From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain record of a Pleasant Journey. Julia Ward HoweЧитать онлайн книгу.
perpetuate the memories of public men, including a great variety both as to opinion and as to service. The solidity of all these adornments and arrangements well deserves the praise with which English authorities have been wont to comment upon them. A little sombre and sober in their tone, they are expressive of the taste and feeling of the nation. Parliament is now in session, and various interesting measures and reforms are under contemplation. Among these are the extension of the elective franchise, the abolition of flogging in the army, and the change of the whole long-transmitted system by which commissions in the latter are conferred or purchased. The last is perhaps a more democratic measure than is dreamed of. Throw open the military and church benefices to the competition of the most able and deserving, and the younger sons of houses esteemed noble will stand no better chance than others. They will then simply earn their bread where they can get it. Then, down comes primogeniture, then the union of state and church, then the prestige of royalty. This last we think to be greatly on the wane. The English prefer an hereditary to an elective symbol of supreme power. The permitted descent in the female line prevents the inconvenient issues to which the failure of an heir male might give rise. The Georges rose to great respectability in the third person, and sank to a disreputable level in the fourth. The present queen is an excellently behaved woman, and has adhered strictly to her public and private duties. Her long and strict widowhood is a little carped at by people in general, the personal sentiment having seemed to encroach upon the public career and office. But the Prince of Wales will be held to strict and sensible behavior, and, failing of it, will be severely dealt with. The English people will endure no second season of Carlton House, no letting down of manly reserve and womanly character by the spectacle of royal favorites, bankrupt at the fireside, but current in the world. All this John Bull will not put up with again. Nor will any Christendom, save that Frankish and monkeyish one which has yet to learn that true freedom of thought is not to be had without purity of conscience, and which, in its desire to be polite, holds the door wider open to bad manners than to good ones.
Rash words! What noble, thoughtful Frenchmen have not we known, and the world with us! Shall boastful Secesh and blustering Yankee, or the sordid, shining shoddy fool stand for the American? Yet these are the figures with which Europe is most familiar. So let us fling no smallest pebble at the nation of Des Cartes, Montesquieu, Pascal, and De Tocqueville. It is not in one, but in all countries that extremes meet. And in this connection a word.
The less we know about a thing, the easier to write about it. To give quite an assured and fluent account of a country, we should lose no time on our first arrival. The first impression is the strongest. Familiarity constantly wears off the edge of observation. The face of the new region astonishes us once, and once only. We soon grow used to it, and forget to describe it. The first day of our arrival in Liverpool or in London gave us volumes to write, which have proved as evanescent as the pictures of a swift panorama, vanishing to return no more. For now we are seated in London as though we had always lived there. We may sooner astonish it with our western accent, unconsidered costume, and wild coiffure, than it can rivet our attention with its splendors and its queernesses, its squares, fountains, equipages, cabmen, well-dressed and well-mannered circles. This for the features, for the surface. But for the depth and spirit of things, the longer we explore, the less sanguine do we feel of being able to exhaust them. We sink our deepest shaft, and write upon it, "Thus far our abilities and opportunities; far more remains than we can ever bring to light."
And, apropos of this terrible familiarity with things once discerned, let me say that when we shall have been two days in heaven, we shall not know it any longer, which is one reason why we must always be getting there, but never arrive. Pope's old-fashioned line, "always to be blest," expresses profoundly this philosophical necessity, although he saw it in a simply didactic light, and stated it accordingly. The line none the less takes its place in the stately train of the ideal philosophy, to which those have best contributed who have been least aware of the fact of their having done so. "Lord, when saw I thee naked and an hungered," etc., etc. On some smallest, obscurest occasion probably, when, the recognized form and the ignored spirit presenting themselves together, thy hospitable bosom received the one, and left the other to take care of itself.
Our neophytes take this great Babel with the charming at-homeness to which our paragraph alludes. They devour London as if it were the perpetual bread and butter which their father's house keeps always cut and spread for them; cab hire, great dinners, distinguished company, the lofty friend's equipage and livery, lent for precious occasions—all this seems as much a matter of course as Lindley Murray's rules, or the Creed and the Commandments. Joachim? Of course they will hear Joachim, and the Opera, if it be good enough, and Mr. Dickens. Lady——, Duke of So and so. Very well in their way. Presented at court? They wouldn't mind, provided it were not too tedious. Mr. Carlyle? Herbert Spencer? Yes, they have heard tell of them.
Happy season of youth, which can find nothing more reverend than its possibilities, more glorious than its unwasted powers! In spite of all the new views and theories, I say, let children be born, and let women nurse them and bring them up, and let us have young people to take our work where we leave it, laughing at our limitations, and excelling us with noble strides; to pause some day, and remember our lessons, and weep over our pains, not the less, O God of the future, surpassing us! So let children continue to be born, and let no one attempt to reconstruct society at the expense of one hair of the head of these little ones, ourselves in hope as well as in memory.
ST. PAUL'S—THE JAPANESE.
The first feature of novelty in visiting St. Paul's Cathedral is the facility for going thither afforded by the city railways—one of which swiftly deposits us in Cannon Street, whence, with the Cathedral in full sight, we beg our way to the entrance, so far as information goes—one only of its several doors being open to the public at all times. The second is the crypt occupied and solemnized by the ponderous funereal pomps of the late Duke of Wellington. In conjunction with these must be mentioned the Nelson monument. These two men have been the great deliverers of England in modern times, and there is, no doubt, a certain heartiness in the gratitude that attends their memory. The duke's mausoleum is of solid porphyry, highly polished, in a quadrangular enclosure, at each of whose four corners flames a gas-jet, fixed on a porphyry shaft. Behind this a large space is filled by the huge funereal car which bore the hero to this place of rest. It is of cast iron, furnished by the cannon taken in his victories. In it are harnessed effigies of the six horses that dragged it, in the veritable trappings worn on the occasion. The heavy black draperies of the car are edged with a colored border, representing the orders worn by the duke. And here the care of England will, no doubt, preserve them, with the nodding hearse-plumes, and all the monuments of that holiday of woe, to moulder as long as such things can possibly hold together. For there is a point at which the most illustrious antiquity degenerates into dirt. And in England the past and present will yet have some awkward controversies to settle; for the small island cannot always have room for both, and to cramp and crowd the one for the heraldic display of the other will not be good housekeeping, according to the theories of to-day. So, when the fox-hunting squire tells us that his chief public aim and occupation will be to keep his county conservative, we think that this should mean to cheat the honest and laborious peasantry out of their eye teeth; though how they should be ignorant enough to be outwitted by him, is a question which makes us pause as over an unexplored abyss of knownothingism.
St. Paul's is clearly organized for the extortion of shillings and sixpences. So much for seeing the bell, clock, and whispering gallery; so much for the crypt. You are pressed, too, at every turn, to purchase guide-books, each more authentic than the last. There, as elsewhere, we go about spilling our small change at every step, and wondering where it will all end. We remember the debtors' prisons which still abound in England, and endeavor to view the younger neophyte in the sober livery of Little Dorrit.
The only occasion of public amusement that we improve, after the one happy hearing of Joachim, is an evening performance of the Japanese jugglers, which remains fresh and vivid in our recollections, with all its barbaric smoothness and perfection.
The first spectacle which we