Biographia Literaria
harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper
than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual
cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard,
and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of
paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen
and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the
whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg,
and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is
uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and
republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that
might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste
which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work
are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards
of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and
yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the
human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of
nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and
country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments
for which men’s habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays
and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women
and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a
nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o’clock, we left the vessel, and
passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to
choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the
Boom House, Hamburg.
LETTER II
To a lady.
RATZEBURG.
Meine liebe Freundinn,
See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet
been six weeks in the country!--almost as fluently as English from my
neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as
we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day,
never fails to greet me with--“---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my
dearest Englander! vhee goes it!”--which is certainly a proof of great
generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.
I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my
proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,
from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification
and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your
sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than
by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix,
ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as
actress, directress, etc., or from the French, as mistress, duchess, and
the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in
every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann’s lady is the Frau
Amtmanninn--the secretary’s wife, (by the bye, the handsomest
woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau
Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel’s lady, die Frau Obristinn or
Colonellinn--and even the parson’s wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am
especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the
Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I know
it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend,
when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a
female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which the objection
will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than
abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their
perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a
sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be
loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--“This
is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has
blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn
where he is and what he has seen.” Well then! that I am settled at
Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither,
will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has
edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the
Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was
amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once
or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all
people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes
in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight
and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain,
wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver
bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of
the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But
I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible.--Therefore,
Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion, who, you recollect, speaks
the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of
confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man
of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed
about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners
from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction;
and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little
attentions, etc., remained, and without bustle, gesticulation,
or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanour exhibited the minute
philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of
the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something
strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the
word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more
easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high
moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner.
I have now in my mind’s eye a person whose life would scarcely stand
scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience;
and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea
of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed
with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter,
I believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us,
whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial
not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners
and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to
others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings
an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to
himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling
of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of
Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This
description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own
remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning
the causes of the corruption of eloquence. “What perfect gentlemen these
old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the
same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero’s
philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in
Pliny’s Letters I seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the
notion of a very fine gentleman.” You uttered the words as if you had
felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree
altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero
an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman,
in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare
in France, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period
of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But
the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the
Anglo-American democrats.
I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,
and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us
on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by
the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him
for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression
of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both
make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased therefore to
find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in
the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to
deliver my letters of recommendation.
I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I
actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time
in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a
liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his
first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I
began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being
so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella hats
shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of
petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul
with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which
stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled
through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a
stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap
behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses
on the back:
“Their visnomies seem’d like a goodly banner
Spread in defiance of all enemies.”
The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:
which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too
glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the
laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their
clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped
along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from
the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always
considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I
had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my
English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight
the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the
foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street,
some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say;
but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese
grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows,
so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt’s window
tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young
toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the
appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not
in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding
that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to
associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I
fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural
beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and
crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of
water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere,
and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all