LETTER XXIV.
TO R. COOPER, ESQ., COOPERSTOWN, N. Y.
Mr. Sotheby has had the good nature to take me with him, to see Mr. Coleridge, at Highgate. We found the bard living in a sort of New England house, that stands on what, in New England, would be called a green. The demon of speculation, however, was at work in the neighbourhood, and the place was being disfigured by trenches, timber, and bricks.
Our reception was frank and friendly, the poet coming out to us in his morning undress, without affectation, and in a very prosaic manner. Seeing a beautifully coloured little picture in the room, I rose to take a nearer view of it, when Mr. Coleridge told me it was by his friend Alston. It was a group of horsemen, returning from the chase, the centre of light being a beautiful grey horse. Mr. Alston had found this horse in some picture of Titian’s, and copied it for a study; but on Mr. Coleridge’s admiring it greatly, he had painted in two or three figures, with another horse or two, so as to tell a story, and presented it to his friend. Of this little work, Mr. Coleridge told the following singular anecdote.
A picture-dealer, of great skill in his calling, was in the habit of visiting the poet. One day this person entered, and his eye fell on the picture for the first time. “As I live!” he exclaimed, “a real Titian!” Mr. Coleridge was then eagerly questioned, as to where he had found the jewel, how long he had owned it, and by what means it came into his possession. Suddenly, the man paused, looked intently at the picture, turned his back towards it, as if to neutralize the effect of sight, and raising his hand, so as to feel the surface over his shoulder, he burst out in an ecstacy of astonishment, “It has not been painted twenty years!”
This story was told with great unction and a suitable action, and embellished with what a puritan would deem almost an oath. We then adjourned to the library. Here we sat half an hour, during most of which time, our host entertained us with his flow of language. I was amused with the contrast between the two poets, for Mr. Sotheby was as meek, quiet, subdued, simple, and regulated, as the other was redundant, imaginative, and overflowing. I thought the first occasionally checked the natural ebullitions of the latter, like a friend who rebuked his failings. One instance was a little odd, and pointed.
The conversation had wandered to phrenology, and Mr. Coleridge gave an account of the wonders that a professor had found in his own head, with a minuteness that caused his friend to fidget. To divert him from the subject, I told an anecdote that occurred just before I left America.
Meeting a votary of the science, one day, at a bookseller’s, he began to expatiate on it’s beauties. From theory he proceeded to practice, by making an analysis of my bumps. Tired of the manipulation, I turned him over to the head of the bookseller, who was standing by, professing to be a better judge of another man’s qualities, than of my own. Now this bookseller was a singularly devout man, and the phrenologist instinctively sought the bump of veneration, as the other bowed his head for him to feel it. The moment the fingers of the phrenologist touched the head, however, I saw that something was wrong, and I had the curiosity to put my own hand to the scull. In the spot where there should have been a bump, according to theory, there was positively a hollow. I looked at the phrenologist, and the phrenologist looked at me. At this moment, the bookseller was called away by a customer, and I said to my acquaintance, “well, what do you say to that?” “Say?—That I have no faith in that fellow’s religion!”
Both the gentlemen laughed at this story, but Mr. Sotheby gave it a point, that I had not anticipated, by intimating to Mr. Coleridge, pretty plainly, that when one discussed the subject of phrenology, he should not introduce his own bumps, as the subject of the experiments. Notwithstanding two or three little rebukes of this nature, the poets got on very well together; and finding that they had some rhymes to arrange between them, I left them to discuss the matter by themselves.
This was a poetical morning, for, on leaving Mr. Coleridge, we drove to the house of Miss Joanna Baillie, at Hampstead, a village that lies on the same range of low heights. Luckily, we found this clever, and respectable, and simple-minded woman in, and were admitted. I never knew a person of real genius who had any of the affectations of the smaller fry, on the subject of their feelings and sentiments. If Coleridge was scholastic and redundant, it was because he could not help himself; to use a homely figure, it was a sort of boiling over of the pot on account of the intense heat beneath.
It has often been my luckless fortune to meet with ladies who have achieved a common-place novel, or so, or who have written a Julia, or a Matilda, for a magazine, and who have ever after deemed it befitting their solemn vocation to assume lofty and didactic manners; but Miss Baillie had none of this. She is a little, quiet, feminine woman, who you would think might shrink from grappling with the horrors of a tragedy, and whom it would be possible to mistake for the maiden sister of the curate, bent only on her homely duties. Notwithstanding this simplicity, however, there was a deeply-seated earnestness about her, that bespoke the good-faith and honesty of the higher impulses within.
After all, is it not these impulses that make what the world calls genius? All men are sensible of truths, when they are fairly presented to them, and is the difference between the select few, and the many, any more than a quickening of the powers, by some physical incentive, which, in setting the whole in motion, throws into stronger light than common, the inventive, the beautiful, and the sublime?
Let this be as it may, Miss Joanna Baillie had to me, the air and appearance of a quiet enthusiast. She went with us to look at the village, and, as she walked ahead, to do the honours of the place, in her plain dark hat and cloak, I am certain, no one, at a glance, would have thought her little person contained the elements of a tragedy.
Something was said of a sketch of Napoleon, by Dr. Channing; a work I had not seen. Miss Baillie allowed that it was clever, but objected to some one of its positions, that, though it was right enough for an American, it was not so right for an Englishman. As I had never read the sketch, in question, I cannot tell you the precise point to which she alluded, and I mention it, as another proof of a tone of reasoning that is sufficiently common here, by which there is an abstract, and a quo ad hoc right, in all things that touch political systems. This peculiarity has frequently struck me, and I think it so marked, as to merit notice. I take it to be the inevitable consequence of all systems, in which the reasoning is adapted to the facts, and not the facts to the reasoning.
As we returned to town, we passed a group in which there was a ring for a boxing match. Not a prize fight, but a set-too, in anger. Mr. Sotheby expressed a very natural disgust, at this human, tendency, (not inhuman, remember,) and, then, with an exquisite naïveté, sympathized with me on the state of things, in this respect, in America, with some sufficiently obvious allusions to gouging! Although, I have not passed ten months in England, in the course of four visits, I believe I have witnessed more fighting in it, between men, than I ever saw in America. But of what use is it to tell this, here? We are democrats, and bound by all the pandects of monarchical and aristocratical opinion, to be truculent and quarrelsome; as, having no establishment, we are bound to be irreligious; and, so far from gaining credit, I should be set down, as one too sensitive to see the faults of his own country.
Conversing with a very clever woman, the other day, on the subject of field sports, she gave a sudden shudder, and exclaimed—“but, then your rattlesnakes!” I laughed, and told her, that I had never seen a rattlesnake, out of a cage, and that, particular places excepted, in a country nearly as large as Europe, they were unknown in America. She shook her head incredulously, closing the conversation, by observing, “that a country, which contained rattlesnakes, could scarcely be agreeable to walk in.”—What are a thousand leagues to such an opinion?
Such notions is the American condemned to meet with, here, not only daily, but hourly, and without ceasing, if he should mingle with the people. The prejudices of the English, against us, against the land in which we live, against the entire nation, morally, physically, and politically, circulate in their mental systems, like the blood in their veins, until they become as inseparable from the thoughts and feelings, as the fluid of life is indispensable to vitality. I say it, not in anger, but in sorrow, when I tell you, that I do not believe the annals of the world can present another such instance of a people, so blindly, ignorantly, and culpably misjudging a friendly nation, as the manner in which England, at this moment, in nearly all things, misjudges us. And yet, with this fact staring us in the face, known to every man who visits the country, a few serviles excepted, told to us by all foreigners, and as obvious as the sun at noon day, there is not, probably, an American, with the exception of political men who are sustained by party, that has a name of sufficient reputation to reach these shores, who does not hold his reputation at home, not only at the mercy of this country, but at the mercy of any miscreant in it, who may choose to insert three or four paragraphs, to his credit or discredit, in any of the periodicals of the day! Really, one is tempted to exclaim with that countryman, who heard a salute from a seventy-four, “now, do I know, we are a great people!”
My admiration of the growth and immensity of London, increases every time I have occasion to pass its frontiers. I was struck with a remark made to me, here, by Lord H——, who said—“the want of a capital is one of the greatest difficulties, with which you have to contend in America.” Of course, he meant by a capital, not a seat of government, but a large town, in which the intelligence and influence of the country, periodically assembled, and whence both might radiate, like warmth from the sun, throughout the nation.
It is not easy for any but close observers, to estimate the influence of such places as London and Paris. They contribute, essentially, to national identity, and national tone, and national policy: in short, to nationality—a merit in which we are almost entirely wanting. I do not mean national sensitiveness, which some fancy is patriotism, though merely provincial jealousy, but that comprehensive unity of feeling and understanding, that renders a people alive to its true dignity and interests, and prompt to sustain them, as well as independent in their opinions. We are even worse off, than most other nations would be without a capital, for we have an anomalous principle of dispersion in the state capitals. In nothing is the American government more wanting, than in tone in all its foreign relations. What American, out of his own country, feels any dependance on its protection? No one, who has any knowledge of its real action. Such an accumulation of wrongs may be made, as to touch the community, and then it is ready enough to fight; but the individual, who should urge his own injuries on the nation, as a case that called for interference, would be crushed by the antagonist interests of commerce, which is now the only collected and concentrated interest of the nation. An Englishman, or a Frenchman, goes into distant countries, with a consciousness that he leaves behind him, a concentrated and powerful sentiment of nationality, that will throw its protection around him, even to the remotest verge of civilization, but the case is altogether different with the American. If a man of reflection and knowledge, he knows that there is no concentrated feeling, at home, to sustain him; that the moment any case arises to set his claims to justice in opposition to the trading interests, he becomes obnoxious to the plastic ethics of commerce, and that there is no condensed community to sustain the government, in doing what is clearly its duty, and what may even be its inclination. Public opinion, half the time, is formed in America, by downright, impudent simulations; for little more is necessary than to assert, that Boston and Philadelphia think so and so, to get New York to join the cry. Such things are not so easily practised in a capital, where the intelligence of a nation is concentrated, which is the focus of facts, and, where men become habituated to the arts of the intriguing and selfish. I believe Lord H—— is right, and that the want of a capital, on a scale commensurate with that of the nation, is, indeed, one of the greatest difficulties, with which we have to contend. We shall never become truly a nation, until we get one. These notions will, probably, seem odd, and certainly new to you, as indeed they are new to me; but it is not a good mode of getting correct ideas of even oneself, to remain always at one’s own fireside.