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.