From Fraser's Magazine.
A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN AT HOME.
BY C. ASTOR BRISTED.
It was a lovely October day; the temperature perfectly Elysian—not half a degree too hot or too cold—and the air moister than is usual in the dry climate of the Northern States, altogether reminding one of Florence in early autumn, only less enervating. Ashburner and the Harry Bensons were gliding up the Hudson in a 'floating palace,' which is American penny-a-liner for a northriver steamboat. Gerard Ludlow was on board, handsome and distingué as ever, but a little thinned and worn by numberless polkas. He had got rid of his wife by a mighty effort, and was going to play le Mari à la Campagne—not at Ravenswood, however, but with some of the Van Hornes who lived higher up the river. While the young exquisite was rattling on in a sort of Macaronic French to Mrs. Benson about the mountains of Switzerland and the pictures of Italy, the ascent of the Nile and "that glorious Clos-Vougeot Blanc Mousseux at the Anglais"—every topic, in short, that had not the least connection with America—Ashburner was witnessing for the third time, with unabated admiration, the magnificent scenery of the classic American river—for classic it is to a New-Yorker since Washington Irving has immortalized its legends.
"I am glad to see you are not ashamed to show a little enthusiasm," said Benson, as he marked his friend leaning over the forward railing, absorbed in the view before him. "Some people don't care much for this sort of thing. There's my cousin Ludlow, how supremely indifferent he is to it all! He is talking to my wife about the last comic opera he saw in Paris, which represents Shakespeare and Queen Bess getting very jolly together."
"Certainly one would hardly be able to tell what countryman Ludlow was, without previous knowledge. He seems, like many of your fashionables, very much out of place here."
"That's true enough; and the man most out of place among them all is my brother Carl, whom we are just going to visit."
Ashburner's recollection and knowledge of Carl Benson were pretty much comprised in a certain luncheon at Ravenswood, which he had found very much in place, and a very good place for. Henry went on to explain himself.
"He prides himself on a regard for two things—sincerity and equity—two very estimable virtues, no doubt, but capable of being ridden to death like all hobbies."
Benson further proceeded to state that he was afraid they would find his brother in no very genial mood—that, in fact, he had two special reasons at that time for being in bad humor. The anti-rent epidemic had broken out in the vicinity, and his place was threatened with perforation by a railroad. The former, however perilous to some of his acquaintance, was no very terrible danger to Carl himself, he having as many tenants in the country as his brother had in town—to wit, just one. The latter was considerably more serious in itself, and rendered particularly aggravating by attendant circumstances. An equally convenient and much safer inland route for the railway had been originally proposed; but Mr. Jobson, the chief engineer, started the project of a new one close along the shore, running through the beautiful private grounds that lined the whole east bank of the river for a hundred and fifty miles. The true motive for this change was, that the company would thus have to pay less for right of way, since the inland route would have passed through the cornfields and vegetable-grounds of farmers, to whom they must have made full compensation at the market value of the land, whereas by cutting through a private lawn they could take the ground at a merely nominal rate, the damage caused to a gentleman by the destruction of his place for all the purposes of a country-seat being a "fancy value," which jurors and commissioners chosen from the mass of the people, and regarding the aristocratic landholder with an envious eye, would never pay the least attention to. But either from a lingering regard for outward decency, or from some other motive, this, the real reason, met with only a passing allusion in Mr. Jobson's report. He came out boldly, and recommended the river route as calculated to improve the appearance of the shore, by filling up bays and cutting off sharp points.[20] What made it worse was, that the majority of these very gentlemen proprietors had been induced to subscribe largely to the road under the solemn assurance from leading members of the company (which took care not to make itself officially and corporately responsible) that the inland route would be adopted, which assurance was thrown to the winds as soon as the books were filled up. Carl was not to be taken in so; he had refused to subscribe to the road, and opposed it to the extent of his small influence from the first; he might be the victim of such people, but he would not be their dupe. This was one consolation to him. Another was, that the railway, when it did come upon him, which would not be for two years yet, would not absolutely ruin his place. It would not go through his house, or across the lawn in front of it, or break down his terrace, for which Nature was to be thanked, and not Mr. Jobson. Ravenswood was partly within one of the to-be-improved bays, and, consequently, the rails would cut it close along the water under the terraced bank. It merely stopped his access to the river, which, as he did not yacht, and had room for the little boating he wanted in the adjoining bay, was no great deprivation. At any rate, the danger anticipated by Harry turned out all moonshine. When they stopped at Van Burenopolis (the landing nearest Ravenswood), Carl's rockaway was on the ground, and in ten minutes their host received them at his front door, both his hands out-stretched, and his face lighted up with unfeigned pleasure.
Carl Benson was an unflattered likeness of his brother, with a larger nose, large feet, that got into every one's way, coarser hair, and narrower chest; altogether a rougher and inferior type of form; but he had a fresh and ruddy complexion, and though he was Henry's senior by six years, there did not seem to be more than a twelve-month between them. In dress he was as quiet as Harry was gay; never cared how old his clothes were, so long as he had plenty of clean linen; was often two years behind the fashion; affected black coats and gray trousers; eschewed enamelled chains, jewelled waistcoat-buttons, and other similar fopperies of Young New-York; preferred shoes (not of patent leather) to boots, and usually tied his cravat in the smallest possible bow. Nor was the contrast in manner between the two brothers less marked; the elder was shy and retiring before strangers, and would have been called a very awkward man anywhere but in England. You might easily guess from his way of behaving himself on a first introduction, the uncertain style of his movements, and his "butter-finger" fashion of taking hold of things, that he had none of that dexterity in the little every-day occasions of life which distinguished Harry; who, for instance, could harness a horse about as soon as his groom, while Carl would have been half the day about it, and not have done it well after all; Harry could carry out a complicated affair of business at one interview, without coming off worst; but his elder brother would have pottered about it three days, and probably been cheated in the end. This inaptitude for small business, this want of promptitude and dexterity, of presence of mind and body, so to speak, is not very detrimental in Europe, where a gentleman with a tolerably well-filled purse can have so much done for him; but in America, where the richest man has to do so much for himself, it is a constantly recurring inconvenience, and it struck the Englishman almost immediately that this, though not especially alluded to by Henry, was one of the things that made Carl out of place in his own fatherland.
The mansion at Ravenswood, which had braved the storms of eighty-five winters (a venerable age for an American house), was pitched on a hill commanding a view of the Hudson for forty miles. Without, it was built of rough stone, with an ample wooden stoop running all round it, and a great variety of vines and creepers running round all the pillars of the stoop;—within, it branched off into large halls and spacious rooms, filled with antediluvian furniture, and guiltless of the ambitious upholstery attempts of Young New-York, which in such matters goes ahead of Paris itself. The library alone, in which Carl lived,—that is to say, he did everything but dining and sleeping there,—was fitted up in modern style, furnished with luxurious arm-chairs and sofas, the walls and ceiling neatly painted in oak, and the principal window composed of one oval pane of glass set in a frame, to which the external landscape supplied an exquisite picture. The hill swept down to the water's edge almost, where it terminated abruptly in a lofty terrace, ninety feet above the level of the shore. The woodlands all about—on Benson's place, on the places adjoining, on the opposite bank—would have been beautiful at any time of the year; now, when the foliage was changing color, in anticipation of the coming frost, they were surpassingly so. As the trees change not all at once, but different ones assume different tints successively, the natural kaleidoscope is varied from day to day. The sumach leaf is one of the first to alter; it becomes a vivid scarlet; then the maple assumes a brilliant red and gold; then others put on a rich sienna, and others a warm olive. Here and there were interspersed patches of evergreens, pines looking almost blue, and cedars looking quite black from the contrast of the gorgeous and fiery coloring that surrounded them. The river water was deep blue; in the little bay north of Ravenswood it shaded off into a soft olive from the reflection of the foliage and grass about it; while beyond the further bank of the Hudson rose the Kaatskill[21] chain, richly wooded to their summits, and painted with the myriad dyes of autumn,—a fitting background to the landscape. Of course the finest part of this view was beyond the limits of Ravenswood, but so much of it as belonged to Carl (and his grounds covered some two hundred acres) was cleverly disposed with the help of an ingenious landscape-gardener; the trees were cut into picturesque clumps and vistas, opened at the desirable points. Henry, who bragged for all the family as well as for himself, took care to inform Ashburner how, when the place came into Carl's possession (or rather into his wife's, for by the laws of New-York, the wife's property is absolutely hers, and out of her husband's control) by the demise of his father-in-law, there was hardly a carriage-road on it, and how he had devoted all his spare income to it for seven years, "and made it what you see it."
As the Englishman had nothing to do for some days but to ramble about Ravenswood, and talk to the owner of it, he had full opportunity of ascertaining how far his brother's estimate of him was correct, and also how far the difference between the two, particularly in their practical aptitude for business, was attributable to the fact, that one of them had finished his education in England, and the other in America, which, for a New-Yorker, means in Paris, in Germany, half over the continent of Europe, in short. His conclusion was, that some of the qualities which made his host so "out of place" were natural, and that others had been superinduced upon these by his English education.
Harry Benson had truly stated, that his brother's prominent trait of character was sincerity. He used to say of himself, that the fairy had bestowed on him true Thomas's gift, "the tongue that ne'er could lie," and that the consequent incapacities predicted by the Scottish minstrel had fallen upon him; he could neither buy nor sell, nor pay court to prince or peer, (that is, in America, to the sovereign people,) nor win favor of fair lady. Certainly this is a dangerous quality in any country, unless tempered with an exquisite tact, which was not among Carl's possessions; but it is peculiarly dangerous in America, for there is no public (not excepting the French or Irish) that feeds so greedily on pure humbug as the American. Populus vult decipi there with a vengeance; and when the general current of feeling has set towards any show or phantasm, moral, political, literary, or social, woe to the individual who plants himself in its way!
Equally correct was the assertion that equity was a leading idea of his mind. "Give the devil his due," was one of his favorite proverbs; and when he said that a thing "was not fair," it seemed to him a conclusive argument against it. His conception of the virtues was the genuine Aristotelian one—a medium between two extremes. Not that he was a lukewarm partisan on all subjects; but of the people he most disliked—and he was a really "good hater" of some classes, Romanists, for instance, and Frenchmen, and Southern slaveholders—he could not bring himself to take any unfair advantage. Now it is no news to any one who knows anything of the Americans, that they are a nation of violent extremes; the different political parties, theological sects, geographical divisions—the literati of different cities, even—vituperate and assail one another fearfully, hardly respecting the laws of the land, much less the principles of natural justice. Add to all this, that Carl had a naturally elegant and fastidious taste, certain to make him aristocratic in sentiment, however democratic he might be in principle, and it will be seen that he had a tolerable stock of incompatibilities to start with before having anything to do with England.
But, as if to settle his business completely, and prevent him from ever becoming a contented and contenting citizen of his own country, it chanced that just at the period of his youth, when, according to the wont of Young America, dress and billiards formed the main topic of his conversation, and he was aspiring to the possession of a fast trotter, accident took him to England, and a series of accidents kept him there, and caused him to make it his home for several years, and his standpoint for all his continental excursions. He grew up to mature manhood among and along with a generation of Englishmen. He acquired a taste for classical studies, and for that literary society, and those habits of literary and ethical criticism which are nowhere else found in such perfection. His life had always been strictly, even prudishly moral; and while casting off the frivolities and fopperies of his boyhood, he also parted with much of the impulsive and imperfectly understood religion of his younger days, and replaced it by a more sedate and permanent feeling, which never rose to ecstasy of emotion, but was always present to him as a daily habit, and was deeply earnest, with little outward show.
Such a man's tendencies were visibly towards the church; and had Carl been an Englishman, or continued his sojourn in England, he would have taken orders naturally and inevitably, and might have made a tolerable parson. But at home he soon found it impossible to assimilate himself to that Evangelical party which constitutes the great bulk of the American religious community.
The three leading tendencies of his character already alluded to, fostered as they were by his residence abroad, had ended by making him very eclectic and very unconventional. He took what seemed good to him from every quarter, without reference to antecedents; and the fact that all the world about him were going one way, was just the reason to make him go the other. The Puritan denunciations of all who differed from them on points of transcendental theology, or of social institutions, seemed to him illiberal and uncharitable. His religion acted upon him somewhat like the Socratic Dæmon; it restrained him from actions, rather than prompted him to them. He abhorred all parade of godliness, and shrunk from disclosing his religious experiences, as he would have done from disclosing his loves to a mixed assemblage. There were many things about these people besides their abhorrence of the fine arts, that shocked his æsthetic sensibility, and their inquisitive censoriousness he deemed ungentlemanly in point of manners, and little short of persecution in point of principle. What most of all repelled him was their unmitigated "seriousness." A certain notorious personage, whom it is no scandal to call the greatest of living charlatans, is reported to have taken for his motto, "Praise God, and be merry." Now this was exactly what Carl wanted to do, to praise God, and be merry; and he did not think the latter clause of the device implied any necessary incompatibility with the former. He held strongly to the "neque semper arcum," and thought that a man was all the better man, and better Christian, for an occasional season of healthy enjoyment. He did not think "teetotalism" necessary to prevent gentlemen from becoming drunkards, and he took his regular exercise on Sunday as well as on other days. His sincere nature revolted equally from the idea of dissembling a merriment which he felt, and from that of simulating a religious enthusiasm which he did not feel. With all personal respect for such men, and all reverence for the service they had done to the cause of vital religion, and civil, no less than religious liberty, he very soon found that he could not amalgamate with them, and gave up all intention of going into the church. Thus it came to pass, that letting himself slide into the place which his fortune and connections had marked out for him, he became a man of society, and a gentleman of the world. It proved that he was not entirely free from the national error of quitting one extreme for another: it could only be said in his defence, that his new rôle rather came to, than was sought for by him. Perhaps his fastidiousness partly led him into it; but this trait of his mind showed itself more in intellectual criticism than in material Sybaritism, and more in the choice of companions than either. Certainly he had no great qualifications for the part, especially in New-York, and very wild work he made of it with his peculiar ideas, some of which were rather English, and all of which were considerably the reverse of American.
The first offence that Carl gave was by getting married in church as quietly as anything can be done in New-York, and going out of the way immediately afterwards, instead of standing his bride up for eight hundred people to look at. He was shamefully negligent of his duties to society in not having given "a reception." Carl said that he married for the present happiness and future comfort of himself and his wife, not for the amusement of society; and that was all the explanation he deigned to give his fashionable acquaintances.
His next eccentricity was refusing to read The Sewer, to let it enter his house, or to talk about it. He said, that in Europe, scandalous newspapers were not taken in by respectable families, that even young men read them at their clubs and by stealth, and never mentioned them before ladies; that people making pretensions to superior morality and decency ought not to patronize an immoral and blasphemous print—and more to the same effect. Men and women who referred to France as the standard of half the things they did, taunted him with referring to England. Benson did not think it worth while to discuss the merits of that case, but answered by a quotation from Aristophanes, how "clever folks learn many things from their enemies,"—which he had to translate before his auditors understood it,—and by another of like purport from a Latin bard, which they were less slow to comprehend, as it has become part of the stock in trade of our public speakers, and even the editors know what it means. Then one man liked The Sewer because it had the best reports of trotting matches; and another, because it published the news from Washington half-an-hour sooner than any of its contemporaries; and they all said, that all the papers were so bad, it was merely a question of degree, and not of kind. Nobody agreed with Carl, not even the people who were abused by The Sewer, and he made no converts out of his own family—his wife, brother, and sister.
But his great crime was blaspheming the polka, for which I believe Young New-York thought him absolutely insane, and would gladly have put him into a straight-jacket. He thought that a matinée which lasted from noon to midnight was an absurd and wicked waste of time; that even six hours a day was too much for a reasonable being to devote to the Redowa; that at a ball or party there should be some place for people who like to converse, and a non-dancing man should not be stuck into a corner all the evening on pain of being knocked over by the waltzers; that the tipsy excesses of the young gentlemen who lorded it in the ball-room rendered their society not the most edifying for ladies; and as whatever he thought he gave utterance to in pretty plain language, he made himself prodigiously unpopular, and was a great nuisance to the exclusives.
On the other hand, he found things enough to annoy him. He had no like-minded, and it seemed no like-bodied men to associate with; no gentlemen to converse with on classical subjects, no acquaintances to join him in his long walks and drives. He was not over-fond of the French. "They make the best coffee and gloves in the world," he used to say, "but coffee and gloves, after all, are a very small part of life." Therefore it was irksome to him to hear the French always appealed to as the standard of dress, furniture, and manners. Above all, it worried him to find their language the recognized one of the salon and the opera. That two or three persons, whose native tongue was English, should go on talking imperfect French, (for the knowledge acquired by a two years' residence in Paris must be comparatively imperfect,) though no foreigners were present, struck him as a mischievous absurdity, and directly calculated to hinder mental growth. But all these were petty troubles compared to the misery he endured from the gossiping and scandalous propensities of his fashionable acquaintance. He now found his error in supposing that there is any peculiar illiberality and uncharitableness in a religious community, as distinguished from a worldly one; and discovered, that in avoiding the Evangelical connection, he had not escaped the spirit of inquisitive censoriousness. A common error of young men is this: they fancy, that because people of the world talk of their liberality, and parade it ostentatiously, they must possess an extra share of it. And doubtless they are more charitable towards their favorite propensities; the "jolly good fellow" will judge leniently of his bottle companion's trippings, and so on through the calender of vices: though even this proposition is not to be received absolutely. Catiline will sometimes be found complaining of sedition; most offenders have some lingering sense remaining of original right and wrong; not enough to keep them straight, but enough to blame others for the self-same obliquities. But to try the question correctly, we should examine the worldly, not in their judgments of one another, but in their judgments of the religious, and see how much liberality they show them. We should watch the hatred of virtue and purity, and the envy of fair fame, developing themselves in every form of slander and detraction, from the sly innuendo to the open falsehood. All merely fashionable society has a necessary tendency to be scandalous; fashionable people must talk a great deal without any definite purpose, and personal topics are always the readiest at hand for small talk, in a momentary dearth of others—this one's dress and appearance—that one's style of living—who is attentive to whom—and so on; so that besides the gossip which springs from deliberate wickedness, there is a great deal that is the result of mere thoughtlessness and vacuity. And New-York fashionable society is probably more scandalous than any other, because there are fewer public amusements for persons of leisure than in the continental cities of Europe, while the men have not that vent in political life, or the women in outdoor exercise, which Londoners find.
Now Carl was imbued with the idea (I believe it was one of his acquired English ones), that the first duty of a gentleman is to mind his own business. He had a horror of interfering with any one's private affairs, and an equal horror of any one interfering with his. It sickened him, therefore, to be among people who were always speaking ill of one another, and fetching and carrying stories. He grew tired of every one in the not very large circle of his acquaintance, which his fastidiousness, before adverted to, had always kept small; for he hated immoral people, and had a very imperfect sympathy for vulgar ones; and the man who begins by excluding these two classes, will make a large hole in his visiting list. He was in danger of becoming morbid and misanthropic. The natural and proper resource for a person so situated, is to take up some active and steady occupation—ride some hobby, if he can do nothing better,—at any rate, give himself enough to do. Carl was not a man of hobbies, and all the available ones were ridden to death already. The first resort of a young Englishman, with good fortune and connections, is politics; it is the very last resort of a New-Yorker similarly situated. He usually has enough of it at college; is a violent politician at sixteen, and by nineteen gives up all thoughts of shining in that way. Why this is so, I will not stop to explain at present, as I have no intention of writing a treatise à la De Tocqueville on the working of democratic institutions in America. I only mention the fact; perhaps you will find some further light thrown on it before we get to the end of this paper.
Two refuges lay open before him—business and literature. "Business"—banking, or commerce of some sort, is the shortest way for a New-Yorker to dispose of himself; but Carl had neither taste nor ability for trading or finance, and was too frank and unsuspecting to make his way profitably in a very sharp mercantile community. To literature his ideas naturally turned; and in some countries a productive literary life might have been his happy destiny. He was not necessitated to write for a livelihood, and was just the sort of man to write for reputation. It was the occupation for which his tastes and his education fitted him.
But he had been too well educated for an American litterateur. His standard of excellence was pitched too high. The popular models provoked his criticism, not his emulation. The exaggerated flattery of newspaper puffs, and the Little-Peddlingtonism of sectional cliques disgusted him. He would not toady others, and disliked being toadied himself. He had too correct an appreciation of newspaper editors, and too much candor to disguise this appreciation. His accurate taste was shocked by little mechanical deficiencies—the carelessness of compositors and proofreaders—the impossibility of getting a Greek quotation set up correctly. He wrote for elegantly and thoroughly educated men, such as had been the associates of his youth, and found few of his countrymen to read, and fewer to understand him; consequently, after a brief experience, he gave up all writing for publication except one species of authorship, which had only a semblance of doing others any good, and which did himself a great deal of harm.
This was the controversial and satirical, to which he was prompted by an honest abhorrence of shams, and in which he was encouraged by the morbid public appetite for any thing savoring of personality or approaching to a "row" upon paper. Carl had a knack of saying disagreeable things in a disagreeable way, with some point and smartness—was clever in prose parody, in the reductio ad absurdum, in quoting a man against himself,—in short, up to all the "dodges" of belligerent criticism, and had a lively sense and keen perception of the ridiculous; but not priding himself as a gentleman and a Christian on these accomplishments, he did his best to keep them down, just as he did to keep down any tendency to say ill-natured things in social intercourse, and only gave them play when provoked by any flagrant exhibition of imposture. But having once found by experiment how this sort of writing took, how an hour's ebullition of sarcasm would command attention, when two months of research and polish were unheeded, and having no lack of material to tempt him, he was seduced into it again and again. If a sciolist undertook to put forth a new theory of the Platonic philosophy without having mastered his Greek grammar, Carl Benson was at hand to turn him inside out, and show up his pretensions. If a demagogue took up the formulas and watchwords of other times and countries, to malign his betters, and stir up one class against another, Carl was the first to dissent from the popular voice of panegyric, and demonstrate in plain terms what mischievous nonsense the lecturer had been uttering. If a Radical magazine blazoned out the discovery of some prodigious mare's nest—some awful conspiracy of England against American liberty or letters, who was so ready as Carl to point out that the editor could not spell the most ordinary foreign name straight, and did not exactly know the difference between Fraser and the Edinburgh! Booksellers and periodicals were glad enough to publish these squibs, and the reading public read them fast enough, with considerable amusement, and no profit or intention of profiting by them; it was parvis componere magna, like Aristophanes and Cleon; the bystanders cheered the exposer, and followed the exposed as fast as ever. Carl began to set up for a professed satirist,—one of the worst things that can befall a man, for the benefit he confers on others is very problematical, and the evil he inflicts on himself positive and inevitable.
He who had been the merriest of young men found himself growing ill-natured and morbid when he should have been in the prime of life. It was hard to say which he disliked most, the exclusives or the democracy, and he uttered his mind about both pretty freely. He was sick of the newspapers, with their bad print and worse principles—of the endless debates about the same old questions in Congress—of literary pretenders and the thousand and one "most remarkable men among us,"—of all the continuously succeeding popular delusions—of the gossiping young men in illimitable cravats, and all the personal intelligence about Mr. Brown and Miss Jones. Still he clung to old Gotham for a reason that influenced few people in it. He had strong conservative feelings and local attachments; his childhood (unlike his brother's) had been spent in the city, and the scenes of his childhood were dear to him, however little interest he might feel in the new characters that peopled them. But when in the rapid march of "up town" progress, the house which his father built, where his parents had died, and he and his brother and sister played as children, became so surrounded by shops, and stores, and manufactories, that he was fairly driven out of it, then he withdrew from the city altogether, and established himself for all the year round at his—that is to say, at his wife's—place on the Hudson. His contemporaries speedily forgot him, or if they ever thought of him, it was only as an unhappy recluse, Bellerophon-like, eating his own heart, and shunning the ways of men.
He was nothing of the sort. In quitting the town, he quitted most of his sources of discontent. He had great capacity of self-amusement when fairly left to himself, and could always find interesting occupation in his library. He now reaped the fruit of his early studies, though not exactly in the way he had once hoped and anticipated. His place, too, amused him greatly, and, not keeping up two establishments, he had money in abundance to spend on it. He revelled in out-of-door exercise; it was a constant pleasure to him to gallop his blood mare (a taste for horses ran in the family) over fresh grass, where there were no omnibuses or fast trotters in his way. Nor was he without society; those who are unpopular with the majority can generally boast a few of the warmest personal friends, and it was so in his case. They came to visit him by intervals and relays,—real worthies of literature, who had been his father's friends before they were his,—quiet men of general tastes and accomplishments, like Philip Van Horne; now and then a like-minded stranger, such as Ashburner, or his sister and her husband, a good-natured, gentlemanly, ornamental Philadelphian; or his brother Harry. But most of all was he happy in his family circle: a man of the warmest domestic affections, he rejoiced in the society of his children and the cheering presence of his wife. We owe this lady an apology for not bringing her forward sooner: it would have been more in accordance with the grammar of gallantry to "put the more worthy person first." And yet, reader, may it not be better to keep the good wine till the last, and after telling you a great deal about a man whom you may not like, then to tell you something about a woman whom you must, or, at least, you ought to like? So let me present you to Mrs. Carl Benson.
Henry Benson used to say that Carl had carried out his eclectic principles in the choice of his wife, for she was something between a blonde and a brunette, and had dark eyes and light hair. She was a tall woman (according to the American standard of female height—I am not sure that she would have been considered so in England), and her figure rose up straight and springy as a reed. Altogether, she was in beautiful preservation, which is more than can be said for every American woman who has mounted into "the thirties," and is the mother of three children. Her shoulders were magnificent, her bust good, her arms and hands exquisitely moulded, her feet and ankles neatly turned, her features regular, yet not wanting in expression, and her complexion almost perfect. Still, with all these elements of beauty, and though of good family (she was one of the Van Hornes) and sufficient worldly prospects, she had never been a great belle, and this was an additional charm in her husband's eyes, who would never have deeply loved a woman that all the world ran after. Indeed, she had not belle accomplishments or tastes, preferred singing English ballads to Italian arias, and galloping over the county all the morning to dancing at a ball all night. And she was so insensible to the advantage of a cavalier per se, that she would rather talk to an amusing woman than to a stupid man, however handsome and fashionable. Of toilet mysteries she knew enough to keep her from dressing badly, but not enough to make her dress well and effectively. Her talents were not of the showy order, and did not fit her for shining in a salon. She had good (not extraordinary) natural abilities, and had been beautifully "coached," first by her father, and afterwards by her husband, so that without any pedantry or bas-bleu-ism, she displayed an extensive acquaintance with literary topics, but she was not brilliant in small talk, in playful raillery, or cut-and-thrust repartee. When she was in Paris (as Miss Louisa Van Horne), the French could make nothing of her; they thought her a handsome bit of marble, cold, unimpassioned, and uninteresting. And when more lately Vincent Le Roi came, as Henry's umbra, to pass a few days at Ravenswood, the Vicomte went away saying that Madame Carl Benson was undoubtedly an angel, but, for his part, he didn't like angels; they were very misty and insipid; he much preferred les filles d'Eve. And all who knew Le Roi agreed that he would not know well what to do with an angel. On the other hand, it must be set off against the deficiencies above mentioned, that she was a true and loving wife, a fond mother, a benevolent lady, and a sincere Christian.
Such was—no, such was not the mistress of Ravenswood. I feel the attempted portrait is inadequate. A passing description cannot do justice to the woman any more than a passing interview. Her superficial blemishes—want of ease in her conversation, or of crinoline in her dress,—were obvious to the casual observer; but the sterling qualities of her character, her truth and honesty, her constancy of affection, her unworldly disposition, her loftiness of soul—all these, as they could only be properly appreciated by those who had known her for years, so can they only be generally and vaguely hinted at in a brief sketch like this. The great mystery was, how she came to marry Carl. Every one said she was too good for him, and he would have been the last man to deny it. Perhaps she was pleased with his simple integrity, and foresaw that he would make a most affectionate husband, though it was not in his nature to be a passionate lover. Perhaps she pardoned his awkwardness in regard for his honesty.
After all, I would not claim that she was morally perfect; very few of us are. I am afraid she was rather censorious, and judged harshly of sinners; that in her own comfortable position she did not always weigh accurately the temptations of others. It is a common practice of very good and moral people to indemnify themselves for their virtue by depreciation of others; 'tis an error that lurks at the heels of Christian duty; for are we not commanded to hate sin? and the transition from the abstract to the concrete is so easy.
I fancy, too, she did not harmonize altogether with Mrs. Henry Benson. Indeed, the two sisters-in law made little secret of their mutual incompatibility. Clara said that Louisa was very proper and very stupid, regular as a machine, and with no fun or frolic in her—that the only man she ever had about her, her cousin Philip, was as dull as herself,—that she dressed badly, and talked bad French,—that she went to church in the morning, and gossiped in the afternoon, and was more charitable to the bodies of her inferiors than to the souls of her equals. Louisa looked down upon Clara as a worldly and frivolous little creature, who fostered her beauty to attract admirers and worried her husband to death by her caprices, who wasted her time in dancing and flirting, and her money in Parisian nick-nacks, or in giving parties to people who did not care for her. In short, the two ladies said many hard things of each other when separate, and were painfully amiable when together.
But these bickerings did not greatly impair the happiness of our party at Ravenswood. The brothers loved each other as much as if they had not been brothers, and had not had to divide a large family estate between them. Even their wives' quarrels could not make them quarrel.
Many a jolly turn had they and their guest, lounging with their cigars after breakfast on the vine-trellised stoop, or under the spreading horse-chesnuts at one corner of the house, watching the white sails that glided by on the sunny water, and the fantastic cloudlets that floated in the clear sky; strolling through the winding walks, or across the terrace at evening, when the setting sun had piled red clouds like a huge volcano over the Hudson, and the Kaatskills looked like great blocks of lapis lazuli, their summits half veiled in fiery mist; riding through the adjacent country in bright moonlight nights, now threading their way among the uncertain bridle-paths of a dense wood, and anon startling a village with their clattering hoofs and boisterous merriment as they swept by it at full gallop; driving four-in-hand a livelong day to visit friends who lived north or south of them on the rivers, by roads that rose up over the hills and showed all the glorious panorama of the Hudson, and then dipped down inland among picturesque glens and water-courses and mill-streams. Capital game breakfast they had, which the women were not too sentimental to help them in doing justice to; and excellent plain dinners, with oceans of iced champagne; and when the cloth was drawn, Carl would chirp over his claret with as comfortable a melancholy as ever any "ruined" Protectionist gentleman in Old England gave utterance to.
At a very early period of their acquaintance, Henry Benson had put Ashburner up to the way of getting at the dark side of things in America. "Never assail anything," he said; "if you do, the people will tackle you, from the highest to the lowest. Let an American gentleman talk; give him his head, and he will soon lead you on the track you want." Acting on this hint, the Englishman let his host talk; what little he said himself would come in the form of a query or suggestion. "You lead a very nice life here," he would say, "but it is rather quiet. I should think an active man like yourself would choose some more stirring form of existence." Then Carl blazed out.
"Go into politics, I suppose! A nice business that for an honest man and a gentleman! Why, Ashburner, the democracy of our State, who are always in fear of being reduced to vassalage by a few thousand easy and unambitious rich men, have lost their liberties without perceiving it to hundreds of thousands of alien settlers with their foreign priests. A successful politician here is either a hack lawyer of thirty years' standing, who has had opportunity enough of getting used to the devil's work in his first business, or an upstart demagogue, who has made his way by dint of sheer brass; either a blind partisan, who knows nothing outside of "the regular ticket," or a "non-committal" man, who says everything to everybody, and never gave an intelligible, manly, straightforward opinion in his life. One party would sell us body and soul to the Slaveholders, and the other to the Anti-renters, and both to the Irish. If I could bring myself to enter the lists with such people, I should have to start with the dead weight of being a "millionaire" (as they call every man here who has two or three hundred thousand dollars) and an "aristocrat" (as they call every man who has the habits and education of a gentleman). There is not a voter in this county has less influence than I have;—to be sure, I don't try for any, because I well know that by doing so, I should only make myself more unpopular, without becoming any more influential. Or be a leader of fashion, perhaps—one of those people who talk scandal about one another all day long when they are not dancing, who try to pursue pleasure in a place where every one else is at work, and are so destitute of resources, that they quarrel for pure want of something to do. See what they have made of my brother, who is a clever fellow and a well-educated man, though I say it. He is becoming a third-rate dancer—one of Tom Edwards's corps; is growing frivolous and scandalous, and getting his earnest honesty knocked out of him every day. Or profess literature, possibly—Henry does a little of that too; you may see him in the magazines sandwiched between the last learned cobbler and the newest Laura Matilda of the West. No, I don't want to belong to any "Mutual Admiration" Society, and if I did, it's too late now. My mind has been spoken so often and so freely, that were I to write a book as good as one of Fenimore Cooper's, (if you can imagine the possibility of such a thing even in hypothesis) no editor would notice it, and no one read it—unless it contained something personal. Here I shall stay and amuse myself in what one of our ex-great men used to call "dignified retiracy;" and if this railroad drives me out, why, then, ingens iterabimus æquor—to England, were I a bachelor, but my wife couldn't live there; no American woman can, after the attention she has been used to at home, except the ambassador's wife—so it will probably be to Italy, or perhaps to Paris, for a man can find occupation there, whatever be his peculiar bent, and fill up his time well in the place without knowing or liking the people."
"It does surprise me," said Ashburner, "that the terminus of a refined American's dream should always be Paris,—that whenever a man has means and leisure, he runs off thither, and stays as long as he can: and if not there, in some other place—anywhere but at home."
"Come now," broke in Henry Benson; he had retired with the ladies after dinner, and now rejoined the men to have some more claret,—"don't you English run over to Paris perpetually, and all around the continent? Don't we meet you everywhere in the four quarters of the globe? You don't like to stay at home any more than we do; only we are franker than you, and avow it."
"We go away from home, but we don't like to stay away," replied the Englishman.
"Exactly; and if we had a pied-à-terre close to the continent as you have, we should not like to stay away from home either—more than half the year. Here has Carl been making his moan to you about our unappreciated condition; it's always his way over the decanters—one of his amusements merely. (Carl, old fellow, pass the Laffitte this way.) Well, I think," and he paused to fill a brimming glass, "that we are very jolly victims; and for my part, I am quite disposed to play, regardless of my doom. Look at our wives and children, our houses and horses, our whole style of living. Ponder well on this Bourdeaux; ruminate on those woodcocks we have been discussing. What miserable misused fellows we are! We do live in a great country—we have such civil and religious liberty as is enjoyed in only one other country in the world; and if we don't have the management of the government, why no one here or abroad holds us responsible for what the government does, and that is just the condition Plato thought a philosopher should pray for. Fill up again, brother mine, and thank your stars that you have your time to yourself, and are not a parliament man, as Ashburner is going to be, and are not set to work twelve hours a day among blue books and red tape."
And now, reader, these papers, which have been running on for a year or more, are wound up. I did not begin them intending to give you anything marvellous, or new, or profound about the aspect, prospects, and destiny, political, religious, or literary, of the great people among whom I am a small unit. I only intended to present you with some phases of outward life and manners—such things as would strike or interest a stranger in our beloved Gotham, and in the places to which regular Gothamites—American cockneys, so to speak—are wont to repair. For I am but a cockney in my own country; I have never travelled far in it,—good reason why, when they are apt to hang up a man at one end of the Union for what is a sort of religion at the other. They did not aspire to be "Sketches of American Society" (that was an honorary prefix of yours, Mr. Editor), nor even Sketches of New-York Society, but only of a very small class of persons in New-York; and therefore I had originally headed them "The Upper Ten Thousand," in accordance with a phrase established by Mr. Willis, though even that is an exaggeration, for the people so designated are hardly as many hundred. In truth, I began the series chiefly to amuse some Cantab friends of mine, who were curious to know how the gentlemen that were their contemporaries and representatives in our Atlantic cities, lived, and eat, and dressed, and amused themselves; what their habits and pursuits and propensities were. The last thing that I expected was that any of them should be read, much less republished, on my side the water. To a New-Yorker, many things which they contain must necessarily appear stale, stupid, and commonplace. For instance, in one number half a page is taken up with the description of a trotting-wagon; to an American I should as soon think of describing a pair of boots; the one is as familiar an object to him as the other. But at the very first number, some clever folks took it into their heads that they were to be very personal,—that every character described or even alluded to in them was to represent a real living prototype; that was enough to make them sought after. And it really did happen that in that first number I had described a sleigh which actually existed in real wood and iron somewhere about the city; and the inference above detailed was obvious. It is not every story in Gotham that has so much foundation; in fact, they get them up frequently without any foundation to speak of, only unfortunately the narratives don't fall to the ground as readily as the houses do. It is hardly worth while contradicting such idle rumors, but to my American readers (since I have some, much to my own amazement) I wish to say one thing once for all—that Harry Benson is not meant to represent any living individual whatsoever, and that his wife, house, horses, and other accessaries, are not designed after the corresponding appurtenances of any real person. And the same remark applies with equal force to all the appendages of Carl Benson, as delineated in this very sketch.
Still, I suppose I ought to be obliged to the members of "our set" who got up this idea; for the factitious interest thus communicated to these papers has caused them to be reprinted (in the cheap and multitudinous style of American reprints), and thus to become known to the outsiders both of our own city and of other parts of the country, who could perhaps judge them more fairly on their own merits, from having no knowledge of, or interest in, the local celebrities supposed to be portrayed in them. Some have been disposed to accept them as what they were really meant for—light sketches of life and manners in a certain circle; some have had the bad taste to wax furious at them. I understand that a few southern editors have departed from their usual stoical calmness and dignified reserve on the subject, to assail me for my occasional allusions to "the peculiar institution;" and am told (life is too short, and time too precious, to read such things oneself, but there are always good-natured friends to put you up to them) that a correspondent of the Ochloratic Review and No Government Advocate, who probably never wore a decent coat in his life, and regards every man in a clean shirt as an oppressor of the people, has seriously taken me to ask for representing some of my characters as elegantly dressed! If this individual could find nothing worse to say of my papers, after nine months examination of them, methinks he might have continued to hold his tongue; but I suppose any trash will do for the Ochlocratic.
Whether the abuse of these persons, or the praise of others, or my own inclination, may tempt me hereafter to essay something more definite and connected, I will not say at present. Of the things that "lie on the knees of the Gods," it becomes no man to speak prematurely. Meanwhile, make a long arm across the Atlantic—So—shake hands, and good-bye!
Frank Manhattan.