Two Years Ago, Volume I

Two Years Ago, Volume I
Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley

Two Years Ago, Volume I

INTRODUCTORY

It may seem a somewhat Irish method of beginning the story of "Two Years Ago" by a scene which happened but a month since. And yet, will not the story be on that very account a better type of many a man's own experiences! How few of us had learnt the meaning of "Two Years Ago," until this late quiet autumn time; and till Christmas, too, with its gaps in the old ring of friendly faces, never to be filled up again on earth, began to teach us somewhat of its lesson.

Two years ago, while pestilence was hovering over us and ours; while the battle-roar was ringing in our ears; who had time to think, to ask what all that meant; to seek for the deep lesson which we knew must lie beneath? Two years ago was the time for work; for men to do with all their might whatsoever their hands found to do. But now the storm has lulled once more; the air has cleared awhile, and we can talk calmly over all the wonders of that sudden, strange, and sad "Two years ago."

So felt, at least, two friends who went down, just one week before Christmas-day, to Whitbury, in Berkshire. Two years ago had come to one of them, as to thousands more, the crisis of his life; and he was talking of it with his companion; and was on his way, too, to learn more of that story, which this book contains, and in which he had borne his part.

They were both of them men who would at first sight interest a stranger. The shorter of the two he might have seen before—at picture sales, Royal Academy meetings, dinner parties, evening parties, anywhere and everywhere, in town; for Claude Mellot is a general favourite, and a general guest.

He is a tiny, delicate-featured man, with a look of half-lazy enthusiasm about his beautiful face, which reminds you much of Shelley's portrait; only he has what Shelley had not, clustering auburn curls, and a rich brown beard, soft as silk. You set him down at once as a man of delicate susceptibility, sweetness, thoughtfulness; probably (as he actually is) an artist.

His companion is a man of statelier stamp, tall, dark, and handsome, with a very large forehead; if the face has a fault, it is that the mouth is too small; that, and the expression of face too, and the tone of voice, seem to indicate over-refinement, possibly a too aristocratic exclusiveness. He is dressed like a very fine gentleman indeed, and looks and talks like one. Aristocrat, however, in the common sense of the word, he is not; for he is a native of the Model Republic, and sleeping-partner in a great New York merchant firm.

He is chatting away to Claude Mellot, the artist, about Frémont's election; and on that point seems to be earnest enough, though patient and moderate.

"My dear Claude, our loss is gain. The delay of the next four years was really necessary, that we might consolidate our party. And I leave you to judge, if it has grown to its present size in but a few months, what dimensions it will have attained before the next election. We require the delay, too, to discover who are our really best men; not merely as orators, but as workers; and you English ought to know better than any nation, that the latter class of men are those whom the world most needs—that though Aaron may be an altogether inspired preacher, yet it is only slow-tongued practical Moses, whose spokesman he is, who can deliver Israel from their taskmasters. Besides, my dear fellow, we really want the next four years—'tell it not in Gath'—to look about us and see what is to be done. Your wisest Englishmen justly complain of us, that our 'platform' is as yet a merely negative one; that we define what the South shall not do, but not what the North shall. Ere four years be over, we will have a 'positive platform,' at which you shall have no cause to grumble."

"I still think with Marie, that your 'positive platform' is already made for you, plain as the sun in heaven, as the lightnings of Sinai. Free those slaves at once and utterly!"

"Impatient idealist! By what means? By law, or by force? Leave us to draw a cordon sanitaire round the tainted States, and leave the system to die a natural death, as it rapidly will if it be prevented from enlarging its field. Don't fancy that a dream of mine. None know it better than the Southerners themselves. What makes them ready just now to risk honour, justice, even the common law of nations and humanity, in the struggle for new slave territory? What but the consciousness that without virgin soil, which will yield rapid and enormous profit to slave labour, they and their institution must be ruined!"

"The more reason for accelerating so desirable a consummation, by freeing the slaves at once."

"Humph!" said Stangrave with a smile. "Who so cruel at times as your too benevolent philanthropist? Did you ever count the meaning of those words? Disruption of the Union, an invasion of the South by the North; and an internecine war, aggravated by the horrors of a general rising of the slaves, and such scenes as Hayti beheld sixty years ago. If you have ever read them, you will pause ere you determine to repeat them on a vaster scale."

"It is dreadful, Heaven knows, even in thought! But, Stangrave, can any moderation on your part ward it off? Where there is crime, there is vengeance; and without shedding of blood is no remission of sin."

"God knows! It may be true: but God forbid that I should ever do aught to hasten what may come. Oh, Claude, do you fancy that I, of all men, do not feel at moments the thirst for brute vengeance?"

Claude was silent.

"Judge for yourself, you who know all—what man among us Northerners can feel, as I do, what those hapless men may have deserved?—I who have day and night before me the brand of their cruelty, filling my heart with fire? I need all my strength, all my reason, at times to say to myself, as I say to others—'Are not these slaveholders men of like passions with yourself? What have they done which you would not have done in their place?' I have never read that key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. I will not even read this Dred, admirable as I believe it to be."

"Why should you?" said Claude. "Have you not a key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, more pathetic than any word of man's or woman's?"

"But I do not mean that! I will not read them, because I have the key to them in my own heart, Claude: because conscience has taught me to feel for the Southerner as a brother, who is but what I might have been; and to sigh over his misdirected courage and energy, not with hatred, not with contempt: but with pity, all the more intense the more he scorns that pity; to long, not merely for the slaves' sake, but for the masters' sake, to see them—the once chivalrous gentlemen of the South—delivered from the meshes of a net which they did not spread for themselves, but which was round their feet, and round their fathers', from the day that they were born. You ask me to destroy these men. I long to save them from their certain doom!"

"You are right, and a better Christian than I am, I believe. Certainly they do need pity, if any sinners do; for slavery seems to be—to judge from Mr. Brooks's triumph—a great moral curse, and a heavier degradation to the slaveholder himself, than it can ever be to the slave."

"Then I would free them from that curse, that degradation. If the negro asks, 'Am I not a man and a brother?' have they no right to ask it also? Shall I, pretending to love my country, venture on any rash step which may shut out the whole Southern white population from their share in my country's future glory? No; have but patience with us, you comfortable liberals of the Old World, who find freedom ready made to your hands, and we will pay you all. Remember, we are but children yet; our sins are the sins of youth,—greediness, intemperance, petulance, self-conceit. When we are purged from our youthful sins, England will not be ashamed of her child."

"Ashamed of you? I often wish I could make Americans understand the feeling of England to you—the honest pride, as of a mother who has brought into the world the biggest baby that ever this earth beheld, and is rather proud of its stamping about and beating her in its pretty pets. Only the old lady does get a little cross when she hears you talk of the wrongs which you have endured from her, and teaching your children to hate us as their ancient oppressors, on the ground of a foolish war, of which every Englishman is utterly ashamed, and in the result of which he glories really as much as you do."

"Don't talk of 'you,' Claude! You know well what I think on that point. Never did one nation make the amende honorable to another more fully and nobly than you have to us; and those who try to keep up the quarrel are—I won't say what. But the truth is, Claude, we have had no real sorrows; and therefore we can afford to play with imaginary ones. God grant that we may not have our real ones—that we may not have to drink of the cup of which our great mother drank two years ago!"

"It was a wholesome bitter for us; and it may be so for you likewise: but we will have no sad forebodings on the eve of the blessed Christmas-tide. He lives, He loves, He reigns; and all is well, for we are His, and He is ours."

"Ah," said Stangrave, "when Emerson sneered at you English for believing your Old Testament, he little thought that that was the lesson which it had taught you; and that that same lesson was the root of all your greatness. That that belief in God's being, in some mysterious way, the living King of England and of Christendom, has been the very idea which has kept you in peace and safety, now for many a hundred years, moving slowly on from good to better, not without many backslidings and many shortcomings, but still finding out, quickly enough, when you were on the wrong road, and not ashamed to retrace your steps, and to reform, as brave strong men should dare to do; a people who have been for many an age in the vanguard of all the nations, and the champions of sure and solid progress throughout the world; because what is new among you is not patched artificially on to the old, but grows organically out of it, with a growth like that of your own English oak, whose every new-year's leaf-crop is fed by roots which burrow deep in many a buried generation, and the rich soil of full a thousand years."

"Stay!" said the little artist. "We are quite conceited enough already, without your eloquent adulation, sir! But there is a truth in your words. There is a better spirit roused among us, and that not merely of two years ago. I knew this part of the country well in 1846-7-8, and since then, I can bear witness, a spirit of self-reform has been awakened round here, in many a heart which I thought once utterly frivolous. I find, in every circle of every class, men and women asking to be taught their duty, that they may go and do it; I find everywhere schools, libraries, and mechanics' institutes springing up: and rich and poor meeting together more and more in the faith that God has made them all. As for the outward and material improvements—you know as well as I, that since free trade and emigration, the labourers confess themselves better off than they have been for fifty years; and though you will not see in the chalk counties that rapid and enormous agricultural improvement which you will in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, or the Lothians, yet you shall see enough to-day to settle for you the question whether we old-country folk are in a state of decadence and decay. Par exemple—"

And Claude pointed to the clean large fields, with their neat close-clipt hedge-rows, among which here and there stood cottages, more than three-fourths of them new.

"Those well-drained fallow fields, ten years ago, were poor clay pastures, fetlock deep in mire six months in the year, and accursed in the eyes of my poor dear old friend, Squire Lavington; because they were so full of old moles'-nests, that they threw all horses down. I am no farmer: but they seem surely to be somewhat altered since then."

As he spoke, they turned off the main line of the rolling clays toward the foot of the chalk hills, and began to brush through short cuttings of blue gault and "green sand," so called by geologists, because its usual colours are bright brown, snow-white, and crimson.

Soon they get glimpses of broad silver Whit, as she slides, with divided streams, through bright water-meadows, and stately groves of poplar, and abele, and pine; while, far aloft upon the left, the downs rise steep, crowned with black fir spinnies, and dotted with dark box and juniper.

Soon they pass old Whitford Priory, with its numberless gables, nestling amid mighty elms, and the Nunpool flashing and roaring as of old, and the broad shallow below sparkling and laughing in the low, but bright December sun.

"So slides on the noble river, for ever changing, and yet for ever the same—always fulfilling its errand, which yet is never fulfilled," said Stangrave,—he was given to half-mystic utterances, and hankerings after Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he worshipped Emerson, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to worship Margaret Fuller Ossoli,—"Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature, when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a semi-human personality, a river-god of its own. It may be but a collection of ever-changing atoms of water;—what is your body but a similar collection of atoms, decaying and renewing every moment? Yet you are a person; and is not the river, too, a person—a live thing? It has an individual countenance which you love, which you would recognise again, meet it where you will; it marks the whole landscape; it determines probably the geography and the society of a whole district. It draws you, too, to itself by an indefinable mesmeric attraction. If you stop in a strange place, the first instinct of your idle half-hour is, to lounge by the river. It is a person to you; you call it—Scotchmen do, at least—she, and not it. How do you know that you are not philosophically correct, and that the river has a spirit as well as you?"

"Humph!" said Claude, who talks mysticism himself by the hour, but snubs it in every one else. "It has trout, at least; and they stand, I suppose, for its soul, as the raisins did for those of Jean Paul's gingerbread bride and bridegroom and peradventure baby."

"Oh you materialist English! sporting-mad all of you, from the duke who shooteth stags to the clod who poacheth rabbits!"

"And who therefore can fight Russians at Inkermann, duke and clod alike, and side by side; never better (says the chronicler of old) than in their first battle. I can neither fight nor fish, and on the whole agree with you: but I think it proper to be as English as I can in the presence of an American."

A whistle—a creak—a jar; and they stop at the little Whitford station, where a cicerone for the vale, far better than Claude was, made his appearance, in the person of Mark Armsworth, banker, railway director, and de facto king of Whitbury town, long since elected by universal suffrage (his own vote included) as permanent locum tenens of her gracious Majesty.

He hails Claude cheerfully from the platform, as he waddles about, with a face as of the rising sun, radiant with good fun, good humour, good deeds, good news, and good living. His coat was scarlet once; but purple now. His leathers and boots were doubtless clean this morning; but are now afflicted with elephantiasis, being three inches deep in solid mud, which his old groom is scraping off as fast as he can. His cap is duntled in; his back bears fresh stains of peat; a gentle rain distils from the few angles of his person, and bedews the platform; for Mark Armsworth has "been in Whit" to-day.

All porters and guards touch their hats to him; the station-master rushes up and down frantically, shouting, "Where are those horse-boxes? Now then, look alive!" for Mark is chairman of the line, and everybody's friend beside; and as he stands there being scraped, he finds time to inquire after every one of the officials by turns, and after their wives, children, and sweethearts beside.

"What a fine specimen of your English squire!" says Stangrave.

"He is no squire; he is the Whitbury banker, of whom I told you."

"Armsworth!" said Stangrave, looking at the old man with interest.

"Mark Armsworth himself. He is acting as squire, though, now; for he has hunted the Whitford Priors ever since poor old Lavington's death."

"Now then—those horse-boxes!"…

"Very sorry, sir; I telegraphed up, but we could get but one down."

"Put the horses into that, then; and there's an empty carriage! Jack, put the hounds into it, and they shall all go second class, as sure as I'm chairman!"

The grinning porters hand the strange passengers in, while Mark counts the couples with his whip-point,—

"Ravager—Roysterer; Melody—Gay-lass; all right. Why, where's that old thief of a Goodman?"