you may find so forcible an image of the domiciliary genius of the past. It is cruelly complete; its bended beams and joists, beneath the burden of its gables, seem to ache and groan with memories and regrets. The short, low windows, where lead and glass combine in equal proportions to hint to the wondering stranger of the medieval gloom within, still prefer their darksome office to the grace of modern day.

Such an old house fills an American with an indefinable feeling of respect. So propt and patched and tinkered with clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its central English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanized with ages of use and touches of beneficent affection, it seemed to offer to our grateful eyes a small, rude synthesis of the great English social order. Passing out upon the highroad, we came to the common browsing-patch, the "village green" of the tales of our youth. Nothing was wanting; the shaggy, mouse-colored donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and huge proboscis, the geese, the old woman--the old woman, in person, with her red cloak and black bonnet, frilled about the face and double-frilled beside her decent, placid cheeks--the towering plowman with his white smock-frock, puckered on chest and back, his short corduroys, his mighty calves, his big, red, rural face. We greeted these things as children greet the loved pictures in a story book, lost and mourned and found again. It was marvelous how well we knew them. Beside the road we saw a plow-boy straddle, whistling on a stile. Gainsborough might have painted him. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a meadow, a footpath lay, like a thread of darker woof. We followed it from field to field and from stile to stile. It was the way to church. At the church we finally arrived, lost in its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the work-day world by the broad stillness of pastures--a gray, gray tower, a huge black yew, a cluster of village graves, with crooked headstones, in grassy, low relief. The whole scene was deeply ecclesiastical. My companion was overcome.

"You must bury me here," he cried. "It's the first church I have seen in my life. How it makes a Sunday where it stands!"

The next day we saw a church of statelier proportions. We walked over to Worcester, through such a mist of local color that I felt like one of Smollett's pedestrian heroes, faring tavern-ward for a night of adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw the steepled mass of the cathedral, long and high, rise far into the cloud-freckled blue. And as we came nearer still, we stopt on the bridge and viewed the solid minster reflected in the yellow Severn. And going farther yet we entered the town--where surely Miss Austen's heroines, in chariots and curricles, must often have come a-shopping for swan's-down boas and high lace mittens; we lounged about the gentle close and gazed insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the waning, wasting afternoon light, the visible ether which feels the voices of the chimes, far aloft on the broad perpendicular field of the cathedral tower; saw it linger and nestle and abide, as it loves to do on all bold architectural spaces, converting them graciously into registers and witnesses of nature; tasted, too, as deeply of the peculiar stillness of this clerical precinct; saw a rosy English lad come forth and lock the door of the old foundation school, which marries its hoary basement to the soaring Gothic of the church, and carry his big responsible key into one of the quiet canonical houses; and then stood musing together on the effect on one's mind of having in one's boyhood haunted such cathedral shades as a King's scholar, and yet kept ruddy with much cricket in misty meadows by the Severn. On the third morning we betook ourselves to Lockley Park, having learned that the greater part of it was open to visitors, and that, indeed, on application, the house was occasionally shown.

Within its broad enclosure many a declining spur of the great hills melted into parklike slopes and dells. A long avenue wound and circled from the outermost gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and bosky recesses--at everything except the limits of the place. It was as free and wild and untended as the villa of an Italian prince; and I have never seen the stern English fact of property put on such an air of innocence. The weather had just become perfect; it was one of the dozen exquisite days of the English year--days stamped with a refinement of purity unknown in more liberal climes. It was as if the mellow brightness, as tender as that of the primroses which starred the dark waysides like petals wind-scattered over beds of moss, had been meted out to us by the cubic foot--tempered, refined, recorded!

II

TURGENEFF'S WORLD[67]

We hold to the good old belief that the presumption, in life, is in favor of the brighter side, and we deem it, in art, an indispensable condition of our interest in a deprest observer that he should have at least tried his best to be cheerful. The truth, we take it, lies for the pathetic in poetry and romance very much where it lies for the "immoral." Morbid pathos is reflective pathos; ingenious pathos, pathos not freshly born of the occasion; noxious immorality is superficial immorality, immorality without natural roots in the subject. We value most the "realists" who have an ideal of delicacy and the elegiasts who have an ideal of joy.

[Footnote 67: From "French Poets and Novelists," published by Macmillan & Company, of London.]

"Picturesque gloom, possibly," a thick and thin admirer of M. Turgeneff's may say to us, "at least you will admit that it is picturesque." This we heartily concede, and, recalled to a sense of our author's brilliant diversity and ingenuity, we bring our restrictions to a close. To the broadly generous side of his imagination it is impossible to pay exaggerated homage, or, indeed, for that matter, to its simple intensity and fecundity. No romancer has created a greater number of the figures that breathe and move and speak, in their habits as they might have lived; none, on the whole, seems to us to have had such a masterly touch in portraiture, none has mingled so much ideal beauty with so much unsparing reality. His sadness has its element of error, but it has also its larger element of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no fantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.

So much as this we seem to decipher between the lines of M. Turgeneff's minutely written chronicle. He himself has sought to understand as zealously as his most eminent competitors. He gives, at least, no meager account of life, and he has done liberal justice to its infinite variety. This is his great merit; his great defect, roughly stated, is a tendency to the abuse of irony. He remains, nevertheless, to our sense, a very welcome mediator between the world and our curiosity. If we had space, we should like to set forth that he is by no means our ideal story-teller--this honorable genius possessing, attributively, a rarer skill than the finest required for producing an artful _réchauffé_ of the actual. But even for better romancers we must wait for a better world. Whether the world in its higher state of perfection will occasionally offer color to scandal, we hesitate to pronounce; but we are prone to conceive of the ultimate novelist as a personage altogether purged of sarcasm. The imaginative force now expended in this direction he will devote to describing cities of gold and heavens of sapphire. But, for the present, we gratefully accept M. Turgeneff, and reflect that his manner suits the most frequent mood of the greater number of readers. If he were a dogmatic optimist we suspect that, as things go, we should long ago have ceased to miss him from our library. The personal optimism of most of us no romancer can confirm or dissipate, and our personal troubles, generally, place fictions of all kinds in an impertinent light. To our usual working mood the world is apt to seem M. Turgeneff's hard world, and when, at moments, the strain and the pressure deepen, the ironical element figures not a little in our form of address to those short-sighted friends who have whispered that it is an easy one.

END OF VOL. X

INDEX TO THE TEN VOLUMES

[Roman numerals indicate volumes, Arabic numerals indicate pages]

Adams, Henry; biographical note on, X, 219; Jefferson's retirement, 219.

Adams, John; biographical note on, IX, 87; articles by--on his nomination of Washington to be commander-in-chief, 87; an estimate of Franklin, 90.

Adams, John Quincy; biographical note on, IX, 133; articles by--of his mother, 133; the moral taint inherent in slavery, 135.

Addison, Joseph; biographical note on, III, 236; articles by--in Westminster Abbey, 236; Will Honeycomb and his marriage, 240; on pride of birth, 246; Sir Roger and his home, 251.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey; biographical note on, X, 195; articles by--a sunrise in Stillwater, 195; the fight at Slatter's Hill, 198; on returning from Europe, 204.

Andersen, Hans Christian; biographical note on, VIII, 231; the Emperor's new clothes, 231.

Aquinas, St. Thomas; biographical note on, VII, 12; a definition of happiness, 12.

Aristotle; biographical note on, I, 149; articles by--what things are pleasant, 149; the lite most desirable, 155; ideal husbands and wives, 158; happiness as an end of human action, 165.

Arnold, Matthew; biographical note on, VI, 208; on the motive for culture, 208.

Ascham, Roger; biographical note on, III, 40; article by--on gentle methods in teaching, 40.

Aucassin and Nicolette; note on the authorship of the work bearing that name, VII, 30; a passage from the book, 30.

Audubon, John James; biographical note on, IX, 144; where the mocking-bird dwells, 144.

Augustine, Aurelius St.; biographical note on, VII, 3; on imperial power for good and bad men 3.

Bacon, Francis; biographical note on, III, 53; essays by--of travel, 53; of riches, 56; of youth and age, 60; of revenge, 63; of marriage and single life, 65; of envy, 67; of goodness and goodness of nature, 74; of studies, 77; of regiment of health, 79.

Balzac, Honoré de; biographical note on, VII, 210; articles by--the death of Père Goriot, 210; Birotteau's early married life, 215.

Bancroft, George; biographical note on, IX, 217; the fate of Evangeline's countrymen, 217.

Beaconsfield, Lord; biographical note on, VI, 31; on Jerusalem by moonlight, 31.

Bellay, Joachim du; biographical note on, VII, 87; why old French was not as rich as Greek and Latin, 87.

Blackstone, Sir William; biographical note on, IV, 169; on professional soldiers in free countries, 169.

Boccaccio, Giovanni; biographical note on, VIII, 167; the patient Griselda, 167.

Boethius, Anicius; biographical note on, VII, 6; on the highest happiness, 6.

Bolingbroke, Lord; biographical note on, IV, 32; articles by--of the shortness of human life, 32; rules for the study of history, 36.

Boswell, James; biographical note on V, 3; articles by--Boswell's introduction to Dr. Johnson, 3; Johnson's audience with George III, 8; the meeting of Johnson and John Wilkes, 15; Johnson's wedding-day, 21.

Bradford, William; biographical note on, IX, 11; his account of the landing of the Pilgrims, 11.

Bronté, Charlotte; biographical note on, VI, 119; of the author of "Vanity Fair," 119.

Brown, John; biographical note on, VI, 56; of Rab and the game chicken, 56.

Browne, Sir Thomas; biographical note on, III, 114; articles by--of charity in judgments, 114; nothing strictly immortal, 116.

Bryant, William Cullen; biographical note on, IX, 194; an October day in Florence, 194.

Buckle, Henry Thomas; biographical note on, VI, 198; articles by--the isolation of Spain, 198; George III and the elder Pitt, 204.

Bunyan, John; biographical note on, III, 165; articles by--a dream of the Celestial City, 165; the death of Valiant-for-truth and of Stand-fast, 169; ancient Vanity Fair, 172.

Burke, Edmund; biographical note on, IV, 194; articles by--the principles of good taste, 194; a letter to a noble lord, 207; on the death of his son, 212; Marie Antoinette, 214.

Burnet, Gilbert; biographical note on, III, 195; on Charles II, 195.

Bury, Richard de; biographical note on, III, 3; in praise of books, 3.

Byrd, William; biographical note on, IX, 38; at the home of Colonel Spotswood, 38.

Byron, Lord; biographical note on, V, 134; articles by--his mother's treatment of him, 134; to his wife after the separation, 138; to Sir Walter Scott, 140; of art and nature as poetical subjects, 143.

Cæsar, Julius; biographical note on, II, 61; articles by--the building of the bridge across the Rhine, 61; the invasion of Britain, 64; overcoming the Nervii, 71; the Battle of Pharsalia and the death of Pompey, 78.

Calvin, John; biographical note on, VII, 84; of freedom for the will, 84.

Carlyle, Thomas; biographical note on, V, 179; articles by--Charlotte Corday, 179; the blessedness of work, 187; Cromwell, 190; in praise of those who toil, 201; the certainty of justice, 202; the greatness of Scott, 206; Boswell and his book, 214; might Burns have been saved, 223.

Casanova, Jacques (Chevalier de Seingalt); biographical note on, VIII, 200; an interview with Frederick the Great, 200.

Cato, the Censor; biographical note on, II, 3; on work on a Roman Farm, 3.

Caxton, William; biographical note on, III, 22; on true nobility and chivalry, 22.

Cellini, Benvenuto; biographical note on, VIII, 182; the casting of his Perseus and Medusa, 182.

Cervantes, Miguel de; biographical note on, VIII, 218; articles by--the beginnings of Don Quixote's Career, 218; how Don Quixote died, 224.

Channing, William E.; biographical note on, IX, 139; of greatness in Napoleon, 139.

Chateaubriand, Viscomte de; biographical note on, VII, 182; in an American forest, 182.

Chaucer, Geoffrey; biographical note on, III, 17; on acquiring and using riches, 17.

Chesterfield, Lord; biographical note on, IV, 66; articles by--on good manners, dress and the world, 66; of attentions to ladies, 71.

Cicero; biographical note on, II, 8; articles by--the blessings of old age, 8; on the death of his daughter Tullia, 34; of brave and elevated spirits, 37; of Scipio's death and of friendship, 43.

Clarendon, Lord; biographical note on, III, 144; on Charles I, 144.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; biographical note on, V, 70; articles by--does fortune favor fools? 70; the destiny of the United States, 76.

Comines, Philipe de; biographical note on, VII, 46; the character of Louis XI, 46.

Cooper, James Fenimore; biographical note on, IX, 170; articles by--his father's arrival at Otsego Lake, 170; running the gantlet, 178; Leather-stocking's farewell, 185.

Cowley, Abraham; biographical note on, III, 156; articles by--of obscurity, 156; of procrastination, 159.

Cowper, William; biographical note on, IV, 217; articles by--on keeping one's self employed, 217; Johnson's treatment of Milton, 219; the publication of his books, 221.

Curtis, George William; biographical note on, X, 183; our cousin the curate, 183.

Dana, Charles A.; biographical note on, X, 146; Greeley as a man of genius, 146.

Dana, Richard Henry (the younger); biographical note on, X, 93; a fierce gale under a clear sky, 93.

D'Angoulême, Marguerite; biographical note on, VII, 53; of husbands who are unfaithful, 53.

Dante Alighieri; biographical note on, VIII, 152; articles by--that long descent makes no man noble, 152; of Beatrice and her death, 157.

Darwin, Charles; biographical note on, VI, 47; articles by--on variations in mammals, birds and fishes, 47; on the genesis of his great book, 51.

Daudet, Alphonse; biographical note on, VIII, 55; articles by--a great man's widow, 55; his first dress coat, 61.

Defoe, Daniel; biographical note on, III, 201; the shipwreck of Crusoe, 201; the rescue of Man Friday, 204; the time of the great plague, 211.

De Quincey, Thomas; biographical note on, V, 115; articles by--dreams of an opium eater, 115; Joan of Arc, 123; Charles Lamb, 128.

Descartes, René; biographical note on, VII, 107; of material things and of the existence of God, 107.

Dickens, Charles; biographical note on, VI, 86; articles by--Sydney Carton's death, 86; Bob Sawyer's party, 88; Dick Swiveler and the Marchioness, 97; a happy return of the day, 105.

Dryden, John; biographical note on, III, 181; of Elizabethan dramatists, 181.

Dumas, Alexander; biographical note on, VII, 241; the shoulder, the belt and the handkerchief, 241.

Edwards, Jonathan; biographical note on, IX, 44; on liberty and moral agencies, 44.

Eliot, George; biographical note on, VI, 167; the Hall Farm, 167.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo; biographical note on, IX, 223; articles by--Thoreau's broken task, 223; the intellectual honesty of Montaigne, 229; his visit to Carlyle at Craigenputtock, 231.

Epictetus; biographical note on, I, 223; articles by--on freedom, 223; on friendship, 229; the philosopher and the crowd, 235.

Erasmus, Desiderius; biographical note on, VIII, 209; specimens of his wit and wisdom, 209.

Fielding, Henry; biographical note on, IV, 75; articles by--Tom the hero enters the stage, 75; Partridge sees Garrick at the play, 83; Mr. Adams in a political light, 89.

Flaubert, Gustave; biographical note on, VIII, 22; Yonville and its people, 22.

Fox, George; biographical note on, III, 161; an interview with Oliver Cromwell, 161.

Foxe, John; biographical note on, III, 45; on the death of Anne Boleyn, 45.

Franklin, Benjamin; biographical note on, IX, 51; articles by--his first entry into Philadelphia, 51; warnings Braddock did not heed, 55; how to draw lightning from the clouds, 59; the way to wealth, 61; a dialog with the gout, 68; a proposal to Madame Helvetius, 76.

Freeman, Edward A.; biographical note on, VI, 214; the death of William the Conqueror, 214.

Froissart, Jean; biographical note on, VII, 39; the battle of Crécy, 39.

Froude, James Anthony; biographical note on, VI, 122; articles by--of history as a science, 122; the character of Henry VIII, 132; Cæsar's mission, 136.

Fuller, Margaret; biographical note on, X, 52; articles by--her visit to George Sand, 52; two glimpses of Carlyle, 54.

Fuller, Thomas; biographical note on, III, 149; on the qualities of the good school-master, 149.

Gautier, Theophile; biographical note on, VIII, 14; Pharaoh's entry into Thebes, 14.

Gibbon, Edward; biographical note on, IV, 226; articles by--the romance of his youth, 226; the inception and completion of his "Decline and Fall," 229; the fall of Zenobia, 230; Alaric's entry into Rome, 237; the death of Hosein, 242; the causes of the destruction of the city of Rome, 246.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; biographical note on, VIII, 95; articles by--on first reading Shakespeare, 95; the coronation of Joseph II, 99.

Goldsmith, Oliver; biographical note on, IV, 177; articles by--the ambitions of the vicar's family, 177; sagacity in insects, 182; a Chinaman's view of London, 188.

Gray, Thomas; biographical note on, IV, 141; articles by--Warwick Castle, 141; to his friend Mason on the death of Mason's mother, 143; on his own writings, 144; his friendship for Bonstetten, 146.

Greeley, Horace; biographical note on, X, 58; the fatality of self-seeking in editors and authors, 58.

Green, John Richard; biographical note on, VI, 242; on George Washington, 242.

Grote, George; biographical note on, V, 165; articles by--the mutilation of the Hermæ, 165; if Alexander had lived, 172.

Guizot, François; biographical note on, VII, 189; Shakespeare as an example of civilization, 189.

Hamilton, Alexander; biographical note on, IX, 123; articles by--of the failure of the Confederation, 123; his reasons for not declining Burr's challenge, 129.

Harrison, Frederick; biographical note on, VI, 230; the great books of the world, 230.

Harte, Bret; biographical note on, X, 224; articles by--Peggy Moffat's inheritance, 224; John Chinaman, 236; M'liss goes to school, 240.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel; biographical note on, IX, 235; articles by--occupants of an old manse, 235; Arthur Dimmesdale on the scaffold, 242; of life at Brook Farm, 248; the death of Judge Pyncheon, 252.

Hay, John; biographical note on, X, 211; Lincoln's early fame, 211.

Hazlitt, William; biographical note on, V, 111; on Hamlet, 111.

Heine, Heinrich; biographical note on, VIII, 139; reminiscences of Napoleon, 139.

Herodotus; biographical note on, I, 3; articles by--Solon's words of wisdom to Croesus, 3; Babylon and its capture by Cyrus, 9; the pyramid of Cheops, 18; the story of Periander's son, 20.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell; biographical note on, X, 31; articles by--of doctors, lawyers and ministers, 31; of the genius of Emerson, 36; the house in which the professor lived, 42; of women who put on airs, 49.

Howell, James; biographical note on, III, 106; articles by--the Bucentaur in Venice, 106; the city of Rome in 1621, 109.

Howells, William Dean; biographical note on, X, 207; to Albany by the night boat, 207.