ON BEING BORN AWAY FROM HOME.
Reading, the other day, in Mr. Stigand's interesting "Life of Heine," about the young poet's discontent in Germany, about his long desire to quit that country and to live in France, and of his final hegira to Paris, it occurred to me that he might be described, not too fancifully, as having been born away from home. How many have had the same fortune, whether for good or ill. But the happier class is the contrasting one, that of persons who have never suffered from the stress of the migrating instinct; and surely it is a fortunate thing to be born in one's own place, as Lamb was born in London, to grow in the fit soil, to lose no time in striking root. Lamb was the happiest of men in this respect. A true child of the city, he held that London was a better place to be born in than any part of the country. "A garden," he writes to Wordsworth, "was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean boldness and felicity, luckily sinned himself out of it." For garden if we read farm in this passage, we have, perhaps, a statement of the feeling which prompts our own country people, and more and more with successive years, to leave the country and come to the city—to crowd the towns and desert the fields. Lamb says again—and one almost trembles to see him thus defying the "poet of nature" to his face—"Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.... I do not envy you. I should pity you did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything." But Wordsworth, the Laker, was quite as clearly born at home as Lamb, the Londoner; and, as we know, he came back to his native hills after no long wanderings, not to quit them again. It is because Lamb hardly wandered at all that he seems so truly autochthonous, so peculiarly a child of the soil. He struck deep root into the intellectual alluvium of London, and until he was fifty years old he suffered nothing from transplantation except when he changed his lodgings or paid his somewhat reluctant visits to friends in the country; and when, at fifty, he ventured away from London, it was no further than to the margin of the city of Paradise—to Enfield, Edmonton—the latter a place which he calls "a little teasing image of a town," where "the country folks do not look like country folks," and where "the very blackguards are degenerate." It was only in London that Lamb's spirit really nourished itself and grew.
And why is it in old countries that the mind seems to strike its most vigorous fibres into the soil, to draw up its most potent juices, bringing to blossom such flowers as Wordsworth's "Poems of Childhood," such pansies as Elia's thoughts? Lamb suggests country images; even though he was of the city, his essays have an outdoor freshness and tenderness. They take us into the open fields, and show us the soft counterchange of shadows and sunlight, bright spaces and pursuing swarths of shade. And where did he learn the longing homesickness of a child for the country? "How I would wake weeping," Elia says, "and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne, in Wiltshire!" Whether in country or city, surely it is in old lands that one gets the fullest home feeling, the complete benefits of soil, and atmosphere, and acquaintance with the various geniuses of the place. Would that we had been Londoners, we say, to know the ancient streets, or Parisians for the sake of the great libraries and of Notre Dame!
That, however, is but a melancholy utinam; there has been no lack of fortunate migrations among people who have been born far away from their fitting homes, and who have found their way thither in course of time. So the "rising young men" of our own colonial days returned to England to make their career; and sometimes we may trace the features of their childhood's "environment" in their developed genius. Our painters, for whom the new country was not yet a quite satisfactory place, displayed perhaps the strongest homing tendency. Copley, West, and Stuart, for instance, all American born, had to seek an older home of art. West returned in youth to England, and Copley in early manhood; there they made their careers, there they lived and died; while Stuart, after passing fifteen years in Europe, came back to settle in America. But none of these artists quite severed himself from his native country. American themes served each of them for some of his best known works: as in Stuart's famous "Washington," West's "Death of General Wolfe," and Copley's first historical picture, so called, the "Youth Rescued from a Shark."[4 ]
There, too, was Copley's son, born, like his father, in New England. In 1774 he was taken to London, where he too made his career, a distinguished one; for the Boston boy lived to become Baron Lyndhurst and Lord Chancellor. But as the eminent nobleman to be, at the time of his demigration, was but two years old, it is difficult to point out any traits of distinctively American statesmanship in his career.
And that other American nobleman, Count Rumford, of whom Mr. Ellis has recently written the first good biography—his was a notable case of birth away from home. It is a little odd to think of the famous Count Rumford, Franklin's compeer in genius, and born but a few miles from Franklin's birthplace, as plain Benjamin Thompson of North Woburn, Massachusetts. His parents were plain New England people, but he was ambitious, and had a handsome person; he had, too, what his neighbors might have called "uppish" ways; for he pretended to peculiar knowledge, and was always making strange researches and experiments; in short, I fear that he was not quite enough of a democrat to suit his neighbors. There was a distinction about him that they did not like; he was too original in his character and tastes; and consequently he was a marked man in that community. His fortunes seemed well enough, I presume, when, at twenty, he quitted school-teaching to marry a rich widow, thirteen years older than himself, Sarah Rolfe of Concord, New Hampshire; appearing on the wedding day, it is noted, in a splendid scarlet suit, to the astonishment and scandal of the young man's friends. But that was in 1772, and his troubles were not far ahead. At the outbreak of the colonial quarrel he was accused of being a Tory, and charged with disloyalty to the American cause. He protested his innocence in vain. He was arrested, tried—and acquitted; for nothing could be proven against him. Indeed, there was nothing to prove; it was his character that was the real cause of offence to the good people of Concord. They were not tolerant of superiority; and there must have been an intolerable superiority in young Thompson's personal beauty, in his manners, in his passion for study and scientific experiment. In spite of his acquittal, he remained un homme suspect; and finally the Concord mob visited his house to take their will of him; but he had fled, never to return. Had he not been forewarned, I fear there would never have been any Count Rumford. The patriots of Concord might not have put him to death, but one does not easily make noblemen of persons who have been tarred and feathered. It is better to admit a tradesman now and then, or even a dentist, to the ranks of the nobility, as it has happened to some of our countrymen more recently. Very luckily, then, young Thompson escaped the tar and feathers; at twenty-two he left family, home, and estate, and fled from the Concord mob, never to return. His property was confiscated, and in August, 1775, after having suffered imprisonment as a Tory, he decided to quit the country. One would think that he had sufficient reasons. He wrote thus to his father-in-law: "I am determined," he says, "to seek for that peace and protection in foreign lands, and among strangers, which is deny'd me in my native country. I cannot any longer bear the insults that are daily offered me. I cannot bear to be looked upon and treated as the Achan of society." Thompson showed a true instinct for the opportunity in choosing this course. He entered the British service, and thenceforward, says Mr. Ellis, "the rustic youth became the companion of gentlemen of wealth and culture, of scientific philosophers, of the nobility, and of princes." Perhaps it gives a wrong impression to speak of him as a "rustic youth"; for besides a winning address, we are told that he had "a noble and imposing figure," and that he was a natural courtier; so that the familiar story of his rapid promotion is not surprising. Under-Secretary of State at twenty-eight, he was knighted by George III. at thirty; and eight years later, by the pleasure of the King of Bavaria, Benjamin Thompson, of Woburn, Massachusetts, was transformed into Count Rumford, having already taken rank as a European celebrity. But he did not forget his early home and friends, and it is pleasant to find him deriving his title from the name given to Concord by the early settlers—a name, by the way, that these patriots misspelled from Romford, the village near London whence some of them came.
Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, never saw America or Sarah Rolfe again. He never saw his only daughter, born after his flight from Concord, until, at the age of twenty, she too left the forests of New England to meet him in London. From the Continent she wrote those interesting letters which his biographer has made accessible, the record of a singular experience—that of a bright but untrained New England girl introduced, without the least preparation, to courtly European life. She relates her blunders and misadventures very frankly; how she filled her father with consternation by making her best courtesy to a housekeeper; how she ordered costly goods without inquiring the prices; how—but I see that this naïve young woman is likely to lead us from our subject, for Miss Thompson evidently went away from home when she left New England.
As for her father, he lived to marry a second widow, the brilliant and distinguished woman who had been the wife of Lavoisier. We cannot say that Count Rumford's good fortune kept to him in the matter of this second marriage. It was an unhappy one; it reminds us of Dr. Johnson's genial remark that second marriages are made to illustrate "the triumph of hope over experience." My lord and my lady did not suit each other; they quarrelled in the midst of their splendor, and in ways not always the most decorous. Poor Benjamin Thompson! I fancy that after Madame had "poured hot water" on the choicest flowers in your garden, you wished that you were taking your ease in Concord again, the Revolution being now safely ended, and no further question of tar and feathers being likely to arise!
Alexander Hamilton was another eminent American who migrated in search of a home; but seeking, not quitting, our dear country. Born of English parentage in another British colony, the West Indies, he spent his boyhood cursing the fate which had doomed him, apparently, to what he called the "grovelling condition of a clerk" in the North Caribbee islands. He longed to escape from trade; boy-like, he longed for a war, for the opportunity of distinction in affairs. Nor did he have to wait until age, or even until maturity, for verification of the saying of his contemporary, Goethe, about the final fulfilment of the desires of youth. What Hamilton desired in boyhood came to him promptly, almost as by the rubbing of the lamp. We all know the story: how at fifteen he found his way to New Jersey, whence extricating himself he went to Columbia college; and how, while he was there, the Revolutionary war broke out, making the lad drop his books at once to accept his appointment as a major of artillery; and how naturally his career flowed from that initial point. And in our own times Thackeray was another product of a British colony, having been born in Calcutta, and spending the first seven years of his childhood there. I will not venture to say that I trace much colonial influence in his writings. He may have been a true Indian at heart, but his novels are certainly those of a club-man and a Londoner; and none of his essays disclose very much of the Hindoo. Sainte-Claire Deville, again, one of the truest of Frenchmen, was born, like Hamilton, in the Antilles.