ENGLISH TRAITS
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chapter I _First Visit to England
I have been twice in England. In 1833, on my return from a
short tour in Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed from Boulogne, and
landed in London at the Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning;
there were few people in the streets; and I remember the pleasure of
that first walk on English ground, with my companion, an American
artist, from the Tower up through Cheapside and the Strand, to a
house in Russell Square, whither we had been recommended to good
chambers. For the first time for many months we were forced to check
the saucy habit of travellers' criticism, as we could no longer speak
aloud in the streets without being understood. The shop-signs spoke
our language; our country names were on the door-plates; and the
public and private buildings wore a more native and wonted front.
Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted to the
men of Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh Review, -- to Jeffrey,
Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott, Playfair, and De Quincey; and my
narrow and desultory reading had inspired the wish to see the faces
of three or four writers, -- Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De
Quincey, and the latest and strongest contributor to the critical
journals, Carlyle; and I suppose if I had sifted the reasons that led
me to Europe, when I was ill and was advised to travel, it was mainly
the attraction of these persons. If Goethe had been still living, I
might have wandered into Germany also. Besides those I have named,
(for Scott was dead,) there was not in Britain the man living whom I
cared to behold, unless it were the Duke of Wellington, whom I
afterwards saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce.
The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people who
can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they are
prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to
yours. The conditions of literary success are almost destructive of
the best social power, as they do not leave that frolic liberty which
only can encounter a companion on the best terms. It is probable you
left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right
mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to
play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, however, found writers
superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief, that a
strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments, and give
one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and a
larger horizon.
On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833, I find nothing
to publish in my memoranda of visits to places. But I have copied
the few notes I made of visits to persons, as they respect parties
quite too good and too transparent to the whole world to make it
needful to affect any prudery of suppression about a few hints of
those bright personalities.
At Florence, chief among artists I found Horatio Greenough, the
American sculptor. His face was so handsome, and his person so well
formed, that he might be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of
his Medora, and the figure of a colossal Achilles in clay, were
idealizations of his own. Greenough was a superior man, ardent and
eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation and magnanimity. He
believed that the Greeks had wrought in schools or fraternities, -the genius of the master imparting his design to his friends, and
inflaming them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new hand,
with equal heat, continued the work; and so by relays, until it was
finished in every part with equal fire. This was necessary in so
refractory a material as stone; and he thought art would never
prosper until we left our shy jealous ways, and worked in society as
they. All his thoughts breathed the same generosity. He was an
accurate and a deep man. He was a votary of the Greeks, and
impatient of Gothic art. His paper on Architecture, published in
1843, announced in advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on the
_morality_ in architecture, notwithstanding the antagonism in their
views of the history of art. I have a private letter from him, -later, but respecting the same period, -- in which he roughly
sketches his own theory. "Here is my theory of structure: A
scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to functions and to site;
an emphasis of features proportioned to their _gradated_ importance
in function; color and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied
by strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason for each decision;
the entire and immediate banishment of all make-shift and
make-believe."
Greenough brought me, through a common friend, an invitation
from Mr. Landor, who lived at San Domenica di Fiesole. On the 15th
May I dined with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living
in a cloud of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house
commanding a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his books, or
magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath, -an untamable petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were
just or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that
haughty mind, and he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He
praised the beautiful cyclamen which grows all about Florence; he
admired Washington; talked of Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, Beaumont
and Fletcher. To be sure, he is decided in his opinions, likes to
surprise, and is well content to impress, if possible, his English
whim upon the immutable past. No great man ever had a great son, if
Philip and Alexander be not an exception; and Philip he calls the
greater man. In art, he loves the Greeks, and in sculpture, them
only. He prefers the Venus to every thing else, and, after that, the
head of Alexander, in the gallery here. He prefers John of Bologna
to Michael Angelo; in painting, Raffaelle; and shares the growing
taste for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek histories he
thought the only good; and after them, Voltaire's. I could not make
him praise Mackintosh, nor my more recent friends; Montaigne very
cordially, -- and Charron also, which seemed undiscriminating. He
thought Degerando indebted to "Lucas on Happiness" and "Lucas on
Holiness"! He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey?
He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I did not fail
to go, and this time with Greenough. He entertained us at once with
reciting half a dozen hexameter lines of Julius Caesar's! -- from
Donatus, he said. He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was
necessary, and undervalued Burke, and undervalued Socrates;
designated as three of the greatest of men, Washington, Phocion, and
Timoleon; much as our pomologists, in their lists, select the three
or the six best pears "for a small orchard;" and did not even omit to
remark the similar termination of their names. "A great man," he
said, "should make great sacrifices, and kill his hundred oxen,
without knowing whether they would be consumed by gods and heroes, or
whether the flies would eat them." I had visited Professor Amici, who
had shown me his microscopes, magnifying (it was said) two thousand
diameters; and I spoke of the uses to which they were applied.
Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, said, "the
sublime was in a grain of dust." I suppose I teased him about recent
writers, but he professed never to have heard of Herschel, _not even
by name._ One room was full of pictures, which he likes to show,
especially one piece, standing before which, he said "he would give
fifty guineas to the man that would swear it was a Domenichino." I
was more curious to see his library, but Mr. H----, one of the
guests, told me that Mr. Landor gives away his books, and has never
more than a dozen at a time in his house.
Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which the
English delight to indulge, as if to signalize their commanding
freedom. He has a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and
inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by what chance converted to
letters, in which there is not a style nor a tint not known to him,
yet with an English appetite for action and heroes. The thing done
avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step
forward, is worth more than all the censures. Landor is strangely
undervalued in England; usually ignored; and sometimes savagely
attacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be right, or wrong, and
is quickly forgotten; but year after year the scholar must still go
back to Landor for a multitude of elegant sentences -- for wisdom,
wit, ...
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