Part 8 (1/2)

I.--THE LAND OF ROMANCE

At the back of the setting sun; beyond the glories of the evening; on the other side of the broad, mysterious ocean, lay for nine generations of Englishmen the Land of Romance. It began--for the English youth--to be the Land of Romance from the very day when John Cabot discovered it for the Bristol merchants it continued to be their Land of Romance while every sailor-captain discovered new rivers, new gulfs, and new islands, and went in search of new north-west pa.s.sages, while the rovers, freebooters, privateers and buccaneers, put out in their crazy, ill-found craft, to rob and slay the Spaniard; while the mystery of the unknown still lay upon it; long after the mystery had mostly gone out of it, save for the mystery of the Aztec; it remained the Land of Romance when New England was fully settled and Virginia already an old colony; it was the English Land of Romance while King George's redcoats fought side by side with the colonials, to drive the French out of the continent for ever.

We have had India, as well. Surely, in the splendid story of the long struggle with France for the Empire of the East, in the achievements of our soldiers, in the names of Clive, Lawrence, Havelock; in the setting of the piece, so to speak, in its people, its wisdom, its faith, its cities, its triumphs, its costumes, its gold and silver and precious stones and costly stuffs--there is material wherewith to create a romance of its own, sufficient to fire the blood and stir the pulse and light the eye. Or, we have had Australia, New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope; coral isles, strongholds, fortresses, islands here, and great slices and cantles of continent there. We have had all these possessions, but round none of these places has there grown up the romance which clung to the sh.o.r.es of America, from the mouth of the Orinoco round the Spanish Main, and from Florida to Labrador. This romance formerly belonged to the whole of our people. In their imaginations--in their dreams--they turned to America. There came a time when this romance was destroyed violently and suddenly, and, apparently, for ever. In another shape it has grown up again, for some of us; it is taking fresh root in some hearts, and putting forth new branches with new blossoms, to bear new fruit. America may become, once more, the Land of Romance to the Englishman. I say with intent, the Englishman. For, if you consider, it was the Englishman, not the Scot or the Irishman, who discovered America by means of John Cabot and his Bristol merchants--not to speak of Leif, the son of Eric, or of Madoc, the Welshman. It was the Englishman, not the Scot or the Irishman, who fought the Spaniard; who sent planters to Barbadoes; who settled colonists and convicts in Virginia; from England, not from Ireland or Scotland, went forth the Pilgrims and the Puritans. While the Scottish gentlemen were still taking service in foreign courts--as, for example, the Admirable Crichton with the Duke of Mantua--the young Englishman was sailing with Cavendish or Drake; he was fighting and meeting death under desperadoes, such as Oxenham; he was even, later on, serving with L'Olonnois, Kidd, or Henry Morgan.

All the history of North America before the War of Independence is English history. Scotland and Ireland hardly came into it until the eighteenth century; till then their only share in American history was the deportation of rebels to the plantations. The country was discovered by England, colonized by England; it was always regarded by England as specially her own child; the sole attempt made by Scotland at colonization was a failure; and to this day it is England that the descendants of the older American families regard as the cradle of their name and race.

As for the men who created this romance, they belong to a time when the world had renewed her youth, put the old things behind, and begun afresh, with new lands to conquer, a new faith to hold, new learning, new ideas, and new literature. Those who sit down to consider the Elizabethan age presently fall to lamenting that they were born three hundred years too late to share those glories. Their hearts, especially if they are young, beat the faster only to think of Drake.

They long to climb that tree in the Cordilleras and to look down, as Drake and Oxenham looked down, upon the old ocean in the East and the new ocean in the West; they would like to go on pilgrimage to Nombre de Dios--Brothers, what a Gest was that!--and to Cartagena, where Drake took the great Spanish s.h.i.+p out of the very harbour, under the very nose of the Spaniard, they would like to have been on board the _Golden Hind_, when Drake captured that n.o.bly laden vessel, _Our Lady of the Conception_, and used her cargo of silver for ballasting his own s.h.i.+p. Drake--the 'Dragon'--is the typical English hero; he is Galahad in the Court of the Lady Gloriana; he is one of the long series of n.o.ble knights and valiant soldiers, their lives enriched and aglow with splendid achievements, who illumine the page of English history, from King Alfred to Charles Gordon.

The first and greatest of the Elizabethan knights is Drake; but there were others of nearly equal note. What of Raleigh, who actually founded the United States by sending the first colonists to Virginia--the country where the grapes grew wild? What of Martin Frobisher and Humphrey Gilbert? What of Cavendish? What of Captain Amidas? What of Davis and half a score more? The exploits and victories and discoveries--in many cases, the disasters and death--of these sea-dogs filled the country from end to end with pride, and every young, generous heart with envy. They, too, would sail Westward Ho! to fight the Spaniard--three score of Englishmen against thousand Dons--and sail home again, heavy laden with the silver ingots of Peru, taken at Palengue or Nombre de Dios. Kingsley has written a book about these adventurers; a very good book it is; but his pictures are marred with the touch of the ecclesiastic--we need not suppose that the young men sat always Bible in hand, talked like seminarists, or thought like curates. The rovers who sailed with Drake and Raleigh had their religion, like their rations, served out to them. Sailors always do.

Drake, the captain, might and did, consult the Bible for encouragement and hope. Even he, however, reserved the right of using profane oaths; that right survived the older form of faith. In a word, the Elizabethan sailor--although a Protestant--was, in all respects, like his predecessor, save that on this new battle-field he was filled with a larger confidence and an audacity almost incredible to read of--almost impossible to think upon.

This was the first phase of the romance which grew up along the sh.o.r.es of America. So far it belongs to the Spanish Main and to the Isthmus of Panama. The romance remained when the Elizabethans pa.s.sed away--they were followed by the buccaneers, privateers, marooners and pirates--a degenerate company, but not without their picturesque side.

Pierre le Grand, Francois l'Olonnois, Henry Morgan, are captains only one degree more piratical than Drake and Raleigh. Edward Teach, Kidd, Avery, Bartholomew Roberts were pirates only because they plundered s.h.i.+ps English and French as well as Spanish; that they were roaring, reckless, deboshed villains as well, detracted little from the renown with which their names and exploits were surrounded, and that they were mostly hanged in the end was an accident common to such a life, the men under Drake were also sometimes hanged, though they were mostly killed by sword, bullet, or fever. The romance remained. The lad who would have enlisted under Drake found no difficulty in joining Morgan, and, if the occasion offered, he was ready to join the bold Captain Kidd with alacrity.

The seventeenth century furnished another kind of romance. It was the century of settlement. In the year 1606, after Sir Walter Raleigh had led the way, the Virginia Company sent out the _Susan Constant_ with two smaller s.h.i.+ps, containing a handful of colonists. They settled on the James River. Among them was John Smith, an adventurer and free-lance quite of the Elizabethan strain. In him John Oxenham lived again. We all know the story of Captain John Smith. He began his career by killing Turks; he continued it by exploring the creeks and rivers of Virginia, with endless adventures. Sometimes he was a prisoner of the Indians. Once, if his own account is true, he was rescued from imminent death by the intervention of Pocahontas, called Princess--or Lady Rebecca. He explored Chesapeake Bay, and he gave the name of New England to the country north of Cape Cod. Such histories, of which this is only one, kept alive in England the adventurous spirit and the romance of the West. The dream of _finding_ gold had vanished: what belonged to the present were the things done and suffered in His Majesty's plantations with all that they suggested. It is most certain that in every age there are thousands who continually yearn for the 'way of war' and the life of battle. Mostly, they fail in their ambitions because in these times the nations fear war. In the seventeenth century there was always good fighting to be got somewhere in Europe; if everything else failed there were the American Colonies and the Indians--plenty of fighting always among the Indians.

Besides the romance of war there was the romance of religious freedom.

Everybody in America knows the story of the _Mayflower_ and her Pilgrims in 1620, and the coming of the Puritans in 1630 under John Winthrop and the Ma.s.sachusetts Company. I suppose, also, that all Americans know of the _Ark_ and the _Dove_, and of Lord Baltimore's Catholic, but tolerant, colony of Maryland. They know as well the very odd story of Carolina and its 'Lords Proprietors' and the aristocratic form of government attempted there; of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Temperance Colony of Georgia. One may recall as well the influx of Germans by thousands in the early part of the eighteenth century, and the first immigration of Irish Presbyterians, the flower of the Irish nation, driven abroad by the stupidity and fanaticism of their own Government, which wanted to make them conform to the Irish Episcopal Church. In the whole history of Irish misgovernment there is nothing more stupid than this persecution of Irish Presbyterians. But, indeed, we may not blame our forefathers for this stupidity.

Persecution of this kind belonged to the times. It seems to us inconceivably stupid that men should be exiled because they would not acknowledge the authority of a bishop, but, out of Maryland, there was nowhere any real religious toleration; the dream of every sect was to trample down and to destroy all other sects. Our people in Ireland were no worse than the people of Salem and Boston. Religious toleration was not yet understood. Therefore, it was only playing the game according to the laws of the game when the United Kingdom threw away tens of thousands--the strongest, the most able, the most industrious, the most loyal--of her Irish subjects, because they would not change one sect for another; and retained the Roman Catholics, hereditary rebels, who were numerically too strong to be turned out.

All these things are perfectly well known to the American reader. But is it also well known to the American reader--has he ever asked himself--how these things affected and impressed the mind of England?

In this way. The Land of Romance was no longer the fable land where a dozen Protestant soldiers, headed by the invincible Dragon, could drive out a whole garrison of Catholic Spaniards and sack a town. It had ceased to be another Ophir and a richer Golconda; but it was the Land of Religious Freedom. The Church of England and Ireland, by law established, had no power across the ocean. America, to the Nonconformist of the seventeenth century, was a haven and a refuge ever open in case of need. The history of Nonconformity shows the vital necessity of such a refuge. The very existence of free America gave to the English Nonconformist strength and courage. Such a persecution as that of the Irish Presbyterians became impossible when it had been once demonstrated that, should the worst happen, the persecuted religionists would escape by voluntary exile.

That the spirit of persecution long survived is proved by the lingering among us down to our own days of the religious disabilities.

Within the memory of living men, no one outside the Church of England could be educated at a public school; could take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge; could hold a scholars.h.i.+p or a fellows.h.i.+p at any college; could become a professor at either university; could sit in the House of Commons; could be appointed to any munic.i.p.al office; could hold a commission in the army or navy. These restrictions practically--though with some exceptions--reduced Nonconformity in England to the lower middle cla.s.s, the small traders. Their ministers, who had formerly been scholars and theologians, fell into ignorance; their creeds became narrower; they had no social influence; but for the example of their brethren across the ocean they would have melted away and been lost like the Non-Jurors who expired fifty years ago in the last surviving member; or, like a hundred sects which have arisen, made a show of flouris.h.i.+ng for a while, and then perished. They were sustained, first, by the memory of a _victorious_ past; next, by the tradition of religious liberty; and, thirdly, by the report of a country--a flouris.h.i.+ng country--where there were no religious disabilities, no social inferiority on account of faith and creed. Not reports only: there was a continual pa.s.sing to and fro between Bristol and Boston during three-fourths of the eighteenth century. The colonies were visited by traders, soldiers and sailors. John Dunton in the year 1710 thought nothing of a voyage to Boston with a consignment of books for sale. Ned Ward, another bookseller, made the same journey with the same object. There exists a whole library of Quaker biographies showing how these restless apostles travelled backwards and forwards, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic, and journeying up and down the country, to preach their gospel. And the life of John Wesley also proves that the Colonies were regarded as easily accessible. I have seen a correspondence between a family in London and their cousins in Philadelphia, in the reign of Queen Anne, which brings out very clearly the fact that they thought nothing of the voyage, and fearlessly crossed the ocean on business or pleasure. The connection between the Colonies and England was much closer than we are apt to imagine. The Colonies were much better known by us than we are given to believe; they were regarded by the ecclesiastical mind as the home of schismatic rebellion; but by the layman as the land where thought was free.

That was one side--perhaps the most important side. But the halo of adventure still lay glowing in the western land. No colony but had its history of ma.s.sacre, treachery, and war to the knife with the Red Indian. Long before the time of Fenimore Cooper the English lad could read stories of dreadful tortures, of heroic daring, of patience and endurance, of revenges fierce, of daily and hourly peril. The blood of the Dragon ran yet in English veins. America was still to the heirs and successors of that Great Heart the Land of Romance and the Land of Gallant Fights.

And such stories! That of Captain John Smith laying his head upon the block that it might be smashed by the Indians' clubs, and of his rescue by the Indian girl, afterwards the 'Princess Rebecca'; the ma.s.sacre of three hundred and fifty men, women and children of the infant colony of Virginia, a hundred stories of ma.s.sacre. Or, that story of the mother's revenge, told, I believe, by Th.o.r.eau. Her name was Hannah Dunstan. Her house was attacked by Indians; her husband and her elder children fled for their lives; she, with an infant of a fortnight, and her nurse, were left behind. The Indians dashed out the brains of the baby and forced the two women to march with them through the forest to their camp. Here they found an English boy, also a prisoner. Hannah Dunstan made the boy find out from one of the Indians the quickest way to strike with the tomahawk so as to kill and to secure the scalp. The Indian told the boy. Now there were in the camp two men, three women, and seven children. In the dead of night Hannah got up, awakened her nurse and the boy, secured the tomahawks, and in the way the unsuspecting Indian had taught the boy, she tomahawked every one--man, woman and child--except a boy who fled into the woods--and took their scalps. Then she scuttled all the canoes but one, and taking the scalps with her as proof of her revenge, she put the nurse and the boy into the canoe and paddled down the river. She escaped all roving bands and won her way home again to find her husband and sons safe and well, and to show the scalps--the blood payment for her murdered child. Such were the stories told and retold in every colonial towns.h.i.+p, round every fire; such were the stories brought home by the sailors and the merchants; they were published in books of travel. Think you that our English blood had grown so sluggish that it could not be fired by such tales? Think you that the romance of the Colonies was one whit less enthralling than the romance of the Spanish Main?

I say nothing of the wars in which the British troops and the Colonial, side by side, at last succeeded in driving the French out of the country. They belong to the history of the eighteenth century and to the expansion of the English-speaking race. But for them, North America would now be half French and a quarter Spanish. These, however, were regular wars, with no more romance about them than belongs to war wherever it is conducted according to the war-game of the day. The man?uvres of generals and the deploying of men in ma.s.ses inspire none but students, just as a fine game of chess can only be judged by one who knows the game. Louisburg, Quebec, 'Queen Anne's War,' 'King George's War'--Wolfe and Montcalm--these things and these men produced little effect upon the popular view of America. In the colonies themselves murmurings and complaints began to make themselves heard; as they became stronger, the discontent increased; but they did not reach the ear of the average Englishman, who still looked across the ocean and still saw the country bathed in all the glories of the West. Then--violently, suddenly--all this romance which had grown up around and after so much fighting, so many achievements, was broken off and destroyed. It perished with the War of Independence; it was no longer possible when the Colonies had become not only a foreign country, but a country bitterly hostile. The romance of America was dead.

After the war was over, with much humiliation and shame for the nation--the better part of which had been against the war from the outset--the country turned for consolation to the East. But, as has been said above, neither India, nor Australia, nor New Zealand, has ever taken such a place in the affections of our country as that continent which was planted by our own sons, for whose safety and freedom from foreign enemies we cheerfully spent treasure incalculable and lives uncounted.

Then came the long twenty-three years' war in which Great Britain, for the most part single-handed, fought for the freedom of Europe against the most colossal tyranny ever devised by victorious captain. No nation in the history of the world ever carried on such a war, so stubborn, so desperate, so vital. Had Great Britain failed, what would now be the position of the world? The victories, the defeats, the successes, the disasters, which marked that long struggle, at least made our people forget their humiliation in America. The final triumph gave us back, as it was certain to do, more than our former pride, more than our old self-reliance. America was forgotten, the old love for America was gone; how could we remember our former affections when, at the very time when our need was the sorest, when every s.h.i.+p, every soldier, every sailor that we could find, was wanted to break down the power of the man who had subjugated the whole of Europe, except Russia and Great Britain, the United States--the very Land of Liberty--did her best to cripple the Armies of Liberty by proclaiming war against us? And now, indeed, there was nothing left at all of the old romance. It was quite, quite dead. In the popular imagination all was forgotten, except that on the other side of the Atlantic lived an implacable enemy, whose rancour--it then seemed to our people--was even greater than their boasted love of liberty.

I take it that the very worst time in the history of the relation of the United States with this country was the first half of this century. There was very little intercourse between the countries; there were very few travellers; there was ignorance on both sides, with misunderstandings, wilful misrepresentations and deliberate exaggerations. Remember how Nathaniel Hawthorne speaks about the English people among whom he lived; read how Th.o.r.eau speaks of us when he visits Quebec. Is that time past? Hardly. Among the better cla.s.s of Americans one seldom finds any trace of hatred to Great Britain. I think that, with the exception of Mr. W.D. Howells, I have never found any American gentleman who would manifest such a pa.s.sion. But, as regards the lower cla.s.s of Americans, it is reported that there still survives a meaningless, smouldering hostility. The going and the coming, to and fro, are increasing and multiplying; arbitration seems to be established as the best way of terminating international disputes; if the tone of the press is not always gracious, it is not often openly hostile; we may, perhaps, begin to hope, at last, that the future of the world will be secured for freedom by the confederation of all the English-speaking nations.

The old romance is dead. Yet--yet--as Kingsley cried, when he landed on a West Indian island, 'At last!' so I, also, when I found myself in New England, was ready to cry. 'At last!' The old romance is not everywhere dead, since there can be found one Englishman who, when he stands for the first time on New England soil, feels that one more desire of his life has been satisfied. To see the East; to see India and far Cathay; to see the tropics and to live for a while in a tropical island; to be carried along the Grand Ca.n.a.l of Venice in a gondola; to see the gardens of Boccaccio and the cell of Savonarola; to camp and hunt in the backwoods of Canada, and to walk the streets of New York, all these things have I longed, from youth upwards, to see and to do--yea, as ardently as ever Drake desired to set an English sail upon the great and unknown sea, and all these things, and many more, have been granted to me. One great thing--perhaps more than one thing, one unsatisfied desire--remained undone. I would set foot on the sh.o.r.e of New England. It is a sacred land, consecrated to me long years ago, for the sake of the things which I used to read--for the sake of the long-yearning thoughts of childhood and the dim and mystic splendours which played about the land beyond the sunset, in the days of my sunrise.

'At last!'

Wherever a boy finds a quiet place for reading--an attic lumbered with rubbish, a bedroom cold and empty, even a corner on the stairs--he makes of that place a theatre, in which he is the sole audience.

Before his eyes--to him alone--the drama is played, with scenery complete and costume correct, by such actors as never yet played upon any other stage, so natural, so lifelike--nay, so G.o.dlike, and for that very reason so lifelike.