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.