The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon
guard particularly against such a temper; for it would double the evil,
instead of redressing the wrong. Nothing is so easy and inviting as
the retort of abuse and sarcasm; but it is a paltry and an unprofitable
contest. It is the alternative of a morbid mind, fretted into petulance,
rather than warmed into indignation. If England is willing to permit the
mean jealousies of trade, or the rancorous animosities of politics, to
deprave the integrity of her press, and poison the fountain of public
opinion, let us beware of her example. She may deem it her interest
to diffuse error, and engender antipathy, for the purpose of checking
emigration: we have no purpose of the kind to serve. Neither have we
any spirit of national jealousy to gratify; for as yet, in all our
rivalships with England, we are the rising and the gaining party.
There can be no end to answer, therefore, but the gratification of
resentment--a mere spirit of retaliation--and even that is impotent. Our
retorts are never republished in England; they fall short, therefore,
of their aim; but they foster a querulous and peevish temper among
our writers; they sour the sweet flow of our early literature, and
sow thorns and brambles among its blossoms. What is still worse, they
circulate through our own country, and, as far as they have effect,
excite virulent national prejudices. This last is the evil most
especially to be deprecated. Governed, as we are, entirely by public
opinion, the utmost care should be taken to preserve the purity of
the public mind. Knowledge is power, and truth is knowledge; whoever,
therefore, knowingly propagates a prejudice, wilfully saps the
foundation of his country’s strength.
The members of a republic, above all other men, should be candid and
dispassionate. They are, individually, portions of the sovereign mind
and sovereign will, and should be enabled to come to all questions of
national concern with calm and unbiassed judgments. From the peculiar
nature of our relations with England, we must have more frequent
questions of a difficult and delicate character with her, than with
any other nation,--questions that affect the most acute and excitable
feelings: and as, in the adjustment of these, our national measures
must ultimately be determined by popular sentiment, we cannot be
too anxiously attentive to purify it from all latent passion or
prepossession.
Opening, too, as we do, an asylum for strangers every portion of the
earth, we should receive all with impartiality. It should be our pride
to exhibit an example of one nation, at least, destitute of national
antipathies, and exercising, not merely the overt acts of hospitality,
but those more rare and noble courtesies which spring from liberality of
opinion.
What have we to do with national prejudices? They are the inveterate
diseases of old countries, contracted in rude and ignorant ages, when
nations knew but little of each other, and looked beyond their own
boundaries with distrust and hostility. We, on the contrary, have sprung
into national existence in an enlightened and philosophic age, when the
different parts of the habitable world, and the various branches of the
human family, have been indefatigably studied and made known to each
other; and we forego the advantages of our birth, if we do not shake off
the national prejudices, as we would the local superstitions, of the old
world.
But above all let us not be influenced by any angry feelings, so far
as to shut our eyes to the perception of what is really excellent and
amiable in the English character. We are a young people, necessarily an
imitative one, and must take our examples and models, in a great degree,
from the existing nations of Europe. There is no country more worthy of
our study than England. The spirit of her constitution is most analogous
to ours. The manners of her people--their intellectual activity--their
freedom of opinion--their habits of thinking on those subjects which
concern the dearest interests and most sacred charities of private
life, are all congenial to the American character; and, in fact, are all
intrinsically excellent: for it is in the moral feeling of the people
that the deep foundations of British prosperity are laid; and however
the superstructure may be timeworn, or overrun by abuses, there must be
something solid in the basis, admirable in the materials, and stable in
the structure of an edifice that so long has towered unshaken amidst the
tempests of the world.
Let it be the pride of our writers, therefore, discarding all feelings
of irritation, and disdaining to retaliate the illiberality of British
authors, to speak of the English nation without prejudice, and with
determined candor. While they rebuke the indiscriminating bigotry with
which some of our countrymen admire and imitate every thing English,
merely because it is English, let them frankly point out what is
really worthy of approbation. We may thus place England before us as
a perpetual volume of reference, wherein are recorded sound deductions
from ages of experience; and while we avoid the errors and absurdities
which may have crept into the page, we may draw thence golden maxims of
practical wisdom, wherewith to strengthen and to embellish our national
character.
RURAL LIFE IN ENGLAND.
Oh! friendly to the best pursuits of man,
Friendly to thought, to virtue and to peace,
Domestic life in rural pleasures past!
COWPER.
THE stranger who would form a correct opinion of the English character,
must not confine his observations to the metropolis. He must go forth
into the country; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit
castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wander through parks
and gardens; along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about country
churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other rural festivals; and cope
with the people in all their conditions, and all their habits and
humors.
In some countries, the large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of
the nation; they are the only fixed abodes of elegant and intelligent
society, and the country is inhabited almost entirely by boorish
peasantry. In England, on the contrary, the metropolis is a mere
gathering-place, or general rendezvous, of the polite classes, where
they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gayety and
dissipation, and, having indulged this kind of carnival, return again to
the apparently more congenial habits of rural life. The various orders
of society are therefore diffused over the whole surface of the kingdom,
and the more retired neighborhoods afford specimens of the different
ranks.
The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling. They
possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish
for the pleasures and employments of the country. This passion seems
inherent in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up
among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural
habits, and evince a tact for rural occupation. The merchant has his
snug retreat in the vicinity of the metropolis, where he often displays
as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of his flower-garden, and the
maturing of his fruits, as he does in the conduct of his business,
and the success of a commercial enterprise. Even those less fortunate
individuals, who are doomed to pass their lives in the midst of din and
traffic, contrive to have something that shall remind them of the green
aspect of nature. In the most dark and dingy quarters of the city, the
drawing-room window resembles frequently a bank of flowers; every spot
capable of vegetation has its grass-plot and flower-bed; and every
square its mimic park, laid out with picturesque taste, and gleaming
with refreshing verdure.
Those who see the Englishman only in town, are apt to form an
unfavorable opinion of his social character. He is either absorbed in
business, or distracted by the thousand engagements that dissipate time,
thought, and feeling, in this huge metropolis. He has, therefore, too
commonly, a look of hurry and abstraction. Wherever he happens to be, he
is on the point of going somewhere else; at the moment he is talking
on one subject, his mind is wandering to another; and while paying a
friendly visit, he is calculating how he shall economize time so as to
pay the other visits allotted to the morning. An immense metropolis,
like London, is calculated to make men selfish and uninteresting.
In their casual and transient meetings, they can but deal briefly in
commonplaces. They present but the cold superfices of character--its
rich and genial qualities have no time to be warmed into a flow.
It is in the country that the Englishman gives scope to his natural
feelings. He breaks loose gladly from the cold formalities and negative
civilities of town; throws off his habits of shy reserve, and becomes
joyous and free-hearted. He manages to collect round him all the
conveniences and elegancies of polite life, and to banish its
restraints. His country-seat abounds with every requisite, either for
studious retirement, tasteful gratification, or rural exercise. Books,
paintings, music, horses, dogs, and sporting implements of all kinds,
are at hand. He puts no constraint, either upon his guests or himself,
but, in the true spirit of hospitality, provides the means of enjoyment,
and leaves every one to partake according to his inclination.
The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is
called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied Nature
intently, and discovered an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and
harmonious combinations. Those charms which, in other countries, she
lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled round the haunts of
domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and
spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.
Nothing can be more imposing than the magnificence of English park
scenery. Vast lawns that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here
and there clumps of gigantic trees, heaping up rich piles of foliage.
The solemn pomp of groves and woodland glades, with the deer trooping in
silent herds across them; the hare, bounding away to the covert; or the
pheasant, suddenly bursting upon the wing. The brook, taught to wind in
natural meanderings, or expand into a glassy lake--the sequestered pool,
reflecting the quivering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping on its
bosom, and the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters; while
some rustic temple, or sylvan statue, grown green and dank with age,
gives an air of classic sanctity to the seclusion.
These are but a few of the features of park scenery; but what most
delights me, is the creative talent with which the English decorate the
unostentatious abodes of middle life. The rudest habitation, the most
unpromising and scanty portion of land, in the hands of an Englishman of
taste, becomes a little paradise. With a nicely discriminating eye,
he seizes at once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his mind the
future landscape. The sterile spot grows into loveliness under his hand;
and yet the operations of art which produce the effect are scarcely to
be perceived. The cherishing and training of some trees; the cautious
pruning of others; the nice distribution of flowers and plants of tender
and graceful foliage; the introduction of a green slope of velvet turf;
the partial opening to a peep of blue distance, or silver gleam of
water;-all these are managed with a delicate tact, a pervading yet quiet
assiduity, like the magic touchings with which a painter finishes up a
favorite picture.
The residence of people of fortune and refinement in the country, has