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.