But time is limited and one must quickly set to work. Murray is out of town; so is Bentley, the publisher; but Bentley will come up from Brighton to suit one’s convenience. In the meanwhile, one can drop in for Julien’s Promenade Concert at Drury Lane, see the pictures at the National Gallery, prowl through Chancery Lane, or go down into Cheapside to witness the surviving pomp and gilded fustian of the Lord Mayor’s show, exploring the Guildhall the next day, in the company of an affable functionary in the finance department whom one picks up, by chance, in the street, to witness a bit of infernal charity, worthy of Dis itself: a horde of beggars pours into the tawny-warm twilight of the hall, with all its flags and banners and fine timbering, to pick and grab at the remains of hams, fowls, pastries, left over from the high-and-mightinesses of the previous day. A comical sight at first; but on slight reflection, not comical: no, not comical. Thank heaven, civilization has not gone quite that far in America.
The world that holds Lord Mayor’s shows--and the starvation and misery behind the show--also holds a bus-ride, on a mellow autumn Sunday, through Piccadilly, by Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and then on, past red cottages and little taverns and open commons, through Hammersmith, Chiswick, Kew, and across the Thames to Richmond Hill, where, at the crest, overlooking a long stretch of parkland, one can see the distant castle of Windsor in the mist beyond, with the Thames itself flashing occasionally like a fish’s back in the sun, in the valley between. After that, one is ready for the sober crimson of Hampton Court--the Van Dycks and the Titians and the Rembrandts: this is what one means by a cultivated life. Must one be harried, must one struggle over vain things, must one know so much temporal bitterness, hardship, evil, in order to live? Not the Marquesans: not the Olympians of England: they both live as the lilies, planting themselves in a nourishing soil, drinking in the sun, growing, forming pollen and fertilizing and becoming fertilized, flowering and seeding. That is life, not the struggling, the harrying, the deprivation. But tomorrow one must leave Rembrandt and Hampton Court far behind: one must dicker for good terms and a fat advance with Bentley.
The greyness of London comes over one: the glacial greyness of St. Paul’s: the brown greyness of Bloomsbury: the smeary greyness of the Strand: the dank blue greyness of the Temple. The choir chanting in St. Paul’s leaves one feeling wan and unhappy. What is Lizzie doing? Where dat old man? If only they were here, or better, if one could be with them for a little while, and come back to the quiet inwardness of one’s days, warmed, refreshed, revivified. One could absorb so much more, if one were settled and secure.
How near one feels to these English, these people who like good solid food and ale and port, who have a manly straightness in their dealings, merchants whose signature makes paper valuable, poets who have created in words poems that atone for all the pictures that remain unpainted and all the music that remains unsung in the English soul: hearty, robust, gay, ready to turn a farce in Beaumont and Fletcher or in a market Punch and Judy show, but grave, serious, at bottom very deep: no one, not Dante, had struck more ruthlessly at the sinister meanings of life than Shakespeare, no one had been more relentless and sardonic than Swift or Hogarth--and yet with what tenderness, what warm love of life, in Swift’s letters to Stella or Hogarth’s portrait of the Shrimp-girl, as fresh as a newly opened wild-flower. A country of sound men, buxom girls, beautiful tidy fields, snug inns--and terrible revealers of life’s immense blackness. How intense the candle in those brave hands: how sullen and eventful the grave shadows that swarm around it!
But that other England--one was very distant from it. The England of wealth and station and reputation and family in the county sense, with its arctic Oh? and its hard, oysterlike rudeness, a stupid England, but influential in everything, governing its very enemies by choosing the issues over which they would fight. The England that had kicked an innocent youth out of a Liverpool club and would doubtless do the same, with less provocation, to a distinguished American author whose reputation was growing in France and Germany: the England of hard-faced men who rolled the wheels of progress over usury and penury as twin rails: the England that had impressed seamen, struck down its continental rivals, enclosed the commons, introduced an inhuman system of industry, and defended privilege and empty title as the very cornerstones of Civil Order--in short, the England of snobs and flunkeys and a complacent, servile, self-righteous middle class--New York, to be sure, without a hinterland that was still free and unclaimed.
How trivial this other England essentially is. What a stupid lot at Murray’s party, and what a bore old Lockhart was, with his ghastly, grinning, mincing way: such a moth-eaten lion! Oh, conventionalism, what a ninny thou art! How completely one felt out of it, how superior one felt to these superiorities. Perhaps there was such a thing as real aristocracy: one wonders if the Scotch Melvilles would show it, or whether one might get a taste of the real thing at the Duke of Rutland’s own seat: but these fishy eyes, these stupid faces, this intellectual torpor, do not reassure one. Blackwood’s had printed a long ponderous review of Redburn: that was a comical black mark against the reigning Tory intellect, wasting good white paper on a book one knows oneself to be trash, which one wrote to buy tobacco with. In a society where the mask, the reputation, the hallmark count for so much, how little any one is concerned with the substance beneath! One is a well-known author: a success: ergo, Blackwood’s takes Redburn seriously, not fathoming how little it is worth serious criticism.
One meets the publishers one by one, Bentley, who did Mardi, Murray, who published Typee and Omoo, Mr. Longmans, Mr. Chapman, Mr. Bohn, Mr. Moxon, who was Charles Lamb’s crony; and when one can’t make the deal one had hoped for, one goes down the line; but the answer is always the same: the copyright is unsatisfactory, the work may be pirated in America; and they cannot risk two hundred pounds on the rights for the first thousand copies. The prospects are not too pleasant; but if the matter could be settled at once one wouldn’t have the excuse and the opportunity to visit the Dulwich Gallery, remote from London, but full of splendid treasures; one couldn’t sit with the Greenwich pensioners at Greenwich; one couldn’t spend a Sunday morning, a little too conspicuous for comfort, at the services in St. Bridget’s; nor could one discuss metaphysics with Dr. Adler at the Edinburgh Castle, dark-walled and like a beefsteak in colour, where the ale was so mellow and the waiters so polite. One absorbs a city by food and drink, as well as by sight and conversation: the Mitre--Johnson’s tavern--and the Cock and the Rainbow--Tennyson’s haunts: the little French hotel in Soho where one has morning coffee and a jelly omelette, or, to know the worst about life in London, a cup of brackish coffee, a dirty roll, an unappetizing piece of bacon, on a dank, foggy morning in a cheap eating-house: such depression of taste, sight, sound, feeling adds a new circle to life’s possible hells.
There are bright spots that serve for perpetual contrast: hours spent over the bookstalls in Great Green Street and Lincoln’s Inn, picking out folios of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Browne, coming, with a sudden recognition of kinship, upon De Quincey’s dreams of an Opium Eater, with passages so much like one’s best feats in Mardi; or a sumptuous dinner with Mr. Bates at East Sheen, nine miles from Richmond, where one meets Lord Ashburton’s nephew, and Baron This and Baroness That and Mr. Peabody the Boston merchant, a warm old soul: where the glasses and the silver are brilliant and the conversation ripples in reflection of it, or at least seems to, as one intricate piece of French cookery gives place to another, as white wine, champagne, hock, claret, port, and Madeira follow in grand procession: Taji dined no better among the five-and-twenty kings.
Yes: but then the melancholy of a day when one has spoken no more than “Good morning” to the slavey: when a frightful nightmare fills with a turbid residue the commonplaces of the diurnal routine: when one feels lonely and apart in the haunts that thrilled one most: when one sits at night in a damp chamber, thinking back to poor Gansevoort, who, two years before, three, was sitting in such a chamber, in the midst of such a silence, withdrawn, homesick, alone. What deep thoughts one seems on the brink of in that silence and solitude: no wonder the Greeks made silence the vestibule of the mysteries. But the weariness of this inward communion, too--oh, solitude, where are thy charms! One’s desires are fulfilled indeed: but always wryly, never in the right proportion....