AN AMERICAN VIEW OF ENGLAND.*

THE judgment passed by eminent foreigners upon England is always interesting and instructive. To see ourselves as others see us should be the wish of a nation, as well as of an individual. Many of our faults, indeed, are visible enough, without the spectacles of strangers. Our strength is sometimes the source of our weakness. We are too proud, too prone to be contentious, too apt to suppose that we must invariably be right and all who differ from us wrong, too ready to think that the wide earth is made for the special benefit of the English race, that,—

"Seas roll to waft us, suns to light us rise, Our footstool earth, our canopy the skies."

All honest criticism, then, ought to be welcome, and when it comes to us from America, and from two of the most original and thoughtful men America has produced, it has a value which is not limited to the time in which it was written.

The volumes before us, as all our readers know, have been, though perhaps in a less attractive form, for many years before the public. Emerson's first visit to England was in 1833, the year in which the first Reformed House of Parliament assembled; a second visit was paid in 1847, and the result of these visits is to be found in English Traits, in which the writer expresses his opinion of what he saw with remarkable vividness and force. With the exception of an interval chiefly spent in Italy, Haw- thorne lived in England from the spring of 1853 to the summer of 1860. Our Old Home appeared after his return to the States. He had taken notes abundantly while with us, and these notes, which convey the first impressions of an original mind, are even more interesting than the carefully written book formed with their assistance. We are glad that a new edition of the works of Emerson and of Hawthorne published simultaneously in this -country affords us an opportunity of returning to volumes which can never cease to charm.

They differ considerably in character. Emerson takes, for the most part, a rapid glance at certain points in our life which strike him most forcibly: To see England well, he says, needs a. hundred years ; and he is content to take a broad view of the land and the race, marking our peculiar characteristics and the secret of our power, our faults and virtues, our literature and religion, our foreign policy and domestic life. Hawthorne notes these traits, too, in his own delightful way, but he loves to loiter about towns and villages, to enter churches and cathedrals, to visit almshouses and cottages, to explore the hidden recesses of the country, and to express his affection, not wholly untempered with another feeling, for whatever age has made venerable. To both writers, England is emphatically the " Old Home," and even their fault-finding is that of sons proud of a worthy parent. Let us note cursorily some of the opinions they express about this little island and its inhabitants.

Forty years ago, Emerson was struck by the patriotism of the race, by the way in which we held together, by our trust in each other ; and he observes that difference of rank does not divide the national heart. In politics and war, he says, Englishmen hold together as by hooks of steel. He is struck, too, with " the fine physique and personal vigour of this robust race," and re- gards as one source of our power the dislike of change. "As soon," he writes, as Englishmen "have rid themselves of some grievance, and settled the better practice, they make haste to fix it as a finality, and never wish to hear of alteration more." But we are too stiff and precise, and " in this Gibraltar of pro- priety, mediocrity gets intrenched and consolidated and founded • Emerson's English Traits and Representative Men. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. London: Macmillan and Co. 1883.

Oar Old Hems and Bnytish Note-Books. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. 2 rob. London: Kevin Paul and Co. 1883.

in adamant" As compared with Americans, the Englishman is said to be cheerful and contented ; when he wishes for amusement he goes to work, and his hilarity is like an attack of fever. One of his highest virtues is the love of truth and liberty, one of his most grievous defects the homage paid to gold ; yet Emerson might have added that in a country like England rank shares the homage with wealth, whereas the millionaire in America shines by his wealth alone. The frame of our society is, he says, aristocratic, the taste of the people loyal, and, he adds, "English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in." As a republican, Emerson sees the good as well as evil side of an aristocracy ; the Church of England, on the contrary, though praised for many virtues, is viewed only on one side. To him, it is not a living power, but an institution existing on tradition, and, moreover, inextricably connected " with the cause of public order, with politics and the funds." With this able writer's creed, or rather lack of creed, such a conclusion is in- evitable; but he is just in pointing out several palpable evils in Church organisation. The growth, however, that of late years has perceptibly influenced the National Church is the best reply to Emerson's animadversion, and already many of his once forcible words on the subject have the decay of age upon them. The loyalty to truth for which he praises us generously in one chapter can be scarcely said to agree with the inference that in accepting the Church of England, to which the English are passionately. attached, they are content

to "take in a lie" at the same time. We are dreadfully given to cant, he says ; but cant means hypocrisy, a vice incompatible with the pervading love of truth for which he gives us credit, If it -hurts our self-love to be informed that we have a taint of

hypocrisy in the blood, it is cheering to be told by an American of Emerson's high mark that only the English race can be trusted with freedom, that our culture is not an outside varnish, that England has yielded more able men in five hundred years than any other nation, and that if the American system is more democratic and humane, " yet the American people do not yield better or more able men, or more inventions, or books, or benefits, than the English." " Congress," adds Emerson, "is not wiser or better than Parliament."

There is a solid value in the English Traits which we respect and admire, but we do not know that these masterly sketches of English character give us a greater interest in the author. Haw-

thorne, though he sees some of our faults as vividly as Emerson, and gives us many hard hits, attracts us to him irresistibly- The reason is not far to seek. American though he be to the backbone, his affection for England is that of a lover and a child, and be has a hundred things to say about her that make us proud and pleased. He declares, indeed, that he can never in a foreign land forget the distinction between English and American. Why should he P But be says also, on leaving England for Italy, that " it seems a cold and shivering thing to go anywhere else." And with what heartiness does he appreciate the beauty of our scenery ! Nay, he has even kind words for the climate, the only thing belonging to Englishmen, he says slyly, of which they are not proud. A perfect summer day in England is exquisite enough, be observes, "to atone for the whole year's atmospherical delinquencies. Italy has nothing like it nor America." And the beauty of England makes him desperate, so impossible is it to describe it. To be reproduced with pen and pencil, " it requires to be dwelt upon long, and to be wrought out with the nicest touches." Again, writing of Wordsworth's country, Hawthorne says :-

"I question whether any part of the world looks so beautiful as England—this part of England, at least—on a fine summer morning. It makes one think the more cheerfully of human life, to see such a bright, universal verdure ; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages—not cottages of gentility, but dwellings of the labouring poor ; such nice villas along the road-side, so tastefully contrived for comfort and beanty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and after-thought of people who mean to live in them a great while, and feel as if their children might live in them also, and so they plant trees to overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines np against their walls, and there live for the future

in another sense than we Americans do Certainly, England can present a more attractive face than we can."

Passages like this, some of them longer, and all expressing a tender and affectionate sympathy with the beauty of the " Old Home," occur frequently. But this sympathy is not confined to natural objects. For London, the dream-city of his youth, Hawthorne at once acquired a home-feeling. He found it better than his dream, and is never weary of losing himself in its streets, and wandering without any particular object in view. St. Paul's appeared to him "unspeakably grand and noble, standing in sublime repose in the very heart and densest tumult of London." He was struck with its airy spaces, and

observes that, unlike a Gothic church, it is fall of light, and that light is proper to it:— "It is a most stately edifice, and its characteristic seems to be to continue for ever fresh and new ; whereas, such a church as West- minster Abbey must have been as venerable as it is now from the first day when it grew to be an edifice at all. How wonderful man is in his works ! How glad I am that there can be two such admir- able churches, in their opposite styles, as St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey !"

To St. Paul's he returns again and again, always with fresh delight; and of the Abbey he says, "I think I never could be weary of it; and when I finally leave England, it will be this spot which I shall feel moat unwilling to quit for ever."

This genuine enthusiasm is felt by Hawthorne for all the

4' things of fame " he finds scattered so thickly throughout England. "The world," he says, "surely has not another place like Oxford ; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to

leave it, for it would take a lifetime, and more than one, to com- prehend and enjoy it satisfactorily." York Minster impressed him as the most wonderful work which ever came from the hands of man, and the view of Durham "was grand, venerable, and sweet all at once." Of the great Cathedrals, Hawthorne writes with a sensibility and a glow of feeling which we who have them so near to us, and can see them so often, may per- haps fail to comprehend.

It would be unjust to conclude from the few passages quoted that Hawthorne has a universal affection for everything Eng- lish. He sees plenty to blame in our institutions, as we have already intimated, and thinks that they are by no means so stable as they seem to be. On many social evils, which bode ill for the future of the country, he writes with something like indignation; but for the island itself, and for the lovely objects on it, he has little to say but what is good. And while writing less of people than of places, he does express frankly and warmly the kindness he received from all sorts and conditions of men in England, and not from those only who could appreciate his peculiar genius. He says, indeed, that an American seldom feels quite as if he were at home among the English people; but this sentiment, it is evident, had no strong hold upon him. Hawthorne was a very reserved man, and did not thaw to strangers readily, but when once the heart was touched no one could be more genial. The friendship felt for him by many in this country was undoubtedly reciprocal, and the confidence of friendship carries with it as few things else can, the sense of home. After all, the obvious fact remains that England can never be what the States are to an American, and it would have been strange if, in the sad moments which come inevitably to a spirit finely touched like Hawthorne's, he had not felt the loneliness of a stranger in a land that was not his.

This imperfect notice of volumes that deserve to be univer- sally read has been written with a special purpose, and we shall end it, after the custom of the old fabulists, with a moral. If to Americans England be the most interesting country in the Old World, what should it be to ourselves ? Its beauty is exhaustless, its associations numberless, its objects of interest so varied that every taste may be gratified, and yet foreign travel has such mystic charms—and we are far from saying it is without its charms—that thousands of wealthy Englishmen spend their time and wealth upon the Continent year after year, whose knowledge of their native land is confined to places devoted to fashion or to sport. " One may have lived in much larger countries," says Mr. Louis Jennings, " but there are none which it takes so long to get tired of as England." This is true, but the men and women to whom we are alluding do not prefer foreign travel because they are weary of their native country, but because they know so little about it.