The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844. Various
p>The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 / Volume 23, Number 4
A PILGRIMAGE TO PENSHURST
One of the admirers of Goëthe, commenting on his characteristic excellencies, has remarked that he is the most suggestive of writers. Were we to seek an epithet by which to describe the architectural remains and historical monuments of England, with reference to their impression on the mind of an observer, perhaps no better could offer itself than that which has been thus applied to the works of the great German. In the property of awakening reflection by bringing before the mind that series of events whose connection with the progress of modern civilization has been most direct and influential, and of recalling names which, to the American at least, sound like household words, they stand unrivalled. Our manners, our customs, our national constitution itself, may be said to have grown up beneath the shelter of these venerable structures, whose associations ally them in a manner scarcely less striking with those wider developments of social and political reason in which we believe the welfare of our species to be involved. Who is there, that, standing within ‘the great hall of William Rufus,’ can forget how often it has been the theatre of those mighty conflicts, in which, however slowly and reluctantly, error and prejudice have been compelled to relax their hold on the human mind? Dr. Johnson has spoken to us, in his usual stately phrase, of patriotism re-invigorated and of piety warmed amid the scenes of Marathon and Iona; but where is the Marathon which appeals to us so forcibly as the field consecrated by the blood of a Hamden or a Falkland? and where the Iona which is so eloquent with recollections as the walls which have echoed to the voices of a Ridley and a Barrow?
It is true indeed, that the recollections of many other lands, as associated with their monuments, lay much stronger hold upon the imagination than those of England. Of the former we might say that there was about them more of the element of poetry; of the latter, that they furnish an ampler share of materials for reflection. One great moral, ‘the comprehensive text of the Hebrew preacher,’ the invariable ‘vanity of vanities,’ is alike inscribed upon all the vestiges of human greatness. For the rest, a serene and touching beauty lingers around and hallows every relic which attests the hand of Phidias, or marks the country of Pericles and Epaminondas. No lapse of time, no process of decay, will ever wholly exorcise that spirit of stateliness and command which sits enthroned amid the ruins of the ‘Eternal City,’ as her own Marius once sate amid the ruins of a rival capital. But in all that regards a common standard of opinions, institutions and interests, and in the facility of reasoning as respects these, from the experience and practice of one time and people to those of another, we cannot but feel that a vast gulf has interposed between our own age and that which is commemorated by the monuments of Greece and Rome. The venerable genius of antiquity, seated among crumbling arches and broken columns, has but little to say to us respecting those questions which most deeply agitate and unceasingly perplex the busy and the thinking part of mankind at the present day. No response are we to expect from that quarter, concerning our bank-laws and our corn-laws; our systems of credit and of commerce; our endless disquisitions on the balance of power and of parties, on the rights of suffrage and of conscience. While we reserve to the theorist the privilege of adorning his theme by allusions to the polity of Lycurgus and Numa, we are sensible that the practical statesman who trusts himself to such examples will be constantly liable to be deluded by false parallels and imperfect analogies. A voice, like that which is said to have startled the mariner of old on the coasts of Ionia, and to have announced to him the cessation of oracles, comes to us from all the remains of pagan antiquity, warning us that the spirit of that ancient civilization has departed with its forms: and while it bids us look forward to a new destiny for the human race, it teaches us that the maxims and the oracles by which that destiny must be guided, are to be sought elsewhere than in the Republic of Plato and the grottos of Egeria.
Compared, then, with the monuments of classic antiquity, those of England claim the distinction of being associated with an order of things which is still existing and still in process of development: compared with those of the rest of christian Europe, they recall a progress, which, much more consistently than in other countries, has tended in the direction of popular rights and constitutional liberty. The reader of English history indeed has too often occasion to blush for the vices or mourn for the madness of his species, as the spectator who looks upon the grim fastnesses of the Tower, or into the gloomy purlieus of St. Giles’, will need but little else to remind him of the despotism and inequality which have pursued liberty into this her boasted and sea-girt retreat. But the Bastile, certainly, did not look in its day upon scenes of less flagrant atrocity than the ‘towers of Julius;’ while this advantage has always obtained in favor of the latter, that he who turned with disgust or terror from that image of despotic pride and violence, might behold at no great distance the piles of Westminster, the seats of law and legislation, where the irrepressible spirit of freedom in the bosom of the Commons was still nursing its resentment or muttering its remonstrances at seasons of the deepest gloom and depression. Henry VIII. might have heard that voice mingling with the groans of his victims; Charles II. could not altogether shut it out from the scenes of his midnight revel and debauchery. But no such hopeful contrast meets us in the features or the history of the neighboring continent. Democracy, it is true, the rough and hardy growth of the German forests, struck an earlier root and flourished at first with better promise there than in England. But this different fortune awaited it on the continent and the island; that in the former it was soon rooted out, and required in modern times the most violent and sanguinary efforts to reproduce it; in the latter it has constantly survived and struggled through every disaster toward a hopeful development. Such has been the different political fate of two branches of the great Teutonic family; let us observe whether some corresponding difference does not make itself manifest in the aspect of their respective countries.
It might have been readily anticipated that the maintenance of the popular right as a constitutional principle, operating through a long course of ages, would have produced not only a sturdy independence among the bulk of the English nation, but to some extent also, a local independence of the country as regards the capital and the court. It might have been foreseen, that instead of concentrating every separate ray of genius and renown into one grand halo around the throne, this habitual effort of the popular mind would have had a tendency to scatter those rays more equally over the land, making the green valley and the sequestered hamlet rejoice, each in the memory of its bard or hero. Such might have been our prognostic from the political condition of England as compared with that of the continent, and such will be found upon observation to have been the result. A French poet aptly describes the centralizing influences of his own capital as regards France, when he tells us that ‘at Paris people live, elsewhere they only vegetate.’ One great holocaust of talents, reputations and fortunes forever ascends there to the glory of the Grand Nation, absorbing every thing, assimilating every thing to itself, and leaving the country widowed of its interest and shorn of its appropriate graces. The poet, whose footsteps on the sunny plains of Provence would have long brightened in the traditions of its peasantry; the hero, whose name would have sufficed to confer undying interest on some old château of the Jura; the orator, whose leisure hours might have made some French Tusculum on the banks of the Loire forever fresh with the memory of associated honors; all these have alike hastened to Paris, identified themselves once for all with its crowds, and added whatever prestige might attend their own names through future ages to the already overshadowing prestige of that wonderful city. They point you there to the house where the great Corneille breathed his last; it is hard by the metropolitan church of St. Roche, and scarcely more than a bow-shot from the Tuilleries, as if the poet of Cinna and Polyeucte could not render up his breath in peace except in the neighborhood of those high dignitaries, into whose lips he had breathed while living so much of his own grandeur and elevation; but who reminds you of the hills of his native Normandy, or points you to the humble chamber or the peaceful valley where ‘gorgeous Tragedy in sceptred pall’ first swept before the eyes of his dawning fancy? No; if you would recall the memory of Corneille through the medium of places familiar with his presence when living, you must repair to the Hotel de Rambouillet, in one of the most noisy and unpoetic quarters of Paris.
Now with respect to England, all this is as nearly as possible reversed. The political influences spoken of before, operating no doubt with others of which it is unnecessary to speak, have acted dispersively