III.
It has been said that the beautiful country round about
Pierre appealed to very proud memories. But not only
through the mere chances of things, had that fine country become
ennobled by the deeds of his sires, but in Pierre's eyes,
all its hills and swales seemed as sanctified through their very
long uninterrupted possession by his race.
That fond ideality which, in the eyes of affection, hallows the
least trinket once familiar to the person of a departed love;
with Pierre that talisman touched the whole earthly landscape
about him; for remembering that on those hills his own fine
fathers had gazed; through those woods, over these lawns, by
that stream, along these tangled paths, many a grand-dame
of his had merrily strolled when a girl; vividly recalling these
things, Pierre deemed all that part of the earth a love-token;
so that his very horizon was to him as a memorial ring.
The monarchical world very generally imagines, that in demagoguical
America the sacred Past hath no fixed statues
erected to it, but all things irreverently seethe and boil in the
vulgar caldron of an everlasting uncrystalizing Present. This
conceit would seem peculiarly applicable to the social condition
With no chartered aristocracy, and no law of entail, how can
any family in America imposingly perpetuate itself? Certainly
that common saying among us, which declares, that be a family
conspicuous as it may, a single half-century shall see it abased;
that maxim undoubtedly holds true with the commonalty. In
our cities families rise and burst like bubbles in a vat. For
indeed the democratic element operates as a subtile acid among
us; forever producing new things by corroding the old; as in
the south of France verdigris, the primitive material of one kind
of green paint, is produced by grape-vinegar poured upon copper
plates. Now in general nothing can be more significant of
decay than the idea of corrosion; yet on the other hand,
nothing can more vividly suggest luxuriance of life, than the
idea of green as a color; for green is the peculiar signet of all-fertile
Nature herself. Herein by apt analogy we behold the
marked anomalousness of America; whose character abroad,
we need not be surprised, is misconceived, when we consider
how strangely she contradicts all prior notions of human things;
and how wonderfully to her, Death itself becomes transmuted
into Life. So that political institutions, which in other lands
seem above all things intensely artificial, with America seem
to possess the divine virtue of a natural law; for the most mighty
of nature's laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.
Still, are there things in the visible world, over which evershifting
Nature hath not so unbounded a sway. The grass is
annually changed; but the limbs of the oak, for a long term
of years, defy that annual decree. And if in America the vast
mass of families be as the blades of grass, yet some few there
are that stand as the oak; which, instead of decaying, annually
puts forth new branches; whereby Time, instead of subtracting,
is made to capitulate into a multiple virtue.
In this matter we will—not superciliously, but in fair spirit—
compare pedigrees with England, and strange as it may seem
at the first blush, not without some claim to equality. I dare
say, that in this thing the Peerage Book is a good statistical
standard whereby to judge her; since the compilers of that
work can not be entirely insensible on whose patronage they
most rely; and the common intelligence of our own people
shall suffice to judge us. But the magnificence of names must
not mislead us as to the humility of things. For as the breath
in all our lungs is hereditary, and my present breath at this
moment, is further descended than the body of the present
High Priest of the Jews, so far as he can assuredly trace it; so
mere names, which are also but air, do likewise revel in this
endless descendedness. But if Richmond, and St. Albans, and
Grafton, and Portland, and Buccleugh, be names almost old as
England herself, the present Dukes of those names stop in their
own genuine pedigrees at Charles II., and there find no very
fine fountain; since what we would deem the least glorious
parentage under the sun, is precisely the parentage of a Buccleugh,
for example; whose ancestress could not well avoid
being a mother, it is true, but had accidentally omitted the
preliminary rite. Yet a king was the sire. Then only so much
the worse; for if it be small insult to be struck by a pauper,
but mortal offense to receive a blow from a gentleman, then of
all things the bye-blows of kings must be signally unflattering.
In England the Peerage is kept alive by incessant restorations
and creations. One man, George III., manufactured five hundred
and twenty-two peers. An earldom, in abeyance for five
centuries, has suddenly been assumed by some commoner, to
whom it had not so much descended, as through the art of the
lawyers been made flexibly to bend in that direction. For not
Thames is so sinuous in his natural course, not the Bridgewater
Canal more artificially conducted, than blood in the veins of
that winding or manufactured nobility. Perishable as stubble,
and fungous as the fungi, those grafted families successively
live and die on the eternal soil of a name. In England this
day, twenty-five hundred peerages are extinct; but the names
survive. So that the empty air of a name is more endurable
than a man, or than dynasties of men; the air fills man's lungs
and puts life into a man, but man fills not the air, nor puts life
into that.
All honor to the names then, and all courtesy to the men;
but if St. Albans tell me he is all-honorable and all-eternal, I
must still politely refer him to Nell Gwynne.
Beyond Charles II. very few indeed—hardly worthy of note
—are the present titled English families which can trace any
thing like a direct unvitiated blood-descent from the thief
knights of the Norman. Beyond Charles II. their direct genealogies
seem vain as though some Jew clothesman, with a teacanister
on his head, turned over the first chapter of St.
Matthew to make out his unmingled participation in the blood
of King Saul, who had long died ere the career of the Cæsar
began.
Now, not preliminarily to enlarge upon the fact that, while in
England an immense mass of state-masonry is brought to bear
as a buttress in upholding the hereditary existence of certain
houses, while with us nothing of that kind can possibly be admitted;
and to omit all mention of the hundreds of unobtrusive
families in New England who, nevertheless, might easily trace
their uninterrupted English lineage to a time before Charles
the Blade: not to speak of the old and oriental-like English
planter families of Virginia and the South; the Randolphs for
example, one of whose ancestors, in King James' time, married
Pocahontas the Indian Princess, and in whose blood therefore
an underived aboriginal royalty was flowing over two hundred
years ago; consider those most ancient and magnificent Dutch
Manors at the North, whose perches are miles—whose meadows
overspread adjacent countries—and whose haughty rent-deeds
are held by their thousand farmer tenants, so long as grass
grows and water runs; which hints of a surprising eternity for
a deed, and seem to make lawyer's ink unobliterable as the
sea. Some of those manors are two centuries old; and their
present patrons or lords will show you stakes and stones on
their estates put there—the stones at least—before Nell
Gwynne the Duke-mother was born, and genealogies which,
like their own river, Hudson, flow somewhat farther and
straighter than the Serpentine brooklet in Hyde Park.
These far-descended Dutch meadows lie steeped in a Hindooish
haze; an eastern patriarchalness sways its mild crook
over pastures, whose tenant flocks shall there feed, long as their
own grass grows, long as their own water shall run. Such
estates seem to defy Time's tooth, and by conditions which
take hold of the indestructible earth seem to cotemporize
their fee-simples with eternity. Unimaginable audacity of a
worm that but crawls through the soil he so imperially claims!
In midland counties of England they boast of old oaken
dining-halls where three hundred men-at-arms could exercise
of a rainy afternoon, in the reign of the Plantagenets. But
our lords, the Patroons, appeal not to the past, but they point
to the present. One will show you that the public census of a
county, is but part of the roll of his tenants. Ranges of mountains,
high as Ben Nevis or Snowdon, are their walls; and
regular armies, with staffs of officers, crossing rivers with artillery,
and marching through primeval woods, and threading
vast rocky defiles, have been sent out to distrain upon three
thousand farmer-tenants of one landlord, at a blow. A fact
most suggestive two ways; both whereof shall be nameless
here.
But whatever one may think of the existence of such mighty
lordships in the heart of a republic, and however we may wonder
at their thus surviving, like Indian mounds, the Revolutionary
flood; yet survive and exist they do, and are now owned
by their present proprietors, by as good nominal title as any
peasant owns his father's old hat, or any duke his great-uncle's
old coronet.
For all this, then, we shall not err very widely if we humbly
conceive, that—should she choose to glorify herself in that inconsiderable
way—our America will make out a good general
case with England in this short little matter of large estates,
and long pedigrees—pedigrees I mean, wherein is no flaw.
